BIANCA REGINA: Your Relationship With Food

1. How would you describe your diet? How do you feel about it? Do you think you need to change it in any way, and if so, how and why? If you feel you need to change it, but haven't yet, what is standing in your way of making the change?

I would describe my diet as fairly healthy. I try to eat lots of fruit and veg, like you should. I recently quit drinking alcohol (for good, I think, though I'm not sure yet). We cook on 3-4 evenings a week, I don't eat much meat etc etc. But. I do eat too much chocolate. Which I should change. Because I, like Andreas, gain weight quite easily. I have recently switched from sweet breakfast cereal to just oats with fresh fruit, that feels good. I have also given up the habit of eating chocolat in bed every night (which I did for years!). Now, I brush my teeth in the evening, go to bed and feel all healthy. Alright, sometimes I feel a craving for my favourite choco-drug, to, but so far, I have always resisted it. However, I have given in to the craving at other times of the day far too many times. So all in all, I'm quite content with the way that I eat. As for the chocolate thing, I guess I haven't changed it because I don't really want to.

2. How do you or your family eat? How do you feel about this? Again, do you feel the need for change?

In the evenings, we all eat together, sit down, no music, no TV, talk and enjoy our food. While I'm at work, I eat at my desk. I work by myself, and I have organized my working days so that I spend as little times as possible at work, which means few and short breaks. So lunches are more of a sustenance and less of an enjoyment thing. Sadly, my daughter is a VERY picky eater, the list of things she will eat is incredibly short. I think that she should change, but she hasn't (yet, I hope). The husband and me love to go out to restaurants. On the weekends, I sometimes cook more elaborate meals. I love trying out new recipes!

3. Where do you shop for your food? How do your food-shopping habits reflect your values?

I shop at one of the two local supermarkets, trying to buy organically grown and local produce as much as possible. We buy our fairly traded espresso beans and some delicacies (like Fleur de Sel) online. We used to have a box of organically grown vegetables delivered to our home every week, but that turned out to be too much of a commitment. All in all, my shopping habits reflect different values: not wanting to spend a lot of time shopping and trying to buy organically grown and tasty stuff.

4. What does your country do to influence how and what people eat? Does this need to change, in your opinion?

All in all, I am happy with what my country does to influence what and how people eat: there is a lot of extra funding for organic farming, school meals are monitored for their nutritional value, and there is now a wide-spread awareness of what is and isn't healthy food.

5. What one thing can you do to:

a) wean yourself off an oil-based diet and onto sun-based foods?
I'm not sure that I know what sun-based foods are. To limit my oil intake, I could quit eating pizza, I guess. Or limit myself to eating a pizza every other months.
As for sun-based - there is a temptation now, in the winter, to buy a lot of fruit from far-off, sun-soaked places like South America and Northern Africa, but that's not really environmentally sound... so I try to make do with products like apples and pears from my own sun-starved country.

b) improve your eating habits and thus your health?
Leave the chocolate at the store.

c) encourage others to do the same?
Abstain from eating dessert with them. Encourage my daughter to try new things again and again. She's good with the sweets, though: she has one "Sweets Day" a week where she can pick 15 sweets from a box - outside of that, there are no sweets, and she deposits all sweets that she receives in that box, telling people "thank you, I'll eat that on Wednesday". That works very well, and she never cheats. Maybe I should pick up the "Sweets Day" habit for myself...