Are you eating proactively or reactively? 5 free meal planning documents to help change your eating
- thefitbusiness
- Sep 28, 2014
- 3 min read
Do you take the time to plan your meals, ensure the calories are balanced for your particular fitness goals, and prep them in advance? If not, you are setting yourself up to be a reactive eater...
A Reactive Eater tends to wait until she is hungry to eat, eats whatever is close and convenient, and allows herself to go into stage 2 or stage 3 hunger before finding something. What are the stages of hunger?
Stage 1 hunger is hard to notice and typically only occurs within the nutrition conscious folks that plan their meals and eat on a schedule.
Stage 2 hunger is when you begin to notice that you are hungry, have light hunger pangs (pains in the abdominal region which occur in the early stages of hunger or fasting and are correlated with contractions of the empty stomach or intestines)
Stage 3 hunger is when you have serious and constant pains associated with an empty stomach, you may feel dizzy, nauseous, feel a headache, inability to focus, become easily agitated or angered, and/or feel thirsty.
Allowing yourself to reach stage 2 or 3 is not beneficial for the body as it allows the body to metabolize muscle for energy. Muscle is what actually drives your metabolism. Basically, the more lean muscle you have the higher your metabolic rate will be. A combination of lack of consistent strength training and digesting your own lean muscle stores will destroy your metabolism over time.
Conversely, a proactive eater plans his meals, ensures that the calories are nutritionally dense and balanced, and preps as much of the hard work as possible by cooking ahead and portioning his meals when he knows he has a busy week ahead… The proactive eater ensures that he is not eating fast food or food that is not nutritionally sound because he creates his grocery list with his fitness goals in mind. He researches healthy recipes, and knows that 80% of his fitness goals are determined by the foods he eats.
I am here to tell you that being a proactive eater is not that much harder than being a reactive eater. The time you spend planning is balanced by the time that used to spend looking for food. The payoff is so much more rewarding, and the control that you begin to take over your nutrition will not only boost your self confidence, but also your immune system, your body composition, skin, hair, nails, and more!
There are tons of apps, products, and articles to help you on your journey to be a proactive eater. Apps like myfitnesspal, dietsnap, and sparkpeople have all-in-one operating systems that allow you to plan your meals, balance your calories, and print your grocery lists in one easy place. You can record your foods, track your progress, and engage with accountability tools such as social media posts. Using your google calendar to schedule your workouts and meals is a great help as it can remind you via a notification or email of when it’s time to eat or workout (very useful for those of us who tend to get engrossed in our work), and finally – find what works for you – maybe it’s the support of a friend or loved one to motivate you, maybe it’s finding the perfect app or software to keep you engaged, or maybe you need the help of an expert to get you started. It took me a little while to get where I am with this journey and I still make mistakes… Success does not happen overnight. Consult with a diet specialist on how to incorporate good behaviors. I used an amazing person, Jody Gisser of food fullness via skype and email to really get me going and she has helped me tremendously.
I will attach for you some sample recipes and my template on excel for designing and tracking my food choices to help you get started. Best of luck to you, and as always – comment below or email me if you need any help!
Commentaires