Are you ready for summer!?

Speed up your weight loss with a few practical tips!

TRY IT, DON'T JUST TAKE MY WORD FOR IT!

The best advice I can give you about nutrition is: don't trust anyone, but test everything that strikes you as interesting. We are all different, and once you start paying attention to your diet, that is, once you begin to eat mindfully, your body will tell you itself: "this YES, this NO".

The key is not to listen to it at the table while you eat, but half an hour later to notice how you feel and what your energy is like. Pay attention to how you sleep, how much energy you have during training, how your health is and how your digestion is....

Your stomach knows better than all the trainers and nutritionists put together what suits you.

HOW MUCH SHOULD YOU EAT BEFORE TRAINING?

If the goal is weight loss, it would be best to exercise when you are hungry (in the morning on an empty stomach). At that moment your hormones will be optimal, so you can reach into your fat reserves. If you don't train in the morning, it would be good not to eat for at least 2 or 3 hours before training, so that your insulin level drops to a minimum. The hormone insulin blocks the enzyme lipase and in that way stores fat.

HOW MUCH SHOULD YOU EAT BEFORE TRAINING?

You won't go wrong with either option; my vote goes to after training. Spelta Vita is an excellent source of the energy needed for recovery, on which the result largely depends.

"I'll just nibble on something, I can't exercise hungry" – WRONG!

THIS IS THE BIGGEST MISCONCEPTION AND MISTAKE I HEAR AND SEE VERY OFTEN.

Whether you have eaten a single bite or a protein bar or anything else, insulin is secreted. As soon as insulin is present, the body stores fat. It is a misconception that you can't exercise while hungry, because you will never actually feel hungry when you are physically active. Your hormonal status changes, blood moves from the internal organs to the periphery, and the subjective feeling of hunger stops, no matter how hungry you were.

BE CAREFUL WITH FASTING!

The best-known hormones that regulate hunger and satiety are leptin and ghrelin. If you fast in the wrong way, you can throw these two hormones out of balance, and once you stop fasting they will do damage to your metabolism. The so-called yo-yo effect.

Leptin is responsible for weight gain, and ghrelin for loss of appetite.

IT IS IMPORTANT TO TAKE IN NUTRIENTS

When the body is hungry, it is hungry for nutrients, especially essential ones, not so much for energy. Often, in their wish to lose weight, people cut their calorie intake but ignore what they are actually taking in. If you supply your body with nutrients (vegetables), fasting will be more painless in every sense.

Fasting greatly slows the metabolism, so if you don't get it going with exercise, your calorie deficit will be smaller. Spelta Vita products can help you a great deal here, as they contain a rich spectrum of nutrients.

REDUCE STRESS

Training, massage, meditation – any form of relaxation will help your weight-loss result. When the body is under stress it doesn't allow any changes; it feels unsafe about leaving homeostasis (balance), because it senses it doesn't have enough energy for such a thing. When you relax, the body gathers the energy to carry out the change. This phenomenon is recognisable when people go to the seaside. Usually, a couple of months before the trip, motivated by the holiday, they take care of their diet and training. The results of that are poor, and then, as if by some miracle, they lose weight at the seaside. Puzzled, people most often tell me: "I swam in the sea, it must be from that." In fact, the effort invested finally "paid off" at the seaside, once people relaxed and the conditions for change were created. Swimming may have contributed to the relaxation, but swimming can only give you a result if you have trained hard and methodically for a couple of months, rather than splashing about in the shallows.

CHEWWWWWW

It's incredible how much such a simple and free thing can do for you. Everyone loves to say "I ENJOY MY FOOD", and then I watch them at the table gulping their meal down. When we don't chew our food enough, we miss out on many lovely flavours that are, at the same time, information for the body: which food has come in, how much of it, and what the stomach needs to prepare in order to receive it properly. When we chew, the food is mechanically better processed and, physiologically speaking, it is soaked in enzymes and slowly makes its way down into the stomach. When the scenario is this ideal, the whole process of digestion is of much higher quality, which means the body will more easily take from the food what it needs and throw the excess in the bin. Try it and pay attention to your energy during digestion when you eat a meal quickly versus when you chew your food for a long time.

Author: Vladimir Danilović, graduate sports teacher