Tell me your honest opinion of this post-exercise food pls

[tulips27]

I've exercised all morning today and for some reason I've got really ravenous and I think I've undone all my work (although I'm not exercising for weight loss in particular).

Breakfast: two black coffees
Cycle 5 miles
Swim 45 minutes

Post swim snack: banana from my bag, a few nuts (so far so good)

Now at this point I would normally go home and eat nothing till my evening meal, but because the weather was so nice I treated myself to a Tesco meal deal which I never do because I can't afford it! I just got carried away.

Meal deal: Brie and cranberry sandwich, hot chocolate

Cycle 5 miles

Evening meal: two samosas and a side salad (no dressing)

Then (!) I was still hungry and this is where things got out of control, I've just demolished another samosa and a small bag of kettle chips from the meal deal that I was saving.

So if you look at it, I've ended up putting away a lot of unhealthy food and probably lost my gains from exercising at all. But I was soooo hungry, I still am. I could eat another dinner right now if I'm totally honest. 😩

Regular exercisers, where am I going wrong? I'm starving. Any advice welcome.

The salad in that photo has dressing/sauce on it. Your post says no dressing.

It's lime juice 🙄

I also had an onion bhaji and a samosa, not two samosas. Maybe you should report me.

Thanks for the amazing meal suggestions to everyone that made them. Especially oat biscuits with cheese, soup and chickpea salad, daal or paneer, porridge, chickpea curry, peanut butter, carrot and lentil soup. All good stuff! 'm off to bed now, all to be repeated tomorrow. Maybe I'll do better. Really appreciate the help.

Chocolate milk is good for immediate post exercise recovery - take it within 20 minutes of finishing.

But you need to seriously up your protein intake to repair / retain / build muscle mass.

Op it does sound you have some real issues with food - if you don’t have an eating disorder, you are heading that way, so pull yourself up now.

we all need to eat regular meals with protein and fibre, never mind if you are exercising that much. Why on earth wouldn’t you eat lunch? And why eat such a tiny dinner?

You are going to make yourself ill if you carry on like this.

Look up NHS healthy eating guidance (it might be a bit low in protein for an exerciser like you but it’s a lot better than you are eating now). You are diving into non-nutritious food like crisps and samosas because you aren’t eating nearly enough.

There are lots of threads on here on how to eat well on a tight budget.

Pre work out

beet juice
Tumeric, ginger shot

breakfast post work out
choc soy nilk
green smoothie (homemade- kale, spin, tropical fruit mix)
banana and peanut butter or egg & Avo on toast

lunch
pumpkin soup, home made croutons, Greek yog
some fruit

supper
chicken fajitas with loads of veg, tortillas, guac, cheese, salsa, NO rice.

Cooking, any sort of cooking, uses a fairly small
amount of energy, unless you are roasting or baking stuff in an oven for hours and hours on end. No meal for one person could use any significant amount of electricity unless you are really on a very very tight budget - and even then you could use a microwave for a very small cost to make a wide variety of food, you can fry things very quickly, use a toaster etc - any of these will cost probably less than 10p to use for a meal.

Glad you liked the ideas. The BBC Food website, among others, has loads of interesting recipes for healthy eating.

Op - how old are you? What’s your daily activity like ie when not exercising

Stop prescribing moral judgement to food and eat more. By denying yourself food, you will fail to see any increased fitness and you’ll just end up binging on less-nutritious foods as your body will be craving a quick calorie hit.

This.

it’s not enough food at all OP

It's not healthy to eat too little food to compensate for the level of physical activity you're doing. You need to be eating more as has been said.

Eat proper meals

You're going to starve and then binge

And yet it hasn’t.

PP have been advising the OP to eat more.

So many MN myths. Including, maybe, ‘anyone who eats less than me is a competitive under eater and must be ridiculed’.

They aren't a myth - visible on many threads. But clearly even they have their limits!

It goes both ways though - there are also lots of here who normalise what I would see as extreme binge-eating. It can be very eye opening.

Anyway, OP - if what you posted is true, this is definitely disordered eating, and I'd suggest counselling to look at your relationship with food. Your use of the word "good" to describe eating only a banana and a few nuts to last until dinner is very troubling. Moral judgements should not have any place in determining what you eat - it should be about nourishment and fuel.

People mis-estimate distances. Sometimes "5 mile cycle" turns out to be < 5km.
People mis-estimate time. Sometimes 45 minutes turns out to be only 20 in the water.
One of the open-water swimmers (local) says she really just bobbles in the open water, but I don't think for more than 10-15 minutes. She does a perfect front crawl in the pool for 50 minutes, btw.

The local surfers have full wetsuits so they might be in sea for 45 minutes.

But no heating on at home when it's 10 degrees outside, esp. on top of OW swim, neah, that's where my belief got suspended. DH would do this voluntarily, I suppose. He's not moaning that I put the heating on today & the fire is burning (4 degrees outside & ~16 inside). He sure as heck would not do OW swimming at all in winter.

You're not eating enough.
I had a bowl of porridge (sugar, yoghurt, organic milk, fruit) before parkrun. I don't think you should be exercising that hard on black coffee.

Aside from the rest of the energy in/ out (and sources of) open water swimming is very depleting of your body heat and your core temperature needs raising. That's going to stimulate appetite and you need to put heat back into your body.
I take a flask with a tin of something like soup/ stews to eat promptly afterwards. That makes a massive difference. A warm shower later also warms the skin up.

Firstly you didn’t have breakfast
you had two coffees

you also didn’t have dinner you had an unhealthy snack

I’ve not rtft but you’re starving yourself and exercising then binge eating rubbish and then berating yourself about it.
of course you were hungry after your dinner, you’d eaten high calorie, low volume, nutritionally poor food and then exercised.

eat actual healthy meals, learn about nutrition and im sure you won’t need to eat a bag of kettle chips after ‘dinner’ and you can be kinder to yourself rather than this torture

@lljkk No idea why you decided to post your, quite frankly, patronising opinion that I don't know how long I swam for or how long I cycled for. It's the height of rudeness.

What's it to you whether I've got heating on or not? I actually don't have heating in the traditional sense because I live in a cottage and I cannot use the woodburner because it triggers my asthma. But you decided to sally forth with your unwarranted, derisory and patronising observations that are total bollocks, by the way.

Someone ought to let the government know that no-one is living without heating because @lljkk doesn't believe they are. Hurrah! The winter fuel crisis has been averted! 🙄

Thank you to those who actually posted useful replies. To the others, why don't you find something better to do with your life than posting patronising, sarcastic comments online and accusing people of lying?

You sound hangry OP