Eating to Lose Weight with ChaLEAN Extreme
One of the main worries of anyone who is trying to lose weight is knowing what to eat. You want to know what you can eat, what you can’t eat, how much can you eat. Beachbody understands the important role good nutrition plays in any fitness routine, and luckily, they provide the information you need to be successful with each and every workout program they sell. After all, it doesn’t matter how hard you’re exercising. If you’re not eating the right way, then the weight just isn’t going to come off. Period.
Beachbody’s ChaLEAN Extreme is no exception. It comes with an eating guide called the Fat Burning Food Guide to help you know what to eat during each phase of the program. It even includes 80 delicious, easy-to-make recipes to make your life even easier.
But even with the a great guide like this to help, it’s still possible to go wrong and not get the results you’d like with a fitness program. This is what happened to me during my first round of ChaLEAN Extreme. Looking back now, I can explain where I went wrong with one word - carbs. But before I go into that more, let me explain a little bit about how the ChaLEAN Extreme nutrition program is set up.
The Basics
As with all of the Beachbody programs, the ChaLEAN Extreme nutrition guides focuses on providing a high protein, low carb-low fat diet. At its core is the principle of eating 5 - 6 times a day, or every 2 to 3 hours. Eating like this has a number of advantages that does your body good. First, it keeps your blood sugar stable, which gets you out of the cycle of peaking and crashing throughout the day. This is often what leads to overeating, because you go too long between meals, and when you finally do eat, you’re starved, so you eat too much. Second, eating frequently speeds up your metabolism because it has to keep charging up to digest the additional food you’ve put in your body.
These 5-6 meals must be a proper balance of proteins, good carbohydrates and fats. It is important that you eat enough protein when exercising because it is the protein which fuels muscle building and more muscles equals a faster metabolism, and a faster metabolism means you burn more fat. Hence the phrase that Chalene constantly uses throughout these workouts “Muscle Burns Fat!” What this eventually leads to is an increased metabolism and more muscle which means you will need to eat more to fuel your body. So you will be increasing the amount of food you eat during the three months of this program and will continue to lose weight and fat. How cool is that! Eat more and still lose weight!
Of course, as I mentioned above, you have to eat foods in the right combination. You’ve learned the importance of eating lots of lean protein in your diet. Now let’s talk about carbs and fats. The amount and type of carbohydrates in your diet could be the most important factors when it comes to losing weight. As you’ve heard over and over, there is a difference between good carbs and bad carbs. Whenever any carbs are consumed, they are broken down into sugars and are absorbed into the bloodstream as glucose, or blood sugar. And while this sugar feeds our brain and gives our body energy, too much sugar, or the wrong kind, cannot be processed correctly by the body and ends up being stored as fat. What makes good carbs good then, is that they are released into the bloodstream at a slower rate. This provides more long-term energy as well as reduced blood sugar and insulin spikes. The best carbs are fiber-rich fruits, vegetables, whole grains, low-fat dairy, beans and legumes.
And lastly, there are the fats that we need in our diet. Many people think that fat is what makes you fat, but it’s actually excess insulin production caused by the over-consumption of sugar that makes you fat. Fat is a critical part of our diets for a number of reasons. One, it makes food taste good! Two, it helps release a hormone to the brain which tells the body, “I’m full. I can stop eating.” And three, it helps slow the rate in which sugar enters the bloodstream, which also gives you longer-term energy levels.
So this was a quick look at what the ChaLEAN Extreme nutrition program looks like and a simple primer on what foods you should be eating to fuel your body properly for exercise and weight loss. Tomorrow we’ll take a look at what I did wrong my first time through ChaLEAN Extreme and how I’ve corrected it with my second round.
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