Do you want to eat and lose weight more easily?
If so read on because today I want to address an important nutritional factor affecting sustainable weight loss.
Before I begin, it goes without saying that following a high intensity weight loss exercise plan is essential for the busy person who wants to achieve weight loss in the quickest time possible and with the shortest workouts possible.
And that by setting specific, measurable, achievable and time bound targets and applying the principles of specificity to our workouts we put our bodies in a state of fat loss, muscle gain, and gain health and fitness too.
Quick Fix Diets Don’t Help Long Term
How many of us look for quick fixes in our quest for weight loss?
I mean crash or yo-yo diets, starving yourself or taking fat loss supplements, only to put the fat right back on, plus a little bit more. It appears many many people are doing just that with limited and short lived weight loss success. Most of us apparently will go for quick fix solutions to weight loss over healthy methods for sustained weight loss and health for life.
Eat For Your Activity Levels
Are you eating appropriately for your activity levels?
Lets face it, most of us are sedentary for most of the time. Even if you exercise one hour per day that leaves 23 hours daily that you are sedentary or low level activity levels. While you are living at this level of activity the body’s primary and preferred source of energy is fat. The very thing you are trying to shed!
Now consider what most people eat at breakfast, lunch, snacks and supper.
Cereal, crisps, bread, pasta?
Low fat ‘health foods’ laced with sugar?
Most people struggle with and experience weight gain, let alone achieving fat loss because of the very foods we consume, and not because of the volume or calories we eat.
In fact I have had a weight loss coaching client eating 600kcal daily and still gaining weight. It wasn’t until she provided her body with the fats, proteins and nutrient dense foods like fruit and vegetables, and reduced her starchy refined carbohydrate intake that she began to achieve.
Eating During And After Exercise
Recovery after exercise – are sports drinks necessary?
The importance of recovery after exercise cannot be over-stated. It is essential in order to get the results you want from your training.
Refueling is important for this and the most important time for this is immediately after your training session. If you really feel the need to eat starchy or sugary foods or consume sports nutrition, do it within fifteen minutes post workout where you are extremely insulin sensitive and the likelihood of the sugar making you fat will be reduced.
An important factor in recovery and muscle gain (essential for weight loss in men an women, and don’t worry about bulking up as this won’t happen) is human growth hormone (HGH). Clever timing of your sports nutrition, or avoiding insulin inducing foods like sugar and energy drinks will make your body more likely to elicit HGH production and result in faster recovery, lean mass synthesis and fat loss.
Peak times for recovery by HGH in the body are a couple of hours after you go to sleep. This is when we repair ourselves and adapt to exercise stress and by avoiding high GI foods before bed this can be achieved. In addition a siesta may well aid recovery but remember you are not likely to have a HGH response if you’ve previously ingested high glycemic index foods. Additionally high GI foods are extremely likely to make you gain weight – not good for you fat loss goals!
How To Eat And Lose Weight
Match your eating to your weight loss goal
Since we don’t perform the same training sessions all year long and periodisation is crucial to improved performance, ensure that your fuelling matches your training. Adjust your protein, fat and carbohydrate intake as your training changes to ensure rapid recovery. All macronutrients play an essential role and your body needs different ratios of each at different training periods.
Take home points – 5 steps to maximise both recovery and weight loss
- Consume sports nutrition quickly post exercise and stay away from it at other times of the day.
- Avoid high carbohydrates during your sedentary day.
- Question the need for sports nutrition at all if your sessions are short.
- Perform very high intensity and short sessions to maximise growth response and fatloss.
- Allow your training to dictate your nutrition. Lots of low intensity exercise using fat for fuel with limited fatloss, or high intensity interval sessions and rapid fatloss? Which have you got time for?
I think it is sad to see so many frustrated people being fed poor nutrition and exercise advice and end up wasting time and money on gimmicky fads that end in disappointment. I hope this blog helps you avoid these mistakes.
If you’re fed up of quick fix and fad diets and you’re ready to make small strategic change to your lifestyle, you’re serious about losing weight in a sustainable way, then please learn more about online nutrition coaching. It is a very different approach to losing weight, and offers you more than just ‘weight loss’, but empowers you to be in control of your eating habits, so you can stop worrying about food and focus on enjoying your life.