The topic of losing weight is very relevant and many online publications are devoted to it, in which tips on weight loss and choosing the right diets are described in different ways. All this information can certainly be useful, but the recommendations should be followed thoughtfully and with caution. Sports nutrition for weight loss is becoming especially popular among people interested in this topic.
Not everyone has the same attitude towards sports nutrition due to the lack of qualified information and the presence of stereotypical opinions about sports supplements.
We will try to write below about the benefits and use of sports nutrition for weight loss, as well as how to choose and where best to buy sports nutrition for weight loss.
The truth about sports nutrition
It’s not new for everyone to divide foods into healthy and “harmful”; the list of the latter includes (not always justifiably) fatty and high-calorie foods, and eating “fast food” generally cannot be combined with the desire to lead a healthy lifestyle and have slim figure. At the same time, the concept of “healthy nutrition” for many does not include the use of sports nutrition, which can be explained by well-known misconceptions about sports nutrition. Let's touch on some.
Chemistry?
Some people quite seriously believe that powders and capsules from jars with foreign names
from sports nutrition stores, these are all “chemicals”, and their use can be harmful to health. You can be convinced of the opposite quite easily, you just have to carefully read the descriptions of several sports nutrition products. Proper sports nutrition has long been made from natural ingredients and contains an order of magnitude less chemicals than products purchased at a nearby store.
When choosing sports nutrition, as well as products in general, you should pay attention to banal things: quality, manufacturer’s reputation, expiration dates, etc. This will help you avoid trouble and benefit from the product.
For professional athletes?
Of course, sports nutrition is consumed by professional athletes. Many well-known brands in this market started their
activity solely for the purpose of providing supplements to professional athletes. This allowed them to create high-quality and safe products with high efficiency. And why can’t ordinary people, who, for example, want to get rid of excess fat or amateur athletes training in the gym, consume the same things as athletes?
Why can't they get the same benefits? The answer is simple - they don’t know or don’t want to.
Can I not accept it?
Of course, you can do without sports supplements, and many do so. As a result, after years of visiting
fitness clubs and periodically going on diets, people do not achieve the desired results. Most people find convenient excuses in such cases: “I have such a constitution,” “slow metabolism,” etc.
It's no secret that a balanced diet is no less important for losing weight than the training process itself. Given the stressful rhythm of life in which most of us find ourselves, maintaining a balanced diet is extremely difficult and in practice almost impossible. An unbalanced diet leads to overwork, changes in hormonal levels and, as a result, to the undermining of metabolic processes in the body caused by a lack of various nutrients - from vitamins and minerals to proteins and carbohydrates. If we add an active training process to this, then our body certainly needs support. And sports nutrition in this case is the best option. It will help you qualitatively and quantitatively supplement your diet and not only maintain health but also achieve athletic results.
Why is weight not losing?
It’s not the first month that you’ve been reducing your calorie intake but your weight hasn’t decreased or even increased? There is nothing surprising. The reason for everything is the peculiarities of our metabolism - metabolism, by this term we mean the set of chemical reactions that take place in our body to maintain life.
Metabolism
To understand the influence of metabolic characteristics on weight loss processes, it is convenient to express it in the number of calories and divide it into components:
- Basic metabolism (BM) - the number of calories expended by the body at rest (for breathing, blood circulation, etc. - to ensure our vital functions);
- Training thermogenesis (TT) - the number of calories burned during the training process;
- Digestive thermogenesis (DT) is the portion of calories from food that is spent on its digestion and absorption;
- Household (non-training) thermogenesis (BT) - calories consumed for physical activity in everyday life.
It would seem that everything is very simple: if the calories you consume in total are less than all these costs, then we should lose weight and, on the contrary, we gain weight if we consume excess. But not everything is so simple, and no matter what kind of metabolism you have, fast or slow, you will still encounter a problem!
Your body doesn’t care about your appearance; it needs to support its vital functions and, if possible, stock up on nutrients. YOU AND YOUR BODY HAVE DIFFERENT GOALS. If the body is “underfed”, it begins to adapt and save energy. As a result, the picture is this: you start your hard-won weight loss program with a diet while being in one state of the body and continue to fight with the body that has already adapted to new conditions, which often does not lead to results and can cause various health problems, including psychological disorders.
This problem can be solved; you need to constantly push your metabolism with fractional meals using sports nutrition for weight loss, which will not allow your body to save energy and you to abandon plans to get rid of excess fat deposits.
Fat burning rules
We have found that in the process of losing weight, your body is by no means an ally and, accordingly, significant efforts will be required from us to reduce fat reserves. To ensure that your efforts are not in vain, you must follow several rules:
- Be careful to ensure that you burn more calories than you take in. There are only two ways to do this: exercise more and lead an active lifestyle and reduce your calorie intake from food. And we have already found out that they only work together.
- Diet control. It is necessary to check your weight loss process against your diet weekly. If the weight decreases by more than 2.5 kg. per week, then most likely you lose more muscle than fat—increase your caloric intake slightly. If the weight does not decrease or decreases by less than 0.3 kg. Accordingly, we continue to reduce the diet. A good result that does not undermine your health is losing weight in the range of 0.5 to 1.5 kilograms per week.
