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05.26.10
Wednesday 10:39am
Wednesday 10:39am
Is Your Workout Wasting Your Time?
General Messages • Posted by FitZone AtlantaWe already knew this, but it is reaffirming to see "experts" finally recognizing it! Best Life Magazine Article
04.27.10
Tuesday 05:33pm
Tuesday 05:33pm
Does Eating Late at Night Make You Fat?
General Messages • Posted by FitZone AtlantaDoes Skipping Breakfast or Eating Late at Night Make You Fat?
Excerpt from Matt Perryman interview http://impulsestrength.co.nz/:
http://epicureanathlete.blogspot.com/2010/04/does-skipping-breakfast-or-eating-late.html
1. Can you tell us a little about your background? Education? How long have you been training? What made you want to become a trainer?
I've been at this a long time. I think this year makes 12 years that I've been lifting in some form or another. I started out in high school, typical skinny kid that didn't eat enough. Exercise was an alien concept to me. I caught the bug after getting out of school and haven't stopped since.
My education: Formally speaking, I've got a degree in criminology. I credit it with exposing me to things like stats, research methods, and critical thinking. Informally speaking, I've got a shelf full of books, including such hits as Supertraining and Science and Practice of Strength Training, among others. What makes me dangerous is the database of journal articles I have access to. I can get most any paper that's available electronically, which means I've got more hard drive space full of research PDFs than most teenagers have of pirated music tracks.
My niche is this field is being the BS detector, going back to the whole research methods and critical thinking stuff. The vast majority of the collected wisdom in this field is either a myth that's been repeated since who even knows when (usually sometime between 1970 and 1990), or something purely made up by people that think they understand science better than they do.
2. I really *love* your approach to nutrition - mind your protein, essential fats, and caloric intake, and you can eat whatever you want. Can you expand a little on that? How do we figure out how much protein is enough to maintain/gain muscle? What are essential fats, and do we need supplements for those? What are some general guidelines for how many calories we need to maintain/lose weight?
I wish I could take credit for the approach, but the majority of my diet inspiration comes from Alan Aragon, Lyle McDonald, and Martin Berkhan (and maybe a few others I'm forgetting, so if I left you out don't take it personally). Those guys are the "diet" guys. I trust their advice for a few key reasons. I know that they can read through and apply research, and that we share a common belief in keeping things simple and parsimonious (that's Occam's razor for the rubes - keep things as simple as possible while including all the important facts).
The main thing is that calories rule all. This may sound mind-blisteringly obvious, but you can't assume that in an era where insulin and high-fructose corn syrup and genetics are all being blamed for an obesity epidemic.
Now the reality is much more complicated than this, and that's where most folks trip up with the calorie balance issue. Your body's a dynamic system. It's always in flux, tearing down and building up tissues. You don't notice much of this because it's a gradual process of replacement. This process of tissue turnover is expensive, in energy terms. It's also variable, depending on how active you are and how much food you get. This is your basal metabolic rate, how much energy it requires just to keep you alive and at a maintenance weight. Unfortunately the fact that this is such a dynamic variable makes it very hard to nail down how much energy a human body actually uses up (or stores, or releases as waste heat, or...). There are far too many factors going into it to model it effectively. The reality is that calorie values are always a very rough estimate, and we have little way to make them less fuzzy.
There's also the matter of how much of what we eat is actually absorbed by the body. If you eat something that nominally has 500 kcal and you only end up absorbing 50% of it, then your estimate is off. If we're wrong about how many calories are in a gram of protein (the Atwater factors), then your estimate is off. The estimate I've seen is that even with weighing and meticulous documentation, your daily margin of error is probably not going below 200-300 kcal per day. This is usually hilarious to point out to the obsessive calorie-counters that worry about 75 calories.
In short, we just don't know with sufficient accuracy how many kcals our bodies use, store, or excrete, and we don't know how much we eat. This doesn't mean that the idea of calorie balance is wrong. It just means that it's inherently inaccurate, and we have to use other tricks and tools to make it useful.
