A day in the life of my eating plan

Everyday someone wants me to make up a meal plan for them.  I used to do this for my personal clients for free. But honestly I stopped because it was time consuming and I wasn't getting paid for it. 

Don't get me wrong, I do love to offer free help and advice, but sometimes you have to put limits on what you do for free and what is a service that should be paid for.  Since I'm not a registered nutritionist, I feel funny charging people for meal plans that I do create. So that's why I stopped.  When I became a Team Beachbody Coach I found a great alternative and problem solver is the Team Beachbody Custom Meal Plan Wizard that comes with the upgraded Club membership.

What I've also found to be a great tool for planning my meals is the nutrition guide books that come with almost every Beachbody workout program.  P90X, Insanity and Brazil Butt Lift are the 3 programs in my library. Each one of those came with a nutrition plan that's easy to follow and if you like to cook, you can totally modify the recipes to suit your taste buds.

So here is a sample day for me from yesterday.  I'm in Phase 1 of the P90X Nutrition Plan.  Phase 1 is a lower carb phase, meaning 50% protein, 30% carbs and 30% fat.  I'm taking in about 1800-2000 calories per day, eating 5-6 small meals.  These meals are inspired by or taken from the P90X Nutrition Guide.

Post workout snack

small recovery drink and a cup of non-fat yogurt

Breakfast

Spinach & mushroom omelet with 8 oz milk, 1/2 a grapefruit and a cup of green tea

Snack

P90X Peak Performance Bar (wildberry yogurt)

Lunch

Grilled chicken over baby spinach with tomatoes, celery, baby carrots, avocado and balsamic/rice vinegar. And 1 TBS of vanilla whey protein powder mixed with water.

Snack

Chocolate Shakeolgy mixed with 4 oz chilled coffee, 4 oz milk and 4 oz water, and a dash of cinnamon

Dinner

Roasted chicken breast with oven roasted veggies, spinach salad and one slice of whole wheat bread.

If you're really serious about changing your ways in order to lose weight, burn fat and gain muscle, or just feel better, you need to get serious about your eating habits too.  But getting serious doesn't mean it doesn't taste good or your starving yourself.  As you can see I had a lot of food yesterday.  My big treat was my Shakeology:)

For those of you who think its too expensive to buy a workout system like P90X or do the Custom Meal Plan Wizard, I say divide the cost by number of days in a month.  For instance the Meal Plan Wizard comes out to about 50 cents per day.  Considering what kind of junk we buy through out the day that costs more than that, I think the Custom Meal Plan Wizard is a bargain.

I'd love to hear from you.  Please feel free to leave a comment below or email me at fitwithjessica@live.com

Procrastination

Okay, I know we're all guilty of it.  I'm perhaps one of the biggest procrastinators out there. As I type, I have a big pile of my 2 year old's clothes to bag up for donation.  I did promise myself I would get to it later today though:)

I had been procrastinating about cleaning my fridge for a long time, but my mission today from Fly Lady was to set the timer for 15 minutes and go to work on it. Well, I set the timer for 20 minutes and finished with 3 minutes to spare - woo hoo! So later today I'll set my timer for 15-20 minutes and tackle that pile of old clothes.

I've often thought that procrastination had to be good for some things though.  Its kept me from spending money on stuff I didn't really need. But there is still a big down side to putting everything off.  Like when it comes to doing something you know really needs to be done, such as de-cluttering, cleaning, exercising, eating right, paying bills...

What happens is every time you put it off, it just seems harder and harder to do it.  In our quest for perfection, we tend to set our expectations too high. For instance, some feel they can't exercise until they lose weight.  I had someone tell me they weren't going to the doctor for a physical until they lost weight (WHAT?). Or we put off eating right until after the holidays. After a while we get so used to making the excuses that we never start what we said we would do and we turn a mole-hill into a mountain.

So what is it that you keep putting off?  How do we stop the excuses and just do it?  What's worked for me is letting go of things having to be perfect and taking baby steps. For example, I could have taken an hour to clean my fridge, taking everything out, getting every nook and cranny clean, but that would have been horrible for me and I would never do it. So I took the advice from the Fly Lady and set my timer for a short amount of time, which I felt I could handle. And guess what? My fridge looks great and I was really proud of myself, plus it was fast!

So what about exercise or eating better? Well you could incorporate the same baby-steps philosophy. Instead of vowing to run for an hour, but never doing it, try 10 minutes, see what happens. Could you handle just 10 minutes? 10 minutes is better than 0 minutes.  Or instead of trying to go full force into better eating, try eating just one good meal per day.  Could you handle that, or maybe even just one healthy snack?

It doesn't have to be as my husband would say a "full balls" effort. That could be very intimidating for a lot of people.  You could just dip your pinky toe in:)

I'd love to hear from you! Please feel free to leave a comment or email me at fitwithjessica@live.com