Captain Ahab’s BodyBlog

I tell all of my clients that they should be eating 5 to 6 healthy, “clean” meals a day and then proceed to tell them why that helps with both their getting fitter and in their losing fat but what I fail to do, and I just realized that, is not tell them what happens if they don’t.
If you wait until you are hungry to eat you have waited too long and your body is already performing some pretty complex physiology. Our bodies (which are way smarter than our conscious selves) have already decided that they can no longer trust us to keep them fed and so they’ve switched around 180 degrees from the fed state and now they kick into starvation mode and as soon as we send them some food they then start to store it as fat, thinking that us as dummies are not going to know when to feed them again and so must prepare for long intervals between feedings.
Feeding your body 5 to 6 or even more times a day in certain cases does not mean sitting down to a full turkey dinner or steak and ‘taters at every meal but if you have a protein shake or a handful (approx 18 –21) of almonds that would be considered a meal, as would a few slices of cucumber and a piece of chicken breast, but a Pop Tart or Twinkie is definitely NOT considered as a meal. Basically as I try and make each of my clients aware almost anything that comes out of a box or you purchase further in to the grocery aisles than the outside perimeter do not consider this as a meal. I say this because most “boxed” foods are almost always overly processed and overly laden with sugar type carbohydrates.
I preach that your morning meal is the most important meal of the day because after spending all night usually 6 to 8 hours or more sleeping, our body has gone through its entire supply of nutrition and is ravenous for food and as a result our blood sugar is low and to start the day off right we need a lot of slow digesting good carbs with an added supply of protein.
It is often the hardest meal of the day to prepare because it is usually the craziest time of day with little Billy late for the school, Fido barfing on the new carpet, hubby can’t find his car keys and mom is running out the door to catch her bus and so once again I preach preparedness. Just as you would prepare for anything else you do you need to prepare for your quest for fitness so that you have the best chance of success. Make as many meals up ahead of time as possible, freeze them, enlist the help of family members or lay out a lot of the necessities the night before so that it does not seem so daunting a task first thing in the morning. These are ways to prepare.
Make sure that you have all of your “proper” food wherever you are or go. Sure it can be a pain in the butt, but taking a container of tuna and salad to work and keeping it in a small fridge or have a portable cooler with you makes the chance of running out for a Mickey D’s death burger less of an option. It may sound like a lot of work but it really is not because thousands upon thousands of people are doing it and why shouldn’t you be one of them?
Plan to succeed. Do your shopping on Tuesdays and Fridays and then you will be set for the week. The reason I say Tuesdays is because after the weekends the stores order their fresh produce Monday and it usually gets there on Tuesday, and also they bring in more fresh produce etc, for the week-ends so on Friday they‘re stocked up and you have the best selection. Do it for a two-week period and you will most likely find it easier than you thought.
If you have good nutritious food around you will eat it, if you only have carb and sugar-laden foods around you will eat them also. Eating 5 to 6 nutritious meals a day will not see you get those crashes at 3 in the afternoon when your energy level goes out the window and you reach for that Mars bar or that last left over doughnut.
We would never think of putting vinegar in our cars gas tank so why would we put junk food in the most important thing we have, our bodies?
If you fail to plan you are planning to fail! It’s an old saying but it still holds true to this day.
 

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 1st, 2007 at 11:17 am and is filed under Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.