Why Your Diet Will Make or Break Your Success
It is no secret that proper diet is important when it comes to any aspect of training, whether you are trying to get stronger, add muscle, or lose fat. No matter what your training goals may be, your diet is the number one physical factor that will decide whether you succeed or fail. A proper and consistently healthy training diet is the number one way to ensure that you see noticeable gains as fast as possible. A poorly planned and often times unhealthy diet can completely derail even the most carefully planned and perfectly executed training routine. In fact, most of us probably know at least one person who works their ass off in the gym and has an awesome training routine, yet seems to not look noticeably different from month to month and year to year. Read on to find out more about why diet can make or break your training results, and how you can avoid the common pitfalls that so many people seem to make.
How Proper Diet Can Take Your Progress to the Next Level
All gains start when you train in the gym, but they develop and mature outside of the gym. Think about your training as planting a seed in a garden. If you don't plant the seed, nothing will ever grow in that spot. However, a seed needs to also be cared for, nurtured, and fed. If you neglect a plant in a garden there is a good chance it will not grow much, if at all. However, if you care for it, there is a good chance it will grow to be big and strong. Muscles are no different. By training in the gym you are planting a seed, but if you do not take care of that seed with diet and proper recovery outside of the gym, you will not make it very far. By treating your body to the proper diet to achieve your desired results, you will be cultivating massive muscle strength and size gains that you never thought possible.
If your goal is to lose fat, diet is just as important. Many people who are trying to lose fat get tricked into the idea that losing weight on the scale means they are making definite progress. This is the number one reason that fat loss diets fail in my opinion. Fat is fat, and everyone wants to lose fat. However, weight can be fat, muscle, or water, most often times a combination of the three. With a carefully planned and proper diet, you can lose mostly fat and water and maintain muscle. However, many of the popular diets today trick your body into draining itself of water, while also losing some fat and muscle. When people step on the scale, they see a loss of ten or twenty pounds and think they are making progress. However, they look the same in the mirror. When they eventually give up on the diet, they regain the lost water and some of the fat, but often times not the muscle, resulting in discouragement. There is a ton of misinformation out there on the correct ways to lose fat, many of which come from these B.S. diets that are to blame for the failure of so many people around the world in achieving their fat loss goals. Learn how to diet properly to lose fat, and you will never fail in your fat loss goals again, so long as you have the will and determination necessary to not give in to the temptations of unhealthy food that are unfortunately all around us.
How a Poor Diet Can Stall Your Path to Success for Months or even Years
Not planning your diet down to the last calorie and eating clean and healthy foods can really set you back over the long run. Consider someone who is bulking, trying to pack on a few pounds of muscle over the course of a couple of months. They know that they need to eat calories above-maintenance, but neglect to eat cleanly, and regularly resort to unhealthy and quick food options rather than taking the time to put together a clean and healthy meal. In a few months, the person in the example will undoubtedly have gained strength and muscle mass (assuming they train often enough), but they will also have put on more fat than someone who bulked with a clean diet than was meticulously planned. Lets say they put on ten pounds of fat, they now have to cut in order to attempt to lose some of that fat, during which time there is a strong chance they could lose some of their strength and muscle gains. Mean while, the clean-bulker is still slowly chugging along, adding muscle slowly and consistently through his careful planning and dedication towards sticking to a strict diet plan. By the time the person in the example has lost the fat, they will be well behind where they could have been if they had only been more careful with their diet. Consider also the person who wishes to gain muscle or strength, but eats at or below maintenance because they did not take the time to carefully count their caloric intake each and every day. A year could easily pass without anyone noticing a change in their lifts or appearance, because they were unknowingly not giving their body the fuel it needs to grow.
Conclusion
