Week 7: These next ideas are easy, quick and painless. 1 - Most of us drive to work in the morning. TURN OFF THE RADIO. THINK. Plan your day. Get rid of things that won’t enhance it. Optimize and enhance your day before it starts. This is also a good time to think about certain goals to further improve your life or to accomplish something that you have always wanted to do. Beware, don’t obsess about your goals and getting them done. Simply put the actions into place to reach your goals. Obsessing about the future doesn’t allow us to live in the ‘now’. 2 – At every meal - breakfast, lunch and dinner, divide up the portions on the plate into 4 equal quarters. The first quarter is a meat product (fish, chicken), the second is your carbohydrate source (potato, rice) the third quarter is a vegetable and the fourth quarter is another vegetable or fruit. The important concept is to have every portion EQUAL in size. Typically we make the vegetables and fruits smaller in size than the meat and carbohydrate portions - consequently over-eating in calories. 3 – As athletes and people who want to lose weight, we want to eat smaller meals 5-6x per day. To prevent over-eating, eat all of your meals on the smaller ‘salad’ plates. Throw-out the big plates. If you are still hungry after your first serving, have a little more meat and eat more fruits and vegetables. --> When eating out and the food comes to your table, ask immediately for a take-home bag and put half of the meal into it for leftovers. Society’s restaurant portions encourage overeating with giant plates filled with lot’s of food. --> A lot of us go to Subway or a similar fast-food place. A whole footlong is very unnecessary – but we eat it anyway because it’s hard to stop. If you want to lose weight, even 6 inches is usually too many calories especially when adding in the cheese and condiments. Get the footlong and have them cut it up into quarters. Eat the quarter and supplement with fruits and vegetables and a glass of Milk (Soy or Regular). Save the rest for lunch for the next few days. *Of course if you are a very active athlete and train at or above the half-Ironman level, you probably can eat what you want as you will be burning it training. Do your homework to make sure you are getting enough calories in for your training as most of these tips are geared for those looking to lose some weight.