Sunday 9 September 2012

Food prep for the week

As you know I was away on holiday last week to Egypt and tomorrow its back to work and the gym, so I spent about an hour today prepping all my food for the week. This is a question I have been asked a lot by students and people with busy lives/jobs "How do you prepare all your food?" or I hear "I don't have time to cook all these meals everyday". Well I was under the same impression when I first started training while I was at university and always slipped from my diet, currently I work as a Specialist Recruitment Consultant, Monday-Friday, 8.30am-5.00pm and I never slip from my diet.


Like the Benjamin Franklin quote, if you prepare all your food your less likely to skip a meal or stray from your diet. I took time whilst cooking all my food to take a few pics and show you how I make sure I stick to my diet and hit my daily macros.

The most important 2 things when it comes to your diet are a good set of scales and tupperwear, lots of tupperwear!



I actually got these Salter digital scales for christmas last year, I got asked if there was any little bits I wanted and I suggested a set of digital scales (I did get a funny look! ha) but I can honestly say I have used these every single day this year. One thing I've found with the tupperwear is not matter which cheap or expensive option you buy it will eventually leak-ALWAYS!!

Firstly I weight out all my Chicken, Turkey and Salmon into portions for the week.




Once each potion is weighted out I put them all on a baking tray and season with all purpose seasoning, chicken seasoning (no added salt) and cayenne pepper. I also add two mushrooms, one spring onion, a red pepper and cook for 30-40 minutes in the oven.




Once everything is cooked I take it out of the oven to cool down on a few plates.




When everything is cooled down I individually wrap each portion in kitchen foil and put in labelled freezer bags and freeze for the week. I'll take out my required portion each evening to defrost for the following day.


And thats it, simple! For that hour or so on a Sunday afternoon, it saves me cooking my food every evening taking up so much time, which I have tried in the past. 

So as you can see below is all my food ready for tomorrow-


Meal 1- Breakfast (not shown)
Meal 2- Protein shake and almond nuts
Meal 3- Sweet potato, turkey and broccoli
Meal 4- Brown rice and Chicken (Pre Workout)
Meal 5- Protein Shake (Post Workout)
2 litre bottle of water (I refill once I've drank its all)
3 Bag of Green Tea
Meal 6- Cottage Cheese (not shown)

Everything you see above is added into my gym bag along with my gym trainers, Under Armour shorts, Optimum Nutrition tee, gym gloves and iPod.



For anyone who doesn't have a big gym bag there is also the very useful 6 Pack Bag which I really want if anyone fancies treating me! 

It's a PERFECT way of managing your meals and highly recommended by so many different athletes. Awesome idea and I hope to pick one up some day.




I hope this article helps and makes achieving your goals and sticking to your diet much easier.




Saturday 8 September 2012

Aesthetic Lifestyles New logo


As promised, new things are happening with the blog. The biggest is taking it form just a blog to launching a web site (www.AestheticLifestyle.co.uk) which I have bought, registered and in the process of putting my graphic design degree to good use and creating the site.

The first and most important thing was creating a corporate identity and after hours of sketching various logo ideas, I'd narrowed it down to a few that I would incorporate into a vector image. After tweaking the colours and layout (and asking peoples opinions) I finally have the official Aesthetic Lifestyle logo to show you all.





I'd love to hear peoples thoughts on the logo, constructive criticism is always good and never taken to heart.

Keep an eye out over the weekend as I'll be posting a new article on how I prep my food for the week, I've had a few emails and tweets from college/university students and people with busy jobs who want to know how I go about all my meals and structuring my day.

Thanks