Fuel

Okay, so I want to run each and every day for a full year. I want to lose weight, but I also need to make sure my body is getting enough fuel. Additionally, because I work night shifts (10pm-9am) 3-4 days a week, I need to be extra-careful that my body gets the right sort of foods all of the time. Because I have to eat what is effectively my ‘lunch’ at work (I sleep during the day), I have to ensure that my food can be easily prepared in the office.

What do I need to eat to accomplish this?

80-20 Nutrition

I feel that the optimum diet for anybody is one that I like to call 80-20 Nutrition. Put simply, that is six days of eating clean - i.e., as per your diet of choice, which in my case is low-GI - and one day of anything goes. And I mean anything. This approach works for me, and I know it will work for you, too.

But how does it all work in principle?

My Diet

Each day, I consume five meals - three main courses and two snacks. As stated, for six days of the week, I eat a low-GI diet. This is pretty clean - I avoid all of the so-called ‘white foods’. This means I do not eat:

• White bread, or anything breaded
• Normal pasta
• Rice
• Potatoes
• Batter, pastry or dough

Wholewheat alternatives for these foods are fine, but to be taken in moderation. I limit my intake of bread, for example, to two small slices of wholewheat at breakfast.

I highly recommend wholewheat pasta. It tastes exactly the same as normal pasta - and I mean exactly - but you don’t bloat on it at all. One or two servings for dinner per week suits me just fine.

However, I tend to avoid even the wholewheat versions of rice and bread for the rest of my meals. This is simply to avoid excessive (and unnecessary) calories.

Alcohol is off the menu, I’m afraid.

(Remember that on the seventh day you are welcome to eat any and all of these foods, if you so desire, including beer and wine, which is very much ‘on’ for me!)

For breakfast, I’ll have 1-2 slices of light wholewheat bread (i.e., Warburton’s, or Nimble) or a wholewheat bagel, usually with organic (sugar-free) peanut butter, a bowl of muesli with soy milk and a small glass of orange juice (about 200ml).

(Note: this is the only time I’ll consume bread in the entire day.)

I’m not big into organic foods per se but more often than not they’re the best option in terms of satisfying the requirements of my diet.

For lunch and dinner I’ll usually have a portion of very lean protein - lately this has been fish, turkey or chicken (I’m avoiding beef and pork as I want to drop more weight), legumes, a small amount of cheese, some nuts, vegetables and fresh fruit. I tend to eat mostly apples and bananas - 2-3 of each per day, usually before and after my workouts.

For snacks I usually eat nuts. I like to keep things interesting with a rich variety, but my favourites include macadamia nuts, cashews, almonds, brazil nuts, hazelnuts, pecans and walnuts.

My day might work out like this:

7am - breakfast
10am - snack
1pm - lunch
4pm - snack
7pm - dinner

I also drink lots of water, aiming for three litres per day, as well as black coffee with sweetener (1-5 cups per day, depending on whether I’m doing a night shift or not) and Diet Coke. Sometimes before a run I’ll have one can of normal Coke. I don’t add sugar or dairy to anything.

Note: the Coke and my morning glass of juice are the only calories I ‘drink’ throughout the week.

So that’s five meals per day. Over the course of a week, that totals 35 meals.

The ‘Cheat’ Day

One day per week - usually a Saturday - I’ll have a day off where I will eat literally anything I want. This is known as your cheat day.

On a recent Saturday, for example, I had two slices of cheese on toast for breakfast. This was mature cheddar (and lots of it) on two inch-thick slices of wholemeal bread, buttered, and a large glass of orange juice. For lunch, I was at my youngest son’s school fete and had a hamburger there, a few small cakes, and half a litre of Pepsi. For dinner we had Chinese. At work, I ate 58.5 grams of Maltesers.

At other times I’ll happily consume the following foods on my day off:

• Pizza
• Chinese
• Cheeseburgers
• Kebabs
• French fries
• Donuts
• Cheesecake
• Ice cream
• Cookies
• Muffins
• Bacon
• Sausage

It’s all good!

As soon as the clock rolls over midnight - i.e., in this case, 12.01am on Sunday - I resume my normal, lean diet. This means a 2am meal (at work) , which is usually lean turkey, nuts and a very small amount of cheese, sometimes with a serving of hummus.

As said, because I then sleep from 10am through 2pm, this meal becomes effectively my lunch for the following day.

So, over the course of any given week, my thirty-five meals will consist of thirty clean meals, and five meals where I eat whatever I want.

Reality Check

Despite our good intentions, it’s not a perfect world - there are always 1-2 occasions each and every week where, for whatever reason, you have to eat something you weren’t planning on. For example, it might be late and we may have ran out of a certain food (i.e., nuts), or at the last minute I may be called into work or to some other function where I will then need to eat something different to that which I had planned.

This system assumes a failure rate of a maximum of two meals per week. So, that gives us 28 out of a maximum 35 meals per week where we’re eating clean.

28 as a percentage of 35 is 80 per cent. This is the ‘80′ part of 80-20 Nutrition.

