EATING FOR A BETTER BODY

THE FIRST step in any fitness programme is proper nutrition. Put simply, you cannot consume more than your body needs or can handle and avoid gaining weight and eventually getting sick.

The first thing to drop is the word ‘diet’. This is an attempt at a change of lifestyle. It will not give overnight results but stick with it and it will become second nature, delivering results constantly.

Our main objective is to eat clean, eat small, eat often. This makes it easier to not only control how much you eat but what you eat as well.

Eating clean means basing our meals on natural foods. We strive to remove all processed foods from our diet. Processed foods usually contain extra ingredients meant to enhance taste and appearance, preserve, or bring down manufacturing costs of these items. The result is food that contains dangerous chemicals, foods that wreak havoc on the digestive system, and/or foods that contain significantly more calories or sodium than they should.

We will also seek to remove juices and drinks. They are extra calories we tend to overlook and we like to feel we need them. We don’t, and we shouldn't want them. Water is all the fluid we need and there is no reason to pack it with chemicals and sugar before we drink it. While cleaning up our nutrition, we will also try to establish a more controlled daily eating pattern. It will involve eating less but eating more often. They go hand in hand. Eating less forces you to eat more often, and eating more often pushes you to eat less and in no time it begins to feel natural.

At no point should eating make you feel so full that you are bloated or uncomfortable. This means you are eating too much per meal. Better to split that meal in two; eat the rest later or tomorrow.

AVOID THESE FOODS:

Fried anything Vegetable oils Pizza Fast foods Cookies Soda Sweets such as: Cakes Muffins Donuts Cinnamon roll/sugar bun Biscuits Drinks Manufactured ‘juices’ Sugar added beverages (tea, sweetened juices, fruit (cran ‘water’) Corned beef and other processed meats, such as sausages.

Some of these items we may introduce after we have cured ourselves of the addiction to them. For now, we will focus on eating more fruits and vegetables as well as ensuring we get adequate amounts of all macronutrients – protein, carbohydrates, and fats – as well as vitamins and minerals.

Look out for our meal prep guide coming in the Food section next week.