Food for Thought

As a fitness professional, nutrition is often considered in terms of performance (eat this to go faster, further or improve recovery times) or appearance (body composition, lose or gain weight or improve muscle definition and shape).  Whilst many fitness professionals do have an understanding of how food affects the emotions, very little thought is given to the impact of what we eat on how we feel or why we eat what we do.

Curiously, the impact of food on how we feel is also rarely considered by those in the mental health services - specifically I'm thinking of counselling and psychotherapy professions.  Yet what we eat can have a profound affect on how we feel.

For example, it is known that caffeine and sugar can increase feelings of anxiety and depression despite giving an initial lift to our feelings, therapists will rarely suggest to clients that an alteration in diet may reduce the burden of difficult feelings like anxiety and depression.

This knowledge is often known by fitness professionals, but rarely is it asked for by clients - this is one of the examples of where counselling and personal training can actually meet: the mind and body is ultimately part of a single unit that should be treated as an integrated whole: YOU!

Is Exercise Failing You?

Are you in the gym everyday, sweating buckets and still not losing weight?

Have a good look at what you're doing outside of the gym:

• Do you drink lots of alcohol? The alcohol you don't burn immediately will be stored as fat. Alcohol will probably also inhibit your performance when exercising
• Do you smoke? This will reduce the effectiveness of your aerobic system (heart and lungs). It will also inhibit nutrient absorption.
• Do you feel you sleep well? Sleep is when your body repairs itself and builds muscle
• Do you have breakfast? All night you've been asleep and your metabolism drops; eating breakfast gives it a kick and gets you motoring. Skipping breakfast may be a false economy.
• Do you drive short distances? Or take the lift? Keeping active is more than getting hot in the gym - it involves raising your activity level throughout the day!
• Do you snack? Be honest! Sugars do horrible things to our energy systems - they encourage us to feel hungry, and then we eat more sugary things to fill us up.
• Do you drink sports drinks? These are full of sugar, and unless you are running marathons contain much, much more energy than you exert in the gym.

Try keeping a diary of what you eat, drink and all the activity you do in a day and how you feel about each thing.