One bright spot to an awful start to training for the year is that I actually managed to figure out a way to get leaner. Between early January and late February I managed to lose 11 pounds. I’ve more or less held steady since then, adding a bit on my week in Canada and dropping it again within a couple weeks of getting back. And at this point I’ve achieved enough dietary zen that I don’t crave anything bad for me anymore. And knowing full well that everyone is different so this probably won’t work for others like it’s worked for me, here are the steps I followed to do it:
Nothing but fruit, nuts, and protein powder before lunch every day. I make rare allowances for something else on days where eating specific things is logistically difficult (a banana and a clif builder bar if I’m skiing or snowboarding or an rx bar before longer runs).
No useless carbs. I’m not necessarily eating “low carb,” but I’m being mindful about not eating carbs that don’t really add any value to the meal. So basically no bread, no pasta, minimal rice, no oat meal, minimal granola. I make an exception for tortillas in a breakfast burritos. And I don’t always stick to this 100%. But that’s the goal. I get plenty of carbs from the fruit I eat.
No junk with added sugar. No candy, no baked goods, no energy bars, no high sugar yogurt. Basically my only sugar comes from fruit. I know this sounds super hard and blasphemous, but after a few days of discipline it’s not that hard.
1 salad as a meal per day. So a salad for lunch or dinner. It can be huge, it can have good, fatty dressing, but it needs to be a salad. I probably get this 5-6 times per week.
Snack on nuts or fruit whenever I feel like I need to.
Try to aim high on protein. I typically have 1-2 protein shakes per day (25-50 grams).
No eating between roughly 7 pm and 9 am. Schedules sometimes dictate a later dinner. But once dinner is done, no more for the rest of the night. The only real exception to that is the occasional protein shake if I’m really hungry and I don’t feel like I’ve had enough protein that day.
I know this sounds super hard and I wasn’t expecting myself to have 7 rules when I started writing this, but it’s really not that bad. The first couple of days I find myself eating a ton of nuts and I worry that I’m eating way too much. But by 3 or 4 days in I stop eating as much and after a week or two of really following this I’m eating significantly less and am never seriously hungry. Add in running 4 or 5 times a week and weight was falling off. It may have ended up being a ketogenic situation since the running was burning off the carbs that I was eating. But I never got that walking dead feeling when I tried going ketogenic before. Now I’m kind of in maintenance mode since I hit my initial weight goal (sub-170) and I have a vacation coming up. But I’m still basically eating the same things.
Not sure if this will help anyone. But I’m someone that has really really struggled to lose weight and break out of bad eating habits and it was fairly easy to follow for me. Don’t @ me with the high sodium content of all the nuts. Perfect is the enemy of good.
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