If your current nutritional plan is preventing you from losing fat, then it's
time for you to start working on building better eating habits. This can be as simple
as committing to one small nutritional improvement per day (such as replacing your
lunchtime soda with water) and one large nutritional change per week (such as setting
aside time on a Sunday to prepare a weekly menu and all of your meals).
But you need to have a plan to make this work, just like how you have a plan for
your workouts. Your nutrition plan should include the contents of every meal, as
well as your grocery list for the week. This will enable you to have meal alternatives
for nights when you might need to be running from one event to the other with no
time or healthy snack alternatives when you are on the road between meetings.
It's important that you make your plan something you can follow. If you are
currently eating 7 meals per week at the golden arches, it wouldn't be realistic
to plan to replace those meals with carrot sticks and tofu this week. A better plan
would be to substitute a couple of those meals with healthier sandwich options and
then work on improving things even more in the following weeks.
So here's a three-step guideline on building a better nutrition plan:
1) Prepare a weekly menu. Outline each meal and snack for every day of the upcoming
week. Take into account the possibilities that you might work late or get invited
out to lunch. The more options you have and preparations you make, the better you
will be able to stick to your fat loss plan.
2) From your menu plan, you'll now know what foods and ingredients you need
to make it through the week. Make your grocery list and stick to it (see mine below).
Grocery shopping is your first opportunity to break some bad nutritional habits.
You can't eat chips, cookies, or cakes if you don't have them in the
house – so don't buy them and you'll avoid any future temptation.
3) Prepare the meals or prepare the ingredients so that making the actual meal doesn't
take a lot of time. Like shopping, it's best to do all of these preparations
at one time (such as on a Sunday or another day off).
My shopping list includes:
Fruits • Apples • Oranges • Blueberries • Melon •
Peaches • Grapefruit • Raspberries
Vegetables • Peppers (red, yellow, green, & orange), • Spinach
• Asparagus • Broccoli • Snow Peas • Mushrooms •
Frozen mixed vegetables • Tomato sauce
Protein Sources • Chicken breasts • Turkey breasts • Salmon
fillets • Lean beef • Skim milk & low-fat, low-sugar yogurt
Carbohydrates • Oat bread • Oatmeal (no sugar added) • Whole-wheat
pasta
Other • Green tea • Unsalted, not roasted, Almonds
You'll notice that most of these foods come without a food label. Most of
the foods that you should avoid come in a bag or a box. Building a shopping list
that contains very few bagged or boxed items is something to aim for. But when you
do purchase something with a label, make sure to avoid two of the unhealthiest ingredients
created by man:
1) High-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) 2) Hydrogenated or partially-hydrogenated vegetable
oil (the sources of trans-fatty acids)
You might have heard of these two ingredients. They are strongly associated with
obesity and other lifestyle-diseases (such as diabetes).
Sincerely,
Craig Ballantyne, CSCS, MS
Author, Turbulence Training