Category: Nutrition

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The most important meal of the day

My brother posted a question on Facebook the other day. He often posts questions to spark discussion, and they often do just that. The question he posted the other day was “Trick Question: What is the most important meal of the day?”

Of course, people chimed in with “Breakfast.” WRONG! (Should have known that from the “trick question” hint.)

Without going any further into the wrong answers, let’s get to the right answer. The most important meal of the day is the one right after you work out.

(Yes, this does assume that you work out. If you don’t work out, I dunno, maybe breakfast is right ;=)

What is so important about the post-workout meal? For about 45 minutes after your workout, your body is primed to start repairing itself, building muscle.

Do not waste that opportunity!

What should the post-workout meal consist of? Lots of carbs and some protein. I’ve read 3:1 ratio of carbs to protein. I usually go with about a 2:1 ratio, with 60 grams of carbs and 30 grams of protein. Specifically, my meal is a protein shake composed of

  • 8-12 ounces of unsweetened almond milk (I prefer Blue Diamond brand)
  • 4 dates or an equivalent carbload of organic honey or dried figs, and
  • a heaping scoop of a vanilla-flavored low carb whey protein powder (Optimum Nutrition makes my favorite).

I gotta tell ya, when I put the dates in there, wow, that is seriously one of my favorite things to eat/drink. Delicious.

You could eat a meal of lean meat or fish and pasta. I am personally not in the mood to do a lot of cooking right after I workout, but if you are, go for it! A protein shake does the trick for me, and every once in a while, I’ll have some fat-free Greek yogurt with honey in it. Tasty.

So, that’s the upshot. If you work out, the most important meal of the day is the meal right after you exercise, so, if you have to skip one, don’t skip that one!

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Lap band? Really?

A friend of mine is considering a laparoscopic adjustable gastric band — more commonly called a lap band — because he just can’t lose the weight any other way.

Really?

My friend and I have had discussions on many occasions about his obesity. He can’t exercise, he says — he’s too fat. I’ll grant you, he does have a problem back that has required several surgeries, but, still, can you at least give some kind of exercise a shot for a couple months? Answer: no.

Fine. I know that your body composition is 70% to 80% determined by what  you eat. So how about you get on a primal or low-carb or low-calorie diet and see how that goes?

Tried it. Just can’t do it.

WHAT?

Seriously, this guy — and he is my friend, I love him like a brother, which is probably why I’m so hard on him — is clinically obese, obviously because he has an eating problem. He just cannot control himself.

But he’s an adult with the freedom to choose how to live his life. Why would he choose to continue to eat himself to death?

I don’t know why I’m asking you, because he doesn’t know either. All he knows is that he has tried everything and failed, so now he’s probably headed into surgery.

I cannot even imagine doing that. I mean, I was obese. Okay, not as overweight as my friend, but I was seriously fat. Then one day something clicked inside me and I became determined to lose weight. Then I became determined to get into shape. Click. Click.

Many people are clickless. They know what they have to do, but they just can’t do it.

I wish my friend luck with his lap band. I have another friend who had one installed, and it worked for her. She lost a ton of weight and is living a fuller, happier life now, thanks to the lap band.

Fine. I don’t get it, but I always say that we all need to test ourselves and choose our own paths to fitness. If your path involves a lap band, I wish you well.

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Too much cardio?

I’ve been protecting my knees, particularly my arthritic left knee, so about two months ago I stopped doing cardio. Sure, I could do some low-impact cardio, but I’m not convinced that cardio is all that important.

Don’t get me wrong. I do think getting the blood moving quickly through the body from time to time is a good thing to do, but I think cardio is highly overrated as a fitness practice.

Cardio, after all, is just another way to work your muscles.

It’s not like your heart or lungs are going to get any bigger. You’ve heard of a physiological problem called “enlarged heart” right? That’s a disease, not a fitness goal. Your heart and lungs are as big as they should be, and you’re not going to make them any bigger.

So what happens when you do cardio, then? Why do you seem to have increased heart and lung capacity?

Well, you are making your muscles more efficient. That’s why your heart and lungs can work more easily, because your muscles are better able to put the oxygen they receive to use, thus easing the burden on your cardiopulmonary system.

Now if you buy into the idea that more movement means more calorie burn — and there is no reason I know of not to buy into that idea — then you may perceive that more cardio is good if you are trying to lose fat. I agree.

But of all the things I do to work out, cardio is the least fun for me. I don’t dig all the jumping around. Sometimes, yeah. Like this weekend I actually decided to give the knee a test and did the Kenpo Cardio X from the P90X Plus series. I had not done this workout in a couple months, so I expected to fall pretty flat, but, you know what? Nope. It went well, one of the best iterations of that workout for me.

I suppose I was okay with the workout because I’ve continued to work my legs, arms, chest, even without doing cardio, so the efficiencies my muscles have realized continue to be in place. Basically, I’m staying fit.

As I was reading through Tom Venuto’s post on too much cardio, I notice that he makes mention of the different schools of thought on weight loss, and it comes back to the premise of my last post. You gotta do what’s right for you.

