Bodybuilding

No, don’t fret if you feel like giving up on that diet plan. All you need to do is need focus on the task at hand, and think of the road ahead. And while you’re trying to do that, here’s how to defeat those diet-busting urges …

It’s no surprise that 80 percent of diets go belly­up, according to the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Why? Because we tend to give up right when we are very close to attaining our aim. what do we do? Give a thought to the following.

You’re starving!

Eat, but eat differently. Grab foods with lots of fibre water. Also keep a stash of dry fruits by your bedside. Create a healthy mix of almonds and raisins in a jar- a tasty hunger-killer. When your stomach is empty, the hormone ghrelin kicks in, which stimulates appetite. By eating foods packed with fibre like fruits and veggies, you’ll feel full while controlling ghrelin production.

You’re cranky

Boost your mood with snacks that satisfy your hormones, not your stomach. Snack on complex carbohydrates, such as a whole-grain treat of a bowl of cereal with your choice of sweet, chopped fruit thrown in blueberries and a little milk. You’re cranky because you’ve eliminated sources of quick mood-boosting energy- like chips and colas. So, you’re going to go through a time when you don’t feel great. Let carbohydrates raise your serotonin levels without inflating your waistline the way sugary carbs can.

You crave food

Give in to snack attacks, but wisely. Keep some low-fat cheese ready at all times. You need ready access to healthy sources of protein or fibre to off set sudden, out-of-nowhere cravings, which are nothing but your brain, by way of your cells, hunting to replenish fat starved cells.

The ‘what the hell …’ syndrome

Weigh in. You need to keep your eye on your rate of weight loss. Setting targets blows away complacency. A study at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth shows that people who weigh themselves regularly are more likely to stay focused. They’re continually reminded of their success so far.

You reach a plateau

Diet less, exercise more. It’s probably going to be easier to exercise more frequently than to further restrict a diet that’s become an ingrained habit. If your exercise is mostly cardiovascular, devote more time to weight lifting. Because you need to burn off more in order to continue to see results.

want your life back?

Let loose- a little bit. Being on a strict diet can drain you mentally, so there’s a huge temptation to let things slide. If you’re meeting your goals, give yourself a break. If you love ice cream, try a lower-fat version. And instead of the all-meat, extra-cheese pizza, top your pizza with vegetables.

A number of the physiological and psychological symptoms and signs of overreaching/overstraining have been suggested to be partly due to a chronic energy deficit, an inadequate availability of specific nutrients, or both. This may affect the body’s response to intensified training. The following describes some of the general dietary strategies that athletes can use to prevent over training.

Energy Intake

The first nutritional strategy to prevent overstraining is to make sure that athletes consume enough calories to offset energy demands or maintain energy balance. Daily caloric intake for untrained individuals typically ranges between 1900 to 3000 kcal’s/day (i.e., 25 to 45 kcal’s/kg/day for a 70-kg person) . Exercise training obviously increases energy expenditure. The longer and more intense an athlete exercises, the greater the energy expenditure. Energy expenditure estimates for athletes have ranged from 3500 kcal’s/day (50 kcal’s/kg/day) for individuals training 30 to 60 min/day up to 12,000 kcal’s/day (i.e., 170 kcal’s/ kg/day) for cyclists competing in the Tour de France (cycling 4 to 6 hrs/day). For most high school and college athletes training 2-2.5 hrs/day, energy expenditure estimates range between 60 to 80 kcal/kg/day. Despite this energy requirement, athletes often do not consume enough calories to offset energy demands. This may result in a chronic deficit in energy intake and has been implicated as one potential causative factor to overstraining.

Athletes particularly susceptible to maintaining negative energy intakes during training include runners, cyclists, swimmers, triathletes, gymnasts, skaters, dancers, wrestlers, and boxers Additionally, female athletes have been reported to have a high incidence of eating disorders. Consequently, the parent and/or coach should ensure that athletes are well fed and consume enough calories to offset the increased energy demands of training. Although this sounds relatively simple, intense training often suppresses appetite and/or alters hunger patterns Some athletes do not like to exercise within several hours after eating because of sensations of fullness and/or a predisposition to cause gastrointestinal distress. Further, travel and training schedules may limit food availability and/or the types of food athletes are accustomed to eating. This means that care should be taken to plan meal times in concert with training as well as make sure athletes have sufficient availability of nutrient-dense foods throughout the day for snacking between meals (e.g., drinks, fruit, carbohydrate/protein bars, etc.).

