What's the deal with staying in shape in early adulthood?

 It is very hard to stay in shape between ages 25 and 35.

What do the people who stay in shape all have in common? They either diet right, exercise well or both. Exercise and dieting come down to one attribute in a person, discipline.

Dieting right calls for you to have balanced eating habits; eating 2-3 meals a day depending how much you weigh, filled with all the proper nutrients. Complex grains for carbohydrates, meat, fish and chicken for protein and fat, fruits for sugar, vegetables for vitamins, water and more carbs, and dairy for more protein and calcium. Will dieting correctly mean you will be skinny? Not necessarily, but it will mean that you will have a healthy body. How skinny a person is or how much one weighs is directly correlated with how many calories one eats during the day. The more calories you eat the larger you will be and the smaller number of calories you eat the smaller you will be. If you would like to be healthy, eat a balanced diet.

In terms of grains this means grains with the smallest number of preservatives in them and whole wheat grains. This means fresh bread, whole grain rice and limiting pasta consumption. Pasta is a great filler food if you do not have enough to eat and if you are willing to burn off the calories the next day. This is why sports teams serve pasta the day before their games, they have high carbohydrate content and are good fuel for a sporting event. Meat, fish, and chicken are very important because these foods will build the muscle on your body. Bodybuilders general rule is 1 gram of protein for each pound they weigh, so a 200 lb bodybuilder should shoot for 200 grams of protein in a day. However, this is the rule if you would like to build muscle. For the everyday person trying to be healthy you should shoot for half of that. So, a 175-pound person should have 87.5 grams of protein in a day. This should consist of lean meats, fishes and chickens. When you shop in the grocery store for these proteins try to get the leanest version of that allotment of it. Fruit and vegetables are easy, just get the freshest version of that fruit or vegetable at the grocery store. "Experts" say you should not puree the fruit or vegetables for a smoothie, but this rule really only applies to juices where the producer extracts the pulp out of the juice. The pulp is full of fiber, which helps you digest the sucrose (good sugar) from the fruit. Pureeing fruit is fine if you are doing it for a smoothie but stay away from fruit juices. Last comes dairy, which is controversial. I have read articles that say as an adult you do not need dairy at all, and I have read things that say it is a great source of calcium and vitamin D. Vitamin D is needed to absorb calcium in the body. Doctors have told me I can take a calcium supplement and get vitamin D from the sun, but what happens during the winter months? Do you just have dairy seasonally? I would leave that up to you. I personally love dairy, but have the low fat kind due to problems with my cholesterol. Dairy is high in saturated fat content, which can increase cholesterol, but I have personally never had problems with my calcium and have never broken a bone.