Should We Focus on Our Weight?
Controlling our weight shouldn’t become an obsession that has a serious effect on our lives. Should we focus on our weight? Depriving the body of the calories that provide it with energy obliges us to use the muscles as fuel.
The obsession with our weight, a danger
When we don’t provide the necessary nutrients the body needs to compensate for the physical effort that training demands, as athletes, we risk our health.
Increasing the amount of exercise you do without providing the calories that the body requires to face the physical demand, primarily affects the muscles. The body “ingests” them to guarantee energy. In the long run, this will affect your sporting performance.
Losing weight is a question of conscience. Healthy food, eaten several times a day, will keep the body active; carbohydrates guarantee the athlete a better performance, as long as they consume them in proportion to the physical exercise they do.
Training, hydration, diet, and rest
For all athletes, the rule is training, hydration, quality diet, and rest. If one of these factors fails, their performance will diminish as will the optimal health conditions. Should we focus on our weight? The answer is yes, as long as we don’t make decisions that disregard some of these rules.
A rigorous training, accompanied by a healthy and complete diet, will guarantee athletes an optimal performance, without necessarily falling into the obsession with being thin and losing weight.
Should we focus on our weight? Everything in moderation!
You should never skip breakfast. It should be a meal rich in nutrients and foods that provide energy, to face the physical demands of your sporting routine. It’s necessary to eat foods that provide energy at lunch too.
Snacks should help maintain your glycemic content at a suitable level; at dinner, you should replace the macronutrients that you’ve spent during the day to help rebuild damaged structures.
Carbohydrates, fats, proteins, vitamins, minerals, fiber, and water, when ingested in adequate amounts will provide the necessary nutrients for healthy bodily function.
Before, during, and after
Before training, you should eat to maintain your blood sugar levels and provide nutrients. During physical activity, it’s essential you keep hydrated to avoid a drop in your blood glucose level, recharge liver glycogen levels, and accelerate recovery times.
It’s also fundamental to drink liquid after training, to avoid catabolism or the reduction of molecules to the most simple form.
Rehydration to regain weight
When you finish your exercise routine, you should rehydrate to recuperate the weight you’ve lost and reserve the muscle glycogen levels. Water is the ideal ally to achieve it; similarly, you can drink juices or energizing drinks.
Chewing and hydrating correctly
Should we focus on our weight? If we take these recommendations into account, the pounds will stop being a worry; in every routine, it’s essential you have a good nutritional education. For example, principle aspects are chewing and restoring the glycogen level after training correctly.
You have to think about chewing each mouthful properly and salivating well will help with digestion. Drinking water in small amounts whilst we eat and large amounts when we’re not eating would be ideal.
The nutritional quality and density of food will help to avoid deficiencies caused by a lack of micronutrients. This can put the most important organs such as the muscles at risk.
Focus on our weight: no snacks, candy, or sodas
It’s essential to reduce these items to the minimum possible or even completely remove them from your diet; you can substitute them for fruits, vegetables, seeds, and fish. Fast foods that are rich in fats aren’t conducive to a training regimen; they provide a low level of nutrients but an excessive amount of calories.
Should we focus on our weight? What about restful sleep?
If there’s no period of good rest, you end up training more but reducing your performance, because this doesn’t allow for adequate recuperation of the body. Often, athletes exceed their hours of training and don’t pay attention to the recuperation periods.
In addition to good rest, cellular macronutrition and micronutrition will help the recuperation time and increase the general wellbeing of the body.
It’s important to avoid reaching levels of stress associated with the demand for immediate energy. The body responds to this by releasing a great amount of adrenaline and noradrenaline and this increases the flow of blood to the muscles, releasing more glucose in the blood. It also increases the heart rate to pump blood around the body faster, dilate the pupils, and inhibit digestion.
It’s important we consider weight, but to ensure that it’s consistent with personal characteristics . The rest is all about a healthy diet, exercise, hydration, and a good rest.