Category: Nutrition

When I am talking with people about getting fit with Tony Horton’s P90X and Insanity, I always tell them that, while working out is very important to building your body, the most important thing to get straight is your diet.

Many times, one of the first questions they ask me is, “What about drinking? Do I need to quit drinking?”

Most fitness professionals I’ve read or spoken with would unhesitatingly answer “yes” to that question.

Sure, “yes” is the easy answer. Of course, you are trying to get fit. You should stop drinking. Drinking is bad for you. I know there are studies that show that one or two drinks a day are actually better for you than none, but do we really stop at one or two? My guess is that if you are asking me if you need to quit drinking, you probably go beyond one or two drinks quite regularly.

Let me tell you about my relationship with alcohol during my quest for fitness.

1) I need a drink to turn off.

There was a time in my life when my drinking life consisted of getting hammered at every opportunity, and, lemme tell ya, I had a lot of opportunities. So, I quit drinking totally for 18 months. It was not hard for me to do that. I decided to quit and I did.

But here’s the problem with that. I can’t slow down. I need to be on all the time. I am either working for money or working out or working for fun. I gotta be doing something.

In order for me to turn off, I need a drink, sometimes two, sometimes a few more than that.

My drinking is currently nowhere near what it was before my 18-month dry spell. That kind of drinking was stupid and self-destructive, not to mention expensive. But I do have a drink or two quite often, and I will have more than that a few times a year.

2) Drinking often makes me snack.

This is probably the biggest problem I have with drinking while trying to get fit. I can have bagel dogs in the freezer for months, but let me have a few drinks, and suddenly I gotta eat a couple of them. And a pizza. And some wings.

Drinking leads me down a path of very little resistance to many high-calorie foods. Those foods are not evil in and of themselves, but when it’s 11:30 at night and I’m packing away an extra 1000 to 1500 calories? That’s a bad idea.

3) Drinking can disrupt my sleep.

I’ve found that when I drink too much, I often wake up in the middle of the night, every few hours. I don’t feel rested the next morning.

Sleep is a very important factor in the fitness equation. You gotta give your body time to recover from the pounding you are giving it, and sleep is that recovery time. So anything that disrupts sleep should be avoided.

4) Hangovers make me not want to work out.

Fortunately, as I said above, I only rarely drink to the point that I may be hungover the next day, so this is not a major issue for me. In fact, on those occasions when I do plan to overindulge in adult beverages, I do not plan to work out the next day anyway.

5) I tend to drink vodka, dark beer, and red wine.

Vodka and my homemade limoncello, primarily. Vodka has no carbs. I like vanilla vodka with club soda. (Probably a girlie drink — my wife turned me on to it — but it’s tasty.) My homemade limoncello has a lot less sugar in it than that crap you buy at stores. And it’s authentic — I got it from an old man in Sorrento, Italy, the birthplace of limoncello. Everyone there apparently makes his own.

When I am out, which is often, because I go to see a lot of live bands in bars, I usually don’t drink. When I do drink, I have a dark beer or stout or red wine. Those are drinks I enjoy and they do not encourage fast drinking. I’ll only have a couple, because I need to drive home. If I am at a long event, I feel free to have more than a couple drinks, but never indulge to the point of intoxication.

With all these considerations factored in, I have still managed to get into the best shape of my life, all the while enjoying adult beverages.

Do you need to quit drinking to get fit? I don’t think so. Quitting might be the best way to go, but I am a regular guy who is trying to be in shape without being  too obsessive about this fitness stuff. And that means I’m gonna drink.

You may find that you need to quit for a bit in order to get yourself on track.

If you’re a beer drinker, you may want to switch to a low-carb beer, or to carb-free distilled spirits.

Or maybe you are cool with just quitting drinking and getting on with your life without alcohol.

Each of us needs to find our own balance. I’ve found mine. How about you?

Never underestimate the power of a good recovery drink. What? You only drink water or some kinda sports drink after your workout? Hmmmmm….

A recovery drink has some important attributes.

First of all, your body needs protein. If you worked out correctly, you broke down some muscle, so you need to build it back up. To do that, you need to ingest some protein.

Secondly, you need some carbs. Not only do you need them to replenish the glycogen stores you depeleted during the workout, but you also want to spike your insulin. Why’s that? Because insulin does lots of things in your body, and one of them is facilitating muscle-building.

“Okay,” you say. “I need protein and carbs. Why don’t I just eat a recovery meal of steak and potatoes?”

Well, that is fine, if you want to do that, I suppose, but I gotta tell you, I am not really in the mood to either make or eat a big meal right after I work out. If you think you’ll just go out to eat, consider that there is only a 45-minute window after your workout that is prime time for a recovery drink/meal, so by the time you shower, get to a restaurant, and get your food, well, you are likely past that 45-minute window.

But let me tell you something else about the recovery drink I use. I love it. It is one of my favorite things to eat/drink. So the prospect of having that recovery drink after my workout is sometimes a great motivator on those days when maybe I am not so inclined to get a workout in.

My recovery drink is a protein shake composed of

• 8-12 ounces of unsweetened almond milk (my local grocery chain, HEB, has their own brand that is really good)
• 4 or 5 dates, and
• a heaping scoop of a vanilla-flavored low carb whey protein powder (Optimum Nutrition makes my favorite).

The dates don’t all chop up in the blender, so there is a little spoon action at the end of the drink, and, man is it good!

