Food for Thought: Part 2

This week’s blog will wrap up the rest of my thoughts on nutrition, mainly focusing on the role of sugar and fat in the diet. First, let me explain what the big deal is about sugar—how it affects the body and why the better you control your intake, the more successful you will be in maintaining your ideal body composition.

Sugar, technically known as glucose, is used in the body for energy, specifically for thinking and moving. This is why when you have too much you have a spike in energy, but if you have too little, you cannot think straight and it is hard to do any major activities. So, glucose is very important to the body, but it must be taken in moderation. Not only this, it is also best if the levels in the bloodstream are able to me maintained without too much variation. When you eat a candy bar, however, your blood sugar hits the roof, giving you that spike in energy, but this has negative effects too. Besides leading to an eventual crash, your body will also produce a hormone called insulin. When insulin is produced it tells the cells to open up and accept the glucose from the blood, helping to stabilize the blood sugar, while also increasing the sugar available in the cells to use as energy. All good stuff so far, but problems arise when there is consistently too much sugar. One thing that can happen is that the cells become so overwhelmed with sugar that they begin to reject the insulin and will no longer take in the glucose. This is what happens in the case of Type II Diabetes. This has a whole set of negative implications of its own so we can leave it at that. The other things that happens, that is more important in terms of fat loss, is that when insulin is being produced, another hormone, glucagon, is not. Glucagon, while mostly responsible for releasing glucose from the liver into the bloodstream when blood sugar levels are low, is also responsible for releasing something else: fatty acids. When glucagon is produced, is tells the fat cells to release the stored fatty acids into the blood to be used as energy. This is an important concept that many people do not realize. Sugar does not make you fat, but it sure does keep it once you have it.

On that note, I would also like to say that low fat diets are not the way to go. For one, fat is a very important nutrient that the body needs, and should make up almost 30% of your daily calories. What you have to realize, however, is that there are different kinds of fat. Trans fats are the worst, meaning that at all costs stay away from hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated vegetable oils. These, along with saturated fat (animal fat & tropical oils) are responsible for high levels of bad cholesterol, while decreasing your good cholesterol. Polyunsaturated fats are tricky because there are two main types: omega-6 and omega-3. Omega-6s are found in your corn oil and vegetable oil, and while they are not as bad as saturated, they are not known to be particularly beneficial. Omega-3s on the other hand, found in fish oil and flax, are considered to be very healthy. These, along with monounsaturated fats (olive oil, peanut oil) should make up the majority of the fat in your diet. So instead of picking up the low fat butter, why not use olive oil for cooking next time. Low fat products are rarely as nutritious (or delicious for that matter!) so why not just find the healthy alternative. Also, eating fat is not what makes you fat. Eating too much is what makes you fat. When you over-consume, the body stores the excess calories as fat to be used for fuel later. When you have a diet that is high in fat, however, it is easier to over consume because fat has over twice as many calories per gram as protein or carbohydrates. So in the end it is more important to eat the right amount of healthy fat, rather than stuffing yourself full of low-fat foods. Many times, you just end up eating more when you know it’s low-fat.

Food can be complicated and stressful, but if you change the way you look at food, it can become quite easy. Natural is probably the easiest rule to follow. If it is of the earth, then you’re probably safe. If it is of man, then there has probably been sugar added, oil hydrogenated, or additives stuck in there to prolong its shelf life. Hopefully the guide I provided last week will also help to get you thinking about the variety of food out there that can be cooked up into any number of delicious meals while also providing the nutrients that your body needs. Diet is about daily choices and planning ahead. It’s about recognizing what a healthy life can provide and committing to living that life. There will always be times that the healthiest choices are not available, but if you eat right 80% of the time, you’ll be way ahead of the game. Good luck and happy eating!

-Colin

Food for Thought: Part 1

After laying out my 5 keys to weight loss, I realized that each of those points would eventually need to be further explained. As such, I will first speak in more depth about what I feel is the most important part in leading a healthy life: food.

