Do you want to lose weight more easily with nutrition and exercise? Today I want to address important nutritional factors that affect weight loss and workout recovery.
Before I begin, it goes without saying that following high intensity weight loss exercise plans 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.
How many of us overlook nutrition in our quest for weight loss though?
Proper nutrition will allow you to lose weight more easily. I don’t 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.
Which answers the question – how many of us overlook nutrition in our weight loss efforts? Most of us apparently will go for quick fix solutions to weight loss over healthy methods for sustained weight loss and health for life.
However there is an alternative to dieting.
Eat Appropriately For Your Activity Levels
Lets face it, many 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 recently started working with a new client who had previously been eating 600 kcal daily and still gaining weight. While the NICE guidelines do advocate eating such a VLCD I would never recommend it.
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 weight loss results. Which goes to show how adaptive the body is, and as calorie intake is reduced, so is the metabolic rate.
The importance of recovery after exercise cannot be over-stated.
It is essential in order to get the results you want from your training.
Refuelling 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 wont happen) is human growth hormone (HGH). Clever timing of your sports nutrition, or avoiding insulin inducng 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 fatloss.
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!
Lose Weight More Easily By Eating For Your 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 macro-nutrients play an essential role and your body needs different ratios of each at different training periods.
Match Your Nutrition To Your Exercise
| Training Volume | Intensity | Nutrition |
| High – endurance athletes and a mistake for fatloss | Low – running, cycling, swimming | Increase your fat intake, with lower carbohydrate and maintain high protein |
| Low – great for fatloss and getting lean body | High – interval training, resistance exercise | Decrease your fat and carbohydrates intake, and maintain a high protein intake |
Protein should be maintained at twenty to thirty percent of total calories. Fat and carbohydrate content should change with training intensity and volume. As always concentrate on a nutrient dense diet.
5 Steps To Lose Weight More Easily And Recover Quickly
- If needed at all, consume sports nutrition within 15 minutes 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?
Its sad that so many of us are looking to lose weight more easily and struggling. By living and eating consistently in line with your goals you will move in the right direction. The key is consistency.
If losing weight and eating consistently well is preventing you from achieving the results that you need, then weight loss coaching might the nudge you need in the right direction.
Please get in touch if you’re stuck, and I hope you find this information useful and it helps you to lose weight more easily.
Happy training,
Nico.