Health & Fitness

You might think eating something before working out is counterproductive if you want to lose weight, but it’s not. The food you eat can give you more energy and improve your workout. Many people in Louisiana realize they hit the wall mid-workout if they don’t fuel up and know the benefits a meal or snack can provide. There are many benefits if you time your meal or snack properly and eat the right food.

What should pre-workout food be, and when should you eat it?

Your pre-workout snack should be a combination of carbs and protein. You should avoid high-fiber and high-fat food. The ratio should be approximately 60% carbs. If you’re eating a snack, it should be about a half hour before working out and contain approximately 100 to 200 calories. It can be as simple as apple slices with peanut butter. Besides giving you the energy to maximize your workout right through the end, a pre-workout snack also helps jumpstart the recovery process.

Put fruit in the blender with milk, protein powder, or both.

Make a smoothie. It’s easy to toss fruit into the blender, add a liquid source of protein, and blend away. You can even get several bags of frozen fruit and divide them up into plastic bags containing one serving. Just put in your liquid and protein if it’s not liquid, toss in the fruit in one individual serving and blend until smooth. It takes about a minute. The natural sugars give you the energy you need and the fiber keeps your blood sugar level.

If you eat a full meal it should be two to three hours before exercising.

A pre-workout meal should be well-balanced but not contain a lot of fat. If it’s higher in fiber, eat closer to three hours before working out. Include a protein source like chicken breast or make a chicken salad sandwich served on whole wheat toast and topped with a tomato and mixed greens. Add a side of fresh fruit. Make it juicy to boost your hydration. Watermelon, grapes, and oranges provide both liquid and potassium. Include a side of baked or roasted sweet potatoes for the perfect pre-workout meal.

• An easy-to-transport snack is a stuffed date. Slice a pitted date down the middle on one side and stuff it with cream cheese, peanut butter, or other nut butter. Put a few berries on top for a bit of freshness.
• Overnight oats are a quick solution if your workout day is crowded. Add nuts, fresh fruit, or seeds on top. Use a small amount of honey if you need more sweetness.
• A large lettuce leaf makes the perfect container for a chicken salad. Make it with a small amount of chicken, celery, onion, and seasoned yogurt for flavoring. Roll the leaf around the salad and eat.
• Leftovers make good pre-workout snacks or meals. Salmon and sweet potatoes with a small side salad is an excellent meal. Dip leftover fresh veggies in a yogurt or hummus dip for a satisfying snack.

For more information, contact us today at Wellness On A Dime Coaching

For centuries, doctors noted the beneficial effects of fasting to control epileptic seizures but realized fasting isn’t sustainable. In the 1920s, they found using an extremely low-carbohydrate diet accomplished the same thing. Cutting back on carbohydrates forced the body to switch metabolism from burning sugar to burning fat. The body converts fat to ketones and burns them. That was the birth of the Keto diet that eventually morphed into a weight loss diet. It works, but as with any diet, it has pros and cons.

It’s more than just a low-carbohydrate diet.

Low-carb diets can vary dramatically. It’s all about the source of calories. In traditional diets, between 45% and 65% of the calories come from carbohydrates Low-carb diets like the Atkins diet get 25% to 40% of the calories from carbs. With the keto diet, 5% of calories come from carbohydrates, 20% from protein, and 75% from fat. If your caloric intake were 2000 calories, you’d only be able to eat 100 calories from carbohydrates. Since one gram of carbohydrates is approximately 4 calories, you could eat 25 grams of carbs. That’s a half cup of cooked asparagus and 5 grapes at 5 grams each, and 1/3 a cup of rice at 15 grams. The rest of the calories come from protein and fat.

The good news is that you’ll feel fuller longer.

The high protein and fat content of the keto diet keeps you feeling full longer. By switching from burning glucose to burning fat, it reduces insulin levels. That helps reduce insulin resistance and lower inflammation from high insulin levels. Keto diets burn more fat and that fat tends to come from the abdomen. It’s visceral fat, the most dangerous type of body fat. It can improve your blood cholesterol profile, help control diabetes, and may lower blood pressure.