I tend to put emphasis on protein intake, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it's required to support tissue turnover. Secondly, protein (or actually, amino acids circulating in the blood stream) is a key trigger of muscle protein synthesis. MPS is a measure of anabolism in the muscle tissue; higher MPS rates indicates that a growth process is going on. Circulating aminos are also synergistic with weight training as a growth signal, which means there definitely is something to the concept of keeping blood levels of amino acids high, and especially before/during/after exercise.
Most athletes and active-types would probably do well to use 0.8-1g/lb as a starting value for protein. If you're sedentary, you can do less, but active types probably shouldn't go much lower than that.
Essential fats are in roughly the same boat. We tend to get a lot of omega-6 fats, which you still need. It's the omega-3s, especially DHA and EPA, that tend to be missing. For this reason, fish oil has become super-popular. You can get a good helping of the w-3s in fatty fish like salmon and mackarel. If you're not eating that a few times a week, a fish oil supplement is one of few things I actually would recommend. The body can synthesize most everything else (it can even synthesize the w-3s to a point, it's just that it's a slow process and it's beneficial to supplement with them in the diet).
I don't have a lot else to say about the other alleged necessities of dieting. Once you distill it down to core axioms, every diet that works follows those rules. You can wank about insulin all day long, but that's based on a flawed understanding of what happens. You can talk about needing to eat every 2 hours to keep your metabolism stoked, but that doesn't pan out in reality. Eat one big meal and it digests for 5-6 hours. Eat a lot of small meals and you've still got food in your gut that whole time. Digestion isn't like picking up an item in a video game, where the food is instantly added to your HP. Eat a few big meals or a lot of small meals, in both cases food is sitting in your gut and releasing nutrients while it digests. Insulin spikes matter if you're getting pure sugar or something, but once you mix proteins and fats in the mix (and you should be), that alters the rate of digestion.
All these diet rules and must-dos and must-not-dos are just smoke and mirrors; at best, they're guidelines that will make you eat less total calories and eat more of the good nutrient-rich foods. I'm not the type that's content to stick with superficial guidelines, though. I like to know how the system works and how I can game it to my advantage. Gaming the body means I can eat ice cream.
3. Give us a snapshot of your nutrition for a "typical" day. What do you eat, when, and how much? Do you eat differently on days you train vs. not?
My average day is an intermittent fasting setup (and I'm going to give Martin Berkhan some love here). I'm usually up somewhere around 7-8am. At that point I start slamming coffee, cause I'm addicted to caffeine. I don't eat my first meal until somewhere between 11am and 1pm. It varies depending on the day and on how recovered I feel. From there I let myself eat for about 8-9 hours from that first meal (though admittedly I've got my off the wagon days where I start early and don't time it).
When I was being strict a few months back, 1pm was a hard starting point and last meal was 9pm. I was eating keto at that time, all protein, fats, and green veggies. I started out weighing 97kg and wound up at 88kg by the time it was done. Right now I'm sitting around 88-90 most days, so I've kept most of it off.
I like this approach because there are no rules besides the eating window. Well, a few rules - I do make a nod to protein dominance, in that every meal is built around a large serving of protein. When I was serious-dieting, I kept the time limits hard and I kept carbs to a minimum. For maintenance I'm not so worried about it. If I see my weight creeping up, I eat less. If my weight starts going too low (no seriously, this is a problem), I get to eat some junk to bump the calories. It's a win-win, because my activity level is usually high enough that I can fit some junk in the mix.
And you know, there's nothing even magical about this. You eat less food because you have less opportunity to eat. There may be some mild magic going on, as far as nutrient partitioning goes, but the important thing is that you just can't stuff yourself stupid if you've got a narrow window to eat and you're paying even a little attention to food quality.
4. For me, one of the most surprising lessons on nutrition for fat loss thus far has been the role of fasting and skipping breakfast. Skipping breakfast is deemed to be a huge no-no by most fitness professionals, and skipping a meal, or multiple meals via fasting, is also very much frowned upon. Are there any scientific basis for these claims, promulgated by even the most astute fitness pros?
