How and What Do You Eat?

Do you eat a balanced diet or just whatever you feel like? Or, do you have a special diet like vegetarian, vegan, gluten free, or Paleo? Why do you eat the way you do?

I eat whatever I want because if I only get one life I'm going to eat what I enjoy. YOLO, you could say.

I drink green juice everyday (all veggies, mostly kale)
I avoid processed food as much as possible.
I try to eat only organic.
I avoid dairy.
I don't eat red meat.
All chicken/turkey is organic/local.
I only eat whole wheat bread/pasta when I do have it.
Everything in moderation really, 90% of my diet is non processed, non dairy, whole wheat "eating clean" kind of foods.
I think "eating clean" is the term for it, although it's not really a term haha I dunno, it's a kind of food choice I learned about mostly on tumblr..

But the other 10% (I give myself shark week off and a few other things) are just whatever. Ice cream, french fries, anything

I typically eat two meals a day.. breakfast and evening. and drink lots of water.

I do it because I feel better. Processed foods, heavy carbs, red meat, dairy.. it's yummy! But leaves me feeling icky, slow, etc..

Why I eat the way I do is because when I do I have energy, I feel better, I poop better, I sleep better, I smell better.. Lol I dunno. When I started to change my diet, yea I missed some of the food I ate but it's nothing compared to how much better I feel!

I don't feel I'm missing out.. I LOVE the food I eat and I still really eat what I want honestly.

When I do go out and have a "bad" meal (french fries etc..) yea, it's yummy.. but after I always feel A) Food coma B) Kinda sick C) Hungry 20 minutes later.

Everything in moderation. I do like to eat but the idea of eating whatever whenever led me to almost 300lbs lol so I try to be sensible now. 80/20. 80 % of my diet needs to be good healthy foods and the oter 20 can be more indugent type things.

I eat pretty much everything lol so trying to make sure half of my plates are veggies and a protien.

I eat....a student diet. LOL Even though I am no longer a student, my pay grade hasn't improved much and I'm gone from home just as frequently. So, student diet.

By which I mean I eat a lot of frozen meals. I eat a lot of carbs. I don't eat much red meat, but that's because I don't really have a way to cook it to my satisfaction (no grill) and it is expensive.

Pizza is tasty, quick, and cost efficient since an entire pizza can feed me for three days.

It's just me, so I have to make single servings of everything which sucks. I don't go through fresh produce fast enough to make it worth buying, so I eat a lot of frozen veggies/fruit and fake mashed potatoes.

I started to eat better when I moved in with Mike because between the two of us we were able to go through fresh things faster and he encouraged me to cook meals. Now that he's gone, I'm going to REALLY have to work hard to not a.) snack all of the time and b.) continue to cook meals and not just junk food.

A Peanut Butter sandwich and goldfish crackers are my staple lunch when I'm at work.

Yes, there is a reason I've gained ten pounds since I moved out of my parents' house.

I grew up eating home grown, home processed, and home cooked (from scratch) meals. I miss it. Would really like to be able to do that myself one of these days, but for now...no time, space, or money.

My first answer, going by the title of the thread, was "insert food in mouth, chew, swallow".

I'm Pescatarian. I eat anything 100% plant based, and anything that spends 100% of it's time underwater (seafood).

I wholeheartedly do not enjoy the taste of other meats. It's not an issue of just not having it cooked well... I've tried it many places, and my dad and I was a cook. I just... Don't enjoy it.

Other than that, I make everything from scratch, 98% of the time. Including stuff like pasta, bread, etc. I have bad enough allergies to... Well, everything, that it's just easier to know exactly what is going in it, and eating it fresh. I also have some intolerance issues going on to gluten, but I'm less good about that... Things like pizza, I just can't live without. And I don't want gluten-free pizza LOL

I'm not 100% by any means, except for eating pescatarian. I eat processed/boxed/prepared foods at times, and suffer for it. But, by far, moat of my meals are home cooked from scratch.

I live in alberta, I grew up on red meat and I fraking LOVE it...but most of my diet now is chicken, I allow myself to have red meat 1-2 times a month, so its always the BEST red meat, Alberta grown AAA tenderloin.

I am also 80/20, or try to be now, the eat whenever whatever lead me to be 350lbs after my dad died so now i watch it as much as i can. It wasnt even being that size that really bothered me, it was the not being able to do ANYTHING, i ended up with foot issues as well. I just dont want to go back to that.

