My Diet & Nutrition Strategies: Part 1

Hello,

Apologies for not peppering you with e-mails for a few days since my last blog post.

Hopefully, you’ve all had great weekends and so far have had a good start to the week. I certainly have!

After squeezing in my first 10k run since July (in all honestly more-like since April!) on Saturday I’ve had a busy weekend prepping for Monday and Tuesdays sessions.

At The Training Pod on Monday I led my first of 6 workshops with the sport science students from Brighton University. These guys and girls are potential s&c coaches of the future. So my first session with this keen bunch was based on the accreditation process of the UKSCA for the back squat and clean & jerk weight lifting exercises. It was great to have an excuse to get my Do-Win lifting shoes on again!!!

In addition to this session, I also had my Young Athletes programme running for 8-19 year olds. They are now in full swing with their programmes and they are already getting stronger. Great work by them so far on this 6-week term.

I then finished the night off with my “Shape Up at the Stadium” Brighton & Hove Albion in the Community (AITC) weight-loss group with their second of three sessions with me at The Training Pod. What a great group they are. In addition to training with myself and the other staff at AITC, they are following a nutritional plan throughout their 10-week course. The results during their half-way weigh-in were great with some of the guys losing a few kilos and notable inches off their waistlines already. Keep up the good work guys!

This conveniently leads us into my first strategy for the guidelines I listed in my last post.

Hopefully, you’ve all now looked at your food diaries and marked yourself out of 6 based on the following:

1. Are you eating something every 2-3 hours?
2. Are you drinking at least 2 litres of pure water (NOT juice, squash, tea, coffee etc…) every day?
3. Are you eating something for breakfast each day?
4. Are you eating at least 5 different types of vegetable each day?
5. Are you eating anything that is a good source of omega 3 (e.g. walnuts, sardines, salmon, beef etc..) each day?
6. Is your carbohydrate intake predominantly made up of low Glycemic Index (GI) food, that affects blood sugar levels slowly (e.g. beans, seeds, whole intact unrefined grains such as oats, rye, durum, vegetables etc…)?

The aim of this post is to simply outline how I recommend meeting guideline numero uno.

Some of you may have read, been told or use a different strategy that works for you. If you do, tweet it to me. It’ll be great to hear how you ensure you are eating every 2-3 hours.

My strategy is so so so simple……..

…………Ready?……….

……….Here it comes………

To ensure I am eating every 2-3 hours………
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1. I don’t let myself get hungry
2. I carry some food with me pretty much all of the time (if not, money to buy some!)

It is only how society operates that means we eat at set times rather than when we need to.

How many of you have breakfast before you go to work and after then your journey you are starving again?!?!

Don’t try and hold out till lunchtime. Eat something!

Your body is hungry for a reason!

Waiting for hours to eat and then stuffing yourself until you are full and bloated isn’t good for you. Nor is it natural. Cavemen, mammals, you name it. They eat when they are hungry. Not when they are told to. If you stuff yourself up, you’re usually pretty unproductive for a while afterwards as your “rest & digest” system kicks in.

Here’s an extract from the now healthy and clean living rock star Keith Richards’ autobiography Life (from pp. 524-525) on this subject:

I only eat when I feel like it, which is almost unheard-of in our culture……..

You’ve got to hit it when you’re hungry. We’ve been trained from babyhood to have three square meals a day, the full factory – industrial revolution idea of how you’re supposed to eat. Before then it was never like that. You’d have a little bit often, every hour. But when they had to regulate us all, “OK, mealtime!” That’s what school’s about. Forget the geography and history and mathematics, they’re teaching you to work in a factory. When the hooter goes, you eat. For office work or even if you’re being trained to be a prime minister, it’s the same thing. It’s very bad for you to stuff all that crap in at once. Better to have a bit here, a mouthful there, every few hours a bit or two. The human body can deal with it better than shoving a whole load of crap down your gob in an hour.

Physiologically, we now know that by not fasting ourselves, our stress hormone levels (in particular cortisol) remain consistent. This helps us maintain a healthy metabolism rate. If we fast ourselves, our metabolism slows down and it becomes harder for us to burn off the calories we ingest. This is a survival mechanism of the body by which it tries to preserve our energy stores.

Often, if your daily calorific intake is adequate, I recommend splitting up you 3 square meals a day into 6 smaller portions. This allows you to still have an adequate calorific intake for the day (or even allow you to increase your calorific intake if you are training for muscle mass gain). Whilst, you are still preventing there being any extended periods of time between eating.

This can often be done if you have your food prepared for the day ahead. (i.e. some of you may take into work several small containers for each time you eat). But, for me I don’t currently have this level of organisation. So, I just ensure I either have food with me (such as fruit, nuts, salads or in some events a Reflex Nutrition High Protein Flapjack from their vitality range available at joebullen.com for 20% off the retail price with free UK delivery Plug! Plug! Plug!) or I can purchase food from where I am.

These are my very simple strategies for ensuring I am eating regularly.

Give them a go.

They are applicable for those who are aiming to reduce body fat and lose weight, as well as those who are training to gain muscle mass. The difference between the two is your calorific intake (more on how to manipulate that another time).

In the meantime, stay tuned for my strategy on how to ensure you are drinking enough water each day.

Until next time,

Joe Bullen MSc ASCC CSCS