Nutrition
and physical fitness go together like bread and butter and if you want
to be as healthy as possible then it is highly important that you pay
equal attention to both. Here we will look at how the interplay works
and why it’s so important to look after your nutrition if you want to be
able to describe yourself as fit and healthy.
People
say that we are what we eat, but very few people know just how true
this is. The reality is that all the materials our body uses to fuel
itself, to build and replace tissue and to regulate the delicate
chemical balances inside our brains and blood; all of it comes from our
nutrition. The most obvious example of this is protein. Protein is made
up of amino acids which are carbon compounds. In other words when we eat
protein this is where we get the meet that our body needs to create
itself. Our body builds skin, muscle, brain matter, bones and everything
else by recombining the amino acids in meat from other animals and
plants (to a lesser extent).
If you don’t get your protein then
you won’t be able to repair and maintain tissue in other words if you
aren’t eating correct amounts of high quality protein, then you’ll find
that your wounds don’t heal, that your skin and hair looks unhealthy and
that you suffer a range of other problems. For those trying to build
muscle it is particularly important to eat more protein as it will help
us to have the matter needed to build those bigger muscles.
Likewise
what we eat obviously effects our energy levels and our feelings of
energy and alertness. If you aren’t eating enough carbohydrates then
your body won’t have anything to burn for fuel, and what will happen as a
result is that it will start looking elsewhere for things to burn – to
our fat stores initially and then to our muscle and eventually to our
organs. This means that we will end up wasting away and feeling
constantly lethargic – and certainly not being a picture of health.
On
the other hand though eating too many carbs can also be very bad for
us. This then means that we have more carbohydrates than our body needs
so it will begin storing the energy that’s left over as fat. That then
in turn means that our heart must pump harder to get the blood around
our body and that can cause circulation problems, lack of breath and
other problems. It can also increase your likelihood of developing
diabetes wherein you will have too much sugar in your blood stream which
can damage nerves and organs and can be very serious.
Consuming
too much fat can be bad for you too as it clogs your arteries and your
veins and creates build ups of ‘arterial plaque’ which means that your
blood can’t get as easily around your body increases the chances of
heart attack or stroke and often causing angina.
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