Plan For a Good Diet

Okay, we all have busy lives and we are rushing all the time.  But if you let that impact your diet, you will wind up eating lousy stuff.  And that will undermine all the hard training you have done.  So we are going to talk about ways to plan so your diet will be good no matter how much helter skelter happens in your life.

The key here is to make a plan.  To make a big change you have to prepare.  If you don't, the change either won't happen or it won't stick.  When you want to change houses, you make a plan for how to sell the old and buy the new.  You think about and plan for changes in your job.  Well, your diet is just as important as that.

Pick a day of the week to do your grocery shopping.  Then always go to the grocery store on that day.  Make it a routine.  Make it a LAW.  You always go on Wednesday.  Even if you only need a couple of things and it takes an hour to go, do it.  Just like your job at work, make it be something that you just have to do, no questions asked. 

Make a shopping list before you go.  That will take only 15 or 20 minutes.  This way you can think about what you should buy without the distraction of seeing all the food in the store.  Remember that grocery stores carefully set up displays of food designed to make you want to buy them.  It works.  If you go in there without being prepared, you will find that over time you are buying stuff that they want you to buy, not necessarily the stuff that is best for your diet.

Your list should include breakfast items like for example fast-to-cook oats, corn tortillas and natural high fiber bread with some natural peanut butter.  Eggs, low fat string cheese or cottage cheese and nuts could be the protein sources.

For snacking, you could put on your list celery to use with the peanut butter.  Remember that for training hard you should be having around six meals a day.  Eat something in each 4 hour period, or even every 3 hour period. 

You have to decide if you will buy your supplements (like Hydroxycut, vitamins, protein powders etc) in the grocery store with your food or separately from a specialty source.  But don't let the availability in the grocery store make the choice of what supplements you will use.  Choose your supplements first, and then look for where you can get them.  If the grocery store carries something you are going to get and the price is good, why not pick it up with your food?

Eating well is just like training.  It is for the long haul.  It is a marathon, not a sprint.  You can't go to the gym for a couple of weeks blasting your muscles and then completely abandon your routine and expect your muscles to just magically keep on growing without work.  Well eating right is just like training.  You have to do it constantly, each and every day.  Make a plan and stick to the pace.

That means just like you make time for the gym out of your busy routine, you have to make time for the grocery store, for planning the shopping list and for preparing healthy food.  It has to be on the same priority level as gym time.  You will see the benefits.  And applying the self-control you use on your training routine to your food routine will show you just how strong your willpower really is.  Once you see how you can control both training and eating, you can use the same technique to anything else you want!  Need to learn a new language?  No problem, just think of it like another part of your routine and blam! Done deal.

So go ahead, take it day by day and plan for a good diet!

Guest post by Bryce.