I am often asked, “Does it matter what order I put my foods in?”  And my answer to that is like my answer to so many other questions asked of me, “Honestly officer, I didn’t see the stop sign.”  Oops…wrong situation.  No, my answer is normally, “Depends, what’s your goal?” 

Asking a blanket question like that without a qualifier is like asking, “Do you think I can wear this tonight?” and you haven’t told the person where you are going!  How are they supposed to answer that?  Yes, the prom dress at your first PTA meeting is appropriate! Make sure you wear a tiara and sparkly shoes, too! [giggling and rolling my eyes]

So we are about to delve into the world of ‘ordering our foods’ for different situations and we are going to tackle “life” first.  This is the same as offseason or maintenance and is characterized by a period of time where you are just either trying to get a rhythm or you are getting ready to go into a season of dieting (and for the record, dieting in this instance means manipulating your food for a specific outcome.  Could be weight loss, building or what have you.) 

Maintenance is a funny word because it is tossed around all the time (“can you tell me how to go into maintenance when I’m done”) as if it is an actual place you go to when you are done dieting: 

“Yo, where you at?”

“I’m in maintenance.”

“Maintenance?  How long are you going to be there?”

“I’ll be out in a week or two.  Just want to hang out here for a while before I start dieting again.” 

“Oh, alright. Well have fun.  Call me.”

What truly makes this funny is if you ask anyone in maintenance mode what they are doing or how they are eating, they will say to you:

“Are you still in maintenance?  How’s that going?”

“Yeah, I’m just eating whatever.  I’m all over the place.  I half diet one day, stuff my face the next.  I’ll get it together soon.”

Ummm…no you won’t.  The problem is not with maintenance.  The problem is not with the diet.  The problem is with YOU. 

YOU don’t know whether you are coming or going.  YOU don’t have a goal.  YOU don’t have a clear cut beginning or end to your maintenance phase so what ensues after this is just mass chaos.  You try to stay in diet mode yet eat like a person not on a diet on some days or if you are prepping for a sport but the training season hasn’t begun yet, you try to keep up with the pace of the sport but eat as if you are sitting on the couch. 

I don’t have many fears—I do have some and we’ve discussed a couple, but man do I fear a client going into maintenance mode.  The only thing worse is a client doing a “building” phase.  Now there’s one that can make me sit in a corner and rock back and forth in fetal position while sucking my thumb!  Very little good comes out of a building season for women (not so much men, they’ve got that covered) and I very rarely see it go all the way to the end, as well.  Just say no to building.

But maintenance does not need to be this hard.  It does not need to be this time of willy nilly behavior with half hearted intentions.  If you truly want to do maintenance, life, offseason (or whatever you want to call it) right, then let’s establish some order in the court!

Here are the rules:

1)       Define how long your maintenance phase is.  Even if you do not know, set a date to revisit your maintenance status in no more than 12 weeks.  So the longest you can stay in that mode before assessing your status is 12 weeks.

2)       TAKE FULL STOCK IN WHAT YOU HAVE!  Oh hear me when I speak!  Much of the dilemma with this time is that you do not appreciate all that you have.  You feel fat, no lumpy, no dimply…or you have performance goals and you want to do them all at once so you are going to yoga, doing speed training, practicing your swing while rehabbing your shoulder, you are everywhere!  Accept where you are RIGHT NOW and that you are GOING TO STAY THERE for a while.  It will make the rest of the time much easier for you.

3)       Begin to put your meals in this order:

            MEAL 1                        PR                   ST                    F/V

            MEAL 2                        PR                   ½ GFAT            F/V

            MEAL 3                        PR                   ST                    V

            MEAL 4                        PR                   ½ GFAT            V

            MEAL 5                        PR                   ST                    V

            Go ahead…ask me why.  Ok, I’ll tell you!;)  You order them this way for 2 reasons:  1) this will make  your meals almost isocaloric—meaning you are not having major ups and downs with cals all day and 2)  it mimics life.  This is what your girlfriends are doing.  This is what your family is doing.  This is doable!  Breakfast, lunch and dinner with 2 snacks.

4)       Lastly, set a work out goal.  It can’t help you to keep your head on straight while dieting, but it will help you pass the time faster while you are in your state of ‘nebulousness’.  This goal can be either performance related or physique related.  Your choice!

Defining parameters in the dreaded maintenance season will help you stay as focused as you can be during that time and it will help you get through it.  It truly is a hard phase to be in for most people.  There is no true definition of maintenance/offseason.  To be honest, most maintenance for folks is really a state of mind brought upon by the fact that they just need a break from actual dieting (dieting in the deprivation sense).  Right then and there you know that since the entrance to the phase is coming from an exhausted, not-necessarily-healthy-place, the existence there is not going to be a walk in the park. 

Hang tight as we get ready to explore other scenarios for ‘ordering’ our foods.  In the mean time, enjoy life will ya?:o)

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