To Cheat Day or Not to Cheat Day?

Image Credit: Dee Jae

I take my food as seriously as I would a major life decision. Rectifying my eating habits has seen this fact become increasingly true. I’ve been struggling lately to fit in a good ol’ shovelling down of chocolate cake now that I’ve banned myself from takeout, rice, and bread. So, I went for the classic decision: one cheat day a week where I can divulge myself on all things oily, sugary, salty, and carb-loaded. As I sit up in my bed with an aching Buda belly filled to the brink with hot chocolate and sushi (as well as, shamefully enough, half of my friend's cake), I suddenly regret having a cheat day.

 Three months ago I could inhale five cheeseburgers in one sitting, now I’m considering an ambulance van for a simple one-night-stand with junk food. I should see this as a good sign that I feel full way quicker now, but, maybe, because of how rarely I get to chow down on something carby, my weekly tummy ache should tell me I need to handle this differently. 

Image Credit: Dee Jae

Thanks to the way-too-many fitness pages I now follow on Instagram, I have been made aware of an interesting part of the healthy life known as ‘counting your macros’. In this, your daily calorie intake is divided into three categories: carbs, protein, and fat. Depending on what your fitness goals are, the amount of carbs, protein, and fat you should be consuming daily can differ. For example, my goal is to drop down a dress size. For that to happen, I should be consuming no more than 1,500 calories per day, and, macro-wise, this should be broken up as 50% carbs, 30% fat, and 20% protein. As you can see from the images encompassing this post, this might be hard to do if I’m treating each cheat day as an apocalyptic event (i.e. a kind of leave-no-carbs-uneaten type of set-up).

Image Credit: Madalin Giorgetta

 



What the macro life suggests — and while it might sound slightly more unforgiving than the option of a cheat day — leaves you more open to consume what you want when you want. For instance, if your macros are open enough that day, you might be able to squeeze in a slice of pizza. This comes from whether you’ve given yourself enough leeway to consume a bit of junk. For example, something with a high fat content might be manageable if your fat count is low enough to squeeze it in. It’s just all about knowing where your grams are at on the day.

I'm not mentally calculating all this. Right now, I'm working off 'My Fitness Pal', which is a free app I downloaded onto my phone. Here, I am able to scan my food in advance to know whether or not I'm getting enough protein in my diet, as well as whether or not I should grab another serving of peanut butter and celery. Frequently now, I am glaring at the app as I withdraw my hand slowly from the milo tin at the back of my cupboard. I'll admit, however, that it's an absolute blessing knowing I usually have a bunch of calories left to spend at the end of the day for carbs or fat or protein. Now that I know about macros, I can figure out what my body is craving and how to satiate those cravings without reaching for the wrong foods.

Image Credit: Dee Jae

Bowl'n for a Good Smoothie

Image Credit: Ashley Valli

The first sign that my friend and I had finally found the famous cafe ‘Bowl’n’ was announced by an embarrassingly shrill squeal on my behalf. I jumped up and down a little as well. People saw. I’d like to back this moment up, however, for the sake of my own shrivelling self-esteem, with the fact that we’d been looking for the place for almost half an hour. 

Of course, I can’t blame Urban List, the website we’d found it off originally. I’d seen the store named in one of their articles, boasting it as one of the best places to grab an acai bowl. Fabulously, I had mistaken the whereabouts of the place and dragged my friend halfway across Perth convinced it was located somewhere on Murray Street. Then, when he looked up the place, it was far down Williams Street. And, to everyone in sight hustling to get to work on time, were two mates looking like they’d never been caught outside before 9AM in their life. For future reference: we probably hadn’t.

When we decided to retry the website we’d originally found the place off, we were finally given a concrete destination. I set my sneakers to the ground as furiously determined as any girl on an empty stomach.

Bowl’n is a shop tucked into one of the busy walkways of St Georges Terrace. Between the flashy business men walking and talking on their phones and the illustrious-looking women darting past, is Bowl'n glowing with faint neon lights. Beneath the counter, is a fish tank — I don’t know why, but that just made me so much more excited to be there. I, a pretty average girl from Bunbury, went to a café at 8AM where they have fish tanks beneath the counter. How wild!

Image Credit: Gloria Sim

The enormous Cheshire cat grin on my face when I walked inside would’ve alarmed most but, by the unperturbed look on the staffs’ faces, it must’ve been a common sight. My friend and I were handed the menu. From memory, the menu consisted of five or six types of smoothie bowls. The small collection of choices made the decision so much harder. Did I want an antioxidant-rich dish? Oh god, what were my goals for today? Did I need a pick-me-up? A detox? What even is a dragon fruit?

My friend went with the easy decision of a cacao-based bowl. I, after a five-minute pause, decided to go with a bowl called ‘Dragon’, which consisted mostly of kiwi and, of course, dragon fruit. The bowls are roughly $13 dollars each from memory — but, guaranteed, you’re as content as any other $13-dollar meal afterwards. As soon as our smoothie bowls were placed before us, I devoured mine as savagely as I would a damn good cheeseburger. In under ten minutes, I was scraping the leftovers off from the sides of the bowl and helping myself to my friend's as well. It’s great, starting out, to pick neatly at the top layer, making sure to keep the aesthetic appearance of the bowl well intact. It wasn’t long, however, until I was mixing the nut sprinkles, kiwi, coconut flakes, and dragon smoothie together to form a massive glob of thick, pink goodness. My friend, a devoted food Instagramer, watched on in horror. Alas, but the taste of all the ingredients together made it all that much better.

Afterwards, the meal left me in great shape. For the thrill of a risk, I had worn a half-top today as a way to restrain myself from over-eating (the fear of looking like Winnie the Pooh is a great way to keep my eating habits in check). To my surprise, while I felt so full I could barely get out of my seat, my stomach was still as flat as it had been before I had come into the store. For someone like me that usually bloats up like an over-pumped basketball after a hearty meal, this was an amazing discovery.

So, cheers to Bowl’n for fulfilling my white-girl fantasies of a perfectly Instagramable breakfast smoothie bowl.

 

Image Credit: Dee Jae