When it comes to diet, many people are confused by numerous conflicting studies, which suggest something is good one day and not the next. It’s almost enough to make you give up altogether, especially when it comes to getting diet-related results from your exercise regime.
The basic principle to keep in mind is that there are only three energy nutrients – protein, fat and carbohydrate – and it is how each of these is processed through your pathways, and how well supported they are with other micronutrients, that decides their fate.
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A recipe for well-being: What's inside
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Glucose is an end product of almost all carbohydrate foods, which predominantly come from plants, vegetables and fruit. Glucose is the preferred nutrient for making energy, so if you need energy, especially in a hurry, carbs should be your first choice. It’s a little bit like throwing paper on fire: carbohydrates will flare up and burn happily to give off a good flame for a short time. The next fuel a fire often needs is wood; that’s where protein comes in. If you have run out of carbohydrates, the protein present in the food you consume will be used for energy. After that, protein from muscle mass is broken down. Fat is the coal – and you have to work long and hard, not fast, to get this fuel going.
Food nutrients for metabolism work synergistically to maintain the proper balance in your body. Everyone’s biochemistry is individual and your lifestyle dictates your needs: whether you are a high user of some nutrients and how well you respond to certain foods and timings. When your body goes through a biological change, or is put under stress, or demands more nutrients due to disease or increased physical exercise, the balance changes.
The science, however, stays much the same. Research has revealed a lot about biochemistry and food chemistry, and the balance between these sciences when it comes to the body. People often look for quick fixes – promises of reshaping and sculpting for a perfect body. These may give you short-term results, but over time they can reset your metabolism to alter hormones, insulin sensitivity, mood levels and cognitive function. From a health perspective, this will not put you in the driver’s seat to take you where you really want to go.
Regular physical activity is very important for a number of reasons and not just to look and feel good. The type of exercise is critical to achieving your goals, as is the timing of whether you perform cardio first or do resistance training, and whether you have the luxury of focusing on only one muscle group per session or doing just cardio.
Whichever way you play it, diet, preparation and timing are worth contemplating.
If weight loss or cutting fat is your short- or long-term goal, it’s important to understand that usually the first weight lost with a dietary change will be water and lean muscle, which is generally not desirable. If too little food is eaten, the body begins to break down muscle protein to meet glucose and energy needs. Unfortunately, this occurs much more easily than the breakdown of fat stores. Your body is put on red alert to survive and the metabolic rate can reduce, so when the diet is stopped it is much easier for the body to gain fat than it was prior to going on the diet. As a result, over time, people can diet themselves fatter.
A healthy diet does not omit any food groups unless you absolutely cannot process them. I have studied and researched diets for years to look for the perfect hit. What is much more important than any particular diet, is to be in touch with your body’s signals and find out a good ratio of energy nutrients balanced with critical micronutrients.
Research dictates a recommended protein intake range, with a maximum and minimum amount depending on your weight. Fat is needed to keep your hormones balanced and maintain cell-wall and arterial integrity and fluidity; the minimum level makes up a good percentage of your calories, and should be somewhere between 45 grams and 60g for a woman, and 60g and 80g for a man.
Carbohydrates fall into a wide range to balance essential needs for brain and heart health as well as activity. This is probably the most debatable aspect relating to diets and is the nutrient you can manipulate to achieve your personal health, weight and lean-tissue goals. It is also the most addictive and mind-altering nutrient, making it a real challenge. As a guide for weight loss, the minimum amount of carbohydrates a woman should consume is about 50g per day, with non-starchy vegetables being unlimited; a man should aim for about 100g. Over this, unless you are running a marathon, weight loss is difficult. In the carbohydrate equation, all cereals, seed grains, starchy vegetables (such as potato), dairy and fruit are counted; the exception is other vegetables.
