Eating healthy is crucial for meeting your fitness goals. It is pointless to train hard and then eat poorly as you will be damaging your progress, whether it is to gain muscle or lose weight.
One of the best ways to ensure that you are eating properly is to keep a diary of what you have been eating. The reason for this is because you can document your eating habits and compare different days to see where you can better it. It is also a great way to build up a solid routine of foods which work best for you and ones that don’t work as well. Also by keeping a track of the number of grams you’re consuming, and subsequently the number of calories, you can monitor the levels to make sure you’re reaching the standards you have set for the day.

Once you cover this, you can also add in other figures to get a more in depth idea of the foods you are eating and their benefits, such as the protein, fats and carbohydrates. Since getting all three of these measurements as well as your calorie intake are crucial for meeting the goals you have set. If they are wrong, you might for example put on weight, if you are trying to lose it or not put on enough to sustain muscle growth.

While we will always push you to pack in the protein when trying to build muscle or lose weight, I also can’t understand why other nutritional requirements are ignored so heavily. For example, healthy fatty acids (try salmon or mackerel) are very often missing from the British diet, despite us being surrounded by the sea! If you find yourself heading down to Tesco’s this weekend, try to cover all areas of the nutritional balanced diet.

 

The impact of healthy fats

I found I seemed to always have cracks and all kinds of sounds coming from my shoulders, creating the feeling like I always needed to stretch or move them around. Following a talk with the doctor, I was told two things. Firstly, I needed to do light exercises focusing on my rotator cuffs, meaning a very light weight which can be thrown in at the end of a shoulder/chest workout. I would also not recommend going to the gym for a good two days after performing rotator cuff exercises (or at least not doing any upper body). Secondly I was told to start consuming omega 3 capsules. I gave them a try but they were absolutely revolting. Problem averted, I began eating a tin of sardines every couple of days. 9 months later (OK that is still a long time but worth it) all the pains and aches were gone. Following this I did get slack and also stopped eating sardines and the pain came back within 6 months. But it shows, through looking after your body and eating what your body requires, you can avoid a number of issues that can be associated with growing old.

Let us know if you have ever faced any relating issues! Also, let us know if you have ever used a food diary or a food journal to help you in the gym.