Macronutrient Intake Guidelines

The second nutritional strategy to prevent overtraining is to ensure that athletes consume the proper amounts of carbohydrate, protein, and fat in their diet. Research has indicated that athletes should ingest between 8 to 10 g/day of carbohydrate during intense periods of training to help maintain carbohydrate stores. To do so, athletes are recommended to eat frequently (e.g., 4 to 6 meals per day) and ingest high-calorie carbohydrate foods and/or concentrated carbohydrate drinks. Preferably, the majority of dietary carbohydrate should come from complex carbohydrates with a low to moderate glycemic index (e.g., grains, starches, fruit, maltodextrins, etc.).

There has been considerable debate regarcing protein needs of athletes. Initially, it was recommended that athletes do not need to ingest more than the RDA for protein (i.e., 0.8 to 1.0 g/kg/day for children, adolescents, and adults). However, research over the last decade has indicated that athletes engaged in intense training need to ingest about times the RDA of protein in their diet 0.5 to 2.0 g/kg/day) to maintain protein balance. If an insufficient amount of protein is obtained from the diet, an athlete will maintain a negative nitrogen balance which can increase protein catabolism and slow recovery. Over time, this may lead to lean muscle wasting and training intolerance.

Although most athletes ingest this amount of protein in their normal diet, there are some athletes who are susceptible to protein malnutrition (e.g., runners, cyclists, swimmers, triathletes, gymnasts, dancers, skaters, wrestlers, boxers, etc.). Therefore, care should be taken to ensure that these types of athletes consume a sufficient amount of quality protein in their diet to maintain nitrogen balance (e.g., 1.5 to 2 g/kg/day). The best sources of low-fat quality protein are white-meat skinless chicken, fish, egg white, and skim milk proteins (caseine and whey). On the other hand, research has also indicated that ingesting more protein than necessary to maintain nitrogen balance does not promote greater gains in strength or muscle mass. Consequently, athletes do not need to ingest excessive amounts of protein to promote gains in strength and muscle mass during training.

The dietary recommendations of fat intake for athletes are similar to those recommended for nonathletes to promote health. Generally, athletes should consume less than 30% of their daily caloric intake as fat. For athletes attempting to decrease body fat, it is also recommended that they consume 0.5 to 1 g/kg/day of fat. The reason for this is that weight loss studies indicate that people who are most successful in losing weight and maintaining the weight loss are those who ingest less than 40 g/day of fat in their diet. Strategies to help athletes manage dietary fat intake include teaching them which foods contain fat so that they can make better food choices and how to count fat grams.

Strategic Eating

In addition to the general nutritional guidelines described above, research has also demonstrated that timing and composition of meals consumed may playa role in preventing overtraining. In this regard, it takes about 4 hours for carbohydrate to be digested and begin to be stored as muscle and liver glycogen. Consequently, pre-exercise meals should be consumed about 4 to 6 hours before exercise. This means that if an athlete trains in the afternoon, breakfast is the most important meal to top off muscle and liver glycogen levels. Research has also indicated that ingesting a light carbohydrate and protein snack 30 to 60 minutes before exercise (e.g., 50 g of carbohydrate and 5 to 10 g of protein) serves to increase carbohydrate availability toward the end of an intense exercise bout. This also serves to increase availability of amino acids and decrease exercise-induced catabolism of protein.

When exercise lasts more than 1 hour, athletes should ingest glucose/electrolyte solution (GES) drinks to maintain blood glucose levels, help prevent dehydration, and reduce the immunosuppressive effects of intense exercise. Following intense exercise, athletes should consume carbohydrate and protein (e.g., 1 g/kg of carbohydrate and 0.5 g/kg of protein) within 30 minutes after exercise as well as consume a high-carbohydrate meal within 2 hours following exercise. This nutritional strategy has been found to accelerate glycogen resynthesis and promote a more anabolic hormonal profile that may hasten recovery. Finally, for 2 to 3 days before competition, athletes should taper training by 30-50% and consume 200 to 300 g/day of extra carbohydrate in their diet. This carbohydrate loading technique has been shown to supersaturate carbohydrate stores before competition and improve endurance exercise capacity. Thus, the type of meal and timing of eating are important factors in maintaining carbohydrate availability during training and potentially decreasing the incidence of overtraining.

