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Innocent Choga Fitness
A good diet programme will ensure that one enjoys both the healthy and junk foods. I believe God gave us both so that we could enjoy them in the right proportions at the right time. At times people eat the right foods but prepared the bad way, and some people eat the bad foods every day.

Surely we cannot be eating cake, sugary drinks and concentrated animal fat everyday and expect to get away with it. Too much of bad food is not good for anyone big or small.

Whether one is eating to lose or gain weight it is necessary to have a vision of what they want to achieve, be it in terms of appearance or fitness attainment. One must have a strategy and a plan of how to attain that vision concerning both the diet and exercise aspect.

The hardest part is on the implementation of the diet plan. There is need to communicate to the people around you of your intentions; it could be a spouse, immediate family or workmates because these are the people who will support you in order for you to achieve what you want.

My plan for example, is to eat lean white meat three days a week and beef two days and reserve two days for vegetables only.

The selection of the kind of food to eat is entirely up to a person depending on what one wants and what one has access to, but it has to be predominantly healthy food.

Make sure the meals are balanced with enough vitamins and minerals and enzymes. These will aid digestion, to ensure maximum utilisation of food particularly if one is underweight and wishes to gain weight.

Eat regularly at least six small meals a day. The meals could contain three regular meals and three snacks or just nibble your lunch box meal regularly. This will ensure that you keep your metabolism on its toes. This is called food or dietary — induced thermogenesis and it works better when protein is involved in every meal.

If one is a busy person and does not have time to eat six meals then some of the meals can be replaced by supplements. These supplements do not have to be sport supplements; dietary food supplements made for medical reasons are ideal.

The metabolism system can only digest a certain amount of food per sitting (at a time); the rest of the food is simply wasted or stored as fat ,so six small meals will ensure you absorb enough of the required nutrients.

As the day progresses one should eat less. At night one should avoid complex foods that are difficult to digest. The digestive system is most efficient in the morning and in the evening it becomes lethargic. In addition we use less energy at night.

That is the reason why we are encouraged to take breakfast seriously. We are also encouraged to eat cereal, the reasons being they are easy to digest and contain almost all the nutrients required to aid digestion of the unbalanced foods that we eat later on.

Remember even lean people need to stay on a good diet as they can also get clogged arteries. Cardiovascular disease can affect anyone big or small. Irregular eating patterns can contribute to weight gain as well.

Most people who are overweight do not necessarily eat too much but it could be due to genetics or irregular eating patterns.

Starving and eating infrequently could result in the body holding on to whatever it gets and turning the food into fat in order to release the food as energy during empty periods.

Using a lot of oil is bad. Using none can make the food taste insipid, so my advice would be to use minimal oil. Fats have their own purpose in our bodies. Fat is a necessary element which cushions organs etc. It is ideal to mind the kind of oil that one consumes, the good polyunsaturated fats (vegetable) or the bad mono-saturate (animal) fats.

It is necessary to change your diet regularly if not daily to confuse the system. There is a good substitute for every kind of food. As a competitive body-builder my aim was to reach the minimum recommended but dangerous fat levels of 3 percent.

Some of the food we had to eat was unpalatable and actually made me sick, for example, I had to eat boiled or baked chicken breast without salt for a month. The diets we followed were the norms which were implemented by most competitive body-builder those days.

I actually got sick of eating chicken breasts which were touted as the ultimate low fat high protein meat for dieting body-builders. Up to now they are not among my list of favourite foods. The chicken breasts ended up tasting like sawdust.

Note that during the final weeks towards a competition one could not eat the protein rich fish or egg whites because of their natural salt content, so it had to be chicken breasts. For body-builders, salt is a bad substance during the final preparatory days, even in very small amounts. Considering my weight and genetic frame at that time, I had to eat at least 35 grams of (protein) chicken breasts at six sittings per day.

Luckily my brother accidentally introduced me to a different kind of meat which even now is on the top of my favourite list.

Rabbit meat is white meat, it was my secret meat, during my competitive days. This meat, just like chicken breasts is laden with protein; it is compact, it does not absorb too much oil even when deep fat fried. My wife simply boiled the meat and made it crisp by frying it in a little bit of oil. It didn’t hurt my diet and won our hearts as a family, it developed into our delicacy at special family functions.

So I was lucky I had variety. I alternated between road runner chicken thighs, drum sticks (fat and skin removed) and my favourite meat, I broke out of the normal tradition. I won a couple of trophies while following that diet.

The same thing happened with potatoes; occasionally my wife would boil them first and use a little oil otherwise she would just boil them alternating with sweet potatoes. I also replaced sugar with a bit of honey and sugar cane whenever I had cravings for sweet things.

In the off season I alternated maize sadza (pap) with that made from millet (mhunga) and rapoko (zviyo). My grandmother introduced these foods to us when we were children. I had variety and did not find it monotonous to stick to my dietary plan. The whole idea is to find a substitute for a recommended type of food.

I think even those who do not believe will agree that the Bible is a manual for life, though it is very difficult to follow since we are faulty human beings. We are advised not to eat too much, gluttony is a sin and occasionally fasting is good for us. 1 Corinthians 3:16-17 helpfully tells us: “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you? If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him. For God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple.”

Eating more than one needs will result in weight gain. When energy intake and energy outflow are balanced weight will remain stable, when it is skewed to the less intake side weight will be lost.

We should eat to supply and replenish our genetic frames; we should not be like hoovers that suck up everything in their path. We should eat to survive particularly as we get advanced in age. If one stops being an active sports-person one should reduce intake amounts since they won’t be burning calories like they used to. Fasting helps rest the digestive systems well as flush out all toxins. But we should always drink a lot of water even whilst fasting.

My recommendation for a diet programme would be to start slowly on alternate days e.g. Monday diet, Tuesday off ,Wednesday diet Thursday off, then change to two days on diet one day off. Next three days on one off until you get to an ideal five days (Monday to Friday) on diet then weekend off.

That way you look forward to the weekend, but remember not to overindulge over the weekend otherwise you erase all the work done from Monday to Friday.

We are creatures of habit so, eventually as time goes by you will find that even on off diet days you will not feel like eating the undesirable foods thus dieting without effort will become a habit

I have two motivating factors for myself. The first is positive; I reward myself by eating whatever I want over the weekend because I ate healthy during the week. The second is negative reinforcement. If I eat “bad” food on a diet day I have to jog an extra kilometre if it is a running day. If it is a rest day then I have to forfeit the rest and run to burn the extra empty calories. We shall be talking a lot more about my diet experience since it is a broad subject and I cannot discuss it all in this article.

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• Innocent Choga is a six time National Body-building Champion with international experience. He competed in the reputable Weider International Federation for Body-building. Currently he is studying for a science degree in Physical Education and Sport.