Stress vs Nutrition

Do you know how the stress can affect your body? When you are under stress, you need extra nutrients like vitamins and minerals. To make it easier to understand, just imagine when you are driving a car, and suddenly you brake sharply. What would happen to your car? It consume more fuel, and you need to supply more fuel to your car. Not only the fuel, you need to change brake , tyres, cooling liquid etc if you constantly speeding or driving your car with sudden brake. This is similar when you under stress, your body needs more nutrients, your heart, muscle are exhausting and more free radicals will produce. To find out what free radicals do to ouy body, please refer to my previous article Health No 1 Enemy - Oxidation. Anti-oxidant is the solution to nuetralize the free radicals.

The sad fact is normally when people under stress and busy, they tend to make poor food choice like fast food, or even skipping meals. This is damaging to the body. Just imagine a car with excessive acceleration and brake without supplying extra fuel, sooner or later, the car will be sent to garage. If the car is our body, we will experience the breakdown of body systems, it could be just a flu, cold to cancer or heart problem dependant on the level of seriousness.

Stress is unavoidable in the modern world, but the diet and nourishment has to be incorporated so that we can cope with the stress in a more effective way.

Why is Protein Important?

Protein is a form of energy in our body. It helps to build strong muscle, forms an important building blocks for our body (cells, blood, skin, hair etc.), and it is essential for body immune system and creating enzymes. Protein is composed of Amino Acids, most of which body can produce by iteself, but 10 essential amino acids cannot be made by our body, and must be consumed in the form of food.

Another benefit of protein is it helps to lose weight. For every extra KG of muscle, it helps to burn an extra 100 calories a day approximately. This is essential for those people who want to lose weight in a healthy way. By gaining extra muscle will help to reduce the excess body fat and shape up.

Good sources of protein include poultry, fish, whey protein, beans etc. Better choice of protein is plant protein like whey protein and soy protein. To compute specific daily protein intake, you will need the ideal body weight.

Woman's ideal body weight:
US measure: 100 pounds for 60 inches in height+ 5 pounds for each additional inch over 60 inches.
Metric: 45 kilograms for 150 centimeters in height+ 0.85 kilograms for each additional centimeter in height

Men's ideal body weight:
US measure: 106 pounds for 60 inches in height+ 6 pounds for each additional inch over 60 inches.
Metric: 48 kilograms for 150 centimeters in height+ 1 kilogram for each additional centimeter in height.

Men and women protein intake range based on ideal body weight:
Minimum Daily Protein Requirement: W.H.O. recommends 0.45 grams of protein per kilogram of ideal body weight per day.
Maximum Daily Protein Requirement: US RDA recommends 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of ideal body weight per day. The UK Department of Health and Social Security is approximately the same.

Reference source: http://www.indoorclimbing.com/Protein_Requirement.html