Nutritionist, trainer share three key tips for slim summer bod
Jun 22, 2012, 11:39 AM | Updated: 8:34 pm
It’s getting to be |
Summertime is the time many people start thinking about
how they’ll look in that old bathing suit. With that in
mind, Bill Radke called in the experts to get the best
advice on how to shape up for the season and maybe for
good.
The key proposed by both of Radke’s guests, Angela Pifer,
owner of Nutrition Northwest, and Elias Roberts, with
Excellence Health and Fitness, is consistency.
“If I could bottle one thing, it would be consistency,”
says Pifer, “consistency, balance, finding something that
works for you and sticking with it.”
That rule applies for both diet and exercise, say the two
health professionals. Pifer says diets don’t work because
it’s people looking for a quick fix, engaging in eating
habits for a short period of time that they can’t
maintain. For a real change, she says you need to change
your lifestyle.
“You need to change the food that you eat,” says Pifer,
who recommends going for real, whole, colorful foods.
“The perfect plate is really going to be half the plate
non-starchy vegetables, colorful, a quarter of the plate
lean protein, that could be animal based or non-animal
based, and it’s going to be a quarter of the plate as a
healthier carbohydrate, so something like quinoa or brown
rice.”
She recommends combining these whole ingredients in
different ways like a tortilla wrap or a stir fry. The
most important thing is that all the elements are
included.
“If we can focus more on whole foods throughout the day,
we can make a huge, huge impact to our lives. We lower
inflammation. It’s better on digestion, anti-aging. It’s
everything that we would ever want to bottle up in a pill,
that you can never get from a food. It’s real food.”
Another big factor for health, and trimming up for your
pool-side days, is the exercise.
“People don’t move enough,” says Roberts. “We [human
beings] have been moving aggressively through our whole
existence until just recently.”
Roberts says when starting with a fitness program, start
out slowly with something you can maintain. It all comes
back to that consistency thing again. Roberts says around
New Years, he always sees tons of new members turn out at
the gym, but either they dig in too much or too little.
They don’t integrate it into their lifestyle in a way they
can sustain long-term.
Eating right and working out are the obvious must-dos, but
Roberts and Pifer agree there is one more often neglected
ingredient that is an absolute necessity to achieve
results.
“Most people don’t get enough sleep,” says Roberts.
“If you ask yourself to work out, if you ask yourself to
prepare your foods but you’re already low on energy from
lack of sleep,” says Roberts, “if we don’t get a sound
eight hours of sleep, our body slowly starts to come
apart, and we lose energy and with that, motivation.”
“For me, that’s the foundation for everything,” says
Pifer.
By JAMIE GRISWOLD, MyNorthwest.com Editor
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