History about my eating habits

As I said in my blog post A little story about my closet..., that we didn't grow up wealthy so our diet consisted of lots of bread, rice, potatoes and pasta.

Also, even though luxury items were limited as kids, we loved snacking chips, chocolate, sweets and desserts. Family get-togethers always involved lots of eating. There would be an abundance of food, cake, chips, sweets and desserts. These eating habits weren't of course a problem to me as child, teenager or as an adolescent, because I had a great metabolism. But in my mid 20s as metabolism clearly slowed down, work stresses ad bad eating habits caught up with me and I could definitely see that I had out on a couple of kilograms.

I knew something needed to change, and the first change I tried making was in preparation for my wedding day. A year prior to my wedding day I started working out and trying to eat right. I didn't go cold turkey, because I've always been a keen believer of the key principle of "everything in moderation". So with my wedding day as my goal I lost the weight and looked great, but this was not of course sustainable. By the time we were on our flight to Mauritius for our honeymoon we were downing glasses of Dom Perignons.

Needless to say, in no time at all I was back to my old lifestyle of eating what I wanted with little to no exercise.

Don't get me wrong I was never obese, but was never quite happy with the body I had, but was also sadly too lazy to put in the work needed to get it to where I wanted it.

With this continued lifestyle, I picked up 20kg when I was pregnant with my first baby. I had never been this huge before and it's like I didn't even see it coming or notice it happening to me.

So I decided to join Virgin Active who had a class for Mommas with babies and you brought your baby with you to the class while you worked out. Pretty cool. I lost a lot of weight because it was quite an insane workout that we did, and I thought I was eating better as I had a "healthy" meal plan during the day:

Breakfast: All bran flakes with a cup of coffee

10am snack: Yogurt

12pm: Meat and veg lunch

3pm snack of fruit and nuts

6pm: Meat and veg dinner

But my problem had always been with night time snacking, especially once the baby was sleeping.

I thought this was a healthy meal plan until I was pregnant wit baby # 2 and my midwife told me that I need to cut out sugars, dairy and starch from my diet. This meant no juice, no yogurt, no bread or crackers, no cereal.

It's crazy to comprehend, but I lost weight throughout y pregnancy, because even though my baby was growing, my weight initially dropped and then stayed the same.

It was only at this stage of my life when I realized what I actually needed to do to look and feel the way I wanted to. But the question was, how would I make it sustainable?