Unique Love Triangle

Lets look at this unique love triangle!

1.     Exercise - Activity to improve, challenge and build muscular and cardio-ventricular system. In simple words, it helps you build muscles, improve your heart and lung capacity.

2.     Diet - Food that we eat which provides us with energy to survive, thrive and build immunity.

3.     Sleep - Helps you recover from physical and mental fatigue. 

As I had mentioned earlier, these are the three factors that make-up for your good health. They are so well connected and dependent on one other that I call them a love triangle.   

Now, let's look at their relationship with each other.

Exercise - Diet

·       When you exercise, you use energy and the same energy is supplied by the food you eat.

·       Type of food you eat will decide the energy levels you have for exercise.

·       Regular exercise will regulate your digestive juices and hunger pangs. This will improve the energy utilisation and choice of food that you make.

·       Choice of healthier, un/semi processed or whole food items will increase your performance and energy levels for exercise.

This cycle can work in reverse way as well.

When you don't exercise you don't use the energy produced by food. When you don't use this energy it will be stored as fat which will induce lethargy. This will make you reach out for easy\packed or fast food which in turn would spike your hunger pangs. You will eventually feel tired and not have the energy to exercise.

Diet - Sleep

·       When you eat un/semi processed food, your digestive system is not overloaded and this helps your body to be relaxed and aids your sleep quality.

·       When your digestive and excretory systems are working well, it helps you have an uninterrupted sleep cycle. 

·       Quality sleep will help regulate body sugar levels and hunger pangs.

·       This will help improve efficiency of the digestive system.

When this cycle reverses, it looks like this.

When you eat too much of processed foods,  you feel sleepy and lethargic. (??However, this sleep will not be uninterrupted or quality sleep??). This will increase the risk of acidity and constipation which will in turn disturb your sleep patterns. And disturbed sleep will invite low energy levels and abnormal hunger pangs. And as soon as you eat highly processed food, this cycle continues.

Sleep - Exercise

·       Good night sleep increases your recovery from the physical wear and tear. By adding some exercises into your routine, you will wake up fresh, active and energetic.

·       This energy will spring you out of the bed and would want you to exercise more.

·       Exercising will release feel good hormones which will make you happy and less stressed and this will gradually aid your sleep. 

This cycle can also work in the reverse direction.

Poor sleep quality will make you feel lethargic and hungry which will leave you with no motivation to do any exercises. This would result in stress and fatigue and also intervene in your sleep quality.

In order to achieve a healthy lifestyle, you will have to make them all work together in great sync! 

How to make them work for you? I will cover that in my next blog. Till then keep it healthy and happy!

Cheers...

Hope you enjoyed reading, feel free to like, share, comment, share your feedback, ask questions. 

Dhaval Bhadeshiya

Certified Fitness and Lifestyle coach

https://www.facebook.com/dhavalbhadeshiya

One hour of workout can change your life in 12 ways

Hi Guys this is about how just one hour of workout can change your life in 12 ways. And how it can impact on what you do throughout the day.

This is going to be a short one. Let’s look at how one hour of training\workout has helped me and can help you in many ways.

1) First things first, it helps you burn calories. One hour of workout can help you burn 300 to 900 calories based on the type of workout you chose.

2) It’s not only calories, your workout will help your heart and cardiovascular system to be healthy.

3) Your lung capacity will increase. Means your utilization of oxygen will improve.

4) Regular exercise will help your bones, strength training with good diet will help you retain and even increase your bone density.

5) Regular workout routine will help you bring discipline and schedule to your life. Either you will wake up early almost same time every day to hit the gym or you will finish off your work on-time every day to hit the gym in the evening.

6) This add one more advantage, working out regularly and being with fit people will help you increase your awareness towards your body and diet.

7) You will understand your body much better, you will be much more aware of muscular anatomy and skeletal structure.

8) Another advantage of working out regularly is eating smarter and cleaner. You will start eating on time and this will help you avoid reaching out to junk and unnecessary cravings. 

9) One more thing you will start doing is to look for Protein in everything you eat, and this will eventually help you choose the right food.

10) Soreness in your body will constantly help you to improve your posture, you will sit, stand, walk and bend in much better way than you would be doing earlier.

11) Fatigue from workout will help you sleep better, quality of sleep will improve drastically.

12) And last but not the least recovery from good night sleep will help you concentrate better on your work.

Hope you enjoyed reading, feel free to like, share, comment, share your feedback, ask questions. 

