How Cooking Helps Your Fitness

When you embark on a fitness journey, you quickly realize that small changes can have a big impact on your progress.

Tweaks in your form when doing a weightlifting exercise can dramatically alter the effectiveness of the exercise. Altering your breathing while running can change how comfortable the run is and how much further you can push yourself. What you eat affects how quickly you recover from a workout, how fast you build muscle, and many more subtle things like how your skin handles stretching or loosening due to your exercise. The following will explore a few cooking tips that can help you eat your way to a stronger body.

Learn About The Hormones In Your Food

The singular thing that can most radically slow a person’s fitness journey is hormones. If you’re plateauing or noticing that no matter what you do, your body is holding to a stubborn form you know doesn’t reflect your healthy habits, hormones might be part of the problem. Keeping the hormonal aspects of food in mind when you’re cooking can help you select healthy recipes that encourage fitness and strength. Hormonal balance is not something that can be ignored if you want to improve your fitness.

Hormones From Animal Products

The animals in feedlots and on conventional farms are stuffed with hormones to help them get fatter as fast as possible. When you eat meat or dairy products from these animals, you absorb these hormones, and the hormones then act on your body, encouraging you to hold weight. Seek out hormone-free meat and dairy products when cooking, and if you take a dairy-based protein powder, you need to find a hormone-free version.

Hormone-Mimicking Compounds From Produce

Beyond conventional meat and dairy, high levels of hormone-mimicking compounds are found in soy and non-GMO corn products. These ingredients are easy to avoid in their raw, whole form when cooking but tend to show up in sauces and spice mixes, so read the labels and avoid soy and corn unless it’s specified GMO-free corn. As well, if you take a soy-based protein powder, consider alternatives like pea powder or hemp powder.

Plastic Touching Your Food Or Drinks

Xenoestrogens damage your hormonal system and are found in plastics. Plastic that is BPA-free is not an exception to this; BPA-free is an advertising gimmick. BPA is just one of many dangerous compounds found in plastic. When liquids or food are kept in plastic, especially in cold environments like the fridge or freezer and in warm environments like in a water bottle in your car, flakes of plastic leech into the food or liquid. It is estimated that the average person swallows a credit card’s worth of plastic each week. Do not ever, under any circumstances, cook with plastic (including stirring your food with plastic utensils or microwaving in plastic containers).

Microplastics And Hormones In Your Water

Even if you’re drinking water out of a glass or stainless-steel container, there are now microplastics in every water source on earth. In addition to this, there are more people on pharmaceutical hormones for birth control or other reasons than ever before. Whenever someone on hormones urinates, these pharmaceutical hormones are released into the water system. Of course, water is filtered before it ends up back in your home by both nature and human water systems, but these systems are not great at removing hormones, and this means your tap water is filled with them. Filtering the water you cook with and drink using a high-quality filter that captures microplastics, and other hormonal compounds can help.

The above information should have illuminated the serious hormone problem the world is facing. Not only do these absurd hormone levels alter our appetites and weight gain, but they also negatively influence our mood and sleep, which in turn have dramatic effects on our relationships, work performance, financial choices, and health choices.