How Do You Follow Your Plan?

Nutrition
1

This keeps happening to me, I decide to follow a nutrition plan, six meals a day, multi-vitamin, fish oil, HOT-ROX Extreme, Metabolic Drive, and Surge. I will follow my nutrition plan for about three days and then something happens and I revert to my old habits. It mostly has to do with cooking, I don’t mind cooking, but I mind spending time cooking instead of doing other “fun” things.

So for the people that follow a nutrition plan, how do you manage your time cooking wise? Do you cook once for three days? Settle for quick meals? Bite the bullet and just cook?

Also, do you plan out your meals the day before / week before or do you just wing it? I am thinking that my spur of the moment cooking might be the culprit.

Thanks for any advice.

2

just keep with it.

3

[quote]nikoa wrote:
So for the people that follow a nutrition plan, how do you manage your time cooking wise? Do you cook once for three days? Settle for quick meals? Bite the bullet and just cook?

Also, do you plan out your meals the day before / week before or do you just wing it? I am thinking that my spur of the moment cooking might be the culprit.

Thanks for any advice.[/quote]

As far as cooking, yes, I usually cook food that will last for several days. I also make protein loaves and put individual serving slices in the freezer so I can just throw one in my backpack. It’s usually thawed in a couple of hours. The more stuff you have ready that you can just eat it when it’s time for a feeding, the more likely you are to stay on plan.

I’m not a morning person, so I measure out my pills for the next day in the evening (except the Flameout - that stays in the fridge until I’m ready to take it) and put them in pill carriers - mine stacks up so that you can have seven different servings/types. I even mix my protein powder into the yogurt and add some fruit the night before, so first thing in the morning I can just grab it out of the fridge.

I also have bagged salads in the fridge, so I can just rip up the lettuce, add a can of smoked herring (your addition could be different, but I love smoked herring), dump some balsamic vinagerette on it and there’s dinner. I’d say I usually have one meal that I cooked fresh that day, but it’s usually an omelette, which isn’t all that cooking intensive and usually just takes a quick rinse to clean out the pan.

Now that I’ve been following this way of eating for some time, I don’t plan my meals out in advance, but when I was starting, I definitely did and it helped.

4

Dude, I keep to my rules by keeping them simple. Go to Subway or Quiznos and avoid cheeses and sauces and grab bottled water if you don’t wanna cook all the time. Go to a Japanese place and eat lean shit like sashimi or sushi or terriyaki with light sauce and extra veggies instead of rice. Go to Wendy’s and grab a grilled chicken and or chilli or a garden salad. Get a meal replacement shake or bar like Metabolic Drive or Myoplex, make some PB sammiches etc.

Supps should be easy. Take your vitamins, HOT-ROX, fish oil or w/e right on waking up. Try eating whole foods before a workout instead of a shake and even sometimes right after.]

Remember, variety is fine. One day, have carrots, chicken and apples and cucumbers, another lettue, beef and oranges and broccoli etc.

5

Protein loaves?

This sounds intriguing. Do you just freeze a protein shake in a box and then slice it up and put it in individual packets or something?

Thanks for the advice its much better that the have no life option :slight_smile:

6

Set one or two afternoons aside and cut up veggies and cook all your foods. It really isn’t hard to be prepared all week long. I spend probably 1-2 hours a week cooking/preparing food. Are you sure you aren’t looking for an excuse to eat foods that you deny yourself.

7

[quote]nikoa wrote:
Protein loaves?

This sounds intriguing. Do you just freeze a protein shake in a box and then slice it up and put it in individual packets or something?

Thanks for the advice its much better that the have no life option :)[/quote]

I’d also like to know about the protein loaves.

To the O.P., you have to realize that sometimes you just have to make sacrifices. Would you rather spend that hour watching tv, or would you rather use it to prepare meals, etc. that will help you achieve your goals overnight.

It sounds like you might have a little bit of an “all or nothing” attitude in that you’re trying to make this massive sweeping change overnight. Just gradually start changing things until they become habits and you don’t even think of them anymore.

8

I wake up 45 minutes earlier than I normally would for the day and in those 45 minutes I make pretty much all my food for the entire day. Now it’s just part of my routine and I’ve gotten pretty efficient at it.

9

[quote]jtrinsey wrote:
nikoa wrote:
Protein loaves?

This sounds intriguing. Do you just freeze a protein shake in a box and then slice it up and put it in individual packets or something?

Thanks for the advice its much better that the have no life option :slight_smile:

I’d also like to know about the protein loaves.
[/quote]
I’m more or less Precision Nutritioning, so my challenge was to come up w/ something that met my protein needs and also had the required servings of vegetables and/or fruits.

