In order for a person to begin to lose weight and avoid crash dieting, there are six pillars of nutrition. These pillars, or steps are progressive and one leads naturally to the next one. These pillars facilitate a lifestyle change rather than a crash diet that rarely works and often creates a yo-yo effect on a person’s weight.
First Pillar - Eat five or six meals a day. This spreads meals over the course of a day rather than just eating one or two large meals a day which is not good on the body.
Second Pillar - Limit your consumption of sugar or processed foods. This includes soft drinks, frozen dinners, even “sports drinks” - Gatorade, vitamin water, all those types of drinks. You should also limit your intake of processed foods and deli meats.
Third Pillar - Eat more fruits and vegetables. This provides you lots of vitamins and minerals, they’re going to boost your health; they are not very calorie-dense, so you’re going to be able to eat a large volume of food without getting in many calories.
Pillar 4 - Drink more water and cut out calorie-containing beverages. That sort of goes along with Pillar 2, with the sugar, but here we’re looking at beer, soda, those $5.00 lattes from places like Starbuck’s or your favorite coffee place.
Those are loaded with sugar, which are empty calories. Consider the vitamin water craze that’s going on right now. These “healthy” drinks have 40 grams of carbohydrates.
Research and scientific studies have shown that people aren’t very good at sensing how many calories they’re drinking. If you drink 200 calories in the form of a soda or a latte or something like that, when you go down to sit at your next meal, your body’s not going to compensate and eat less. You will eat the same amount that you had previously.
Pillar 5 - Focus on consuming lean proteins throughout the day. This does not
include processed meats, bologna, salami, deli meats. Replace these process
meats with fish; there are different types of fish that you can eat. Even
salmon, would normally and traditionally be considered the fattier types of
fish; those are great because they contain great Omega 3 fatty
acids.
Chicken, lean red meat, pork are lean proteins and can be consumed as
proteins at every meal.
The importance of eating enough protein is that it’s going to provide you
building blocks for muscle, and it’s going tp help prevent the reduction and
loss of lean body mass when you’re dieting. This is very important, because when
you lose lean body mass your metabolism slows down.
In addition, protein is
satiating; it makes you feel full and it has a greater thermic affect of food.
It takes your body more energy to digest protein than it does to digest
carbohydrates or fats.
6th Pillar - Save starch-containing foods until after your workouts or for
breakfast. Basically what that means is foods like pasta, rice, potatoes,
oatmeal can be consumed as foods after you’ve worked out, and then sometimes in
the mornings for breakfast, which could be your first meal of the day.
For
oatmeal, that would be an ideal time to have. The reasoning behind this pillar
is that your body takes those carbohydrates and puts them to use as a fuel and
not as fat storage.
It has a lot to do with the hormone insulin, which when you eat carbohydrates, insulin is released and your blood sugar goes up. Now, insulin, it’s just thinking to itself, “We just need to get the sugar out of the blood. I don’t necessarily care where. We can go into muscle cells, or we can go into fat cells. Whatever’s available.”
After your workouts, insulin comes up, but your muscle cells are more sensitive to it. Therefore, your blood sugar rises, insulin is released, but all of a sudden, insulin is causing the blood sugar to go to your muscles and not your fat cells. So that’s where you need to limit these starchy carbohydrates to a time when your body is going to preferably shuttle them to good places.
Put these simple nutritional tactics into play and you will start losing weight with great ease. Remember no more counting calories. Just follow these rules.
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About the Author: Mike Roussell is an author and nutrition doctoral student at Pennsylvania State University. Mike writings can be found in Men's Health and Men's Fitness and Ironman Magazines in addition to the internet's largest bodybuilding and fitness website - T-Nation.com His Warp Speed Fat Loss system is a complete Done-for-You A-Z Fat Loss Blueprint. You can learn more at WarpSpeedFatLoss.com Warp Speed Fat Loss is a complete 28 day diet and training system crafted to help you lose 10,15, or 20lbs of body fat in just 28 day. To start losing weight fast visit Warp Speed Fat Loss. |