Fitness exercise, training without eating is equivalent to training for nothing! Maybe, you are a friend who wants to lose fat, lose weight, and shape your body. In order to lose a few centimeters around your waist and legs, you gave up your favorite food, but after a while you find that restraint is no longer so effective. My waistline and waistline have remained unchanged for a long time, and I didn’t get the figure I dreamed of.
In fact, in fitness, eating is very important!
- How to eat when exercising to gain muscle and lose fat?
Eating the Right Things at the Right Time—Eating is the next more important step after you’ve rediscovered your body shape, cardio, and resistance training. Nutrition theory may sound boring, but after remembering it, it will definitely benefit you for life. So, honestly take a small notebook and take notes! - Calories
As a unit of nutritional energy, the calorie was first proposed by the American chemist Wilbur Atwater in the 19th century and has not been modified until now. At present, the most popular and most accepted statement is that as long as the total number of calories a person eats is less than the number of calories he expends, he will definitely lose weight.
I believe that there are also many people who calculate the dietary intake of each meal according to the calorie nutrition table on the food packaging bag every day when they are exercising and losing weight, and even know the calorie value of food clearly, hoping to lose weight through strict calorie control Achieve weight loss. However, is it really that simple?
Different nutrients burn calories in different ways
As we all know, the energy supply of human diet is mainly composed of three major nutrients: protein, carbohydrate and fat. People usually write down the calories provided by these three major nutrients roughly: the calories (energy) provided by each gram of protein and carbohydrates are about 4 kcal, and the fat is 9 kcal. But in fact, the meanings of the calories contained in these three nutrients are different, and their differences are not only distinguished by the calorie value they can provide.
To give a simple example, although the calories provided by protein are similar to those of carbohydrates, the energy consumed by the body after eating food rich in protein and food mainly composed of carbohydrates is completely different.
In fact, it takes five times as much energy to digest protein than to consume the same amount of fat. And many carbohydrates, such as sugar or honey, can enter the body directly without digestion and are absorbed and stored by the body.
Therefore, even from a calorie point of view, the calories of an egg may be higher than that of a lollipop, we should eat more eggs instead of lollipops in fitness and weight loss.
There is a limit to how the body can degrade food
Students who lose weight must have heard the theory of eating less nuts, because most nuts, such as almonds, peanuts, walnuts, etc., have a scary high calorie count. According to the weight loss theory of calorie increase and decrease, it is natural to eliminate such high-calorie foods as much as possible. However, can the nuts you eat really be completely digested and absorbed by the body?
In fact, humans cannot digest all nuts.
A study by the U.S. Department of Agriculture once showed that eating a serving of almonds can only get more than 120 kcal, not the 170 kcal written on the label. Nuts are full of essential fatty acids, antioxidants, potassium, magnesium, fiber and protein, but they are very good for the human body!
Foods are processed in different ways so that they are not absorbed equally
For the human body, after cooking and processing most foods, the calorie intake will become more. For example, protein and carbohydrates, after heating, the calorie intake of the human body can increase significantly. Therefore, when we choose food, it is best to choose food with less artificial processing. That said, brown rice is better than white rice, and whole wheat pasta with bran is better than refined pasta.
From the above points alone, we can see that the effect of calorie counting on weight loss is not as simple as everyone thinks. It is a very complex math problem with many variables, far beyond what can be determined by addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.
However, calorie counting is not useless. In the absence of a more scientific nutritional calculation method for us to choose, there are still many benefits to a certain extent in using calorie counting for fitness and weight loss.
However, when it comes to diet, we should try to learn more than calories to make sure we can design our diets to make weight loss more efficient and healthier.
Diet Indicators Beyond Calories: Salvation of Fat and Hungry, Glycemic Index
There are many inaccuracies in the way calories are counted as food calories, so how can we fix this problem? Here we need to introduce a concept that is very practical for weight loss and health: glycemic index, or GI value.
The glycemic index is an index that reflects the degree of food-induced increase in human blood sugar. It is used to describe the speed at which food is digested and absorbed by the human body and the response status of the body’s blood sugar production.