Dhaval Bhadeshiya

Certified Fitness and Lifestyle coach

https://www.facebook.com/dhavalbhadeshiya 

Deceiving Shortcut workouts

Hi Guys, I am back with one more :)

This time around it’s about the motivation on social media. I would rather call it deceiving information. 😊

I see number of videos\articles and picture proposing the quick fat loss/flat abs/muscle gain workouts.

They are titled like "7 minutes fat loss", "10 mins flat abs", "15 days weight loss", " 21 days flat stomach"  and the list goes on. Google these phrases and see the number of results for yourself.

Now the best thing about these tips are that they turn you on immediately. And you start dreaming about the flat abs in 15 days, 21 days with 10 mins workout.

And then the reality strikes, and it come with disappointment. After 15-20 days you realize it’s not working 😢

Fact of the matter is that there is no such quick fix. If it were so easy everyone would have been fit.

 Something like "If greatness was easy to be achieved, everyone would have been great"

There are few very important things that most of these articles don’t tell you.


Part 1: Scientific Principles of calorie burn

Now let’s look at this from scientific principle of caloric consumption\burn rate. 

Some of the most intense workout burn around 800 calories per hour, so for 10 mins it 133 calories. 

And as I mentioned previously you need to burn 7700 calories to loose 1 KG of body fat. So based on this calculation 7700/133 it will take 57 days to reduce 1 KG. 😲

Part 2: Scientific Principles of Workout design

Now let’s look at guidelines for workout

1.    Before you start any exercise you need 5-10 mins of warm-up (oh forgot your program was only for 10 mins 😂)

2.    These 7 mins or 10 mins cycles usually needs to be repeated 3-4 times in a session, which makes around 30-40 mins of workout. (another disappointment isn't it) 

3.    After you finish your workout you need to cool down and stretch for 5-10 mins. (they never told you this)

So all-inclusive this needs to be a 40 mins to 60 mins session. Wooo that's way longer than what you thought it was. 

Part 3: Diet and Nutrition plan. (this was never included)

Now let me tell you the biggest secret, that no fitness program is complete without diet. Shocked?

Whatever your fitness goal may be, if it’s not supplemented by the correct type of diet and nutritional program it’s not going to deliver results.

Only sustainable and balanced workout and diet plans will provide long lasting and satisfactory results.

"There is no shortcut to success" 

So stop looking for these quick tips on internet, instead follow proper guidelines for workout and diet to achieve your goals.

Slow and steady wins the race applies even today :)

Hope this will help you chose right workout for yourself.

Dhaval Bhadeshiya

Certified Fitness and Lifestyle coach

Demons of Diet

When I published my last blog, I got overwhelming response from all you guys. I would like to thank all of you for reading, comments and feedback. This is biggest motivation for me to write more often.

Demons of Diet

In few weeks, I had so many discussions on all three factors affecting the health and fitness of an individual, one of the most interesting topic was Diet. And no prize for guessing. 😄

On Diet, there are so many researches, books and tutorials out there and in spite of them being around we still somehow are not able to get this right. Especially the ones who are looking at weight management(Mostly weight reduction).

I think the reason behind this is we are made to believe and we have now accepted that its very complex and difficult thing. Based on all the research I have done and speaking to people, its not as difficult as it seems to be.

So lets first look at why it seems difficult. Reason is, as soon as we hear a word "Diet" suddenly we start feeling stressed and feel like we will have to punish ourselves. We will have to avoid a particular type of food, specially that you would love to eat, buy low fat\low cholesterol oil and products. They are going to be costly. They wont taste the same. You cant eat Samosa, Paratha, Cake etc. These are some of the demons occupy your mind immediately.

And if you little more exposed to fitness industry and social media then you are in even more miserable condition. 😃 
You will have questions like, should I adopt Vegan diet, Keto diet, GM diet, Paleo diet, juice detox, gluten free and what not.

And then you start getting into details of what these diets are and being in place you are in, India(which is not the origin of these diets) will you get all these ingredients here? If you are veg, how will you do Keto diet? etc.

By now as you go through these you have already fought and lost half the battle in your mind. 

And as the popular belief says, you start something being skeptical or with negative mindset you are most like to fail.

If you look at the issue of diet in weight management its very simple equation to start with.

Its calories that you consume from food every day versus calories that you burn everyday.

