Weekly Challenge: Week 4 - Nutritional Accountability

Mrs. Gias made grilled chicken salad with asian sesame dressing for dinner tonight. 

Perfect P90X food.

It's been three full weeks on this round and we're moving into our first recovery week.  It's the perfect time to reassess our nutritional goals and to make a conscious effort to evaluate how we've done and to re-double our efforts if we've fallen behind.  In any fitness program if you want results you must have good nutrition. 

One of my favorite sayings is "abs are built in the kitchen".  I don't care how many crunches you do, you'll never get the abs that you want without dropping body fat and eating right.  It just isn't going to happen.  No electronic "ab belt" or "ab circle" or "ab ball" or whatever gizmo you saw on TV is going to get you abs. The ONLY thing that will work, is changing your body composition and lowering your body fat percentage.  To do that, you have to eat good food.  Accordingly, almost all measurable fitness results are dependent on good, solid nutrition. 

So what do we do for nutritional accountability this week?  Simple.  We think about everything that we eat, we write everything down and we review the rules that we set up for ourselves to make sure that we're still on track.

The rules that Mrs. Gias and I are trying to follow during this round are below.  These are guidelines liberally borrowed from an online chat with T-Hort last year.

Diet Guidelines

1: No enriched/processed flour – only whole grain pasta, whole grain bread, no cakes, no cookies, etc.

2: Reduce dairy intake – a slice of low fat cheese is OK here and there, Pizza once a month tops

3: No carbonated drinks – one diet 12 oz cheat per week tops

4: 1 cup of coffee per day + 1 protein shake + water and tea only

5: At least 2 meals a day with vegetables, 1 with fruit

6: No red meat for 30 days

7: Write it all down for the first 30 days (at least).

8: Eat 5 times a day at 7am, 10am, 1pm, 4pm, 7pm

9: Your goal is 40% protein, 40% carbohydrates, 20% fat

10: If you are not hungry enough to eat an apple, you are not hungry – skip the munchies

Remember: Don’t create arbitrary rules for eating if their only purpose is to make you feel in control. Try to eat healthfully, but if there’s a choice between eating ice cream and spending all day obsessing about ice cream – eat the ice cream, just don’t go crazy and don’t make it a habit.

Bringing it during workouts is only 20% of the program.  Bringing it in the kitchen is the other 80%.