Fat Loss Health Nutrition admin

Eat Slowly and Until 80% Full

Do You Eat Too Quickly?

It takes 20 minutes for fullness cues to be sent around our bodies. That is the time it takes your stomach to send a signal to your brain and come back again to say you’re full. It’s in those 20 minutes that someone can overeat. Speaking to clients and gym members over the years, eating too quickly is one of the things that comes up a lot. The good news is it’s also something that be worked on without actually changing your diet. This is the reason it’s one of the first habits I coach clients. Even when someone says “I eat healthily” they can still overeat if they eat too quickly. It can still happen with good quality foods. If I scoff down huge amounts of the best foods the chances are that I’ll still eat too many calories. The food may be highly nutritious but if I’m looking to burn some fat it just won’t work. Now imagine if my food choices weren’t great, the surplus calories would reach a huge total. Which leads to today’s point of interest.

Slow Down

Part of my coaching is to allow you to eat your favourite foods but to improve your habits. I want to add better things in and not cut things out. This goes in the face of every diet you see on social media or TV. You know the ones where you cut out carbs, lose a ton of weight, regain the weight and learn nothing. I’m not a fan of “everything in moderation” either. Your idea of moderation will be different to mine and the next person’s and the next’s etc. Instead of cutting things out and being restrictive I want to coach someone healthier habits for their goals, how much to eat and why. The first part of that is eating slowly.

Let’s say your diet is absolutely dreadful and includes high calorie meals full of sugar and fat. Not only that but you eat really fast. In the time it takes your brain to send the ‘I’m full’ signal to your stomach you would consume tons of excess calories. If you just slowed down you would eat a lot less and consume fewer calories in that 20 minute window. You haven’t changed the food but you’ve saved yourself from more damage.

Here are some tips to do it;

  • Take smaller bites
  • Chew a little longer
  • Try to taste the food more
  • Have a drink between bites
  • Chat with whoever you’re eating with

You’ll be surprised how much more you’ll enjoy your meal. Once you’ve slowed down a little you can then move on to the next habit.

Eat Until 80% Full

Think of this as eating until you’re no longer hungry. You don’t have to stuff yourself with each meal. We don’t live on a deserted island not knowing when we’ll get food again. Gratefully the majority of us have food readily available for our next meal and you don’t need to hit your daily calorie numbers in one sitting. Most people have a problem with leaving food behind so they clear the plate. This becomes a problem when portion control isn’t great and so most of us finish a meal feeling stuffed. Before you learn better portion control, eating until 80% full or until no longer hungry helps with this problem. A good gauge of having eaten the right amount is that you shouldn’t feel hungry, you should feel energised and able to get up and move around easily or go for a walk. If you feel sluggish, heavy or need to sit down after eating you’ve probably overdone it!

Something For You To Try

After a typical meal of yours note how you feel immediately after finishing and each hour until your next meal. If you’ve eaten the correct amount for your fat loss goals it should resemble something like this;

Immediately after – Not hungry at all or like you could have eaten a little more.

1 hour after – Fully satisfied with no desire to eat another meal.

2 hours after – Maybe a little hungry but by no means an overwhelming need to eat.

3 hours after – You should be feeling the need to eat again. A 7 or 8 out of 10 for hunger. This could be more or less depending on any physical activity you might have done. If you’re not hungry now you probably ate too much at that previous meal.

4 hours after – You are now at an 8 or 9 out of 10 for hunger. Objects are turning into different foods like that lion sees in the Madagascar animated movie. It’s around this time that if we let our hunger get this far we’re more likely to make poor food choices.

Take Home Message

Eating slowly and until 80% full might take some getting used to. If you’re serious about changing your health and fitness for the better it really is worth giving a go for a couple weeks. It will help improve digestion, your training performance should be better and you’ll enjoy your meals more. And it’s not even restrictive. Hope this helps!

Health Nutrition Training admin

Glycemic Index and Load

Often when people begin to look at their nutrition more closely they come across glycemic index and glycemic load. They hear or read that you need to make sure to eat foods that are low on both scales and avoid everything else. But as you’ll see in the next few paragraphs they’re not quite the same and the numbers for both can be conflicting.

