Timing or just Stress?

I struggled a bit with the timing of my snacks and meals yesterday. Normally I try to eat every three to four hours, and workout 1-2 hours after breakfast or lunch. I find this keeps my blood sugar level steady so I have enough energy to get through the various parts of my day. This also helps to prevent wild mood swings and my getting overly hungry and craving sweet snacks. The only problem with this is that life is not always measured out in neat 3 hour segments.

Yesterday I had an appointment at 3:30pm, followed by other meetings from 5:30 to 7pm, which means that if I was to fit in a run in the afternoon it would have to be 1:30pm, no later, so I would have enough time to stretch, snack, shower and get to my appointment. I considered doing my run after breakfast, but after taking Monday off to go to a funeral, I really needed to get on with answering all my e-mails and returning all the calls made. And that usually goes better first thing in the morning. So I had a latish breakfast, an earlyish lunch, did my run at 1:30pm, then had two afternoon snacks. It sort of worked – I wasn’t starving during my afternoon meetings and felt I had enough energy to get everything done. While they did add a good 185 calories to my total, I was glad I included a few chocolates in my second snack as it was just the pick me up I needed (though having only 3 pieces left me craving more!).

However, I was really hungry for my lunch (4 hours + after breakfast) and would have preferred something a bit more substantial than just soup and bread, even though with the rice pudding I had over 500 calories and 20g of protein. Then again, I was really hungry for dinner too and absolutely exhausted after it. Quite possibly it was not my diet that let me down, but simply the amount of stress kicking around after the funeral on Monday.

The Score:

Calories:	Protein:	Carbs:	Fat:	Alcohol:	Fibre:
2086.20	100.63g	265.80g	68.98g	0	25.73g
	19%	51%	30%
Calories burned through exercise:		400

What I ate:

Time	Item	Amount
08:00	Vitamins - Centrum Advance A to Zinc, 400iu of Vitamin E, 1000iu Vitamin D3 and 500mg Glucosamine sulphate	1 each
	Cold water	200mL
	Mattesson's Turkey rashers	3 rashers
	Mesa Sunrise cereal	60g
	Alpro Soy milk	120mL
	Sainsbury's pressed apple juice	200mL
08:30	Black Tea	500mL
10:00	Raspberry and Echinacea tea	250mL
12:15	New Covent Garden Pea and Ham soup	300g
	Genius brown bread toast	1 slices
	Muller rice pudding original	190g
	Red seedless grapes	107g
13:30	Hill Run - 30 min
14:15	Citrus Nuun electrolyte tablet in water	750mL
14:45	Sponser Chocolate Recovery Shake	30g
	in Skim milk	225mL
17:00	Brazil nuts	6g
	Cashews	17g
	Classics by Thorntons chocolates	3 pieces
19:45	Baked salmon	98g
	Merchant Gourmet Red and White Quinoa	100g
	Kraft Light Honey Mustard dressing	10g
	Stir fried Kale	45g
	in Olive oil	7.5mL
	with Pine nuts	4g
20:30	M&S The classic fruit salad	183g
22:00	Ellactiva Chocolate Calcium Chew	1 chew
	500mg Glucosamine sulphate	1 pill

Plus 500 to 1500mL of cold water sipped from a water bottle throughout the day.