Eat like a champion

When we start on the path to better health and fitness, having the proper equipment and exercise advice is fine but another vital link is proper nutrition. What you put into your body is as important as what you do with it.

I found that the one best thing I ever did for my nutritional habits was to stop eating deep fried foods. Basically if it's deep fried it's not food. I still have my token burger and fries about once every couple of months but that's it. Cutting out the fried food is tough because for a lot of us that's our comfort food. That goes back to the days when we worked physically hard and food was often hard to come by so we had to pack all the calories we could into a meal. Well now most of us don't have physically demanding jobs and we are not wondering where our next meal is coming from. If anything we eat to much to often.

Water is our number one nutritional need. We can live a while with out food but we can't go long without water before our body starts shutting down. So the first and most important thing you can do for proper nutrition is drink your 8 glasses a day as a minimum. Coffee and that chemical mix we call soda doesn't count toward that 8 glasses. Juice, and other caffeine free drinks do. If your not hydrated you can't perform anything the way you should, from exercising to even just thinking.

The next thing you want to remember is that the concept of DIET should be banished from your vocabulary. Dieting is slow starvation because you are consuming less food than your body requires to live, the theory there is that your body will make up for the deficit by releasing and burning your stored fat. Bad thing is the body knows it's in starvation mode so it releases the stores very slowly and slows your metabolism way down.

So if dieting isn't the answer what is? The answer is eating the proper amount of good food and adding exercise. When you exercise you build muscle tissue and that muscle tissue will burn the fat and your metabolism will we super charged giving you plenty of energy. The increased muscle working to keep you in motion will consume your fat stores much quicker than a starvation diet.

Our body burns carbs for fuel so that is our biggest requirement. Protein repairs muscles after a day of motion and all the things required to keep us alive, like our heart beating. Fat is required since our body needs a small amount to process a lot of the vitamins and minerals we need to function and stay healthy.

I future blogs, we will discuss the proper mix of carbs, fat and protein.

Thanks for reading.

Rambling Panda