Weight Strength Training

Posts Tagged ‘proper diet’

Maybe you’ve already started weight strength training, or perhaps you are just looking to start. Either way, to get the best results possible you will need to create a meal plan that will enhance your results. For days that you plan on doing heavy cardio, eat plenty of carbohydrates on the day before. Carbohydrates provide a healthy and easily burnable source of energy that is optimal for high performance activities. As long as you avoid excessive salts, sugars and fats the progress you make by strength training will remain unhindered.

Taking a multivitamin and additional supplements certainly won’t hurt either. In a perfect world you would be able to get all of your required nutrients from a properly balanced diet, but modern distractions have made this fairly difficult. Also, the occasional energy snacks are fine, but pay close attention to their salt and sugar content. Unbeknownst to many consumers, there are several brands of energy snacks that are composed of unhealthy ingredients.

While your eating habits will be focused on your exercise plan, you don’t have to feel trapped in the same monotonous menu. Trade recipes, eat on the healthy menu when dining out and try new ingredients. Use proteins to promote building and repairing muscles while eating leafy greens for Folic Acid, Zinc and other essential vitamins. For greater ease, try to plan out meals on a weekly basis so that you won’t end up making excuses to eat the wrong things.

Most of us equate the word diet with calorie reduction. This is understandable, since most diet marketing is relentlessly focused on offering consumers low-calorie options.

Unfortunately, this way of thinking is categorically wrong. The simple fact that any nutritionist will verify is that everyone is on a diet. Even those who do not wish, or do not need, to lose weight are on a diet, as are those who are increasing their weight. Dieting has nothing to do with calorie reduction, and everything to do with calories choices. The foods you ‘choose’ to eat determine the type of diet you are on.

Indeed, to the digestive system and the intestines, a candy bar and a stalk of celery are neither seen as junk food nor diet food. They are both seen as simply food. The candy bar leads to a rapid glycemic reaction and the production of fat cells. The celery does not. Still, the body does not label one as junk and the other as diet food. In fact, everything that the body ingests, it tries to use in the best way that it can.

However, outside the neutral intelligent internal body systems, the term diet persists in our often rather misguided external world of advertising, marketing, and diet plans. As such, we can group diets into two categories: deliberate and accidental.

Deliberate diets are designed with specific requirements, such as those engineered to lose weight, to gain weight, and to maintain weight. Deliberate diets are typically what people refer to when they use the catchall term ‘diet’. This is in contrast to the other kind of diet that is called the ‘accidental diet’. Accidental diets have no requirements, and march to a simple chant: eat whatever, whenever, and the body will take care of itself.

However, despite the fact that there are two terms for diets – deliberate and accidental – there is a denominator that unifies them both: protein. All diets, even those that are accidental, require protein.

Protein, and the amino acids that comprise protein, are essential for life itself. Every system within the body depends, directly or indirectly, on protein. In fact, because protein regulates hormones, some cases of depression or anxiety are actually instigated and perpetuated by either a lack of protein, or the body’s inability to fortify its neurological system with this critical macronutrient.

Yet for those on a diet — and that includes everyone — the importance of protein is more pragmatic. Many deliberate diets such as the Atkins™ diet and the South Beach Diet™ restrict carbohydrates, while other restrict fats. That leaves protein. Protein is the common link between all nutritionally-sound diets. But is it also the missing link? Or, is protein readily accessible and readily present in the foods we eat?

Oddly, most American meals and snacks are protein deficient. Indeed, complete protein is absent from 6 of the top 10 foods eaten in the US, and absent from all 10 of the most popular snacks (see chart at end of article). This shortage of protein in the American diet refers both to the absolute amount of protein, which is recommended to be a minimum of 50 grams per day, and the kind of protein as well. The healthiest protein is a “complete protein”, which includes all 19 amino acids. However, even people who are ingesting 50 grams of protein may not be eating complete protein. As such, these people are sometimes unwittingly suffering from some form of protein malnourishment, and experience symptoms that include drowsiness, digestive problems, emotional disorders, and other adverse physiological effects.

So to achieve a balanced diet — regardless of the diet regimen – an appropriate level of complete protein must be present in each meal. This, of course, is easier said than done for most time-starved people. Regrettably, these people are more than time-starved; they are oftentimes macronutrient starved, as well.

Protein also builds muscle. If you are not getting proper protein intake you will have an impossible task to build muscle.