What to eat before and after exercising is dependent on a number of criteria. Cardio exercise is the preferred choice for women and includes walking, jogging, elliptical and cycling for varying lengths of time. If you want to lose weight, your body needs to be in a catabolic state, in which you are breaking down and using energy from muscle stores, lean muscle mass and, hopefully, fat stores. If insulin is present from consuming any form of sugar, you immediately stop any fat breakdown. The best pre-exercise meal is a little carbohydrate about three to four hours before you exercise. Water hydration is the key to keeping up energy use during your workout. If you have fasted overnight, food is not going to contribute to energy as it takes at least 30 minutes to be of any use, and water, again, is the key. Even if you haven’t eaten, you can be active for at least two hours with little adverse effect, and longer if you are in good health. If you have insulin resistance, a small serving of carbohydrate, such as a couple of bites of banana or one or two dates, is all you need.
Restoring balance but also encouraging further fat oxidation after working out will be more successful if you take in a protein food, such as low-fat dairy – protein from cottage cheese, milk, yogurt and a small amount of complex carbohydrate is a good idea. This is the basis for whey protein shakes; however, these are not necessary for most exercisers due to the high amount of protein, which will break down to glucose and defeat the purpose of keeping sugars down.
Sports drinks are not advised at all and I despair seeing people drinking them during exercise classes that they are clearly attending for weight management. Sports drinks are useful for competitive athletes mostly involved in outdoor activities and swimming events, in which they lose a lot of hydration. The drinks are usually watered-down, as too much glucose in the colon at one time actually draws water out of the body, causing greater dehydration.
For recreational gym goers, I recommend water before exercising and a protein food, with a small amount of carbohydrate, as in cereal or a fruit. It is also a good idea to take a meal in the next two hours to replenish a wider range of nutrients. The focus should be on protein, a small amount of complex carbohydrate and vegetables. Fish and chicken are easily digested along with a small portion of starch and vegetables. A two-egg omelette with tuna, vegetables and some cheese is also a well-balanced after-meal dominated by protein, using vegetables for carbohydrates and with extra protein from fish and fat from cheese.
Starches can be a medium-sized sweet potato, half to two-thirds of a cup of wholegrain pasta, brown rice or quinoa. More refined starches, such as white bread, will spike insulin and may not be the best choice after the work you have been doing.
Nutrition for resistance training is a little different as you are not using glucose, but making energy at a cellular level, often without oxygen. Cardio exercise drives oxygen from breathing, and training improves oxygen turnover. During resistance and muscle-building exercises, the type and repetitions are critical to achieving your goals, but muscle breakdown is the first part of rebuilding new and bigger muscles. That means protein is an integral part of the diet, before and after working out. Carbohydrates have the job of reducing lean-tissue breakdown; they also help drive protein back into tissue building. Fat is also important, as it forms new cell walls and maintains arterial fluidity for better oxygen transport and delivers healing nutrients.
If you are competitive and want to perform to a high level, and are not aiming to cut weight, you should choose a mix of complex carbohydrates and more readily available choices. After resistance training, nutrition is about easily digested protein, such as whey isolate. But milk with chocolate, rice pudding, cottage cheese and dried fruit are all options. Dairy is a great choice and can be consumed as a smoothie or plain yogurt with fresh fruit. If you are dairy-free or dairy-intolerant, a small serving of oats with dried fruit or wholegrain toast with banana works well. Banana is a good choice, as it has fructose and glucose as well as potassium, which is lost if you are sweating. It might be good to take a protein concentrate early in the day to drip-feed protein, followed by a whey isolate to quickly replace muscle afterwards, or use low-fat dairy as a base for protein, but it will have a higher carbohydrate content. If this is your choice, don’t load your smoothie with excess fruit, honey and yogurt. You might like to add ground nuts, flaxseeds, chia and use stevia as a sweetener. It often makes up the sweetness of high-quality shake mixes. If you are dairy-free, rice, pea and maca protein are good choices, but don’t be put off by the smell and colour.
Fats, especially omega 3s, reduce inflammation and help with recovery. Walnuts, coconut, avocado, oily fish and flaxseeds are the best sources. Adding these to a smoothie or yogurt works beautifully in recovery.
If you have plans to add a starchy carbohydrate food to your meals over a day, the best time to have this is at the meal following an exercise session, as your stores will be low and it will go into topping up muscle glycogen rather than being put into fat storage.