It’s amazing how complicated a topic such as food can be, but even in my own studies, it takes countless sources and a variety of opinions before one can come out with worthwhile information, and even then there may be a study coming out next week debunking the last most probable data. Either way, there are a few things that I do feel confident in saying when it comes to eating. As I said before, if you eat more than you expend, weight loss can never be achieved. What I would like to focus more on, however, is how to get the right foods, therefore promoting proper caloric intake, and also helping you to lose fat, since that is really what people want when they are trying to lose weight.

The guiding principles behind a healthy diet and fat loss reside in finding foods that are naturally produced and provide more for you than just you carbs, protein or fat for the day. When it comes to eating, vegetables are king. Eat as many veggies as you can and you will be on the right track. Spinach, avocadoes, tomatoes (though technically a fruit), broccoli, zucchini, red and green pepper, carrots, and cauliflower are just some of the many types of foods that you could stuff yourself with all day and end up with a very healthy body.

Another important plant group is fruit. While I would encourage you to enjoy fruit throughout the day, fruit should not be consumed in the same manner as vegetables. The difference is that fruit is high in sugar. It’s true that when you eat fruit it’s not the same as eating a spoonful of table sugar, but sugar is sugar, and too much can unhealthy. I will explain the dangers of sugar later, but for now, 2-4 pieces of fruit per day is going to be a safe bet. My personal favorites include: watermelon, grapefruit, cantaloupe, strawberries, raspberries, mango, blueberries, apples, and bananas. These are a great substitute for dessert if you are a real sweets lover.

I would also recommend getting some good lean meat in your diet. Unless you are vegetarian, where beans and nuts are your main sources of protein, it is just easier to make sure you are getting all of the essential amino acids by eating meat. Chicken, lean beef, fish, and dairy products are good choices. This doesn’t mean that just because you eat meat you cannot have beans or nuts. These are both healthy food items that should not be neglected.

The last type of food to include in your diet is grains. Now this one can be tricky because it is easy to get into trouble with sugars again when you start eating grain products. That is why I recommend whole grain items, mostly from whole wheat pasta, whole wheat bread, brown rice, and whole grain oatmeal. When you eat whole grains, you are eating more than just the starch (which is basically a string of sugar bundled up together)—you are getting fiber, vitamins, and minerals that keep the sugar from hitting you system as fast.

These are my recommendations for eating, but diet is a lifelong experiment. You must discover for yourself which foods are most enjoyable, manageable, and available. Remember the guiding principle of natural foods with lots of veggies, but discover the details of your diet for yourself. As this post is already long enough, I will save the rest of my thoughts for next week. For now, start thinking about which parts of your diet are healthy, and which parts you might want to change. It is important to be mindful of what goes into our bodies; otherwise we are at the mercy of our cravings to determine what we eat. Check in next week where I will speak more specifically about the affects of sugar and fat in ones diet. Good luck and happy eating!

-Colin

Functional Fitness

This week I want to talk about the basic ideology behind my style of training and my way of thinking about exercise. For me, the single most important thing I can do as a trainer is to help my client to function better in life. Now, they may have goals that are more important to them than general functioning, but all that means is that I need to find a way to help them achieve their goals in a manner that will also allow them to function at their highest capacity. If you to lose weight, but are no more functional in your daily life, then the weight loss was not a success. I think that in the end, most goals are functional goals, though they can take on many forms. Keeping with the topic of weight loss, there are of course the aesthetic reasons behind having a goal like this, but usually someone who is overweight also wants to be more active, not tire as easily, or simply be able to get through the day without all the stress that extra weight can put on the joints and organs. So when I put together a plan for weight loss, it will be focused on calories burned, but I will use activities that will make this person not only leaner, but more capable in movement, strength, endurance, flexibility, and stability.

This idea of functional fitness gets thrown around a lot in the fitness industry these days, but I feel that much of the functional training that goes on is not functional at all. To me functional is about participating in activities that you can take back to your everyday life. Doing upside down pushups on a stability ball may seem like a functional progression of a shoulder stabilization exercise, but the fact is that this is not something you will likely encounter in your daily movements…unless perhaps you are in the circus! So when I talk about functional training, this is what I mean:

Stretching - allowing your muscles to go through their complete range of motion.

