Why You MUST Eat Your Vitamins if You Want to Lose Weight
Too many people who are trying to lose weight will focus purely on their macronutrients. These are things like carbohydrates and proteins – the basic food groups that we can break all food down into. While this might appear to make sense though, the unfortunate reality is that it misses out some very crucial details.
Specifically, focusing purely on carbs vs fats and the calories therein means that you miss the importance of micronutrients. Vitamins, minerals and other nutrients such as amino acids, fatty acids and enzymes all play very important roles in our diet and they can make all the difference when it comes to losing weight. Read on to find out why and what you can do about it.
Energy
When you try and fail to lose weight, you might well find that you blame the amount of time (or lack of time) that you have in a day.
In other words, you don’t have time to exercise and you don’t have time to prepare the right food.
In reality though, time is not often what is really to blame.
More likely is that it is energy that is the problem.
If you have low energy, then you’ll find that you struggle to bring yourself to exercise at the end of the day or that you struggle to stay motivated in order to make healthy foods rather than just binge on chocolate and sweets.
Think about it: if time is the problem, then why not just wake up half an hour earlier? Because your energy levels won’t let you.
Eating vitamins is crucial then because it helps you to get your energy levels back.
If you want to feel more awake and more alive, then eating more vitamin C and B complex vitamins is perhaps the very best strategy and can bring instant benefits.
Metabolism
The other reason that micronutrients are so important is that they will actually help you to speed up your metabolism to help you burn more fat and feel more energetic as a result.
Take something like lutein for example. This is a nutrient that is often thought of mainly for its ability to prevent degenerative eye disease. What is less well known however, is that it is also capable of speeding up the rate at which you burn fat.
Lutein helps to improve the function of the mitochondria, which are the tiny ‘energy factories’ found in our cells.
Other nutrients that can do the same thing (through similar or completely different mechanisms) include coenzyme Q10, PQQ, B vitamins, resveratrol and others.
What you may not realize is that most of the supplements that you consume to lose weight or perform better in the gym are simply vitamins and minerals.
The best way I recommend to get more of this in your diet is to focus on foods that we would have eaten naturally in the wild. Foods like meats (especially organ meats), vegetables and fruits contain everything we need to survive.