There are drawbacks to using the keto diet, too.

The first thing most people notice when they use the keto diet is the keto flu.

There are negatives to the keto diet. It can cause dizziness, fatigue, nausea, headaches, and constipation. It comes from the adjustments made by the body when switching from glucose to ketones. A keto diet can be hard on the kidneys and interfere with your microbiome. It’s the sudden limit of fiber that creates that problem. The keto diet can lead to nutritional deficiencies. It can also cause blood pressure to drop too low. Using a keto diet may affect bone health.

• Even though a keto diet may lower blood pressure, there’s also a danger that it increases the risk of chronic conditions like heart disease or cancer.
• Since fruits and vegetables are carbohydrates, the keto diet limits the amount of healthy foods. It’s one reason why it can cause nutritional deficiencies.
• While the keto diet gets most of the calories from fat, people often focus on the bacon you can eat and forget about the healthy fat of avocados and nuts.
• There are both positives and negatives to the keto diet. If you choose to use the keto diet or any other diet, always check with your healthcare professional first, especially if you have health issues.

For more information, contact us today at Wellness On A Dime Coaching

Losing weight isn’t easy and losing fat is even harder. There is a difference. If you’re shedding pounds, those pounds aren’t always from fat. It can be from muscle tissue, making it even harder to lose additional pounds. You may be working your hardest and staying true to your path but still see slow or no change. You may be making fat loss mistakes that are setting you back. It’s time to make changes and turn your weight and fat loss efforts into a success.

Are you just focusing on a diet without including exercise?

Eating healthier will help you lose weight, but it won’t give you all the progress you may desire. By creating a calorie deficit, the body gets calories from burning both fat and muscle tissue. Muscle tissue requires more calories to maintain than fat tissue does, so the less you have, the slower your metabolism. Include strength training in your workout and build muscle tissue as you burn fat. The more muscle tissue you have, the higher your metabolism, the easier it is to lose weight and the more success you’ll have.

You may cut your calories too much.

If cutting your calorie intake by 500 is good, then would cutting it by 1500 be three times better? In most cases, the answer is no. Cutting calories too severely can make weight loss harder. A severely calorie-restricted diet can cause the body to go into starvation mode. That’s when it slows metabolism so there are calories for vital life functions or organs. Keeping your metabolic fires burning is vital. It’s one reason people include cheat days in their diet plans.

You might be eating low-fat diet food.

You’ll find diet foods in every grocery. They’re low-calorie or low-fat alternatives. If you want to lose fat, eating less fat sounds sensible. It doesn’t work that way. First, you need fat to burn fat. That has to be healthy fat. Second, when manufacturers remove fat, they replace it with something else to maintain taste and texture. That something else is often sugar that is far worse than fat.

• Only doing cardio is a big mistake. Include strength training to build muscle and burn fat. Cardio burns calories from both muscle and fat.
• You may think you can exercise away those extra pounds of fat, but that’s not enough. You can’t out-exercise a bad diet. Combine a healthy diet with an exercise program to burn fat.
• You focus too much on counting calories and don’t focus on eating healthy. Eating healthier means eating lower-calorie foods like fruits and vegetables and cutting out highly processed food or food with added sugar.
• One big mistake is burning the candle at both ends. Too little sleep affects your hormones. It causes the body to create too much ghrelin—the hunger hormone—and too little leptin—the one that makes you feel full.

For more information, contact us today at Wellness On A Dime Coaching

If you’ve read other blogs, you already know one of the benefits of yoga is stress relief. That can help both your mental health and physical body. When you learn to calm your mind, you’ll be able to deal with stress immediately. The breathing techniques from yoga help calm the mind. At the same time, they also help lower blood pressure, slow heart rate, relax the body, and improve overall outlook and good health.

Yoga can help protect your muscles from injury.

Yoga boosts flexibility, which increases the range of motion. An increased range of motion helps prevent muscle pulls and tears. Many of the flexibility exercises are also yoga poses. The warrior pose of yoga is similar to the Western exercise, the lunge. The bridge pose is also a bridge exercise. Yoga can help relax muscles, reduce lower back pain, increase flexibility, and build strength.

