Aha! Just having a look at the nutritional content of some breakfast cereals and realised that I was looking at the

per 100g

data instead of the per serving…. idiot!! Ah well, it also means that I have consumed less fat AND less calories than I thought I had – BONUS

I remember a conversation that I had with an old colleague some time ago (as a bit of background, he is a very dedicated athletic who is trying his best to get an Olympic place in London 2012) as he was monitoring the food that he ate as tried to reduce his body fat to improve his performance. He said that he was surprised at just how much fat that he actually ate even though he thought that he had a healthy diet – obviously so being the athlete that he was.

Over the last few days I would now have to agree with him, if you break my food intake down into protein, fat and carbs, about 25% is through fat – this astonishes me, as I, like my old colleague, thought I ate reasonably healthily….

Fortunately as I have been keeping a food diary I can establish where the fat intake actually comes from so that I can plan to reduce what is sensible to reduce. It would appear that I should be consuming just under 50g of fat daily and 10g of that is coming from my breakfast which really surprises me as 4g is from my semi-skimmed milk but an even higher 6g comes from my HEALTHY muesli!

I think that I am going to start buying proper skimmed milk for my breakfasts (that’s going to mean 3 different types of milk in the fridge now as my little girl is still on the full-fat blue top) and review my breakfast cereal to see if I can improve on the fat content.

A further 6.5g of fat comes from my salad dressing (extra virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar), now I’m not sure if there is an alternative to this as I love this dressing on my salad but I’ll have a look around and see what’s out there….

Generally the rest of the fat tends to come from vegetable oil used when cooking dinner and the spread used on my sandwiches at lunch. As I want to look for alternatives to sandwiches (not everyday though as they are convenient) my consumption may improve but I was thinking of houmus and pitta bread and there is still fat in that so I’ll have to have a bigger think…