What I'm doing

I've been going to the gym 5 times a week.  I go on sunday, tuesday, wednesday, thursday and saturday.  Three out of 5 days I do pretty intense weight training with at least 30 minutes of cardio and on the other days I usually do an hour of cardio.  For me, 1 hour on the eliptical is about 900 calories burned.  I have also changed my eating habits quite a bit.  I spend a lot of time researching nutrition, exercise and weight loss.  Even though there are so many different opinions out there about stuff, I take the things that it seems most people agree on and stick with those.  

Mornings, most research says that "Fat people skip breakfast".  Wellllllllll, since this is something that I've done most of my life I figure maybe it's true.  I don't always have the appetite to eat when I wake up but I MAKE myself drink at least 2 cups or so of soymilk.  I find this an easy way to get protein in my stomach and turn my metabolism on and I don't have to be hungry to get it down.  

Fiber, I have never found a single weight loss plan or article that doesn't stress the importance of fiber (lots of it).  Fiber makes you feel full, for a long time, it's amazing how unappealing Mcdonalds sounds when you're full.  Here is how I know that this works.  I could eat an entire box of captain crunch and the only thing about it that would fill me up would be the milk.  Lately I've been eating either oatmeal or fiberone cereal and I usually don't finish one bowl.  Fiber one tastes bad, I know, that's why I mix 1/2 cup of fiberone (14g fiber) with 1 cup of honey nut cheerios and I really don't even notice it's in there.  AWESOME, and I didn't even learn that at culinary school.

Offensive eating, one of the most important concepts for anybody, especially with an intense workout regimen.  This is planning your eating according to how you WANT to feel and not eating because of how you feel.  Breakfast with lots of fiber and protein is awesome for starting your day off right, I have so much more control over temptation by eating BEFORE  I even get hungry, I don't feel bad about eating whenever I want because the foods that I'm eating are so nutritionally dense.  Don't let your feelings tell you what to eat because a small bag of cheetos in the vending machine at school has 40 grams of fat in it and almost no fiber or protein not to mention hardly any vitamins at all.

I eat tons of dairy, cottage cheese with fruit, string cheese, soymilk, yogurt.  It's awesome, studies show dairy helping weight loss for lots of reasons.  Almonds are becoming more and more famous, I've read that people who ate 70 or so almonds a day lost far more weight than people on a low fat diet.  Almonds will make you feel full, I buy flavored ones and salted ones because I just can't eat the plain ones.  If you're worried about sodium, don't eat processed foods and fast food as much, and by that I mean very rarely.  Fast food is killing this country but they are not the ones putting it in our mouths.  I told my wife that I will eat it twice a month, and when I do I'm getting the biggest size and I'm eating all of my fries.  Don't try to eat healthy at fast food joints, the food is designed by professional corporate chefs to be CHEAP, FAST, FLAVORFUL, AND HAVE A SUPER LONG SHELF LIFE.  Do you know how to get a longer shelf life out of food, add trans fat and salt.

I'm still learning about what works for me and it changes here and there, but I'm starting to really figure out how to make healthy food work for me.