Whatever you choose to use for your recovery drink, don’t skip it — it’s the most important meal of the day.

Back in 2007 I realized I was fat and out of shape. I’d been that way for a long time, but in 2007, I finally realized it. But I’ve covered this story in my last post.

Having then realized that I was fat and out of shape, I set about to change that the only way I knew how: Calorie restriction and walking.

Sure, I’d tried low carb, Somercizing, low fat, you name it, but calorie restriction seemed to be the only answer for me. Plus a little exercise.

So I ordered Nutrisystem and started walking. My walking goal was 10k steps per day.

I lost 55 pounds in about 7 months!

Great. Of course, I could not keep up a calorie restricted diet forever, so I added steps, reaching for a daily goal of 15k, and sometimes even surpassing 30k.

But my weight crept up again. I gained back 15 of the 55 pounds I’d lost. Still not bad, and I rationalized to myself that I was older and could not lose weight as I had been able to do in the past.

Then my brother convinced me to try Tony Horton’s P90X.

Wow! It was tough, too tough for me to complete all the  workouts at first, but I continued through it, and continue working out with Beachbody products, including One-On-One and Insanity to this day. I am down 25 pounds since I started back in February 2010, and have put on a lot of muscle, so I am probably down 30-35 pounds of fat.

Much of that fat loss has to do with the diet I went on when I started P90X. It was a lot of calories — up to 2400 per day, although I shot for 2000 — but I completely cut out products with added sugar, focusing more on protein as 50% of my caloric intake, with carbs and fat at 20-30% each.

After about 60 days of P90X I pretty much leveled out with my fat loss. I moved to a primal diet where I didn’t count calories. I think this was problematic, because I was eating a lot, and taking in more calories that you burn is a surefire way to gain weight, which in my case meant gaining fat. As I said, I had pretty much plateaued, so my situation was not dire, but I sure did want to lose a few more pounds of fat from my gut.

Still, though, I stuck with my diet and workout plan.

Then one day, I came to the realization that I was not meeting my goals. I was doing great, I weighed a lot less than I used to, and I was in possibly the best shape of my life, but that excess gut fat was still there. I had to change something, try something different. Enter Insanity.

I had put off Insanity because I have an arthritic left knee. I felt that I was injuring it with the P90X aerobics and could only imagine what Insanity would do to it. But I finally told myself that I had hurt the knee before and cured it by quitting aerobics — I would try Insanity and, if it hurt my knee, I’d just quit, go back to resistance training.

I’m in my fourth week of Insanity and my knee feels great! I can still tell it’s arthritic, but no continual throbbing pain as I sometimes felt when P90X was my sole workout program.

I should note that my knee does not / did not hurt after I got it warmed up and into the exercise. It never felt weak. The pain would hit later, and it was really more annoying than anything.

My waist size is slowly moving downward again.

So the point? You have fitness goals. You think you are doing all the right things, but you are not reaching your goals. As you get older, you may tend to just tell yourself, “Well, I guess I just can’t do it anymore. I’m old and that means I’m going to be out of shape.” WRONG!

If you are not achieving your fitness goals, don’t give up. Try something different!

On a low-fat diet? Try low-carb. Doing P90X? Try Insanity.

Don’t give in to rationalizations that explain your failure to achieve your goals. Continue to strive for them by changing what you’re doing. You may be very surprised by how successful you will be!

How do you know if you are fat? This seems like a silly question, right? Look at the scale. Look in a mirror. Pretty simple.

You might think so, but so many of us are blind to our own shortcomings. You’ve surely observed the people in your life who rail about the actions of others, when you know damn well that the one doing the railing does the exact thing they are railing about!

I’m sure there is a psychological term for this, but I’m not a psychologist, so I dunno what it is. I only know this phenomenon exists and that it quite likely exists in all of us.

Even in ourselves. Yes, we are not immune.

When I was fat, I only had an inkling that I was fat. I was buying XXL t-shirts, and I wondered why the manufacturers were making shirts smaller these days. I bought increasingly larger waist sized pants. I looked at my friends and wondered how they could let themselves go like that.

You might think that larger sized clothing is a key clue to weight gain. Well, sure it is. I knew I was gaining weight. But was I fat? After all, I had always worn size XL shirts. XXL is only one size larger. As for the pants, I can’t tell you what I was thinking. When I realized that size 42 was now getting tight, I started to wonder.

All that evidence, but still no action on my part.

What finally got me to thinking about my weight was my blood pressure. My doctor had put me on one medication, then he added another. This made me really nervous, because I do not like taking medication. I believe that drug companies are only trying to make you dependent on them — not cure you — so I was not really willing to be a participant in their profit motives. And that’s not to even mention any side effects, documented or not, those drugs may have.

So I was finally thinking about losing weight, but still not taking action. I had looked around. Everyone my age was fat. I supposed, perhaps, that was just the way life goes.

Then my wife and I went on a cruise. I am notoriously shy in front of a camera, preferring to shoot rather than be shot, but, of course, on vacation, photos happen. Wow. I saw the photos and immediately ordered Nutrisystem.

That started me on a path to fitness that I doubt I’ll ever veer from.

So, to answer the question, “How do you know if you are fat?” It’s rather easy. Face reality. If you are facing reality, you will be able to see if you are fat.

My friend Ken told me something once that has always stuck with me: “If your gut sticks out farther than your chest, you’re too fat.”

Put on a t-shirt and stand straight up. Is your gut sticking out farther than your chest?