The Best Fitness Food

Fitness is so much more important than most people imagine. Fitness isn't just about looking good, but about feeling your best and being able to dig in and enjoy life. Diet fitness is probably the most important element to success and being able to reach your personal goals.

The food you eat accounts for up to 80% of your fitness efforts. This truly puts a different spin on the way we should be looking at food and how it applies to our fitness goals. If you've ever heard the phrase "Garbage In, Garbage Out", it should be particularly important when it comes to our bodies on a daily basis. It's impossible to feel your best when you fill your body with food that amounts to nutritional garbage.

Become a food snob! Exercise your right to a healthy and beautiful body by refusing to purchase or eat inferior overly processed food. Demand fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains and lean meats at every meal. Aim for as much as 85% of each day's diet to come from raw, whole, unprocessed food as close to it's natural state as possible.

By embracing raw, whole and unprocessed foods as the major portion of your daily food intake, you will go a long way in achieving diet fitness and a healthy body.

An exercise diary is the place to document your exercise program and goals. Your goals will determine the type of exercise program you will want to pursue. Starting a new fitness program is quite different than a fit athlete working on marathon training. Both, however, benefit from coming up with a plan for how they will meet their exercise goals. Someone new to exercise will want to start slowly, doing short sessions of cardiovascular training, strength training and stretching. A marathon athlete might spend a great deal of time on improving cardiovascular fitness and endurance, and less on strength and stretching.

There are nutritional supplements available, however, that are indispensable for enhancing muscle-building and fat loss.

1.glutamine

How Glutamine works: glutamine is known as a "conditionally essential" amino acid; it becomes "essential" during intense exercise such as weight training or cardiovascular exercise, as the need for glutamine is greatly increased. During bouts of intense activity (or stress), glutamine enters the bloodstream and travels into the liver where it is converted into glucose; this newly synthesized glucose helps to fuel the working muscles. This process is known as gluconeogenesis-the process of turning a non-carbohydrate substance (glutamine and some other amino acids) into glucose which can be used for energy.

2. Branched chain amino acids (BCAAS)

How BCAAs work: Unlike glutamine, BCAAs, consisting of leucine, isoleucine, and valine, are essential amino acids, meaning that the body cannot synthesize them from precursors-they must be obtained from the diet. Like glutamine, there is a greater requirement for BCAAs during intense exercise such as weight training and they are derived primarily from catabolized muscle tissue.

Creatine monohydrate:

How creatine works: Adenosine triphosphate (ATP) is the primary energy source to fuel intense muscular contractions, such as those during sprinting or weight-training. ATP contains a high-energy phosphate bond, which is broken down into ADP (adenosine monophosphate), releasing the energy necessary for muscles to contract. Every muscle cell has a store of phosphate, from which ADP is recycled back into ATP to continue fueling contractions.