FitnessRum

Recently, I’ve been asked by many people to write about the state of spring fatigue or spring tiredness. Now, I already have an action plan, which I follow and I can see its first results. I am bursting with energy and although you can’t see it judging by the number of posts here, I work hard and I’m not at all tired. 🙂

Here’s the plan:
1. Daily doses of sun, at least 15 min.
2. I get enough sleep
3. I eat a lot of organic vitamins and minerals

Point 1: It’s good that we turned the clocks forward, because now I can get some more sun 🙂 Usually, I sleep till late (10 hours), then I do some work, and then I workout (it takes more time when I create new training plans). Later, I have something like a brunch, I take a shower and before you know it’s 4.00 pm. But it’s spring again and at 4.00 pm the sun is still shining. I stroll, I get a huge bag of vegetables and fruit – products to cook dinner. I do the shopping on a daily basis so that I have a reason to take a walk.

Point 2: I go to bed very late, very often after 2.00 am and I love to wake up on my own accord, without an alarm clock. I seem to be needing less sleep after my fasting. There are days when I sleep for just 5 hours, which used to mean a very bad day, lack of energy and increased appetite (the body needs sleep and it takes this feeling as lack of energy by mistake. It wants to provide this lack with more food, at least that’s how I feel). There are days when I get for 8 to 9 hours of sleep. I can’t care less – I sleep as much as I want.

Note: I fasted for reasons of health (which I managed to cope with), and not for losing weight. Now I can understand why after feeding only on fruit or fasting people generally tend to put on weight. The reason is that when you increase the amount of food the surplus gets stored away in the form of fats.

At the moment I take extra care to control how much I eat so that I don’t start storing fats! I still weigh 2 kg less than what I used to weigh and this is 2 kg of muscles, which I can never rebuild in 2 or 4 weeks. So if I restore my previous weight fast, I will restore mainly fats, because muscles get built slowly and gradually. Truth is I’m not terribly anxious to rebuild my muscles fast. All in its good time, I’m not in a hurry.

Point 3: I eat mighty huge quantities of vegetables and a lot of fruit. Today my brunch included the following:

• 50 g almonds (I soaked them for 3 hours)
• 1 tablespoon linseed (soaked for 3 hours too)
• 1 small lettuce with frilly leaves
• 1 small red lettuce
• 1 tomato
• 2 red peppers
• 2 carrots
• vinegar

If you chop these vegetables into a salad, you get a terribly huge salad 🙂 However, mince them in the food processor and it doesn’t look that frightening. First I blend the almonds and the linseed. At noon today I felt like having almonds for lunch so I soaked them for the time I worked and trained. Well, sometimes I eat them without having soaked them. It’s best when you soak them overnight because of the phytic acid and the lectins.

Phytic acid is the principal storage form of phosphorus in many plants. Once in the human digestive system it blocks the absorption of minerals such as zinc, iron, magnesium and so on.

Phytase is the enzyme that neutralizes phytic acid and releases phosphorus. This enzyme can be found to occur in plants containing phytic acid. In order to catalyze the phytase enzyme, plants need to be soaked in warm water and then cooked. Some people have a stronger than usual ability to produce phytase via bacteria in their digestive systems, so their bodies are more tolerant to foods containing phytic acid.

Recently I’ve been eating one avocado every day. It fits perfectly my vegetable hotch-potch 🙂 bursting with vitamins, but from time to time I take a rest from a certain type of food so I decided to replace the avocado with almonds – both contain fats, proteins, carbohydrates, fibre, vitamins and minerals.

Desert: 500 g of apples

I’ve noticed that apart from micronutrients and macronutrients we need a certain volume of food too, in order to satiate. I give this piece of advice to all my clients – eat a bowl of salad which contains green vegetables (lettuce, iceberg, spinach, broccoli, parsley, dill, spring onions and garlic, rucola (salad rocket) and others) twice a day.

Guys, I challenge you!

(I will ask you tomorrow if you’ve eaten your vegetables ;-))

Eat the following every day:

• 1 lettuce
• 2 tomatoes
• 1 cucumbers
• 2 red peppers
• 2 carrots
• A handful of spinach (even if you don’t particularly like it, such a small quantity won’t trouble you)
• A bunch of parsley

You can replace any of the vegetables listed above and add up some of the following for a change: beetroot, cabbage, celery, rucola, iceberg and whatever vegetables you like. The point is to eat them fresh so that you take advantage of the vitamins. You may split the amount of your daily vegetables into several courses, the thing is that you have to eat them.

There are some additional benefits from this – this type of nutrition gives you the feeling of satiation and you have no space in your stomach for those types of food that contain calories only (with no vitamins and minerals). Also, you can eat as much fruit as you wish, provided that your don’t eat bread, potatoes, rice and other similar products.

I’ll be waiting for you to share what vegetable hotch-potch you ate. 🙂