Personal Training: Eating Right for Newbies by Anders N W Lindgreen

If weight loss is the goal of your personal training regime or the reason why you’re stepping up the exercise intensity, don’t forget about what you put into your body. I would even go as far suggesting that about 50-75% of the weight loss come as a result of good eating. And in contrast to some people in the fitness industry, I don’t have a problem with all the different diets and eating plans out there. Sure, I have my favourite one, but I don’t expect everyone to agree with me. I only have issues with eating plans that involve starvation, nutrient deficiencies, have little or no information to back up their claims and education and transition onto long-term eating habits for health and weight maintenance. I also believe that there are some simple rules that you can adopt your lifestyle to that will keep your body looking great without counting calories or being too technical about it.

Clean Eating

When you leave it up to the manufacturer to produce your food, you can be sure that it is tampered with to boost the taste, longevity or look of the product. These changes can mean that you get more than you bargained for and instead of just consuming the food itself you’re chugging down a small chemical lab as well. Getting around this is easy; avoid processed foods and let the majority of foods bought be clean. By clean I mean that if you buy a raw chicken breast, you know it’s chicken, if you buy an apple you know it’s an apple - but buy either in a tin can or pre-cooked and who knows what you “get a side-order of”.

Good and Bad Foods

In my opinion there are no good or bad foods. That is just silly. I do divide them into two different groups still; healthy foods and treats. But they have no emotion connected to them. My reasoning is simple, if you eat more healthy foods, you will end up looking healthy, but if you have more treats, you’ll also end up looking like one! So, if you find yourself taking the shape of your treats instead of the leanness of that chicken breast, you know what you need to have less of.

The 80/20 Rule

I believe in anything in moderation, and if you can stick to 80% healthy habits and 20% whatever-you-want – you will do well. The same goes for my philosophy around eating, keep 80% of your energy intake from the healthy foods category and the remaining 20% can be treats.