To reach your goals, you need to make sure to not only put effort into your workouts, but also into your diet. I’m sure you’ve heard people say that your progress is 30% due to exercise and 70% due to diet, and it’s true! What you put in your body can affect every other part of your life, including your workouts.
Most people always want that quick fix – that magic diet that gives you the results you want in the time you want them, without having to actually sacrifice anything. Well, guess what… it does not exist! It takes a lot of hard work, determination, and accountability to yourself to eat towards your goals.
Speaking of which, what are your goals? Because depending on what your goals are can drastically change your dietary requirements. If you’re looking to create a healthier body for yourself (keep your blood pressure, cholesterol, body fat, hormones, etc in check) then you need to monitor your intake of vitamins, minerals, carbs (complex vs simple), fats (saturated, unsaturated, trans), protein, water, and the list goes on! However, if you’re looking to transform your body without worrying about the health benefits, you just need to worry about your macros – carbs, proteins, and fats. Also, if you’re working towards performance goals, you need to manipulate your diet to your training and competition schedule, making sure you are fueling your body at the right times to elicit the best results.
Confused and overwhelmed? Here’s a simpler version of it all:
For body composition (lean muscle and fat content), it all comes down to calories in vs calories out. If you are looking to gain weight, you need to eat more than you burn (calories in > calories out). If you’re looking to lose weight, you need to burn more than you eat (calories in < calories out).
Next step: what kind of weight are you trying to gain/ lose? If you just want to gain weight, go nuts. Eat all the food. However, if you want to gain lean muscle without putting on too much fat, you need to monitor what you eat, to an extent. Same thing goes for losing weight: if you just want the number on the scale to go down, eat less. However, if you want to reduce your body fat percentage while maintaining some lean muscle under it all, you also need to monitor what goes in your stomach.
To make these changes, you need to know where you’re starting from. A good tool to monitor this is the app myfitnesspal. It helps you track what you eat and when you eat it, as well as breaking it down into the macronutrients and micronutrients you are consuming from each meal. Calories come from macronutrients. 1g of carbs accounts for 4 calories, 1g of protein is 4 calories, and 1g of fat is 9 calories. From here, you can manipulate your diet to increase the calories or decrease the calories, as well as monitor where your calories are coming from (carbs/ fats/ proteins).
When focusing on macronutrients, you can get your macros from any food source; if you want to eat an Egg McMuffin for breakfast, go for it. But realize that this means your fat intake for the day will be decently high and you will have to reduce the fats in your other meals to account for this delicious breakfast. Also, if you know you have a birthday to go to later and are going to be eating ice cream cake, you can limit your carbs and fats earlier in the day to account for the increased levels in your later meals.
In saying all this, the easiest way to maintain your macros as well as a healthy body is to just eat healthier foods. Canada’s Food Guide is a good place to start – check it out to see what a healthy body should be ingesting, and make adjustments as necessary.
The most important part of this whole post is this: these changes are not a temporary thing; to see long lasting changes in yourself, you must make these eating habits permanent. A quick 30 day diet may alter your body for a bit, but once the diet is done and the old eating habits come back, the changes go away. Change your eating habits for the better and your body will thank you for it!
Diet and exercise manipulation can be somewhat confusing at first, especially when it differs so much based on your goals. If you would like a hand getting a personal diet and exercise plan set up, feel free to leave a comment here or to email me at suggyfitness@gmail.com.