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On today's FABulously Fit Friday we're talking about nutrition for fat loss. Nutrition is
the number one component for fat loss. You can exercise your butt off, but if you don't
have your nutrition in place, you're not going to lose the fat like you'd like to. What I
do before I go grocery shopping each week is, I plan out my meals for the entire week.
Now, I really like to be kind of simple with my meals because I have a really busy lifestyle.
I don't have a whole lot of time to cook, so my meals tend to be pretty basic. I know
what I need to eat from my FAB University meal planner, and I keep copies of that right
on my refrigerator over here so that I always have it in front of me, just in case for some
reason I haven't cooked my meals, which happens, right? Because we all get busy with our lives,
and I have all of my grams, and the quantity, and the serving sizes that I need right here,
so that if for some reason I don't have my meals made for the week, I can go ahead and
cook it up, but it's always right in front of me so I know exactly what I'm supposed
to eat. So, as you can see, what I do is I print out a couple of days worth of meals
because I like a little bit of variety in my diet, not a whole lot. I'm pretty okay
with eating the same things day in and day out. But I do have two different meal plans
that I print out, and then I make my grocery list from there, and I head off to the grocery
store. So let's go through each of the foods that I have here. I mean, this is pretty much
what I would eat in a week. What you need are many complex carbohydrates. So that's
what you see in the back here. So I have my long grain brown rice, and I just keep this
in a container. I buy it in bulk, really inexpensive. A great carbohydrate gives you a lot of energy.
Lightly salted rice cakes. These are great for portability. You can take them anywhere,
and you don't have to heat them up, which is really nice. These are also wonderful for
right after a workout if you need to get those carbohydrates into your system very quickly
to help with the absorption of the protein. So I really like my lightly salted rice cakes.
Here I have my Quaker Oats old-fashioned oats, and you really want the old-fashioned kind,
so this is great--another complex carb. Because if you get the one-minute oats or the quick
oats, as they're called in some other brands, those are processed foods, not source foods.
These are pretty much wholegrain, but when you get into those processed foods, with the
one-minutes oats or quick oats, that digests very quickly into the body. So if you're not
running a marathon at the time that you're eating them, your body's likely to store them
in fat, so stick to the old-fashioned oats. Other complex carbohydrates: I have lettuce,
of course. You can eat as much of this stuff as you want to. I typically buy several heads
of lettuce at a time because you can eat it unlimited. It won't add a whole lot of calories
to your diet. I have here celery, which I love celery. Just plain celery on its own,
and frozen broccoli. Frozen broccoli is a wonderful complex carbohydrate. You can eat
a whole bunch of this, bags and bags, and it's not going to add a lot of calories. So
a lot of vegetables in your diet is great for fat loss. And then one of my favorites
is sweet potatoes. I absolutely love sweet potatoes. I would actually buy about seven
of these a week and cook them up as part of my meal plan. These are a fantastic source
of complex carbohydrates. Next, we always have to have healthy fats in our diet as well.
Any diets that are extreme on one end or the other, maybe cutting out fats or cutting out
carbohydrates, that's just simply not good for overall nutrition, and it's not good for
fat loss. I love unsalted almonds, and as you can see here, I keep a container of these
in my kitchen at all times. These are a great, healthy fat source. Another healthy fat source
is extra *** olive oil, and what you're going to see in just a couple minutes here
is, I cook up all my chicken with a bunch of extra *** olive oil. And it's a great,
healthy fat source that you should have in your diet as well. And then last, but not
least, my absolute favorite is protein. What you need to have in your diet are lean protein
sources. I absolutely love egg whites, and you can see here I buy the five dozen medium
egg whites in these huge, family-size packs. Sometimes I'll even buy two of them, depending
on what my meal plans look like for that week. I absolutely love egg whites. We also have
chicken. I will buy two of these flats a week. And what you have to be careful of with chicken
is, if you're buying frozen chicken, really watch out for that sodium because a lot of
the frozen chicken is pumped a whole lot with sodium. That's why they taste really good
when you cook them up, so I tend to like to buy fresh chicken because it's not pumped
with so much sodium. They do have sodium solution in it, but not as much as frozen. So watch
out for that. Another protein source that I absolutely love is ground turkey. So I buy
ground turkey, usually one or two packets a week. This is really easy to cook up in
the skillet. Fantastic source of protein. And then last, but not least, is whey protein.
