When you search for tips on how to get fit and healthy, you’re always led to the same routines. 5-minute Six Pack Abs or Brazilian Butt Lift workouts from doing 10 minutes of exercise. These may seem too good to be true and more often than not, they are. But not because of the exercises.
The key reason why is that muscles are made in the kitchen, not in the gym. There’s no point doing all the work if you’re not also feeding your body what it needs.
Here are 9 hacks to help your body get fit and healthy.
1. Increase your Daily Water Intake
It is recommended that we should drink around 2 litres of water per day. For many, this isn’t enough water. The importance of hydration has huge bodily effects including increased brain activity, muscular performance and recovery.
To calculate how much water you should be drinking, click here.
Dehydration actually will cause your body to hold onto more water on a cellular level. This leaves you feeling larger than you actually are as your cells are full of water.
Increasing your daily water intake will optimise your cells water retention. Whilst for the first few days your bladder may be a bit shocked, your body will adjust. You will start feeling more productive in no time.
If you’re struggling to remember to drink enough maybe try one of these!
2. Keep to Mealtime Routine
Whilst your brain is aware of the fact that if you eat later than 1pm it doesn’t mean you’re going to starve, sadly your body doesn’t.
A lack of regularity in your mealtimes causes your body to going into “storage mode”. This means that your body will try to hold onto any food that is being digested. It goes into “Caveman mode” as it’s unsure when the next meal is arriving.
In order to help your body get rid of that stubborn belly or leg fat, try to keep your mealtimes to a consistent 30-minute window. Your body will be safe and know that the food will be there soon enough!
3. Eat Less Food
Who else thinks of a takeaway as a challenge to see how much food you can fit in your stomach before you explode? I know my son certainly thinks so.
The Japanese believe in 腹八分目(hara hachi bun me) which simply means “fill your belly until it is 80% full”. The idea behind the principle is that every time you fill your stomach, you are stretching it. This means that the next time you want to fit it, you’ll have to eat more than the last time.
Whilst I don’t promote diet restriction, 腹八分目 has led to the Japanese populations elders’ typical body mass index (BMI) to about 18 to 22. The typical BMI or adults over 60 in the United States is currently 26 or 27.
The science behind it is that a reduction in meal size will help prevent your meals burdening the body. Long digestive processes accelerate cellular oxidation (ageing) and prevent a gastronomical traffic jam.
4. Chew your Food!
Following on from point 3, you won’t be helping your body get healthy and lean if you’re trying to swallow half/un-chewed mouthfuls of food.
Experts have a lot to say about chewing. One common piece of advice is to chew your food an estimated 32 times before swallowing. It takes fewer chews to break down soft and water-filled food. The goal of chewing is to break down your food. This way it loses texture as is easier for the stomach and small intestine to digest.
Increasing the amount you chew your food will help your digestive system work more efficiently. This is because it doesn’t have to try physically break down the food as well as chemically. This will help your body bloat less and leave you feeling less lethargic after meals.
5. Keep Water Away from Meals
Whilst you’ve probably had to increase your water intake, you will also have to avoid drinking water for at least 30 minutes before meal time and 1 hour afterwards. This is to prevent the water from diluting the stomach acids that are breaking down the food. Avoiding water during this time will make the digestive system more efficient.
6. Eat 3 Meals per Day
Nice and easy. Try to keep to a fixed schedule of meals per day.
For example:
- 7.30am – Breakfast
- 12.30pm – Lunch
- 7.30pm – Supper
If you’re concerned about getting hungry throughout the day then you may be suffering from dehydration. That means you’ll need to up your water intake. You may also be suffering from sugar cravings from eating too many carbohydrates or sugary foods.
Both of these will give your body an urge of hunger and push you towards the fridge. In reality, what you want and your body needs are very different!
7. Give your Body a Break
Your digestive system is like a car engine. If you don’t let it have a rest and keep it constantly under strain then it’s going to breakdown.
Think about the time between each meal and what’s going on under your own hood. Try give your body at least a 4-hour break between mealtimes so that it can try to get through as much of the digestion needed as possible.
It is also essential that you attempt to maximise the gap between supper and breakfast, so that your body can rest overnight and not have to work too hard whilst you’re sleeping.
8. Don’t Eat where you Sleep
As touched on in number 7, try to finish your last meal of the day at least 2 hours before you’re planning on going to bed.
This will allow your body to get the fundamental parts of digestion done before you try to sleep. It will help your body to recharge and focus on repairing itself over night, instead of trying to digest the rest of your food from the day before.
9. Keep Track of what you Eat
A lot of people suffer minor intolerances to different foods and have no clue at all. Try to keep track of the meals you’re eating and if there are any that are making you bloat. Take note over a week or more with a food diary in order to work out what is causing the problem.