Tony,

There is a bakery in my town that makes "health bread" that is a 40/30/30 bread (the ratio that is recommended by sports nutritionists like Michael Colgan). It's pretty good, too. If you go with the tuna sandwich route (I put dill relish in mine), make sure you don't destroy the whole thing by eating the wrong bread with it. Shop around and try to find a good, relatively low carb, protein fortified bread. Boutique bakeries make them.

Also, make yourself up some egg salad and bring it to work for sandwiches (or by itself). If you really want to keep the calories down, lose some of the fat by removing *some* of the egg yolks. I've known body builders who don't seem to mind eating only egg whites (great source of protein), but they just don't do it for me, so I leave most of the yolks in.

If you can find even a 1% cottage cheese that you can stomach, it's much better than whole or 2%. I didn't like non-fat cottage cheese at first, but I got used to it. I found that I could get used to almost anything after a while: diet vs. regular soda, non-fat dairy, non-fat salad dressings. I didn't like any of them at first, but over time I actually prefered them.

The other "miracle foods" from my fitness and weightlifting days were: Grape Nuts (complex carbs, you still need carbs, but try to stay away from starches and sugars. GN is an easy and fairly good breakfast as long as you get yourself some protein to have with it), chicken breasts, fish (Colgan has some great things to say about fish), roasted turkey breast, sweet peppers, asparagus, brussel sprouts, sliced low fat deli meats like chicken and turkey.

If your activity level picks up, especially with weight lifting, you will need more protein. With 3-4 days/week of strenuous weight training, you will need about 1g per lean body mass pound. That is a lot of protein. People will argue about this, but the research is available. I found that with heavy weight lifting, the only way I could keep my protein intake high enough was to go with a protein supplement. Whey is probably the best. It tastes awful, so another alternative is to back off on the strength training. Depends on what you're after. Another thing that people will argue with but is well documented is that the best way to lose fat is with resistance weight traning. Cardio workouts are great, and good for other reasons, too, but if you want to take off the pounds, high intensity weight lifting is the way to do it. PM me if you want some materials on this approach. It's not as horrible as it sounds: 30-45 minutes 3 or 4 times per day.

Take a good multi-vitamin and the research seems to show that chromium picolonate will help with what is thought of as "GTF" or glucose tolerance factor. Chromium appears to have something to do with insulin and sugar metabolism.

Have you read "Optimum Sports Nutrition" by Colgan? It is a must read.

Jim