So I prefer About Time because it's sweetened with Stevia, and I take my whey protein usually
right after a workout for that quick absorption. Now, if you're trying to lose fat, you know,
I hear a lot of people that have protein shakes throughout their day. And one thing I want
to caution you against is, whey protein in particular is designed for quick absorption,
so if you're having whey protein shakes throughout the day it's very possible, depending on your
calorie level and what else you're doing in your life, that if you're eating whey protein
shakes, you can actually be adding fat to your body if you're not burning it up at that
time. So just watch out for that. I do like to add a little bit of flavor to my chicken
and turkey, and so what I do is I add some condiments, such as this hickory bacon mustard,
and this is my old dijon mustard, which I love. There's very few calories, just a few
carbs per serving, so if you just watch and make sure you don't put too much in, you can
add some flavoring your protein sources. And then, of course, I am a Mrs. Dash addict.
I've got about four billion of these things. So you can add Mrs. Dash to any of your protein
sources. It'll add some flavor. I do eat a little bit of fruit. So I absolutely love
grapes, and I will have a few grapes after my workout with my whey protein in order to
quickly absorb that protein in the body and replenish the glycogen stores. So let's go
ahead and cook up a bunch of these for the next three day's worth of my meals. Okay.
Now I've got all my foods out, ready to cook my meals for the next three days. I've added
a couple of things here that we didn't have out before. I have my Heavy Duty Reynolds
Wrap. This is the really long version. This is the, let's see, 18 inches long, and I love
to use this to line my cookie sheets with to cook my chicken because it's just real
easy cleanup. I mean, literally just crump it up and throw it out. Real easy, and I like
simple cooking. You know, we have busy lifestyles. We really need cooking that's efficient and
easy, so this helps quite a bit. Next, we have a food scale, and if you are on any sort
of fat loss plan, or you're trying to lose fat, you got to get yourself a food scale.
Before I had a food scale I had no idea how many calories I was really taking in. I would
eyeball, or measure it, or do some of the plans that tell you: Well, you need a palm-size
version of a certain carbohydrate. Well, when you get down to measuring your food, what
you find out is that you're either eating way more calories than you thought you were
or way fewer calories than you thought you were. So I highly recommend you get yourself
a food scale. You can get these on Amazon.com. They're very inexpensive. I bought this, I
think it was 20 bucks. And what I do, I actually line it with Saran Wrap around the buttons
because sometimes you get food splattered on there. You don't want to mess with the
electronics on that, so just put a little Saran Wrap on it. That seems to do the trick.
Next, I have my containers. So I have 16 containers here, and that's because the first meal of
the day I like to cook fresh. I always have egg whites and oatmeal for my first meal of
the day. So I cook that fresh every morning, but the next four meals through the day, I
have already pre-made in these containers. So the first thing we're going to do is go
ahead and line our cookie sheet, or baking sheet.
And then I'm going to drizzle some of my extra *** olive oil on this. No science to this.
Just go ahead and drizzle it right on there. And then I'm going to get out my chicken and
coat it with that olive oil. Now, when I did this in my Planning Meals for the Week in
Two Hours video, I got an awful lot of comments on that video about not washing my chicken,
and, you know, washing chicken is actually an old wives' tale. You don't have to wash
it. Cooking the chicken is what get rids of all those bacteria and all those creepy crawly
stuff.
Okay. So I've done that. Now my fingers are all covered with raw chicken. Now this is
where you have to be really careful because you don't want to touch anything else with
the raw chicken juice on your fingers. That is where you can have cross contamination
and potentially get sick. So make sure you wash your hands really, really well after
that.
So I went ahead and I set my oven for 450 degrees, and that's in preparation to add
the chicken. I'm going to cook my chicken for about 10 to 15 minutes at 450 degrees,
and then another 10 to 15 minutes at 375. And I do that sometimes because I like to
have a little bit of searing on the outside of the chicken, and then it cooks on the inside
quite nicely at that 375 degrees. But in the meantime, I'm going to go ahead and prepare
my sweet potatoes. I'm going to wash these off, pierce them with a knife, and then put
them in the microwave.
