Eat Healthy , Get in Shape and Stay Fit

By Chuang, Yu-ting（莊喻婷）

Adequate workout and appropriate diet can improve your health, help your body get in shape and stay fit. Besides regular exercise, diet plan is also a key to keeping your body in great shape.

Everyday Food Plan

Many people think that eating less and refusing to eat starch will help them lose weight.  However,  Donna Chen（陳怡錞）, a professional dietitian, indicates that it is a misunderstanding which will make the BMR (基礎代謝率) decrease and result in regaining weight easily.

Basal metabolic rate

The rate at which energy is used by an organism at complete rest, measured in humans by the heat given off per unit time, and expressed as the calories released per kilogram of body weight or per square meter of body surface per hour.

In addition, not absorbing enough starch could reduce your muscle and do harm to your body, causing cardiovascular diseases（心血管疾病）. Donna recommends eating starch with low GI（升糖指數）, for instance, brown rice, grain, root vegetables, and oatmeal – which are all better than white rice. Fats make hormones, and not having enough fat could cause endocrine disorders（內分泌失調）. For those who are afraid of fats and insist on eating boiled food, Donna warns  that everyone must have at least one spoon of oil or equivalent fat value of nuts per day.

GI

Glycemic index is a number associated with a particular type of food that indicates the food's effect on a person's blood glucose (also called blood sugar) level. A value of 100 represents the standard, an equivalent amount of pure glucose.

Workout Food Plan

Before exercise, Donna suggests that we have some carbohydrate with low GI or medium GI like toast and low sugar fruits. Our body is in hydropenia（缺水） during exercise, so we should drink water instead of tea or coffee which includes caffeine that will make us urinate more. For those who have exercised for more than an hour, juice is a nice choice because it includes water and sugar which can replenish what the body needs. After exercise, you could have food with sugar, carbohydrate and protein, for example, soy milk and banana or buttermilk with sweet potato in 30 minutes, which is the time for glycogen（肝糖） replenishment and let nutrients get into the muscle for muscle recovery.

There are many people who eat whey protein to accelerate muscle-building, but actually you should take in protein from natural food, for example, meat, beans, fish, nuts, and milk. Only when you can’t eat that much food, should you eat some whey protein.

All in all, having a balanced diet is the only way to stay health and stay fit.