To put it simply and crudely, for the meaning of weight loss, a high GI value means that a food is easy to be stored as fat after eating, and it is easy to be hungry after eating.
Studies have shown that eating foods with high GI value for a long time is more likely to cause metabolic diseases such as diabetes. On the contrary, foods with low GI value are not easy to cause obesity or hunger after being absorbed by the body.
The main reasons for this difference are as follows:
First, after food with high GI value enters the intestinal tract, the body’s digestion and absorption rate is higher and faster, so that glucose can quickly enter the blood, leading to reactions such as high blood pressure and high blood sugar, and also triggering high blood pressure. The main function of insulin is to promote the synthesis of glycogen, fat and protein, so that the food eaten is more likely to be stored as fat.
Second, food with a low GI value stays in the intestinal tract for a long time, and the efficiency of digestion and absorption by the body is relatively slow, so that the blood sugar index in the body rises relatively stably, and there will be no sudden peak. Correspondingly less insulin is required, resulting in lower insulin levels, effectively controlling blood sugar fluctuations. And foods with low GI value are generally more likely to produce a feeling of fullness, which can help the body burn fat and better achieve weight loss.
This can also explain why some white bread is obviously high in calories, but it is easy to feel hungry after eating it. Because the GI value of white bread is relatively high, it is easy to cause blood sugar to rise quickly after being quickly absorbed by the body, and high blood sugar will lead to a corresponding increase in insulin. As soon as insulin increases, the efficiency of fat storage will increase, and the continuous increase of insulin will make the blood sugar in the body drop rapidly. Blood sugar drops, and the body will feel hungry again… thus entering a vicious circle.
In other words, the higher the glycemic index of a food, the easier it is to feel hungry after eating the food to some extent, and the easier it is to make people fat. At the same time, because of the long-term unstable fluctuation of blood sugar, it is likely to exhaust the pancreas, which will also increase the incidence of pancreatitis. Plus, because you have high insulin resistance, you can also develop type 2 diabetes.
But what if you’re eating low-GI foods like whole grains?
On the contrary, although coarse-grain bread is not high in calories (lower in digestibility), but due to the low GI value, the absorption of sugar in the small intestine is slow [2], and it takes a long time to maintain a relatively stable blood sugar index. It will make the insulin secretion in the body normal and stable.
This is the reason why coarse grains are highly praised in both weight loss and fitness articles. It can not only reduce calorie intake, keep you from gaining weight, but also become healthy. You must know that the daily calorie intake of modern people exceeds the standard. Even for those who do not exercise, we recommend changing the staple food to whole grains.
So some students asked: What food has a higher GI value?
The common ones are polished rice noodles, bread and cakes, cooked peeled root foods, candies and so on. To put it simply, the more refined the food, the higher the GI value. Among them, simple sugars (white granulated sugar, fructose syrup, and corn syrup are common in the food ingredient list) need to be eliminated most, such as sodas, fruit juices, candies, and cakes rich in sugar. Not only do they have a high GI value, they are easy to get fat and hungry after eating, but they are also very harmful to the human body due to the addition of a large number of food additives.
Correspondingly, foods with low GI values are generally unprocessed foods such as whole grains, lean meat, and nuts. You can eat more in your daily life, or partially replace foods with high GI values.
Of course, the GI value is not the only criterion for judging whether a food is healthy. A high GI value does not necessarily mean that it is very unhealthy. For example, the GI value of some fruits and vegetables may also be relatively high (the GI value of carrots is very high), but from the perspective of nutritional intake, they are relatively healthy; Foods with high fat content, such as beans and Snickers bars, have a relatively low GI value, but they are not healthy. We should also eat as little as possible in our daily life.
In addition, everyone should eat more foods with high GI value after exercise, which can better promote the body’s absorption and recovery. This is also the best time to exercise and lose weight. On this point, we will talk about it in detail in the following fitness diet – carbohydrates.
Once the concept is understood, the rest is easy. Think about the foods you like to eat and eat often, look up the GI value, and adjust accordingly. Generally, you should be wary of foods with a GI value higher than 60. It may sound difficult to completely eliminate them all at once, but it may be a good way to try to find some similar substitutes and reduce them gradually.
