Most people realize that in order to reach their fitness goals, there are two factors that they have to get right: diet and exercise.
What I've come to realize is that training is perhaps the easier of the two to master. For lack of better words, when it comes to training, you do it hard and you do it briefly. After that you recover and then go back in when it's time to train again.
In regards to diet, I see a lot of people struggle. In part, I believe it's because training can be addressed in an hour or two a week. I'm an advocate of brief, high-intensity training, so I do not recommend spending hours a week in a gym. It simply is not needed if you're willing to put forth the effort to train hard. On the other hand, what one eats is a constant decision and requires more attention.
Put another way, you can spend one hour a week training and have that problem taken care of. Eating, on the other hand, is something that you have to deal with constantly; all the time.
You go into the kitchen to pour yourself a glass of water. Do you also open up the fridge to look and see what there is to eat? You make yourself lunch and finish your meal but then have the desire to eat more. Do you do it? You have a business lunch with clients. Do you have a healthy salad or opt to eat a high-calorie meal? All of these questions arise, for most of us, daily.
The way that I've looked at these situations is that they're small battles. Just face it: you're going to be faced with dozens, if not hundreds, of eating choices a day and you can choose to do what will further your fitness goals or what will sideline them. Every time that you make the right eating decision, consider it a small battle that has been won. A smaller step forward towards winning the war, if you will. On the other hand, every time you make a poor eating decision, consider that a small loss.
I use this concept because ultimately what matters is if you reach your fitness goal. If you make a couple of poor eating decisions, make note of it (either mentally or on paper) and figure out how you're going to remedy it. Perhaps you could be more active for the day or decrease your portion sizes for the remainder of the day.
Having a treat or "falling off the wagon" once or twice isn't going to derail your progress all that much. Remember: it's nearly impossible to lose much fat in a day and the same is true for gaining fat. It's not what happens in a single meal or a single day...but what you do for a period of time that matters.
Why is proper eating so important to one's fitness goals? It is commonly accepted that carrying an excess amount of body fat contributes to poor health. Hypertension, Type-II diabetes, high cholesterol, and high cancer rates have all been associated with unhealthy levels of bodyfat.
If you're in the gym training to develop strength and muscle size, you're not going to be very pleased if your newly developed muscle is being hidden under a thick layer of fat. Not only are you going to be much healthier with lower levels of bodyfat, but you're going to look far more impressive if you're lean.
Guys especially seem to fear losing much body fat for fear of becoming too small but once you become lean you'll realize that you look far more impressive than when you have a smooth, bulked-up look.
I see people on a weekly basis that train very hard. They likely have the training part of the puzzle figured out. But many of them will admit to not following a proper diet and overeating on a regular basis. Don't make the mistake of thinking that just because you've gone to the gym to train that you're now immune to the effects of poor nutrition. While it is true that exercising will allow you to eat more food without consequence, in reality the amount of calories that you're burning are relatively small. Look at it this way: a pound of fat is roughly 3,500 calories. Walking at 3 mph, for one hour, burns three hundred calories. You would have to walk over eleven hours to burn off one pound of fat! Likewise, if you go into the gym and have a hard weight training or cardio session, you may burn 400 calories, but that 400 calories is equivalent to a slice of pizza. In other words, that hard workout that you just put in can be nullified, if you will, by a single slice of pizza. So don't fall into the trap of thinking that you're immune to the effects of poor nutrition just because you exercise.
In regards to diet, I usually recommend that people follow one of two options: eat constantly changing variety of healthy food and count the calories in the food, or, find healthy foods that you like and stick with eating those same foods, in lieu of counting calories. Either way will work. I've found that it's easier for me to eat the same foods, at the same time of day. This takes away the math and the constant tracking of calories. But then again, I enjoy this so I've found that it's not a chore to eat the same foods every day.
If you're someone who likes constant variety, then I suggest having a big list of healthy foods that are allowed on your diet and simply adding them into meals until you've hit your caloric goal for the day. While this may seem like more work, it really doesn't take a considerable amount of time (most foods have nutritional information on the labels now) and gives you a considerable amount of freedom in your diet.
Ultimately what matters are calories. You may've heard the saying: calories in, calories out. The idea is that everyone requires a particular amount of calories, every single day, to maintain their current body weight. You are likely eating somewhere close to this number already. How do you figure this number out? Well, you can do a quick search on the Internet for a "daily calorie chart" of something similar. You plug in your sex, age, height, and activity level and the chart will likely give you a pretty accurate idea of how many calories you need per day to maintain your weight.
