Contestant's Diet on Fit for Fashion

Q: Is diet or fitness more important when trying to reach your fitness goal?

A: Fitness is 30% and Diet is 70%. You can work very hard with strength conditioning and cardio, but if you are eating the wrong foods and too many calories you will never achieve your weight-loss or athletic goal. Period.

While I was in Malaysia filming for Fit For Fashion TV, I used my nutritional counseling training to create the diet for contestants. It was honestly a difficult task because they each had differing goals in terms of calorie intake, protein needs, and food allergies. Ideally, contestants like Matty who entered the competition with a greater amount of lean muscle needed to increase his protein content in order to continue building muscle mass and avoid using it for energy. Individuals like Vanessa or Fred whose goal was to drop weight, needed to reduce calorie intake while filling up on vegetables, good carbohydrates and protein.

In general, I focused on foods that provide long-lasting energy. Energy is the key factor in your ability to shed weight easily and permanently. Energy regenerates your liver and other tissue cells, flushes toxic waste from the body helps maintain your ideal weight, keeps your skin’s collagen smooth and your hair healthy.

What eats up energy? Digestion. The full process of energy takes up more energy than any other internal function of the human body. It may take as much as half or more of your total energy. For the contestant’s transformations, I focused on a diet of healthy, alkaline, electron-rich, plant-based meals with lean protein, healthy fats and complex carbohydrates.  I eliminated a majority of processed foods, sugars, bad fats, carbohydrates high on the glycemic index and high-allergy foods. Combining a clean and supportive diet with daily exercise will restore health, harmony and balance in the body. This is will aid in fast fitness gains, like weight-loss or muscle building.

I will discuss fats, proteins, and carbohydrates in future weeks, but let’s start with common foods that drain your energy and prevent you from attaining your ideal figure. I eliminated high-allergen foods from contestant’s diets immediately. These foods include dairy, gluten and sugar. They all create sluggish and sometimes blocked digestion, which lowers energy and holds on to weight.

Dairy: 

Dairy is one food group that is difficult for most people to digest, primarily due to the sugar- lactose- found in dairy products.

The small intestine produces the enzyme lactase, which breaks down the sugar- lactose. When your small intestine does not produce lactase, your body is then unable to break down much of the lactose that is ingested. When this happens, the lactose that doesn’t get broken down enters the colon. From there, bacteria that lives in the colon, breaks down the lactose and creates fluid and gas, causing you to have symptoms.

Surprisingly enough, not everyone who lacks any or all of the lactase enzymes has symptoms. Those who do experience symptoms are considered lactose intolerant. Most people with this intolerance can have some amounts of milk or milk products and experience little to no symptoms. The amount of lactose that actually causes symptoms varies from person to person.

If you are one to have digestive issues while eating or drinking dairy products, try lactose-free milk and other dairy-free alternatives such as coconut and almond milk based products.

Gluten: 

Gluten, in Latin, Means “glue”, found in barley, wheat, rye, spelt, bulgur and kamut. It’s also made up of two groups of proteins, gliadins and glutenins.

Reactions to gluten aren’t always the same. There are two types of reactions an individual can be categorized under: Celiac Disease or Non-celiac gluten sensitivity. 

Celiac Disease Is an autoimmune disease, which causes an inflammatory response to the absorptive cells in the small intestine. In response to this, the body attacks the villi of the small intestine, damaging the tiny finger-like projections that are important in nutrient absorption. Unfortunately, there isn’t a cure for this disorder either.

About 50 percent of individuals experience the “usual” symptoms of this disorder such as cramping, diarrhea, and malnutrition, all of which deal with the digestive tract.

The other 50% experience symptoms that don’t have anything to do with the digestive tract, such as depression, chronic fatigue, migraine headaches, irritability, plus so much more.

Non-celiac gluten sensitivity is an immune system reaction to gluten, rather than an autoimmune disorder found in Celiac Disease patients. An individual with this disorder can have the same “usual” symptoms one would have with Celiac Disease; however, symptoms are usually not associated with digestion, rather fatigue, chronic infections, trouble sleeping, allergies, and much more.

Because both conditions are hard to pinpoint, they are often misdiagnosed or even overlooked.

The prevalence of gluten sensitivity has increased over the past 50 years, primarily due to the changes in wheat. In fact, wheat crops are more genetically modified than ever before. Genetic modification requires more “human intervention”, which means more “chemicals” are needed to maintain the wheat crops. Because of this, these new forms of wheat are unrecognizable to the human body, making it harder for our bodies to digest.

