Diet Tip of the Day 7/22/09

[PTAaron]

Today's diet tip:
Diet Tip of the Day 7/22/09 Diet and Nutrition Discussion FitnessBoard.NET: Build Muscle, Burn Fat, Improve Your Health and Fitness.

Plan your meals

One very effective way to ensure you stick to your diet plan is to pre-plan all of your meals for a week at a time. It sounds complicated, but really it isn't that hard - and it makes a big difference. It makes it much easier to stick with your plan and avoid the temptation to have "bad" snacks.

I'll use myself as an example: I know that every day I am going to eat a meal at 10am, noon, 3pm, 6pm, 9pm, and midnight. I also have a rough idea of how many calories I plan to get in each day, and I divide that up equally over the meals. In my day I know that I won't have time to sit down and eat something at noon or 6 - so I plan to have something that I can eat quickly. You can easily set up your own plan in a similar way.

In my case:
10am - I am getting home from the gym, I have time to eat "real" food
noon - running between patients, I eat almonds and a protein shake... or hard boiled eggs and almonds...
3pm - I have time to sit down, so I usually have steak, ground beef, ground turkey, chicken, or something along those lines.
6pm - again running between people, so generally a shake and almonds, or peanut butter and a shake
9pm - steak, turkey, chicken, or something along those lines
midnight - cottage cheese, a shake, or something of that type.

I just fill in the blanks ahead of time.