Eating clean while living a busy lifestyle can be a big challenge. It’s hard for most people to eat a small meal every 3 hours much less get the right combination of foods to maintain a growing physique. Here are some tips for eating on the run:

Plan Ahead – This is the most important key to eating clean when outside the comfort of your own home. If you’re going to be gone all day, think about how many meals you’ll need during that time and make plans to cook and prepare those meals before you leave. You can store them in containers and keep them in a cooler if you have food that might spoil in the heat. It takes a little more work, but fixing your food ahead of time is well worth the effort.

Stay Hydrated – It’s important to bring enough water to last you the entire day. Drinking water in between meals will help keep you full so you avoid the vending machine and other snacking temptations you might encounter. It’s also critical that you stay hydrated by drinking enough water. Many people get so busy in their daily lives they forget to drink enough water and may become slightly dehydrated without even exercising.

Use a Timer to Stay on Schedule – Some people get so immersed in their daily routine that they forget to eat. You might be in meetings or on the phone and before you know it the day gets away from you. It may help to have some type of alarm or timer to stay on track. Your cell phone or computer may be able to let you know when it is time for your next meal.

So you fell off that dialed in diet at a holiday barbeque and want to lose a couple of added pounds. A study published in The Journal of Sports Medicine and Physical Fitness compares the body composition altering potential of high intensity interval training (HIIT) to steady state running at a moderate pace.

Although the research went on for 12 weeks and used overweight college students, the results might inspire you to go the HIIT route. Subjects who performed HIIT 5 times a week alternating intensity between at 85% and 50% of exercise capacity achieved more impressive results than subjects who jogged continuously at 50% of capacity. TIP: Use an outdoor track for this kind of training, sprinting the straight sections and jogging the turns. See today’s Daily Fitness News for a different exercise routine for battling body fat.