Diet

I read somewhere recently that some experts believe that physical performance depends on nutrition more than training. I do not know if that is true or not, but more and more I tend to agree with it.

A couple of months ago I started to reduce the amount of diet soda that I drank. I used to have at least one diet cola a day, typically it was a couple at lunch and one in the evening at home. I stopped buying diet soda at the store because I realized I was spending a fortune on the stuff. Sooner or later, I stopped ordering them while I was at lunch. There was no real reason, I just was a little tired of them. What I noticed is that I began to feel a lot less tired during the day, and I was getting to bed earlier each night. I used to get 5 to 6 hours of sleep at night because I was a night owl. After I kicked the soda habit, I was going to bed at a much more reasonable hour. In addition, I later read more scientific evidence that consuming artificial sweeteners actually causes you to consume more calories per day. Your body expects a sugar rush when it tastes the sweetener, since it is then deprived of sugar it will kick your cravings into overdrive. the result is that you will gorge on other sweets or items like refined breads, pastas etc to get the glucose.

A friend of mine recently gave me some nutritional tips from a scientific perspective. He confirmed the research behind artificial sweeteners and also shared with me some other best practices. A little over a week ago I decided to clean my diet up even more and I have actually lost about 8 to 10 pounds. Most of it is probably water weight due to the fact that my sodium intake has dropped dramatically, but nonetheless I feel better. The best thing about it is that I am not counting carbs, calories, fat or following any strict plan. I also am not walking around feeling hungry all of the time. This is not a fad diet that is supposed to last a couple of weeks, it is a lifestyle diet. In my next post I will share some of the keys to the plan.