I eat a very healthy, low fat and balanced gluten-free diet. Gluten-free, because I'm intolerant. Healthy and balanced because I'm losing weight (80 lbs so far) and want to live a long, healthy life. Right now, I'm even counting calories on MyFitnessPal (tomorrow is my weigh-in day). I cook everything we eat except for maybe six times a year when we go out.

The food I eat most is vegetables. Lots of salads and huge sides of vegetables. I eat brown rice and quinoa in moderation. For protein, I eat turkey, chicken, fish, bison and egg whites with the occasional egg and a tiny bit of cheese. A little fruit maybe once a day. No crap food.

I eat very little bread, pasta, white potato and prepared foods.

Uh, I try to eat veggies daily. Doesn't always happen. I don't eat much meat, but I also don't make up for the protein loss by eating other foods.

Basically, I eat a very unbalanced diet. I AM trying to do better but, it's a work in progress.

When I can afford it (time, money, and energy wise) I eat a balanced diet. Otherwise I eat whatever. My mom usually cooks dinner, but her meals are VERY carb-heavy. A typical meal it something like chicken and rice and corn. Or steak and bread and potatoes. To her, "vegetable" means "anything that comes directly from a plant" even if it's corn or potatoes. Last night was chicken and cornbread and baked beans.

Lately for lunches I've been making some of those pasta-on-the-side or rice-on-the-side things and adding chicken and vegetables to make it at least somewhat healthy.

I'd love to do keto again, I felt AMAZING on it and lost a ton of weight. But it's expensive, because meat and vegetables are both expensive.

When I live on my own, I had a much better diet, since I could use the kitchen whenever and however I want. I usually had tuna or chicken or something for lunch, and fish or chicken with vegetables and a bit of rice for dinner. Still not perfect, but much better than now. Snacks are my downfall...I'm currently gorging myself on puppy chow.

I rarely eat breakfast. I try, but I either forget or feel like crap and don't want it. I'm NOT a morning person, and I feel physically ill most mornings. Once I'm up and around it's fine, but the thought of eating...NO. I've tried to do shakes, bars, yogurt, nothing really works. I've even tried just some V8 Splash for breakfast, and although it's tolerable, it's not exactly healthy. But then i get to be STARVING by 10am and at that point I can't eat because I'm covered in various animal excrement and food just doesn't work in that environment. If I get a real zoo job in a different department, break time is at 10am, so that would work out perfectly - I could bring breakfast and eat it at break when I'm hungry (the entire zoo except for my department and the restaurant/guest services goes on break at 10am and 3pm every single day for 20-30 minutes with very few exceptions).

I feel like if I had a more set schedule with work, I'd be a whole lot better at eating right. And if I had my own kitchen to do what I want in. And more money. When I was on food stamps for 6 months a few years ago I actually managed to eat a pretty balanced diet.

When I was giving plasma, I ate a lot of protein out of necessity. I think I should start doing that again (both the plasma and the protein, because the plasma pays for the protein )

I really don't eat much these days. Like...coffee, multivitamin, and energy drinks fulfill my energy needs 90% of the time. I've even resorted making Egg Coffee lately. It's actually pretty good.

When there's actual food involved, though, I'm Paleo on crack. No grains, very little carbs, only red meat or fish, limited fruits and decent servings of vegetables. The simpler the food dish, the better. Soups, sauces, etc are all out.

I have Crohn's, so I have to avoid everything that is going to make me sick. Sometimes that's easiest by just not eating.

For the most part I'm on the student diet as well >_< Frozen pizza's are good, pot pies, etc. But we do try to cook when we have the money, time, and energy for it! Veggie stir fry is my favorite, but we have a lot of others, some healthy and some not nearly healthy lol

For the most part it's frozen stuff with a few fruits as snacks.

100% vegetarian for the last ten years. I eat way too much processed crap because I can't regularly afford a lot of fresh.

Work in progress.

It's actually just been 1 year of eating 'like this' (gluten allergy diagnosis, ahem), and I'm very happy with it. My diet is fruits and vegetables, some meat, and a little grain, usually rice. I probably eat too much fruit, haha, but it's easier than most vegetables. I'm allergic to and/or avoid gluten, seafood, corn, dairy, pork, turkey and a lot of nuts, plus some other random foods. Pretty much everything I eat is organic and made at home. I do eat minimal processed stuff, and it's pretty hard to find processed things I can eat anyway. I eat the way I do because it's tasty, it makes me feel nice, and the athlete thing tends to make me view food as fuel, no point in eating a lot of stuff that won't help me. Not that I don't have the occasional sugarnom, just a v. v. minor part of my diet.

