Best Meals for Workouts

If you want to achieve a body that’s fit and healthy, you have to understand that diet and exercise go hand in hand. You have to exercise regularly while also making sure that you don’t let yourself go and ensure that you eat healthy as well.

But what usually happens is that either most people exercise regularly but let themselves go on their diet by eating unhealthy food or eating more than what they need or just not exercising at all but still eating healthy food like including a hefty amount of fruits and vegetables in their diet while shying away from fatty foods. To ensure that your health and fitness is kept at its optimum level, you have to make sure that you have to keep a degree of balance and agreement of exercise and diet.

Exercise and Diet

It is often that after an exercise or after a workout session, you tend to be hungry. While most people just end up opening their refrigerators and getting anything their eyes might see fancy, there are actually foods and drinks that are suited for you, especially after exercising.

These foods and beverages not only quench your thirst or satiate your hunger but they also promote the replenishment of your body’s energy, promote the growth and development of your muscles and even help you to lose that excess weight that you have.

What are the foods and drinks that are best eaten together when you exercise? Here are just the perfect food items that can help you keep your body fit and healthy after an exercise or workout session.

Good Old Water

First of on the list is probably the most important thing that you need to take – water. This is because when you exercise, you lose fluids as well. Put the fact that when you exercise in a more intense manner, like in humid weather and putting more effort on your cardio and strength exercises, you need to stay hydrated or your body won’t have the oxygen that it needs to keep functioning.

Keeping yourself hydrated is also a good way to gain mileage on your exercise regimen as the fluids will allow you to keep going longer. Instead of immediately grabbing a sport drink if you’re exercising at the gym where it’s temperature-controlled and quite comfortable, plain water is the perfect hydrating solution.

Salmon and Other Fishes

Yes, it’s important to eat protein, especially right after a workout. But people are usually scared of consuming too much because protein commonly comes from meat sources that are often also rich with fat.

If you’re looking for a healthier approach, salmon is the way to go. This is because the iron that you get from salmon provides you with a great amount of energy while its protein content is of the highest quality even with its small size. It allows your body to repair itself and grow after accomplishing your exercise regimen.

Furthermore, salmon is also an excellent source of Vitamin D which you don’t often get in other food sources. A low level of Vitamin D will often lead to weaker muscle strength which just won’t do when you’re exercising.

Uncanny Juices

It’s already a given that you lose fluids when you exercise. But it’s not just water that you lose. You also end up excreting the valuable electrolytes in your body. Through sweating, electrolytes like sodium and potassium are excreted. That’s where the saying of healthcare practitioners come from, “Where sodium goes, water follows.”

While it sounds easy to replace them with just a fix of a sports drink, go for the natural option with the choice of tomato juice. It’s not only filled with electrolytes but it’s also a hydrating beverage which will help you keep hydrated if you’re exercising. Measuring the amount of electrolytes that tomato juice and sports drinks provides, tomato juice wins hands down when it comes to electrolyte content.

Getting Carbohydrates and Energy

If you want your muscles to grow, carbohydrates are the best way to go. They are the primary source of energy of the body by providing glucose which is used by the muscles to keep on moving.

There are two kinds of carbohydrates – simple carbohydrates and complex carbohydrates. While complex carbs take time to be processed and absorbed by the body, simple carbs are easily consumed and utilized by the body, providing you with a boost of energy.

But what complex carbohydrates bring is a prolonged effect of the sugar in the blood keeping you all fueled up. That’s why oatmeal is one of the best choices when it comes to food that’s best in exercise. It’s a form of complex carbohydrates that keeps the blood sugar to its optimum level, ensuring that you have enough energy to last throughout your exercise session.

Get a Jolt of Energy

If you need a quick boost of energy before starting your exercise, drinking a cup of coffee or chocolate can provide you with great help. This is because both coffee and chocolate contain caffeine. You get a quick boost of energy that can help in making your exercise last longer and give you a better endurance. It’s like getting a jolt of energy once you down a cup of coffee or chocolate. Furthermore, chocolate also provides an additional feature by giving you a boost in energy through its sugar content.

Keeping Potassium Available

One of the most important electrolytes in the body is potassium. It is often in tandem with sodium when it comes to usefulness. Potassium contributes to how to body maintains adequate muscle strength. In fact, potassium is so important that it maintains the contractility strength of the cardiac muscles ensuring that your heart is strong enough to keep beating. That is why when you work out, it is important to have a good source of potassium.

