You are what you eat

“You are what you eat”. We’ve all heard the saying from mom and dad over the years, but what does it really mean? To fully understand this, we first have to look at how the human body works. I won’t bore you with specifics or the science behind it, but here’s the short version:

Food enters your digestive tract through your mouth and goes down your throat into your stomach. There, enzymes dissolve your food and it passes into the small intestine where the nutrients can then be absorbed into the body. Nutrients are typically delivered through one of 3 MACRONUTRIENTS (macros for short). These are

• Fats (9 calories / gram)
• Proteins (4 calories / gram)
• Carbohydrates (4 calories / gram)

Macros are (arguably) the most important part of your diet. If you do not assess the amount of each that you are putting into your body, you will never know how your body is working, and thus cannot tune it. Some people even think that Macros are the only thing that matters, hence the phrase #IIFYM: “If It Fits Your Macros”. I don’t agree with this personally, I don’t think you should eat a giant piece of triple fudge cake just because you’re down on fats for the week. Cake is still f’in cake. There is an app called “Nutritionist +” that is currently free for android and Apple devices that can help you keep track of your macros. It has a ton of great features such as a scanner that reads bar codes and brings up the macros of the things you are already eating. I suggest going through you average day and scanning in everything that you eat (or searching for it if it doesn’t have a bar code) without any changes. This will give you a base line of where your Macros are, so that you can then make the necessary changes. There are tons of philosophies on this, I’m just going to share two diet plans that have worked well for me.

The Balanced Plan:

This is the plan that will work best for most Americans (because we can’t escape the massive amounts of carbs/sugars in our western diet). It allows for slightly more wiggle room on your carbohydrate intake. A typical balanced Macro plan would look something like 40% Protein / 35% carbs / 25% fat. Using the nutritionist app that I spoke about earlier, you can find out roughly how many calories your body needs to sustain it’s current weight. You can then consume slightly less to lose weight, or slightly more to gain weight. Someone who wants to gain weight via muscle will need to consume more protein, where as someone who is training for an endurance event such as a marathon or triathlon will want a slightly higher carbohydrate intake. A simple google search of “macro nutrients for (your goal IE fat loss, running, building muscle, etc.) ” will show you a number of great plans that people have put together. Then just track the Macros of the food you eat and make sure that you stay within your range.

The “No way in hell that actually works” Plan:

Ketosis (follow the link for an in depth description) is basically the re-tuning of your body to burn fat for energy instead of carbohydrates. Many people will remember the Atkins diet that was so popular some years back, which was a similar concept. Basically it goes like these: Cut out all carbohydrates from your diet, up your levels of heathy fats (because that is going to be your fuel at this point) and consume enough protein for whatever it is that you’re doing. Examples of what people may need:

• Body builders, high protein (~1-2g per lbs of body mass per day)
• Runners, active people, mid levels of protein (~.75-1g per lbs of mass per day)
• Low activity persons (~.3-.5g per lbs of mass per day)

My daily Macro intake (currently) is around:

• ~300 grams of fat
• ~50-100 grams of protein
• ~20 grams of net carbs

Many people get the wrong idea when they hear about this. I AM NOT SAYING that you can go eat mcdonalds burgers and lose weight because they have a lot of fat in them. Your fats should be all healthy fats. Coconut milk, fatty steaks, grass fed no salt butter, coconut oil, chicken, organic bacon, avocado, eggs, etc. These are healthy fats that your body can use for energy and not get gummed up. If you are going to Keto-adapt (switch to a Keto diet) you should stay away from; white bread, processed foods, soda – which you should be avoiding anyways because it’s terrible for you, white rice, processed cereals, sugars, etc. Read the labels on your food, and use common sense.

No matter what you decide to do, make sure you stick to it. Anything worth doing, is worth doing whole heartedly. If you jump into something like a lifestyle change where you want to alter how you think, look, act, and feel, but you only “kind of want to try it”, you might as well just sit and watch the beach body commercials and hope it happens to you. It won’t. Getting into shape takes time, planning, work, but most of all it takes consistency. It takes doing the same things, the right things, every day. That doesn’t mean you can’t have a cheat meal once in a while! If you lose 5 pounds your first week of not drinking soda, have a coke. If you love pasta and you dropped three pant sizes after Keto-adapting, go reward yourself with some spaghetti.

LETS GET TO WORK

I purposely put diet first in this section because I’m a firm believer that no matter how hard you work in the gym, if you eat fast food and sodas every day, you will not see the results. That said, you have to bust your ass in order to get that six pack regardless of what you eat, so here we go.

In this section we are going to break down exercising into two sub categories, strength training and cardio. Yes, you read that right, YOU are going to start doing cardio. We will break down into smaller muscle groups, as well as direct some of the science behind lifting in order to make the most out of your time invested.

Strength Training:

Strength training is very important when whipping your body into shape. You burn almost as many calories lifting weights as you do during light cardio, which means that you are actually burning fat on top of building muscle. Whats more, the more muscle mass you have on your body, the higher you resting burn rate will be (meaning it will take more calories for your body to function, thus you will burn more fat just being alive throughout you daily routine). Also as your muscle mass grows, the fat that you do have will be stretched thinner, easier to break down, and will be less noticeable. The best way that I have found to build muscle is to get a good workout in, then give the body three days of rest. Now this sounds great, working out only two days a week, but it simply isn’t enough. That is why we train MUSCLE GROUPS Bottom line: Build muscle, even if you’re a girl.

Cardio:

Science: Burning calories is literally the energy burned moving your body from A to B using a force. From a science standpoint, WORK = FORCE x DISTANCE. From this equation, you can see there is no time or speed, meaning that if someone walks a mile, or runs a mile, they should burn the same amount of calories. We know this isn’t true, but the amount of calories burned is actually not far off (about a 30%-50% difference). What this means is that it doesn’t matter if you can’t go out there and run 2 miles to get your cardio in, just run what you can, walk when you need to. As long as you get out there. If you have bad knees, use an elliptical. If you want to get a faster burn, jump on a rowing machine. As always, if you have any question whether you are healthy enough to start a new fitness routine, talk to your doctor first. I am not a doctor and cannot give you guidance from that aspect.

Walking/Running: You typically burn around around 50 calories per mile for every hundred pounds you weigh. (Example: 200lbs person walks 2 miles = 200 calories burned) and it takes 3500 calories to burn 1 lbs of fat. This does not take into account elevation changes (you obviously burn more calories running uphill) and other factors that can help burn off the pounds.

THIS SECTION STILL UNDER CONSTRUCTION

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