Category Archives: Recipe’s

Food Prep – The Road to Getting Lean!

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Good Food  Food Prep

We all want washboard Abs, great chest and arm muscles and if you’re a lady a nice tight butt and slim hips. You may be prepared to put in the hard physical work necessary and hit the Gym, train or workout 5 times a week, but that’s only half the battle. What food you buy, what food you eat and how you eat,to my mind at least, is the hardest part of the battle. Most of us are prepared to shift the weights , hit the treadmill and wear the Lycra to get fit, it’s the healthy eating and laying off the booze that leads us astray.

I’ve written before about the need for consistency and firmly believe that if you eat and train well 80%+ of the time then you can allow yourself the odd bad night or weekend. However there is no getting around it, the food that you eat is critical if you want to shed those pounds, reduce body fat and finally show those long hidden abs.

One of the biggest issues and regular excuses that people make is the time and effort it takes to prepare healthy food compared to so called “convenience” food. Yes it may well take a bit of extra effort when shopping and preparing your food but it is worth it. The key is to BE PREPARED! When you go shopping you need to know what to buy and what you are going to do with it. I’d also suggest that you prepare at least some of your meals in advance. I often spend 45 minutes on a Sunday or Monday and knock up 4 or 5 meals that I can have for lunch every day the rest of the week. It may be slightly boring but it will be healthy, good for my waistline and contain lots of protein to help me build muscle and shed fat. With Summer coming fast and not much time to get into swimsuit shape why not try this for the next month and see what happens.

Below is a brief shopping list of some of the things to buy weekly or put in your store cupboard that will help you eat clean, healthy and become lean. Below that is a simple recipe that I use that will make your 4 meals that you can stick in the fridge and just microwave as needed.

Shopping List:

Steak, Chicken Breasts, Turkey breasts, Turkey Mince, Lean Pork, Lamb cutlets, Fish – Pretty much any and all types of fish are fine. Vegetables – Brocolli, Cauliflower, Avocado, Greens, Salad leaves, Green beans, Onions, Asparagus, Red Peppers, mushrooms, Spring Onion, Carrots, Beans & Lentils, Sweet Potato, Brown rice. Fresh Ginger, Chilli’s, Garlic. Fresh herbs like Coriander, Basil, Tarragon, Mint. Lemons, Blueberries, Strawberries, Banana’s, Apples, Pineapple, Melon. Dried spices such as Turmeric, Cinnamon, Paprika, Black pepper. Coconut oil ,Olive Oil and some light soy sauce for cooking and dressings. Bags of mixed nuts for snacking. Greek (Not greek “style”) Yoghurt or Skyr Yoghurt. Pure peanut butter or nut butter. The final thing would be a good Whey Protein powder. That’s pretty much it. If you cook and eat exclusively from that list of ingredients above you will a) be eating very healthily and b) in combination with regular exercise be almost guaranteed to become leaner and more muscular.

Foods to try to avoid would be: Bread, Pasta, Potatoes, Sweets, Crisps, Chocolate bars, cakes (all pretty obvious). Almost all packaged and processed foods (wherever possible, it’s very difficult to completely eradicate these). Sweetened drinks, fizzy drinks and booze (again a couple of beers or glasses of wine at the weekend won’t hurt much).

So now you’ve bought all the right things….what to cook. Here is a simple recipe that you can knock up on a Sunday, stick in the fridge or freezer and will give you a healthy, muscle building lunch or dinner for the next 4 days or so. Other than the ingredients above the only thing you’ll need is a good stack of smallish Tupperware boxes with lids.

Right, lets kick off. Firstly. Get a large bowl of water on the boil. Add in enough brown rice to make 4 small/medium sized portions. Add a dash of salt and leave to simmer away for approximately 25 minutes (Brown rice takes longer to cook than normal rice and retains a firmer texture even when cooked).

Then in a large frying pan or preferably a wok do the following. Add two tablespoons of Coconut oil and heat. Then add one large diced onion, a couple of carrots cut into small round slices, one red pepper diced, a handful of mushrooms diced, 2 cloves of Garlic finely chopped and a large thumb sized piece of ginger sliced or chopped. Depending on if you like your food spicy or not you could also add anything from half to a whole chilli chopped. Fry this off for a couple of minutes until everything starts to soften. Then add in one large Turkey breast cut into smallish cubes (one large turkey breast is normally equivalent in size to around 3 chicken breasts). Continue to fry this for around 4 to 5 minutes. Then as the Turkey starts to brown off add the following. 2 large teaspoons of Turmeric powder, 1 teaspoon of paprika and half a teaspoon of Cinnamon. Continue to cook and stir for around 3 more minutes. If it starts to dry out add a bit more oil as needed. Also grind in a good heap of fresh black pepper. Once you know the Turkey is cooked turn out the heat.

