First Stop - Diet.....

Eeeeek!!!! Time for honesty. I’ve had an extremely rocky road with food over the years! In my teenage/twenties years I went completely off the rails and the pendulum swung heavily in both directions. Funnily enough, I can assure you that being too thin is almost more damaging psychologically than being too heavy!! Anyway, this whole issue is a story in itself but I’ll say that I have been the same weight for about the past 15 years. However I have only been mentally secure about the whole weight thing for about the past 10.

Part of the way that I have recovered from such a turbulent time was to take the whole focus off food and definitely no calorie counting, otherwise I’m prone to becoming obsessive about it. These days I prefer to look over a full day and make sure I’ve consumed a fairly proportionate amount of protein, carbs & healthy fats – along with a few treats here and there. With this I add some moderate to high intensity exercise and figure that whatever weight I end up with is where I should be. Fighting this for the sake of a couple of kilos is just asking for trouble as far as I’m concerned.

So here I am, preparing my mind for a year of muscle gaining, fat burning training. I don’t have any sort of mentor/trainer yet but I’m working on it. So I’ve scoured the net and it seems that my first priority is to eat more and gain muscle.

And the first thing I have to face is my diet. So I found a website that takes all of the guess work out of it and I have been plugging in exactly what goes in my mouth during the day. My initial findings are;

-          I need to basically triple my protein intake if I want to gain any muscle.

-          I’m doing ok on the fats front – surprise surprise!!

-          Carbs are looking ok but they could do with a bit of portion control in order to get the mix right.

So I went out today and bought brown rice. My husband kindly ate it under his pile of stir fried veges and lean chicken (I’m taking them all down with me!!!). Re the rice, he said, “Mmmmm. This is different’. Different means it takes like shit. He protested this fact but I am a realist. I have made a decision to make two pots of rice from now on. The kids can have white while Rob and I can adjust our pallet to appreciate ‘different’.