Balance - making sure that you are capable of maintaining your equilibrium and posture through movement, preparing your body for the stabilization and reactivity needed to maintain balance throughout all activities.

Stabilization – focusing on the muscles around those joints that are in the greatest need of stability: the knee, hip, lower and upper back, neck, and shoulder.

Strength - training in the basic movement: the squat, deadlift, overhead press, pull-up, and push-up.

Cardiovascular Training- getting your heart used to working at higher intensities, increasing the maximum output that your heart can handle, and increasing the volume and efficiency of your oxygen consumption.

By combining these important areas with the goals of the client, I am able to produce the most effective changes that will both make the client happy and functional.

Now in the world self-training, where you do not have a trainer, start thinking about the exercises you do, what the purpose is, and see how functional they really are. My favorite nonfunctional activity is the bicep curl. Unless you are a body builder, there is really no purpose behind this single joint movement. Of course some people just want to have bigger arms, and that can be a legitimate goal, but don’t think that this is going to be useful in any other endeavor. I would also point out that in a well balanced training routine, you are already working the biceps during pulling exercises and the triceps during pushing exercises. Often times, if you add in arm work on top of that, you can end up with disproportionate limbs. So if functional training sounds like something that interests you, here are some tips.

- Workout on your feet. You sit enough during the day, and most movement takes place standing, not sitting.

- Stay away from single joint work, i.e. curls/extensions for the arms, legs, wrists.

- Run outside. A treadmill does not produce the same effect on your body as when you propel yourself across the ground.

- Sweat. If you really want to make any changes, you need to push yourself. Don’t overdo it, but if you aren’t sweating, you aren’t working hard enough.

- Stretch after training- check out my previous blog, Flexibility First

- Do single leg work such as single leg squats and single leg deadlifts. These are great for working on balance, symmetry of strength and movement, and training you for life the way most movement happens- one leg at a time.

- Form first. If you do not have correct form during exercise, your efforts are only going to be counterproductive. Work on stability first, and only work with as much weight as you can handle.

This is not all that being functional is about, but it’s a good start. Try thinking more about what you do and why you do it and you may find yourself changing some exercises that you do. I hope this helps—if you have any questions, feel free to ask. Take care and happy fitness!

-Colin

Not all Group Classes are Created Equal

If your involved in a group yoga or pilates class, make sure your instructor knows what they are doing! Any class can have a bad instructor, but these two types of activities can more readily lead to injury. In today’s culture of high intensity exercise, many of these classes have been modified to appease the masses, making them more challenging or getting you to feel the burn. Unfortunately, these activates were not meant to serve all of our fitness needs, so when we try to make them harder, they also become more dangerous. Make sure that your instructor is both experienced in their field and knowledgeable about the why and how of the movements you are performing. Yoga and pilates are very worthy forms of exercise, but when used inappropriately, they can have unpleasant consequences.

If you haven't taken a yoga or pilates class, I would certainly recommend adding it to you exercises repertoire, they have many health and movement benefits that are useful in our everyday lives. Just make sure to find that instructor that will lead you through it safely!

-Colin

5 Keys to Weight Loss

1. Eat Less

This is the number one rule if you want to lose weight! It doesn’t matter how much you exercise, if you do not eat fewer calories than you expend during the day, it is impossible to lose weight. Now this doesn’t mean you have to starve yourself. The best thing to do is to keep a food journal for a few days. Write down everything you eat, how much, when, and why you ate it. This will be useful not only for discovering extra calories that might be slipping in, it will also show you if you are an emotion eater- eating when you are sad, tired, bored, etc. With this information, you can also find a program that will calculate how many calories you eat; I recommend FitDay. Once you know how much you eat, look for ways to cut out 300-500 calories each day, and this will be the first step to dropping those pounds.

