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Toning Up With Healthy Eating

By Chad Cannon

Eating healthy to get any results for a good toned body is essential. If you're not eating the correct amount of times per day and not eating the correct ways for your specific goal, you may not have any hope of reaching the full result you want. So make sure you are eating supportively! Here's how:

We want your metabolism to be as fast as possible! One major way of helping that along is to eat more often! Scientifically, your metabolism WILL slow down if you go over an average of 3 hours without eating. That's just the way the body works. We have absolutely no control over that. So we need to beat it to the punch. Who ever came up with the 'Three Square Meals Per Day' phrase? My personal opinion is: NO ONE! I think this is what society just created into. We all need to break out of our three square meal shells and move on to five or six round meals per day. I like to call them 'round meals' simply because I have always used round plates, not square ones. I also hate using the big dinner plates. I LOVE using the smaller salad plates. Why? Because the plate cannot hold as much food. When I talk about eating more meals, I'm talking about much smaller ones. If you want to think of it in terms of calories, then no more than 600 calories per meal. The goal is to be kind of hungry again 3 hours from the last time you ate. Always remember that: Be hungry again in 3 hours.

Let's start with breakfast. YES, it is the most important meal of the day. Why? Because you haven't put any energy into your body in 6-10 hours while you were sleeping, so if you skip the most important meal, breakfast, then you have slowed down your metabolism since it's been way over 3 hours since you last ate something, and your body has absolutely no energy to run on, so it pulls from other sources within the body making your fat cells bigger and making more of them. Is this what you want your body to do? Of course not! So make sure you eat breakfast every morning!

What should I eat, you ask? Good question!

You must have some kind of complete carbohydrate since carbohydrates are the ONLY source of energy we get from food. You can have some good protein to go with it as well. An example would be a piece of who grain toast with peanut butter and some cottage cheese with blueberries on top.

Here are some other great examples of good breakfast items?

A good second meal option would be...

What about lunch?

Forth meal options are same as the second meals options.

Dinner Sample Options are pretty easy:

Every now and then a starchy carbohydrate is okay, but not too often such as whole grain bread, sweet potatoes, wheat pastas, and brown rice.

If you want to, which I do recommend, have a bit more to eat a few hours after dinner. I recommend the same options as the second and forth meals.

Some things to keep in mind:

Always read the labels! Look at serving sizes and how many servings there are. If the label says 0 grams of fat yet there are 700 servings with each serving being 1/3 of a second spray, guess what? After that 1/3 of a second there is now fat! Always read the servings and serving size!

Also look for key works in the ingredients for sugars like sucrose, fructose, lactose, glucose, dextrose, honey, sorbitol, maltose. Hydrogenated, enriched and high fructose corn syrup are the 3 big ones.One of the most important things to go into the body and helps increase our metabolism is WATER! You hear people say drink 8 glasses per day. Well, they are correct, but the way that sounds seems like so much water. Start carrying around a water bottle everywhere you go. Take a small sip every 5 minutes. Don't drink 1/2 of a bottle at once, just a small swig over and over, all day long. When the water runs out, just fill the bottle back up again. Before you know it, you will be through four or five bottles and you didn't even notice. And it won't seem like a lot since you are spreading it out over time.

Now you are set to eat healthy and tone up!

About the Author:

Chad Cannon is a certified personal trainer, weight loss expert, author, speaker, and director of Shaing Concepts in Hilton Head, South Carolina. His website is www.shapingconcepts.com