1. How often do I eat?
This is a very important place to start as controlling you're eating times and changing your eating patterns is a very important factor in helping control hunger and helping promote weight loss. The pattern to follow is eating every 2-3 hours, reducing the size of the main meals so you can have 5-6 smaller but nutritionally packed meals. This will prevent your body from entering into starvation mode, and will give your body the confidence that it is going to continually get food throughout the day. This will super-charge your metabolism and will keep your body fuelled for weight loss.
2. How do I fuel my muscles?
It is important understand that muscle is made from something called amino-acids and it is long chains of these molecules which make muscle fibres. Some our bodies can make themselves, but the most important ones when building muscle have to be obtained from our diets. It is massively important to understand where the best place to obtain these nutrients is, so you can factor them into your small nutritionally packed meals. Eating low fat, high quality protein is the best place to obtain the nutrients you need for muscle building.
Meat such as lean red meat, low fat chicken, fish, low fat cottage cheese, white turkey meat and pork tenderloin are all high quality sources of protein with reduced saturated fat content. An excellent way to boost your protein intake is to drink whey protein shakes which will provide a quick boost of amino-acids to help fuel your weight loss.
3. Getting vitamins and Minerals
Vitamins and Minerals are essential for a range of physiological (that's basically your body working) functions. They will help immensely with your weight loss but it is important to increase your intake if you are exercising on a regular basis. First and foremost is obtaining these vitamins and minerals from your diet and this will involve eating a good variety of fruit and vegetables. The more colourful and varied in colour the better for obtaining a wide range of vitamins and minerals,also try to eat good quality produce. Unfortunately it is not always easy to do this so I would highly recommend supplementing your intake using a good quality multi vitamin and mineral supplement. This will ensure you are at least getting your daily requirements with your diet boosting this, it is important to note that the supplement is not in place of a varied diet.
4. Which Carbohydrates to eat?
Sticking to the correct types of carbohydrates will ensure the best supply of energy for your workouts and recovery. It is important to eat as much fruit and vegetable to obtain good quality carbohydrates but also compliment with wholemeal rice, wholemeal pasta, potatoes and yams. This will ensure you are avoiding processed carbohydrates which offer lower quality nutrition and ultimately can affect your weight loss efforts.
5. Good Fats Please.
Eating the correct types of fats is massively important if you want to control your metabolism, control your weight and fuel your muscle recovery. It is important to eat higher levels of mono-saturated and polyunsaturated fats than saturated fats. Saturated fats are needed for nervous function and hormone production but it is important to eat small amounts to ensure your body is dealing with them efficiently. To obtain mono-unsaturated fats you can eat foods such as mixed nuts, olives and olive oil. Polyunsaturated fats can be found in flax seed oil, fish oils and again mixed nuts. The better quality fats, known as good fats, will help regulate weight loss and aid muscle recovery after workouts.
6. Hydration.
With nearly 65% of the human body being made up of water it is obviously important to keep hydrated. The best way to keep your body hydrated is by drinking plain old water on a regular basis throughout the day. The amount depends on age, gender, size and activity levels so it is important to check your basic requirements first. If you increase your activity levels then it is important to increase your intake of water, do not wait till your thirst response kicks in, keep topping up with water throughout your workouts and throughout the day. A good habit to get into is to hydrate as soon as you wake up with 500ml of water before you drink or eat anything else.
7. Planning and Control.
Plan your weekly eating in a diary, making sure you keep a balance of the nutrients and food types mentioned above. Look into the amounts of each food you need to eat in each of your small power meals so you create balance. Track your foods and your progress and look for weaknesses in your diet so you can address them in your planning. Not every day will be perfect and some days you will find it hard to stick to your plan so it is important as a rule of thumb to try and eat 80% of your plan and let yourself have a treat meal or snack within your week. This way you will not deny yourself treat foods and you will be less likely to gorge and binge on them which will really knock you off your weight loss pathway.
