Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve looked at counting calories, creating a deficit and staying on track. Being prepared takes can help us to stay on track and making good choices throughout the week.
There are so many little adjustments that could be made, covering everything would take a small novel and lots of reading!
Let’s look at a few examples instead, after all, we know ourselves the best. Hopefully, one of the examples resonates with you, if not speak to a member of team SF, and we’ll be able to find something to help you out!
First off, we need to find a way to regulate our intake, again many, many ways to achieve this, couple of examples below:
| Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat | Sun | Total | |
| Strict Cycle | 1650 | 1650 | 1650 | 1650 | 1650 | 1650 | 1650 | 11550 |
| Training Cycle | 1750 | 1600 | 1750 | 1600 | 1750 | 1600 | 1600 | 11650 |
| Weekend Cycle | 1600 | 1600 | 1600 | 1600 | 1600 | 2000 | 1600 | 11600 |
Strict – same calories everyday, important to remember here that we aren’t saying everyday has to be the same meals, just the overall intake. This works well for peeps that like a rigid structure and who may don’t fair so well when given a little more leeway…..
Training cycle – Calories are higher on training days, straight forward here. We need to balance this out, so the off days are slightly lower, also we can run the inverse of this and have a few more calories on our rest days to help recovery.
Weekend cycle – works well for the busier social life or if we find staying on track during the office week easier, specifically easier when we only take the necessary food to work. We can let our hair down at the weekend a bit and still enjoy a bit of social time.
The key point here is if we go massively off track when we are tracking, either we have created too much of a deficit or the structure isn’t working for us. If finding the right solution is proving difficult, a good starting point is to start with protein, hit your protein goal first, then work backwards from there.
Meal prep, how many times have we been in the situation of..
‘What shall I have for lunch?’
Preparing food in advance can help alleviate some of the higher calorie trips to the fridge or the meal deal aisle (not that all the options are bad!).
Once again, lots of different ways to go about this, in the end if we follow the yellow brick road it all ends in the same place.
It could be as simple as having healthy options in the fridge:
- Salad items
- Cooked meats (chicken, beef etc)
- Pre-measured assortments of nuts/seeds
- Mini meals
- Ready-made smoothies
- Protein yogurts – double check the macros though!
We could also look at having fully cooked meals ready to go, portioned out, so it’s super simple to grab one and know that fits into the day properly.
A weekly meal plan for the evenings can also help us, this can be used when we go shopping to ensure we aren’t trying to think about what to have, also try not to go shopping on an empty stomach, this rarely helps.
All of this requires a bit of planning, granted, however the time spent on this will help you to stay on track and save you time in making those decisions.
Going to end with a little question.
How many calories do you drink throughout the week, maybe pick just a few of your weekly drinks and look up the value…..
If you would like to go over your how you could plan and prepare your weekly intake, speak to a member of Team SF on info@spikefitness.co.uk