By and large it's meat, veggies, fruit, nuts and seeds, and cheese.

I went from eating "clean" to eating primal mostly. My only dairy is in the form of cheese, I don't eat a TON of it and digest it fine. I will eat some rice sometimes, and on occasion also eat corn, but it's never very much when I eat either (my dad gets amused watching me count out eight corn chips when I make nachos...) Also I will still allow the very rare occurrence of sugar as long as it's real sugar and not HFCS or some crap like that.

Honestly I spent years being sick all the time. It first started when I was in ten years old. I was 28 when I axed grains. That's almost two decades of just plain being sick. I started cleaning up how I ate because I just wanted to - and miracle of miracles I actually stopped being sick all the time. People ask questions like "did you get carb flu when you went low carb?" or "when you went paleo did you feel sick at the start?" I can't answer that because I ALREADY felt sick all the time just as a matter of course. I was sick to my stomach routinely, woke up in the middle of the night and had to dash to the bathroom - or sometimes, possibly even worse, I wouldn't actually GET sick and would just be huddled in the bathroom feeling like I was going to throw up at any minute for an hour or two. I literally had to plan my life around eating, and like Lyzelle said (although the test for Chron's came back negative for me), sometimes it was easiest to just not eat as a way to avoid eating something that would make me sick. It went from "this makes me sick" to "this might make me sick" to "well, everything makes me sick."

I seriously did not think I had any kind of gluten intolerance. The doctor's tested me for celiac and it came back negative so they never even suggested "try cutting out gluten anyway." I mean I had a colonoscopy to see if there was something else seriously wrong with me and they suggested THAT before "hey why don't you just try cutting gluten?" So as it happens I didn't cut gluten to see if it was making me sick - I did it because I wanted to, and surprise! Yes, it WAS making me sick.

I will never ever ever go back to eating like that again. I ate something a few months ago that had gluten in it and was so violently ill in the middle of the night, yet I clearly remember thinking "huh. this used to be normal for me. ...why did I ever think that was okay?!" I just figured that was how my life was and I had to live that way. SURPRISE YOU DON'T HAVE TO LIVE LIKE THIS.

Most of the "gluten free" packaged stuff is chock full of crap, so it's beyond just eating gluten free. Primal is a fine word for it (though paleo is the more well-known variation) but I almost don't like to use either because I feel like so many people who eat paleo are like... doing it as a contest with one another. I EAT SO MUCH MORE PALEO THAN YOU or YOU EAT CHEESE? GOTCHA or... it's just tiring. I legit just don't care that much about what other people put in their bodies to play the paleo-penis-measuring game. =P

Largely meat, eggs, veggies and protein shakes and lots of water lol.

Very little starch, some fruit, and almost no dairy.

I eat often, and protein at every meal. What I eat that day also depends on what I do.

I eat the way I do because it works for me. It was formulated for the program I was doing (and will be going back to when it starts up again) and it made me feel more energetic than ever.

Oh, forgot to put (and too late to edit) that I just kinda eat small things throughout the day in the morning/afternoon, and then have a moderate dinner at night. No real proper breakfast/lunch though, just a kind of..constant stream of food.

I drink tons and tons of water. I do my best not to eat fast food anymore, or rarely. I make 1/2 gallon of coffee on Sunday evenings, and I add sugar & unsweetened cocoa at a 2:1 ratio, and a splash of milk.

During the week, it's usually a free range, organic poached egg or crunchy peanut butter on 1/2 of an increased fiber English muffin and a banana for breakfast. Lunch is usually a turkey sandwich on whole wheat bread, or a salad. I snack on salted almonds with chocolate chips, and dinner could be anything or nothing. Sometimes I have hotdogs & Cheezits, sometimes I have quinoa and fresh veggies. On the weekends, I'm more of a grazer. I'll either have Cheerios or bacon/eggs/grits/toast. I usually don't eat lunch, and we try to cook dinner a couple of times. Most of our veggies come from our garden or local produce stands, and our meat is from our CSA - humanely raised, free range, organically fed beef, pork & chicken.

Somehow I've managed to lose about 15# eating like this, so I am not complaining at all. It beats the heck out of eating fast food 2-3x (or more!) a week and frozen meals and other horrible junk food.

Pretty much anything I want right now, only in moderation & not after 8 pm

Hahaha I have had Mac & cheese for breakfast before xD

This, exactly. Except I'm pescetarien.