Petrol for the days activities

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Petrol For The Days Activities Is So Important

There are a vast number of approaches to dieting out there in the world and a lot of different opinions to go along with them.  Every time someone has a fantastic result with body fat weight loss, they feel compelled to share their story and sprout it as the “be all” in weight loss strategies.

With so much diet and marketing information available to us, there is little wonder it can be very confusing.  A diet usually involves monitoring the type of foods, or the total consumption of foods with the intention of altering and individual’s weight or the amount of body fat that they may be carrying.

So why do people diet and why do diets often fail?  People diet for a number of reasons.  Most commonly a diet is designed for weight reduction.  The success of a diet will often be retrospective of the goal or the source of the motivation that drives a person to make adjustments to their eating habits.

The diet usually involves a set time frame in order to reduce ones excess body fat or a set number of kilograms on the scales and this is often the reason that diets are not successful in the long term.  People regularly have the capacity to reduce their weight, but their ability to keep their weight off permanently is another story.

SO, I want to share with you today a simple little strategy in order to make any weight loss attempts both successful and sustainable in the long term. The fact of the matter is that the term “diet” generally carries with it the stigma of a set goal or time frame and this almost makes the terminology a forbidden word.  By having a better understanding of the body’s requirements and how the body utilizes nutrients, we can establish eating patterns that suit every individuals needs without the need to “GO ON A DIET”.

Before I introduce you to my little thesis on petrol for the days activities, I want to brush over a couple of the most prevalent diseases affecting our society today and how they are directly diet related and shock you into some alarming statistics.

Some Alarming Statistics:

First the stats: in 2007, seven million Australians were overweight.  That figure is predicted to rise to 75% of the population by the year 2020.  In Victoria alone, 49% of the population in 2008 were deemed overweight or obese.  Now for the diseases that affect us as a result of being overweight or obese.

There are two types of diabetes and people who live with it have abnormal blood glucose levels for a number of reasons.  Either their body does not produce insulin, or it cannot properly use the insulin that is produced. Insulin is a hormone secreted by the pancreas and required to remove or uptake glucose from the blood stream.  The pancreas’ job, among other things is to ensure that our blood glucose levels remain within a narrow range.

Type I diabetes is an autoimmune condition that is not preventable.  It’s caused by the body’s own immune system destroying the insulin producing beta cells of the pancreas.  Type II diabetes on the other hand is lifestyle created and occurs when the pancreas is either not producing enough insulin or the insulin that it does produce is not working effectively.

The main cause of these two types of conditions is from overworking the pancreas that is constantly rising and falling blood glucose levels which in turn requires the two hormones insulin and glucagon to be secreted.  The roller coaster effect of the constant spiking and then plummeting blood glucose levels is caused by poor dietary habits.

85-90% of all cases of Type II diabetes are lifestyle related and therefore preventable and to a certain extent, curable by lifestyle changes rather than medical intervention.
Who has heard of the operation that is being performed now called lap band surgery?  This is where a band is placed around the top of the stomach, making the entrance smaller and therefore more difficult for food to enter it.

There have been some remarkable results in terms of curing type II diabetes using this technique.  Osteoporosis, Hypertension, Coronary heart disease and stroke are also prevalent diseases where the risks of contracting are greatly increased by a poor lifestyle especially relating to diet.

A Quick Lesson In Energy

So, before we get on to discussing what petrol we need for the day, lets first have a quick lesson in energy requirements.  The human body requires energy for three main reasons:

1. The maintenance of body processes, breathing, digestion etc,
2. Growth
3. The performances of the daily activities such as training and working in our jobs.

The amount of energy that we require depends on a number of factors such as our age, gender, basal metabolic rate, activity level and the level of lean muscle mass.  There are a number of different macro nutrients, with the word macro meaning IN LARGE QUANTITIES. The three main ones are carbohydrates, fats and proteins.

Carbohydrates and protein have 4 calories per gram. Alcohol has 7 calories per gram and fat has 9 calories per gram.  However, wholefoods do not generally contain just one macro nutrient; they are often made up of a combination of all three.  So, in terms of the body’s preferred energy sources, it has the ability to use all three sources of energy at any one time and no one fuel source is used in isolation.

However, it does have a preference in the fuel choice:

1. Carbohydrates
2. Fats
3. Protein (However, we don’t ever want protein to become the preferred energy source.  We want protein to be used to repair, recover and recuperate)

The only time carbohydrates are not the first choice source of fuel is when alcohol is consumed.

So, what is a carbohydrate?  Simply, they are defined as anything that is starchy or sweet.  Paul Chek a holistic health practitioner has defined carbohydrates as foods that do not have a set of eyes.  Pasta, potatoes, rice, breads, cereals, grains and sugars are all sources of carbohydrates.

