A Simple Diet for Simple Goals

So I wanted to write a follow up post for those of my readers who aren’t interested in following such an involved diet. The following diet is a good general outline of how to and what to eat in a more simple diet. This should be geared toward people who don’t have ambitious body transformation goals. This

Alright so I’m going to give you choices of what to eat. You will need to eat 4 maybe 5 meals a day if you can. Five is better than four of course but whatever your schedule will allow you should do, because the point of the diet is to be able to do something you can live with. Don’t make it so hard that you mess it up, get discouraged, and quit, just like you may have heard before, K.I.S.S. keep it simple stupid!

Meal 1 Breakfast
This is the most important meal of the day! You absolutely HAVE to eat breakfast! This is the meal that will get you metabolism revved up for the day and will allow you to burn fat. This should also be your biggest meal of the day, and it will be ok if you have something sugary with breakfast but don’t go overboard with it.
Breakfast Items:
Fruit – bananas, oranges, apples, blueberries, strawberries, etc.
Oatmeal – it would be best to get old fashioned oats and sweeten with honey or agave nectar, but if you don’t like that just get those little packets that are flavored
Whole Grain toast – you can put whatever you want on it I would steer towards jelly/jam instead of fats like peanut butter or butter if you want to use fats use just a little
Eggs – you can eat some egg whites, but if you don’t like them you can have scrambled eggs with a ratio of one whole egg for every egg white
Cereal – you can always eat cereal just be sure to find one not sugary like Kashi cereals, and be sure to use skim milk

Meal 2 Snack
Make sure you get a snack; this will keep your metabolism going!
Fruit – fruit is a good snack because you can usually take it with you
Yogurt – yogurt makes a good snack just be careful of all the sugar I think you can find a low-carb yogurt
Veggies – veggies are a good snack because you get fiber, and they fill you up just be aware that they have little caloric value meaning they don’t have a lot of calories
Dried fruit – dried fruit is good but pricey and don’t go overboard with dried fruit because there is usually a good amount of carbs in a little fruit

Meal 3 Lunch
Time to start putting in a little more protein into your daily diet, I usually eat some meat, some salad, and a yam or something for lunch.
Meat – Chicken, tuna, fish, lean steak these choices are better than lunch meat, but you can have lunch meat on a sandwich if you want
Carbs – yellow potatoes, yams, whole grain bread, whole grain pasta
Fruits
Veggies

Meal 4 Snack
For your last snack I would try to incorporate more fats into you snack and less simple carbs. You can have some of the things you would have in your first snack just be easy on the carbs and try to get your calories from protein or fat.
Nuts – walnuts, almonds etc. peanut butter maybe have some ants on a log!

Meal 5 Dinner
If you get hungry after dinner eat a small healthy snack but do not eat within three hours of going to bed. You need to really cut the carbs at night and if you get hungry eat something high in fat maybe some peanut butter or hummus. Also one trick I have heard of doing is drink a big glass of water then brush your teeth, you won’t want to eat after brushing your teeth.

Meats – chicken, fish, lean beef (lean steak or even lean ground beef)
Carbs – brown rice, multigrain pasta, etc
Veggies
Nuts

Just some little tips when dieting: Its all about portion control, basically just eat a little bit just enough not to be hungry. You should be able to fit your meal easily on a small plate. Until you know how much to eat, just eat a little, take a break, drink a large glass of water, wait ten minutes and if your not hungry, quit eating! You’re going to be eating four or five meals so all of them will be small. If you drink, I would limit or cut out alcohol out of your diet as well. Don’t even think about eating anything out of the freezer section, that crap is all processed and not good for you and full of calories. If you think you have done well for the week you should have a cheat day, but I find my diet is more effective if I try to do well for two weeks then take a cheat day. Try to make better food choices, it’s the little things that you do that make a big difference. Once you diet for a week or two you will probably notice that you keep eating the same things over and over again, you should find new things to eat because your body will get used to eating the same things over and over.

Building a Successful Diet Part 1

So my next few posts will be an entire series of posts. I will be talking about nutrition. For my post today I am going to do a quick overview of a healthy diet, and will try to give some advice so that all my readers can benefit. The next few posts will go into depth on how to utilize macronutrients such as carbohydrates, protein, and fat. If I can do enough research in time to do it, the final post will go into detail on utilizing certain foods to get the most out of their nutritional value in order to minimize the need for supplements. I am very interested in this topic, because I am currently not using any supplements and can not afford them.