Most of that comes from the correlation between missing breakfast and obesity, which has been studied a few times. The problem here is obvious: correlation is not causation. The most likely response there is that people that skip breakfast tend to be the types that are lazy about their diet in general. They skip breakfast then gorge on McDonald's the rest of the day because they're hungry.
That's entirely different from skipping breakfast in the context of a larger plan. A physiological issue you can't do much about; a psychological or behavioral issue is a different matter. Physiologically, there's actually quite a bit of suggestive evidence that skipping breakfast can be a positive thing. The downside to that is that you have to make sure you don't go on a donut bender because you missed your Cheerios.
Of course the voodoo doesn't stop at that. These days you'll hear this idea that you have to eat every 2-3 hours or you go catabolic, and that's just not true. Well it's kinda true, but it's not necessarily the drawback people think because they don't distinguish where catabolism happens. If you want to lose fat, you want your fat cells to be catabolic. The thing is, muscle doesn't just start wasting away like that. Fat tissue is fairly dynamic in how it stores and releases fat - it has to be, because it's basically a battery there to store and release energy - but muscle takes longer to build and to atrophy. You're not going to lose your hard-earned guns because you skipped a meal. But you might help burn up a little more fat.
The interesting thing to me is that fasting might actually promote favorable body-comp changes by improving insulin sensitivity. When you fast or eat low-carb, you see a favorable change towards fat-burning. Insulin is low, which means the fat cells are letting go of FFAs, and that in turn means fat oxidation is ramped up. If muscle glycogen is depleted as well (which is questionable on a short fast, mind you, but it is possible over a longer diet), then you've got an environment that's almost ideal for fat burning, and then when you do eat, eating without fat gains.
I'm still on the fence about that last part, I will say, but it is at least plausible that some of that is going on. How much it matters compared to "just eating less" is still up in the air.
5. What about timing of your meals? A lot of nutrition and fitness "experts" say that eating after 6 or 7 pm will hinder our efforts to lose fat. Any scientific basis for that claim?
Nope.
This is based on the naive idea that the effect of any one meal will affect the outcome of the entire 24-hour day, and that's just not the case.
Here's a hypothetical, to illustrate the point: If you need 2000 kcal a day to maintain your weight and you eat 1000 kcal before you go to bed, are you going to get fat? Of course not. In a calorie deficit, there's not a damn thing that insulin can do to make you store fat; your body needs that energy to live.
This is of course where I'll remind you of the "assuming adequate protein and fats" clause, too.
When you point that out, the goalposts will shift. Now it's not about losing weight, it's about optimizing fat loss. And again, it doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Yes, it is true that a meal will increase insulin and circulating levels of aminos, and that this tends to work against fat oxidation. That sounds just awful on paper.
The problem is that they've yet to explain why, assuming the same daily calorie intake, this is worse at 7pm than at noon. Does your body have a stop watch and suddenly decide that this meal will go to fat, while eating the exact same meal three hours before is cool? Your body isn't affected by clocks or calendars or the Moon. All that matters is short-term physiological responses and the summation of those responses over time.
6. I really struggle with understanding the concept of "fat burning" foods. What does this mean, exactly? Are there foods that literally burn the fat off our bodies? Don't all foods pretty much lead to fat gain unless we burn their calories off somehow?
Basically. You've got the infamous celery, with its negative calorie content (chewing and digesting celery allegedly burns up more calories than it provides), but realistically the only thing that's going to directly burn fat off you is certain drugs.
Food is just food. It's the energy and nutrient content that it delivers to your body.
I think this idea has come from two areas. Protein is rated high on TEF, or thermal effect of feeding. That means that protein has a high energy cost to digest, which is sometimes quoted at 20-30% of its total energy value. The idea is that protein "gives back" something in terms of calorie burning. The problem is that this is already factored into the energy value for protein; when we say 4 kcal per gram (the estimate varies a bit more widely, but that's the "accepted" value), that means its the net energy you'll receive from eating it. There's no "enhanced fat burning" from that. The sales tax is already in the price.
