All the Way to Fitness!

It is official. I have a fitness team! I hired a personal trainer a few weeks back and now, I have a nutritionist to monitor my intake for 12 weeks.

Yesterday, I met with my nutritionist for the first time. She evaluated my food diary for the past 3 days to check what I was doing right and where I was going wrong with my diet. It was a diet that I created for myself, without the guidance of a nutritionist but with the stock knowledge I have or what I remember from my past diets. Here's what I did:

- Absolutely no softdrinks. Instead, I substituted it with Del Monte Fit and Right.
- I still drank 1-2 cups of coffee a day ... this I can't seem to stop.
- I had 3 servings of half a cup of rice distributed for breakfast, lunch and dinner
- I avoided pork and beef. I opted for chicken and fish instead. I still eat pork and beef but in matchbox size only, 2-3 times a week.
- I had six meals a day, taking smaller portions per meal: breakfast, am snack, lunch, pm snack, dinner and midnight snack.
- Snacks mostly contain fruits and other light meals like a cup of nuts (boiled not fried), corn on the cob and sweet potatoes alternately.

I was successful so far and managed to lose a few pounds through this diet plus 3-4 times of visits to the gym.

However, I still could not meet my goal of losing 2 pounds per week. There were weeks that I've lost only a pound and 1 or 2 weeks where I've lost 0 pound. I was not happy with these results. So, I had a talk with Ness, the nutritionist from ABS-CBN Fitness First. I told her my dilemma and I decided to hire her to help me.

Back to my meeting with my nutritionist. I had the surprise of a lifetime when I learned that my intake for the past 3 days (and for the weeks that I did not record on the diary), consist only of 600-700 calories per day! This was way below the required limit of 1,200 calories per day. I was taking only 700 calories and burning more than that with my exercise at the gym. How can that be bad, you wonder? Well, my nutritionist says that if we are taking less calories than what is required, the tendency of the body is to save the calories it has. This is some sort of defense mechanism of our bodies. In effect, metabolism slows down. Thus, your ability to burn fat goes down as well.

The right thing to do is eat the required meals (6 meals I mentioned earlier) in the right portions and nutrient requirements. This means, we need calories, protein, fats etc. , IN THE RIGHT AMOUNT and distribution.

I will discuss this diet more on my next post.