2. Eat Better

While eating less is surely important, you are most likely not trying to lose weight just to have a lower number on the scale. You want to be healthy! So another key ingredient to not only losing weight, but being in overall better shape is to change the way you eat. Incidentally, healthy foods also tend to be lower in calories! (Fat has 9 calories per gram while Carbohydrates and Protein only have 4). So what foods do we need to focus on? Well, I hate to be cliché, but fruits and vegetables are a good place to start. Very few people get enough, if any, of these most important food groups in their diet, yet they are vital to having a fully functioning body. Add in some lean meat (turkey, chicken breast, lean beef), whole grains (whole grain bread, brown rice, oatmeal), and some good quality fat (olive oil, avocados, fish), and you’re ready to go. This can be a major change for some people, so take it slow. Try adding a salad in with dinner, or having a piece of fruit for a snack. It all starts at the store, so start shopping healthily. If you don’t buy it, you can’t eat it! A good rule of thumb is to stay on the perimeter of the store; here are all your plants, produce, and dairy. When you start getting into the middle, you run into processed food that is full of unhealthy fats, refined carbohydrates, and sugar. If you can start shopping healthily, and slowly integrate healthy foods into the diet, you’ll be one step closer to achieving your desired weight and lifestyle.

3. HIIT it hard

There has been a long standing myth that long slow endurance training is best for fat burning. This was based on the fact that at lower levels of exertion, your body burns a higher percentage of fat compared to carbs. With this logic, however, the most ideal way to burn fat would be to do nothing at all, because the highest percentage of fat would be burned at rest! So we can see that a change in philosophy is in order. What we know now is twofold. First, to burn fat and lose weight, we need to work at higher intensities to have the most overall calories consumed. Second, because most fat calories are consumed at rest, we want to increase what is called our excess post-exercise oxygen consumption (EPOC). EPOC is basically the elevation of the body’s metabolism after exercise. So while we were burning calories during exercise, now we are also burning them as we recover from exercise. So how do we utilize these two components? We HIIT it hard. HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training) has been shown to have the greatest effects on increasing metabolism and in turn increasing fat loss. This method of training involves working at a very high intensity, ideally for a minute, and then dropping down the intensity for recovery. This recovery period can be anywhere from twice to half as long as the interval itself, decreasing as you become more fit. Don’t jump right into this however; if you have not been running / cycling / rowing, try working on maintaining a good pace for 20-30 minutes before you try out HIIT. You don’t want to overdo it.

4. Weight train

Weight training will help with weight loss in two ways. First, it is great exercise, and can work in a similar fashion as HIIT- increasing metabolism and burning calories during the work out. The other major factor in weight training is that as you build muscle mass, your body’s resting metabolism will increase. This is no longer part of EPOC, this is your metabolism the rest of the day, including while you sleep. So now we are burning more calories throughout the day! And don’t worry ladies, I know that having big muscles is the opposite of what you are looking for, so be assured by this: women cannot build muscle in the same way men do. As women build muscle, the fibers form in a much more dense fashion than in men, so while the size increase is less than men, the strength and metabolic affects are still there! This doesn’t mean that women cannot build muscle size, however, so hypertrophy training (8-12 reps) may not be for you. If you are worried about this, stick to endurance type training (15-20 rep range). This will still increase the amount of muscle fibers but will have less of an effect on muscle size.

5. Don’t obsess

The final rule to weight loss is to not obsess. Too many people become overly conscious of when and how they eat and exercises. What I always say is that nutrition and exercises should not be seen or treated like a program. They should be treated as part of your life. Yes there are certain things we can focus on here or there, but the goal is to make these lifestyle choices sustainable. If you really love chocolate chip cookies, don’t give them up forever, but just enjoy them as a special treat instead of having a box ready to go for your nightly snack. If you hate running, try out swimming or biking. And if you are feeling worn out from a long week but only had two days at the gym, it’s ok to let your body rest and recover rather than forcing yourself to get in that third day. Ten years from now, you want to be a healthy, balanced individual, not someone that tried to get in shape once but found it to be just too hard.

I hope these suggestions can help someone out there. Good luck and happy fitness!

-Colin