This entry was posted on Monday, January 22nd, 2007 at 11:13 am and is filed under Diet, Top Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Part 4 of 6
Well, this is a very large topic that a million and one people have written about. I truly believe that the whole diet subject has been made unnecessarily complicated. If we are honest with ourselves we all know which foods are good for us and which are bad. Our busy lives and often lazy attitude results in bad choices. We spend years putting on the weight and creating an unhealthy body and then expect to be able to lose it in a matter of days through starving ourselves of the nutrients it needs. This is not a healthy habit to get into.
Good calories/ Bad calories:
Calorie counting is one way to help your health, however it can be flawed. In theory if you eat more calories than you burn off you will gain weight. If you eat less calories than you burn you will lose weight. If that was true we would all be on the chocolate pizza and beer diet. You have to realise that there are good calories and bad calories. The average adult male requires approximately 1800 calories a day. So you could say after 5 large beers and a pizza around 1700 calories you should be losing weight. It obviously doesn’t work like this. You want to make sure that your daily intake takes 95% good calories at least and only 5% maximum bad calories. Good calories come from fresh foods. Bad calories come from alcohol, sugars, processed foods and others. Having a good calorie diet will help you get healthier and lose any excess fat you may need to. If you are interested in calorie counting visit http://www.fitday.com/. It’s a very comprehensive way of keeping a diary of your calories.
Food is Your Fuel:
I feel that the best advice for getting your diet right, apart of course from eating healthy foods, is to never go hungry through the day. As soon as we are hungry the body recognises this and goes into ’starvation mode’ which means that the food we do eat is more likely to be stored as fat. Why? Because the body cleverly reacts to our hunger and automatically stores the food as fat and fat is just stored energy, which it will need for the next time you’re hungry. So the more you let yourself get hungry the more the body will store what food you do have as fat. The solution to this problem is to eat regularly, before real hunger kicks in, so you have enough energy for your various activities. For example, you couldn’t take your car out with an empty tank for a drive and then fill it up afterwards with petrol/gas. It is impossible. However our bodies are so advanced we can run before we have fuel to give us energy but we sacrifice a lot by doing so. Yes you will use your body fat as energy but our bodies need more than just energy to function properly. If you are hungry and you don’t feed your body it will start to break down your own muscle to get more of the nutrients you need. It’s almost as though you’re digesting yourself, scary stuff. As your muscle gets broken down it reduces your metabolism, the control of how much energy your body burns. Therefore if your metabolic rate slows down your body will require less energy. When you do eat more will get stored as body fat than used as direct energy. So hopefully from this you can understand why a lot of diets that leave you hungry are actually bad and long term will leave you in a worse position than when you started.
I know I am going on a bit but this is really a subject that requires more attention than just one article so this subject will be bought up again and again in this blog, it is very important. So one last point before I wrap up. Make sure that you drink enough water. They say that 2 litres of water per day is the appropriate amount for an adult. I have to agree that they are right but they need to expand on a couple of points. Firstly if you exercise or exert yourself then you need to up your daily intake on those days. Maybe as much as double. This does not mean that you should drink like a fish and try to get your water quota drunk in the first few hours of the day. This quantity should be spread out through the day otherwise you will flush your system of the nutrients you have ingested from the day’s food. Remember your body will let you know when it’s thirsty and this happens a long time before your mouth gets dry. It lets you know in the same way it lets you know that you are hungry. So when you are feeling hungry it may actually be your body asking for liquid and not more food.
I have gone on for a bit now and haven’t even scraped the surface of the nutrition topic, but I hope I have helped you understand that you can bring changes to your lifestyle that don’t involve drastic dietry changes. And it’s these alterations that will bring advantages to your health.
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January 23rd, 2007 at 9:20 am
[...] read part 4 « Mind Set Diet » [...]