The other thing is plain old fashioned voodoo. A lot of times what you see is some research or another, usually in rats, that will allegedly claim some ridiculous thing or another, like a thirty trillion percent increase in lipolysis or fat oxidation or something. Supplement companies love this one.
Then you go read the paper and see that the poor researchers said nothing of the sort. Maybe the percentage was right, but the absolute effect was tiny. Maybe it was taken out of context. Or maybe it's the fact that humans aren't rats.
Trying to extrapolate big-picture realized effects from the tiny bits and pieces of biochemistry will almost always lead you astray. We don't know biochem well enough to start extrapolating this kind of thing. And let's talk to Sir Occam again: if this were really true, do you think it would be personal trainers and supplement companies discovering it, instead of pharmaceutical companies that employ armies of scientists with real labs, and make money by developing such things?
Yeah.
Take care of your calorie intake and keep your protein and EFAs up. That's all the fat-burning food you need.
7. What are some of the most common mistakes that people make that sabotage their fat loss goals?
Lawds where to start.
I think an unhealthy relationship with food is the beginning and end of diet problems. When I say this, I don't just mean the typical OCD crap that most fit-types are talking about with their clean-food nonsense. Most people quoting that line are one whiff of a donut away from a Krispy Kreme bender. It's transparent and a fake attempt at keeping control over themselves.
An unhealthy relationship with food can mean binging on junk, but it can also mean an unhealthy obsession with food quality. Suddenly most of those fitness pros don't like so much like healthy people as they do victims of another eating disorder.
When I was coaching figure girls a few years ago, I made it a point not to exclude any particular kind of food. That goes against just about everything you hear in those circles - fruit is bad, dairy is bad, certain types of grains are bad. Junk food? You'll be laughed right out of there, because everybody knows that if you want to be fit and healthy chocolate and pizza must be banished.
I don't buy that. For purely mental reasons I think it's good to have some junk in there if it keeps you from going on a weekend binge. There are some people for whom that strategy will trigger the binge, and being strict may be more important for that group. On the whole though I think that demonizing foods is a mistake. The key word here is moderation.
Physically I think there's a case to be made as far as refeeding; I can't tell you how many times I've seen somebody frustrated cause she couldn't lose weight for a week or so, then go eat a few candy bars and wake up leaner the next day. Everybody focuses on the deprivation without looking at the bigger picture. Your body needs breaks too, and it responds surprisingly well to cheat days and refeeds.
There's also the fact that things like fruits and dairy, which are often thought of as "bad" diet foods, actually have benefits that these people are missing out on. Micronutrient deficiencies can develop when you restrict food too much.
I think there's something to be said for simplicity and not throwing too many rules at the problem. We like to discuss this issue in abstract terms, talking about ideals and optimals and distilling it down to key principles. In working with real people, I've found that it's a matter of keeping it simple, maximizing economy. The simple changes often have the greatest effect, so that's what you should focus on. Be mindful of portions and food quality - that is, instead of getting a pizza and a bag of Doritos, eat some beef and veggies. Switch to diet colas instead of the hard stuff. If you find yourself craving junk, then find ways to limit it, like reducing the portions or giving yourself a few hours to cheat each week.
Things like that will go a long way for most people, and it's not such an overwhelming change. Once they've made those steps and are comfortable, then you can add in additional strategies if necessary. Which is another point - if it's working and they're getting results, why change it? Don't make things any more complicated than it has to be.
From Practice CrossFit blog: http://www.gopractice.biz/ />
Mindy..
Amelia..
Brandon..
At what point did being "strong" become taboo?
Recently I spent a weekend with some of the strongest men and women on the planet, and one thing reigned through. You can never be too rich, have too much fun, or be too strong.
