Guide to a Healthy Life Part One: Your Diet

I am writing this to the best of MY understanding of how food works and how it fits into your diet.

Have you ever wondered why some people manage to stay fairly fit while not doing any real active exercise while you're jogging every day or lightly hitting the gym? Obviously, they must be doing something right.

There is a reason I decided to make part 1 of Guide to a Healthy Life your diet, and not exercise; that's right, despite what you have heard, your diet is THE bigger factor in a healthy lifestyle.

The comparison would probably be around 60-40 diet to exercise respectively, so as long as you're not sitting on your ass all day long, you don't really need to hit the gym or jog regularly to stay in shape. (Note that I am NOT recommending you to not hit the gym or get some sort of exercise into your life, but I'll get more into that in part 2.)

Let's get on with some basics of your diet.

There are three basic categories of foods: Carbohydrates, Fats, and Proteins. All of which have calories.

What are calories? Calories are just a unit of energy. it takes X amount of calories to jog a mile, or Y amount of calories to sit and watch T.V. or Z amount of calories to go and lift weights, EVERYTHING YOU DO REQUIRES CALORIES. When you do something, you burn calories, just like a car burns gas, so if you do more, you burn more calories.

In general, the average person burns 2000 calories a day, hence the 2000 calorie diet, this changes with everyone depending on how active you are, and how much you weigh. If you're an active person, expect to burn more calories. if you're a heavier person, expect to burn more calories.

Say you were to do literally no calorie burning activities. That is not possible, because just the act of LIVING requires calories. in order for your heart to beat, brain to think, etc etc you need calories to burn.

Another VERY important aspect of calories that you will need to know is that just being yourself burns calories, just having muscles burns calories (roughly 6 calories per pound per day) and having fat also burns calories (roughly 2 calories per pound per day) [correct me if these numbers are wrong, i just did a quick google search]. Note that a pound of muscle burns more calories than a pound of fat.

Back to the carbs, fats, and proteins.
1 gram of carb= 4 calories
1 gram of fat= 9 calories
1 gram of protein = 4 calories

This does NOT mean that eating a gram of carb will affect you the same way as eating a gram of protein, or halfish a gram of fat. Each of these units burn differently. Lets see how they work.

CARBOHYDRATES: There is no doubt that the carbohydrate is the biggest staple of diet throughout the world. Carbs consist of almost everything you eat, grains (rice, bread, cake, chips, you name it), vegetables(brocolli, lettuce all the stuff you hated as a little kid), Fruits (apple, orange, peppers, cucumbers, tomatoes, all the sweets that just weren't as good as chocolate), roots (potatoes, carrots, mushy starchy stuff), and many other things (There will be some contradictions here, but I believe that even meats have trace amounts of carbs.)

You can break carbohydrates into two major groups and probably a more minor group. We have simple carbohydrates, complex carbohydrates, and sugars. The basic difference among these are how fast they burn in your body.

Simple carbs consist of stuff like white rice, white bread, anything from flour, most fruits, and possibly certain vegetables among some. Simple carbs burn quickly. In general, if it's processed, it's likely a simple carb

Complex carbs consist of stuff like brown rice, whole grain bread, vegetables, roots, etc. complex carbs burn slowly, and you should strive to eat mostly complex carbs.

Then we have sugar, and we all know the deal on sugar. sugar burns very very quickly, hence why you'll hear of people getting sugar highs, which are basically just a big boost of energy that is depleted very quickly.

Why does the speed of calorie burning matter?

It all depends on how active you are, because if you don't burn your calories as they are being burnt by your metabolism, guess where they go. If you guessed to the fat around your gut, or anywhere else on your body, then you are very correct.

For example: remember, these are just numbers
Person A (sprinter) eats 100 calories of simple carbs, lets say an apple
Person B (your average joe) eats 100 calories of complex carbs, a potato.
Person C (lazy WoW player) eats 100 calories of sugar, lets say a candybar

A ate 100 calories right before he goes to sprint. During his sprint(lets say his sprint was x time), he burns 120 calories. 100 of those came straight from the apple(which burns coincidentally in x time) that he just ate, and let's say he dug into his glucose reserves in his body for another 10 calories, he has 10 more calories left, those last 10 calories would be a combination of burning calories from his FAT and some muscle. After his sprint, that apple will be gone as energy, he will be dead tired because he has no more reserve energy, and he will also ahve loss a small amount of weight from burning fat and muscles.

B eats 100 calories of potato before his work day. lets say the 100 calories of potato burns over the course of 2 hours, coincidentally B uses exactly 100 calories in the course of 2 hours at work. Cool, the potato went to good use.

