What's to eat?

When you are training as much as I have been training, you get hungry a lot! You have to be very careful about making sure you are prepared with healthy food to eat throughout the day or else you'll get so hungry that your body will convince you that you need junk and lots of it!

We use something called the BodyBugg at our gym that you wear on your arm and it detects heat, movement, number of steps and gives you a pretty accurate idea of how many calories you have burned along with a graph,etc. I wore it for about 2 months in December and January to get an idea of just how many calories I am burning with all of this training. My average on training days was about 3500 calories. I had a couple of higher days- 3700, 3900 but most of the training days were somewhere between 3000 and 3500.

This was really helpful to know because most of the time I wasn't eating enough and then after a hard days training, when I had only eaten 1500 calories so far, I would get ravenous cravings for stuff I don't normally eat. I started to spread out 3000- 3500 calories of food throughout the day and I eat about 700-1000 calories of it during and right after my workout. This seems to be working well- I have energy for my workouts and I am recovering and I don't have the uncontrollable urge to eat foods I shouldn't be.

A normal day for me looks like this-
Wake- 5:30am
6:00am Coffee, 2 eggs, 2 egg whites, spinach, 1/2 avocado, Banana
9:00am Cottage Cheese and blueberries or Oatmeal, blueberries and milk
12:00pm- Wheat Tortilla with Turkey Breast, 1/2 avocado, carrots
1pm- Train with a Lara Bar or Bonk Breaker, Gu2O, Gu gel (400-500 calories)
Surge Recovery Drink when I am done- 300 calories
3:00pm Peanut Butter in a wheat Tortilla, Trail Mix(nuts, seeds, etc.)
6:00pm Protein Bar, apple
7:30pm Chicken, Steak or Fish, Vegetables, Baked Potato
9pm Yogurt and Walnuts
Bed at 10:30pm

Lots of food, huh? I try to follow the principles John Berardi outlines in his Precision Nutrition. If you are lost on how to eat this is a great source to check out for nutrition recommendations. Click Here.

Also he has a FREE 8 day email course that is very informative- check it out