Our 3 best for controlling your nutrition in lockdown

If you have just been put into lockdown, it can become harder to maintain the motivation levels to have a consistent training routine, healthy nutrition and a positive mindset. It may be a good idea to switch up your goal to one that you’re purely looking to maintain your current physique instead of changing it. But the big question is: How do you do it (and stay consistent with it)?

One of the easiest strategies and goals you can have is to really focus on cleaning up your nutrition to help maintain your current physique. Below are some great areas to focus on with helping stay on top of your nutrition through lockdown.

Change your daily calorie intake

If you have a current body composition goal, you will know that changes to your physique come through the manipulation of daily calorie intake vs calorie expenditure. When in lockdown, you will probably find that your daily calorie expenditure will reduce, meaning that you will burn less calories as you would be more sedentary compared to pre lockdown life.

With this, your daily calorie targets may have need to reduce if you find yourself less active than you were before. If you now find yourself getting less than 5,000 steps per day, you are quite sedentary, regardless what your home workouts look like, and your daily calories should reduce as a result. Ideally you’re aiming for 1-2 long walks a day, generating a minimum of 10,000 steps per day.

Control your environment

We know that our environment plays a big role in the way we eat from day to day. If you find yourself sitting at home for most of the day and know that there are high calorie dense foods that will fufil your tastebuds, 9 times out of 10 you will eat whatever that may be. On top of that, being ‘bored’ and/or ‘stressed’ at home whilst in lockdown while having highly calorific foods in the house in lockdown has the potential ti lead to an overconsumption of daily calories.

Top tips for controlling your food environment:

• Ideally, during your weekly food shop, these foods are to be bought in a small quantity, if at all.
• Buy pre packaged meals such as, My Muscle Chef, Youfoodz to help portion control
• Leave a bowl of fruit on display, you will more than likely reach for that instead of the higher calorie dense foods

Be open to nutritional change

This is such a great time to really focus on your cooking skills and implementation of different types of meals/foods that you wouldn’t normally have.

Top tips for helping with nutritional change:

• Spend time using different appliances that you don’t normally use
• Add in different foods that you don’t normally have
• Try and cook different cuisines