Insanity Workout Day 16: To Eat or Not to Eat?

For the better part of a decade I have been on what some would call a "professional's diet." For those of you that are living in breathing Corporate America you might know this diet includes coffee as a meal and is usually picked to be the breakfast and lunch of champions. This is not a diet that is developed on purpose or overnight. One day you wake up in the busy world of back to back meetings realizing that it is three o'clock in the afternoon and the only thing you have had to eat all day was the cream and sugar  you added to your cups of coffee. By this time you think yourself that it is only a couple hours away from dinner so you might as well grab another cup and head off to another meeting. My body is now a well oiled coffee machine and does not want for food in the mornings. Well, at least that is what I tell myself. It may need food but it does not want for it. I never realized how much I could be hurting my health or the shape of my body by slowing my metabolism. Like I mentioned earlier this diet wasn't on purpose but rather an outcome of my particular circumstance. Now that this habit is as familiar as biting my nails or twisting my hair into a bun the moment I awake from sleep.

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I did not occur to me that my bad eating habits might impact the INSANITY challenge. I have workout, been in a gym and even started running while maintaining the same eating habits. Yes, I read the nutrition guide and I have heard it all before about eating six small meals. But really, who has time for that?  Convincing a mind that has survived on the professional diet for years was going to take more than a pamphlet inserted into a DVD workout program. I would need to see proof!

After sixteen days of doing my best to muscled my way through the INSANITY workouts I may have been given the proof I needed to make the change to ditch the professional diet. As I have mentioned in my past posts I can feel my muscles getting stronger and I even performed better on the second fit test but my measurements must have been written in permanent marker.

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Being one out of three individuals doing the program and not losing the weight or inches you begin to question what it is YOU are doing differently. After several conversations it has been narrowed down to the question of "to Eat or Not to Eat?"
The other two individuals are following the six meals a day plan with a focus on healthier choices. They have not gone completely organic or vegan but started small with the simple changes such as less sugar, more fruit and more water, less soda. In this case I guess you could say that the "proof is in the pudding" literally.







Now that my mind has been opened to the possibility that I may be holding myself back by the choice to remain on the "professional diet" I am willing to make a change. This week I will focus on eating breakfast within the hour I wake and repeating a meal/snack every two hours thereafter. If I keep the meals around 200/300 and the snacks around 100 calories I should still be able to maintain my goal of eating less than 1200 calories a day. So let the eating begin! Oh, I forgot to mention this does NOT mean I am giving up coffee. I will just add a meal to go with my beverage of choice.