Friel's Paleo Diet for Athletes is pretty sound (besides the title.... seeing how he ends up not recommending paleo diet). It's very much in line with the Core Diet, the former preceding the latter.
For me, my strategy for some time has been to cook one big meal once a week (often once every two weeks, freezing most of it) consisting of baked vegetables (carrots, parsnips, red and yellow beets, brussel sprouts, onions, sometimes sweet potatoes, black beans, chick peas) all baked to a sweet crisp in olive oil. I cook local 100% grass fed ground beef or wild caught alaskan salmon separately, and then for lunches and dinners, I heat this mix up on the stove mixing in eggs, or the ground beef (or in the microwave at work). I reserve a rice & chicken or beef mix, the rice cooked in chicken broth and vegetable soups, for heavy training periods and keep my non-vegetable carbs down very low. I also have a breakfast mix of old fashioned rolled oats, chia seed, unsweetened coconut flakes, raisins and walnuts for breakfast in which I mix chopped apples and yogurt (the only dairy I eat, unless my gf wants cheese cooked into the stovetop reheated vegetable mix).
The prep time is ~6 hours, which includes shopping, once every two weeks. I can cook two weeks/14 days worth of food for two people (both lunches and dinners) for less than $140 (that includes the breakfast mix, meat, eggs & oil), so less than $3 per meal, and yeah, everything's organic & shit.
When at the store, I don't buy junk, so it's never in the house.
The purpose and resulting success maintaining low body fat even while in a phd program has been that I
always have incredibly healthy food on hand & there's a pretty large price incentive. I'm never put in a position where going out to eat, ordering food or going to the store for not so healthy food is a more convenient option. And I think that is the key to success in this regard: having a strategy in place where the opportunity cost always favors eating healthy and in a way that adheres to your diet objectives and desires.
Counting Calories & the Scale: I
do not count calories or weight myself. I just won't. the people I've seen do this have often developed eating disorders (dated some D1 female runners) and/or the control-orientation needed for a diet leaks unhealthily into other areas of the person's behavior and even personality; and my friends who've gone this route were pretty adamant and stubborn and even angry when I suggested that this may not be the best approach, but here's the thing: they aren't doing it any longer or at least have taken a
long break from using those strategies of counting and weighing[one person still has an eating disorder, but so does her mother and sister, so it's a more complicated issue of life-control]. Those strategies aren't sustainable and they are not psychologically healthy. I'm 38 now and I've been close to the same weight since I was 17 (weight myself maybe once every three months just to gauge w/kg for cycling for when I need to procrastinate with meaningless calculations; more swimming has meant more weight due to muscle), but I do put on fat
much more easily now. But, I stick to the above strategy of preparing healthy and delicious meals ahead of time and it allows me to be happy and it doesn't feel like a chore and it is sustainable.
Hacking Self regulation & Emotion Regulation: Seligman in
Flourish discusses his own battles with weight loss, and he cites that diets have an 85% failure rate. Focusing on your previous and current character strengths and building on those is much more successful, and I think my above strategy capitalizes on that research-proven positive psych approach built upon recognizing that self-regulation is more obtainable when the person is actively and successfully resolving discrepancies between the person's current and desired/goal state. For me, my hierarchy of diet goals are to eat, for it to taste good, for the meal to be convenient, to feel full, for the meal to be healthy, to feel good about myself, and to look good (recognizing that I can miss a day of working out and think I look like shit, but then do a 30min run and think I suddenly look great - recognize perception is a distorted MF'r and to have a laugh about it). With each of those goals that I accomplish, I experience positive affect and that reduces future emotional, possible substrate-based and/or central governor based resources needed to successfully regulate my behavior and my emotions. This positive psych approach prevents, or at least stymies/negatively moderates, the emotional roller coaster that occurs when weighing/measuring due to goals not being met or the goal discrepancies being too disparate compared to your current state; e.g. measuring for
each and every meal is not convenient and you are likely to not feel full because health foods that could be filling like baked vegetables take too long too cook, so the inconvenience drastically increases the discrepancy between your current and desired state, making the goal-achievement much more difficult and when you don't reach a goal, you experience negative affect and that begins a downward spiral of negative affect, poorer emotion regulation, leading to behavior that leads to further negative emotions.
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