Do you eat on a schedule?
Do you have a challenge of eating on a schedule?
Do you make a date with specific times in your calendar to eat your meals?
Or do you just wing it, ending up eating either the ‘wrong’ things or eating twice as much as you know you should have?
This week, scheduling meals has been quite the issue for my clients. In order to balance the blood sugars well, think coherently and solve problems, you do need to feed the brain and keep the blood sugar levels balanced well.
Eating regularly spaced meals will also help your training sessions if later in teh day!
When the blood sugar drops, your brain lacks the fuel it needs to put words together – you may find you cannot recall the words well! This is not a sign of old age, it is a sign your blood sugar is low and it is probably time for a meal.
One of my athletes came in this week, and since he is off on summer break from teaching and his wife has an injury preventing him from riding with her, he has found it easy to just not plan meals or exercise. He realized during the session we had, that he can do the plan but does much better on the plan when he exercises.
We worked together to create a schedule not only for his exercise (and what groups he may find or activities he can do without his wife so she cannot get jealous) and match the meal timing to that exercise. When he doesn’t exercise, he gets bored and eats out of boredom rather than hunger. So a schedule for both exercise and eating should help him with this challenge of eating regularly and portion control.
I have another client who just works right thru the day when she should be taking a break to eat. She does take care of the house, the kids and also does some cleaning of houses. When she is cleaning, she will just push thru the hunger and then forget to eat. The challenge there is that without stopping to eat at noon, about 4 hours after her last meal, she then pushes through the rest of the afternoon without eating, slowing her metabolism. Her body is going into conservation mode and gaining weight instead of losing weight because she is not getting the much needed calories through out the day to keep the body burning fat. Instead it is holding onto it. She is not eating unhealthily by any means. But without the regularly spaced meals, the body breaks down muscle tissue to get the glucose for brain function. That break down in muscle then slows metabolism despite going to the gym regularly.
A third client, also wanting to lose weight has been skipping breakfast. Their last session, we also talked about setting a schedule with eating breakfast. Today in our follow up, she did eat breakfast regularly and no longer was snacking at night as a result.
With all of these clients, the need to eat on a schedule that will work for them is key to helping them with their weight goals. For all we had to create a schedule, and suggest making a date in the calendar, either in the paper one or the one on the phone. The one on the phone will at least send you a reminder with an alert! I prefer this one as you can also set it to go off every day at the same times with a reminder 15 minutes before and again at the time of your meal date.
For me, I look at my calendar and schedule clients around the times I exercise and want to eat. The clients don’t know why I am not available at any given time – they just know I am not.
And if a client session goes a bit long, I have my baked potatoes, heads of romaine, hard boiled eggs or leftover grilled chicken all ready to go so when I do have time, I am not guessing at what it may be that I am eating. I can quickly munch a baked potato with sliced avocado in between sessions. But I do like to carve out a good 30 minutes just to eat vs. a mere 15. I do need to chew and enjoy my food 🙂
On days where the schedule is really crammed, I will make a green smoothie or my newest Green Frappucino as my snack or meal to tie me over. I usually make them the day before or will make them in the morning after my training session. Sometimes I will also just eat a handful or two or nuts when I do only have less than 15 minutes!
Do you want to eat on a schedule?
What do you do to make this easier?
What are some of your quick meals??