It's more a question of quality calories in. First off you should minimise the rubbish. Keep up the training & cut out as much of the junk as you can. If you get cravings give yourself one or two cheat meals a week. The best way is to plan them. Say you've got a meal out on Thursday evening. There you go, Thursday evening is cheat meal time. Now, say you get a craving for your favourite rubbish food on Monday. Now, instead of going
"You can't have that!", you can go,
"Not now, but on Thursday, Your MINE!" .You've more chance of avoiding temptation if you can cheat, some times.
I'd settle on that as your main aim for stage 1. Getting all the junk (except for one or, at most, 2 cheat meals a week. And sorting the rest of your diet to be as unprocessed as possible. Given a choice, go for whole grains instead of refined flour. Plenty of salad is a good idea, as it fills you up with less calories. Having breakfast is vital (this is a study about girls, but it'd apply to either sex):
Quote:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050909/ap_on_he_me/fit_cereal_obesity
Study: Breakfast Helps Girls Stay Slim
BALTIMORE - Girls who regularly ate breakfast, particularly one that includes cereal, were slimmer than those who skipped the morning meal, according to a study that tracked nearly 2,400 girls for 10 years.
Girls who ate breakfast of any type had a lower average body mass index, a common obesity gauge, than those who said they didn't. The index was even lower for girls who said they ate cereal for breakfast, according to findings of the study conducted by the Maryland Medical Research Institute. The study received funding from the National Institutes of Health and cereal-maker General Mills.
"Not eating breakfast is the worst thing you can do, that's really the take-home message for teenage girls," said study author Bruce Barton, the Maryland institute's president and CEO.
The fiber in cereal and healthier foods that normally accompany cereal, such as milk and orange juice, may account for the lower body mass index among cereal eaters, Barton said.
The results were gleaned from a larger NIH survey of 2,379 girls in California, Ohio and Maryland who were tracked between ages 9 and 19. Results of the study appear in the September issue of the Journal of the American Dietetic Association.
Nearly one in three adolescent girls in the United States is overweight, according to the association. The problem is particularly troubling because research shows becoming overweight as a child can lead to a lifetime struggle with obesity.
As part of the survey, the girls were asked once a year what they had eaten during the previous three days. The data were adjusted to compensate for factors such as differences in physical activity among the girls and normal increases in body fat during adolescence.
A girl who reported eating breakfast on all three days had, on average, a body mass index 0.7 units lower than a girl who did not eat breakfast at all. If the breakfast included cereal, the average was 1.65 units lower, the researchers found.
Breakfast consumption dropped as the girls aged, the researchers found, and those who did not eat breakfast tended to eat higher fat foods later in the day.
"We think it kick-starts your metabolism because you've eaten something," Barton said. "When you get to lunch you're not starving and you can make reasonable choices for lunch and dinner."
John Kirwan, a professor of medicine at Case Western Reserve University's Schwartz Center for Nutrition and Metabolism, said the findings may be "more reflective of overall eating habits and quality of food consumed."
"Those who eat breakfast on a regular basis are more likely to have a structured eating plan throughout the day and consequently are less likely to snack between meals and consume empty calories," said Kirwan, who has studied the effect of breakfast consumption on exercise performance and was not involved in the study.
He also pointed out that the study did not distinguish between low-sugar and high-sugar cereals, noting growing evidence that those who eat so-called low glycemic foods have a lower risk of obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
While cereal can often be high in fiber and low in fat, "you can't walk away saying, I'm going to eat cereal and lose weight," said Melinda Johnson, a dietitian with the Arizona state health department and an ADA spokeswoman.
Johnson also noted, however, that the foods often consumed with cereal tend to be healthy, and the study was another in a series to find a link between breakfast consumption and lower body mass index.
"You can walk away saying breakfast has been shown in lots of different studies to be really important for my children," Johnson said. "So parents can feel confident that serving cereal is definitely not going to do harm and eating breakfast is the right thing to do."
The best idea is to eat little & often. So, getting 5-6 feeds a day will get your body burning more calories that 3 gut-busters. You could eat 3 small main meals & 2 or 3 snacks, so something like:
Breakfast: Porridge, a peice of fruit added for sweetness & a heaped tablespoon of ground flax seeds
mid-morning snack: Fruit or a sandwich, or some nuts, or a protein shake
Lunch: Avocado salad, with rice/quinoa/potatoes & some fake meat/tofu/tempeh or similar
afternoon snack: Similar to mid-morning snack
Tea: Similar idea to lunch or soup/steamed veggies
Evening snack:(optional) You can have something later in the evening if you need it, a protein shake or a small helping of something healthy
Points to remember. Drink a lot of water. Fat is only mobilised if you drink enough. If you're dehydrated then fat mobilising is impaired, you can't normally drink too much.
Chew your food. This seems like a stupid point, but thoughly chewing your food slows down your eating & allows more nutrients into the body, so you wont want so much to eat.
Don't miss a meal. This is vital, you've got to keep eating every few hours, that way your body knows it doesn't need to store fat incase food runs out (the body begins to prepare for famine after about 3 hrs without food, not including sleep time). If you are not losing weight cut down
portion size, NOT amount of meals you have a day, this is how you control your food intake, by how many calories you eat each feed. If you miss meals your body just turns on the fat storage & you get fatter!
That's my rough ideas on how to plan a healthy eating plan. It's not the only way by any means. I cover some stuff in more detail in a download I written on the subject download the
nutrition guide (you need either MS Word or acrobat to read them)
Hope that's been of some use?
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But i think it's not that big problem unless you're aiming for competition size.