Thursday, 29 November 2012

Fitness and diet


Fitness and diet

What you put into your body will form 75 - 80% of the results you will see. Therefore, it is extremely important to be consistent in your eating routine, to eat 5 - 7 small meals per day and to plan ahead. An eating routine is a huge topic and I will aim to put up some detailed meal plans, articles on good foods and healthy recipes. But if I were to sum up the basics of what you should or should not be eating into a short paragraph, I would say, avoid all refined sugars and as much processed food as possible. As to what you should be eating, aim for protein rich foods, such as chicken, turkey, tuna, fibrous carbohydrates, such as green veg and salad and limited good fats, which includes olive oil, almonds and flax seed.
Eat 5 - 7 small meals a day. The reason behind eating so frequently throughout the day, is that, every time you eat, you raise your metabolism. This is why eating breakfast after your 7 - 8 hour overnight fast is so important when trying to lose weight. Do remember that you want to maintain the same calorie intake (assuming that your current calorie intake is at the appropriate level) across the larger number of meals as you ate previously with fewer meals. For example, if you should be eating 1800 calories a day, a rough breakdown across 6 meals would be 350 calories for a main meal, ie breakfast, lunch and dinner and 250 calories for your three snacks, mid morning, mid afternoon and pre-bed. You may need to modify this depending on when you train but I will expand on this in a later article.
It is much easier to stick to your planned diet if you plan ahead for this. One way of managing this is to prepare your food for the week on one day. I prepare food for a 5-day working week but you could do it for a full 7 day week too. I make the protein portion of my meals and snacks on one day, because this is the time consuming part of meal planning.
I prepare my week's food on a Sunday, making sure I check on portion sizes, based on the "size of your hand" principle. This usually means one chicken fillet, a cup of lean mince or a palm-sized piece of steak for each adult. Because the protein preparation is the most time-consuming, this is mostly what I prepare ahead of time. The carbohydrate portion is usually salad, which I prepare in the morning, or frozen vegetables which only take a few minutes.
A typical week might have two fish dinners, two chicken dinners and one steak dinner. I use frozen fish, so this doesn't need preparation ahead of time because it only takes 15 minutes to bake on the day of use. I thus need to prepare for two chicken and one steak dinners, plus lunches. For two people, this might mean cooking 2 steaks, 8 chicken fillets and 6 hard boiled eggs. The cooked steaks, four chicken fillets and the eggs go in the fridge for dinner and lunches early in the week and the other four cooked chicken fillets go in the freezer for lunch and dinner later in the week. The eggs may also be used for breakfast. This assumes cooked meat can be stored safely in the fridge for two or possibly three days.
This leaves just snacks to be prepared for the end of the week and it is easy to boil some more eggs on a Wednesday evening.
On a closing note, always remember, failing to plan is planning to fail.

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