What Are They?

The glycemic index (GI) gives a food a score on a scale of 0-100 for how quickly it is digested and released as sugar into the blood stream. Pure glucose (sugar) is given a score of 100. Lower GI foods cause your blood sugar to rise at a slower rate after eating that food. Higher GI foods cause the blood sugar to rise quicker. Glycemic load (GL) gives a more accurate assessment of how a food will impact your blood sugar levels. It does this on a ranking scale also but it measures the amount of carbohydrates in a serving of a particular food. Foods with a low GL rank from 0-10 and have very little impact on your blood sugar. A GL between 10-20 will have a moderate impact and a high GL over 20 can cause a sugar spike.

Watermelon As An Example

Watermelon is a very good example of a carbohydrate with a high glycemic index of over 70 but a low glycemic load under 10. The GI is high because it’s based on lots of watermelon but an actual serving of it has a GL of just 7. This is because watermelon is mostly water! Lower GI and GL foods tend to have more fiber and nutrients in them and help keep our energy levels more balanced throughout the day.

Insulin Release

You can still get a blood sugar spike from eating a lot of a low or moderate GL food however and so it’s also important to know the correct amounts to eat. When your blood sugar rises dramatically your body releases insulin to bring it back down. When this happens too frequently it can lead to insulin resistance and in some cases type 2 diabetes. There are many things that have an influence on your absorption of sugar from foods and their reaction on insulin release.

These things include;

  • Your fitness level
  • Amount of body fat you have
  • Genetics
  • Gut health
  • Amount of muscle you have
  • Whether you’ve trained recently, how hard and how long you trained
  • The time of day
  • What else you ate in a particular meal

The Take Home Message

Taking all of this into consideration I feel using the GI or GL is kind of over complicating things. If you want to improve your health and fitness just focus on doing the basics well and consistently. Eat mostly minimally processed foods that are higher in nutrients. Make sure you’re getting enough protein and vegetables. Exercise consistently and aim to improve your strength or fitness levels. When you can get more/improve sleep, do so. Give yourself a break now and then to try and manage stress. Keep things simple and enjoy the process without complicating things.

Nutrition Supplementation admin

Have You Heard Of The Master Mineral?

Let Me Introduce You To Magnesium

Yes, the “master mineral” is in fact magnesium. It has earned this title as it is used in hundreds of processes in our bodies. It was during the reading for my vitamin D post that I thought magnesium deserved its own and here we are. Vitamin D supplementation is good because most of us aren’t getting enough. But if we are also deficient in magnesium, the vitamin D we take doesn’t get used properly. Unfortunately we’re more than likely deficient in magnesium too.

Magnesium;

  • Fights inflammation
  • Improves muscle function
  • Makes new proteins to build muscle
  • Boosts exercise performance
  • Promotes healthy blood pressure
  • Reduces insulin resistance
  • Prevents plaque formation in our blood vessels
  • Allows the body to maintain proper calcium levels
  • Is helpful in preventing migraine headaches
  • Fights depression

You can see why it’s called a master mineral with all of the things it does for us.

How Do I Know If I Need More Magnesium?

Common habits that lead to a magnesium deficiency include drinking carbonated drinks, high alcohol consumption, high coffee consumption, sugary diets, taking prescription medications and even having IBS can lead to it. You may exhibit excessive anxiety, suffer from muscle cramps and eye twitches. A deficiency has also been linked to a difficulty losing fat! It is likely that one or more of these things might relate to your lifestyle.

The recommended intake for magnesium is 400-420mg for men and 310-320mg for women. It is found in foods such as green leafy vegetables, spinach, beans, nuts, avocadoes, bananas and dark chocolate. The issue is that you may not eat or enjoy these foods. Even if you do, you might need to eat some of all of these to hit the recommended daily amounts. As this is a personal training website chances are that you exercise to some degree also. Sweating through exercise can deplete magnesium by up to 20% and so this is where a magnesium supplement can help.

