Source: http://www.mypyramid.gov/

What is nutrition?

Nutrition is defined as the science that studies the process by which living organisms acquire all the things that are necessary for them to live and grow. Nutrition deals with both diet (ingestion) and metabolism. To help understand these concepts, asks yourself these questions. What do I eat? How much do I eat? And How often do I eat? In this posting, I will touch a little on the diet component, which deals with the questions of what and how much do I eat?

My Diet?

Your diet is what you eat and drink, the solids and fluids your intake to satifsy the body’s nutritents requirment. In the fundamental sense of weight management, gaining control of your diet entails understanding what you consume or intake, but also how much you consume. To lose, maintain or gain weight, you need to pay attention to both factors. For example, if you eat all the right foods but in too large of portions, you will gain weight. If you eat the right amount of foods (total calories) but only eat a limited number of food types, then you will be lacking essential nutrients that the body needs.

What should you be eating?

The Federal USDA, has long established that individal need to be intaking foods from the 6 major foods grous. http://www.mypyramid.gov/pyramid/index.html. Depending on your age, weight, sex and other factors, the actual amounts will vary; but as a general rule, the following should be considered for:

1. grains vary from 3-11 ounces;
2. vegetables vary from 1-6 cups;
3. fruits varies from 1-4 cups;
4. milk and other dairy products vary from 2 – 4 ounces;
5. meats and beans vary from 2 – 8 ounces;
6. oils vary from 3-6 teaspoons;

Now, the actual caloric amount is another question.

How much should you be eating?

How much should you be eating is determined by your weight goal? If you want to lose weight, you should be reducing caloric intake; if you want to maintain weight, then you can keep your caloric intake constant; or if you want to gain weight you need to increase your caloric intake above what you are currently consuming. Whether is is decreasing, maintaining or increasing caloric intake, it is good to have an ideal of what your current caloric consumption is. At weight-loss-center.net, there is an online caloric intake calculator that estimates how many calorics you are consuming based on body stats and current exercise levels, click link to assess http://www.weight-loss-center.net/daily_calorie_calculator.html.

Once you have this number, you can either increase, decrease or maintain depending again on your weight goal. The general though is that if you are wanting to lose at least 1 pound a week via dieting alone, then you should subtract, or reduce your dailiy caloric intake by 500 calories a day. The reverse is the case if you want to put on a pound in a week, you need to increase you daily caloric intake 500 calories per day. You can alternatively use a few online calculators to make this detemination as well. For example:

For determining weight loss or weight maintenance

http://www.freedieting.com/tools/calorie_calculator.htm

For determining weight loss, maintenance or gain

http://www.hpathy.com/healthtools/calories-need.asp

A very important part of this nutrition component and understanding dieting and dieting control is the frequency of caloric consumption. This factor is one of the major factors that affect your metabolism (i.e.,. what happens after you intake that food/fluids into your body). Fortunately, this will be the focus of tomorrow’s posting.

Final Thought?

We at Better Bodies in Training, strongly believe that knowledge is power. Knowledge empowes you by giving you more options and informing your decisions. Our goal will this posting is to help you better understand that nutritional component to not just our program but to any effective weight management program.

As we stated in yesterday’s posting, weight loss or weight mangement can be very difficult, some more so than others, a truly effective program will tackle the problem many fronts. Tomorrow we will discuss the particular details of the metabolism aspect to the nutritional component. In that time, what are your thoughts about the points explored in the posting? Do you understand what nutrition is? What about the two major component of nutrition, diet and metabolism? Your thoughts, suggestions and questions are welcomed.