Hopefully for the past 2 days you’ve been focussing on the basics: more water, less junk, healthier snacks and a touch of exercise.

Today’s focus is very simple: eating a bit healthier. As you should know by now, it’s easier to not put calories in your mouth than it is to work them off. So you should (slowly, it takes time, I’m still working on this) learn to eat better vs learning to exercise more. Both are important, but to save yourself hours in the gym (and lots of frustration), eating better is key.

For most people, the easiest meal of the day to fix is breakfast. You’re (generally) at home. You have (most of) the things you need at home (hopefully). And you have total control. The hardest meal is generally lunch because it requires eating at the right time, not overeating, planning your meals, not “upsizing” when you eat out, not buying dessert when you eat out, etc. It’s a minefield.

But breakfast is easy.

Now you’re likely in one of 3 camps for breakfast:

  1. You eat chocolate frosted mini wheat flakes with marshmallows
  2. You eat some kind of cereal, with milk and sugar
  3. You don’t eat breakfast

If you aren’t eating, start. It kicks off your metabolic process. What we want to work towards is to having your body constantly digesting food all day long. It’ll burn calories, but more importantly it’ll supply a constant amount of energy, vs the peaks and valleys you’re probably used to now. And, contrary to popular early weight loss program belief, eating less doesn’t mean losing more.

Eat your breakfast. It’s the best way to start things up.

Some healthy choices for breakfast:

  1. Oatmeal, skim’d milk. Fruit on top (I find frozen fruit the easiest, you can buy 2 week’s worth of breakfast fruit for 5-10$). No sugar.
  2. Kashiik cereals (specifically the Go Lean variety). They taste quite decent and have a metric tonne of the vitamins you need early in the morning. They’re more expensive though. Eat with skim’d milk (noticing a pattern here? Heh). Some blueberries will round this meal out.
  3. One piece of whole wheat/brown toast. One poached egg. A bunch of fruit. This is my favourite because it gets me protein early which staves off all kinds of cravings, it’s fast and easy and it tastes really, really good.
  4. Have other suggestions? Let me know in the comments!

Your other goal is to continue exercising. During the last 2 days you should have done at least one ab/crunch routine. If you’re able to, do another round of 3 sets of 10 crunches again. It’s not a huge amount of exercise, but getting your muscles moving the right way is the hardest part of crunches and pushups, so the practice really does help and you’ll see rapid improvements by doing these simple exercises every couple of days for 5 minutes at a time.

In addition, try and take a medium-paced 20 minute walk. A treadmill is fine if you want to go to the gym, but outside is best if it isn’t too cold where you are. Your goal is to basically break a light sweat. So whatever pace has you hot and bothered about 20 minutes in. Feel free to bring music, a book (if it’s early enough) or better yet a book on tape you can play from your iPod. Whatever it takes so you don’t get bored and think about the time passing or how much work it is.

And again, that’s about it. A bit more explanation this time, but the goal for your next 2 days is pretty simple: drink more water just like before, eat a better breakfast and try and get 1-2 very light workouts in, just to get your body used to the idea.

During Day 3 we’ll deal with eating out, whether it’s lunches or dinners, and start to prep for the beginnings of an exercise routine in Week 2. At this point, you probably aren’t noticing any specific changes in your body, so to stay motivated focus on the changes in what you’re able to do. Are the crunches easier the second or third time around? Do you feel more energy due to starting a better breakfast and more water? Are you drinking less pop and eating less junk food?

Celebrate these milestones. Once the weight starts coming off it’ll be easier to focus on that, but the first few weeks your weight loss won’t be huge. Your goal here is to build habits that will last, will give you more energy and will make you feel better about yourself. The actual weight loss is always secondary to personal fulfillment. And when it isn’t, the weight always comes back on.

Good luck, and have a great week!

As always, any comments, questions, suggestions or tips let me know in the comments!