Rule of Thumb for a Good Diet

A good diet is supposed to be simple and not over-complicate things. Because the key to a sustainable fitness lifestyle is to have your diet simplified so that you’re able to stick to it long-term. For those who seek to gain muscles, your priority is not food restrictions. Instead, you should be focusing on the number of calories you’re going to take throughout the day.

For starters, I recommend tracking your daily calories intake to have a clear picture of how your diet looks and how you can manipulate it afterward. Next is to determine what are your macronutrients percentage and finally the essential micronutrients (which can be easily covered with supplements). Trust me, by becoming aware of your daily food intake, you will ultimately make better food choices in near future.

Diet Plan Tip:  Preparation is the key to eating healthy. It may sound tricky and complex to prepare. Do not over-think it, instead choose foods that you enjoy eating and make a balanced meal.

Foods to avoid

Generally, you should be avoiding food that makes you feel ‘bloated’, ‘sick’ and ‘low-energy’. This includes processed, highly-toxic (with chemicals), junk food and sugary foods. Sugar is the main factor that  you should really look out for as it is present in foods particularly that aren’t fresh, frozen or dried. Additionally, sauces such as pasta sauce, ketchup and chili sauce contain sugar as well. Moreover, fruit juices and fizzy drinks are things that you need to avoid as well.

Supplements To Avoid>

Supplements today are expensive! And if you’re not careful, you’ll end up burning a hole in your wallet with supplements that do not work. There are a lot of people these days sold to the craze of muscle enhancing supplements that promise jaw-dropping muscle mass development.

But honestly, do they even work? There are various supplements that would improve muscle growth but only handful of it are actually scientifically proven to work if consume in the recommended method.

Supplements that do not offer any muscle growth are considered placebo pills and powders which is merely an implication to your mind that it affects your body.

The key to building muscle is proper training and nutrition, not reliance on supplements.

Protein Supplement Scams

We like protein powder. It’s a quick, convenient and cost-effective way to hit our daily protein targets. Whey protein is not the cheapest, but it is popular due to the high BCAA content, particularly leucine, which is critical to the muscle building process. Now, with consumers becoming wiser there is a rising demand for products that claim to have been lab tested, but this comes at a time of overall rising global demand (and thus prices).

With consumers becoming sensitive to these price increases and a lack of general education about what they should be looking for on the packet, the incentives for companies to cut costs by cheating the system are all there, and many do. I’m talking about the rise of the phenomenon known as ‘protein spiking’. The way it works is this: some labs test for the total amino acid content rather than the amounts of the individual amino acids themselves.

This means that protein companies can dump cheap amino acids into the mix (mainly glycine and taurine), skimping on the actual whey content, which is expensive, and yet still pass some quality tests.

Of course, there are other useful supplements worth mentioning such as Multivitamin, BCAA, HMB, Beta-alanine, glucosamine etc.

Now there’s always some subjectivity in deciding whether these supplements are worth being on this list or not and as with all of my advice, feel free to disagree with it based on your own judgment. Additionally, it is quite likely that this list will prove to be outdated in a few years as more research comes out. We at Wonderfully Fit Personal Training are here to provide nutritional, and exercise support you may have.  Contact Terrine today.