Welcome to the Get Fit Guy featuring your quick and dirty tips for shaping up and slimming down.

My name is Ben Greenfield, and in today's episode, we're going to shift focus to your nutrition.

How often do you think about exactly what you're going to eat before you exercise?

How about what you're going to eat when you're done exercising? And no, I'm not talking about that

big bowl of ice cream or tasty martini that you're trying to earn while you're slaving away on the

treadmill. I'm talking about really planning your pre and post workout fueling so that you

get maximum results from your fitness efforts. If you don't have a nutrition plan for your fitness

routine, you're doing yourself a pretty big disservice when it comes to getting the results that

you desire. If you work out while you're starved, you simply won't have the energy for

your body to gain maximum fitness. If you exercise for a long time without eating, you'll

limit your ability to burn calories and maintain intensity. And if you don't feed your muscles

and replenish your energy stores after exercise, you won't have the necessary building blocks for recovery

or the necessary energy for the next day's workout. In this episode, you're going to learn about

ideal pre-workout, during workout, and post-workout nutrition with a quick and dirty tip for

optimizing each of these components of fitness fueling. Let's start with pre-workout fueling.

Just before you exercise, the last thing you want to do is put a bunch of proteins and fats

into your body, even if they're healthy proteins and fats. These type of fuels take a longer

time to digest. They can make you feel too full or have an upset stomach while you're

exercising, and they can draw precious oxygen and energy delivering blood into your stomach

and away from your exercising muscles. But if you don't eat at all, an exercise starved,

you risk breaking down muscle, not being able to burn a high amount of calories, and causing a great deal of stress

to your body during exercise. So the ideal pre-workout meal should be consumed about two hours

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