I've been on both sides of the nutrition aspect. I used diet and exercise to lose weight. And in total lost ~85 pounds from my heaviest. I was running, and in the beginning restricting calories watching what I ate. But I felt there was still some weight to lose and no matter what I did in terms of restriction/running I couldn't lose it.
Then I started Hansons to really push myself to reach my running goals. But at the same time decided to take the mindset of less calorie restriction and actually eating more food/calories (just more healthy food). I went from:
-cereal to eggs and oatmeal
-peanut butter to lunch meat to crock pot chicken
-yogurt to apple
-added two bananas
-removed the peanuts
etc.
I dropped another 10-15 pounds to be down in total about 100 pounds from my heaviest. But I noticed that this last set of weight loss seemed to be a lot more fat loss and muscle gain.
Here's my current diet:
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Breakfast and Lunch are almost this everyday, but dinner is variable. Based on a rough BMR (that's not personally calculated but merely a calculator online) I burn around 1800 calories just by existing. In addition, my current training runs based on Garmin data burn between 1000-2000 calories per day (1000-1500 for weekdays). So between existing and running I burn 2800-3800 calories per day. Since I'm not necessarily trying to lose weight, I need to try and stay at or above this number right now. I believe this diet change in combination with the Hansons has concurrently played a very big role in my dramatic decrease in race times over the last year.
I also do reward myself once a year. Not a alcohol drinker, but I love myself a good apple fritter doughnut from the local bakery. Just can't resist..... Yes, I consumed both in less than 2 days.... There is a reason I weighed 100 more pounds than today...
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Otherwise my reward is meeting my running goals. The time I cross the finish line matters more to me than the extra cookie or ice cream cone.