Not feeling and looking your best? There may be a couple simple things you can change about what you consume that will produce tangible enhancements to your body.
Adding just a few more natural foods to your diet will help you reach your goals.
If you are overweight and don’t put too much thought into how you eat, this will be especially helpful. But just about everyone has one or two facets of their diet that cripples their fitness goals. They’ve tried to quit, but it’s been years, and still, there it is. Fast food. White bread. Soda. Beer. Cigarettes. Candy. Fried chicken (or fried anything). Often we are all too aware of what is holding us back.
From here onward I’m hoping you’ll look at this in a slightly different way because the flip side of the coin is there are also a couple crucial things your body desperately needs that probably aren’t making it in. Learn to have just a quick glance at the bad stuff you struggle with, but focus more on getting the good in to your body and see what kind of progress you can make.
First, ask yourself, What did I have to drink over the past three days? If you answered soda, alcohol, coffee, juice that wasn’t fresh squeezed, or other things along those lines, this is a great place to start.
Not only are these things impeding your results, they indicate you’re not giving your body something it really does need…water! Watch the fittest people at the gym, or top bodybuilders when they train, and guess what… they drink heaps of water!! That is no coincidence. At the absolute minimum you should be drinking 2 or 3 cups of water during your workout, plus a cup first thing when you get out of bed in the morning, 1 cup with each meal, and two cups or so between each meal. It sounds like a lot, but ease into it and you’ll find it very do-able.
So taking an honest look at what you might normally drink, if you have 2 cans of Coke, 2 cups of coffee, a glass of non-fresh juice, and a beer in the evening, exactly how much pure water are you getting? Some, but the crap that accompanies the water in those drinks works against much of what the water could be doing on its own.
While there is enough hydration in those types of drinks for survival, my guess is that is all you’re doing. Surviving. Getting by. But not looking good. Not feeling good. Pure water will help almost immediately! It helps your skin, digestion, fat loss, muscle builiding…it quite literally helps all the cells of your body function optimally. If your cells are functioning better, you look better. Your workout will deliver better results. And your body can better fight against disease. Water dramatically impacts every facet of your health.
And it helps your body metabolize stored fat. It’s pretty simple…
- Your kidneys need a lot of water to function properly
- When they don’t get enough water, the liver helps out
- As a result the liver isn’t able to metabolize fat as well, & your body stores fat
- And if your body is storing fat, you aren’t lean and healthy (to put it mildly)
Now secondly, ask yourself, What did I eat over the last three days? If you can write that down and raw, green leafy vegetables didn’t pop up 3 or 4 times, you’ve just found your second easy way to improve your health. Ideally you will base your lunch and dinner on raw veggies at some stage, but for now, for the quick fix, you can immediately make an improvement to your body by incorporating a nice raw salad at lunch and dinner.
Raw, green leafy vegetables are key. These are packed full of minerals, enzymes, and amino acids that help you get stronger and fight disease. Look for dark greens along with cucumbers, tomatoes, spinach, broccoli, celery…you get the idea. If you can base your meal on that, even better. But if you weren’t eating these proper salads at all in a given 2-3 day period, your body might be nutritionally deficient in a lot of areas, and filling half your plate with this good stuff at lunch and dinner will make a difference.
And salad dressing? A little extra virgin cold pressed olive oil with some fresh squeezed lemon & sea salt works great without adding heaps of bad fat. Or if you normally use Ranch Dressing, Blue Cheese, or any normal store-bought dressing, cut it in half & add the olive oil for the other half for now. That is a huge step forward.
But you may not even need any dressing. You might find that the other half of the food on your plate adds all the flavor you need to the salad. For example if you normally would eat a heaping plate of spaghetti with a couple pieces of garlic bread for a sample meal, and you want to make this change, just fill up a good portion of the plate with your amino-rich salad, skip the bread altogether, and have a smaller portion of spaghetti. You’ll find that because of the pasta sauce already on your plate you won’t need much, if any, salad dressing. But if you still can’t eat the valuable salad without it, have a little bit of the dressing. Or make your healthy lemon/olive oil/sea salt combo. Bring these with you in sealed containers to work. Check back later on for other ways of making healthy salad dressing.
So if you’re now switching to drinking water primarily and eating a robust raw salad with your lunch and dinner (which of course means you’ll be eating less fattening, empty foods), you’ve just taken a HUGE step towards improving your health. Try this out for at least two weeks. The water and salads will immediately put your body on the right path. Then if you feel like doing more and achieving maximum health benefits, keep reading our articles. We’ve got a very simple way of eating that will maximize your efforts to get in shape and reach your health goals.
In the meantime, finding a couple things in your diet that are hurting your progress and replacing them with what your body does need will be a great way to transition into how you will eventually be eating.
So drink your water and eat those green leafy vegetables and you’ll be on your way!