Daily food plans are crucial to achieving your health and fitness goals, whether it’s to build muscle or lose weight!  Without a structured outline of how you’re going to accomplish something, you’re more likely to stray off course.  Many would argue that just making that mind body connection and visualizing what you need to do is just as important.   It’s not as difficult as it sounds, and no you don’t have to sit and count calories everything you have a snack or meal!

There’s a difference between reading a plan and executing it. A daily food plan is something you read in a book, magazine, or blog post.  Planning is something you DO.  It’s how you apply the information you learned.

Plans are nothing;  planning is everything. – Dwight D. Eisenhower

Daily Food Plan – Choose My Plate

The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) offers super helpful tools and information FREE!  www.ChooseMyPlate.gov is chocked full of easy to navigate tools and resources to help you learn more about the basics of balancing a healthy diet and your Personal Trainer can offer even more insight into how you can utilize them to help you achieve your goals.

Here are some examples:

Courtesy of ChooseMyPlate.gov

(If you don’t already know what calorie level you should be at, there’s a tool to figure that out as well.)

1.  Click the “18+ year olds” link next to which ever caloric level you should be at. Again, your Personal Trainer can help you with these basic questions, and if not send him/her packing.

2. The link will bring you to a colorful pdf file that breaks down what your daily meal plan should consist of.

This second example is also easy to find on ChooseMyPlate.gov and it’s a great visual for understanding the differences between common foods that we’re all aware of, if not eating on a daily basis.

I really encourage everyone to at least check out the site.  It’s organized to be extremely easy to navigate and things are explain in easily understandable terms.  There’s a lot of focus on weight loss (because obesity is an epidemic in the US) but there’s also some useful information about working out and physical activity.

The goal of this site (and this blog post for that matter) is get you in the mindset of planning – of doing.  You can follow a daily food plan from a personal trainer or a popular diet, and you’ve likely done it many times only to find it’s just not realistic.  That doesn’t mean that you’ve failed and resort back to unhealthy behaviors.  It means that you’re not learning.  You’re not planning, you’re just following the plan!

Give a man a fish and he’s fed for a day.  Teach him how to fish and he’s fed for a lifetime.

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