PiYo Get Lean Eating Plan Day 1

Day 1 of the PiYo Get Lean Eating Plan

I've been doing Les Mills Combat for 50 days now, but I never tried the eating plan. I'm a fairly picky eater and I have a hard time following "diets." I just don't like a lot of things. I'm not adventurous and don't want to spend money on food that I'm not going to like. I skimmed the Les Mills Combat eating plan, but wasn't impressed. It had a seven day kick start plan where you picked meals from their list and you ate only those meals for a week. After that, it gave more info on what to do, but I don't even remember it because it just didn't seem like something I would be able to stick with. I decided to just do the exercise program and try to eat well. 

When I bought PiYo, I bought it for the exercise program, but I had to read through the nutrition plan. If I'm going to get something and blog about it, I feel obligated to read it. I really liked the nutrition plan. One of the major deciding factors with me on whether I will follow someone's nutrition plan or not is if it has a sliding scale for calories. I read Dolvett Quince's book The 3-1-2-1 Diet which sounded like a great concept. Eat and Cheat your Way to Weight Loss. However, women of all shapes and sizes get a whopping 1200 calories and on cheat days we get 1500. I'm 278 pounds. At the time I read his book, I think I was still around 310. It takes more calories to move me around than it does someone who is 160 pounds. I've tried to eat 1200 calories before and I get light headed and miserable. it's not pretty. The PiYo eating plan allows more calories to people who weight more. If you plan to stay on this eating plan long tern, you should be sure to redo your math every month or so to make sure you haven't lost so much weight that you're calories should drop too. This plan had one point in it's favor right away.

The next thing I look for in an eating plan is flexibility. Like I said, I'm pretty picky. I don't want an eating plan that is loaded with a bunch of different recipes that I need to cook for the next two months. I want to know what food I can eat. I will then pick from the foods I can eat and I'll find ways to make those foods edible for me. This thing has two points in it's favor.

As long as you're sticking with the number of servings per group, you really don't need to worry about counting calories or macros on this. I've got a BodyMedia device which has a food tracker, but I'll be honest...I hate using it. I find it time consuming and annoying. I don't want to take time to plug in numbers. If the food I want isn't in the database, I have to go search around Google or find a product label and plus all the stuff in. It's rather annoying. I did track religiously for a week once and then I tried tracking my food when I started Les Mills Combat, but tracking my calories just makes m fixate on food and I'm more hungry. With this, I can just come up with a plan on the weekend of what I'm going to eat for all of my meals for the week. If I stick with the plan and don't add in any extras, I'll be within my calorie count for the plan. 

Okay, so according to the math........I'm supposed to eat 2858 calories each day. However, the chart of how many servings you get for your calorie bracket has 1800 or More as the highest bracket. This puts me in the calorie range that I had been aiming for. Less than 1800 calories tends to make me a little cranky. 

I made a little Excel Spreadsheet so I can just plug in the names and quantities of the food I ate. If I this plan isn't working for me, I can go back and calculate the calories to see if it's a caloric issue for me. For now, I'm going to just keep this spread sheet. There is one error for today though. I only had 1 tbsp of olive oil. 

I will admit that there is a downside to this plan for me and my picky ways. While there are foods from each list that I will eat, there aren't that many from the Primary Vegetable section. I could easily get bored with the list. I will have to broaden my horizons at some point and find a way to eat more of this stuff. I'm not sure how long I will stay on this plan. I mainly did it just to change things up a little bit. There's no talk in here about cheat meals or cheat days. I'm sure I'll be cheating on the weekend, but I'll still be in my caloric bracket since according to the math, I get an extra 1,000 calories to eat.:)