I didn’t really think that I was eating that poorly before I started working out. I ate a lot of stuff from the freezer aisle or from boxes in my pantry. Occasionally I’d make a salad and top it with fat-free dressing and lots of cheese; I assumed that was healthy.
In the first month, I lost like two pounds. At that point, I hadn’t changed much about my diet. That’s when I started talking to the trainers about my progress, and I realized that the things I thought were healthy weren’t helping me lose weight.
After working with a trainer at Burn Boot Camp, I learned that I needed to be eating healthy, whole foods all the time. He said that I needed to eat ingredients instead of eating foods that have ingredients, which made sense to me.
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Since I’m an all-or-nothing kind of person, I decided to create a meal plan. On that plan, I made oatmeal for breakfast, and chicken breast, sweet potatoes, broccoli, spinach salad with chicken, and lots of egg whites for lunch and dinner. Another one of my go-to breakfasts is an egg casserole made with whole eggs and egg whites, plus potatoes, veggies, and ground turkey.
Within three months of changing my eating habits, I’d lost 30 pounds. I was happy with my results, but then I thought, “Now what?” I wanted to give myself new goals. So I set out to build more muscle and get lean.
From there, I increased my calorie intake, ate a lot more protein, and started carb cycling. That meant one day I’d eat 200 grams of carbs and the next two days I’d eat 50 grams. A high-carb day was full of things like oatmeal and sweet potatoes, and on low days I avoided grains and stuck mainly to lots of chicken, egg whites, and veggies.
I did that for two months to kick things into gear, and then I started following a maintenance plan where 45 percent of my calories come from protein, 35 percent from carbs, and 20 percent from fat.
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This helped me build a lot more muscle. When I first started, I grabbed the 10-pound weights and I thought that was heavy. Now I use 40-pound dumbbells.