Hello, everyone! In my last two articles I introduced some ideas about nutrition and talked about how and why people let their diet stop, or even reverse, their progress. This week I will continue to give you a few guidelines on how to improve your diet. Without further procrastination, here we go: 4. Eat 5-6 smaller meals a day instead of 3 big ones.
While this is not necessarily a must it can be a huge help in controlling insulin spikes (which can lead to fat gain), and hunger. It is also much easier to control caloric intake and maintain consistent energy throughout the day when eating this way.
By the way, a mid-morning or mid-afternoon meal can consist of a protein shake and a handful of nuts or an orange. I’m not talking about eating a steak six times a day.
5. Don’t drink beverages with more than zero calories.
People just don’t realize how many calories they drink. The main reason for this is that most beverages simply don’t make you feel very full and it usually doesn’t take very long to drink them. You can very easily take in 500-600 calories in a day with drinks and not notice a thing. If you do this 5 days a week (and those of you who get your fancy Starbucks drinks before work absolutely do) that adds up to about a pound a week. That’s 52 pounds a year. From a drink with no nutritional value. That takes 5 minutes to consume.
Stick to water or green tea. If you need more taste to your water get some of those little Crystal Light packets. Many people looking to lose weight can drop a quick ten pounds on this advice alone.
6. Eat breakfast.
This is kind of an offshoot from number 4, but we’ve all heard the expression that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. It’s true for many reasons. It gets fuel in our system, it stabilizes our energy, it jump-starts our metabolism. I think it’s important because simply getting some healthy food in us to start our day makes it much less likely that we’ll binge on unhealthy foods later on.
Many times people say they can’t get up early to fix something. I say it takes less than 10 minutes to make and eat a bowl of oatmeal with a handful of nuts and a scoop of protein powder mixed in.
In my next article I’ll finish up this series. If you have any questions about this topic or any other, please drop me a line. I promise I will get back to you, and maybe your question will get answered in this very column! Have a great week!
-from the Castro Valley Forum, March 10, 2010
Mitch Rothbardt MitchRothbardtTraining@yahoo.com 510-754-7113 Discover Your Strength!
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