Another option is to track your meals for an entire week. At the end of the week, add up all of your calories and then divide that by seven. If you've not gained or lost any weight, this will give you your daily caloric needs.
Most people, instinctually, eat close to their caloric needs every day. We have a complex hormonal system that regulates such things. The problem is that most people tend to overeat a slight amount every single day. Let's say that you require 2,500 calories a day to maintain your current bodyweight. What happens if you eat 2,800 every day for an entire year? That equals out to be 109,500 excess calories that you've ingested over the course of a year. So what are the practical implications of this, you ask? It comes out to be 31 pounds of bodyfat.
Thirty one pounds of bodyfat is a large amount of fat to add...especially over the course of one year. You may ask yourself, "Eating three hundred calories a day doesn't sound that horrible. I may be doing that but I haven't gained that much weight. Why?" As I mentioned earlier, the human body is really an amazing thing. There are a cascade of homones that interact in the body to cause certain reactions. In most people, these hormones work as intended. You have ghrelin, leptin, and many other homones in the body that control our hunger (there are probably many more that we're not away of). If you change the level of one hormone, you're less hungry. If you increase the levels of another hormone, you're hungrier. In addition, it has been shown that the human body comes to expect the same volume of food per day. Your body becomes accustomed to saying, "Hey, we need a certain volume of food per day. If you don't feed it to us, we are GOING TO MAKE YOU EAT!" This is one of the reasons that dieticians have long advocated eating foods that are low in calories but high in bulk (think vegetables and fruits). These foods fill the stomach up (they fullfil the bulk requirement) all the while providing few calories.
The kicker is that our society has done an incredible job of making extremely tasty, high-calorie foods. These foods don't exist in nature and are almost always high processed. It's not secret that if you add salt, fat, and sugar to a product, we are going to want to eat more of it. These ingredients make the food taste better but they also cause us to eat more. By making these foods staples in our diets, you can easily see how we can bypass Mother Nature's built-in "stop eating" mechanism.
This is why I generally recommend natural, unprocessed food to eat. If you buy these types of foods, they are going to be relatively low in calories and also provide a high amount of bulk and nutrients. The bulk (water and fiber) is going to fill you up and cause your hunger mechanism to get switched-off.
How often should you eat? How many meals shoud you have? These are all questions that only you can answer yourself. Just remember, what is most important are the total amount of calories that you eat throughout the course of the day; not how many meals you have.
I have found that I function best by having three large meals a day with three small snacks in between. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner are my large meals and take the longest too eat. Whereas my snacks are usually small portions of nuts, a piece of fruit, or a slice of toast.
The current trend nowadays is to eat every two hours. While I don't do that, some people do and have success at it. Just don't believe that you NEED to do this. The human body is a very adaptive organism and we certainly do not have to adhere to regimented eating times. Do what is convenient for you and stick with it. I will say that eating at very frequent intervals requires packing food with you everwhere you go and also having an atmosphere that will allow you to do such things. Some people may not have jobs that allow this type of schedule. If that is the case, simply eat when it is convenient for you. You have to make your dietary habits convenient for you, otherwise you'll never be able to stick with them. Remember: make it work for you.
Make a commitment to watch your diet for just two weeks. Track your food and calorie intake for just 14 days. Set a goal every day and stick to it. After two weeks you should see a noticeable improvement in how you look. Instead of telling yourself you want to lose thirty pounds, instead say that you wanto to lose four pounds in two week. Set small, achievable goals like that and as Clarence Bass (http://www.cbass.com/) says, "success breeds success." You'll feel a true sense of accomplishment and mastery over your body if you proceed like this.
Just as you can't gain much fat in one day, you can't lose much either. If you're trying to lose bodyfat, you have to accept that you're in this for the long haul and that this has to be a lifestyle that you follow. Don't be one of the countless victims that diet down in one or two months only to regain all of the weight, and then some, months later. Go slow. Go Steady. Set small, reasonable goals...and then achieve them!
While it may be tempting to go home at night and sit on the couch and eat, think about the reality of the situation: does eating really make you happy or do you feel depressed and guilty afterwards? At your current rate, what will your health and appearance be like in five years from now? Will you suffer from a shorter life-span and poorer quality-of-life because of your eating habits? Will you be around to see your grandchildren?
I'm not sure who said it but I believe in the old adage of, "Nothing tastes as good as looking good feels." If that saying doesn't make sense to you, hopefully it will soon.
