Nutrition Blue Print

OK, yesterday we got started by mapping out your day to a typical work week and I am sure you did great :) I mean who knows your schedule better than you do. If you need a reminder on how it should look, take a peek at my Google calendar example right here to the left (the image will display larger if you click on it). Well lets get back to our planner or calendar that you are using to write your schedule on. Now that you have your day planned with when you wake up, go to work, when you get your breaks, get off work, typical errands needed to be done throughout the week, and when you go to sleep.

I want you to now plug in when you will be eating. Now I know you want to start asking all the typical questions like, Shawn but what should I eat, how much, how often, whats best, whats the worst, blah blah blah... Listen, we will get to all of that just relax, and be open and honest with yourself, it wasn't the last few weeks that caused you to be where you are at was it? "Conventional Wisdom" will cause you to second guess all of this planning you are doing and when that happens just remember that there are over 18,000 diets available today and yet 66% of America is overweight, half of whom are considered obese.

See, if we make a blueprint the right way this plan will last us for the rest of our life because it will always be able to transform to our life's current circumstances. Don't fall for one of those cheap well marketed headlines saying, "Lose 10 lbs in 7 days, Guaranteed". It just simply won't happen and if your anything like me and my family you will just keep the product without ever returning it, then it becomes a fancy paper weight with a new title called-Good Intentions to Get Back In Shape. You don't want that, do you?

With that being settled, let's start to understand how our nutrition dictates your well being. It all starts with the building blocks of our body, macro nutrients and micro nutrients, which is simply what you know as protein, fat, and carbohydrates (macro), then you have vitamins, minerals, and phytochemicals (micro). Now over the next couple weeks we will get into great detail about nutrition and roles it plays, but for today and simplicity purposes on getting you started with your plan lets just say your body needs over 40 nutrients to support life, and that's just the ones we know about so far.

There are many foods that are good sources of these various nutrients, but no single food provides everything! Let me say that again, there is no single food that stands above the rest. This is precisely why Variety is the Spice of Life. Eating a Variety of foods, preferably in their whole form, is the best way to get all the nutrients your body needs. Some of these nutrients require others for optimal absorption (we will cover this later), but excessive amounts may result in health problems. What does that mean? I like to think of that old saying, to much of any one thing can be bad.

So lets get back on track. In order to rev up our metabolism so that we are consistently in calorie burning mode and staying away from fat storing we must incorporate two things into our lives. 1) We must eat small regular meals so that our body feels satisfied and safe which translates into burning fat. The body won't hold onto access weight unless it feels it needs it, simply because the more weight you hold on your frame the harder your body has to work. 2) We need to workout regularly so that we activate muscle tissue so that we raise the metabolism which translates into more energy needed to survive, making the body pull energy from fat.

Everything we have just talked about doesn't make sense until right now, I want you to take your calendar and write down the time you eat breakfast in the morning, if you don't then start too, remember we need the metabolism to stay high which means after 6-10 hours of sleep with no food we really need a pick me up in order to rev it back up to fat burning mode. Now that you wrote down when you eat breakfast, write down when you eat lunch and dinner on a regular basis (the two most commonly eaten meals).

Done? Great.

So now we have a regular schedule of 3 square meals, thats awesome. We want to aim to get in 4-6 small meals a day (5 seems to work best for me, 3 meals 2 snacks), so take those times your wrote down for breakfast, lunch, dinner and add in a snack between breakfast and lunch, then between lunch and dinner. This will give you 5 times to eat throughout the day and ensuring that our metabolism stays high. Make sure to only eat until satisfied which takes about 20 minutes for your stomach to let you know, so just be conscious of what and how much you are eating.

Here is a rough example of what my day may look like (underlined when my meals and snacks are):

Stay tuned tomorrow where I show you how to implement and schedule in your workouts, whether you want to workout twice a week or six times, it wont matter how often.