3 Food Fitness Tips That Don’t Get Enough Press

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Everyone who’s been around the gym for more than a couple of minutes knows that diet is one of the fundamental elements of any plan to get in shape, perform to a high athletic standard, look good naked, or enjoy better health.

A bunch of different sayings exist to drive home this exact point.

“You can’t outrun a bad diet,” to point out that it’s a lot easier to consume calories than to burn them, for example.

The thing is, the dietary advice that gets shared around most widely, seems to rise and fall, and vary, according to what’s popular that week, or according to what scientific study was released that month.

It’s important to realise that different things will work for different people, in different circumstances, and that there aren’t necessarily hard and fast dietary rules for when you’re trying to get fit. All the same, here are a few food fitness tips that don’t get enough press – including some that have fallen out of fashion, and others that just haven’t caught on properly yet.

1. Eat plenty of fermented probiotic foods, and get plenty of prebiotic fibre in your diet

In his book, “The Diet Myth,” The scientist and researcher Tim Spector Looks at a bunch of the various benefits of keeping a healthy gut, and nourishing the organisms in your microbiome.

Among other things, the balance of microbes in your gut seems to have a lot to do with how good you are at staying lean versus getting fat. Research done on identical twins, eating the same diets, has found that weight can vary dramatically just based on the microbes that people carry around inside their intestines and digestive tracts.

The microbiome also seems to have a lot to do with mood, immune function, and more.

There are a few things you can do to improve your microbiome. For one thing, eat plenty of fermented foods such as sauerkraut, kimchi, and kombucha. Then, get plenty of soluble prebiotic fibre, as sold by companies like Boost My Fibre.

A lot of serious lifters, especially, avoid fibre because they worry it will reduce their testosterone levels. If you’re getting the right kind of fibre, in the right quantities, though, it’s likely to do a lot more good than harm.

1. Follow some old-fashioned advice about the times of day when you should do most of your eating

There’s an old saying that goes “eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper.”

Interestingly enough, this old-school bit of diet advice has been completely inverted by some recent nutritional trends in the fitness world.

The idea of “Carb Backloading,” for example, says that you should eat a bunch of simple carbs at night, just before going to sleep. And a lot of intermittent fasting routines favour fasting in the earlier part of the day, and feasting like a lunatic-Emperor later in the day, and at night.

As it so happens, though, there’s been a good deal of evidence coming out recently that shows that skipping your last meal of the day (or at least, eating a lot less for that meal) leads to significantly greater fat loss than skipping breakfast.

Research has also been coming out in recent times, that suggests it’s important to eat during the day, and not at night, to regulate your circadian rhythm, and keep your body hormonally on track.

Dr Rhonda Patrick and Satchin Panda have both commented on this topic.

1. If you’re into intense exercise, and are looking to lose weight – try cutting back your fat rather than your carbs

Yeah, yeah, “fat is good for you, you’ve been brainwashed by the diet industry, you need lots, and lots, and lots of saturated fat in order to produce hormones,” et cetera.

When all is said and done, though, research suggests that even dropping your fat consumption very low indeed, has only a relatively minor effect on your anabolic hormone production.

On the other hand, there’s a lot of evidence that low-carb diets hit your testosterone levels hard, and cause assorted other problems, over the mid to long term.

If you’re into intense exercise, in particular, and you’re looking to lose some weight, cutting back on your fat, rather than your carbs, may be a great idea.

Your body metabolises glucose, in the form of glycogen, during high-intensity activities, and no matter how “keto-adapted” you are, you’re just going to be able to sprint harder when you’re carbed up than when you’re carb-depleted.

What’s more, research shows pretty reliably that there isn’t much, if any, difference in how much fat you can expect to burn by eating either a low-fat, or a low-carb diet. Mostly it’s a matter of preference.

So, if you like carbs, and they keep you from lashing out at everyone around you (a commonly reported side-effect of low-carb diets) maybe you should try to go back to the 1980s way of doing things for a while.