Ok so let’s talk about a proper healthy diet. As far as the diet goes it should be pretty simple. Five to six meals a day is good for most people, but some of you just starting the habit of eating like this may want to stick to four to five meals instead, and that’s still ok. Believe me this is nothing, some people on hardcore weight gain diets may eat as much as 8 to 10 meals a day! As far as how much protein, carbohydrates, and fat you should eat per meal, I have found for myself at 5’7” and between 165 to 180lbs., the following has worked for me to add muscle: 30 to 40 grams of protein per meal, 40 to 60 grams of carbs per meal and 10 to 13 grams of fat per meal. There really is no exact science to figure out how much you need to eat per meal. I generally use two different ratios in figuring out how much protein, carbohydrates, and fat I need to eat per meal, depending on my goals. So the first of the two ratios I use is 2:2:1. Two parts of your daily calories come from carbohydrates, two parts come from protein, and one part from fat. This is a ratio I would use if I was going to try trim down and lose fat. The second ratio is 3:2:1, three parts from carbohydrates, two parts from protein, and one part from fat. This is the ratio I would use to gain muscle.

Alright so some of you who are new to calculating calories this could get a little complicated so pay attention closely! Let’s say for example you need to eat 3,000 calories per day for your diet. So using the 2:2:1 ratio above, 1,200 of your daily calories need to come from carbohydrates, 1,200 calories from protein, and 600 calories from fat. So how many grams of each macronutrient will you need? Well 1 gram of carbohydrates is equal to 4 calories, 1 gram of protein is equal to 4 calories, and 1 gram of fat is equal to 9 calories! So 1,200 calories from carbohydrates is equal to 300 grams, 1,200 calories from protein is equal to 300 grams, and 600 calories from fat is equal to almost 67 grams of fat. Now that you have an idea of how much of each macronutrient you need to consume, you need to figure out how many total calories you will need per day.

You can use all the scientific calorie calculators in the world and never really know exactly how many calories to eat. Calorie calculators can be used as a guide to get a close amount of calories you will need, but really it’s a trial and error process. I would use this calorie calculator from Bodybuilding.com: http://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/macronutcal.htm as a basis and adjust the amount of calories you will need per day from there. It calculated 2,970 calories for me, but with my metabolism and workout intensity I know I need at least 3,400 calories to maintain my weight. So I would start off eating as many calories as the calculator suggests and monitor your weight and fat percentage and adjust your diet from there. Once you find out what your body needs to maintain your weight it should be easy from there. If you want to cut fat subtract about 500 calories from your daily needs and use the 2:2:1 ratio to calculate your macronutrient needs. If you want to gain muscle add 500 calories to your daily needs and use the 3:2:1 ratio to calculate your macronutrient needs.

At this point I’m sure you’re wondering, “Ok, but what the heck should I eat?” Every meal should have some sort of lean protein source, some sort of grain for carbs, and a fruit or vegetable for fiber, in order to get fats you usually won’t have to add any to your meal, but you should cook with some good fats, such as olive oil, canola oil, or peanut oil. I will be elaborating more on what to eat in my later posts on each of the three macronutrients.

Any questions or comments will be greatly appreciated! Remember to “Like” me on Facebook, and follow me on Twitter!

The Gym Maniac

The Maniac's Workout

So for my blog post today I figured I would go through a brief overview of my workout plan. If you haven’t viewed my bodyspace.com profile yet it can be found at: http://bodyspace.bodybuilding.com/wrestler236/. You can find my goals and stats on here such as weight, body fat percentage, body measurements, and lifting stats. My goal right now is to be able to drop my body fat percentage from 11% down to 8% and to be back up to 170 lbs from my current weight of 161 lbs. I want to do all of this by January 31st, 2012. This is about 11 weeks from now, and I am already into my second week of working out.

The workout I’m on now has me doing:

Monday – Chest, Back, Biceps, and Triceps

Tuesday – Quads, Hamstrings, Calves, and Shoulders

Wednesday – Abs and Cardio

Thursday – Chest, Back, Biceps, and Triceps

Friday – Quads, Hamstrings, Calves, and Shoulders

Saturday – Abs and Cardio

Sunday – Rest Day

This workout seems very involved, but is actually fairly low in intensity, which is just what I need for starting to get back into shape. The lifting sessions only take 45 to 60 minutes. I am doing 2 to 3 sets per exercise with a rep range of 10 to 12 reps per set. I’m taking a 90 second rest between exercises and I superset exercises together of opposing muscle groups. i.e. chest and back or biceps and triceps. This workout is fairly easy to get me acclimated to lifting again and will increase in intensity every two weeks.

