A Look at Nutrition, Diet and Exercise
Wed, 1st July 2009
Health and fitness is a hot topic with people nowadays. In addition, young people, and others interested in their physical fitness have the desire to sculpt their bodies to ahieve that magazine-cover look. As a result, gyms, health spas and other fitness centers have proliferated to cater to the needs of the fitness buffs and exercise afficionados.
Informercials selling their exercise machines, weight loss products, and other paraphernalia to improve fitness have more or less gained control over the airwaves and made their way into the households. Exerise is not the only way to build that body beautiful. It also involves interest in eating healthy food. Being healthy and fit requires one to follow a nutritional diet in addition to exercise to attain overall fitness.
Nutrition and diet are as essential as exercise itself. Having the proper nutrients in your diet provides the essential nutrition one needs to enhance muscles conformity and assist in healthy growth. Nutrition and diet should never be taken for granted. With the popularity of keeping fit, many different views, methods, programs and dieting strategies have been formulated by many professionals. Among these are high carb diets and high fat diets. Which one is more effective and which one should you to choose to follow?
The first thing to know is the fundamental differences between the two diet approaches. As the name implies, high carb diets concentrates on taking in carbohydrate-rich foods while high fat diets endorses fat-rich foods. High carb diets are utilized to store glycogen in the liver and muscles. Glycogen is a glucose complex that provides large amounts of energy ready for use in anaerobic exercises.
Fats, on the other hand, are well-known for being the richest source of calories. It actually contains 2.5 times more calories than carbohydrates and proteins alike. Studies also show that it takes the body 24 calories to metabolize carbohydrates while it only takes 3 to burn down fat. So which one do you want to follow? A person can follow a high carb and low fat fitness diet or the other way around. It is absolutely not recommended that you follow both at the same time; unless of course if you want to gain body fat.
Maintaining a nutritious diet is not all about losing fat; it must also be considered in maintaining your weight. Research shows that sustaining your loss of weight can only be achieved on a diet which suits individual food preferences, lifestyle, medical profile and satiety signals.
Diet programs can help you shed excess pounds. Other principles of planning a nutritious diet that can become a part of healthy eating includes moderation, balance and variation. Be careful not to leave out important nutrients and other substances necessary for healthy body functioning. Health organizations are clear about the amounts of nutrients an individual should have to maintain a healthy body.
Low fat, high carbs? High carbs, low fat? The question is not which diet program will work but which one will work for you. Maintaining a healthy body does not have to be a burden. It does not mean that to have a nutritious diet it has to be boring and that you have to eat the same kind of food daily. Be adventurous and try out new foods. Who knows? You may even find spinach to your liking.
diet, nutrition
It is hard to find information relating to Nutrition, Diet, and Exercise that does not include a discussion of the merits of drinking water and how to burn calories.
Can the question of losing weight be a simple issue? and can the answer involve drinking water? Well, the answer is YES!
You can actually lose calories by drinking ice water. Your body loses calories in the process of warming this ice water to the body temperature. Now any enthusiast, must surely be thinking, if we can lose weight by drinking ice water, can we lose a large amount of calories if we drink lots of ice water?
Well, to answer this question we have to look at some simple calculations.
First of all we need to distinguish between calories and Calories. Calories (i.e. with a big c) are used to denote the amount of energy that is contained in food. Where as calorie with a small c is used to denote the energy required to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water 1 degree Celsius.
Another interesting fact is that it takes, 1 Calorie to raise the temperature of 1 kilogram of water by 1 degree Celsius. So when you are drinking a 140-Calorie can of cola, you are in fact ingesting 140,000 calories in your body. This is the same when you burn say 100 Calories working out, this means that you have actually burned 100,000 calories.
The main purpose of telling you that the definition of calories is based on the rising of temperature is to tell you an interesting fact. We have just seen that when our body raises the temperature, it burns calories, so when you drink ice cold water your body loses calories in raising that ice cold water to body temperature.
Now let us get the math right.
Our body temperature is at 37 degree Celsius.
The temperature of ice cold water can be safely said to be 0 degree Celsius.
There are 473.18 grams in 16 fluid ounces of water.
It takes 1 calorie to raise 1 gram of water by 1 degree Celsius.
So, if your body raises the temperature of 473.18 grams of water by 37 degree Celsius it burns 17508 calories.
But this is calorie with a small c. It actually denotes only 17.5 calories. You might be thinking that losing 17.5 Calories doesn’t count much compared to the calories we intake.
But, you are not going to drink just one 16 once glass of water are you? Even if you stick to the recommended minimum of 8 glasses of water you will end up burning 70 Calories in a day and that too by doing practically nothing. You can also increase the water intake if you want to shed a few extra pounds.
Well, although it is definite that drinking ice cold water helps you to burn calories you should not try to replace it with exercise. You should continue with all the weight reduction methods that you already on to. You can just boost up your effort by drinking ice cold water.