A great benefit of magnesium supplementation has shown to be improving your sleep. It activates parts of our brain to help quiet the mind and calm us down. Added to the effects of improving mood and decreasing anxiety it might just help you get a better and more restful sleep. Most people who use magnesium take it 30 minutes to an hour before going to sleep. I hope it helps you if you decide to try it!

Nutrition Supplementation Training admin

Are You Getting Enough Vitamin D?

The Sunshine Vitamin

The majority of people could do with more vitamin D. That’s right, the vitamin you get from the sun. Your body makes vitamin D when it is exposed to sunlight. The problem for us here in Ireland is that the sun comes out for about 2 minutes in between bouts of rainfall. You can also get the vitamin from fatty fish or some fortified dairy products but it’s challenging to get enough from diet alone.  Some people don’t even eat much of either of those. Added to the fact of not getting much sun exposure and this leads to a lot of people being deficient in vitamin D. While you can look up the many things that low vitamin D levels can lead to, I’ll list the ones that are most relevant to us.

  • Loss of strength and diminished athletic performance
  • Difficulty building muscle
  • Lower testosterone levels
  • Increased chance of Type 2 diabetes, cancer and heart disease
  • Depression
  • Low sex drive and function in women

If you don’t trust me on that last one see the following study;

Krysiak R, Szwajkosz A, Marek B, Okopień B. The effect of vitamin D supplementation on sexual functioning and depressive symptoms in young women with low vitamin D status. Endokrynol Pol. 2018;69(2):168-174. doi: 10.5603/EP.a2018.0013. Epub 2018 Feb 14. PMID: 29442353.

Looking at the above list I’d prefer to have more vitamin D wouldn’t you? It’s not my place to tell you how much to take should you decide to supplement with vitamin D however. The particular supplement that I take gives me 2500IU of vitamin D in one softgel. Most recommendations you’ll find in the training world will say take up to 5000IU per day. And just recently some studies administered up to 60,000IU of vitamin D to combat Covid-19. (See – https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7761895/)

 

Fat Loss Nutrition admin

Protein – Quantity, Quality and Timing

Do You Know All You Need About Protein?

There are 3 factors when it comes to protein. How much you should eat, which protein to eat and when are the best times to eat it. The latest and best research states that consuming 1.6 grams per kilo of body weight is the optimum amount of protein per day. I would aim for 0.8 – 1 gram per pound of body weight. If you aim for the lower end you might not hit it, if you aim for the upper range and just miss, you’ll fall right into the perfect range. For those looking for fat loss it’s fine to eat a little more.

When it comes to quality, research also has this covered. Casein has shown to be the gold standard, followed by whey protein concentrate and then whey protein isolate. We can see this in the Digestible Indispensable Amino Acid Scores of 141, 133 and 125 for the 3 proteins respectively. Pea protein only scored 73 as a comparison. For you guys who may be spending money on protein supplements, casein is usually more expensive and so most people go for whey. For anyone who is just starting out in their training you can’t really go wrong once you’re hitting the protein intake amount with any of the 3 proteins. Start there and then see how you progress.

The timing of protein intake is where science doesn’t quite have it nailed down. The best results up to now has been a fairly equal spread of protein throughout the day. If you weigh 200 pounds you’d likely need 160-200 grams of protein per day. Spread over 4 meals that’d be 40-50 grams of protein at each meal which is fairly easy to do with supplementation. It becomes a little tougher with whole foods and is even harder if you’re a vegan/vegetarian without supplementation. It’s clearly not impossible but just more difficult.

What Did Some Studies Say?

A Japanese study looked into protein timing and came out with interesting results. They split a group of men into 2 groups. Both groups were given breakfast, lunch and dinner and were consuming the same overall amount of protein as the other. The big difference was that one group had a high protein breakfast using a protein drink and the other had very little protein at breakfast but much more at dinner. This reflects the majority of peoples’ diets. Think of the person rushing out the door with only a coffee and some toast (if even) or those of you who might only have cereal for instance. This was the nutrition for 12 weeks and all subjects did 3 strength training sessions per week. After 12 weeks the high protein breakfast group put on 40% more muscle than the low protein breakfast group. Without a different weights program and having the same amount of protein per day that’s an incredible result. It is crucial to your progress to have adequate protein at breakfast to stimulate more muscle protein synthesis. This means your body will make new proteins to build more muscle.

