wannabekickboxer wrote:thanks mark, good ideas, I do eat alot of processed foods - mainly in the form of frozen meals (you know the low fat low calorie kind) - should I cut them out completely?
I'll work on eating smaller meals more often over the next week and see how I go.
I would definitely recommend at least reducing what percentage of those make up your diet. I'm not sure whether you are relying on them because you (a) don't have time to cook, (b) don't like/know-how to cook, (c) like the idea of the "guesswork" taken out of nutrition. I guess my responses would be (a) you can cook a week's worth of food on the weekend, freeze most of it, and thaw when needed, (b) you can make pretty simple stuff
using recipes from World's Healthiest Foods, (c) eating raw, unprocessed foods is a good, simple rule-of-thumb.
There are lots of problems with those frozen low-cal (or low-carb) meals. Perhaps the biggest is that they tend to focus on the macronutrients (protein, carbs, fat) and don't feature a very good amount of micronutrients (vitamins, minerals, prostaglandans, etc.) Your body is actually pretty good at figuring out when it's not getting the nutrition you need. If you eat food that has plenty of macronutrients but not enough micronutrients, your body will still trigger the hunger reflex to get you to eat more in the hopes of rectifying that situation.
I'm a mathematican so I tend to think of diet as an optimization problem. When I plan my meals, I'm trying to maximize the value (micronutrients, protein, EFAs) of what I eat while minimizing the "cost" (overall calories, saturated and/or trans fats, etc.). Minimially-processed foods are the best way to go. So a serving of wild-caught salmon that I poach myself is better than a serving of farm-raised salmon that is cooked with higher, dryer heat because, while they both have the same macronutrient profile, the former contains fats that are much more valuable to my body than the latter (farm-raised salmon has a lower EFA count and cooking with dry heat can destroy EFAs).
One final note, you'll notice that carbs weren't listed in either my "value" or "cost" catagories above. As a result, I don't give much thought to them. I tend to eat somewhat low-carb (compared to the average person) but that's not by design. It just turns out that many carb-rich foods don't fit my criterion for a high ratio of nutrients to calories. The exceptions, of course, are fruit and eating before or after a workout when my body has a strong need for carbohydrates. See the nutrition chapter of Science of Sports Training for more information on pre- and post-workout nutritional needs.
-Mark
P.S.: As far as the eating a smaller number of meals goes, it's just something to try. If it doesn't work well in your schedule for whatever reason then you can skip it. I personally eat 3 meals with 2 snacks in between but I'm not really convinced it makes a huge difference.