- Use a fractional diet, in which you will receive the required number of calories in small portions. This will not allow your body to go into saving mode and, on the contrary, can increase overall energy consumption.
- Increased water consumption. Lack of fluid can significantly slow down metabolic processes, which makes it difficult to burn fat and worsens your health.
- Intense training in which it is necessary to combine anaerobic and aerobic exercise. Fat loss training involves using energy for training from stored fat. But our body uses energy more readily than others, which are more “convenient” for breaking down nutrients - proteins and carbohydrates. It is strength training at the beginning of the workout that will use up these reserves and allow you to break down fat rather than previously stored glycogen during aerobic training.
Which sports nutrition for weight loss to choose
With all the diversity, sports nutrition for weight loss can be divided into two areas. The first is supplements to provide or adjust your diet. Secondly, these are drugs designed to increase the impact of the training process.
Sports nutrition to support diet and nutrition
Carbohydrate blockers
Carbohydrate blockers are actively used in losing excess weight. The main function of the drugs is to prevent our body from absorbing the carbohydrates we consume by neutralizing the enzyme activity in the digestive tract. Lipotropic and thermogenic fat burners go well with these supplements. The intake is carried out together with food and requires moderation, since the body still needs carbohydrates, although not in the quantities that we are used to consuming.
Drugs to reduce appetite
Of these products, we will name two that have a natural composition and proven effectiveness:
- 5-HTP (5 hydroxytryptophine) are drugs containing an intermediate metabolite of the good mood hormone serotonin. Taking the drug can not only improve your positive mood, but also significantly reduce your appetite. 5-HTP is a great way to support your diet by eliminating sugary snacks.
- Chromium Picolinate - in conditions of limited carbohydrate consumption, reduces cravings for sweets. Lowers glucose levels.
Protein
Despite the popularity of protein for gaining muscle mass, when losing weight you should also not lose sight of these sports supplements. We are primarily talking about additives that have a prolonged absorption period - casein and complex proteins. Taking protein can achieve two goals. First, suppress the feeling of hunger for a sufficiently long period. Thus, casein proteins can be absorbed slowly, over several hours, reducing your desire to snack to a minimum. Secondly, the body has to spend more calories digesting such protein, the process takes longer, which helps speed up metabolism.
Vitamin and mineral complexes
By switching to a calorie deficit mode and increased physical activity, we force all body systems to work at maximum capacity. Our metabolic processes are intense and they all require the presence of a large number of active and necessary elements such as vitamins, minerals and trace elements. In order to ensure our metabolism during a strict diet and eliminate health problems, special sports vitamin and mineral complexes have been developed. Sports vitamins have higher concentrations of components compared to pharmacy multivitamins, which can cover the need for physical activity.
The range of multivitamins is quite wide, including separate complexes for women and men. Since the goal is to lose weight and not undermine your own health, it is better not to neglect such drugs, because you probably don’t need to convince anyone of the benefits of vitamins.
Sports nutrition for fat burning
No matter how you adjust your diet, without additional burning of calories during active and exhausting workouts, we won’t see abs or a slender waist like our ears. Special supplements are designed to support our training process.
L-Carnitine
L-carnitine is perhaps the most common supplement for weight loss, because in addition to its effect on the fat burning process, it has many beneficial properties, including strengthening the immune system and supporting the cardiovascular system.
In our case, it is important that l-carnitine ensures the transport of lipids to the mitochondria in cells, where they are broken down and released energy. It is to speed up this transfer process for fat utilization that we are trying to increase the concentration of L-carnitine by taking it additionally.
L-carnitine
The maximum effect of L-carnitine on fat burning occurs when we drive our body into a state of carbohydrate and protein deficiency. At the same time, fat deposits become the main source of energy.
There are two “golden” periods when our body actively utilizes stored fats:
- From the 20th minute of aerobic training and for some time after it, provided, of course, that you did not have a heavy snack before exercise;
- From the moment of waking up in the morning until breakfast, when the reserves received from the evening are used up due to metabolism, of course, only if you follow the advice - give dinner to the enemy.
It is for these reasons that you should take L-carnitine immediately after getting up in the morning, and before cardio training. In all other cases, it is difficult to expect effectiveness from this sports drug.
In what form should you choose carnitine - tablets, powder or drink? It's more a matter of convenience. It is much more important to use the correct dosage. Most manufacturers indicate a range from 0.5 to 2 g. In the sports community, opinions shift upward in the range from 1.5 to 3 g, while there is a practice of taking up to 10 g of the substance in the pre-competition period.
For weight loss purposes, it is worth buying L-carnitine. It is available at affordable prices in sports nutrition stores and is considered a safe supplement. It goes well with both medications and other sports nutrition. Contraindications include only individual intolerance.
Thus, the substance L-carnitine is healthy and effective for weight loss purposes and is therefore often included in other sports supplements. Its lipotropic properties are used to enhance the effectiveness of fat burners, which will be discussed below.