I am training my abs two days a week for right now, but will step it up to three days a week when I feel ready. I am training them on a separate day and will be doing lower reps with resistance to strengthen my core. I need to strengthen my core since I haven’t worked out in awhile. This will give me a solid base to perform exercises that require heavy weight when I get ready to do these exercises later. Your core is the most important area on your body. A strong core will enable you to handle more weight, which in turn will mean more muscle. I train my core on a separate day so that I can devote all my focus and energy that day on my core, in order to obtain better results.

As for the cardio, two days a week is all I will need. I have a very fast metabolism and any more than this will make it difficult for me to gain muscle. I may add in another day of cardio down the road if I feel like I’m not losing enough fat. For my cardio I am doing intervals. Right now I am doing about a 40 second sprint followed by low intensity jog for about a minute and a half. I will do a 3 to 5 minute warm up and a 3 to 5 minute cool down. The total amount of time I spend on cardio during a session right now is about 15 minutes. This is why I love doing intervals, I can get all the cardio I need to kick-start my metabolism in a cool 15 to 20 minutes.

As for my diet right now, I really haven’t started dieting. I eat pretty healthy already and I am eating 5 to 6 meals a day. I will eventually need to clean up my diet in order to reach my goal. Right now I am monitoring how my body is reacting to my workouts and I will change my dieting accordingly. I will eventually start keeping track of all my calories I’m taking in and monitor my carbohydrate, protein, and fat intake. Being able to monitor and listen to how your body is reacting to your diet is essential to shaping your body. I am slowing changing my diet, because this is a great way to ease myself back into eating lean and having a strict diet. Most of you will find this to be extremely helpful when starting a new diet. If you start out changing a little at a time you are way more likely to follow a diet than jumping full steam into something completely foreign.

If you have any questions, comments, or would like to suggest a topic please feel free to comment below!

The Gym Maniac

The Importance of Having Goals

I almost thought about skipping this post, because even though it’s not the most interesting it’s still very important. I want to talk about setting goals. Setting fitness goals is extremely important. Without goals and some sort of direction, you have very little chance of becoming successful. Strong goals are the foundation of a successful fitness program. So where do we start?

First off you need to identify what you want to achieve. You can’t have that blanket New Year’s resolution response, “I want to start working out!” that will get you nowhere and will give you nothing to achieve. Do you want to lose weight? Gain weight? Put on muscle? Take off fat? Look good in a bathing suit? Get in shape for a sport? Realizing what you want to achieve is going to give your workouts direction so you don’t end up quitting the gym after a couple weeks.

The next step is to identify your motivation. What is your motivation? This could be anything! Very few people have strong intrinsic motivation, (motivation that comes from within). Maybe you want to workout, because you love it and you like the way it makes you feel and it’s fun for you. Very few people say this and that’s ok, but you should at least have some sort of intrinsic motivation. After all what’s the point in making a lifestyle change if you don’t like it? There is none! Most people that read this are going to find their motivation extrinsically, (motivation that comes from external factors). Examples of this might be: (my personal one) you have been that scrawny little shrimp all your life and you’re sick of it!, you want to be able to fit in an old pair of jeans, or maybe you want to live healthier and longer to be able to enjoy being a part of your loved one’s lives. Whatever the case, you need to find the motivation of your goals to give them validity.

The secret to having success when setting a goal is to make your goals SPECIFIC! I can not stress this enough! So many times I hear people’s general goals: “I want to lose weight.” “I want to gain muscle.” “I want to look good in my bathing suit for Spring Break.” “I want definition.” It’s unfortunate in our society today that people think all they have to do is say the magic words, “I want to lose weight.” and it happens. This method of goal setting is ingrained into the minds of the countless lost souls of society’s fitness failures, and unfortunately it’s a completely useless form of goal setting. Do not fear though, because The Gym Maniac is here to set everyone straight! So how can we make these goals more specific?

Well for example: “I want to gain 10 lbs.” is better than, “I want to gain weight.”

“I want to gain 10 lbs. of muscle by February.” Is even better, and “I want to gain 10lbs. of muscle while maintaining my current body fat percentage, in time for Valentines Day, February 14^th, 2012.” is better yet!

Having specific goals will give your workouts purpose and meaning and you will be more likely to keep to your workout plan when you give yourself an end point.