Limit your caloric intake and most of the people go wrong here. Instead of looking to limit their caloric intake, people try to remove a particular type of food item from their diet, and replace them with some fancy off-the-shelf products from super market. By doing this they may haven't changed their caloric intake but they would have definitely deprived their selves of some essential nutrients their body needs resulting in altered metabolism.


Second most common issue that I have seen is the speed at which they want to reduce the weight gained. They would have added 5 kg of weight in in a year but they would want to reduce that in a month. Here is where all these fad diets come into play. They provide the rosy picture of reducing kgs of weight in month but what they dont tell you is that, its not scientifically sustainable and you are not loosing body fat, but you are also loosing muscle mass, which is detrimental to your strength and well being. So you will end up feeling miserable, low on energy, and weak. And not to mention, as soon as you come back to your normal diet you will gain that weight again. This time its going to be fat gain with muscles(worse than what it was earlier).

So essentially I would recommend that the 2 simple principles of weight management that you should be looking at is to 

1. Reduce and caloric intake and not the nutritional intake.
2. Second is have a reasonable timeline for reducing the weight.

Lets look at these two principle in details for reducing body fat

1.  Deficit\Negative caloric intake

Why is this important?

reducing the caloric intake is the most important factor in reducing your body fat. and a very simple reason is that the amount of calories that you can burn daily is limited by your physiological and biological composition. Working out for more than 1 hour daily is very difficult for a common man. And when your workout for an hour the amount of calories that you can burn is as follows.

Calories Burning Chart per hour of workout.

So now you know how much time it takes to burn these many calories. what this also tells us is that there is a limit to which we can burn these calories. So only exercise without control on diet will not be too useful in reducing body weight.

So what is the ideal intake, its divided as below.

How Much:

Your weight is direct result of your calorie surplus. Means the total calories you eat - total calories you consume\burn.

70 kg male needs 2600 calories a day if he works out for 30-60 mins70 kg female woman needs 2150 calories with the same level of workout

What:

Now divide these calories by these Macro nutrients:
Protein + Carbs + Fats
And Water, Vitamins, Minerals, Fibre(These micro nutrients do not have caloric value)

When:

Divide these into 5-6 meals daily.

Eat within 30 mins of waking up and do not eat 1-2 hrs before going to sleep.

Now as you know the calories required per day and calories that you can burn everyday based on your routine, its time to look at what is your current caloric consumption.

Examples:

• 100 gms of apple is 52 calories
• 100gm of banana is 89 calories
• 1 chapati - 100 calories
• Mcveggie Burger (W/O Cheese) - 360 calories

You can always look for more details on the calories that you consume on daily basis by searching the caloric value of your staple food on google.

How many calories to reduce from your existing diet?

Its safe to reduce about 200-250 calories per day. Which will result into half a kg of weight per week. In order to reduce 500 gms of body weight, you need to cut down 500 calories per day.
If you are doing a moderate workout for about 60 mins daily then, you are burning 250-300 calories per day.

You lose one Kg when you burn 7700 calories.

Establish reasonable timeline.

Establishing the reasonable timeline is very crucial. First thing that you should do is to check how much time did it take for you to gain the extra weight. If its a sudden increase, try to look back on our recent diet and other activities to check if its a result of that. In case of a sudden increase please get your regular health check-up to eliminate any medical conditions or ailments.
If its gradual increase then most probably its safe to assume its because of excess calories intake vs the calories burnt.

In any case reasonable time line will be minimum of 12 weeks to anything about 1 year. This is purely based on the amount of weight you need to reduce and your physical activity levels.

As mentioned about 1-2 kg per month is acceptable and reasonable weight reduction. Going at a greater speed of reduction has its own disadvantages. That includes gaining back the lost weight, sometimes gaining more than what is lost, also feeling very week and low on energy, loss of concentration, constant carving for food, insomnia etc.


To sum up, remember below points.

• Control your caloric intake

• Workout regularly

• Do not remove any particular food item from your diet or maintain your nutritional balance.

• Slow and steady wins the race

Hope this helps you control your diet and weight.

Dhaval Bhadeshiya

Certified Fitness and Lifestyle coach

Take control of your fitness

Its been sometime since I wrote a blog post. With this post I bring to you three major components that impacts your fitness and how can you really control your fitness.

So now lets look at what they are!

1) Exercise\Workout

2) Diet\Food\Nutrition

3) Sleep

Now as we look at the these 3 aspects, they form the base of your true fitness. You must wonder whats new about these, most of you might know this. What I want to draw your attention towards is how you can control these to your benefit.

