You Are What You Eat
While the concept of calories in, calories out is true, it’s the hormones that regulate the body that are often not discussed. The standard in the fitness and bodybuilding communities is this rigid discipline of calorie counting that has to become part of a person’s lifestyle.
Certain foods trigger different hormonal responses in the body, which is why counting calories is only effective to a certain extent. When we ignore the balance of hormones in the body, chaos begins to occur, and health starts to decline.
Not only can hormones make dramatic changes to your body in a short period of time, but a lack of minerals can affect how you look and the amount of pump in the muscles.
Why The Best Diet is No Diet
Dieting is only useful in our lives when we haven’t learned much about our own bodies. For example, a person looking to lose 30lbs will rather start a diet that’s unfamiliar to them than observe which foods they’re eating are causing the weight gain.
The dieting starts to work until the body adapts to the new diet, the weight loss begins to plateau, then climbs back up over time.
Weight gain is simply a byproduct of a hormone imbalance that an individual must correct to restore order to the body. The reversal of entropy or things coming into order is called negentrophy.
The main goal of any serious weightlifter or fitness athlete should be to maintain this negentrophy at all costs to maximize performance whenever you’re training. Many diets neglect this and focus on the amount of calories or protein macronutrients within each meal.
People consuming a standard American diet high in fat, sugar, and carbs had much higher cortisol levels than those eating more fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and polyunsaturated foods.
Cortisol is the stress hormone that regulates our sleep/waking cycles and helps activate the body’s flight/fight response system. When there’s an imbalance of this stress hormone, this can result in higher-than-normal blood sugar levels, feelings of anxiety, and difficulty sleeping.
Dieting is very black and white. It’s either perfect or you’re off the rails, which sets your body up for failure.
This is where the concept of intuitive eating has become popular among people who are familiar with dieting and hate the dieting lifestyle. Intuitive eating allows you to form a healthy relationship with your food by removing the anxiety around ‘bad’ foods, which can lead to overeating.
Intuitive eating removes restriction and allows freedom, abundance, and flexibility. As you learn to listen to your body’s hunger/fullness cues, you gain insight into how much food you need to consume for your body’s needs.
You also start to become aware of bad eating habits you may have that could be causing you to self-sabotage. Some examples of these bad habits are watching TV while eating, finishing your plate when trying to lose weight, eating too small portions, snacking later, and forgetting to eat more whole foods rather than processed foods.
The Wrap Up
When deciding on the appropriate diet to deliver results, it’s wise to avoid specific diets to avoid wasting time. Attempting to start a diet without resolving the conflicts that cause overeating will create chaos within your body and make weight management more challenging. Establish a healthy relationship with your food, strive hard in the gym, and watch your physique change right before your eyes.
What else do you want to know?
Why Changing Your Dieting Style Is Irrelevant
