Eating healthy should not be seen as a chore or difficult; it should be looked at as a necessity. It is the secret to longevity.
A healthy diet can have lots of other positive effects on your body, such as better skin, feeling more active, and not to mention having less fat. When a balanced diet and regular exercise are coupled, the advantages are much more apparent. Bodybuilders are among the healthiest people on earth in terms of the diet, exercise, and lifestyle. To be a bodybuilder you need to adopt some basic routines into your life.
These are regular exercising, feeding the body the right nutrition at the right time, and getting sufficient rest. These three basics need to be followed rigidly if you are a professional bodybuilder or hoping to be. But there are many aspects of a bodybuilder’s life that can be used by all of us to improve our health and well-being.
It’s All About the Diet
As a bodybuilder it is all about getting to know your body and understanding its needs. But this is not just true for bodybuilders. Many of us eat when we are hungry without any thought for what the body actually needs. Of course we all know that the body needs food for energy, but just because we are full doesn’t mean the body is getting the right energy.
In today’s food market which is full of quick fix meals and fast food it is understandable why so many people end up filling their bodies with foods that the body doesn’t want and doesn’t have any use for. A diet packed with these types of foods will cause you to feel lethargic, start packing on the fat, and make you want to eat more as the body still cries out for some decent food. Such a cycle is dangerous.
A bodybuilder will eat something on an average of every two to three hours. This is not because the person is hungry all the time, but it is to keep the body in constant supply of all the nutrients that the body needs. Eating small healthy meals every two to three hours also goes a long way to preventing the craving of fast foods and snacks which happens to most of us when we allow ourselves to get hungry.
This also helps regulate metabolism and prevents fat storage. If the body knows it will be getting a regular supply of the nutrient it needs for energy and other functions then it will get into the habit of storing less fat. If you tend to eat irregularly and skip meals the body will store fat so that it can call upon these reserves for energy because it doesn’t know when you will end up missing a meal. Of course not all the stored fat will get used and the longer you continue to eat irregularly the more fat will build up.
For the typical individual who has no intention of becoming a bodybuilder, making sure you eat three main meals everyday and snacking on fruits, vegetables, or other low fat, low sugar snacks will be of huge benefit.
A typical days meal could look something like this for example:
Breakfast –
- Medium sized bowl of porridge with a teaspoon of honey
- 1 banana
- Glass of orange juice
Mid morning snack –
- Yogurt or rice pudding
- Fruit
Lunch –
- Chicken salad sandwich
- Low fat snack
- Fruit
Dinner –
- Grilled Salmon
- Brown Rice
- Vegetables
The above list of meals gives an idea of the types of foods you should be including in your diet, but there are lots of different ways to tweak your meals to make them more appealing to you and to make them more exciting. Structuring your meals in this way does enable you to easily feed the body the right nutrients. Some forward planning will be needed but after a few weeks then eating healthy will be second nature.
