At Lean Body Training, we don’t subscribe to any one diet, as the client’s individual needs will dictate the direction we guide them towards.
However, what we’ve found over years of coaching is that our advice is nearly always rooted in these five key eating habits.
How closely the client must follow the plan depends on the client’s starting point and goal.
For example, a client who wants to get from 30% to 20% body fat will have a much ‘looser’ plan than a client looking to get from 12% to 8%, where a much tighter and more detailed plan must be accounted for.
Following these five habits, regardless of the goal won’t see you go far wrong and will keep you staying toned and healthy forever.
1. Eat every 3-4 hours
Whilst exact eating times are not so important, the key here is making sure you’re eating regular meals every day. Every 3-4 hours will generally work out to be 3-5 meals and snacks a day.
This habit is important in maintaining blood sugar levels, whilst also helping reduce food cravings and hunger. Staying satiated is absolutely essential for fat loss.
Eating way too little with large gaps in between meal times is a recipe for disaster, and opens up an ‘accidental’ binge waiting to happen. This first habit will prevent this.
2. Make sure every meal consists of lean protein
One of the most uncompromising rules we have with our personal training clients in Finchley is that every meal must contain a source of protein.
For the majority of clients who come to see us, their protein consumption is almost always inadequate.
Read More: Why Consuming Protein Helps You Lose Fat
If body composition changes in your physique are what you’re after, you must follow this habit. A simple rule to follow: For men, aim for 25-35g per meal, which is around 150g of cooked chicken breast. For women, aim for 20-30g per meal.
3. Eating vegetables with every meal
Everyone knows that eating vegetables is important, but why?
Here are a few main reasons:
1. Packed with vitamins and minerals
No supplement can replace real food. Eating a range of different vegetables is still best for making sure your vitamin and mineral requirements are met. It will also help with detoxification and suppression of inflammation around the body. So eating more vegetables will help you look younger.
2. Improves digestion
Vegetables (especially green vegetables such as broccoli) are typically high in water and fibre, which will help you keep it ‘regular’. This is more important if somebody is following a low-carbohydrate or low-calorie diet.
3. It keeps you feeling satiated
Satiety is something we keep mentioning. A sustainable diet is something you can see yourself doing a year from now. Staying satiated is the easiest way to stick to this, as it keeps you feeling fuller, prevents cravings and prevents any ‘outbreak binges’.
Vegetables provide this through their natural fibre content and overall high water content.
A guide to follow with vegetables is to make sure it covers at least a third of a plate with meals. If you’re on a low carbohydrate diet, increase this to half a plate of veg.
4. Consume Healthy Fats Daily
When comparing all the macronutrients, fats in our diets have got the worst reputation. It’s been linked to growing numbers of obesity, high cholesterol and heart disease.
While dispelling these myths goes beyond the length of this article, numerous studies have shown us that fat isn’t the bad guy to avoid.
If you want to live a balanced, leaner lifestyle, fats are essential nutrients for the body.
And here’s why:
1. Healthy fat plays an essential role in absorbing fat-soluble vitamins through the intestines. If you want the goodness from those veggies, you need fat in your diet.
2. Fat is needed to maintain cell membrane health. These surround every cell in the body, and their health of them is critically important in managing inflammation and metabolism.
3. Fat is essential in balancing hormones.
4. Fat is a great source of energy, especially on low-carb diets.
So What Are ‘Healthy Fats’?
It’s important to include a range of fats in your diet. Mono fats can be olive oil, avocado, and nuts as well as polyunsaturated fats; fish oil, and seeds, as these fats each, have their own role to play in the body. To make things simpler, add a source of these healthy fats a couple of times a day into your diet.
What we advise you to avoid are trans-fats in your diet, which are manufactured fats which we recommend avoiding as are strongly associated with a number of health complications.
5. Make sure the majority of carbohydrates are consumed around exercise.
Just like fats don’t make you fat, carbs aren’t evil either. While not an essential nutrient in the body, there are some clear metabolic benefits to eating carbs:
1. Fuels your workouts
Keeping some carbohydrates around your training times can boost performance, recovery and strength.
2. Increased muscle
After exercise, protein breakdown is at its highest level. Providing carbohydrates at this stage provides glycogen replenishment when you’re most sensitive. While some dismiss the window of opportunity that training provides, our experience with thousands of clients has been evident to us that consuming some carbohydrates post-workout can really help with building muscle tissue and losing fat.
3. There are two times in the day when we prefer to add carbohydrates to our meals or snacks: after training and some before bed. Put simply, carbs at night can help relax the body and improve the quality of sleep.
Good carbohydrate choices can include 1-2 cups of basmati rice, sweet potatoes, new potatoes or oats.
Meal plans, macronutrient targets and strict diet can have their time and place. When you really need to dial things are useful tools in creating radical body transformations.
However, to be able to keep your physique long-term, and make eating sustainable, we need to ingrain good and sustainable habits.
The five habits we’ve written in this article are what we find to mainly focus on habits to master in staying lean and healthy forever.
If you want to get expert training with nutrition planning to get you in the best shape of your life, enquire below and see how Lean Body Training can help achieve more learn more
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