During prolonged exercise, athletes become fatigued. For many years, exercise scientists believed that fatigue was simply related to peripheral muscle glycogen depletion and perhaps the hypoglycemia which may occur during prolonged exercise. However, more recent studies indicated that athletes fatigue even though blood glucose levels were maintained during exercise and a sufficient amount of glycogen was available in the muscle. These findings suggested that fatigue could not simply be explained by peripheral adaptations but that other factors may be involved in the fatigue process during prolonged exercise. The potential role that central fatigue may play in overtraining, and dietary strategies that may help delay central fatigue.

Central Fatigue Hypothesis

Newsholme, Blomstrand, and colleagues initially advanced the theory that fatigue during prolonged exercise may be partly related to exercise-induced alterations in the central nervous system. The theory suggests that as muscle glycogen levels decline during exercise, there is an increased oxidation of fat and the branched-chain amino acids (BCAAs) leucine, isoleucine, and valine as fuel substrates. As a result, free fatty acid (FFA) levels in the blood gradually increase while the availability of BCAAs in the blood decreases. The increase in FFA levels in the blood is accompanied by a release of the amino acid tryptophan from albumin, serving to increase the level of free tryptophan in the blood. The result is that as one exercises, the ratio of free tryptophan to BCAA steadily increases.

Increases in the ratio of free tryptophan to BCAA have been shown to increase the entry of tryptophan into the brain. Increased concentrations of tryptophan in the brain have been reported to promote the formation of the neurotransmitter beta-hydroxytryptamine (serotonin). Increased levels of serotonin in the brain and peripheral tissues have been reported to induce sleep, depress motor neuron excitability, influence autonomic and endocrine function, and suppress appetite in animal and human studies. Consequently, an exercise-induced imbalance in the ratio of free tryptophan to BCAA has been implicated as a possible cause of acute physiological and psychological fatigue (central fatigue). It has also been hypothesized that chronic elevations in serotonin levels, which may occur in athletes who overtrain, may explain some of the reported signs and symptoms of the overtraining.

Although the central fatigue theory seems straightfor­ward, there has been debate in the scientific community regarding the validity of the hypothesis. Segura and Ventura hypothesized that the increase in the free tryptophan to BCAA ratio may help to decrease the perception of pain, thus improving exercise performance by increasing the pain threshold. However, given the most recent research there is more sound scientific evidence to support the theory that central influences during exercise may play a role in the onset of fatigue under certain conditions. However, because the potential causes of overtraining are multifaceted and have yet to be fully understood, the degree to which central fatigue may contribute to overreaching and/or overtraining remains to be determined.

Nutritional Needs of the Immune System:

Although moderate exercise has been reported to enhance immunity, intense prolonged exercise has been found to temporarily suppress the immune system. For example, research has indicated that following intense exercise, the immune system may be depressed for as long as 6 hours. This open window of suppressed immune function may allow the body to be more susceptible to acquiring host infections. To support this theory, several studies have reported that following intense exercise like a marathon, athletes have a greater incidence of upper respiratory tract infections (URTIs) for several weeks following the event. Additionally, athletes who overreach and/or overtrain often get URTIs, ear infections, and/or colds. This suggests that athletes who train too often or too intensely may experience a chronically suppressed immune system.

The primary metabolic fuel for the lymphocyte is glutamine. The availability of glutamine affects lymphocytic function. In this regard, in vitro and in vivo, evidence suggests that increasing the availability of glutamine enhances immune function while decreasing glutamine levels suppresses immune function. During high­intensity intermittent and prolonged exercise, it has been suggested that glutamine levels decline in the blood. The reason for this is that glutamine, like BCAAs, readily serves as a metabolic substrate during exercise. The exercise-induced hypoglutaminia has been reported to last up to 6 hours following high-intensity intermittent exercise. Moreover, some overtrained athletes have been reported to have chronically low glutamine levels Consequently, one theory of exercise-induced immuno-suppression is that decreased glutamine availability following exercise may serve to suppress lymphocytic function, making it more difficult to respond to immune challenges. Athletes involved in periods of intensified training that often involves training more than once per day may therefore be more susceptible to a hypoglutaminia-induced immunosuppression.

