The Fitness Foods That Help You Perform

Nutrition is vital for your body, and makes all the difference in how you perform. The correct nutrition will help you to maintain a healthy weight, reduce body fat, have enough energy, sleep well, and feel better. Furthermore, studies show, it's the most important part of your fitness programme.

What defines a balanced diet?

A balanced diet means eating a variety of foods, with as many unprocessed and whole foods as possible. People will interpret this differently, with some eating sugary foods daily whilst others limiting this to a weekly occurrence. The key is to find balance for you and not feel like you are restricting yourself, a treat here and there is all part of a balanced diet that enables you to keep this up long-term.

What makes up a healthy diet?

As a general rule, vegetables, fruits and starchy foods should provide the bulk of most of your meals, with the remaining part being your protein foods. As mentioned above, you should limit the amount of foods and drinks that are high in fat or sugar, while trying to increase antioxidants which reduce the inflammation in our body that help us fight disease and illness.

What Are Fitness Foods?

The term "fitness food" is often confused with "superfoods". Eating a diet rich in both is essential to our health. The following is a list of fitness foods that experts recommend:

• Oats (high in fibre, improves digestion/increases metabolism)
• Eggs (high in protein, helps to build muscle)
• Greens (rich in antioxidant, reduces inflammation)
• Lean meat and fish (high in amino acids and protein, helps to build muscle).
• And foods that contain quercetin, such as broccoli, onions, apples and berries (reduces inflammation)

Eating and fitness:

• Energy. The food we eat has a massive impact on the energy we have throughout the day. Nutrient-dense foods are digested slower and therefore will be released into the system over a longer period of time. On the other hand, easily digestible food (simple carbohydrates) will digest much quicker, giving you a short spike of energy but causing the body to feel hungry again in a much shorter time frame. If choosing to workout, it becomes important to time your meals carefully and appropriately around this; too big and you’ll feel sluggish, too small and you won’t have enough energy to complete a workout.

• Brain Power. Omega 3’s (found in oily fish such as salmon) can provide long term benefits to support our memory and learning, as well as reducing a number of deficiencies and long-term issues. 

At times it's easy to forget to focus on our diet as much as we do on our training. You probably eat most of the above, but is your diet as good as it could be. Take some time to think about any ways you could improve it, in order to improve you daily energy, and your athletic performance. And for other suggestions and stories, read our other blogs: https://castore.com/blogs/journal

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