Fitness Weekly Discussion #1

Thanks for clarifying!

Here goes my oat saga: (cc: @ReapersGale)

I don't remember which threads they were, but there were several instances within the past several months where people talked about doing "overnight oats," and the idea seemed appealing to me because I'm an absolute sucker for convenience. The idea that I could prepare make-ahead meals that were easy, tasty, filling, and healthy was great. The idea that they were vegan/vegetarian (depending on how you prepare them) is also a bonus, as my husband and I are trying to cut down on our meat consumption and go for more plant-based foods. We're not vegan or vegetarian, but we would probably consider ourselves as pointed more in that direction than we ever have been before, if that makes sense?

I should qualify here that I don't really like oatmeal in general. I find the taste bland and the texture off-putting. I grew up eating those flavored instant oatmeal packets and loved them, and it wasn't until I returned to oatmeal as an adult that I realized I liked them because they were absolutely loaded with sugar. Every other attempt I'd made as an adult to eat oatmeal had floundered, because I couldn't find a way to make oatmeal tasty without making it unhealthy. It felt like the only way to make it palatable was to counterbalance the good oats with other bad things. If I tried to get around it, with, say, sugar substitutes, it still tasted terrible. I would mix in fruit and find myself picking it out of the mush, avoiding the rest of the still-bland oats.

Given this, it's a surprise that the idea of overnight oats would appeal to me at all, but again, I'm a sucker for convenience. So, a little less than two months ago I started experimenting with overnight oats. My goal was twofold: I wanted something that was decently healthy, and I wanted something that was genuinely tasty to me. I've changed my diet many times before and failed, and a lot of that is because I'd go from eating stuff that was awful for me to stuff that tasted awful. I'd force myself to eat the healthy stuff, telling myself all the while that "I can do this because it's the right thing to do." That's a hard hook to hang your hat on when it comes to food, and there have been countless times in my life that I've done the "health whiplash" move as I call it, going from junk food to extremely healthy stuff, only to shift rapidly back to junk food once my well-intentioned willpower breaks.

This time, my husband and I wanted to get really serious about our health. We're overweight, and we're getting older. We're starting to feel the effects of our neglect to take care of our physical organisms. Early in life many people, us included, feel invincible. We could eat whatever, not sleep, not exercise, and not feel the effects too badly. We now live with a sense of foreshadowing given to us by others and felt within our own bodies. Things are only going to get harder from here on out. It's not alarming right now, but it's definitely foreboding. Furthermore, in a pragmatic sense, getting healthy is always easier now than it will be in the future. It's hard to see that when you're younger, but I get it now. I don't want to look at myself years down the road and hate my past self for the things it didn't do to take care of me.

As such, the changes we've decided to make have focused on smaller, incremental steps and sustainability. We're also treating "falling off the wagon" as an inevitability and prioritizing frequent, smaller resets than large-scale diet and exercise overhauls that tend to work for a bit and then fizzle out, leaving us defeated. The best diet, they say, is the one you stick to. We're now prioritizing the "stickiness" of our actions over ideology or perfection.

Overnight oats have been an incremental and transformative change for me. They are now my lunch at work, every single day. I'll spare you the gory details of all my experimentation and just go to some of the key things I've figured out that really work for me:

• Texture was a main complaint of oatmeal, so I was surprised to find out that I far prefer the texture of overnight oats to cooked ones.

• Between quick oats, rolled oats, and steel-cut oats, I surprisingly like the texture of the quick oats the best. Steel-cut have a nice nuttiness and chewiness to them, but I haven't yet figured out the right ratios of everything to make the meal as satisfying as it could be.

• I bought a big bag of frozen berries and pour some out on the top before sealing the containers up. I then mix them in before eating. This is easier than using fresh fruit (I don't have to keep buying berries each week), and they seem to hold up better, though they are kind of mushy and dead by my last (4th) day.

• Adding some dark chocolate chips gives a taste and texture break, so that the meal isn't as "samey" the whole way through. They tend to end up at the bottom, and sometimes I scoop down to get them throughout the meal, and sometimes I save them for the end as a little "dessert" phase.

• Sunbutter mixes in really well because it's very soft, but it tends to add a bitterness to the whole thing that I find offputting. Almond butter is tough because it's more solid and doesn't mix in as easy, but I love the flavor it brings. I'm still trying out different nut butters to see what works best.

• I don't love cleaning mason jars since I'm an aforementioned sucker for convenience and their lids tend to rust after repeated dishwasher trips, so I got some plastic containers off of Amazon that work wonderfully and dishwash easily.

• Adding in chia seeds changes the texture up in a good way. For regular oats it makes them less slimey, and for steel-cut it basically creates a two-layer meal, with the oats on the bottom and a "chia pudding" on the top.

• This is somewhat TMI, but I'll offer it here just in case it helps anyone: I tried adding in flaxseed and it gave me what I will politely call "sustained gastrointestinal discomfort." I then learned that I'm supposed to use ground flaxseed instead of whole ones, and that gave me what I will call "slightly less sustained gastrointestinal discomfort."

At present, here's my "recipe," though each week I try different tweaks:

• 1 1/4 cup water (most people use almond milk, but water has worked fine for me)
• 1/2 cup oats (1/4 if using steel-cut)
• 1 scoop protein powder
• 1 tbsp chia seeds
• 1 tbsp shredded coconut
• 1 tbsp dark chocolate chips
• 1 tbsp nut butter
• an unmeasured sprinkling of frozen berries on top

I can't say that I crave it, but I can say that I like it, and have been doing it now for almost two months. Combining this with some other incremental dietary shifts have allowed me and my husband to each shed 10+ pounds without feeling like we're really "restricting" ourselves, which has been dramatically different from all the other times we've tried in the past.

If anyone has any overnight oat recommendations, tips, or tricks, please share them!

EDIT: I just had the dawning realization that I accidentally created a post that has a too-long, unnecessary life story at the beginning with a recipe tucked all the way at the end. I'd like to apologize to every food blog I've ever unfairly judged for doing the same thing. I get it now.