People are frequently surprised that Next Level Fitness in Irvine, CA, offers nutritional meal planning besides personalized workouts. They shouldn’t be. Diet is as important as fitness to be your best self. If weight loss or muscle building are your goals, getting adequate nutrition and eating healthy, low-calorie foods is 80% of the challenge. You can’t out-exercise a bad diet. It’s also true that you can’t build muscles just by lifting a spoon. Exercise also plays a vital role in weight loss.
Building muscles and losing weight efforts improve when you eat healthy and exercise.
Weight gain or loss boils down to calorie surplus or calorie deficit. If you want to lose a pound, you need to eat 3500 calories than you burn. You can do it in three ways. You can maintain your calorie intake and exercise to boost the calories you expend, reduce your calorie intake, or increase your exercise time and the number of calories you burn as you reduce the calories you consume. If you do both, you’ll lose weight faster. Exercise builds muscle tissue, but you also need building blocks for muscle. A healthy diet provides that.
A healthy lifestyle improves your longevity.
A healthy lifestyle can extend your life. Adequate sleep, a nutritious diet, and regular exercise are good ways to start your program. Exercise keeps you looking and feeling younger. It affects the body on a cellular level by creating longer telomeres. Telomeres are at the end of chromosomes and prevent them from unraveling, protecting them from damage or death. Exercise also increases the body’s stem cells, which replace damaged cells.
What you eat makes a difference. ‘
Your body is a complex machine. Just getting up in the morning requires thousands of messages sent to various parts. Hormones and enzymes help transport these messages. The body needs the proper nutrients to create the enzymes or hormones. Gut microbes produce some of them. They play a vital role in your body’s health. The diversity and number of microbes determine digestive health, immunity, metabolism, and mood. A well-balanced microbiome largely depends on diet, although fitness does play a role. Fiber feeds beneficial microbes. Sugar feeds harmful ones. Sugar also causes inflammation, while a diet containing certain fruits and vegetables can reduce inflammation.
- A diet high in sugar causes blood glucose levels to spike. Insulin opens cells to uptake blood glucose, so it increases insulin. That leads to inflammation, obesity, and insulin resistance, a precursor of type 2 diabetes.
- A healthy diet contains antioxidants that prevent oxidation, which causes cell damage and death. Phytochemicals that give plants their color provide those antioxidants. Each color has different benefits. It’s why your plate should contain a variety of colors.
- You don’t have to diet or go on a strict exercise program to get benefits. Cutting out highly processed food or food with added sugar and increasing your activity is beneficial.
- You don’t need a full half-hour to an hour straight to exercise. You can break it up into ten to fifteen-minute sections. Instead of exercising a half-hour all at once, break it into ten-minute sessions you do when time is available.
For more information, contact us today at Next Level Fitness