Just as you wouldn’t drive aimlessly around your city hoping that something great will happen if you just keep driving, you definitely wouldn’t just eat & exercise hoping that you are doing something right and that you will just get fit. If you don’t know what you want out of your fitness program, how do you know if you are successful. Some want to gain, most want to lose, what is it you want?

The Solution

Set goals for yourself. I’m sure you’ve heard it before, but I will tell you one more time. What do you want from your efforts. If you want to get to single digit body fat, well then great that is your goal. Of course you will want to break it down into smaller and more easily attainable goals. Say 1-2% every month until you reach the specified target. Another important thing is to track your progress with a notebook. Keep daily workout logs as well as food journals if you so desire. Doing this will bring extra motivation when you realize how far you have progressed throughout your notebook. This also keeps you from guessing how much weight you should use on each lift from week to week. Trust me on this one, this has changed the way I look at my workouts. It is easy & hardly takes any time. Just write down your numbers & whatever else in between each set.

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You are on your way home from work/school and it has been at least 4-5 hours since your last meal. You are completely starved and you can’t wait to get home and see what you have in your kitchen to eat. You get into the kitchen and your stomach is aching with hunger, so you open the fridge to see what is handy.

The first thing that you see on a shelf is a chocolate pudding snack that look so good and ready to eat. You quickly scan for a healthier substitution but all you see are raw chicken breasts. You think would I rather spend 10-15 minutes while my hunger continues and cook up a healthy meal with chicken breasts or would I like to grab that snack pack and devour it’s deliciousness right now.

You eat the pudding and now you feel a little bit weaker in your will power so next you go for the sweet role sitting on the counter. When you’re through with that you decide oh well and continue on your all out binge all because you let hunger strike.

The Solution

Keeping a satisfied stomach throughout the day can work wonders for your will power and ultimately your whole diet and fitness goals. This involves 5-7 meals spread throughout the day to keep your hunger at bay without any long stretches of hunger. Always plan ahead and don’t skip any of your meals, which could lead to a binging episode caused by severe hunger and cravings.

So simply put don’t let yourself get hungry. Eat your meals even if you are not hungry. This will guarantee that you won’t even be tempted to deviate from your planned diet. Another note to take in here is to go shopping on a completely full stomach. When you are full you will shop with your brain not with your stomach. Logically your brain will pick out all of the fitness friendly & healthy foods at the store. While if you shopped with your stomach you would end up with….well, you know.

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You are at your friends house along with several other buddies and it is getting to be time for your next meal. Your friend decides to order pizza while you are out back chatting with the others. When it arrives the pizza is set out on the counter. You come inside to a counter full of pizza and they look extremely cheesy and they are covered with all your favorite toppings.

The next thing you know you start to justify why you need this pizza and start to contemplate whether you actually should just dive right it. There is a good chance that you will cave into that temptation without any second thoughts.

The Solution

This one can be very hard to deal with. If you go throughout your day seeing what comes your way there is a good chance that something unexpected will pop up. From the previous example you might not have expected that you would be faced with an array of pizzas tormenting your will power. You need to decide at the beginning of the day that everything that you put into your mouth is going to benefit you and bring you closer to your goals.

Pre-plan what you will have throughout the day and if anything deviates from what you had already planned you can easily reject it. You don’t even have a choice to eat anything else during the day because you have already decided that you will eat healthy. Start your day off with a good breakfast and you are on your way to a healthy day.

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What does this mean do you ask, well let’s see. What does a dessert shop have on hand, well that’s an easy one, desserts. What are people going to eat if they are hungry at a dessert shop, desserts. Let’s take that same principle and apply it to home.

Let’s say you have your pantry well stocked with cookies and easy to make cake mixes as well as chocolate frostings and your freezer has some frozen pies and ice cream. If you have a strong craving for sweets what do you think you are going to do.

Well it would be so easy to just run to your pantry and demolish a Twinkie or go to the freezer and pull out that half gallon of ice cream or whatever else may be handy in your kitchen.

This one has a fairly easy solution. Just throw out all of the garbage that you wouldn’t want to eat on a consistent basis. If you don’t have any sweets handy when you get that intense urge are you going to take 15 minutes to drive to a grocery store and and run to the Little Debbie isle, I think not.

Unless you have some severe lack of will power this little trick could save you numerous diet crashes.

It’s a simple fact, keep your kitchen clean. When I say this I am referring to the food content of your kitchen but the other implication is also good advice as you don’t want to be eating in a dirty kitchen.

Where are these protein fortified candy bars?

Well probably in your kitchen or office under the disguise of some name such as “Deluxe Energy Bar”, “Protein Builder”, or whatever other creative names there might be. Take a look at the 2 bars below:

Bar 1
calories: 250
fat: 5g
carbohydrate: 44g (20g sugar)
protein: 10g

Bar 2
calories: 280
fat: 7g
carbohydrate: 27g (18 g sugar)
protein: 13g

Well aside from the obvious minor variations in the macronutrient contents and total calories, Bar 1 is advertised as a nutrition bar packed with protein, while Bar 2 is known as one of the Snickers brand candy bars. Although not all protein bars are to this extreme they are not far from it. In addition to getting all of that extra fat needed for binding of the bar’s contents, you also get unneeded amounts of sugar which are in almost all protein bars, and most bars do not even contain a great amount of protein in them.

Stay smart, avoid the marketing gimmicks and know what you’re eating!