Somewhere down the line we began to rehab ourselves...right around the same time, we stopped getting stronger. Strength is just another term for prehab. We spend time strengthening in the now, and less time in the future saying, "if only I had". Regret is generally the mantra of Rehab patients everywhere. Somewhere down the line we made up excuses like "I don't wanna bulk up". Forgetting that to do requires large amounts of calories. So all the while we avoid weights we are continued customers of "Ben & Jerry's"...talk about "Bulk".Somewhere on our "progression" we developed huge facilities where we had tons of treadmills and machines, and we kick out folks who cause a ruckus..AKA- folks who are strong and intimidate us. Somewhere down the line we became sicker and sicker, simply, because we got weaker, and weaker...well some of us anyway.
Over the weekend I began to take note of certain things these folks did...right or wrong. Some interesting things seem to come up when looking at the mass benefits of simply getting "stronger". Below are just a few things I learned from Louie Simmons and crew, at Westside Barbell.
1. Louie's aged. Sixties I think, and still stronger than 99% of the population. He was injured a dozen times before he developed his methods which today prevent injury(someone has to pave the way with injury, so the rest of us reap the benefits). But even in his sixties, he puts guys under half his age to shame. He works out multiple times a day, all geared toward strength, speed and power. Short intense sessions. Thats it. Today, the guy is lovable as hell, but if you backed him into a corner, I wager he could tear your head off if he needed to.
2. While the nutrition I witnessed made me cringe from every angle, I must say, I bet there is a correlation between how the body will handle even the most ridiculous concoctions as long as you are testing the limits of your strength capacity frequently. To sum that up, you may not be the prettiest on the block if you eat how WS Prescibes, but even eating sub par, has alot less negative effects if you pair it with amazingly taxing strength workouts done frequently, and quickly.
3. "Being big sucks...it just makes you fight gravity more", Lou said. He went on to explain it became his goal to figure out how to make athletes as strong as possible without getting any bigger.Those of you with the "I don't wanna get bulky argument", pay special note of that. Strength does not equal size...strength equals health, calories equal size. Food makes you big, and big makes you work harder.
4. In CrossFit health is paramount, unless your a games hopeful. When you pair the simple diet strategies we RXD along with CF conditioning and strengthening you have the most well rounded program imaginable bent on delivering results in every aspect from, heath, virtuosity, appearance, psychological, and so on. Remove one part of that equation, and that gaping hole may rear it's head when you least expect it.
So what does this mean for CF'ers everywhere? Simply put, there is never a time when strength is a hindrance, so if your neglecting your work that makes you stronger, stop avoiding. If you scaling unnecessary to just go faster, quit. Stop finding excuses to miss your strength days because you don't feel as though it was as good of a workout...lift heavier. Stop finding ways to spend time on the treadmill instead of under a bar. Make sure when you finish a strength workout you feel just as spent as a met-con. Decide now weather you want to do the only substitute for strength work....rehab.
"Treadmills are for fat people" -Louie Simmons
03.13.10
Saturday 11:46am
Saturday 11:46am
Another Goal 4 You-Peachtree Road Race 2010
General Messages • Posted by FitZone Atlanta
Sunday, July 4, 2010 Online registration for the AJC Peachtree Road Race opens at 1 p.m. EDT Sunday, March 21, 2010 at ajc.com/peachtree. Read more. Click here to read online registration tips. Click here to see an example of the online registration form. Want to become a 2010 AJC Peachtree Road Race Volunteer? Volunteer registration is now open. Click here to sign up! New for 2010 - Start wave placement for the AJC Peachtree Road Race will be performance-based. Read more. View start wave time standards. New venue and number pick-up added to the Peachtree Health and Fitness Expo. Read more. Looking to train for the 2010 AJC Peachtree Road Race? Join us for In-Training for Peachtree! The program begins on April 24, 2010. Click here to register. *Note- registering for In-Training does NOT guarantee entry into the race. 
whole9life.com/2010/03/the-grain-manifesto/
The Grain Manifesto
We’re continuing our “manifesto” series (refer back to dairy and peanuts for earlier offerings) with the one topic most likely to spur controversy – grains. Our Whole30 program doesn’t include grains of any kind – no breads, cereals, pasta, rice, not even fake grains like quinoa or gluten-free substitutes. We’re about to tell you why. (Note, we are well aware that this information may run counter to everything you’ve ever been told by your parents, doctors, personal trainers, government agencies and TV advertisements. For that, however, we make no apologies… because all the people who have been selling you Whole Grains for Health all these years have been just. Plain. Wrong. We understand if this makes you kind of angry. It makes us angry too.. but that’s a topic for another post.)
