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Fitness: What You Need To Eat
Diet is the major part of any weight loss or fitness regime and can account for about four fifths of your achievements. You can help improve your diet by planning your meals for the coming week and eating more frequent, smaller meals, to spread your intake over the day.
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.
Breakfast is an important meal of the day, especially when trying to lose weight. When you eat, you raise your metabolic rate (how fast you use energy) and by eating breakfast after your overnight fast, you increase your energy usage first thing in the morning. This energy increase from eating can be used to your further advantage by eating smaller meals more often. You can eat small meals between five and seven times daily to help keep your metabolic rate up. It’s important, however, to remember to cut down on the amount at each of these meals to ensure your overall calorie intake remains the same (or is reduced, if you are trying to lose weight). On 6 meals a day, you could plan for 3 meals with 350 calories each (breakfast, lunch and dinner) and 3 meals with 250 calories each for mid morning, mid afternoon and supper. This would allow you 1800 calories a day and you can reduce or increase your intake at each meal for different calorie intake levels.
I plan ahead for my meals for the working week, because then I have something ready to eat when I need it and I am not tempted to buy expensive fast-food from a nearby shop! The prepared food includes protein for my meals and snacks.
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. For more information on fitness and diet look at the Wordpress Blog – My Fitness Tale
For more information on diets please visit home delivered diet and home delivery diet meals
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