A couple of years after retiring, my wife and I started eating just two meals a day. Depending on the day’s activities we have breakfast sometime between 7 and 10 AM and our second meal around 2:30-4:30 PM. We don’t eat out a lot, maybe once or twice a month. The reason we don’t is mostly because we too often are disappointed in the quality of the food. We hate to pay a lot of money for food we don’t really care for. We eat a lot of food that we grow in our home garden.
Having guests for the afternoon/evening meal throws things off a little but we explain that we’re early eaters and usually settle on a time between 5 and six PM.
Has anyone else here on the forum found that their eating habits change much in their retirement years?
Yes! We eat healthier and cook more at home. I’m eating low fat and low salt, mostly WFPB and as much variety as possible. We’re still eating 3 meals a day, but we’re exercising a lot. Like you, I hate spending money, even a modest amount, on restaurant food I don’t want to eat. It’s worse now that I’m eating healthier…before it just had to be better than what I could cook at home, now it’s that plus low fat low salt green stuff.
We also eat early, usually 5 pm, have for decades. It’s not fun trying to meet friends for dinner. Sometimes we meet friends for activities rather than meals, even better!
When I was employed, I did have fairly regular meal times. I worked 4pm to midnight, so breakfast/lunch was whenever I wanted and perhaps 1 meal. I could snack, ec. Then at 4pm I was at work. About 6:30 some teammates and I would often go out to eat. All-you-can-eat buffets, Chinese, Bar-B-Que and so on.
I would get home about 12:30 am and relax and maybe eat. It was a very leisurely day I guess.
Then I went into semi-retirement at age 51 or so, worked a job during the day, 6 days a week at times. We did a guest oriantation each Monday and I had leftovers which included fruit, pasteries and had that available for a few days in the fridge.
After a few years of that I was on the farm working. My days are not planned. I eat whenever I want. If I buy something like lettuce at Costco, I will eat it in the next few days. A package od Pot Roast will be eaten also for the next few meals. Although it sounds a bit like binging on a particulat item, over the week or month I guess I am getting a fairly general diet, just not balanced every day.
I had my quadruple bypass 10 years ago last week. That was probably caused by all those buffets and smoking and so on. Although I have a few aches and pains (age 74) I am in realtively good health. My Mom lived to age 96 and I hope to at least aproach that.
I am sure there are those who say that you should have 3 balanced meals a day (maybe reduced to (2) but I don’t think that is most important.
Decades ago there was a PC program I had which was quite novel. It may be available now as a paid app but it was free at the time. You entered each item into it (like 8 oz whole milk, 1 slice American cheese, 4 oz of beef, etc) it then showed you your daily intake of calories, minerals, fat, sodium - all the stuff on a typiceal nutrition label except that one label shown was the culumnation of all you ate. It also showed you what percentage of your recommendated daily allowance you ingested. The app contained all sorts of items but you could also add the nutrition label info of a product not yet in there. It was like a Nutritionist watching over you.
I usually eat one meal per day, sometimes between mid-afternoon and late evening. I snack on leftovers to some extent until I go to bed. Once in awhile I’ll have a small breakfast or lunch.
I’ve only had two meals a day for my adult life. I spent 20 years with TWA [remember them?] on graveyard shift. So lunch was around 4 am, and it’s difficult to match meal times with family and their normal hours.
Dinner with family around 6-ish.
As later project manager, had to be on the job site by 7. [55 miles away] So up at 5:30m grab toast and LOTS of coffee. Lunch at work and dinner at home.
Two meals a day for decades. Almost never eat out–too much salt.
We rarely eat out for those reasons. Rising costs and poor quality. When we do we stretch leftovers because the food is normally salty. Probably have one larger meal per day and 1 to 2 snack type meals.
Cooking your own meals gives you a little more assurance of what goes into them and usually most tasty in my opinion.
I’m usually eating no breakfast, lunch around 2pm and dinner around 6pm. So all my eating is happening in a 5 hour window. Not doing it intentionally, but this is that new fad they call intermittent fasting.
I think many restaurants are using less salt than they used to…except for fast food. I do make a point of complaining when the food is too salty. Something about a squeaky wheel…
Our eating habits are similar to yours. A fairly light breakfast, high fiber cereal with banana and juice. Big-azz lunch around 1:30 or so. Light snack around six and popcorn and a homebrew ale around 8:30. We almost never eat out or have company except Thanksgiving when the daughter and her hubby come up from Florida. Then we cut loose for 3 or 4 days. Yes, we are pretty dull, but that’s the way we like it.
Our go-to breakfasts are often an apple/banana/yogurt bowl or cereal/banana. Every two weeks or so my wife needs to keep our 52-yr-old sourdough starter going so I have pancakes then. We recently started using mashed avocado instead of butter or mayonnaise on my wife’s whole-grain wheat bread for toast and sandwiches, we like it.
For our second meal, (3-4 PM,) we usually have three to five different vegetables from our garden with some kind of meat or poultry 2 or 3 times a week. We have red meat maybe 2-3 times a month and poultry and/or fish twice or three times a week.
I eat zero added salt and my wife uses very little. Getting down to that level is kinda like changing from whole milk to skim milk, it’s difficult at first, but once you acclimate to it, you don’t want to go back.