C on the other hand, eats 100 calories of a candybar (SUGAR). Now, sugar burns very quickly, he could probably burn 100 calories of sugar in about 10-20 minutes. Unfortunately, C is a lazyass and sits to play wow. His intense game play burns a total of 100 calories over the course of 1 hour. During the first 10-20 minutes of his gameplay time, the sugar will be giving him a nice rush of mouse work, that only requires about 20-30 calories of use. So what happens after his sugar finishes burning? he only used about 20-30 calories of it. It goes to his gut(figure of speech, it actually spreads as fat throughout his whole body). C burns 20-30 calories as the candy burns, leaving 70-80 calories left over, which will ALL go to FAT, since it has not been used. After his nice sugar high, C will feel tired and hungry again because he will have no food to burn, and will start burning his glucose stores.

This idea is also the backbone of the trend to eat 6 smaller meals a day instead of 3 big ones, if you can spread out your calories throughout the day, you won't end up having more calories than you are able to burn, therefore reducing fat gains.

Fats: fats are basically just like carbs, except that you get more calories per gram of fat, and fats tend to burn slowly like complex carbs, or perhaps even slower than complex carbs. The anabolic diet preaches the replacement of carbs with fats because it is a better energy source, and also because of the idea of if you eat fat, then your body will get more used to burning fat, and will burn more fat when you need energy and less muscle.

Fats can be broken up into different categories, but I won't go so much into those. just know that there are good fats (olive oil, fish oil, flaxseed oil etc), bad fats (animal fat(although this isn't exactly a bad thing), corn oil, etc), and just your no hurt no gain fats (vegetable oil, etc). None of these fats are technically "bad" for you, you just need to find a good balance between them. they are only bad if you eat too much of one kind. Think of it as they cancel each other out.

Proteins (if it is a sentient being, chances are it has proteins, or if it's a nut or bean)

Proteins are pretty straightforward. You need proteins to build muscle and there are many different kinds of proteins. Also, proteins are a crap energy source. Sure, it might say that a gram of protein = 4 calories just like a gram of carb, but the truth is that your body is really bad at converting protein to calories, so a gram of protein is more like 2 or 3 calories when used as energy.

Your body makes proteins, some proteins that is. Others you will need to get from an outside source. there are many ways to get these proteins, the most common are animal sources, or if you're vegetarian, nuts and beans.

Note that protein from an animal source are MUCH better than protein from something like soy or peanuts. Humans were meant to eat meat, therefore, our bodies are better at utilising protein from animal sources. a gram of protein from something that flew or mooed is going to be much better than a gram even 2 grams of protein from a bean.

How to efficiently set up your diet

Remember that you need calories just to maintain your body and get through your day. you can branch off at 2000 calories per day, A good estimate for 2000 calories would be a normal person not sitting on their ass all day, weighing about 150ish pounds, would be my guess. If you weigh more, you likely intake more calories, vice versa if you weigh less.

That makes gaining or losing weight fairly simple. If you eat more calories than your maintenance, you will gain weight (if a good portion of those calories are protein and you workout, you will gain good muscle). If you eat less than your maintenance, you will lose weight (this will be a mixture of fat AND muscle)

Unless you are going to be doing something that requires a lot of calories (play a sport, hit the gym, run, [sitting in a sauna does not count, just because you are sweating does not mean you are burning a bunch of calories]), stay the fuck away from simple carbs or sugars, or else risk gaining fat. On the other hand, if you're going to be doing something hard like mentioned above, eat some sugars or simple carbs to give you a nice energy boost to your performance.

The time you eat your carbs, proteins, and fats are also important.
As a general rule of thumb:

Carbs are good to eat in the morning, before strenuous activities, and NOT at night, you want to eat no carbs about 4-5 hours before you sleep, to ensure that you won't have too many leftover carbs sitting around while you're sleeping, where you'll be burning very few calories.

Fats are good to eat throughout the day, and also if you're hungry at night, something high in fat/protein and low in carbs is good. fats burn slowly, so you can likely burn it throughout the night.

Proteins are good throughout the day, but especially before you workout, after you workout, and before you sleep

Notice that carbs and fats are both main sources of energy, do NOT mix these together. If you're going to be eating a high carb meal, stay low on fat, and vice versa. you do not want to have two different sources of energy coming in, your body will likely just use one, and turn the other one straight into fat.

That is all I can think of for now, if you have any questions, post em up and I'll try my best to answer them. Since many people have weight problems edging on the side of overweight, I will write a guide to losing weight sometime in the future (It's good too because i am experienced with this, I used to be quite overweight myself.)

Cheers.
-Kev