You know when it comes to weight gain most of us think that it is just simply the problem of too much ‘through the old cake hole’ and not enough moving around.
I use to think that too. But the more I worked with people on this, the more I concluded that there is far more to this than meets the eye.
You see before the creeping on of fat and decline of health there is always a decline in mental health first.
It is why so many of us really struggle with motivation and sticking to the plan. It is why so many of us find simple changes so fundamentally impossible to keep at.
Life gets in the way. The kids are running riot. The stress of life, job and bills all keep coming and coming. The mountain never seems to move.
Optimal brain chemistry in health and fitness programmes is key to success.
How?
Well you can have someone bark at you, drag you out of bed in the morning and kick you up and down a car park or you can take control of your moods from what you eat, drink and think.
You do this and rest assured you will never need to worry about lacking the motivation to do it because you can subtlety manipulate the way you respond to life and what it throws at you.
A lot has to do with the role of a brain chemical called serotonin. Get it normal and you have a winning formula on your hands. You will feel happy, motivated, lifted and life ‘ain’t so tough all the time’.
I was standing there after a camp session there the other day and we were noting that people are so angry all the time. You know it wasn’t so long ago that we used to whistle, hum, skip and smile our way around the place.
Nowadays you would be lucky not to be ploughed out the way by ‘mother-of-three-in-jeep-at-the-car-park-trying-to-find-the-space-closest-to-the-door’.
Anger, stress and in the inability to cope with life are all markers of poor mental health. Ok – point accepted – it is not ‘prozac’ time or dehabilitating levels of depression. But it is certainly a sliding scale.
So what to do? Well there are few things but this is what you can do NOW.
Get hydrated. Your brain is dependant on you to give it its ‘oil’ and that oil is water. 3-4 litres every day – male and female.
You know we wouldn’t dream of letting our car run dry of oil yet we do it everyday to our brain.
Clean up your diet next. Focus on lots of green veggies and green drinks and add
in seeds and some vegetable based proteins. Limit your cooked meat to one meal per day and make it really good quality. Since you will be buying less you can really focus in ‘where it came from’.
Get the junk out. Most of us wouldn’t dream of feeding our kids before bed a good dose of sweets washed down with a cocktail of sunny delight. We know that it would bring about Hurricane Katrina in the living room.
The reason being is that you (yes, you – they didn’t know) have altered their brain chemistry. Since they are smaller it is faster acting too.
And since our mind and gut are inextricably linked via the valgus nerve plugging them up with piles of bread and constipating them also has a direct effect on their mental status.
Did you know that MSG actually does a pretty good job in killing off brain cells?
And that Alzheimer’s has been linked directly to diets high in sugar?
Green drinks and alkalising salts are a great addition to your daily plan. They work in maintaining and promoting an oxygenated and pH balanced body (for more on this go to my website). You need this for optimal health.
You can also supplement with tryptophan or 5-HTP, amino acids that are used in the production of serotonin. Most people sleep better with this too as increasing
serotonin will have a direct affect on the production of melatonin that will help
you sleep.
The main aim of these four simple steps (and there are so many more beyond the scope of here) is to boost our natural serotonin levels and, unlike anti-depressants that encourage you to draw on what little serotonin you have, they will give you a good boost hopefully empowering you to make the route to health
and fitness a little easier.
As is always the case, work with your health and medical practitioner if you intend on implementing some of these strategies. You never know you might teach them a thing or two :).
John Lark is a Personal Trainer and Nutritional Consultant. Download your ‘5 Top Tips for Fat Loss’ at www.spherefitnessstudio.com. He can be reached at 01-5052131