80 per cent is a big positive number. If politicians operated at an 80 per cent success rate, we’d all be ecstatic. If our favourite sports teams won 80 per cent of their games, we’d be thrilled. If we were truly happy 80 per cent of the time, life would be amazing.

If you can manage to eat 80 per cent clean for your entire life, you’ll reach a pretty amazing standing of health. Perhaps more importantly, maintaining this 80-20 split is surprisingly easy. The 20 per cent ‘anything goes’ makes the 80 per cent ‘diet’ part a lot easier to (ahem) swallow, simply because you know it’s only six days until you can have a donut again. Or a cookie, or a muffin, some ice cream, some fries, a hamburger, a milkshake or a bottle of wine.

A word of warning - make sure you stay within the boundaries of a cheat ‘day’. Despite advice you might read to the contrary, if you try to break it down into ‘cheat’ meals - i.e., breakfast, lunch and dinner - and spread these at different points in the week (as opposed to on one single day), you’ll find yourself blurring the clean/less-than-clean nutritional line far too often.

Also, use common sense and plan your cheat days around occasions - as I said, I like mine to be a Saturday normally, as it’s a great day to take advantage of an ‘anything goes’ approach to food. However, if I know I’ve got a party on a Friday night, or I’m going to a meal with friends on a Thursday, or there’s a wedding on a Sunday, I’ll move my off day accordingly. This may mean 1-2 days more or less of eating clean, but if you plan ahead it’s very easy to make this work. You don’t want to be having an off day and then going out for an all-you-can-eat buffet with friends two days later, just because you ‘forgot’.

You only get two blemishes outside of your day off per week, remember, and these need to be minor.

Make The Most Of Your Day Off

What you’ll also find as you lose weight and approach an optimum level of health is that you’ll only want certain things on your day off - your body will crave them, to some extent - and you really won’t gorge at all. You might in the first week or two, but after a while you’ll realise that because you only get one day off per week you’ll want to make sure that the things you have as treats have to be the very best they can possibly be. Don’t waste your day off eating garbage when you could be having fillet steak. And don’t be satisfied with cheap vanilla ice cream when you could be enjoying Ben and Jerry’s Cookie Dough.

At all times when planning cheat meals, ask yourself: is this the thing I want the most in the world right now? If it’s not, choose something else. Choose something better. Don’t eat for the sake of it, and don’t stuff yourself unnecessarily - just eat the good stuff.

Why This Works

The day off does not hurt your diet at all. In fact, it helps it, as the spike in calorific intake stops your metabolism resting, getting used to the routine (of eating the same kinds of clean, healthy foods each and every day) and, worse, going into ‘starvation mode’, where it starts hording fat and actually makes you gain weight. By pigging out on your off day, you’re encouraging your body to lose weight the rest of the week - as long as the rest of that week is clean!

And The Reverse Is True, Too!

Every 1-2 weeks I like to also have one ultra-clean day, where I’ll eat maybe 500 calories lower than my normal (clean) days. This has a similar effect to gorging on your day off - the body is surprised as it wasn’t expecting this change in calories, and has to make adjustments accordingly, keeping the metabolic rate buzzing.

It all keeps the body guessing - it’s thinking: what’s coming next? - and this, coupled with an effective fitness program, is the key to sustainable weight loss.

Better Yet…

The principle of 80-20 Nutrition can be applied to any diet - you don’t have to eat low-GI for 80 per cent of your meals. It would work with Atkins, South Beach, low-fat, high-protein, or even a semi-vegetarian diet. Just don’t have more than one day off per week, and try to make sure your day off takes place on one day only.

Supplements

I take one decent multivitamin per day with breakfast - currently, this is Revive!, an effervescent vitamin sold at Sainsbury’s (which is identical to Berocca, but a third of the price.) I’m on the fence regarding the value of vitamins but figure for such a minimum expense it’s better to be safe than sorry.

Conclusions

I’ve been on this plan now for a couple of months. For me it has been nothing short of revelatory - after feeling bloated, lethargic and irritable on and off for years, I now feel energetic and lean pretty much 24/7. This diet also provides a great source of fuel for my running - it’s filling and light enough to ensure I get out the door not too long after a meal, and the slow burn of the carbs I have eaten means my workouts are solid.

As above, knowing that each Saturday I can pretty much eat what I want just makes the rest of the week go by in a breeze. I can’t understate how simple this all is. There’s no measuring foods or counting calories - I don’t keep any kind of log and I don’t really pay much attention to food labels.

Possibly of more importance to my ego, my wife has been commenting on how ‘ripped’ I’ve been looking. This alone, of course, along with all the other benefits outlined above, is enough of an incentive for me to know that I am committed to this for the rest of my life.

Other Articles Of Interest

You might like to read the following articles on nutrition that I have written:

• How To Lose Weight (And Keep It Off) With A Modified Low GI, Slow Carb Diet
• 28 Days Later - How To Make Or Break A Habit In Four Weeks
• A List Of Low-GI Foods