Motivation comes and goes ...
The last few months I've been training consistent and eating properly for the first time since 2007.
The best advice I can give is to make it easy for yourself:
The longer you have to spend each day on achieving your goals, the less likely you are to stay on the rails.
The further you are from your gym, and the longer it takes to get there, the less likely you are to drag yourself there on bad days.
The more time you have to spend in the kitchen to eat properly, the less likely you are to eat properly.
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Tips:
1. Training: Train at the closest gym you can, and make time in your schedule each day for training. Try to make it at the same time each day, for consistency.
2. Diet: Tupperware, oven, boiled eggs, vegetable steamer, frozen veggies, oats, brown rice, tuna cans, water jugs, big cups, several protein shakers.
Spend $$ on enough tupperware to put at least 4 days of meals in. At 6 meals a day, that is 24 tupperware containers.
Cook your protein on Sunday for the coming week, divide it into the proper portions and put 3 days of food in the fridge and the rest in the freezer. Move frozen food to the fridge 48 hours before you eat it.
I like to bake chicken breast, cook hard-boiled eggs and steam a couple days of vegetables at a time. Baking chicken breast is easy and you can cook many at once. I put 10 chicken breast in the oven after drizzling with lemon and sprinkling with salt and pepper. Come back in 45 minutes and you have 5 days worth of lunch and dinner prepared and ready to go.
Hard-boiled eggs are a godsend. Put 12-24 eggs in a large pot of water, turn the stove to High and put the pot over the heat. Come back in 15-25 minutes and you have 12-24 eggs ready to go. Put them back in the trays they came in and put them in the fridge. Great for breakfast and lunch on the go, and saves a lot of kitchen time that you'd spend if you were to cook eggs daily. Keeps them fresh too.
Get a rice cooker. Measure out a weeks worth of long-grain brown rice and follow the cooking instructions. Come back in an hour and you have 7 days worth of carbs.
Oats. Learn to like steel-cut rolled oats. Boil some water in the morning and use it for your coffee/green tea, and your oats. Really simple and cheap.
Tuna cans. Get a good can opener and buy bulk tuna cans. Great for meals on wheels. Bring a good fork.
Water jugs. Get four glass 1/4 gallon water jugs and fill them before bed each night. Toss out all the condiments and salad dressings in the door of your refrigerator and put them there. Make sure you drink all four by bedtime each day. Buy a nice water bottle to take with you on the road, to work and class.
Lunch box. It's cool to have a lunch bag/box. Get one, and some of those ice packs. Put the ice packs in the freezer overnight. Put 1 or 2 of them in the box in the morning and add two or three tupperware containers with your away-from-home meals, your water bottle, and your protein shakers.
Ziplock bags. Put your multivitamins and any supplements you take in a few ziplock bags and put them in your lunch box as well. Take your fish oil in the morning or at night.
Clothing. Buy 7 plain t-shirts, 7 training shorts, 7 pairs of socks and a large bag to use for your training gear. It saves a lot of time usually spent on washing clothes each week. You always have a set ready to go.
Consistency and motivation. Buy a calendar and put it on your wall above your desk. Put an X for each day you hit the gym, and another X for each time you do cardio, and a 3rd X for each day you eat properly. Be accountable to yourself.
Set aside 2.5 hours each Sunday to take care of the above, plus whatever time it takes you to run to the store and buy food.
You can put 12 chicken breast in the oven, steam 3lbs of broccoli, boil 24 eggs, and make 14 servings of rice all in about an hour and a half. That takes care of the bulk of your diet for the week, fill in the rest with some tuna, oats, frozen veggies, and lean beef.
^ Make it easy for yourself and less about achieving peak motivation, and more about routine, consistency and going through the motions. Rely on a practical and efficient system, not your emotion. The system doesn't have bad days or take days off, so even if you aren't at peak motivation, it's still easy for you to grab a few tupperware containers, a protein shaker, and drive to the gym with your fresh set of training clothes to grind out the day, than sit at home because you couldn't be ****ed to spend an hour cooking a meal and 30 minutes commuting to the gym.
