Following on from the first instalment of this article, as promised, here are five things to focus your energy on instead of a diet to ensure life long results :
Focus On Food Quality Over Food Quantity. 🍱
Instead of counting calories of low-quality foods like cereal, canned soup, sandwiches, chips, and fast food, you need to design meals around whole foods: Meat, fish, nuts, seeds, eggs, vegetables, fruit, dairy. These foods have lower energy density but greater nutrition than most refined foods, which allows for greater meal satisfaction and the elimination of constant hunger.
Train With Weights. 🏋🏼♂️
Instead of focusing on calorie burning, your first mode of exercise should be to train with weights because this will maintain muscle mass so that you sustain the amount of calories your body burns daily. It also leads to beneficial metabolic adaptations such as increased fat burning, a higher resting energy expenditure, and better blood sugar management.
Design Meals Around Protein, Especially Breakfast. 🍳🍗🥩🍤
Protein for breakfast is especially important because apart from being the building blocks for that all-important muscle synthesis it will also suppress appetite and can subsequent eating over the course of the day.
Stress-Busting.🤯
If you’re trying to improve body composition but haven’t taken your stress levels into consideration, you could be setting yourself up to fail!
Stress raises cortisol, which triggers food intake of high carb sugar-laden foods. The hormone insulin, which is released in response to carbohydrates, is a cortisol antagonist, which means that when insulin goes up cortisol goes down. Carbohydrate cravings are essentially a protective way for the body to manage stress.
Take Responsibility For Your Results. 😇
It’s easy to blame if you don’t get results when in reality, it was you who deviated from the program.
When you take responsibility for your nutrition and physical activity, it makes you accountable to yourself for any mistakes. If you’re always blaming someone or something for missing a workout or eating something you don’t actually want to, how will you ever improve?
The solution is to figure out a way of exercise and eating that you ENJOY. If you hate and can’t stick to something, it’s never going to work. Fact!
Finding gratification in the day to day experience and creating positive habits will see you want to keep coming back for more.
I’ll leave you with this thought… What is ONE thing you can change right now that will move you closer towards your goal?