If you want to lose weight or get fit, your diet is going to form the major part of any results you achieve, perhaps 75 or 80%. It is preferable to spread your eating out over between five and seven meals a day and to ensure that your food intake is the best you can achieve, you could plan your meals for a week ahead.
If you’re unsure of what food to eat to get ht best results I strongly recommend you to check out this Wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diet_food where it explains all that.
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 vegetables,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 post.
I plan ahead 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.However if you’re a person that does not enjoy eating diet food but still wants results I would recommend that you cut back on the amount of food that you are eating as this is often one of the leading causes of weight control problems. People tend to overeat because they do not realize that they are full, There are programs and supplements out there that can assist you in feeling full faster and eating less. The most talked about product in that range would be something called Sensa which tricks your body into thinking it is full which helps with weight loss. If this is something you would prefer then I suggest you try sensa now.
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.