Using the Japanese study’s results we now know we need a more even amount of protein throughout our daily meals. However, we can do even better than that again. Let’s say your last meal is at 7 or 8pm, your body will now go without protein for up to 12 hours until breakfast the next morning. Instead of that, a smart practice for you to adopt is to eat some protein 30 minutes before going to bed.

A meta-study reviewed the results of 9 individual studies which looked at night time protein intake. They concluded that;

“The consumption of 20-40 grams of casein approximately 30 minutes before sleep stimulates whole-body protein synthesis rates over a subsequent overnight period in young and elderly men (preceded or not by resistance exercise, respectively). In addition, pre-sleep protein consumption can augment the muscle adaptive response (muscle fiber cross-sectional area, strength, and muscle mass) during 10-12 weeks of resistance training in young, but not in elderly men.”

In other words, consuming casein protein before bed makes your body build more muscle throughout the night. It also helps your muscles get stronger and bigger. Alternatively you could use a whey protein or a whole food option which wouldn’t do as much as casein but would be a lot better than no protein at all.

MMPT Takeaways

  • Try to have an even spread of protein intake throughout the day, especially at breakfast.
  • Experiment with protein 30 minutes before bed and see how it affects your training and progress

Sources

Jun Yasudea, et al, “Evenly Distributed Protein Intake over 3 Meals Augments Resistance Exercise-Induced Muscle Hypertrophy in Healthy Young Men,” The Journal of Nutrition, 2020, April 22.

Caio E.G. Reis, et al. “Effects of pre-sleep protein consumption on muscle-related outcomes – A systematic review,” Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport, 2020.

Samuel L. Buckner, et al. “Protein timing during the day and its relevance for muscle strength and lean mass,” Clin Physiol Funct Imaging, 2018, Mar;38(2):332-337.

 

Uncategorized admin

The Thermic Effect Of Food

What Is The Thermic Effect Of Food?

The Thermic Effect of Food (TEF) is the amount of calories your body burns while processing foods. However, not all foods have the same TEF. Protein has the highest TEF where 20-30% of the calories from lean sources of protein are burned just to process it. Carbohydrates are next with 5-15%. Fats have the worst TEF where the range is 0-5%.

Why Is The TEF Important?

This is crucially important in your fat loss efforts because you now know what foods to eat more of. Even if you’re already in decent shape and you’re looking to get leaner you can use this information. Quality of food really does matter instead of just filling up your diet with worse food choices. When you eat more protein you’ll hold on to more muscle and burn more calories. Protein also helps make you feel fuller for longer. The same can be said for quality carbohydrates. This means a diet made up of quality proteins, carbs and mostly healthy fats will allow you to stay in a caloric deficit a lot easier. Junk foods usually contain a high sugar/high fat combination which makes them calorically dense but they don’t fill you up. You can eat lots of them and they’ve such a low TEF that not many calories are burned processing them.

If you’ve tried to lose fat or get leaner in the past it might pay to look at your food choices. Eating a little more protein if you hadn’t been already, or decreasing fat intake might mean the difference in a couple hundred calories per day. That may be all you need to move things in the right direction without changing much else!

Fat Loss admin

What Is The Best Way To Burn Fat And Keep It Off For Good?

It’s not “exercise more and eat less”

You’ll lose that battle each and every time with your metabolism. The problem is most people want their excess fat to be gone ASAP. That’s why they adopt the wrong approach. It’s like firing all the cannons at once, it makes a big splash but your metabolism just hunkers down in the bunker. It waits for you to get tired, laughing at your folly attempts to put a lasting dent in it. You need a smarter approach. You need to whittle away at it, guerrilla style. Instead of trying and failing to burn all the unwanted fat at once we’re going to sneakily lose a small amount every week. We’ll continue to win the weekly battles until the war is won. Here’s how it’s done.

