Fiber and a healthy diet - Personal Trainer explains

As a Singapore personal trainer and fitness boot camp owner, I am passionate about helping my clients reach their fitness, fat loss, weight loss and muscle gaining goals. A large part of this means that we spend a lot of time talking about the ideal healthful diet. Diet, more than anything else, affects fat loss and fitness! Even if you were attending boot camp 4 times a week on top of personal training sessions, if your diet was crappy, you would NOT reach your goals.

The idea healthful diet should contain a lot of FIBER. Many people have far too little fiber in their diet for optimal health, particularly if that diet is mostly made up of processed foods.

So, what is fiber?

Fiber is the part of the plants we eat that our digestive enzymes can't break down into absorbable nutrients. The main forms of fiber are soluble fiber, insoluble fiber and resistant starch. All three forms of fiber are usually labelled as "dietary fiber" on food packaging.

Fiber has an essential part to play in maintaining health and an ideal body weight. For instance, fiber buffers the impact of digested food on blood sugar and insulin levels, reducing the promotion of fat storage. Also, high-fiber foods need more time to chew, so your body has more time to register that you're full, so you're less likely to overeat, fills you up longer and has more volume for fewer calories.

Here is a breakdown of the 3 different types of fiber and their health benefits:

1. SOLUBLE FIBER: Soluble fiber becomes a gel when dissolved in water. Most of this will be undigested, but a small amount is fermented and partially broken down in the colon. Health benefits of soluble fiber include:

- slowing down digestion so you can absorb nutrients better - helping to regulate blood sugar levels (great for people naturally intolerant of carbohydrates, diabetics and those with prediabetics conditions) -lowering levels of total cholesterol and LDL cholestorol -encouraging growth of beneficial intestinal bacteria while reducing number of bad bacteira

Sources of soluble fiber include most fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds, psyllium husks, flaxseeds, barley, dried beans, oat bran and oats.

2. INSOLUBLE FIBER: Insoluble fiber won't dissolve in water and is not digested any where in the body. It's mostly made of cellulose (from the cell walls of whatever plant you ate) that leaves the body intact. Health benefits of insoluble fiber include:

- pulling toxins out of the body (very important considering out modern lifestyle and environment) - helping with regular bowel movements =) - helping food move through the gut (one advantage of rapid bowel movements is that it may help minimize our exposure to DNA-damaging chemicals and other toxins in food) - controlling the pH balance in the intestines

3. RESISTANT STARCH: Resistant starch re complex carbohydrates (sugars) that resist digestion and arrive in the colon largely intact. It offers some of the benefits of both soluble and insoluble fiber. An example of a resistant starch is hard bread crust, which resists digestion until it's in the colon, where it is partially digested by fermentation.

Now for the bottom line - how do we get more fiber in diet?

Here are 4 simple steps!

1. Don't juice - stick to whole fruits (pears etc) or vegetables (tomatoes etc). 2. Eat more vegetables! 3. Use a fiber supplement. Try to get a fiber supplement that is gluten-free, even if you are not sensitive to gluten, and change the brand of fiber supplement you use every week (use one brand this week and another brand the next and continue alternating) , as people can easily develop sensitivities to fiber supplements. 4. Eat whole grains instead of refined grains (well, no one should be eating refined grains anyway!)

Enjoy the health benefits of fiber!