New feature: Healthful Eating Sundays- your guide to healthy recipes, low-fat snacks, meal plans and weight loss tips.

Nutrition and weight loss are one of the most important keys to successful performance in running, on the bike, in life, all the time. For myself, I am constantly striving to improve and find small ways to tweak my diet and lose those last few stubborn pounds.

One of my goals for this year is to shave off 500 calories from my daily diet and drop that baby weight (or just extra weight). A few things I’ve learned is that recipes and having a PLAN are the keys to losing weight. Snacking appropriately is the other major issue. Waiting to eat until I’m starving- makes me fatter. If I’m ready to eat the kitchen counter- then it’s going to be a bad night. I have also been successful with protein shakes. Protein can do multiple beneficial things for the woman athlete. You can read more about the benefits of protein here or at Hammer Nutrition. Graeme Street also has a complete Cyclo-Fuel Nutrition Plan that comes complete with recipes, plans, and templates to download.  Coach Al Lyman has a great article about fueling your body properly.  You can read it here.

Here is a sample menu taken from Shape Magazine. You can read up on the whole seven days here. It is based on 1600 calories per day. It provides a good base of recipes that I would actually eat. The stuffed peppers I’d make as a dinner and then eat the leftovers for lunch. 1600 calories per day is questionable- depends on your activity level and how many pounds you want to lose. I bet I burn 200 calories just getting the mail everyday- one kid up the hill and the other kid goes down the hill.