Eating for Looks and Life
Eating for Looks & Life:
An Introduction to Healthy Eating Habits
Nutritional habits play an extremely important role in how you look and ultimately how you feel. Everyone needs to eat basic and nutritional foods everyday in order to survive. However, if your goals expand beyond everyday survival (such as fat loss or weight gain), then your requirements for such things as calories (energy), fat, protein, carbohydrates, vitamins, minerals and water can change dramatically.
Whether your goals are to simply eat for good health or to become a competitive bodybuilder, eating the right foods and maintaining a consistent and proper diet can become a difficult task. It may even appear to be impossible to eat the right foods and follow a nutritious diet with all that you have going on in your life. But ignoring or making no effort to manage your nutrition can have devastating consequences on your body.
Without daily physical exercise and moderate attention to diet and nutrition, the potential to gain weight in fat increases greatly. In fact, did you know that when women exit their adolescence and enter college, the work force, or start their adult lives, well over 50% of them gain an average of ten pounds or more during their first two years of independence? And that weight gain is in the form of fat!
You should not equate following a good diet or eating right as not eating good foods, nor should eating right be equated with torture or pain. Following a sound, nutritious diet daily does not mean that you will eliminate all so-called bad foods or "junk" foods from your life forever. However, following a good diet does require some discipline, awareness and preparation.
Remember "you are what you eat." If your diet consists primarily of "junk" food, chances are that you will not look and feel your best. Likewise, if your diet consists mostly of good, healthy food, then the chances that you will look and feel good substantially increase.
Eating right to attain your goals can seem complicated due to the wealth of information and conflicting schools of thought related to dietary issues. However, there are three simple and basic components of diet that affect everyone:
1. CONTENT (what you eat)
2. VOLUME (how much you eat)
3. FREQUENCY (how often you eat)
In addition, there are three basic goals that determine how we manage those components:
WEIGHT GAIN (in the form of muscular weight)
WEIGHT LOSS (in the form of unwanted fat)
WEIGHT MAINTENANCE (management of one's present conditioning)
As goals change over time, so do the eating components. When we decided to pursue fitness competitions and modeling part-time, we had to change the muscle build of our bodies and reduce over all body fat. We went from 135 lbs. and 16% body fat with an athletic build (from our college softball training), to a restructured a more solid, lean muscular balanced body at 145 lbs. and 12% body fat. We did this by increasing the frequency (number of meals per day), moderating the volume (how much we ate at each meal) and completely changing the content (what we ate).
Fit Tip: Body Image
We have seen too many people become too obsessed with their mirror image. Get a third eye to help watch you progress, and track your progress by taking photos to compare every four weeks.
