Nutrition and your diet: Be patient.
You look at the girl running next to you and wonder why you don’t look like that; you do the same exercises. Or see that friend eat a horrible diet while you watch every calorie and she is still thin as a rail. How about the guy in the gym whose muscles are busting through his shirt while you can’t gain weight? So many things go into our body make up:
Body composition: we all have a body type: which are you?
How we process our calories: how we burn them is dependent on lots of factors, including gut health.
Gut health: is your gut healthy or full of bacteria?
Metabolism: slows down with age, our diet choices.
Hormone levels: as we grow older our levels drop and they can be affected by our diet.
How you have treated your body over your life span
Sleep: do you get the recommended amounts, go by your circadian rhythm?
Nutritional deficiencies: are you eating the right stuff?
Recovery: do you allow your body to rest or push it hard every day?
Food allergies or intolerances: are you even aware if you have one?
Eating behaviors: do you gobble your food or eat mindfully?
Where does your food come from? In a package, grocery, farmers market, from the farm? How were the plants or animals feed?
Environmental factors: are you a 25-year-old struggling to pay rent. A 35-year-old mom with 3 kids and limited time or a 48-year-old empty nester with lots of time?
As you see, so many factors can go into what your body looks like and how it responds. It is impossible to duplicate what someone else does, our biological makeup is different as well as the environmental factors in our life. So, what do you do? Well you do the best that YOU can do and quit comparing. Look at the above factors and see if there are a few things you can do better. Can you get to bed earlier? Take an extra recovery day? Move more if you need to. Eat less processed foods and more whole foods? Pick one or two small changes any try for at least two weeks. Review what worked and what did not, how you feel and readjust if you need to. Remember, it is never too late to work on your health.
