By Richard Lee - 06/07/2008

You Are What You Eat

With pre-season training only a few days away, we are sure to be welcomed back to training with a variety of tests to see what kind of shape we are in after a few weeks without football.

It’s amazing how quickly the body can lose muscle mass after a few weeks without conditioning, so those who haven’t trained over the summer will be easy to spot. Another critical subject, not only in the summer but throughout the season, is what food you eat - the fuel that you put into your body.  I call it fuel because that is exactly what it is, the ‘better’ you eat the better the results.

For a footballer, the summer can be a dangerous time as with no training there is a license to drink more alcohol and eat foods that you wouldn’t normally eat. The problem is that doing this and not training can make it very easy to gain weight. The body is used to a certain level of training and the metabolism will, in most cases, be very high but this can soon change as the body adapts to less training.

So what is recommended? Well it's thought that over the summer months it is wise to avoid carbohydrates - for instance pasta - as although this can be great when working hard, the excess carbohydrates will only be converted into fat when not being used for working out.  Salads and fruit are great for you; they help reduce the acidity in the blood, are low in fat, low in calories and easy to digest.

The subject of eating is a funny one. How often would we consciously do something that we know is bad for us? Similar to those who smoke, with food we consciously know that when we are eating fatty foods or drinking alcohol that we are damaging our body yet we continue to do it.

I have drastically cut down on my ‘bad’ foods in recent years but still give into the temptation of a McDonald's from time to time, even though I know it’ll make me feel sluggish after eating it.

In truth, man wasn’t meant to eat all the processed foods that we enjoy today and, for that reason, it's essential that we counteract that by eating plenty of vegetables and fruit in order to keep a good balance and avoid risk of health problems in later life. It goes without saying that exercise is also very important but is made less essential by keeping a good diet.

It then brings up the question: what is worse, being an excessive eater or smoker? Both will cause health problems at some point yet smoking is looked down upon far more that someone who is overweight. You wouldn’t have any problem telling someone off for smoking, yet if they were to look at you and call you overweight you’d probably think they were very rude.

I guess the main difference is that with smoking a large part of the problem is that it involves more than just yourself but you can see my point. With anything that we do that isn’t good for us, a lot of the time we need some leverage on ourselves in order to change.

Many smokers have said how seeing someone actually dying from the effects of smoke has been all the motivation they need never to touch it again and the same with food, without motivation to change our habits it can be hard to do. With leverage comes change.

Coming back to football, another season is upon us, 10-and-a-half months of tough training, all with one goal in mind: promotion back to the premiership. So if anyone sees me eating a Big Mac I give you permission to take it off me and put it in the bin!