So, I tweaked a zucchini loaf recipe by substituting Grow for the flour. It’s all very flexible and I hardly ever make it the same way twice, but here’s the most basic, stripped down, easiest to make version:

Defrost a bag of frozen spinach, put it in a piece of cloth and squeeze out as much of the liquid as you can. Put it aside. In a large bowl, mix up 4 scoops of Grow (other whey powders may work, Metabolic Drive definitely didn’t), 1 teaspoon of baking powder and any spices you decide to add (cinnamon works with most fruits, apple pie spice or pumpkin pie spice can also be good). You can also add a .5 cup of nut meal (I like almond meal) or peanut butter if you want to add some fats. Add an egg and mix it all up. Now squeeze out the spinach one last time, and dump the spinach in the bowl. You’ll think it doesn’t have enough liquid, but keep stirring and it will end up pretty moist. When it gets to the point that it’s pretty easy to stir, put in any fruit you want - during the summer I used a cup of blueberries, but lately I’ve been using dried apples cut into small pieces. If you added PB, then apples will probably work better than blueberries. You could also add chopped walnuts, anything like that. Mix it up really well (don’t squash the blueberries if you’re using fresh). At this point I usually taste the batter and add some sweetener if I think it needs it. Put it in a loaf pan and then stick it in an oven that you’ve preheated to 350F. Cook it until the top is firm and a knife comes out clean (unless you hit a blueberry, in which case it will come out blue).

The way I make it, it makes 4 servings at around 30g of protein and 300 calories, but the above recipe is probably a little lower than that. You can substitute all sorts of things - I usually use grated zucchini rather than the spinach (but I figured spinach is easier since you can just buy it frozen and you’re ready to go), for a carbier version, cook a sweet potato until it’s soft, peel and sub that for the spinach. If you’re going carbier, you could also add raisins and things like that. The directions are long, but it’s pretty easy to make and it freezes really well so I usually have some in the freezer.

10

Lifting requires dedication and cooking is a large part of it. If you cant dedicate enough time in your day to make food because you have other fun things to do then don’t lift. I don’t fully enjoy cooking but I do enjoy assisting hypertrophy and that is pretty “fun.”

11
  1. Plan my meals 1 week at a time.
  2. Have wife cook said meals and eat them.

:sunglasses:

12

It’s best to just get it done and not think about it. Maybe you need to ask yourself how dedicated you REALLY are…

13

For the people questioning my dedication.

I am fat. This is not the girly type of fat, its not 5 pounds that I got to lose, I weigh 255 pounds and I am 5’9". What I am trying to do is change my lifestyle.

I have identified my sticking point to cooking. I can make myself go to the gym 5 times a week, but I eat like crap, which produces no body change, which in turn depresses me, which in turn takes my motivation away from working out.

I know its a problem, I keep restarting my work out and I keep messing up my meals. Today was my birthday, the only thing I did was hang out with my roommate…and ate a lot.

Tonight I am going to sleep and tomorrow I am going to get up and try to change my life forever. I am tired of being a loser, I always come last in everything I do. My IQ is 150, classified under super genius, yet I have problems with the way I eat. Its pathetic.

I am getting sidetracked, what I am trying to say is my life sucks, and I know its my fault. Becoming 27 today made me realize that I keep getting older and hide behind excuses.

What pretty much all of you said was, suck it up, if that is what you want to do you should be able to do it, just plan a little and spend some time cooking.

And that is exactly what my plan is going to be.

  • Niko

PS. Thanks for the protein loaf recipe, seems interesting to say the least and a bit creative :slight_smile:

14

the whole body/lifestyle transformation thing is a long road, especailly coming from a defecit as you described. if pre cooking all your weekly meals is too much of a jump for you to stick with now, try what the other guy said.

If you must eat out, you can pick healthy choices no matter where you go pretty easily. when you go shopping for your own groceries, dont buy shit, plain and simple. if all you have in the house is good food for you, guess what? no matter what or when you cook it, your ok. buy plenty of spices, marinades, shit like that.

when i dont feel like cooking i throw yogurt, pb, bannana, ground flax, protien powder, greens powder in a blender and BAM complete meal with goodness and calories. make it happen for yourself.

15

DOn’t jump in and aim for perfection. Its taken me a year to get this down right. Food prep, etc.

Just start with your usual meals. Then add in two meals. Then just keep adding them. Your going to fall on your face a few times, just get back up and find ways to do it better. Your going to have to find recipies that suit you… When to pack them, when you don’t have too. Its doable but your trying to hard to maintain too many habbits that just arnt yours.

Try building one habbit at a time.

16

Niko,

Due to my work, practice and workout schedule (as well as trying to have a life), I’m usually very crunched for time. I come from a family of chefs so I’ve adapted as many of the food service “tricks” that I can to save time and effort. Here’s a few that might help you. (I don’t do a lot of measuring, so these are more outlines than exact science.)

