How Can Eating Healthy Change Your Life?

Are you looking for inspiration to eat better and change your life? Despite being constantly told that we should eat healthily, what impacts can good habits bring to your routine?

In addition to making you more energetic, a healthy diet helps to stabilize your mood, maintain your physical conditioning and much more. Therefore, you must learn to control your impulses, satisfying your body with what it really needs: foods with high nutritional value.

Check out some of the changes I’ve seen in my body as I adhere to a healthier lifestyle!

1. Fat Loss and Fitness Improvements

It becomes hugely easier to achieve your fitness goals by eating healthy, and there is simple math behind it. As we explained in other articles, your body spends a certain amount of calories daily to maintain good functioning.

To put it simply, the number of calories you burn depends mainly on two factors: your metabolism and your lifestyle. This means that the more active your routine, the more calories you will burn.

Following this line, you must understand the concept of macronutrients so that what you eat (calories ingested) is aligned with your caloric expenditure and your fitness goals. Check out our article to learn how to calculate your macronutrients.

Assuming your caloric expenditure is 2500 kcal daily, you will need to put yourself in a caloric deficit to lose weight or a caloric surplus to gain weight. To lose fat, you will need to eat fewer calories than you expend on average, while to gain weight (or muscle mass, for example), you will need to eat more calories.

That’s precisely why understanding what a healthy diet is and how to implement it into your routine will make you reach your fitness goals much faster.

2. Improvements in Mood and Energy Levels

This was one of the most notable factors along my fitness journey. At the height of my sedentary lifestyle, I constantly felt without energy, regardless of how many hours I slept or if I had spent the whole day sitting and working.

During this period, I weighed 17 kg more than I do today, and I used to eat junk food pretty much every day. Here is the real problem: processed foods are poor in nutritional value despite having a high caloric value.

When you eat a poor meal, even though your body feels full momentarily, it will soon recognize that you didn’t get the nutrients you needed. In other words, by swapping a healthy meal for pizza, you’re forgoing high-quality macronutrients for poor carbs, bad fats, and excessive amounts of salt and sugar.

As a result, once you stop ingesting nutrients you really need, your body reacts with stress, besides a lack of energy and disposition. A poor diet can still affect your cognition and sleep quality.

3. Faster Body Recovery

The macronutrients are responsible for keeping your body functioning correctly, so your diet affects how quickly your body recovers from illness, injury, or heavy workouts.

By eating proteins, carbohydrates, fats, vitamins and minerals in adequate amounts, we ensure that our body has all the resources to perform vital activities and recover from infirmities – or micro-injuries generated during intense physical exercise.

Proteins, for example, are essential to maintain your muscle mass. In addition, it is precisely in the recovery period, after the workout, that proteins act to “heal” the muscle, building muscle mass.

4. Stabilization in Appetite and Less Hunger

Have you ever noticed how sometimes, shortly after eating junk food, you are hungry again? Unfortunately, while your taste buds love that burger, your body understands it’s not enough to satisfy its nutritional needs.

Imagine that your daily caloric expenditure is 2000 kcal and that you eat an average of 3 meals a day. Considering that that burger deal you usually order can easily reach 1000 kcal, you’ve just ingested half your daily calories in a single meal – which didn’t satisfy your hunger or nutritional needs.

That same 1000 kcal that you just slurped in could easily be split into two healthy 500 kcal meals, so you would still have 1000 more kcal to eat during the day.

In short, by avoiding that fast food you love, you can eat more, distribute your meals better throughout the day, and have a healthier body. Sounds more interesting, doesn’t it?

5. Overall Performance Improvement

In the same way your workout is not as good when you’re on an empty stomach, your routine is totally undermined by malnutrition – and I speak of this from experience.

When I started to eat better, I could notice improvements in several areas of my life: during the workout, at work, in sleep, and even in my interpersonal relationships. I had no idea how poor eating affected my mood and my willingness to do things.

In addition, I was often sick, and besides the fact that I didn’t like going to the hospital, it caused me to miss days at work and not be consistent with my workout routine. I couldn’t be that consistent in the things I set out to do, or I just didn’t have the energy to face new challenges.

Obviously, each body is unique, and we can all have different reactions to the same stimuli, but you should never neglect your diet. Remember that eating well is a physiological necessity and that there is a lot of truth to “you are what you eat”.

Life already puts many obstacles in our way. Don’t let your health be one of them!