reading time ~9min

Here are some helpful links if you are looking into eating healthy and improving physical fitness

All the best with your health journey

Important Principle: Primary purpose of food is to provide nutrition to your body (get all the right proteins, fats, minerals and vitamins). Taste is also important, but only secondary

Must Pre-Read

1. Healthy Eating Beginners Guide
2. How to start eating Healthy today
3. Importance of Satiety
4. Lists of food with high satiety

Diets

1. Mediterranean Diet (what I follow mostly, you don’t have to starve or be miserable, it’s very easy)
2. There are many others like Paleo, Keto, etc. Look at Weight Loss Diets and see what suits you

Exercise

1. Beginners Guide to Exercise
2. 10 Basic Exercises

Personally, I recommend 20-40 mins per day (4-6 days a week). Focus on quality not on too much time. I prefer to do at home without equipment which is sustainable, but choose whatever suits you

Remember, it is mostly about relationship with food which helps you improve your overall health. Movement is also beneficial. Other topics like mindful eating, stress free lifestyle and good sleep are important for good health as well

It is also helpful to move regularly especially walking is beneficial for the mind and the body

Healthy Eating in Sunnah

1. The Messenger of Allah (ﷺ) said, “The food of one person is enough for two, the food of two is enough for four, and the food of four is enough for eight.” (Muslim 2059) (Ibn Majah 3254) (Tirmidhi 1820) (Mishkat al-Masabih 4178)
2. The Messenger of Allah (ﷺ) said, “The son of Adam cannot fill a vessel worse than his stomach, as it is enough for him to take a few bites to straighten his back. If he cannot do it, then he may fill it with a third of his food, a third of his drink, and a third of his breath.” (Tirmidhi 2380) (Ibn Majah 3349) Sahih
3. The Messenger of Allah (ﷺ) said “The unbeliever eats with seven intestines, and the believer eats with one intestine.” (Bukhari 5393) (Bukhari 5397)

Tips on health and losing weight

General Tips

1. Physical fitness is a mindset thing. The day you understand it your life will change 
2. Enjoy the journey of exercise and healthy food. Enjoy every push-up every step, every bite of broccoli
3. Do not move or exercise for your physical body. Do it for your mind. Swimming works for me 
4. The same thing works for eating – eat healthy foods because they give you more energy and awareness
5. Movement and Joy are essential. Exercise is so misunderstood in todays diet culture. It has a bad reputation. Some people find it laborious, others think it is necessary to lose weight. (Weight loss is much more about food than exercise). If we are moving and enjoying ourselves it helps build muscle and strength. Add resistance training into it, that even helps during rest phase. Movement helps with mental energy and mood as well (learn more about hormones to understand)

Understand Willpower

1. It takes willpower to over eat on a healthy diet e.g proteins, vegetables and whole carbs
2. It takes even more will power to not overeat an unhealthy diet e.g processed or junk foods

Gain Muscle, Lose Fat

1. You want to gain muscle and lose fat. Don’t worry about number on the scale too much 
2. Fat loss happens with calorie deficit. Do not go beyond 300 daily otherwise you lose muscle
3. Muscle gain can be done with calorific surplus. Do not go beyond 300 daily otherwise you gain fat
4. Having muscles help you in old age 

Health is not just about looks

1. Body image and health is not about having 6% body fat and photoshopped magazine cover body. It’s about having a healthy, strong and resilient state of health and the superficial definition of muscles/appearance will come as a by-product if you take care of yourself and have healthy habits
2. Very often people who are malnourished are also obese. Even if they are eating a lot, they are missing key minerals and vitamins because of the choices they are making
3. People are not fat because they want to eat all the time. People want to eat all the time because they are fat. Overweight people are unable to burn it because insulin does not allow fat cells to be broken. Body only accepts glucose for energy 

Develop Healthy Habits

1. Develop positive habits for mental peace and relaxation. Things like movement, exercise, swimming, healthy food, sleep etc. help you mentally feel good. Don’t focus on the physical impact
2. The cognitive effort required to change is only when developing a habit. Once developed, it should require no effort or motivation. If it does, you will give up. Make healthy exercise and food habits
3. Forming healthy habits takes ~266 days of tries based on some research. Other research says it can take up to 254 days. Only during the initial phase do you feel resistance but then it should become easy. If something is not easy for you after trying again and again, please change strategy or your choices
4. Find the fat loss tricks that work for you and feel easy. Do not assume they work for others too. 
5. Never do two bad things back to back. If you miss a workout make sure to do the next one. If you have a junk food meal the next one should be healthy

Learn the Basics

1. The key to improvement is gaining #knowledge once you know something it’s easy to practise it
2. Gain knowledge on how sugar, insulin and salt work on the body to control their consumption. This helps to avoid bloating and gaining fat
3. Learn how hormones (such as dopamine and ghrelin) work to understand cravings and when to stop eating, etc
4. Sugar Might Be as Addictive as Cocaine. It is not a matter of willpower. It is a biological problem to quit sugar easily. We must go cold turkey for about 2 weeks 
5. Understand what healthy food is. Have a diet which is colourful and not just shades of beige
6. A sign of healthy foods is if you leave it outside and goes bad soon
7. Balance between nutrient dense healthy whole foods and foods which are tasty but processed and empty in nutrition. I usually prefer 80/20 on this respectively
8. When you start eating healthy, the pleasure from simple foods also increases exponentially (e.g. don’t have sugar for a week, then have a strawberry and you will taste real joy and flavour)

How to work smarter not harder 

The objective of the human species was never to “gain muscle” or “lose fat”. These are modern and mostly aesthetic pursuits

1. Muscles are an expensive commodity. Think about this, the more muscle you have, the more calories you need to consume regularly to maintain (as big body builders have crazy calorie diets) and the more exercise you have to do regularly like spending 2 hours in the gym 6 times a week. 
2. Our forefathers who had more muscle had to hunt more animals and the big guys would eat more food in the group which was not beneficial to overall wellbeing of the tribe.
3. Multiply this to entire humanity, the more people consume the more our demand increases and stresses the environment as a whole. 
4. Our forefathers used to minimise both nutrition and exercise. They only did it when absolutely necessary

The objective is to live a fulfilling life with fun activities and keeping up responsbilities with the least amount of exercise and food consumption (least amount needed for nutrition and pleasure). If your life goal is to become an athlete it’s different

If you want long lasting health and ability to do daily chores and not lose muscle while growing older. A better goal would be to optimise the amount of time/money you spend on exercise and in preparing and buying food. And not focus on the muscle or fat values you want to attain. What is the best combination of food and exercise which are sustainable long term and beneficial

E.g. How to eat less amount but satiating foods (like whole foods and vegetables) and how to do more compound exercises which benefit entire body muscles in a short amount of time like swimming, running, burpees, etc. 

This will eventually help with not only looks but also mood, energy and motivation because it will have less chances of taking over your life too much

Simply

 “get max output out of life” 

with 

“least amount of input”

Your most important commodity is time 

Healthy Eating Plate

Source: Harvard Healthy Eating Plate 

Body image and health is not about having 6% body fat and photoshopped magazine cover body. It’s about having a healthy, strong and resilient state of health and the superficial definition of muscles/appearance will come as a by-product if you take care of yourself and have healthy habits

Additional Reading

1. The Perils of Overeating in Islam
2. Healthy Eating Plate – Harvard
3. 8 Big Lies About Sugar We Should Unlearn
4. Everything You Need to Know About Insulin
5. Sugar Might Be as Addictive as Cocaine