Yes another Saturday night living on the edge of sanity. No alcohol for over a year now, but harder still a whopping three days on ‘managed’ sugar. I have decided that sugar free would be not only pointless (and not particularly good for me!), but virtually impossible to achieve, so I am aiming to stay around 80g / day of unrefined sugar. But if you are at all serious about fat loss, enhanced sports performance or quite possibly both then you will also know that you can’y out train a rubbish diet generally!
We all train hard, most train MUCH harder than I do for sure! But my saving grace is that I do at least incorporate both Strength & Conditioning (as you would expect!) and diet into my weekly training plan. I have been super focused on my nutrition for the past couple of years now, so it has become very much a way of life and second nature.
I’m certainly no Master Chef and quite often make the rudimentary mistake of letting myself get too hungry and then just raiding anything and everything! Yes I count calories (ALL OF THEM), and yes I do make sure that I am eating a balanced and varied diet. At one level that is really all you need to do… But just eating a balanced diet will fail if you consistently consume more calories than you expend, so you do need to know how many calories you are eating. And just to underline that point a little more; unless you KNOW how many calories you are consuming (because you keep a food diary) then you will probably be consuming many more than you think!
Two simple strategies concerning food that have really helped me are; bulk prepare when ever I can (and then store in pre-weighed portions) and secondly to keep it really simple and fast whenever possible. Of course these are in addition to keeping my food diary and updating it when I eat things not at the end of the day when you will have forgotten the little details.
So living on the edge this crazy Saturday night involved 75g pasta, 125g ricotta, 2 garlic cloves, half teaspoon sesame oil, 50ml of skimmed milk and 400g fresh spinach. This took no more than 15 minutes to cook and was fab… I won’t lie to you a bottle of white would have been perfect with it, but absolutely not! Running this morning was a doddle compared to NOT opening a bottle. In fact of all the training ‘sessions’ that I do sticking religiously to my nutrition goals are always the hardest. But when I get to Nottingham in a few weeks, I know ‘they’ will pay off. Because ‘they’ always do!
When you are thinking about your training plan, if it doesn’t include food then you may have missed a bit. But that of course is just my opinion, other opinions are also freely available on the internet 😉
Cheerio!