Lets start with,

1) Physical Exercise or Workout. 

Control percentage 80%, means you have very high control over exercise routine, only thing you dont have voluntary control over is the reaction of your body to the exercise routine.

This aspect of fitness is tangible. You can choose Frequency, Intensity , Time and Type of workout you want or you enjoy doing.

How many times you workout per week. 

Its recommended that you workout at least 3 times a week to maximum 6 times a week.

Intensity with which you perform the workout.

For aerobic workout its suggested that you hit 60-90% of your maximum heart rate and for strength training, its recommended to have 8 to 12 reps at 70-80% of 1 rep max.

Duration of the workout per session.

Session needs to be minimum of 20 mins to optimum 60 mins.

Type of workout, Aerobic , Strength or Flexibility training. 

Its highly recommended to include all three i.e. aerobic, strength and flexibility training in your overall workout schedule.

Based on the workout that you follow, you will have your Aerobic capacity, Muscular strength, Bone density, and Range of Motion(Flexibility) enhanced. This will also determine the calories that you are going to burn. (Very important for weight management)

So this is a voluntary task, and the performing this task is in your control. 

Higher the frequency, intensity and duration of the training, more calories you burn.

Moving on to the second aspect, 

2) Diet\Food and Nutrition. 

Control percentage 70%, you have control over what, when and how much you eat. But you dont have control over how the food was produced(grown\processed) and how your body reacts to certain types of food(it could be allergy or certain aliments or hormonal levels).

This is one of the critical parts of the individual fitness. And this has different impact on each individual. With respect to diet and nutrition there are general guidelines laid for daily nutrition requirement. These requirements define the amount of carbohydrates, protein, fat, vitamins and minerals requited for daily consumption. 

As for choosing workout we also have a choice to decide what, when and how much do we eat. Most of the people who failed to manage their weight have gone wrong here. we often hear from them that in-spite of working out they are not able to loose weight or gain weight.

One of the things that we dont have voluntary control here is what our body does with the food that we eat. By choosing the right type, time and amount of food we can more or less control its effect on our body. 

Items you should include in your diet.

Fresh fruits and vegetables, Milk, Eggs, Whole grains. Replace sugar with honey and Jaggery(Brown sugar) where possible. And limit your total sugar consumption to less that 6 spoons a day.

Things you should limit in your diet.

Refined carbohydrates, desserts, table sugar, deep fired food, any food which is highly process and refined. 

And looking at last and most important and somehow widely ignored aspect of the health is,

3) Sleep

Control percentage 40%, we dont have too much of direct control over the quality of sleep. There are physiological as well as psychological factor that play a very important role.

However we may not have direct control on the quality and quantity of sleep, doing the first two(Exercise and Nutrition) right will help you improve the quality and quantity of sleep. One of the other things that can help you enhance your sleep\rest\recovery is bringing in a fixed schedule in your daily routine. 

Additionally there are multiple relaxation techniques that can help you better your sleep quality. Use dim lights in you bed room and reduce the over all light intensity in your house before bed time. Read some fiction book. Take a warm water bath. Slow down your breathing pace and inhale and exhale deep. Meditate if you can. Listen to some calm non lyrical music.

Avoid coffee\tea 4-6 hours before bed, stop use of any gadgets like mobile, TV etc 1-2 hours before going to bed. Avoid puzzles and brain teasers.

With understanding of the above factors you can gain more control over your health. As I conclude I would want to make a point that all three Exercise, Nutrition and Sleep are very profound scientific topics. This blog contains very generic guidelines and observations which I have drawn from my personal learning and experience.

Hope this helps your take control of your fitness

Dhaval Bhadeshiya

Certified Fitness and Lifestyle coach

Opinion: Aamir Khan's body transformaton

To all the fitness fanatics and Bollywood junkies all of us would have seen this video of Aamir Khan's transformation for his movie Dangal.

Aamir Khan's Transformation for Movie Dangal

• What this video tells you is:
• His Weight was 97 Kgs
• Body fat was 38%
• He brought it down to 9.67 %
• In just 5 Months

Now after getting inspired and awed by the transformation of Aamir Khan's body most of saw this video.
Video that explains that he took steroids

• In this video this guys suggests that he took steroids for getting this transformation.
• This kind of transformation is not possible without great genetics(which he doesn't possess).
• It will take 5-6 years for any normal human to achieve this level of fitness.

So now you demotivated or possibly also shaming Aamir Khan.

