Happy Tuesday! Rosie here. If you've been following our Sunday Summaries or seen my
2012 Round Up you'll know that I don't follow a specific 'diet' - I just 'eat clean' and make healthy choices. By doing this, along with regular exercise, I lost a stone in a couple of months at the end of last year. This was with a lot of help from Charis, who runs '
Louca Personal Training'. Charis has kindly offered to write some posts for Where Are My Knees and we have some great posts lined up from him about strength training and the importance of goals. His first post is about a clean and healthy diet. Over to you Charis...
A lot of people think that getting a healthy, lean and good
looking body is something extremely complicated, needing all sorts of expensive
equipment, and someone to stand over you and make sure you hit the precise
correct angle on your situps. Well, I’m here to tell you it is not – all it
takes is some simple discipline and planning. Here are 5 tips to help you stick
to a cleaner and healthier diet.
If you can’t find it in nature, don’t have it
A lot of food nowadays goes through various levels of
processing to get it to the supermarket shelf. You must be able to recognise it
and understand how far it is from its natural form in order to make educated
and healthy choices. If something is so far gone from its natural state that
you cannot directly relate it to something found in nature, then move on. You want the absolute basics – vegetables,
fruit, meat, poultry, eggs, limited and high quality unprocessed dairy
(raw/unpasteurised products only), legumes and beans. Avoid all products with
added sugar, sweeteners, all processed foods, most cereal, most bread, most
prepared meals (unless you trust the source to use natural ingredients), and
the majority of drinks except natural juices, water and green/white tea or
variants without sugar or sweeteners (except honey, which is a far better
alternative and natural). Disregard the
majority of products that are not 100% what they say on tin. For example peanut
butter can be part of a healthy diet; as long as it is 100% natural peanut
butter – not 80% peanut butter, 10% sugar and 10% hydrogenated fat.
Fat is your friend, sugar is not
Healthy fats have a myriad of health benefits, from
healthier skin, to hormone balancing, to cholesterol control. Also, without
good quality dietary fat, your body will not get rid of its own bodyfat. With
an influx of carbohydrates and low fat intake, your body will use those as a
primary source of energy and store what is not used as bodyfat. “Low fat”
products remove the fat, along with all its precious nutrients and benefits,
and replace it with sugar or derivatives of sugar. The better option is to have
moderate amounts of natural, healthy fats throughout your diet and lower your
carbohydrate intake, while completely removing all processed sugar products.
Empty your kitchen before you start
When you decide to clean up your diet, you must get rid of
all the other bad foods and drinks you have in your kitchen. If you suddenly
change your eating and drinking habits for the better, you will start to crave
the things you used to enjoy but ultimately do you nothing but harm. By having
these things around the house, it is far too easy to give it to the cravings
and ruin your diet before you’ve even started. It takes about 10 days to kick
bad food cravings. After that, they will be more sporadic, and you may well be
able to have something you really miss and get away with it under the 80/20
rule (below).
Plan/ Cook in advance
In order to enjoy your cleaner diet, you must cook and plan
in advance. The best way to help your diet fail is to put yourself in a
position where the only option is no food or junk food. You must prepare as much as possible in
advance, and this requires a plan. With my clients I like to organise a weekly
meal plan, review it at the weekend, and they can shop and cook accordingly as
the week goes on. Without this plan, you are leaving things down to chance, as
maybe you are delayed from work and slowly fading away from hunger, you have
some errands to run or you just can’t be bothered to go to the effort of
preparing and cooking something clean every single day, and would much rather
prefer to get a frozen pizza instead to save time and effort. The easiest options
are usually the worst, so plan in advance and make preparations. Cook larger
portions of food, use leftovers intelligently, and prepare in good time,
including healthy snacks – not just main meals.
80/20 rule
So you have stuck to your diet well and you are making good
progress but it is your mum’s birthday next Friday. Her sister makes her a big
chocolate cake every year, with choux pastries on top, and it is truly a sight
to behold and a culinary delight. This is where the 80/20 rule comes in. If you
have been eating clean and looking after yourself for 80% of your meals, you
can afford to have something not quite so clean the other 20% of the time. I
would prefer a 90/10 approach, but 80/20 is a good start and is much easier
mentally for someone to agree to and sacrifice any other bad food opportunities
that come up. It is like money in the bank. You can keep up with your savings
(eating clean) by not spending all your money in the January sales (avoiding
bad food), and then one day you can splash out on something you really want
(get in great shape). Or, you can keep getting little items you don’t really
want (snacking on biscuits, eating badly), and then after a few months you are
wondering why your bank balance is really in the red (you’re out of shape).
And here’s a bonus 6th tip – BE PATIENT. Results
are not overnight. It’s the months of focus that count, not the hours. Don’t
weigh yourself every day and wonder why you haven’t lost a stone this week yet
even though you’ve been really disciplined and gone to the gym twice since you
started 4 days ago. Track progress every week or even two weeks, and there
should be a pleasing result.
Good luck! Feel free to leave questions in the comments or
contact me as below!
Are you someone who
wants to make a positive lifestyle change? Or maybe you are an active person
who wants guidance to take your results to the next level, or even a
competitive athlete wanting to finish on the podium at your next competition?
Then contact me at www.loucapersonaltraining.com or Twitter @LoucaPT with any questions you
may have! 10% discount for clients through Where Are My Knees, just give it a
mention in your query!
