Fitness: What You Need To Eat
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.
The basics of any healthy diet are proteins, carbohydrates and fats. For healthy eating, your proteins should concentrate on poultry, such as chicken and turkey and fish, eg, tuna. Your carbohydrates should be healthy ones, such as salads and green vegetables, while your fats should come in limited quantities from almonds, flax seed and olive oil. Try your best to avoid processed foods and refined sugars.
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.
On Sundays, I prepare my protein food for the coming working week. The protein part of the meal usually takes the longest to prepare, so this is what I get ready. Portion size is important and I usually count on one chicken fillet or a palm-sized piece of steak or a cup of mince for each adult person. The carbohydrate portion is usually frozen veg for meals and this only takes a few minutes to cook. For snacks or meals eaten at work, I usually use salad, which I prepare on the morning of use.
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.
Thursday and Friday snacks, such as hard boiled eggs can easily be prepared on Wednesday evenings.
On a closing note, always remember, failing to plan is planning to fail. For more information on fitness and diet look at the WordPress Blog – My Fitness Tale
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