Fat burners
Moving on to the description of such a category of sports nutrition as fat burners, it should be noted that these are more advanced drugs that require more serious treatment compared to l-carnitine.
Fat burners can not only start the weight loss process, but also ensure the “drying” process. Losing weight differs from cutting weight. For the first, it is to reduce overall body weight, for the second, to ensure only the burning of the fat layer with maximum preservation of muscle mass.
Most fat burners are not mono-drugs and contain several components - up to several dozen.
The composition of the supplements is composed of so-called matrices, each of which can consist of several components and has its own mechanism of action aimed at fat burning:
- increased metabolism;
- appetite suppression;
- suppression of absorption of carbohydrates or fats;
- blocking the processes of lipid deposition in adipose tissue;
- liquid output.
The main function of fat burners is to activate the conversion of fat molecules into energy.
fat burners
It is customary to divide drugs according to the principle of action into lipotropics and thermogens. Moreover, given that the composition includes many substances, it is more correct to talk about lipotropic and thermogenic components of fat burners.
We actually described the mechanism of lipotropic action: it ensures the transport of lipids for utilization and conversion into energy. L-carnitine is the main lipotropic used.
Another equally popular type of fat burner is thermogenics or thermogenics.
The biology of the body is designed in such a way that fats are stored and stored in adipocyte cells. In order to use fats, they first need to be extracted from these adipocyte stores and only then transported with the blood for processing. In general, lipid extraction occurs with the help of active substances: hormones (cortisol) or other chemical mediators - catecholamines (adrenaline or norepinephrine).
Thermogens duplicate the action of catecholamines by interacting with certain receptors, provoking the release of fatty acids into the bloodstream. A side effect of this lipid activation is the generation of additional thermal energy. This generally determined the name of the drugs. Additionally, each thermogenic has an activating effect on the central nervous system and helps suppress appetite.
The process of fat burning when using thermogenics seems to go in cycles: the thermogen releases lipids - heat is produced - heat provokes the need for calories - calories are covered by fat deposits. And the process, by and large, will be interrupted only if the active substances are used up or the body receives a new source of energy (for example, carbohydrates or proteins). This confirms that thermogens are capable of providing fat burning not only during active training, but also outside the training process. But don’t forget that 100% returns can only be achieved during intense aerobic exercise.
Thermogenic fat burners have excellent reviews when used during “drying”. Relief training and low-carb diets give excellent results, which are not so pronounced on the scale, but very noticeable in the mirror.
The most common substances included in fat burners include: synephrine, caffeine, green tea, golden root and pepper extracts, chromium picolinate, yohimbine, guggulsterones.
In a special category of thermogenics, it is worth highlighting fat burners based on the herb ephedra. The active component here exhibits the same thermogenic effects and at the same time stimulates the release of adrenaline and norepinephrine. But at the same time it has a strong stimulating effect on the central nervous system, which is compared in strength to the effect of amphetamine.
Medicines containing ephedra have more contraindications and side effects. It is worth buying a fat burner with ephedra if you are an experienced athlete.
Most fat-burning products containing ephedra are marketed as “ECA,” which means they contain ephedra, caffeine, and aspirin.
When taking fat burners, you must remember that without an appropriate diet and regular exercise, the benefits of their use will be minimal!
BCAAs
The next safe sports supplement is BCAA . BCAA is a complex of three branched chain amino acids - valine, leucine and isoleucine. These three amino acids are not synthesized in our body, and therefore are essential and one of the most important in the construction and restoration of muscle fibers. Nearly half of muscle tissue is made up of BCAAs, and when you exercise, 25% of your energy comes from these amino acids. This is why it is so important to replenish our muscles with a complex of these three amino acids before, during and after training.
BCAA also delays the secretion of the hormone cortisol, which briefly makes it possible to prolong your workout and give 100% effort.
You can drink 5 g of BCAA before, during, and after strength training (before aerobics).
When choosing BCAA, you also need to carefully look at the composition. It should not contain: aspartame, maltodectrin, sucrose, lactose, cane syrup and other carbohydrates and sugars.
Where can I buy
The most convenient way to buy sports nutrition is in specialized online stores in Moscow. Without leaving your home, you can compare many supplements, read real customer reviews and choose a product that is suitable for you in terms of price and quality.
The online store TrainerIzDoma.rf offers a convenient catalog of sports nutrition for weight loss. Products from trusted sports nutrition manufacturers are presented.
We offer sports nutrition for weight loss on the website TrainerIzDoma.rf!
catalog of sports nutrition for weight loss
Fat burners
The first thing that comes to mind when it comes to specialized weight loss supplements is taking fat burners. It seems that it is enough to drink a couple of capsules and the fat will begin to melt right before your eyes. However, in order for sports nutrition to start working, you must have a fairly high metabolic rate, be sure to exercise at least 3 times a week and give up fatty foods and fast carbohydrates.
Fat burners are available in the form of tablets, capsules, powders, drinks and come in several types, including lipotropics (L-carnitine), thermogenics, and adrenergic agonists. Of the natural compounds, yohimbine and caffeine are capable of triggering the fat burning process.
