Program Guidelines
Lesson Overview
In this lesson of your Onboarding, we’ll cover:
Program Guidelines
Choosing Your Food
Alcohol
Eating Out
Hydration
Veggies + Fiber
Sleep + Stress Management
Program Guidelines
Choosing Your Food
Take this on-boarding week to practice logging your food into MFP. Practice both on your app and via their computer website version to get comfortable using both versions of the MFP tool.
Remember, log a normal day worth of food, then make adjustments to hit your numbers. If you’re still having trouble hitting your goals, start simple. Choose: a lean meat, a vegetable, and a carb source.
For example: chicken breast, broccoli, brown rice. Adjust your portions as needed.
Remember that this program is about flexibility. We want you to choose foods that you enjoy so this becomes a lifelong habit. Don’t just choose things you think are healthy, explore the balance between hitting your macros with foods that you actually enjoy eating.
Alcohol
If your goal is to look and feel better, constantly drinking alcoholic beverages is not going to help you reach that goal quickly. So cutting back on the alcohol or getting rid of it all together is suggested if you’re looking for faster, consistent results.
That being said, even when alcohol is enjoyed responsibly, we have to log it in a unique way. Pure alcohol does not contain carbs, protein, or fat, so there are a couple of different ways to log depending on the type of alcoholic beverage.
For liquor and basic mixed drinks: It’s really hard to get exact calories on mixed drinks because of all of the variables involved. To simplify, we will be tracking alcohol as a carb & a fat. Each standard drink will be logged as:
10 CARBS + 10 FATS
Use the quick add feature in your MFP food diary to pre-log 10C & 10F per drink.
For wine, beer, hard cider, and hard seltzer: Alcohol is super high in calories, so a glass of wine or two can seriously mess up your macros. Plan your macronutrients ahead of time. Way ahead of time.
Use this Alcohol Macros Chart when logging these types of alcohol into your MFP.
For fruity alcoholic drinks and cocktails:
Use this: Alcohol Macros Chart when logging these types of alcohol into your MFP.
These are macros estimates. There are so many variables here so it’s hard to get an exact count. These types of drinks are super high in sugar, carbs, and can really mess up your macros. Indulge sparingly and alway pre-plan.
Log your alcohol intake first thing in the morning and then work your way backwards so you know you’ll have enough macros to drink.
Eating Out
Eating out is a tricky subject, but here’s the bottom line:
When you’re eating out, you’re guessing on your macros.
This affects the accuracy of your logging.
Restaurants also tend to use an outrageous amount of fat and salt to make things delicious.
Guessing on your macros is not going to be helpful when trying to dial in on what makes you feel good. So if you’re looking to see and feel results faster, don’t eat out everyday.
This includes your favorite carry-out spots and Whole Foods buffet items too!
Hydration
Drink at least half your bodyweight in ounces.
Example: Someone that weighs 130 pounds would drink at least 65 ounces of water every day.
Veggies & Fiber
Your goal is to eat 25g of fiber each day.
Aim to get your fiber from whole foods, preferably vegetables. Eating proper macronutrients is important but you're still going to feel like sh*t if you're getting all your calories from protein powder, tequila, and donuts.
Make eating vegetables with every meal your goal. Try to fill up at least half your plate with veggies. This will also go a long way to ensuring that you eat enough of each micronutrients (vitamins and minerals.)
Sleep & Stress Management
Sleep
Both sleep and stress management are crazy important for hormonal balance and weight management.
Commit to between 7 and 9 hours of quality sleep each night.
Your body this much sleep to work its hormone regulating magic.
If you are doing intense workouts and/or implemented a new type of training that your body is adapting to, you’ll likely need closer to 9 hours for recovery.
If you’re not used to sleeping this much, it can be an adjustment. We recommend planning out your wakeup and bedtime. Be firm with your bedtime and resist watching one more episode (or 3) of your favorite streaming series.
Stress Management
While it’s near impossible to completely remove stress from your life, there are plenty of ways we can remove unnecessary stressors from our lives. Take toll of the sources of stress in your daily life and minimize them. Some examples include:
Clean your home environment
Clear out your schedule of unnecessary obligations
Delegate work, tasks, chores where needed
Set boundaries with people that are sources of stress (this includes family and friends)
Manage time effectively.
Make changes and leave situations that have been too stressful for too long
This may include jobs, careers, cities, relationships.
We are not trees, you are not chained to any situation that is negatively impacting your wellbeing and health.
Next Lesson: Program Tools
There’s a few tools you’ll need over these next several weeks to help measure your food portions and to measure your metrics to track progress. In the next lesson, you’ll learn what tools you need and where to get them if you don’t have them on hand (#AMAZON).
Click the lesson link below to continue.