Sugar: 

When we eat sugar in large amounts, it can act like poison and wreak havoc on in our bodies. If done in a continuous cycle, havoc can eventually turn into diabetes, and weight gain. Most of us don’t realize that the amount of sugar in our diets has gone beyond toxic over the years. The main issue is that when we eat sweets, our brain gets psyched, literally. When sugar is consumed in large amounts, a surge of dopamine follows, leaving us addicted and wanting more in order to reach the highest “sugary rush”.  These same addictive behaviors happen during drug addiction. Once the drug of choice, in this case-sugar is consumed in large amounts on a daily basis, an individual may find it harder to stop. He or she can have the same withdrawal symptoms as one would have with a street drug addiction. How crazy is that?

The added sugar you see in processed foods comes from sugar beets and sugar cane, both of which have equal parts of glucose and fructose. However, most processed foods now in days include more processed fructose, which can wreak even more havoc on the body. More processed sugars are harder on our bodies than other sugars because it’s easier for our bodies to break it down.

Here is what glucose and fructose do while in our bodies: 

Glucose

When digested, it is broken down in our stomachs, and then transported into our small intestine. From there, our pancreas is triggered to secrete insulin, a hormone that takes glucose from our blood and transports it to our cells to be utilized for energy.

• Insulin also blocks production of leptin, the “hunger hormone” that tells your brain that you’re full.

• Increased insulin levels leave you unsatisfied, wanting more food even if you’ve already eaten. With this, your body is in a stimulated starvation mode, which then causes your brain to tell your body to start storing the extra glucose as belly fat.

Most sweets contain large amounts of glucose that when digested it shocks our body, giving us a “sugar high”. To bring this high down, our brain triggers the hormone, serotonion, a sleep-regulating hormone, which causes us to then “crash”

Fructose

When digested, it is also broken down in our stomachs, and then transported into our small intestine. From there, it is transported into the bloodstream, which then delivers it straight to the liver.

• Your liver works to break down fructose so that your body can utilize it for energy. However, when fructose is consumed in large amounts, the liver becomes overworked and unable to break down all that fructose at once. In time, the excess fructose can cause fat globules to grow throughout the liver, causing lipogenesis- the precursor to nonalcoholic fatty liver disease.

This all doesn’t sound too appetizing to you, does it? Well, luckily there’s Healthier sugar alternatives available that won’t wreak as much havoc on your body as does regular table sugar.

Sugar Alternatives: 

Maple Syrup and Honey
These contain fewer chemicals and provide a more of a glucose-fructose balance (and antioxidants). The good thing is: Less is MORE. The unique flavors are sweet enough to satisfy your sweet tooth.

Natural Sugar

Yes, natural sugar from fruits and veggies are BETTER. In fact, it’s harder to go overboard on truly natural sugars since the fiber provided in fruits and vegetables slows the sugar’s absorption in your body, preventing a spike in insulin.

Other names for sugar that you should be aware of when reading labels:

Agave syrup
Barley malt
Beet molasses
Beet sugar
Brown rice syrup
Brown sugar
Cane crystals
Cane juice
Cane sugar
Corn sugar
Corn syrup
Corn sweetener
Crystalline fructose
Date sugar
Dextran
Dextrose
Ethyl maltol
Fructose
Fruit juice
Galactose
Glucose
High Fructose Corn Syrup
Hydrolyzed corn starch
Lactose
Maltitol
Maltodextrin
Maltose
Malt syrup
Molasses
Muscovado sugar
Palm sugar
Panocha
Rice Syrup
Sorbitol
Sucrose
Sweetened condensed milk
Treacle
Xylose

There are also other names for sugar substitutes that you should be aware of like: Acesulfame potassium, Aspartame, Neotame, Rebiana (stevia), Saccharin, and Sucralose.

 

Sources: 

http://www.eatingfree.com/newtrition/nutripedia/did-you-know/how-can-i-keep-my-energy-up-during-the-day-without-ruining-my-diet.aspx

http://www.myfitnesspal.com/blog/diethack/view/8-delicious-foods-to-boost-up-your-energy-levels-128

http://www.womenshealthmag.com/nutrition/good-energy-foods

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2012/08/15/foods-that-boost-energy-_n_1779032.html

http://www.active.com/nutrition/articles/foods-that-boost-energy

http://www.mensfitness.com/training/pro-tips/10-energy-foods?page=3

https://christinebullockold.omuze.com/the-next-dietary-bad-boy-gluten/