Healthy cooking and eating Part 3. (final installment)

Create a Lifestyle part 3: Healthy Cooking & Eating

So you have mapped out your day and tackled the grocery store, now the final part of the puzzle is preparing and eating your food. Similar to dedicating a day of the week to shopping for groceries, I encourage you to dedicate 1 or 2 evenings per week to food preparation. If you live with a partner or spouse make this something you guys do together and make it a fun experience that will help you to grow your relationship. My wife and I like to throw on some music and try cooking something brand new each week to broaden our array of foods and avoid getting bored of the same things over and over again.

As far as your protein sources from the grocery store, you are going to cook them either in the oven, on the grill or on the skillet. I am a big advocate of using the oven for food preparation because it’s simpler, has the least mess and allows for a large amount of food to be cooked at once. Each type of meat varies, so you will have to do a quick Google search for how long to cook a certain cut and type but I recommend cooking each protein source at 425 degrees Fahrenheit to avoid it drying out. (For example a thawed chicken breast, I will cook at 425 for 25-30minutes and cut after cooking to ensure they are cooked all the way through)

To prep the meats for the oven I will take them out the night before or morning before to thaw. Then I will take a baking tray and line it with aluminum foil and spray the foil with my extra virgin olive oil spray. Then I will season the meats with my choice of seasoning and/ or marinade and arrange them onto the baking tray so that they are not touching and give them room to expand in the oven. Then when the oven is preheated I throw them in and set the timer for required cooking time. This method will allow you to cook multiple amounts of meat at once and then you can throw them into tupperware and freeze them for later in the week, then you simply take the tupperware out of the freezer the morning that you head to work and reheat it in the microwave to eat.

For carbohydrates such as rice there are instructions for how to cook those on the packets… make sure to read the serving size to ensure that you do not eat too much per meal. Vegetables can be cooked by steaming on the stovetop, grilling or my personal favorite; roasted in the oven. Again I will prepare a baking sheet just like with the meats and throw on the vegetables I want to cook. (Broccoli and asparagus are some of my favorites) I will cook the vegetables at 425 Fahrenheit for around 20minutes so when the meats go in for 30 minutes, I will add the vegetables after 10minutes of the meats being in the oven.

My fats come from egg yolks in the morning, almonds as a snack during the day or a little olive oil, or coconut oil with my other food preparation. Finally my supplements are all taken with breakfast in the morning, with the exception of my whey protein, which I use immediately after my afternoon resistance training and sometimes as a snack during the day maybe between breakfast and lunch, or lunch and dinner.

So as you can see from this article and the 3 previous articles, changing your lifestyle and becoming the best version of you possible isn’t difficult, in fact it’s very simple however it does require discipline and organization. Temptation is going to creep in more than once but the key to your transformation is going to be having the mental strength to ignore it and be relentless in your journey to greatness!

Stop dieting and start a lifestyle

Over the past 8 years I have had enormous fluctuations in weight gain and weight loss. I have tried just about every diet out there: Low carb, high carb, low fat, high protein, juicing, gluten free, paleo, the list could go on for hours and I'm not going to sit here and tell you that some of these diets didn't achieve the weight loss that they promise because they did, however when the time period of the diets ended there was a rebound effect that would have me right back where I started in the first place if not even further back. It took me some time to realize what some of these diets were doing to my body that had long term negative consequences and finally about a year ago I found the answer and it was the simplest solution to what I was unnecessarily making a complex situation.

When we search for popular diets or see commercials for them on the TV, what do they all promise?... massive weight loss right? Well let me ask you this: What if I told you that you lost 20lbs but your body fat stayed identical, so you would look exactly the same, just the scales would change? Of course you wouldn't be happy! This is what happens when we go to low on carbohydrates for a prolonged period. Not only does our body go into a state called ketosis but it also starts burning lean muscle when our goal here is to burn fat. Also ketosis has negative effects on our insulin sensitivity so when we do eventually reintroduce carbohydrates into our diet down the road (which is going to be absolutely necessary for our own health), then we are going to be massively sensitive to them and gain back a lot of weight and body fat. This happened to me multiple times throughout my first few years experimenting with various diets.

The key to losing fat and transforming your body versus just 'losing weight' and looking exactly the same is balance! First and foremost our primary goal should ALWAYS be to improve our health and that requires us to create a lifestyle, not start a diet. We want to implement ways of shopping, cooking, eating and living that are sustainable for as long as we live and allow us to continuously improve our health and our body's aesthetics.

That being said I will be following this article with 3 articles on HEALTHY LIVING & EXERCISE, HEALTHY SHOPPING and HEALTHY COOKING & EATING. It's important that you first throw away the concept of embarking on a journey that has a deadline. Instead set goals but realize that the journey to true health and fitness is infinite. Fulfillment comes from sharing your successes with others and motivating family, friends and peers to embark on their own journeys. We rise in life by lifting others, so don't just give to get... give to inspire others!