When the rice is cooked, drain any remaining water and also then pour a kettle of boiling water over the rice and drain again to remove excess starch. Then once the water is gone tip the rice into the Turkey and veg mix and stir until it is thoroughly mixed through. Then add in a couple of teaspoons of olive oil and a couple of teaspoons of soy sauce and stir thoroughly again. At this point you want all the rice to darken slightly to show the soy is mixed right through. If you want you can also finely chop a couple of spring onions and stir those in. Allow everything to cool down, split equally into about 4 Tupperware boxes, put the lid on and either freeze or refrigerate. When you want to eat it just microwave for a couple of minutes and away you go. The whole dish including chopping the veg and turkey takes a max of 30/35 minutes and that’s 4 meals done.

There are a whole load of variations of this type of thing that you can do and I’ll do more recipe’s as time goes on. In fact if anyone would like to see videos of recipes such as this please let me know.

I hope you found this helpful, your comments are welcome.

Take Care,

John

Why Diets Don’t Work……..Ever!

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muscle-building-foods

You’ve all been there. You look in the mirror and sigh, try to pull on a pair of jeans or skirt you haven’t worn for a while and mysteriously can’t get the zip done up no matter how hard you tug. “That’s it, I’m going on a diet” you say. On a Diet, those three words sum up the problem with diets and the reason they just don’t, won’t, can’t work….not in the long term anyway. It doesn’t matter if it’s the Atkins, the Cabbage Soup or the Caveman diet, ultimately they will fail and you will gain back any weight you lost. Why? Well because the whole phrase going on a diet implies that at some point you will come OFF of that diet, and what happens then? Inevitably the bad habits come back and the weight starts to creep back on.

Also the whole psychology behind dieting creates a negative mindset. It’s all about denial. Denying yourself the foods you’d like to eat, being hungry all the time, forcing yourself to do something you aren’t mad keen about in a desperate drive to lose some weight. If you have that mind set how does it make you feel. Anxious? Depressed? Stressed? At some point you are going to crack. No matter how much will power you have you can’t keep that up for the rest of your life.

Wouldn’t it be soooooo much better to feel positive about your food, what you eat and how you eat? Wouldn’t it be better to east tasty, fun foods, eat decent sized portions and also NOT to feel guilty or beat yourself up when you occasionally tuck into something bad like a sticky toffee pudding with cream. “What, how can i eat that on a diet?”.  Well on a diet you can’t, but if you follow what I’m about to say you CAN!

What you need to do is change your whole outlook and attitude to food. You need to change how you eat and what you eat FOREVER. You aren’t going on a difficult diet, you are going to change your lifestyle and become a HEALTHY EATER. This really isn’t rocket science, in fact it’s absolute common sense and to be honest our grandparents generations and the ones before that did it as a matter of course.

It’s really really simple to do. Basically you just need to eat fresh food. That’s it. “It can’t be that simple?”  Well actually it pretty much is with a couple of rules. The key is to avoid processed and packaged produce as much as you possibly can. Avoid sweet or packaged snacks as much as you can and avoid fizzy or sweetened drinks as much as you can, and cut back slightly on Carbs such as potatoes, bread and pasta. That is pretty much it. Other than that you can still eat 2 to 3 meals a day and for your main dinner you can eat pretty healthy/large portions.

So what do i mean by processed foods? Again it’s simple. Anything that comes in a packet or packaging that has a list of ingredients needs either to be avoided or the label carefully studied. ALL ready meals, most childrens meals, ALL fizzy drinks, anything that has lists of chemicals, sweeteners or E numbers on the label. “Hmmmm, so what can i eat?” As i said, basically it is fresh stuff. Meat, Fish, Poultry, Eggs, Beans, Nuts and Vegetables / Salad / Fruit. Within reason you can eat as much of these as you like. Throw in some exercise and you will either lose weight (if you are currently overweight), or maintain a healthy weight (if you are not really that overweight).

Is it a bit more difficult, less convenient in this busy modern world. Yes it is slightly but would you prefer the slight inconvenience of having to buy and prepare fresh food and healthy meals that you can eat a lot of and enjoy, or suffer the misery of continually being on a deny yourself everything type diet?

