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NUTRITIONAL OPTIMIZATION

December 24, 2017

Excerpt from Healthy Running Step by Step, Chapter 5

Nutritional Optimization

Real foods control your insulin, help you burn more fat as fuel, and help deliver optimal performance.

Training is only half the battle when it comes to achieving the body you desire, food is the other.

Just like with your training, a science-based approach to what you put in your body and when you do it has a great effect on your ability to achieve your athletic and health goals. My approach to health and fitness involves guided exercise and an easy-to-follow, “close-to-the- earth” diet. Both are designed for one singular goal: metabolic efficiency—to make you a better butter burner. We have discussed the importance of precision heart-rate training to develop your fat-burning metabolism in chapter 4; now it’s time to dial in your diet to further serve this goal.

All of us, especially athletes, need to alter our relationship with food. We need to view daily nutrition as the source of our life energy and focus on foods that further health, not disease. In recent decades, we’ve been told more about what not to eat than what to eat to stay healthy. Slowly, our relationship with food is changing as our food supply is being exposed as corrupted and unnatural. We are realizing that we need natural foods to help keep us healthy and make us stronger, leaner, and more resistant to disease.

Fact: Most foods in the grocery store have been processed to such a degree by the giant food corporations that they have little nutritional resemblance to their root food sources. Based on extensive and costly research from farming to processing to packaging, the food industries try to get us hooked with appearance and addictive combinations of salt, sugar, and fat. Natural nutritional integrity be damned! What’s worse is that medical and health experts have unintentionally played into the “laboratory-food- is-better-than-nature” syndrome by incorrectly tarring eggs, butter, and other healthy foods as health killers.

The key concept you need to remember about healthy nutrition is that you should eat foods that are close to the ground—meaning unadulterated and unprocessed. It’s rare to find a food that comes out of the ground with unhealthy proportions of sugar, salt, and fat and that is damaging to our bodies.

I feel the best diet plan is simple, science based, easy to achieve, and can be boiled down to one sentence: Control insulin levels throughout the day and train your metabolism to be efficient at burning fat, not storing it.

The problem is that we are constantly fighting the evolutionary forces that have programmed our bodies over millions of years to make and store fat to survive times when food scarcity was a constant threat. We have played right into our antiquated genetic predisposition by feeding ourselves an unnatural diet that encourages rampant production of insulin from the pancreas.

Insulin is released into your bloodstream to transport digested food into your muscle cells for energy production; the excess is stored as body fat. If you are not active and your muscles are not called upon to do any work, then all of the excess calories, whether in the form of protein, carbs, or fat, are transported to the liver and turned into fat.

There are only two ways to fight our body’s built-in evolutionary tendencies: exercise and diet. You have read in chapter 4 that the first order of business for your workouts is to use low-intensity exercise, which reprograms your muscles to favor fats for energy production. Now it’s time to focus on the importance of dietary manipulation during each of the Periodization phases to help achieve the athletic goals of each stage of your training.

Stay Fit and Stop Storing Fat

Performance nutrition starts with sound daily nutrition. The value of good daily nutrition is analogous to good sleep habits; if you regularly get adequate sleep at night, but you miss some time in the sack because of a late night, you’re still okay the next day. But do this too often and you will become chronically fatigued and run-down.

Likewise, when you eat right every day and then miss a meal or snack here and there, your energy levels and your workouts won’t suffer. To keep energy levels stable and ready, eat often. You must train every cell in your body to expect, receive, and use nutrients frequently (six times a day) throughout the day.

This cellular expectation is created when insulin levels drop a few hours after your last meal, at which time you need to feed your cells again with a snack. Your goal throughout the day is to keep nutrients coming at regular intervals so your metabolism keeps revving all day, burning more calories, and helping maintain a healthy body weight. At the same time, frequent meals keep energy levels constant to facilitate great workouts every time. But when you don’t eat every 2 hours, your insulin levels wane and your metabolic motor goes into an idle. The result is poor energy levels, reduced calorie burn for the day, lackluster workouts, and potential weight gain.

Healthy Running Step by Step By Robert Forster, PT and Roy Wallack

Healthy Running Step by Step will help runners of all ages and abilities understand the science behind every aspect of running: training program design, running technique, nutrition, recovery, flexibility and strength training and why running injuries occur, how to prevent them, and how to speed up recovery.

Injuries plague the majority of runners, wrecking training plans and cutting running careers short by decades, but they are not inevitable.

Authors Robert Forster, P.T., and Roy M. Wallack explain that nearly all running injuries can be rehabilitated quicker and even avoided altogether with the right training, strengthening, stretching, running form, and diet strategy. Drawing from Forster’s three decades of training and treating Olympic athletes and more than 10,000 runners, cyclists, and performance athletes at his award-winning Santa Monica, California, physical therapy and high-performance centers; this book emphasizes that better performance is inextricably bound to injury reduction and that a comprehensive, science-based training plan with built-in anti-injury “insurance” must include these crucial elements: Periodization training, Proper technique and footwear, Nutrition, Posture and flexibility, and Strength training.

This book also includes detailed, step-by-step rehabilitation matrixes for the five most common running injuries: IT band syndrome, Achilles tendonitis, shin splints, plantar fasciitis, and hamstring injuries. Using these unique matrixes as your guide, you’ll recover from injuries more quickly and understand what you need to do to prevent their reoccurrence.
Buy Now

Related Posts

  • NUTRITIONAL OPTIMIZATION STAY FIT AND STRONG
  • THE RIGHT BALANCE OF NUTRITION TO OPTIMIZE YOUR HEALTH

Tags: healthy running step by step, nutrition, ROBERT FORSTER PT Categories: NUTRITION, PHASE IV PROGRAM

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