What and When Should I Eat?

Why is what I eat so important?
It helps the muscles grow.
It keeps off the ugly fat!
It keeps me from fainting when I train harder.

Pumping iron tickles our sleeping muscles into waking up and start growing. But how do my muscles grow? Well, if I ask my body to make more muscles and not provide it with the raw materials it needs, it can simply not make any more muscle!! In the same manner, if I do not provide it with quality materials, I won’t get a quality product!
To make good concrete, we need not only enough cement and enough sand, not just good cement and good sand, but also the correct proportion of cement and sand!!

Now, if you have got the drift, to make my muscles grow, I need enough nutrients, good nutrients and the right combination of nutrients!!

Let us first start off by deciding when to eat. After a meal, our digestive system needs a lot of blood supply. Why? First, the stomach needs enormous amounts of acid to digest our food, which it extracts from the blood. Next, the digestive system needs to produce a lot of hormones and enzymes to help in digestion, the raw materials for which are again found in the blood. Finally, the blood takes away all the digested materials loaded in the cells lining the intestines to be utilized and stored in the rest of the body.

All these processes require an enormous increase in blood supply to the intestines.

So what?
Well, when I work out, my muscles also need a huge amount of blood supply. But if most of the blood is already busy washing my intestines off its food, there won’t be enough left to feed my muscles!!

So, it is not advisable to exercise within 2 hours of a large meal!

Again, for similar reasons, sitting down at the dining table immediately after working out is also not advisable. I have to give time for the blood to drain out from my muscles and be available to digest what I eat. A half to one hour wait after the workout should be enough. I can finish my shower in the meantime!

On the other hand, a light snack, preferably liquid, half an hour before my workout gives me enough energy to go through my schedule without tiring out easily, especially if I am training in the morning after an overnight fast! This light snack can be something like a fruit or a glass of fruit juice. Any kind of fat or oil is to be avoided in this snack, because fats take much longer to get digested. And liquids are better, because they are digested and absorbed faster.

How do I choose what to eat?

The recommended proportion of the major nutrients is carbohydrates 60%, proteins 20% and fats 20%. Now how do I measure that? In my opinion, these exact proportions are for the serious body builders to stick to. For the regular person, a regular balanced diet should suffice. For me, there is a very simple formula to follow for a balanced diet. In my every meal, I mentally divide my plate into four equal parts. I fill one part with carbs, another with proteins and the other two parts with vegetables. That provides me with all the major nutrients along with a lot of vitamins and minerals. Well, where did the fats go? An average person gets all the fats he needs from the cooking oil used at his home.

I guess almost everyone know which foods make up carbs and which make up proteins. In case someone has a doubt about this, do post your query.

The next question is, how do I know if I have eaten enough! Again I will speak for the average person, not for the serious bodybuilder. I use a medium sized plate and fill my plate only once – no second helpings! And no dessert after dinner – the carbs on my plate in my meal were enough and I can do without having to burn extra calories the next day!

Of course, a dessert now and then and a pizza sometimes are okay. But I take care that this type of junk feeding does not become a habit.

Most of us believe that our digestive system needs to rest – so we should eat only two or three meals. Exactly the opposite is true!! Our body (especially insulin – the hormone absconding or inactive in diabetics) is adapted to better handle small meals. A large meal overwhelms our digestive system and our blood gets loaded with more nutrients than it can carry to the store houses at one time! This is the reason for increased blood glucose in diabetics immediately after a meal – their insulin system is even slower! The easy way to do away with this problem is to have more number of small meals – typically 5 to 6 meals. If you cannot have 5 meals, make it three meals and two in between meal snacks. And again, don’t start drooling over that pizza or burger at the mention of a snack! An occasional burger is fine. But a healthy snack could be a fruit, a glass of milk or a cup of coffee with two biscuits.