In keeping with making specific goals, you also need to keep specific how you are going to achieve these goals. For instance say someone wants to lose 40 lbs. They need to be specific in how they are going to achieve this. Maybe go to classes at their local gym twice a week and work with a personal trainer twice a week. They will also need to come up with a specific diet program. This is the part in which you may need to consult with a health professional in order to do this.

Another factor you will need to take into consideration is a time limit for your goals. Many people may find this easy, because a lot of fitness goals coincide with a specific date: “By spring break”, “By such and such’s wedding”, “By this important date”. But for those of you who are not trying to meet fitness goals for a specific event you need to come up with a timeline. It is important to put a time limit on what you are trying to achieve, because it gives you that sense of urgency and motivation to get it done. Think if you told some construction workers to build you a house and to get it done when they can, it would never get done!

Keeping your timeline in mind as well as, what you want to do, and how you are going to do it, you must also make everything reasonable. It wouldn’t make much sense to set a goal to gain 20lbs of muscle in 2 months. That just isn’t reasonable. You also want to make your goals challenging. A goal to lose 10 lbs. of muscle in 4 months is way to easy! When setting a goal make sure that you will challenge yourself, but at the same time it is very important to know your limitations. Part of knowing your limitations is realizing how much work you are willing to put into achieving your goal. Don’t fool yourself into thinking you can go from not working out to joining a gym and attending five to six days a week. You will undoubtedly burn yourself out before you get a chance to achieve anything. It takes a long while to get used to any habit and you need to give yourself the time to make the changes in order to be successful.

Lastly now that you have all these goals in mind you need to write them down! What’s the use in all of this brainstorming if you don’t write any of it down? Writing your thoughts down will help you visualize and bring validity to your goals. They will get ingrained into your mind and you will also be more likely to remember them. You can even write them down and put them in a place you look all the time. Maybe a dresser drawer, where you put your alarm clock, the bathroom mirror, or maybe the refrigerator. Whatever the case may be this will give yourself a reminder of what you want to achieve everyday! Another method that helps, that I like doing is to tell people what you plan on achieving. This gives yourself some sort of accountability to other people to achieve your goals. You are going to look pretty silly when Fred at the office comes up to you three months later and says, “How’s that workout going Bob?” and you have to say, “Uh well… I… Uh…” Wouldn’t you rather be able to say, “Splendid! I’ve been losing a lot more than I thought already and I feel great!”

Developing goals are going to be the number one factor in your fitness success. This is something that is going to make or break your entire workout regimen. Without goals you will have n direction. So remember to find your motivation, make them specific, give yourself a time limit, and be reasonable when developing your goals.

Good Luck!

The Gym Maniac

Welcome to "The Maniac's Gym"

Hello, and welcome to The Maniac’s Gym.  My name is Paul, but as my close friends call me when I’m in, talking about, reading about, or dreaming about the gym, it’s “Maniac”.   

A little bit about me and how I got into fitness first. My older brother got a Weider weight bench for Christmas one year when I was very young. Watching my brother, I became fascinated with lifting and getting stronger, because I didn't know there was a way I could change my body. Later I got into wrestling in the 7th grade, and once I got to high school I was amazed at the changes that I was responsible for in my body. By the time I was a senior I was hands down one of the strongest wrestlers in my weight class of 125lbs. (Although not nearly the best.) I choose not to further my wrestling career through college. During my first year in college, wrestling season came and went and I was absolutely lost. I didn't know how to fill the time I normally spent wrestling. I started off throwing weight around in the gym not really knowing what I was doing. Eventually I started reading bodybuilding books and was able better train myself with my newly acquired knowledge. I am continuing to mature and develop my knowledge and skills towards working out and obtaining the body I desire.

Which brings me to what I am up to now, I vowed back in 2009 that I would consistently workout for a year straight.  None of this workout for a few months then quit for a few months business.  Well, one year turned into two years and I absolutely loved every day of it!  Then in April of this year a series of events had me put my workout life on hold, and now I’m looking to get back on the horse again!

Here is a couple pictures of me one year ago..

And these are some pictures of me now…

I’m so distraught, back in April I was at my peak at the end of a mass gain phase.  I was 195lbs and only about 13% body fat.  I was the biggest I ever looked and stronger than ever.  Unfortunately I’m about 160lbs now and still about 13% body fat.  I had dreams of doing my first bodybuilding show, but all of that is out the window at this point.

This blog is going to chronicle my climb back to where I was before, and along the way I’m going to share with you my tips, tricks, and secrets regarding my diets, supplements, and workouts.  So follow along with me as I post my progress and how I’m doing what I am doing each and every week.