One of the best sources is raisins. It’s not just a competitive source for an energy bar, it brings you a lot more benefits that you can imagine like delivering a boost of energy, helping in keeping you hydrated throughout your exercise and preventing muscle cramps which often cut the duration of the workout for most people.

Exercise plus Coffee?

It’s already a known fact that exercise and diet go together in the goal of achieving a fit and healthy body. With regular exercise, we burn excess fat and calories while toning the muscles in our body. With the proper diet, your body is getting all the nutrients that it needs while avoiding foods that can incur additional cholesterol and calories that you don’t really need, only adding excessive weight.

The blending of these two factors are needed when it comes to the goal of a healthy body but what usually happens is that people tend to outbalance one factor from the other. For example, people tend to eat too much without matching the amount of exercise needed for the food they consumed. In other cases, people tend to exercise too much without eating the right amount of food, leading to hypoglycemic events that render you weak. That’s why exercise and diet should go hand in hand to become effective and efficient.

There are a lot of foods and drinks that boost the results and performance of your exercise regimen. These foods are usually healthy in nature, giving you the right amount of nutrients that can help you in working out as well as giving you a boost of energy that you need to exercise longer. Foods like oatmeal, fruits and protein bars are good examples. But one drink that brings a lot of benefits when it comes to exercise is the brewed concoction that is coffee.

Exercise

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Water During Exercise

ExerciseThe body is essentially made from water. About 2/3 of the body is made out of water. Water is vital for our survival and it’s involved in nearly all functions of the human body. From transporting nutrients, being the liquid that blood utilizes as a medium, through the process of digestion, breathing, eliminating waste products in the body and a lot more, water is there. It’s also needed for absorbing water-soluble vitamins which are required in our daily consumption. Water also contributes to the temperature of our body.

So what’s the big deal with drinking water during exercise? It’s a very big deal. When you work out, you lose a great amount of water. That’s why you feel so tired, bushed and dehydrated after a workout session. It’s a given that you should drink plenty of water, especially if you’re exercising.

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The Post Workout Meal  

When it comes to getting a healthy and fit body, we have to face the truth that it isn’t just about exercise. To ensure that you’ll have the body that you want, you have to take note that regular exercise just won’t cut it. It has to be partnered with a healthy diet.

Sure, some people will contradict and say that with exercise alone, you can achieve the healthy weight that you desire. But that’s not the case. This is because when you exercise, you lose a lot of fluids, electrolytes, nutrients and energy in the process. You have to recover these lost components to ensure that your body is kept functioning to its optimum capacity.

The main factor that coincides with exercise consists of three major components – carbohydrates, protein and fats. While these three are commonly found in all of the food that we eat every day, the amount varies with each type of food. Together with exercise, carbohydrates and proteins play a huge role in helping you gain a body that’s fit and healthy, also aiding in the healthy weight loss or weight gain. So what are the foods that you can eat right after a workout session? Here are just some of them.

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The Value of Food plus Exercise

Exercise and diet are both integral parts when it comes to our health. Regular exercise is needed if you want to achieve a healthy body that’s fit and sturdy just like a well-oiled machine. On the other hand, adequate nutrition through the diet that you have is important as well since you have to supply your body with the right amount of nutrients to be healthy.

But what usually happens is that either of these two offsets the other by either being too much or too little in quantity. Eating too much while not matching up with the equal amount of exercise will lead to unhealthy weight gain. Exercising too much without replacing the calories that you’ve lost through physical activity may lead to nutrient deprivation and loss of electrolytes. So why is it so important that exercise and diet should go together?

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Why Eat Before a Workout?

There’s this debate that has been continuing for so long already. While it is already a proven fact that regular exercise can do wonders to achieve the goal of gaining a healthy and fit body, there is a debate when it comes to the combination of diet and exercise. While diet has its own benefits for our health by managing the amount of nutrients that we take in and focusing more on eating healthy foods like fruits and vegetables while shying away from junk foods, eating before a workout session has received countless inquiries.

Some people would argue that you shouldn’t eat before a workout session because it defeats the purpose if you want to lose weight. Some people would also argue that eating before a workout session gives you a full feeling which may interfere with your exercise. There are a lot more arguments when it comes to this but the answer can be summarized in just a few words.

It depends.

While some people would argue that eating before exercise isn’t advisable, that’s not always the case. In fact, it is quite helpful to eat before exercise. However, eating too much right before going on your workout isn’t really helpful. Why should you eat before going on your workout? Here are just some reasons as to engage in the said routine.

Work Out Meals

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