So what does this mean in practical terms? The best way to illustrate that is probably to tell you what I’m eating at the moment. I am on a drive to lose some weight and strip some blub from around my middle area. I’m not overweight at all really. I was about 12 stone 5 pounds  and want to get down to about 11 stone 10 if possible. Why? Well because as I’ve already told you I’m vain and would love once in my life to have some proper 6 pack abs. So I’m training quite hard and want to lose some weight but at the same time don’t want to lose any muscle and therefore need to eat well and decent portions. So here is what i ate yesterday and will eat today.

Yesterday: Went to the Gym first thing. When i got back i had a medium bowl of Greek Yoghurt (the real stuff, not Greek style) with a large handful of blueberries thrown in and a drizzle of honey over the top. This was washed down with a double scoop protein shake. Late morning i had a Banana. At lunch i had 2 eggs, simply cracked into a bowl, salt and pepper and microwaved for 1 minute. Mid afternoon a large handful of mixed nuts. Then for dinner we sat down as a family and smashed into 3 beautiful lamb cutlets (with the lovely crispy fat as well) and a large salad. The salad was mixed leaves, loads of tomato’s, red pepper, spring onion and a large avocado. It took ten minutes to make the salad and about 7 minutes to cook the chops, what’s hard about that? I was full and very happy.

Today is a no Gym day. So far I’ve had the same bowl of Yoghurt, Blueberries and Honey plus one banana. For lunch i plan a couple of Ryvita’s smeared in delicious Nut butter, probably another Banana and some Melon I’ve got in the fridge. Mid afternoon I’ll probably break cover, be bad and have a cup of coffee with a biscuit. Then for dinner it will be similar to last night. We have some marinated spicy turkey breast steaks with a different type of salad and maybe some couscous.

Is it working? Absolutely! I’m down to 12 stone 1 pound. Feel great and am seeing some Abs appear (although long way to go yet). Also the trick here is that I don’t deny myself. We have got a few social nights out coming up in the next few weeks and on those nights I’m going to eat and drink what the hell i like, no denial whatsoever. Can you do that on a diet? No. However on a lifelong healthy eating plan you can cut yourself some slack and break loose now and then.

To just go back over this and make things very clear. The critical thing you need to change is not just your diet, it’s your attitude to food and eating. Be proud of the fact that you are changing your life for the better. In the book I’m writing I talk about pride as being a big motivating factor and maybe my next post will be about pride and other tools you can use for motivation. Your attitude needs to be “I am going to eat well, eat healthily, prepare my food myself instead of letting the supermarket do it, and I can eat big portions and be bad now and again”. It’s just common sense, it’s just going back to what our Grandparent did and adopting their “meat and two veg” lifestyle but making it more fun.

Future posts will start to give recipe advice, tips on how to prepare food in advance to cut down on time and if you want I’m happy to give more examples of what I’m eating.

Take Care,

John

 

Daily Eating Tips to Guarantee you Lose Weight!!

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Scales

Yep that’s right, if you follow most of these tips I Guarantee you will lose weight. I’m going to stick my neck out and personally promise you that if you follow this guide for 4 weeks you will have lost weight, possibly even a significant amount of weight depending on your starting point.

Firstly, to allow me at least some chance of being right, there are a few rules here that you need to stick to.

  • You MUST exercise. By that i mean at least twice a week you need to do some form of energetic exercise that gets you blowing hard and works your muscles. That could be running, a weight session in the Gym, some form of exercise class, or even just a vigorous home work out. The other 5 days you need to do at least 20 minutes of some form of activity that raises your pulse and brings on a mild sweat. That could be a brisk walk, a 20 minute home circuit as detailed in one of my previous posts here, or a quick session with some dumbbells in your garage.
  • You MUST attempt to eat healthily and stick to the plan for a minimum of 4 days and ideally 5 days of each week. If you go to less than 4 full days you will negate all the positive effects and to be honest may as well not bother (I will cut you some slack if you have a lot of social activity but for one week only)
  • You MUST be hardcore about cutting out the big evil in your kitchen…..SUGAR! That means on your good days, No biscuits, No chocolate, No fizzy drinks (or any other juice or sugary drinks) and if possible cut out or definitely cut back drastically on any alcohol from Monday through to at least Friday evening.

Got That? Gonna stick to it? Of course you are. So here we go…

Breakfast! We all know that old saying “The most important meal of the day”. Well i hate to break it to you but that ain’t necessarily true. Many people now believe that intermittent fasting (going for lengthy periods without food, or only eating at certain times) is the way forward. I have to say that i do believe it works but it’s probably a bit unfair to drop you newbies straight in at the deep end. So here are a few simple ideas for breakfast that will satisfy your overnight cravings but won’t break the Calorie bank.

A boiled egg, or two if you insist (No soldiers to dip in it), followed by a banana. Black coffee, no sugar.