Eat more food

Yes, more food. Your body needs a caloric deficit but only by a few hundred calories a day when done the right way. Too harsh a deficit and those unwanted metabolic pathways kick into gear. Aim for a 10-15% deficit and begin tracking your progress. This way you’ll retain more muscle which burns more calories in the long run. (more on muscle shortly) While I say eat more food I also mean the right kind of food. You want high quality sources of protein, vegetables, smart carbs and healthy fats. They should make up 80-90% of your nutrition. Depending on the amount you feel you can or want to lose, give yourself 10-20% for the foods you absolutely love and can’t do without. Be brutally honest with yourself here though. I don’t ask my clients to cut out their favourite foods. They have a time and place. But if you have an unhealthy relationship with any food/beverage that’s holding you back you need to work on that. These are trigger foods. The ones where a little just isn’t enough and before you know it any sense of control is lost. A topic for another time!

Don’t be a carbophobe!

Years ago, fats had a bad name and everyone said you need to go low fat and fats were the devil! Now fats are getting a better time of it as carbs are taking all the heat. This is down to many fad diets blaming carbs for excess weight gain. It’s just not true. The vast majority of us need carbs to fuel our workouts, to give us energy for daily tasks. Our brains need glucose to function optimally. You know you’re getting enough carbs if you’re losing fat while your hunger, energy and cravings are in check. This can take a bit of experimenting to find that point but once you have it, you’re golden.

Focus on strength training

Strength training does more for your physique than spending hours and hours per week on a piece of cardio equipment. Before I move on just reflect on what your eyes tell you. When you walk into a gym, where are the people who are generally in better shape? What are they doing? They’re lifting weights, using resistance machines or using their bodies as resistance. On the occasion that they might use the cardio machines, they’re probably hill walking or doing intervals. And if not that’s what they should be doing. How does a beginner start doing these things? Use lighter weights or body-weight routines. Focus on getting stronger. Use bigger movements like squats, lunges, upper body pulls and pushes. Think compound exercises and fewer isolation exercises to begin with. Are you worried about becoming “bulky”? Snap out of it right this second. Women generally don’t have enough testosterone to build muscle. You also need to be in a caloric surplus for that to happen (you shouldn’t be) and need to be lifting a lot of weight, frequently.

Strength training works better over time because muscle is more metabolically active. It burns more calories at rest than fat does in the long run. This means we want to hold on to as much muscle as possible. As we age our bodies lose muscle. We can slow this down by strength training. It will also help us in later life if we have a fall and we don’t break a hip! When someone says “I just want to tone up” they’re saying they want to have more definition. This means there’s less fat covering the muscles leading to more definition or the muscles get bigger and the fat that is there is spread over a larger area and there’s more definition that way.

Do the right types of cardio

Cardio is better done these two ways, low impact walking or high intensity intervals. The middle ground (jogging) isn’t optimal. Walking is great for reducing cortisol (a stress hormone), it gives you time to think and doesn’t put stress on your joints. It won’t burn a ton of calories but it can be done at the end of a strength workout. Burn more calories by increasing the incline on a treadmill. High intensity interval training is great for your fitness and burning calories well after your workout has finished. This can be done as a standalone session or on days where you’ve trained upper body. Build up your fitness with some smaller runs before you begin interval training. No need to go crazy with the amount of time with these runs. We just want to look and feel better, you’re not trying to be the next Sonia O’Sullivan! I’ll talk about jogging another time. It deserves its own post for how it just isn’t good for most people.

Enjoy the process

Getting in better shape is not a quick process, it takes time and consistent effort. Give yourself that time and celebrate the many wins along the way. Being able to do a properly executed push up or pull up. Playing with your kids without being out of breath. Feeling confident in a new pair of jeans or fitting into some old favourite clothes. Notice I didn’t mention weighing a certain weight. Enjoy the food you eat and make better food choices 80-90% of the time. Do the right kind of cardio for your body and get stronger.

