Optimal Health and Fat Loss are Possible

Today’s Re-Powering Information. Nutrition planning is the key to exceptional health and fat loss. If you don't have good nutrition, optimal health and excess fat loss will allude you. No workout will ever be good enough to give you the best results you deserve. If you are making an effort to workout at 5:30 in the morning, you may as well compliment it with good eatin!

Prepare Your Weekly Nutrition Plan

Build better eating habits. This can be as simple as committing to one small nutritional improvement per day (such as replacing your lunchtime soda with water) and one large nutritional change per week (such as setting aside time on a Sunday to prepare a weekly menu and all of your meals).

But you need to have a plan to make this work, just like how you have a plan for your workouts. Your nutrition plan should include the contents of every meal, as well as your grocery list for the week. This will enable you to have meal alternatives for nights when you might need to be running from one event to the other with no time or healthy snack alternatives when you are on the road between meetings.

It's important that you make your plan something you can follow. If you are currently eating 7 meals per week at the golden arches, it wouldn't be realistic to plan to replace those meals with carrot sticks and tofu this week. A better plan would be to substitute a couple of those meals with healthier sandwich options and then work on improving things even more in the following weeks such as choosing salads if you must frequent a fast food establishment.

So here's a three-step guideline on building a better nutrition plan:

1) Prepare a weekly menu. Outline each meal and snack for every day of the upcoming week. Take into account the possibilities that you might work late or get invited out to lunch. The more options you have and preparations you make, the better you will be able to stick to your fat loss plan.

You can prepare serving sizes of just about anything. Carry a small cooler with you. Put in snack begs of carrots, strawberries, an apple, and of course protein options such as a shake, hard boiled egg, turkey wrap, a few raw nuts, or 1/2 tuna sandwich. You can even plan one day at a time the night before if you feel overwhelmed by doing the whole week in advance. Your food mood can change so it is great to have a variety of options ready to go.

2) From your menu plan, you'll now know what foods and ingredients you need to make it through the week. Make your grocery list and stick to it . Grocery shopping is your first opportunity to break some bad nutritional habits. You can't eat chips, cookies, or cakes if you don't have them in the house - so don't buy them and you'll avoid any future temptation.

3) Prepare the meals or prepare the ingredients so that making the actual meal doesn't take a lot of time. Like shopping, it's best to do all of these preparations at one time (such as on a Sunday or another day off).

Sample shopping list includes:

Fruits
• Apples
• Oranges
• Blueberries
• Melon
• Peaches
• Grapefruit
• Raspberries

Vegetables
• Peppers (red, yellow, green, & orange),
• Spinach
• Asparagus
• Broccoli
• Snow Peas
• Mushrooms
• Frozen mixed vegetables
• Tomato sauce

Protein Sources
• Chicken breasts
• Turkey breasts
• Salmon fillets
• Lean beef
• Skim milk & low-fat, low-sugar yogurt

Other
• Green tea
• Unsalted, not roasted, Almonds


You'll notice that most of these foods come without a food label. Most of the foods that you should avoid come in a bag or a box. Building a shopping list that contains very few bagged or boxed items is something to aim for. But when you do purchase something with a label, make sure to avoid two of the unhealthiest ingredients created by man:

1) High-fructose corn syrup (HFCS)
2) Hydrogenated or partially-hydrogenated vegetable oil (the sources of trans-fatty acids)

You might have heard of these two ingredients. They are strongly associated with obesity and other lifestyle-diseases (such as diabetes).


Superior health and fat loss are possible for everyone. It does take some prep time and planning though. You can do it!

Take a risk today!!

Your friend in fitness,