NUTRITION BASICS

Today's topic is about health and fitness. I forgot to mention that English is not my first language so I apologize if something is not clear, just write a comment below and I'll try to explain ok?. So, as in my previous post, I'm going to start by saying that I am not a professional bodybuilder or anything like it. Yet, I've always had this passion for sports, staying in shape. I love being able to get my body to look the way I want and not just accepting that my body is a certain way because I am cursed or something (which I've known lots of people that think this way). In order to be able to do this, you first need to know how the body works and respond to certain things like training and nutrition.

Now, as I said before I am not a bodybuilder of fitness model or anything like that. This means that I have a life like everyone else, I go out at night, I work, I study, I have my "cheat meals" and I even have some drinks now and then. I make sure though, that for the most part of the week I take healthy decisions when it comes to eating. With this lifestyle and with 24 years old I weight about 86 Kg, 1,80 mts in height and my body fat is somewhere around 12%.

I've been training for about 10 years now. Of course when I started out I didn't know anything about how this thing worked, I used to hit the gym and that's it. The thing is, lots of people do that for years without wondering why hasn't their body changed, why cant they gain some muscle mass on their bodies. I have been reading a lot about training and dieting for the last 10 years and here I am now trying to share some of my knowledge to save you some time haha.

So, today I am going to go with the basics. Fist of, loosing weight and gaining muscle is not only about hitting the gym hard and you are done, this might work at first because you go from doing nothing to actually exercising and burning calories. However, after some time doing this you are going to notice that you are no longer loosing fat nor building muscle. This is because you probably haven't changed your eating habits much.

I like to think that nutrition is 80% if not more when it comes to transforming your body. Training will be the other 20% leaving the supplementation as an extra thing.

When you hear the word diet you probably are thinking: ohh man do I really need to starve? .. Let me tell you its absolutely the opposite. I see so much people following generic diets that somebody told them its great or they read about them on the internet. I just cant believe it, those diets are NOT HEATHY, those diets do work in the short term just because most of them are low on calories. You ARE going to starve with this diets, and yeah you are going to loose some weight. BUT, when you drop the diet and you start eating as you normally do (because you don't want to starve for the rest of your life do yo?) you are going to get fat again, probably fatter than you were.

So what you need to do is actually very simple. You need to EAT MORE FREQUENTLY. Yes, you are actually going to eat more. But you are going to eat the right food at the right times ok? The normal thing for regular people is to eat 4 times a day right? well you are going to add in a pre-workout meal and a post-workout meal. That makes it about 6 meals a day at least. What you need to do is eat smaller portions of food every 2-3 hours. That way you will keep a high metabolism. Think about it this way: we humans are survivors right? So our body stores fat in order to have somewhere where to take the energy in case we cannot find any food for some days. Everything has evolved except our digestive system. Our body doesn't know that you can have a burger anytime you want. So by eating frequently, your body its going to get used to getting the fuel it needs throughout the day and wont find it necessary to store fat. (I hope I'm being clear haha).

Now lets talk about WHAT you have to eat, cus you know you wont loose any fat if you are eating junk food every 2-3 hours haha. Lets go over the 3 Macronutrients: Protein, Carbs and Fats.

Protein is what you need to eat most ok? it prevents muscle catabolism, aids recovery, raises your metabolism and can even be an energy source in some cases. You need to get about 1 - 1.5 grams of protein per pound of body weight, divided into the 6-7 meals you are going to have.

Carbs are going to be your primary energy source. Try to get the complex type of carbohydrates ok? simple carbs might work for hard gainers but usually you want to stick with the complex. This is because simple carbs spike your insulin levels and that ends up storing fat. Some examples of complex carbohydrates are: sweat potato, wheat bread, brown rice and oats. Keep fruits to a minimum, if you want to eat them try to have them with your breakfast or your pre and post workout meals. The amount of carbs varies depending on the persons somatotype (will talk about this on future posts) and how active you are during the day besides training. So, I would suggest to test yourself, start by taking the same amount as you take of protein, you check how it affects you in a few weeks and then consider if you have to increase them or decrease them.

Fats are also very important. Good fats of course, such as olive oil, nuts, egg yolks and avocado. Aids with hormone production and can actually aid in fat loss. However, dont exceed them because fats have more calories than protein or carbs. Start with about 0.5g of fat per pound of body weight.

Get this 3 Macros on check and you will already have your daily calories on check. After these you have the micronutrients which are essentially the vitamins. You might consider taking a multivitamin supplement for these.

Don't forget to drink water. Stay hydrated! Water aids fat loss too and definitely improves your performance.

So, today I talked a lot about nutrition cus as I said before, its the 80% or more of this whole deal. Want to transform your body, try my suggestions, these are the basics, I'll be posting a lot more in the future. Tomorrow I'll go a bit over how to train ok? Hope this is helpful. Thanks for your time. Bye for now!