11 Simple Rules For Your Optimal Nutrition

Do you want to improve your health status by following an optimal diet?

Follow these simple rules:

1 - Do 5-6 meals a day
Eat frequently holding by you daily caloric requirements. To feel better, be good looking and a have good health is important to supply energy to your body gradually throughout the whole day. Don’t let too much time pass between two meals, not more of 4 hours. Plan at least 3 principal meals, breakfast, lunch and dinner and 2-3 light meals or snacks. In this way you will have more energy and won’t be hungry. An active person (who does sport) that eats frequently (every 3-4 hours circa) accelerates metabolism keeping the energy levels stable all day long. Reducing the number of meals metabolism get slower and less calories will be burnt.

2 – Combine carbohydrates and proteins in every meal
Our body works better with the right equilibrium of proteins and carbohydrates. Proteins are essential for muscles formation, immune system keeping and insulin levels stabilizing, thus providing constant energy all day long. Moreover proteins sate better and appetite decreases. So avoid a carbohydrates-rich nutrition, and offset proteins and carbohydrates.

3 – Choose right portions
Portions’ dimensions are important to the weight control. By and large a portion is equivalent to the quantity of food you can hold in your hand’s palm. For example, if half a cup of rice or of chicken breasts stay on the palm of your hand, thus that is your portion. Do the same with vegetables and all the other food. For main meals choose a portion of proteins, one of carbohydrates and/or vegetables from the list of the 7 foods. Eat at least 2 portions of vegetables a day.

4 – Plan meals in advance
Before you begin your training program, try different recipes and choose those that are more suitable for you and the best matches. Thus you will be ready to get off on the right foot. So, if you can, prepare meals in advance or program your menu of the day, or of the week, so to decrease temptations and to follow more easily your program.

5 – Improve the wrong choices
Instead of the usual chocolate snacks, eat an energetic bar only. Use skimmed milk or partially-skimmed milk, not full-cream. Choose a low fat yoghurt instead of full-cream ones. Cook meat on the grill rather than frying it with oil.

6 – Drink at least 10 glasses of water
When you follow a training, nutrition and integration program is very important to drink water, at least a glass during every meal and 4-5 during the day. If you drink “light” beverages (sugar free), tea or coffee, because of their diuretic effect, you’ll have to compensate drinking at least another glass of water.

7 – Don’t eat immediately before or after training
If you can, train in the morning as you wake up with empty stomach to burn more fats.
Moreover, eating not before an hour from training increases even more the fat-burning effect. Last, don’t eat immediately before you go to sleep.


8 – Use high quality supplements
Supplements can help in covering nutritional lacks and in increasing performances. When you buy supplements, choose those Companies that invest in research to improve efficiency of their products.

9 – Find right motivations
Put a purpose and write it so you can see it in every moment of the day. Shoot some photos “before” the beginning of the program and set a date to shoot photos “after”, trying to reach the physical form you want.

10 – Aim to constancy rather than to perfection
It will occasionally happen to eat meals or snacks that are out of the list of the recommended foods. When it happens don’t let you go, enjoy your “distraction” and come back to your program with the next meal.

11 – Reward yourself!!!
Sometimes award yourself with your favourite food: pizza, ice-cream, etc…

How To Eat And Keep A Good Physical Shape Without The Fear Of Fat

Keeping the shape is not a mirage, following a few simple tips you can reach a good physical form and preserve your health. Lipids are important nourishments for our body, they not only bring calories, but as for carbohydrates and proteins, they have very important metabolic functions and so they have not to be demonized.

As usual is the quantity to make the difference, and a food can be useful or harmful according to its quantity. Lipids are an important source of essential fat acids and liposoluble vitamins (A, D, E, K), which are all necessary for life. The spreading sedentariness put us up against a long series of problems and often our answer isn’t to gift us with some spare time, but instead it’s to blame someone or something: but it’s not lipids’ fault!

Obesity and overweight found their richest soil in social progress: a great availability of food and a very few physical effort to get it; it determines a radical change in lifestyle, which brings to a poor expenditure of energy and consequentially brings to a population that tends more and more to over weight and often to obesity!

If you add to all of this a poor knowledge about foods’ nutritional value, it’s easy to understand how this condition can become a spreading social phenomenon. The most expert nutritionists ask people to read nutritional tags and it’s common in supermarkets to see people reading labels on boxes. But it’s equally easy to see how sometimes those people reject bakery food containing butter preferring the ones containing vegetal fats, without understanding that foods containing butter are of higher quality. And it’s equally easy to see people having snack with four chocolate “innocent cookies”, without realising that they just brought in a calories quantity equal to a 100 g pig steak!

The meaning is: it’s the global caloric balance to make the difference, that is calories brought in within a day! Changing dietary habits can yet be very hard and it represents a key point on which many diets fail: if I use to keep on my desk cookies or snacks, it will be very easy to go over the daily caloric quantity and then I won’t reach the goal I set. So it’s very important doing snacks, in mid-morning or mid-afternoon, that have a little caloric contribution, but with a filler effect, to allow you to arrive to the main meal a little hungry and without any difficulties.