Fat Loss admin

Exercise More and Eat Less, Simple Right?

Not So Fast!

You may have heard the dated expression to exercise more and eat less to lose weight. This might seem like sound advice but it’s just not that straightforward. For the couch potato living a sedentary lifestyle doing no exercise at all, then yes it could work. But only for a short period of time as our bodies adapt, specifically our metabolism. During periods of extended eating less your body will get hungrier, energy levels drop and you get cravings. The same happens when you exercise harder, longer or add more training sessions to your schedule.

Your body wants to stay at the same point, this is called homeostasis. When you decide that you want to make a change to your energy balance like doing the above it pushes back. It will slow your metabolism to burn fewer calories. This is called adaptive thermogenesis and the caloric burn can decline by up to 25%.

The exercise more and eat less idea can spiral out of control. When your weight loss starts to slow down as the metabolism starts to adapt what do most people do? They decide to do even more exercise and eat less again until the scales start moving the way they want it. It’s a race to the bottom. You’ll be eating so little and trying to fuel too much training that you can’t perform optimally, your mood will be awful and illness/injury won’t be far behind.

Let Me Show You That Works

Using the calculator from my last post I input the details of a 30 year old female, who is 5′ 2″, weighs 11 stone/70kg and is sedentary. Her maintenance calories would be 1648. She wants to lose weight so she restricts her calories to 1200 per day and starts walking a couple times a week. She begins to lose weight for a few weeks but it then slows down. In an effort to keep it going she reduces calories again to less than a 1000 per day and begins running instead of walking, for a longer duration and more frequently. Weight loss begins again but it’s only a matter of time until it slows again. Do you think it’d be a good idea to reduce calories further? Have you seen how little 1200 calories worth of food is let alone less than a 1000? Good luck enjoying 3 meals and a snack or two spread over that many calories.

Check back later this week when I’ll explain a better way to lose weight and keep it off for good.

Fat Loss admin

Just 4 Weeks To Go

The Next Gym Workout Is Almost Here

4 weeks from today gyms will finally, happily and thankfully reopen. I personally can’t wait to get back to working with my personal training clients after such a long time out. Summer would be almost upon us too if not for the rain on what seems like every day now. Generally this means a lot of you will be getting back to your gym training. You could be taking up training for the first time or just thinking about getting in better shape for summer weather. I wanted to say holidays but who knows what the hell that situation will look like! With that in mind I want to help you with quick, actionable information over the coming weeks. In doing so, hopefully pointing you in the right direction to better health and fitness. This week I’ll look at calories.

For the majority of people, getting in better shape means burning fat. Note that I said burning fat and not losing weight. Without going too far off topic right now, weight loss is pointless if it’s through water loss or worse, muscle loss. That tends to happen when average folks without any training or nutrition knowledge blindly cut out every carb they can think of (probably without also resistance training or consuming enough protein) because they heard that’s what their friend did before their wedding. Or they remember all the times they did that before to lose weight. They fail to realise that they regained the weight they lost as soon as they reintroduced carbs to their nutrition. This means they repeat the process over and over. You know what they say about madness…

To Burn Fat, You Need A Calorie Deficit

If you take away anything from these few short minutes of reading please let it be this. Don’t go zero carbs, zero fat or zero anything. Just don’t. If you want to know why you shouldn’t, I’d be happy to explain in another post but for now just take my word for it.

At the end of the day fat loss boils down to being in a calorie deficit. That is, burning more calories than you consume. Using the following quick and easy calculator will give you your maintenance calories per day or the calories you need to consume to stay the same weight.

https://www.thecalculatorsite.com/health/bmr-calculator.php

From there you just consume a few hundred calories less than that maintenance number and theoretically you should burn fat. I say theoretically because there’s more to it than just that. Calorie consumption, absorption, digestion etc. are all different in each individual as well as calorie numbers on food labels being an average and well, you get the picture that this isn’t so simple. Hence the reason people hire a trainer like me to navigate the muddy waters and steer the ship in the right direction. Use the formula as a good starting point and track your progress for a couple weeks.