Regular exercise combined with a nutritiously structured and consistent diet will provide you with even greater fitness benefits over time. You will experience some improvements after 6 to 8 weeks, and by 3 to 4 months, you will have a reasonably impressive overhaul of your health and general wellness.
What Are Your Daily Food Intake Habits?
Whether building muscle or shedding fat, the calories quantity, and quality you consume daily, are key determinants. It can be quite a daunting task to keep tabs on the calorie content of everything you consume. Or perhaps, you live a busy lifestyle and may not have the time to engage in nitty-gritty details such as these. Additionally, consuming calories in surplus or denying your body the much-needed calories will likely give you undesirable results.
If your calories intake is insufficient, instead of losing fat, your muscles may break down instead. Excessive calories will lead to weight gain in the form of fat, as opposed to lean muscle. For optimal results, you will need to ensure you balance out the calorie’s macronutrient ratios of fats, proteins, and carbs by following a personalized diet and exercise plan. Supplementation, such as with Nutridyn supplements, can be a strategic way to meet your macronutrient and micronutrient needs, especially when tailored to your individual dietary and fitness goals. In addition to this, there are basic eating rules to adhere to stay lean and healthy. These are:
- Consume food every two to four hours.
- Eat different variations of healthy fats regularly.
- Ensure that the majority of your carbs come from high-quality sources and are ingested during exercise or at night.
- Include veggies with every meal.
- Include a protein source in each meal.
How Does Nutrition Affect Your Body?
Your body composition has several factors that impact it directly, such as genetics, hormones, environment, stress levels, sleep patterns, and nutrition. Therefore, to prevent weight loss or weight gain, essentially, your calories intake should equal the output, thus maintaining homeostasis. For an effective body transformation, you will need to balance out your nutritional value intake with essential foods that will help you achieve visible results.
Essential Nutrition Tips
Here are 3 essential nutrition tips for a body transformation.
#1: Change Your Lifestyle
When you go on a typical diet, you risk metabolic damage by cutting off high-calorie foodstuffs, making it difficult to reduce weight in the long run. Most times, the high-calorie foods that you cut off will not be adequately replaced, causing a calorie deficit. This will lead to cravings, a direct temptation of your willpower.
Instead of going on a diet, which typically has a life span, meaning you are back to your old ways once your timeline is over, change your lifestyle by adding nutritional foods to your daily meals. Derive your carbs from vegetables mostly. Add good quality fats as they aid the body in transporting nutrients, aid in brain function, and a variety of other critical metabolic activities.
#2: Prepare Your Meals in Advance
One of the biggest culprits to eating meals poor in nutritional value is a busy lifestyle. Long working hours will make you skip meals and when you eventually eat, you are likely to opt for fast food. While healthy take-out options exist, it is difficult to ensure they have the right number of calories, and more often than not, dictating the condiments isn’t an option.
To alleviate this, consider preparing your meals in advance. This will ensure you plan each meal with sufficient carbs, fat, protein, fruit, and vegetables. Taking an hour or two over the weekend to prepare several different meals that you can spread out over a couple of days for the week will ensure you maintain healthy eating.
#3: Choose Your Carbohydrates Wisely
Carbohydrates are the weakness of many because they taste so good. However, because they are generally high in calories and low in fiber and nutrients, they are responsible for most fatty weight gain. To create a calorie deficit to increase fat loss and maximize muscle growth, you will need to control your consumption of carbs.
For maximum performance, carbohydrates are a fantastic fuel source and assist in the sustenance of training intensity, so not all are harmful. Lean people tend to tolerate carbs more, as insulin sensitivity improves, allowing more glucose from the blood to be apportioned into muscle tissue and far less into adipose tissues, as this is where body fat might build up.
Eating healthy and monitoring your calories intake doesn’t mean that you have to eat boring, tasteless food. If you are looking to burn fat and gain muscle, here are some healthy, tasty food options that will assist you in the process. However, please note that different body types react differently to certain foods and you will need to monitor your body and understand what works best for you as an individual.
*Photos by RODNAE Productions
