Eating For Fitness
The food we eat affects our fitness and our appearance. No one disputes that. The type and quantity of food you eat is important, when you eat and how frequently you eat is also important. If you want to succeed in improving your health and fitness, you should keep reading.
When you eat has a huge impact on your health & fitness. Let’s start from the very beginning. When you first wake up, your body hasn’t had any food for many hours. Your blood sugar level first thing in the morning is low, and your body is running on reserves. Once those reserves are used up, your body will turn to its next available source of fuel, your muscles! It’s real tough to work out hard and focus on getting fit when you’re groggy, hungry, and your body is cannibalizing the muscles for energy. You need to eat your first meal as soon as possible after waking up. This gets your body fueled up and preserves your muscles.
So now you know how important it is to have a healthy meal as soon as possible after you get up. Doing so gets your blood sugar to the correct level (assuming you are eating healthy stuff) so you can function effectively and preserves your muscles. You’ll feel better, function better, work out harder, and protect your muscles while getting into shape.
The quest to keep your blood sugar level in the right zone also tells us how often you should eat. Within 3 to 4 hours of eating, your body digests whatever you ate and your blood sugar level will start declining. So you really should eat something every 3 hours or so (except when you are sleeping at night).
If you have to eat every three hours or so, you’re going to be eating more than the standard three meals a day. For most people, that means fitting in 5 or 6 small meals a day, rather than three larger ones. By going to this kind of schedule, starting from when you get up in the morning, means you’ll never go more than three to three and a half hours between meals. Eat decent food each time and your blood sugar levels remain where you want them at all times.
One last thing. If your new diet requires you to eat five meals a day, you’re going to have to eat less in those meals. Asimple approach is to make the second and fourth meals into healthy snacks of just 100-200 calories, and cut back on the other three a bit. Doing it this way should make it easier for your body to adapt. Eating a small healthy snack mid-morning and mid-afternoon shouldn’t be too tough. Doing so also leaves you less hungry at lunch and dinner making cutting back a bit on those meals easier too.
Eat this way for a few weeks and see what you think. It will take you a lot closer to becoming as fit as you desire.
Tags: Amp, Appearance, Blood Sugar Level, Blood Sugar Levels, Decent Food, Eating Healthy, get fit at last, Getting Fit, Getting Into Shape, Half Hours, Hasn, Health And Fitness, Health Fitness, Improving Your Health, Muscles, People, Stuff
by weightloss-411admin on February 12th, 2009 | RSS | trackback