I usually plan out a week in advance and shop on Sunday for that week. Between cooking and prepping for the week, it takes me about 2 hours total - 3 if I have a lot of unwashed fresh veggies. This time of year I do the prep while watching football so it’s pretty painless.

I also always have something I can slam together in my pantry in case of emergency - I don’t have time to cook, something bad happened to whatever I had defrosting, hubby ate what I was planning for dinner when he got home (don’t laugh - it’s happened.)

  1. A crock pot. In my 5-quart version, I can fit about 6 pounds of meat and about 2 pounds (2 cans) of salsa, seasoned diced tomatoes or similar juicy veggie based mix. Cook on low for a workday. That night I’ll just fish out a chunk or two of meat and serve with veggies, as a sandwich, over a salad, whatever. The rest usually gets shredded with forks, mixed with the remaining sauce, portioned and frozen. That process takes only about 20 minutes. In the morning, I’ll pull out a bag of meat for dinner. Some various ideas are (depending on your diet needs) - heat and slap between buns for a sandwich, heat and roll into tortillas, cold in a salad, heat with tomato sauce for pasta, heat with some spices and a can of drained beans for chili. I usually have three varities of these seasoned meats in my fridge at a time.

  2. There is no such thing as a leftover. If I’m taking the time to cook, I’m also planning ahead. If I grill chicken, I adding a few extra for ready-made chicken breast salad, just add veggies and a splash of seasonings and vinegar. If I’m on a high-carb cycle (and I do eat more carbs than most people on the board because of the endurance aspect of my sport) I’ll cook some extra high protein pasta and mix with a little olive oil, some veggies and cooked chicken, tuna or steak for pasta salad.

  3. Have a backup plan. If you’re rushed and hungry, it’s easy to go back to bad habits or grab fast food. Have a backup plan in place. Something as simple as high-protein pasta and tomato sauce in the pantry can take under 15 minutes and still reasonably be within your diet. A couple of cans of chili. The more you can plan ahead the better.

I’ve been where you are and know what you’re going through. Don’t beat yourself up if you stumble. Just pick yourself up and go right back to what you know is healthy. Eventually the lifestyle will become your new habit.

76-SH

17

You have to slowly change your habits. You can’t expect to be holding to a plan perfectly overnight. Every day make an effort to eat a healthy breakfast. Build on it from that. They say if you do something I think thirty times in a row it becomes a habit.

Buy things that are easy to make like frozen vegetables that can be thrown in the microwave, cans of tuna that can be quickly prepared, protein shakes to substitute for a meal or two, and the list goes on.

I don’t mean to sound harsh, but there are two types of people that start a lifestyle change for the better. Those that get down to business and do it and those that whine it’s too hard and end up living a life not truly happy with their poor physical health and the way they look.

Good luck,

D

18

Don’t let anyone bring you down…keep chipping away at it…makes me sick when people try to bring others down. Do your thing, and stick with it.

My tip for you is to eat cottage cheese - it makes a great meal, and it’s easy.

I don’t cook either. I usually have a protein shake for breakfast (with or without milk - your choice), another with creatine after working out, then a salad (from the bagged lettuce) & a can of tuna, next I have 2 cups of cottage cheese, then I’ll have a scoop of protein with water, and a MR bar, and finally 6 egg whites and a cup of cottage cheese.

This way, all I have to do is boil some eggs. Nice and easy! This is just a suggestion, but it works for me, and it’s super easy. You can mix things in to it, like a handful of almonds, or a couple of glasses of milk, etc. Just get going, and stay with it. You can do it!

19

[quote]fidytwocent wrote:
Don’t let anyone bring you down…keep chipping away at it…makes me sick when people try to bring others down. Do your thing, and stick with it.

My tip for you is to eat cottage cheese - it makes a great meal, and it’s easy.

I don’t cook either. I usually have a protein shake for breakfast (with or without milk - your choice), another with creatine after working out, then a salad (from the bagged lettuce) & a can of tuna, next I have 2 cups of cottage cheese, then I’ll have a scoop of protein with water, and a MR bar, and finally 6 egg whites and a cup of cottage cheese.

This way, all I have to do is boil some eggs. Nice and easy! This is just a suggestion, but it works for me, and it’s super easy. You can mix things in to it, like a handful of almonds, or a couple of glasses of milk, etc. Just get going, and stay with it. You can do it! [/quote]

If you were referring to me I wasn’t trying to bring anyone down. Only let the OP know you have to want it enough to do it. As that green little bastard Yoda said “there is no try, only do or do not,”.

D

20

dude, If you don’t like to cook there are other options.(Canned tuna,canned salmon, sliced turkey breast, cheese sticks nuts ect.) All these things are healthy and make good meals. They may not taste that great(No one likes canned tuna), but its a sacrifice you have to make