A medium sized bowl of Greek yoghurt or Skyr yoghurt with a large helping of blueberries thrown in. Drizzle with some organic honey if you need a hit of sweetness.

A small bowl of oats and nuts with the same yoghurt as above, again with some honey to sweeten.

A small portion of scrambled eggs (2 eggs is fine) with some flakes of smoked salmon broken into it. Add pepper and you have a breakfast for kings.

One slice of wholegrain toast smeared with Nut butter/peanut butter and if it floats your boat also add sliced banana on top.

That’s it. 5 breakfasts and I’m sure you can conjure variations on these themes. The key is not having big volumes and avoiding crappy sugar filled cereals and loads of bread. So what about lunch?

Lunch to some degree depends how active you are. If you hit the gym in the morning or have an active job that involves physical exertion then you are allowed a little bit more. If not then be good and stick to the plan and remember it’s only for 4 to 5 days.

Crack 2 eggs into a small bowl, sprinkle some salt, add a fair bit of pepper and microwave for between a minute and minute 30 seconds. Get a spoon and eat. It’s surprisingly filling and has lots of protein and not many calories.

Get a ripe avocado, mash it up with a little olive oil, salt, pepper and some chopped chilli until you have a rough paste. Spread it on a piece of wholegrain toast or ryvita, drizzle with lemon. Job done.

If you are training hard and want something more substantial try this. I make a batch up on a Monday and it lasts me 3 days. Boil a decent amount of brown rice for 20/25 mins (until soft). In another pan fry (coconut oil) some chicken, onions, peppers, carrots, Garlic and a LOT of fresh chopped ginger. Mix the rice in with the chicken, give it a good stir and drizzle with some light soy sauce as you stir it. Let it cool down, put in some Tupperware and stick in the fridge. Microwave for 2 minutes when needed and easy to take to work with you.

How about a chicken drumstick – cooked or cold with a mix of salad leaves , drizzle of Olive Oil and some balsamic vinegar. Again just use your imagination, stick to meats, proteins, veg, eggs or maybe small portions of cheese and you’ll be fine. The idea of lunch is just to fill a hole and fulfil your nutritional needs, NOT fill you up!

Right, most people’s main meal….dinner. Here you have a new best friend….salads! “Whaaaat? Salad, that’s rabbit food”. Not true. You can supercharge salads and make them hugely enjoyable. Use  the standard ingredients and then add the extra’s that add flavour. These include blue cheese, feta cheese, parmesan, walnuts, grapefruit (yep), basil, coriander, olives, chopped/sliced chilli, chopped/sliced ginger. Exciting dressings using lime/lemon juice, different types of vinegar, a drizzle of soy sauce. You can easily have a variety of salads 3 to 4 nights a week. Don’t panic though because alongside the salad you will have one of the following: Grilled or pan fried chicken with whatever spices and herbs you fancy, sweet chilli turkey breasts, a couple of lamb chops, grilled or pan fried salmon, mackerel or pretty much any fish you fancy.

Or if you don’t fancy a salad one night how about some chicken, turkey, fish or pork, a big serving of Brocolli and some sweet potato mash with added spices, olive oil and loads of pepper.

What about snacks? Well if possible try to avoid them but we all know that ain’t gonna happen. So have a bag of mixed nuts in the cupboard and grab a handful a couple of times a day. Always have banana’s on hand and peel one if you feel the need. A bag of carrots in the fridge and grab one (unpeeled) to munch on whenever you want. Of an evening 2 or 3 squares of genuine full cocoa dark chocolate won’t break the bank.

The other key as I’ve said is what you drink. Wherever possible it’s going to be water (add lemon, lime, mint, ginger if you need some flavour). Otherwise black coffee, a glass of milk a day is fine and if you really must a glass of red wine a couple of times a week is also fine of an evening.

Then what happens at the weekend. Well that comes down to you. It would be stupid to spend every weekend deliberately cramming bad things down your neck. Try to be good. Avoid the processed crap we have talked about, try to stick to good snacks and not bad ones, but otherwise reward yourself. If you want a few drinks, have them. If you are going for a meal, have what you want, fancy a good breakfast, have a healthy fry up. The key is to be sensible. If you go for a big curry and beers on Saturday night, why not skip breakfast on Sunday. You’re a grown up (hopefully) so just be sensible and stick to what you know is right. Enjoy your weekend and reward yourself for your sacrifice in the week, but unless its a big event keep thinking about the long term goals.

There will be a lot more recipe’s and details on food and eating patterns in the weeks to come. As always, any questions or comments please fire them at me, I’m ready and willing to answer.

Take Care,

John