Proteins are essential in the human diet and are found widely throughout the food supply.  Except for things like avocados and nuts, most common sources of protein come from things that have a set of eyes. eg: chicken, beef, lamb and fish.  Fat is an essential nutrient for the human body.  It is required for the production of cell membranes, blood lipids, bile and the transport and digestion of fat soluble vitamins.

Fat as already alluded to are high in energy and if too much fat is consumed, it can easily contribute to obesity.

Micro nutrients are nutrients required by the body in small amounts (as opposed to macro nutrients required in large amounts).  Vitamins and minerals fall into this category.

Metabolic Typing

Have you ever noticed how two people could go on the same diet, do exactly the same thing and one person achieve excellent results and the other fail miserably.  This is because there is not one diet that is right for everyone, therefore to achieve optimal health you must determine what is right for you.

Metabolic typing is a system that identifies an individual’s genetically-based nutrition and diet requirements.  To me this makes so much sense given that we are all so different yet we are supposedly grouped together when it comes to dieting.  We have different hair color, eye color, skin color, body shapes, so it makes such logic sense that our metabolic type would be different for each of us.

Related: Metabolic Type-Protein
Related: Metabolic Type-Carbohydrate
Related: Metabolic Type-Protein

Petrol For The Day’s Activities

So, let us get to the topic of this article, which is petrol for the day’s activities.  I like to use the analogy of a car when talking about our dietary requirements, mainly because a car is a machine, not too dissimilar to that of the human body.  The only difference is that at the end of the day when you turn the car off, it stops working, whereas, when you lie down and go to sleep, the body continues to operate, so instead of using a typical petrol, diesel or LPG fueled car for my analogy, that can be filled up in large quantities to drive it long distances, I’m going to use a typical car with a very small fuel tank to show how my analogy works.

Your body’s requirements for petrol are not dissimilar to your car’s need for petrol. If you’re going for a drive in the country, the first thing you do is check the petrol gauge to ensure that you have sufficient petrol in the tank to get you to your destination.

What happens if your car is empty and you head off on that long drive?  You guessed it, it runs out of petrol and you could be in for a very long walk with a petrol can to the nearest petrol station for more petrol for you car.

Now when you’re driving home after going for that long country drive and you are about to park your car in the garage for the evening, it doesn’t really matter too much if the car is almost out of petrol.  You are going to turn off the key and its going to sit until the next day.  Herein lays the difference between your car and your body.

If you’re going to undertake a strenuous exercise session, or perform any type of daily activity, (like going for a drive in the country) you need to ensure that you provide your body with the necessary petrol before hand, otherwise, like your car on a long country drive, you are going to run out of petrol.

Alters and Schiff Essential Concepts for Healthy Living7 Steps to Get Off Sugar and CarbohydratesThe Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating

In a nutshell, your body will not have adequate energy to perform at optimum levels during exercise sessions or your daily activities if you haven’t provided it with enough carbohydrates (the bodies number one preference for energy) to get through your routine. So, what’s the best gauge for your body when your energy levels are low?  Simple, the answer is your body.  It will tell you when you need energy and it’s not necessarily hunger pains that are best gauge for energy.

Often, when you feel tired or sluggish during the day, your body is probably telling you that you need to fuel up.  If you feel sluggish or tired after eating, then perhaps you ate the wrong ratio of macro nutrients for your metabolic type, but that’s the subject of another article.

Sit down for a second and think about what times during the day you are most active, and then consider what is the best time of the day for you to consume the right combinations of carbohydrates fats and protein? You should be aiming to go to bed in the evening with minimal carbohydrates in your system given that you are not going to need any energy while you sleep.

However, your body will need to recover from the day’s activities and to do this, a good source of protein (something with eyes) and some vitamins, minerals and antioxidants would suffice as your main evening meal, in other words, a good healthy serve of leafy green, red and colorful vegetables.

Water

Water is also one of the most under rated and under consumed item today.  I’m not going go deeper into the where’s, whys and how’s of water here as that’s the topic of another article, suffice to say, calculate how much you should drink using the following formula (bodyweight in kgs x 0.033 = Amount of water to consume daily in litres), divide this amount into 5 equals amounts and then aim to drink this much by each meal.  EASY!!!

So to summarize here’s my top 5 tips to maintaining a healthy eating lifestyle:

• Fuel up for the day’s activities by always eating a good hearty breakfast.
• No matter what your metabolic make up is, always try to eat protein with every meal.
• Drip feed your body with its daily fuel requirements by eating smaller meals more often. (Breakfast, morning tea, lunch, afternoon tea, dinner)
• Eat like a king for breakfast, a prince at lunch and a pauper at dinner
• Drink more clean water.

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