Help when struggling with your diet - Singapore Fitness Boot Camp Instructor Explains

Being a fitness bootcamp instructor and personal trainer in Singapore, many people I work with struggle with food cravings although they are committed to fat burning, weight loss, muscle building, fitness and health. Everyone knows what to eat and what not to eat, but it's tough. Our environment doesn't help - we live in a time where unhealthy food tastes good. Not just that, but it's cheap and easily available!

In fact, eating right is a mental battle - a mental battle most of us come equipped to lose!

Why?

One of the most simple reasons for this goes back a long way, right into our early childhood. I doubt many of us had parents who made us eat really healthfully.

Most of us had, I'm sure, good home-cooked meals made with love, but at the same time, we were allowed candy and snacks as little treats. A visit to Pizza Hut and other trans-fat cities were considered "special occasions"! Muffins and banana bread were considered a hearty, happy Sunday morning breakfast. It was "normal" to have candy, coke and nachos at the cinema.

Consequently, our minds and bodies associate crappy food with pleasure, with fun, family and fellowship. It taste good, it feels good. We like it! We crave it! When we start reeducating our minds, e.g; "Highly-refined carbs like white rice and white bread etc pile on the fat and have poor nutritional value." "One MacDonalds meals provides enough calories for your ENTIRE day", "Fructose is liver poison, like alcohol," those old associations deep in our psyche don't just politely bid us goodbye.

Rather, they war against us!

We feel deprived, even though we are actually now better nourished than we were before! We have become victims of emotional/comfort/pleasure eating.

What can we do about this?

1. Use L-glutamine. This amino acid puts out cravings for sugar and alcohol. In the early 50s, Dr. Roger Williams discovered that l-glutamine supplementation helps control carbohydrate and alcohol cravings and it's been a boon to many in the recent years.

Here's how you use it: When you're craving pastries, cookies or a tankard of good, strong stuff, take a heaping teaspoon of l-glutamine powder, dump it into a glass of water and chug that down (it's not going to taste great). Your cravings will disappear within minutes.

As you get used to your new diet and your body and mind adapts, you should need less and less of this as the days pass.

L-glutamine works because cravings are often a situation of the brain wanting energy and L-glutamine is an alternative, quickly absorbed alternate source of glucose to the brain.

The most plentiful amino acid in the human body is L-glutamine and supplementing with it isn't good for only sugar cravings - it is at the same time vital to the immune system, promotes muscle recovery after exercise, and is a crucial nutrient for wound repair and intestinal health.

2. Damage reduction or management

There will be times when you give into your cravings. Don't beat yourself up over them, rather, remember that you can reduce the damage and stay in control with these three easy steps!

- Allow yourself to cave in ONLY after (preferably after) a workout, for instance, after your fitness boot camp session, so the food goes towards repairing and refueling the body, rather than repairing and refueling fat cells.

- Eat LESS E.g.: dump half of that candy bar. Wasteful? Your money's gone whether or not you eat it - eating the whole thing won't bring your $$$ back! Rather, it will give you a rush of guilt and make you feel fat. So don't worry about having to throw out little servings of junk food a few times a week, if it helps you to stay in control.

- DON'T buy it, and if you do, buy as few servings at one time as possible. If it's not on hand, you will be less like to end up eating it.

While we can't reprogram ourselves overnight (to be honest, I still adore Turkish Delights...), we can will ourselves to win, use the right supplements judiciously AND make lifestyle changes that will support our shaky attempts to live new diets.

And I assure you - it gets easier as time passes! Stick like a barnacle to your fat loss and exercise programs, keep attending that fitness and weight loss bootcamp, hang on to that healthy diet of yours, enjoy being alive and watch that body of yours stay lean, sexy and strong decade after decade!