While we all strive to stay fit and maintain good health, few of us manage to achieve it successfully.
To stay fit and healthy, one needs to maintain a lifestyle balance with regular exercise and a nutritious diet.
For body builders, weightlifters and other athletes, staying fit and healthy means an emphasis on power food and supplements and fitness exercises.
While you may not want to build mega muscles, proteins, vitamins, minerals, carbohydrates and fats can greatly enhance your state of health and fitness levels.
Besides shrinking your gut, power foods also promote longevity and should constitute a large part of your diet. The more power foods in the diet, the more your body can build lean muscle mass and avoid fat storage.
Power foods help build muscles, strengthen bone density, control blood pressure, promote weight loss, improve the immune system, as well as fight cancer and heart diseases.
Here are a few power foods to include in your diet to maximize the benefits:
Beans: Beans such as pinto beans, kidney beans, soybeans, navy beans, chickpeas, and lima beans provide protein, fiber, folic acid, folate and iron. These power foods help build muscle mass, burn body fat and regulate digestion. While many people resist beans because of intestinal disorders, beans are good for the heart. Eating beans also aid in controlling hunger.
Remember that replacing a meat-heavy dish with a bean-heavy dish twice or thrice a week can cut out excess saturated fat from your diet and replace it with high amounts of fiber.
Dairy Products: Products such as fat-free or low-fat milk, cheese, yogurt, and cottage cheese provide a lot of calcium, riboflavin, potassium, vitamin A, vitamin B12 and phosphorous. These foods help build strong bones and facilitate quick weight loss. They are also good at fighting against obesity, cancer, high blood pressure, and osteoporosis.
The more you consume these dairy products, the more calcium you get to diminish a heavy belly. Studies show that consuming 1,200 – 1,300 milligrams of calcium a day can reduce your weight by twice as much as if you don’t consume calcium. According to the researchers, calcium helps prevent weight gain by raising the breakdown of body fat and obstructing fat formation in the body.
Eggs: The most effective power food of all, egg provides vitamin A, vitamin B12 and protein. It helps to build muscles, burn fat and fight obesity. People often consider egg to be a source of increasing cholesterol in the body. However, according to researchers, eating one or two eggs a day doesn’t increase cholesterol levels in the body.
Take advantage of eggs to increase protein production, as these proteins are more effective in building muscle mass than proteins from other sources.
You can also include power foods such as oatmeal, peanut butter, spinach and other green leafy vegetables, turkey, olive oil, bread, cereals, berries, almonds in your diet to stay fit and healthy.
