Why Diet Is As Important As Fitness?

There’s a reason why I include nutritional coaching with personal training. It’s because diet is just as important as fitness, if not more important. It’s all about living a healthier lifestyle that includes adequate sleep, eliminating unhealthy habits, and staying hydrated. The food you eat determines whether you’ll be successful when you exercise or only see minor improvements. You can’t build muscle tissue if you don’t have the proper nutrition.

You can’t out-exercise a bad diet.

Do you eat plenty of fruits and vegetables, including greens, at every meal or are you a fast food junkie? Taking nutrition out of the picture and just focusing on calories, you’ll see how weight loss is nearly impossible with a fast food diet. A cheesy jalapeño bacon quarter pounder with double cheese has 870 calories, a large fry has 480 calories, and a large cola provides 290 calories. That’s 1640 calories in just one meal. Add another 500 calories if you include a shake. You’d have to run over an hour at top speed just to burn off those calories or jump rope for almost two hours. It is too easy to consume extra calories and far harder to burn extra calories.

You need a healthy diet to provide the building blocks for muscle and energy.

There’s a reason a pre-workout and post-workout snack is important. A pre-workout snack provides energy to get more from the workout and a post-workout snack speeds the recovery process and helps boost muscle growth. You need the right fuel, including lean protein, beneficial carbohydrates, and healthy fat. Some people recoil when they hear the word fat, but you need fat in your diet to burn fat. The body also requires vitamins, minerals, and phytonutrients to function properly.

When you eat, you’re eating for trillions.

When you eat, you provide more than just nutrition for your body. You’re also feeding the trillions of microbes in it. You have more microbes than you have cells. Some are beneficial and others are harmful. Building a microbiome of primarily beneficial bacteria means eating a healthy diet that contains adequate prebiotics. Soluble fiber found in fruits and vegetables are prebiotics that feed the beneficial microbes, some of which boost weight loss. Sugar and simple carbohydrates feed harmful microbes.

• Besides a healthy diet, you can boost beneficial bacteria by increasing your daily exercise. Studies show a program of regular exercise boosted the population of beneficial microbes.
• Losing weight isn’t the only fitness goal a healthy diet benefits. Boosting energy, improving endurance, building muscles, and improving health are other fitness goals a healthy diet benefits.
• Remember the food you eat is only part of the calories you consume. What you drink makes a difference, too. Sweet tea and soft drinks are also high in calories. Switch to bottled water to cut calories.
• Studies show that drinking diet soda doesn’t help. One study found the more diet soft drinks people had daily, the bigger their waist circumference due to belly fat.

For more information, contact us today at Thrive Fitness!