How Important is Eating Right When Looking at Your Fitness Goals?
We all want to be there.
The fitness model in the little outfit on the magazine or the guy with the muscles popping out everywhere on the bodybuilding magazine, or maybe just the guy or girl on the beach that just oozed health and fitness while they are playing in the waves or walking confidently out of the water after their swim, not grabbing frantically for a towel the moment they leave the protection of the water.
The thing is, you can be those people.
It is not a difficult thing to understand, it is though, a difficult thing to undertake and put into practice.
Human nature wants us to reach all our goals, be it in a professional or personal capacity, yesterday.
I want to look like that girl yesterday, and of course, it must be easy.
The real truth to the matter is that it is simple, definitely not easy.
The question begs: Can I achieve all my dreams for the perfect body by training alone? Or do I need to take a closer look at what I put in my mouth? We do not want to hear it, but the answer is YES, overwhelmingly YES! Now, before you go on a witch hunt and throw all the "bad stuff" out of your kitchen cupboards, think on the following.
Do you want to change your lifestyle and be healthier, fitter and better looking for the rest of your life? Or do you want to do it for 6 months, look awesome, get all the compliments and then go right back into the rut? If your answer is the yes for the first question, than change in your dietary habits must be gradual.
Start with an all new all healthy diet tomorrow and I promise you will not be able to stick with it.
It will be hard, you will be denying yourself all the things that you have loved for years and you will fail! Do the following for yourself.
Get a little notebook and for a full week, write everything down that you eat or drink, everything.
From the half packet of chips that you bumped off your friend to the 3 cans of fizzy drinks that you consume religiously every day.
After a week, get the fright of your life, get over it and then start making small changes.
Reduce your 3 cans of fizzy drinks to 2 in the next week and then to one in the following week.
If you are eating fast foods three times per week, cut it down to only twice a week.
Replace the one fast food meal with a home cooked meal.
Not rocket science, but this is the right approach if you want to see results and keep those results.
By eliminating the "bad" stuff slowly, you will give your body time to adjust to not getting the quantities that it is used to.
We are not currently getting into the tuff stuff of calorie counting and making sure your burn more calories than you take in.
That is an article on its own, and not something we want to go into right now.
Now we are just eliminating some of the unhealthy food and drink out of the diet.
Your next step is to go do shopping.
The best rule of thumb here is to stay away from the middle aisle, keep to the edges of the shop, there you will find all the fresh produce, go for it and pack your trolley to your hearts content, green, yellow, red.
This should make up most of your trolley.
Then go over to the meat department and stock your trolley with fresh fish and boneless, skinless chicken and some nuts.
Anything that comes in a box or has a shelf life or more than 2 weeks are prosessed junk that will clogg your arteries and your super fast blood highways will become congested back roads with a traffic light out of order.
This will lead to a "traffic standstill" in other words blood will flow slower through your body, no oxygen to the brain and eventually a stroke.
Give your body the healthy alternative and the super blood highway will stay open and you will live to be a granny one day! The point is, you can train as hard as you like, if your eating habits are somewhere between the odd donut for breakfast, the fizzy drinks, chocolates and take away foods, you are going to have a hard time looking like those beach bodies that you admire so much.
The whole concept of living healthy is just that, you have to apply it to all the parts in your life, not just training.
The training part, for most of us, is easy.
You can handle 45 minutes three times a week.
It is the other 23 hours and 15 minutes that are full of food and drink landmines.
You tighten that part up a bit, using the basic tips given in this article and you will start feeling the results.
The fitness model in the little outfit on the magazine or the guy with the muscles popping out everywhere on the bodybuilding magazine, or maybe just the guy or girl on the beach that just oozed health and fitness while they are playing in the waves or walking confidently out of the water after their swim, not grabbing frantically for a towel the moment they leave the protection of the water.
The thing is, you can be those people.
It is not a difficult thing to understand, it is though, a difficult thing to undertake and put into practice.
Human nature wants us to reach all our goals, be it in a professional or personal capacity, yesterday.
I want to look like that girl yesterday, and of course, it must be easy.
The real truth to the matter is that it is simple, definitely not easy.
The question begs: Can I achieve all my dreams for the perfect body by training alone? Or do I need to take a closer look at what I put in my mouth? We do not want to hear it, but the answer is YES, overwhelmingly YES! Now, before you go on a witch hunt and throw all the "bad stuff" out of your kitchen cupboards, think on the following.
Do you want to change your lifestyle and be healthier, fitter and better looking for the rest of your life? Or do you want to do it for 6 months, look awesome, get all the compliments and then go right back into the rut? If your answer is the yes for the first question, than change in your dietary habits must be gradual.
Start with an all new all healthy diet tomorrow and I promise you will not be able to stick with it.
It will be hard, you will be denying yourself all the things that you have loved for years and you will fail! Do the following for yourself.
Get a little notebook and for a full week, write everything down that you eat or drink, everything.
From the half packet of chips that you bumped off your friend to the 3 cans of fizzy drinks that you consume religiously every day.
After a week, get the fright of your life, get over it and then start making small changes.
Reduce your 3 cans of fizzy drinks to 2 in the next week and then to one in the following week.
If you are eating fast foods three times per week, cut it down to only twice a week.
Replace the one fast food meal with a home cooked meal.
Not rocket science, but this is the right approach if you want to see results and keep those results.
By eliminating the "bad" stuff slowly, you will give your body time to adjust to not getting the quantities that it is used to.
We are not currently getting into the tuff stuff of calorie counting and making sure your burn more calories than you take in.
That is an article on its own, and not something we want to go into right now.
Now we are just eliminating some of the unhealthy food and drink out of the diet.
Your next step is to go do shopping.
The best rule of thumb here is to stay away from the middle aisle, keep to the edges of the shop, there you will find all the fresh produce, go for it and pack your trolley to your hearts content, green, yellow, red.
This should make up most of your trolley.
Then go over to the meat department and stock your trolley with fresh fish and boneless, skinless chicken and some nuts.
Anything that comes in a box or has a shelf life or more than 2 weeks are prosessed junk that will clogg your arteries and your super fast blood highways will become congested back roads with a traffic light out of order.
This will lead to a "traffic standstill" in other words blood will flow slower through your body, no oxygen to the brain and eventually a stroke.
Give your body the healthy alternative and the super blood highway will stay open and you will live to be a granny one day! The point is, you can train as hard as you like, if your eating habits are somewhere between the odd donut for breakfast, the fizzy drinks, chocolates and take away foods, you are going to have a hard time looking like those beach bodies that you admire so much.
The whole concept of living healthy is just that, you have to apply it to all the parts in your life, not just training.
The training part, for most of us, is easy.
You can handle 45 minutes three times a week.
It is the other 23 hours and 15 minutes that are full of food and drink landmines.
You tighten that part up a bit, using the basic tips given in this article and you will start feeling the results.
Source...