You Are What You Eat
While the concept of calories in, calories out is true, it’s the hormones that regulate the body that’s 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 food choices have 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 only has usefulness in our life when we haven’t learned too much about our own bodies. For example, a person looking to lose 30lbs will rather start a diet that’s unfamiliar to them instead of observing which foods they’re eating is causing the weight gain.
The dieting starts to work until the body learns to adapt to this new diet and the weight loss begins to plateau and then climbs back up over time.
Weight gain is simply the byproduct of an hormone imbalance that has to corrected to restore order in 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 main this negentrophy at all cost 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 of high fat, sugar, and carbs had much higher cortisol levels than people who were eating more fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and polyunsaturated foods.
Cortisol is the stress hormone that regulates our sleep/waking cycles and helps activates 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 with people familiar with dieting and hate the dieting lifestyle. Intuitive eating allows you to form a healthy relationship with your foods by removing your anxiety to ‘bad’ foods, which cause 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 on how much food you need to consume for your body’s needs.
You also start to become aware of bad eating habits that you may have that could be causing you to self-sabotage yourself. Some examples of these bad habits are watching TV while eating, finishing your plates when attempting to lose weight, eating too small of portions and snacking later, and forgetting to eat more whole foods instead of processed foods.
The Wrap Up
When trying to decide on the appropriate diet that will deliver results, choosing to stray away from specific diets is wise 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 that 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
Why Staying Committed to Most Diets is So Difficult
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