Meal Planning

One of the best ways to insure you make appropriate food choices throughout the day as you try to reduce body fat and maintain muscle is to plan ahead. To assist you in this endeavor Cornerstone Wellness provides the most advanced, web based meal-planning tool available anywhere. It is very simple to use but also extremely complete and educational. What you learn from this site will "train" you for a lifetime of good healthy choices to get you to lose excess body fat and then maintain for the rest of your life.

To do your meal planning, simply click on the nutrition button and this will take you to your food log. On the right side of the screen there are bar graphs allotting your goals (calories, protein etc) and as you chose food items from the food database you can watch the bars climb until you meet your allotment for calories, protein, carbs and fats.
Your calorie goal for the day is calculated from your individual body composition analysis,(from your BC-1 testing) which determines your basal metabolic rate (BMR). This is the calories you burn at rest- the calories required to keep your temperature at 98.6, heart pumping, breathing etc. Your BMR minus 10% of BMR is the number of calories that you want to consume daily until you get down to your body fat goal. That number populates your meal plan automatically. Once you get to your goal, your physician/coach will manually determine your calorie goal going forward.
You should eat 5 meals a day, 3 main meals and 2 snacks. This will keep you from getting hungry and keep you from going into "fasting" mode, which results in excess fat storage. You will also have more energy, with no peaks and valleys of blood sugar, which may cause you to grab high glycemic snacks, which results in you being hungry 2 hours later due to "insulin overshoot".
The meal plan allots 35% of calories from protein and carbohydrates and 30% from fat. This is a very healthy breakdown, which will result in maintenance of muscle while primarily losing excess body fat. Your physician may chose a different proportion eg Atkins but the Cornerstone proportion is both very healthy, sustainable and aimed at fat loss with muscle maintenance.
The food database contains thousands of food items but there is a "my food favorites " dropdown, which Cornerstone has pre-populated with healthy choices including the Cornerstone meal replacement shake. Feel free to add your own favorites as well. You will just need to know and enter that item's nutritional facts. Feel free to browse the "food database" and browse by food types-this will steer you towards making better choices- lower calorie, higher protein and lower carbohydrates.
All over fat people eat too many carbs and not enough protein. Carbohydrates, particularly high glycemic carbs (bread, potatoes, pasta, rice, beer, candy, sugar) cause insulin levels to rise resulting in storage of carbs as fat. Eating fat does not make people fat- eating high glycemic carbs does. The way to fatten a cow for slaughter is to feed it grain (starch) not fat, right? Also, the main cause of elevated cholesterol and triglycerides is high glycemic carb . Dietary fat and cholesterol play very little role.
Snacks should be low glycemic fruits or preferably some protein-cheese, hard boiled eggs, a little tuna, egg or chicken salad etc. Be careful with so called protein bars- most are simply "candy bars" with some "cheap" soy protein added. If for convenience, you must use bars, be sure to enter them as a new favorite and enter in all the nutrition label- you will be surprised how much sugar is in most of them, especially the "all natural" bars. Granola and "trail mixes" are very high in sugar-better to eat a handful of pecans, almonds or walnuts-remember peanuts are not nuts- they are peas.
If all this is too time consuming or confusing or if you don't have or "hate" computers, your physician/coach will simply print out some meal planning "templates" for you based on your caloric goal, and will teach you about simple food substitutions.

You will quickly learn that the simplest most convenient way to meet your protein goal for the day without exceeding your calorie and carbohydrate limit is to utilize the all-natural, high protein, low calorie, low carb partial meal replacement by Cornerstone. This finest of all meal-replacements is all natural, delicious, refreshing and tremendously nutritious and will insure you maintain your muscle mass and lose excess body fat. This will in turn improve your appearance, self-esteem, energy level, productivity and, of course, your general health. As the great Roman poet Virgil stated 2000 years ago, "the greatest wealth is health".