If you exercise regularly can you eat what you want?

This question has cropped up three times in workshops in the past week so I thought it would be worth addressing it here.

Regular exercise is the ideal way to lift your mood, boost your energy levels, manage your weight and help you sleep better.  But does this mean that if you exercise well, you won't need to worry about your food routine?

Here are 3 things to consider
1. Exercise can keep you looking healthy but external appearances do not constitute the full picture and say nothing about how healthy you are on the inside.  Everything you eat and drink can have a positive or negative effect on the optimum operating environment within your body and although exercise can mitigate the impact of some negative food choices it cannot completely offset any damage done.

2. Exercise boosts energy but if you're not fueling yourself well there's a glass ceiling on how good your energy levels will ever be.  If you find that you're more focused and more productive when you exercise, just imagine how effective you could be when you combine an active lifestyle with a regular, quality food routine.

3. If you're a regular exerciser, chances are that you enjoy getting active.  It's also likely that you feel some improvement in your fitness levels by maintaining exercise in your schedule but no athlete would rely on exercise alone to achieve their optimal results and neither should you.  

The bottom line

With a regular exercise routine you'll be fit but not necessarily as healthy as you could be.  And even your hard-earned fitness could be compromised if not supported by eating healthily so check your food routine for anything that you think is detracting from your ability to exercise well and recover promptly, and put a plan together to replace some of the suspect items with choices that will maximise your energy to work out and allow your body to recover and repair more quickly.  This approach will bring quicker and more dramatic results which will in turn boost your motivation to stay on track with healthy choices in every area of your routine. 

Here are some snack ideas to get you started:

5 Quick and Easy Snack Ideas for Boosting Energy

Image by Cookie M Flickr

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A Fantastic Exercise Recovery Strategy

In our recent article in Men's Running Magazine, 17 Ways to a Faster Recovery, I mentioned using the foam roller to stretch out tight muscles and rebalance your body.

We've worked with lots of people who've managed to fix some quite painful and sometimes long-term injuries using the foam roller so we're big fans of making rolling a regular part of your routine.

In the June edition of Women's Running Magazine there's a guide to how to best use the foam roller and they've kindly let us reproduce the article here.

Try adding some of these suggestions to your weekly exercise schedule.  Our personal favourite is the ITB (iliotibial band) release.  It can be painful but it's the answer to a lot of knee pain experienced by runners and cyclists.

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Is Healthy Living for Lent or for Life?

Almost one week into the period of lent and how are you doing?

Today is day 7 of the 40 days during which many people aim to give up something, typically something they like and enjoy.

Last year I wrote a blog about how to make giving something up easier:

4 Top tips for making lifestyle changes

Something else to think about is whether or not the things you try to give up or alter in your food routine are for lent of forever.

The reason people choose to give something up for lent is that they feel their consumption of the item in question, whether it be coffee, chocolate, cake or alcohol, is out of balance with where they'd like it to be, and they want to prove they can live without this thing in their life so they set out to avoid it completely for 40 days.

But while it might be useful to set a challenge like this and complete it, do the changes we make for 40 days have any lasting impact?  Sometimes they do, but more often than not we return to the patterns of eating we were familiar with before lent began.

Would it not be better to moderate consumption of your chosen 'vices' in the long-term and avoid 40 days of feeling deprived and 325 days of feeling guilty because you've overindulged?

Here's a 3-step plan for ensuring balance and enjoyment of your food routine in the short, medium and long-term:

1) If you feel something is out of balance in your routine, keep notes on how much you're eating and drinking, and how often
2) Decide what would be a more desirable balance in relation to your health, energy and lifestyle priorities
3) Be specific about the timing and quantity of this revised balance.  Understand what items you'll be eating, when you'll be eating them and how much of each item you'll be consuming.

Choosing in advance what you'd like the balance of your food routine to look like is much easier than trying to second guess yourself in the middle of a busy day.  If you have a clear plan, you'll be surprised at how easy it is to follow.  Every decision on food and drink that you currently make can be put in the context of your chosen plan which will save you time and energy.

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