Super greens to be super lean

Not many exercisers understand the importance of balancing your body’s acid and alkaline levels through effective nutrition. I will attempt to arm you with the basics through this article, which you can use straight away and get ahead with your fat loss goal.

Basically, the modern diet is jam packed with highly acidic foods and drinks i.e. sugars, fast foods, meats, white breads, fruit juices and alcohol which have caused an imbalance in our pH levels and lead our nation towards an increase in obesity, cancer and cardiovascular disease.

I will attempt to get across to you the benefits of alkalising foods on the body and how you can reap the rewards by making simple changes.
In a nut shell, we do not eat enough alkaline foods which has caused us problems with not only changing our body composition, but compromised our ongoing health. At Odyssey Fitness, getting across this important message is pretty close to the top of the list when educating our clients about healthy eating in accordance to a fat loss goal. We understand the powerful effect this can have on our ability to change our shape and strongly advocate change in this direction.

Consuming more alkalising foods not only helps with a fat loss/body composition goal, it contributes towards:

- The health of our internal organs (kidneys and liver)
- Healthy joints and can prevents arthritis and heart disease
- Better blood circulation
- Regulating health blood suger levels.

Some of the key alkaline foods include:
- Cabbage, broccoli, green beans, lettice, onion, peas, almonds, red cabbage, carrot, beetroot, garlic, spinach, sunflower, spelt, lentils, flax, buckwheat, pumpkin, lentils.

Acidic foods:
Meats, eggs, dairy, yeast, fermented products, citrus fruits, sugar, alcohol, coffee, chocolate, fizzy drinks, sweeteners, fast food, powdered soups, sunflower, vegetable and corn oils.

At Odyssey, we review our clients hormonal profiles before designing any exercise or nutrition programme. Quite often, bodyfat around the stomach are is an issue which we know means that the hormones insulin and cortisol are being over produced.

Choosing the right proteins, cutting down on sugar and starch and improving your body’s pH are top priorities. Improving your alkaline intake can have a very positive effect on reducing your cortisol levels (which we know contributes to stubborn fat storage around the stomach area), for this reason making the obvious step towards choosing more alkaline foods rather than only acidic ones (which we still need by the way! Don’t go cutting out all acidic foods!) will make a difference. We often recommend ‘Greens drinks’ to our clients which is basically a powdered form of highly concentrated alkaline substance.

Coupled with choosing more alkaline foods, consuming a greens drink every day has proved to be very effective when looking to reduce fat around the abdominals, simply because of the cortisol reducing effect of the increased alkaline. This is especially valuable/effective if you are training alot and consume a large amount of protein (which we know is acidic) everyday.

I have personally found it to have a highly energising effect and have included a greens drink twice a day into my daily routine. The fat loss results from some of our clients have also been amazing with the introduction of a greens drink. If you would like us to recommend a ‘Greens Drink’ product to you, please contact us. In the mean time, stay green and healthy ; ).