So in order to cook my sweet potatoes in the microwave, I'm going to take three sheets
of paper towels and just fold them over on each other because, again, I like really super
easy, efficient cooking. Stick this in the microwave, and then put my sweet potatoes
right on top of that. And then I'm going to set my microwave on high for 21 minutes. Now,
that's for three sweet potatoes, but if you're only doing two, you could cook them on high
for maybe 15 to 16 minutes. One, cook it on high again for maybe 10 to 11 minutes. So
while that's cooking, I'm going to go ahead now and I'm going to put some spices on my
chicken. I've got my Mrs. Dash here that I love so much. And I'm just going to do a few
of my chicken *** with Mrs. Dash because the other ones I like plain because later
I'm going to be adding some honey mustard or hickory bacon mustard to the chicken in
my meals. So now that my oven is heated up, I'm going to stick the chicken in there.
And set the timer for about, let's say, 10 minutes. Now, while the chicken is cooking,
and the sweet potatoes are cooking, I'm going to go ahead and start measuring out my healthy
fat source, which, in this case, is almonds. I absolutely love my almonds. Now, I have
two meals a day with almonds in it. Part of the reason that I do that is because I like
a very quick source of food while I'm at work. I do have an office job, so it's really hard
for me to eat a mass amount of vegetables at that time. So a healthy fat source which
also gives you energy is a great way to get around that. So I'm just going to portion
out my containers.
And then, to use the food scale, I'm going to go ahead and turn it on, and put this container
on the food scale. Now, it's registering zero right now, and that's exactly what I want
because you want the food scale to register the weight of the container and set it at
zero. If it doesn't register it right away, you'd click that button again--that "on" button--and
it would set it to zero. Now, now I can add my almonds, and I know exactly how much in
grams from my FAB University Planner that I always keep on my refrigerator. And so what
that tells me is, for my second and third meal of the day, I need to have 22 grams of
almonds.
Okay. So now we just need to wait for that chicken and the sweet potatoes to cook, and
then we'll cut it up and portion it out, and that'll be our meals for the next three days.
Pretty easy, huh? Okay. My sweet potatoes and my chicken are about done. So I want to
go ahead and take the sweet potatoes out so that they can cool off. And do you remember
how I wrapped the paper towels over three times? Well, this is why. You can go ahead
and take your sweet potatoes and just pull them right out. This would be a great Bounty
commercial, wouldn't it? But it's actually not Bounty that I'm using.
And then I'm also going to pull out my chicken and let them both cool down.
And let that cool down for a few minutes, and then we're going to go ahead and cut them
up and portion them out.
Now that I have it all cut up, I can go ahead and portion out my chicken and, according
to my meal planner, it's 117 grams per meal for my chicken. So go ahead and turn on my
food scale and measure out my chicken.
Now, when I'm measuring out my chicken with the containers that already have the almonds
in it, I'm going to put the container on the food scale and then hit that "on" button again
and reset it to zero, so I can add my chicken to it and measure out that 117 grams.
Now I'm going to cut up my sweet potatoes and do the same.
And last, but definitely not least, I'm going to add a little bit of flavoring to each of
my meals. For my chicken and almonds, I'm going to add just a squirt of mustard to each
one.
And then, for my sweet potato and chicken meals, I'm going to add salsa. Now, we hadn't
talked about salsa before but this is another great way to add some flavor to your meals,
not add a whole lot of calories, give you some extra vegetables on top of that.
So that's it for my meals for the next three days. Looks pretty yummy, if you ask me, and
that's a lot of food. And I think one of the misconceptions about individuals that are
trying to lose fat, or trying to get into shape, is that we starve ourselves. Obviously,
that isn't true. So thank you for watching this episode of FABulously Fit Friday, and,
of course, if you have any questions or comments please leave in those comments below this
video. And if you do really like this video, go ahead and hit that "Subscribe" button right
above here because when you do hit that, you'll be notified of every video as it's released.
I'm Kristin Shaffer, founder of Figure & Bikini, and I hope to see you at the next FABulously
Fit Friday. Hey, gals. FAB University is open. Head to FigureAndBikini.org to check it out.