A Healthy Diet for Men
For a man looking to get in shape through a combination of exercise and diet, he needs the right workout routine and the right diet to make it work successfully.
If you're thinking along these lines, I can talk you through the right kind of diet you'll need to put together. Before I get started, there's a real important question you need to ask yourself and the answer will give you a clue to whether you're going to succeed or not.
"How committed are you?"
That's it. No need to pretty it all up and sugar coat it.
I can tell you now that if the answer is anything less than 100%, don't expect your body to change much, if at all. It won't!
100% or Nothing
Now I've gotten that out of the way and I have your total commitment to succeed in getting your out of shape body back in shape, let's talk about what you need to be eating and what you must not be eating (and drinking).
By the way, I'm not going to be focusing on propriety diet programs like Weight Watchers, or ready meal diets like Medifast or Nutrisystem, or any of the others. This is all about going back to basics.
The most effective diets for men are the ones that provide all the nutrition a guy needs to run his body at the elevated pace he's going to run it because he's exercising too. That's a done deal by the way.
You need to eat right and get your body active enough to burn more energy than you're putting in to lose weight and burn that excess fat away.
Reality Check
Just working out on its own is often not enough if you don't take into account what you're eating and drinking at the same time. I'll give you a hard lesson by way of an example.
An hour of elevated treadmill work will burn about 90 calories. One can of soda contains around 400 calories.
Do the math.
Why do you think I asked you for nothing less than 100% commitment back there? You're going to need it if you want your body to achieve what your mind thinks it can achieve.
In fact, there's a lot of truth in the mental attitude side of health and fitness. When your mind is totally immersed in reaching your goal, the body will follow. You just need to give it a helping hand.
You do that by giving it the right food and avoiding the wrong stuff.
What Food and Drink is Wrong?
OK, now for the nitty gritty part. What you eat and drink is mostly down to common sense once you are aware of what's in everything you consume.
If you're not sure, simply reverse-engineer how you got overweight and out of shape in the first place. Here's a generalization of how it usually goes:
You're activity levels are pretty low to non-existent. Maybe you do a desk job or you drive for a living. What happens is you spend most of your day sitting down and when you come home you head for the sofa and watch TV before going to bed.
Your diet is awful. You think it's OK, but you're fooling yourself.
Those packets of healthy-looking lunch meals you buy at the store are not really healthy at all. They're full of additives, preservatives, added sugar and trans fats.
The healthy-looking cereal you eat for breakfast is loaded with sugar and salt.
The takeaway meals you have most nights are loaded with a cocktail of poisons that are slowly destroying your liver, building your store of fat and clogging up your arteries.
The soda you drink is full of sugar and if you don't quit, diabetes is not far away.
Oh, you thought you'd be clever and switch to diet soda, did you? Lose-lose. Diet drinks have artificial sweeteners instead of sugar. These poisons fool you into thinking you're hungry (so you eat more sugar-laden junk) while causing cell damage at the very core.
You've been slowly eating and drinking yourself fat and your lack of exercise is allowing your fat store to keep growing.
What Food and Drink is Right?
The food industry is not your friend, while what's worse is the diet food delivery and weight loss industry isn't really, either. Neither is the government or the health authorities.
If they all really wanted you to be healthy, they would advocate a diet of only wholesome, healthy foods and natural drinks.
- Wholesome foods are the fresh stuff you buy in the greengrocery part of the store or in farmer's markets. That includes:
- Fresh vegetables that don't come in packets that you have to wash, peel and prepare before cooking a meal with
- Fresh meat (if you're not vegetarian or vegan) that is butchered right there in front of you and is preferably organic or grass fed.
- Fresh fish from a fishmonger that was caught today and prepared in front of you before you take it home to cook.
- Organic, free range eggs, cheese and butter
The general idea is to buy all your food fresh and totally avoid anything that is sold in a packet, can or jar. What's even better is if you can grow your own vegetables and fruit, but that would mean you'd need access to a small holding of land and learn how to grow things yourself.
As for what to drink, the answer is as simple as it gets. Water.
No juice, no soda, no sports drinks, no anything that isn't fresh, clean, clear water!
OK, you can add interest to plain water. My favorite trick is to squeeze a lemon into a pint of water and keep it in the fridge to drink through the day.
Lemons are nature's body-cleansers. They alkalize, detox and revitalize you! What's more, there a lot of evidence to suggest that mixing lemon juice with the pulp and the zest forms a powerful anti-cancer mixture that is way more powerful than chemo drugs yet is kind to healthy cells.
But that's a subject for another article, I believe.
From what I've told you so far, have you figured it out yet? How you're going to lose weight, get in shape and improve your health that is?
Weight Loss in a Nutshell
Here's the abridged version of all I wrote above.
- Stop eating all processed, packet foods and takeaways. Period
- Replace with home cooked meals made from fresh, wholesome ingredients
- Cut out all sugar and other sweeteners. Period
- Drink water (or water plus fresh lemon juice)
- No soda or other manufactured drinks (that includes diet drinks). Period
Now for the part that ties it all together.
Exercise every day. It doesn't need to be a strenuous workout at the gym, either.
It can be going for long, brisk walks in the fresh air. Swimming or cycling or whatever other activity you enjoy. Just make sure you do something every day.
If you work in an office, don't take the elevator, take the stairs! You'll be amazed just how fast doing that one simple thing will boost your energy levels and burn off excess fat.
Spend some time each day outdoors in the fresh air and sunshine. Your body manufactures its own vitamin D when exposed to the sun. You need that vitamin to help you lose weight.
Fresh air in your lungs helps your metabolism improve. Lack of it (by being indoors all day) slows your system down and allows it to store more fat!
Get your mind in the right frame. That means be positive and determined to work toward your goal without ever giving up.
If you never give up, you can never fail. Remember that!
Now go away and start doing this stuff. Time for reading about it just ended. Time for doing it just stated!
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