Nutrition is a huge part of the program that we offer here at Gage Strength Training. The fact is that you can workout as hard as you want, but if you aren\u2019t making changes to your diet, you\u2019ll never see the results that you want.
It\u2019s true what they say – if you want to SEE a change you have to MAKE a change.
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I meet with hundreds of clients every single year to discuss their goals and help them change their body and I have every single person start with one thing: Studies show that when Americans are asked to estimate how many calories they typically eat in a day, their estimations are, on average, 1,000 calories OFF of what they are actually eating. When you track your calories for 10 days, you\u2019ll start to get a very clear picture of what you\u2019re eating. <\/p>\n\n\n\n You\u2019ll notice that I only ask that clients track for 10 days. The reason is that we tend to eat the same foods all the time. A research group asked a group of people how many \u201cfood related\u201d decisions they made every single day. So, now that you know WHY you should be tracking calories, here\u2019s the HOW.
Tracking calories for 10 days.
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It\u2019s probably the most boring and tedious thing you can do, but it\u2019s also the most effective.
First, here\u2019s WHY you need to track your calories:\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That\u2019s the average.
So, you may think you\u2019re eating a clean and healthy 1600 calories per day, but there\u2019s a very good chance you are eating 2500 calories per day.
The first reason we need to track calories is purely for our own awareness. It shines a light on proper serving sizes, and some foods that are secretly calorie bombs that we never knew.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When I meet with clients and I ask them what a typical day of eating looks like, it usually goes like this:
Breakfast I either eat X or Y, lunch is always X, and dinner is a X, Y or sometimes Z.
We all have habits and patterns that we repeat in our diets, so when you track for 10 days, you pretty much cover everything you eat on a regular basis.
Once you start tracking each meal, you\u2019ll start to see the REAL portion sizes compared to what you have been eating and can start to make adjustments based on that.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
They estimated that they made about 20-30 decisions about food everything single day.
Next, they tracked the reality.
Reality is that people are making 200+ food related decisions every single day. These decisions include walking by the pantry and NOT grabbing a snack, resisting a donut in your office break room, driving by McDonalds on the way to work and not stopping, etc.
What this study showed was how \u201cmindless\u201d a lot of what we do really is\u2026and that includes eating!
People tend to consume hundreds of calories without even realizing it. If we don\u2019t really focus on remembering what we ate everyday – or tracking it in real-time – we tend to miss all the little things like picking a few french fries off our kids plates, grabbing some M+Ms from the office candy dish, or a quick handful of snacks out of the pantry while on the phone.
Mindless eating can account for hundreds of calories every single day, and when you commit to tracking your calories and bringing a huge amount of focus to it, you\u2019ll start to see where the numbers add up!
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First, I want you to make sure you have all the tools you need:\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n