Now what I would like to tell you is something he didn't highlight and that is very important for you to understand.

1. Aamir Khan wasn't weighting 97 Kgs for all his life. He had put on this extra weight for this movie in a very short time. In fact he added 25 Kgs in 6 months.
2. All the fitness experts and dietitians would suggest that if you put on weight quickly you can reduce it quickly as well. As that is not your body type or your body is not used to that weight for a long time.
3. He used to eat more, eat food with extra calories to gain weight, which he normally wouldn't. so as soon as he would return to his normal diet, he was expect to reduce his weight.
4. Even when he was 97 Kgs he was working out and training for wrestling so his body is already capable of doing exercise. Which means if he just stopped his extra calorie diet even then he was expected to reduce weight.

Now lets look at things which are important. If Anyone follows these things then is surely expected to get much fitter in 5 months then what he is today.

1. He used specialized diet plan, which would work for him. This was calorie deficit plan, which means he will consume less calories than he would need to burn every day. If you consult your dietitian and get a similar plan for yourself, you are expected to lose weight.
2. His discipline and dedication to the training. (no amount of steroid can replace this) He stuck to his workout, which was again designed by fitness experts specially for him. He didn't build those muscles sitting on a couch. If you get yourself a plan designed for yourself, based on your body type and stick to it, you will see the results in 5 Months. 
3. Intensity of training: If you are going to train with the right intensity and focus without cheating no one can take away results from you. His training plan is designed for a specific need, loose fat and gain muscle.

So get off that couch and put on your gym gear. Go out there and sweat out for your fitness.

Workout Hard

Eat Right

Sleep Well!

Dhaval Bhadeshiya

Certified Fitness and Lifestyle coach

Diet For Workout

Hi All, welcome to my new blog on fitness lifestyle.

As a fitness expert very often people ask me about diet. However this is a very generic question which one comes across every now and then. In this blog I will try to simplify the provide basic details.

Questions:

1. What should one eat pre-workout?
2. What should be the diet during workout?
3. What should be the post workout diet?

Lets start with Pre-workout diet. This diet should serve two purpose, one to provide continuous supply of energy during workout and to repair and build the muscle fibers during and post workout.

So before workout your diet should contain protein and carbohydrates(complex carbohydrates). You should have your food preferably around one hour prior to your workout.

Food items you can have before workout: Pasta, Rice, Whole wheat bread, whole wheat cereals, most of the fruits and Veggies. As these are complex carbohydrates they provide a steady and longer supply of energy. Avoid simple carbohydrates like sugar, they will provide you with instant energy but it will not last long. Do not forget to have enough water, it is very much necessary to have your body adequately hydrated. 

Now lets look at the second part of the diet, during workout. This may not apply to you if you are going to workout up to 60 mins. If you are working out for more than 60 mins at a stretch then you need refueling during your workout. You should be targeting food with high carbohydrates. The purpose of this food is to supply energy. 

Food items you can have during workout: Fruits, juices, sports drinks and most importantly water. Body losses lots of water and salts during workout. Its very important to replenish our body's water content. 

Now comes the last part, post workout diet. This is quite different from the other two. The reason is the purpose. Purpose of this diet is to repair and rebuild. During our workout muscle fibers are damaged, this process prompts our body to repair these fibers and build new ones. In order to achieve this goal, we need lots of protein. Proteins are the building blocks for muscles. This doesn't mean we need only proteins, we need carbohydrate and fats as well. 

Another important thing about this part of the diet is that its not one serving\meal, it is all the meals that you have after your workout. This diet should make sure that your body is replenished and repaired so that you are able to workout next day. Also this diet has to make sure you have enough supply of essential nutrients throughout the day.

Food items you can have post workout: 

Proteins: Eggs, Milk, Cheese(not processed), Paneer, dal, beans and pulses, nuts(almonds\peanuts etc), Broccoli, spinach(palak)

Carbs: Bread, Roti, cereal, pasta, rice, sweet potato etc.

Fats: Oil, Ghee etc used in preparation is enough, no need to look far extra fatty content.

Few basic rules: 

1. Avoid added sugar of any kind as much as possible, sugar does more harm that fat.
2. Choose whole grains\foods, they are rich in fibers, fibers help absorb fat and are negative in calories as they don't produce energy.
3. Water, Water and Water. Make sure you have 3-4 liters of water.

Dhaval Bhadeshiya

Certified Fitness and Lifestyle coach