Examples: fruit, yoghurt, vegetables, etc….To avoid: cold cuts, chocolate, candies, fast food, gassy drinks and any sweets. It’s a good habit to have a complete breakfast and if you have not enough time for a lunch because of you work, it would be a good alternative to eat a well balanced equivalent meal.

Features of a good equivalent meal:

- Balanced in carbohydrate, protein and lipid quantities:
- It has to give a good sense of surfeit
- Good digestibility and good taste.

Equivalent meal arises to be sure about what is brought in, to exceed not about those calories which represent the typical referral parameter.
Another good suggestion is to entrust to expert professionals, avoiding those dangerous diets “lemon-based”…”apple-based”…”melon-based”…or any other summer ideas up to-date.
A safe loss of weight, and above all lasting, always passes by expert professionals, doctors or expert nutritionists.

Always remember that too many calories mean too many fuel, and our body doesn’t waste it…it absorbs it in the form of lipids, but again…it’s not lipids’ fault!

Tips to Improve Strength

During a sport season, strength is a very important feature in every work program, especially during wintertime, even if is good to do recalls during the whole year.

Strength has many different components (stamina, power or speed), when you are on the court being strong means to be able to push efficiently with “longer gears”, and this makes the difference from an athlete to another.

For example, how can strength be trained? Recent studies have shown that training in gym using is useful to young people and beginners, less useful to an evolved athlete because it determines a lag in reaching physical shape at the beginning of the season, also because, once you stop training with loads, 4 up to 6 weeks occur to burn off muscular fatigue.

Moreover, a wrong usage of loads can give a muscular mass increase and a very negative consequence for your weight/power ratio (that’s true for many sports) with a consequential loss of performances.


Bearing that in mind, we have to admit that with the cold season, when light hours go decreasing, temperatures become less pleasant and more importantly you find yourself in that period from November to December, when you can dedicate to other sports (the so-called cross-training with run, swimming, cross-country skiing, walks on mountains) and it is possible and useful to withdraw with gym and generally with indoor training. The aim is to keep a minimum amount of aerobic and muscular tone conditioning using a “circuit-based” work, through which different muscular areas (legs, arms, torso’s muscles) are involved, using loads that are about the 50-60% of the maximum for two minutes circa of use.

Thank to this method, cardiac frequency keeps a low rhythm, that is an aerobic work, muscles work with no fatigue thus keeping tone and stress resistance. Very important is the work of “transfer” done on bike or on spinning bike, after work done on machinery.

Period to be dedicated to this kind of work in gym, generally lasts not more than six weeks.

How can strength be fed? The supplementary feeding during workout or following the sessions during which exercises are planned for the development of force, is very important, especially with regard to recovery. After every workout it’s necessary first to reinstate the sugars used in efforts given the importance of amino acids and proteins; hard work leads to micro-lesions at the level of muscle tissue that must be quickly repaired, so as to allow, during the anabolic phase, improving of the contractile ability of the muscle itself and expression of the force.
Only in this way you can get some good improvements.

How To Best Manage The Training In A Typical Week

At the beginning of training all athletes are looking to train stimulating the different qualities to be ready for the races; this means way to the so-called "week-type" training.

This term was always meant that microcycle of workout that stimulates the various organic aspects and implies a good basis for preparation. The week-type makes sense, then, in the first phase of the competitive period, but it is useful to continue with the same pattern throughout the year?

Here we must be very clear: if you mean the same pattern in terms of workloads, then it makes absolutely no sense to arrive at a basis pattern to be pursued; and may be less serious if we’re speaking of days dedicated to various kinds of training.

For example, if you're used to dedicate a day to force, one to threshold repetition and one to the distance, this pattern may also be valid forever, varying loads within each day anyway. It makes no sense to do a number repetitions of strength on Tuesday, tot series at threshold on Thursday, for example. Following the same pattern will end up then with the body to bear all the same loads and instead they should vary; then how do you do a recovery period?

I believe that each of us must keep in mind what could be his week-type of training, and that it has to coincide with the best performance, but this pattern can serve as a starting point to establish clearer and more precisely periods and future trainings.

In essence, find out your typical week, but not as a point of arrival, than as a starting point to look for improvements in form and performance you want.

Look At Here How An Eagle Can Become A Chicken

A few times ago I read a short story that impressed me very much. I want to repeat it here to you.

A man found an eagle's egg and put it in a hen’s nest.
The egg hatched simultaneously with the brood, and the baby eagle grew along with the chicks.
Throughout its life the eagle did what the backyard chickens did, thinking of being one of them. It rummaged through the soil looking for worms and insects, cackling and shaking its wings rising from the ground a few feet.
The years passed and the eagle grew very old.
One day it saw above it, in the cloudless sky, a beautiful bird that soared, majestic and elegant, in the midst of a strong air current, barely moving his strong golden wings.
The old eagle looked up, startled. "Who is that?" asked.
"It’s the eagle, the king of birds," replied its neighbour.
"It belongs to the sky. We, however, belong to the earth, because we are chickens."
So the eagle lived and died like a chicken, because it considered itself to be such.

This is what I concluded:

"You can fly too, you just have to know it and believe it!"

Draw yourself your own conclusions!