Why We Don’t Eat Grains
A. Grains provoke an inflammatory response in the gut
Lectins are specialized proteins found in many plants and foods, but are found in high concentration in grains (particularly wheat), legumes (particularly soy), and dairy. The most commonly referenced grain lectin is called “gluten”, but there are many others which are found even in pseudo-grains like quinoa. Lectins serve many biological functions in animals, but foods with high concentrations of lectins are harmful even if consumed in moderate amounts.
Lectins are hardy proteins that do not break down easily, and are resistant to stomach acid and digestive enzymes. They migrate through your digestive tract largely intact, and disrupt the intestinal membrane, damaging cells and initiating a cascade of events leading to eventual cell death. (Translation: lectins destroy the cells that line your intestines, leading to small “microperforations” or tiny holes in your intestinal lining.) These holes allow intact or nearly intact proteins, bacteria and other foreign substances to cross into the bloodstream – where they do not belong. As the immune system notices foreign substances in the body, it responds and attacks. The immune response can manifest in an unlimited number of conditions (not just in the digestive tract!) commonly referred to as “auto-immune” in nature.
It’s important to note that these cautions are not just critical for those with a diagnosed Celiac condition. These negative downstream effects happen to everyone who eats grains, to various degrees.
B. Grains spike insulin levels
Grains pack a whopping amount of carbohydrates in a very small package. As most grains are also heavily processed (yes, even whole grains) they are broken down into blood sugar (glucose) in your body very quickly. A high amount of ingested carbohydrate broken down very fast leads to a spike in blood sugar. The body, demanding homeostasis, then releases a massive dose of a hormone called insulin to pull blood sugar levels back down. This is often referred to as an “insulin spike”.
When too much blood sugar is present in the system, your body quickly runs out of places to store it as useful energy, and will store any excess as body fat. In addition, when too much insulin is present in the system, the cells in your body become desensitized to the hormonal “message” insulin is trying to send. Since the message isn’t getting through, your pancreas is prompted to release even more insulin when your body doesn’t need it. Finally, chronically high insulin levels lead to a condition in which your body has trouble releasing the energy already stored in your cells. This is a bad place to be. If (via a diet high in carbohydrates) this pattern continues, insulin levels continue to rise, fat stores continue to grow and the body becomes completely incapable of responding to its own directions.
C. Grains have an acidifying effect on the body
A net acid-producing diet promotes bone de-mineralization (i.e. osteopenia and osteoporosis), and systemic inflammation. Grains are one of the highest acid-producing food groups. By replacing grains and grain-containing processed foods with plenty of green vegetables and fruits, the body comes back into acid/base balance (and a more positive calcium balance). Recent research out of Tufts University has also shown that a more alkaline diet preserves muscle mass. We like muscle mass.
D. Grains are “empty calories”
All grains – things like oatmeal, pasta, breads and cereals – have two things in common. They are calorically dense, and nutritionally meager. A small portion of grains packs a whopping amount of calories, almost all in the form of carbohydrates. All those calories, however, contain a miserly amount of vitamins, minerals and phytonutrients (also called phytochemicals). Compare the calories, carbohydrates and vitamin profile of two large slices of whole grain bread (100 grams) to one cup of chopped, cooked broccoli (184 grams – nearly twice the volume). (Nutritional stats from NutritionData.com)
Note that we’re not saying there is nothing good to be found in grains. They do contain vitamins and minerals in various proportions and amounts. But the serious down sides of grains far outweigh any potential health benefits. Bottom line – there is NOTHING found in grains that you can’t get from a better source with NO down sides (like vegetables, fruits, nuts and seeds).
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