Coenzyme Q10 is found to be a strong natural compound that is beneficial in the promotion of chemical reactions of the body in addition to providing protection to the body against free radicals. It is also known as  . It is naturally available in food and can be synthesized from amino acid tyrosine by the body through a multistage procedure which requires numerous trace elements besides eight vitamins.The most vital effect of Coenzyme Q10 is its control on the oxygen flow within the body cells in addition to its antioxidant qualities.

Dosage:

Normally the daily dosage of Coenzyme Q10 is 30 mg but in cases where the supplementation of Coenzyme Q10 has proved to be beneficial this may be raised to a higher amount. It must be taken with a meal which must contain a combination of vegetable or soy oil or some fat as that is likely to help by absorption by the body quite substantially. Studies have revealed that the body absorbs Coenzyme Q10 easily and no side effects have been reported yet with dosage as high as 300 mg of Coenzyme Q10.

Ingredients and Nutrients :

The ingredients and nutrients present in Coenzyme Q10 are safe. It consists of alpha lipoic acid and nutrients like vitamin Q and Ubiquinone.

Benefits of Coenzyme Q10:

1. It helps in boosting energy in the body.
2. It is also beneficial in improving the immune system of the Body.
3. It acts as a coenzyme in the energy production within the body cells.
4. It is also used by the body for the purpose of transforming food into ATP (adenosine triphosphate).
5. It is also helpful in the treatment of breast cancer, periodontal disease and muscular dystrophy.
6. It is also helpful in the treatment of diabetes mellitus.
7. It helps in the prevention of cholesterol in the body which make plaques in the human arteries.

Side Effects:

1. Sleeplessness.
2. Elevated levels of liver enzymes.
3. Dizziness and irritability.
4. Fatigue, rashes and heartburn.
5. Nausea and pain in upper abdominals.

Precautions for Coenzyme Q10:

• Pregnant women must not use this supplement.
• It must be kept out of reach of children.
• It must be consumed after medical advice.

The Ketogenic diet is characterized by an initial and rapid weight loss primarily due to the loss of water in the human body. The muscle and liver glycogen are lost due to a sudden reduction in the amount of carbohydrates in the body which can have serious implications on body. It is also characterized by strong but non-permanent diuretic effects.The main advantage of such a diet is fast and substantial loss of body weight. The body would burn more of fats stored by restricting the intake of Carbohydrates. There is also a reduction in the level of hunger. The diet includes oil, meat, butter, fish, cheese and eggs.

Benefits of ketogenic diet:

• It is helpful for treatment of epilepsy.

• It is also helpful for reducing depression and fatigue.

• It is beneficial for muscle and joint pains.

• It reduces the level of irritability.

Foods that can be used during a Ketogenic diet:

Sugar Free Jelly – This is a great and tasty food, in addition to being economical and usually comes in a great variety. One can use whipped cream for better results and taste.

Meat Substitutes – This can prove to be a great source of the ketogenic diet but care must be taken to ensure about the quantity of carbohydrates they carry with them. For example- Vegetarian hot dogs.

Peanut Butter – This is also a great food and the quantity must be limited to extract all of the benefits associated with it.

Nuts – Same as peanut butter in terms of fats and carbohydrates content and must not be excessively consumed. You can also take on almonds, sunflower seeds and peanut for a wide variety.

Salads – It serves a great food to ease hunger pangs and also in the meanwhile providing bulk to the diet. This also acts as to provide the liquid fat to the diet and thus ensure a solid food base.

These all foods may be rich enough to be on a ketogenic diet but stress must be placed to ensure that enough of fat and protein must reach the body to satisfy its daily needs. Nutritional supplements comes handy in this, they can give you the required amount of energy and still making sure that you do not gain weight.

Side effects of Ketogenic diet:

1. Dehydration.
2. Weakness and nausea.
3. Loss of electrolytes.
4. Reduction in the body level of calcium.
5. Kidney problems.

Thus to conclude one can say that there are enough options for a ketogenic diet for a vegetarian and one must not start this diet only because he is not a consumer of meat and meat products. The food must be carefully chosen and the diet must be analyzed properly to ensure that one gets the benefits out of his diet regimen.