🏋Mazzle's Getting Fit - Food Food Food! 🏋

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Food - The Biggest Part of Hitting Your Fitness Goals

Firstly, I am not a nutritionist. I am not trying to be an expert here. I am just talking from my personal experience to date.

When talking fitness, we generally focus on the exercise. What we don't talk about is the most important part of your lifestyle, and that's what you eat.

Food is a huge part of achieving any fitness goal, but there's a tonne of misinformation out there. And this misinformation can lead to a hell of a lot of confusion about what a real and sustainable diet should look like.

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For example, a lot of clients that I've met in recent months have been encouraged to follow diets such as the ketogenic diet by their friends and colleagues. And while the ketogenic diet has its place, the diet originated as as a way to reduce epileptic seizures in people suffering from the condition rather than as a method to lose weight. Doctors simply noticed that those who followed the diet also lost weight.

So while this diet can be successful in aiding a person to lose weight, it is a diet that really needs a high level of understanding to execute properly, and if not managed well, can cause some unwanted health problems.

The ketogenic diet is a diet where you remove almost all carbohydrates from your diet, and drastically increase your protein and fat intake. The ketogenic diet involves forcing your body into the state of ketosis which is where your body utilises fats for its energy source rather than carbohydrates - which is its natural source of energy.

Ketosis isn't a simple state to maintain, and a lot of people get this wrong. Long term ketosis can also lead to a lot of negative health implications, so it's not a diet that is designed for long term use. Making it very unsustainable.

Diets should be sustainable over the long term

Dieting doesn't work, so if you're going to maintain a high level of fitness and a healthy weight then your diet needs to be sustainable over the long term.

What this means is that you need to allow yourself an occasional cheat day, we all want to go out and have fun on the weekend. But your diet throughout the rest of your week needs to be one that is healthy i.e. lots of good quality, healthy foods such as plant based foods and balanced amounts of healthy proteins and carbohydrates.

Your diet should be low on processed foods, reasonably low in salts, and low in processed sugars. And of course, we should probably avoid alcohol as much as possible, not that I'm great at this one.

I am not an expert, I should make this clear but even a diet like this is something that I can understand and stick to (most of the time). So this is how I eat.

Put simply, your diet needs to work for you over the long term while allowing you to maintain your ideal level of fitness and weight. And you also need to be able to enjoy yourself from time to time. We all need fun in our lives and your diet shouldn't ruin this for you.

Fad diets should be avoided at all costs. They are not sustainable over the long term and some can even lead to some serious health implications.