Yoga helps reduce chronic pain.

Like traditional stretching exercises, yoga increases flexibility and relaxes the muscles. That can help reduce chronic pain like back pain. It helps reduce the pressure on the joints to relieve joint pain. You’ll burn extra calories to help you lose weight, but for weight loss, the biggest benefit is the mindfulness yoga creates. You become more in touch with your body, and more aware and careful with what and how much you eat.

As noted before, yoga is a stress buster.

Stress plays a role in all aspects of health, both physical and mental. It causes the production of stress hormones that increase inflammation. Cortisol, one of the stress hormones, is associated with the accumulation of abdominal fat, the most dangerous type of fat because it crowds the organs. The reduction of abdominal fat can help prevent insulin resistance. Stretching the body with yoga can help increase lymph flow to boost the immune system, it can help prevent bone loss from osteoporosis and even reverse it.

• Yoga helps you sleep better at night. A good night’s sleep reduces stress and helps balance the satiety-hunger hormones. Lack of sleep reduces satiety hormones and increases hunger hormones.
• Doing yoga can reduce the number of headaches and their intensity. It also helps lubricate the joints by increasing the circulation of synovial fluid that lubricates the joints.
• Yoga can improve functional fitness and help older people remain independent longer. It helps lower blood pressure, reduce inflammation, and aids in strengthening the body to perform the functions of daily living.
• Even though yoga is a gentle exercise, always check with your healthcare professional before starting any exercise program. There are yoga classes for people of all fitness levels. Find one that’s right for you.

For more information, contact us today at Wellness On A Dime Coaching

If you’re hitting the gym daily and pushing as hard as you can until you can’t move, you aren’t doing yourself any favors or gaining any ground. You need rest days to achieve optimal performance. Your body needs a day or two of rest to heal and recuperate from intense workouts, especially strength-building workouts. When you do strength training, it causes micro tears in the muscles that require 48-72 hours to heal. When they heal, the scar tissue makes them stronger. If you don’t rest, the muscles continue to tear and break down.

Rest days don’t require you to sleep in or lay on the couch.

Rest days include active recovery. Active recovery is a mild exercise that increases circulation but doesn’t push your body hard. You might go for a brisk walk, ride a bike, swim, or do stretching exercises. The mild exercise and increased circulation help remove toxins, boost healing, and aid in reducing muscle soreness. It’s a good time to work on flexibility to increase the range of motion.

Burnout can occur if you don’t rest.

Have you ever dreaded going to the gym or felt too exhausted to start your workout? You probably pushed ahead, hoping you would feel better once you started. In most cases, that’s exactly what occurs. If you suffer from burnout, that feeling of dread never ends. Your workout suffers and you experience mental and physical stress. An intense workout stresses your body. If you do it consistently, that physical stress extends to mental stress. It can cause muscle weakness, injury, sleep disturbances, a higher heart rate, and reduced immunity.

Cut down the number of rest days by alternating the muscle groups you work.

Taking one day a week as a rest day is always good, so don’t omit rest days completely. To avoid overuse injuries and damage from working muscles before they heal, consider alternating the groups of muscles you use. You can do intense strength training every day and don’t have to wait 48 to 72 hours if you alternate among muscle groups. Create workouts that focus on different muscle groups. If you’re working your upper body one day, it won’t hurt to work your lower body the next day.

• Track your heart rate if there’s a chance you need rest days. It’s better to slow down your workout than to give it up for several weeks to recover.
• You’ll boost your focus and concentration when you take rest days. Lack of focus, one sign of burnout, can lead to injury or minimize the benefits of the workout.
• Rest days let you rebuild your store of glycogen. It’s stored in the muscles and used for energy when you workout. Lack of glycogen not only causes fatigue but also can cause muscle soreness.
• If weight loss is part of your goal, rest days are vital. If you stress your body too much, it leads to an overload of cortisol. Cortisol, a stress hormone, is linked to the accumulation of belly fat.

For more information, contact us today at Wellness On A Dime Coaching