You Are What You Eat
While the concept of “calories in, calories out” is true, the hormones that regulate the body are often not discussed. The standard in the fitness and bodybuilding communities is a rigid discipline of calorie counting that must 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 body’s hormonal balance, chaos ensues 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 30 lbs would rather start a diet that’s unfamiliar to them than observe which foods they’re eating are causing the weight gain.
Dieting starts to work until the body adapts to the new diet; 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 number of calories or the protein content of 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-wake cycles and helps activate the body’s fight-or-flight response. 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 familiar with dieting and who hate the dieting lifestyle. Intuitive eating helps you build 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.
