Q&A: What I Eat In A Day ( A Sample Menu) and How Important Is Flexibility?

Hello, Ines. I’ve been following your blog for a year and I am really impressed with your consistency, dedication and the results you have. I love the fact that you are obviously eating enough food, you train moderately, and your progress is constant. Could you share an example of your daily menu?

This is something, I want more people to believe in- the slow, steady progress. During the last year and a half I achieved a lot, both training and physique wise, and everything is due to the slow progress- without extremes, with the mere goal to achieve my goals faster.

In the future, I intend on achieving much more, but even though I am dying to get more results, I know that if I want long term progress, I should be patient and I should have smart approach and trust the whole process, no matter how long it takes me.

When it comes to my food, I will share it in pictures. During the past couple months, I’ve been eating just three times a day. Here is a sample menu:

When it comes to food quantities I do not measure or count anything. My food depends on how I feel, if I need more or less of it. Some days I might eat bigger quantities, but once again it depends on how I feel.

What I am always conscious about, when it comes to my food choices is to eat optimally real and clean food; I always aim to have meat/fish/eggs/ organ meats; fats coming from butter/ olives/ avocado/ bacon; a variety of vegetables- mainly leafy greens, peppers, mushrooms, broccoli, cucumbers, tomatoes, zucchini, carrots. Every now and then when I can get home made dairy products, I add homemade cheese or curds.

For me every single meal is the same. It doesn’t matter if it is for breakfast, lunch or dinner; if it is pre or post workout. I do not follow such strategies. I just really emphasize on the quality of my food.

Ines, I read a lot your opinion about weights, but could you share what you think about flexibility? Where do you place it and how important do you think it is?

Most people get flexibility the wrong way. If you are the kind of person who can “tie his body in a bow, i.e. you are so flexible that you can twist in all kind of poses…congratulations. But this might be a two edge sward. I think that flexibility as a main goal, might do more harm,than good. Usually people who are extremely flexible, have problems with hyper- mobile joints. This leads to a lot of stress on ligaments, tendons and joints and in the long term it might be followed by a lot of bad injuries.

What I’d recommend is a combination of mobility and stability. Both qualities are kind of complimentary. And if I have to give a precise definition, I’d say as follows:

Mobility is the ability to perform the desired movement with the desired range of motion.

Stability is the ability to resist an unwanted movement.

In order to stay away from injuries, it would be best if you achieve a combination of mobility and stability, which should be optimal for a particular joint. Some joints need more stability, others need more mobility. As Mike Boyle says, here is a list of the joints that need stability and those that need mobility:

Foot — Stability
Ankle — Mobility
Knee — Stability
Hip — Mobility
Lumbar Spine — Stability
Thoracic Spine — Mobility
Scapula — Stability
Gleno-Humeral Joint — Mobility
Elbow — Stability

Sure, this is not a one size fits all, because when you decide if you should emphasize on mobility or stability, you should take every individual differently, depending on lifestyle, injuries and so forth, in order to decide what a particular joint needs in this particular moment.

For example a shoulder joint should be mobile, but there are people who have hyper-mobile shoulder joints and they need to emphasize on exercises that will improve stability.

My case was similar. Before I started injuring my shoulders, I had extremely flexible shoulders. But unfortunately, nobody told me that I should take care of stability, in order to avoid all the dislocations that followed in the future.

So it is good to have some flexibility, but if you are too mobile, focus on doing exercises that will improve the stability in the particular joint, so you can avoid injuries.

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And one picture from yesterday 🙂