Food is the foundation of how our body looks and feels from within. Therefore, what we eat directly affects how we look and feel. If you spend innumerable hours hitting the gym and still fail to see any significant results, maybe it is time to modify your diet.
Your diet plays a vital role in your overall fitness. A bad diet that lacks essential nutrients or contains excessive calories can hamper your health and fitness levels. Your fitness is 80% of your diet and 20% of your workout.
You cannot expect excellent results if you consume an unhealthy diet or starve yourself. It is true, lack of calories affects the way your body performs, too. Therefore, understanding your body and its needs is the first and the most crucial step in your fitness journey. Whether you want to lose weight or gain muscle mass, diet will help you achieve your fitness goal. People who eat healthy, well-balanced meals rich in all essential nutrients have significant fitness levels. They are fitter and leaner even though they do not exercise vigorously every day.
The human body needs food to function efficiently and at its best capacity. Starving or over-feeding your body will not only make it super unhealthy but can also lead to irreversible damage. For example, a car cannot function without gas; similarly, a workout without a good diet cannot help you achieve your fitness goals.
If you are someone who only concentrates on working out and takes their diet lightly, then this article is just for you. Read on to understand the importance and significance of a good diet that can make or break your overall fitness.
What is Fitness?
Many fitness professionals have defined fitness as 80% diet and 20% workout in the recent past. So what does this mean? The emphasis on diet and nutrition has never reduced ever since health and fitness have gained paramount importance.
The first set of questions that any person gets is, why is this formula true? We have many athletes who eat and work out hard and do not look unfit. To add to the confusion, our parents and grandparents say that they never used to think before they ate their food. Instead, they used to keep themselves physically active, and voila! They have fit bodies even at 80 years old.
So the big confusion for the current generation of fitness enthusiasts is, should we eat more or less? How much to eat while working out? Well, every industry has its professionals to talk to and release journals. Similarly, fitness has also had its experts, and we should always listen to them. They study about it or experiment with different things on their bodies before seeing the result they desire.
Yes, they are right. Fitness is all about how good your body works bio-mechanically, apart from the great looks a fit body can show. Moreover, food plays a vital role in supporting fitness.
Importance of Food in Fitness
First, let us understand what food provides us to keep ourselves healthy.
- The food that we eat provides us with all the nutrients that help to keep our bodies intact.
- Micronutrients like vitamins and minerals help in the normal functioning of the body parameters. Macronutrients like carbohydrates, proteins, and fats present in food are equally essential to provide us with energy, rebuild our tissues, take the nutrients to the bloodstream, and much more.
- Food not only fills our stomachs or satiates our taste buds, but it provides nutrients for our body to perform better.
- A solid and fit body consumes more nutritious food than its unfit counterpart does. Even if it means both people are hitting the same gym simultaneously and doing the same workout routine.
- Fortunately or unfortunately, eating food ultimately works like an equation inside us, where the results show up on the body. The formula for how to fit a person is always about calories in vs calories out.
- The experts measure food in terms of calories, which is the total addition of all the macronutrients consumed by one.,
- An increase in fat accumulation is a clear indication of unfit bodies. It is always a result of excess calories that we consume.
Summary
Let us assume that one of our friends spends a good 3 hours at a fitness centre doing some of the best workouts on the planet. However, suppose this person ends his day at a bakehouse or a fast-food joint and consumes way more calories than he burned. In that case, he ultimately stores the excess food as fat.
Let us consider another scenario, and we have another fitness-conscious friend who spends a good 3 hours of his time. Additionally, he goes to the best fitness centre and has access to the best training available. Unfortunately, he ends up consuming way too few calories. The body does not show the best results because it does not have the micronutrients required to adapt to the intensity of training. Nor does he have enough calories to rebuild the broken tissues.
All these suggest that food is the primary reason why we look and perform fit or unfit. However, it can make or break your training days. The hard work you put into training can alter depending on how you consume your food.
The harsh reality of the food industry is every amazing-looking food on the counter out there with great taste is loaded with unwanted calories. But, on the contrary, all the healthy food that mother earth produces is full of all the essential nutrients we need.
So let us get smart, start consuming nutrient-dense food, and stay away from all those empty calorie-dense foods. These empty-calorie-dense foods can ruin all the hard work we do in our training.
That is why it is safe to say that fitness is about 80% diet and 20% workout, and this is why you cannot outrun a bad diet. So be smart and plan your fitness regime well, including a wholesome diet and some great workouts. Then, supplement your workouts with a good diet and see your body transform in no time.