Here’s Tom’s conclusion in the article, which makes plenty of sense: “What you should avoid is doing hours and hours of cardio every day in an attempt to lose weight, while slashing calories to very low levels at the same time. That is worse than starvation dieting alone. Your goal is to find the right balance between burning calories and cutting calories and avoid extremes on either side [emphasis added].”

This makes so much sense. If you are doing a lot of cardio, you need extra energy and also the building materials to repair your body, so, of course, you need to eat appropriately! Find the right balance.

Now, having agreed with Mr. Venuto, I also have to say: Too much cardio? Whatever.

I think it’s interesting to read about such things, and I think it’s necessary to learn all you can about fitness and nutrition, but as a regular guy or gal, i.e. not an elite athlete or bodybuilder, don’t get wrapped around the axle about everything you read. Don’t use “too much cardio lowers your metabolism” as an excuse to skip a workout. Do use it as an excuse to examine your current fitness practices. Are you feeling rundown all the time? You probably need to eat more. Simple. Hey, maybe you are doing too much cardio. Substitute in some resistance training.

Set goals and work toward those goals. Continue to learn what science says is right and implement what your body says is right. Fitness is a lifestyle.

Do you love cardio? Do it! Do you love eating less. Do it! Resistance training? Do it! Love ’em all? Do ’em!

But, dammit, do something. There are no magic pills.

It really boils down to this for me: Do I feel better while I’m reaching my fitness goals? All good. Not feeling so great or not reaching the goals? I need to make some adjustments.

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Screw what the “experts” say. How do you feel when you eat carbs?

There is so much conflicting data out there about carbs. I’ve read so many books and absorbed so much information about paleo diets, nutrient timing, general nutrition, and my conclusion is that you really need to gauge your own body’s reaction to carbs.

Of course, that is the answer for everything: How does your body react?

Studies about human nutrition are based on generalities. Often they are not perfectly scientific, because it is just impossible to achieve a perfect environment where only one factor is changed when you are dealing with human nutrition.

Imagine trying to figure out if olive oil is good for humans or not. How can you do that?

So many of the studies are so general in nature, and so subjective, that we are fed a lot of misinformation.

The French drink five times as much wine as Americans and their levels of heart disease are five times lower than Americans’, so the wine must be the answer! This may be true, but there is no way to know if it’s the wine or not. Maybe the fact that they eat 50% more cheese than Americans is the answer.

The studies about carbs are about the same. Even if there were a way to show that carbs generally are great for the population at large, better than fat as an energy source, how would you know if it’s good specifically for you?

TRY IT!

I will use myself as an example.

I’ve gone without carbs for days, just to see what that did to me. I ended up with pretty good energy, but I felt like hell. My eyes burned, my mood was terrible.

On the other hand, I also know that when I eat a lot of simple carbs — say, around 75 to 100 grams at a sitting — I end up feeling sluggish and unable to keep my eyes open about 20 minutes later.

So I know pretty much my body’s reaction to carbs, and I consume them appropriately, based on what I know about my body, not based on what some expert or study has told me.

How about you? How do you feel when you consume carbs? Do you know?

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Get started with good nutrition when you are young

So many things we learn as we get older. It takes a while to get out of shape, but it all starts when you are young. For me it was around when I turned 25 or so. That’s when I started putting on fat.

I’d always been skinny — and I do mean skinny — when I was a kid. When I went into the military, I weighed 119. 5’10”, 119 pounds. Skinny.

At my peak weight, or at least the highest number I ever saw on the scale, I weighed 235. Yes, in 27 years I had doubled my weight.

Wow.

As a military member, I was forced to be somewhat fit. I had a maximum weight. I had to pass fitness tests. Nothing too rigorous, but it was something.

I was a runner for a while. I ran a couple half-marathons — 13.1 miles — at an 8-minute pace. Not bad.

I lifted weights for a while, but that didn’t really hold my interest. And while I enjoyed distance running, I lost interest in that, too. Then when I tried to get back into it years later, my joints couldn’t handle it.

Even without the exercise I was doing, though, I could have pretty much avoided the fat gain if only I had watched what I ate.

Don’t get me wrong. I thought I was watching what I ate. Sort of.

I went on diets, tried different ones to try to lose weight. I was a vegetarian for three years. I SomerSized. I did Atkins. I tried the Cabbage Soup thing. Low fat. Calorie restriction. I even tried some stupid rice diet that I am pretty sure messed me up for life. I lost weight on all of those diets, but the pounds always came back.

I couldn’t stick with them, or, in the case of vegetarianism, I ate so much fat — i.e. so many calories — on that diet that there was no way I’d stay healthy. (Well, the fact is that I only became a vegetarian to keep myself from eating fast food. To this day, I only very rarely visit fast food restaurants. IT WORKED!)

I think I have good eating habits now, but how much easier would my life have been if I had only developed those good habits when I was a kid? I suppose I would have missed out on a wealth of experiences, had I done that. I would not have been through the fitness ordeals that probably made me a better person.

But, still, when I see a young person latching onto the principles that will keep him or her fit throughout life, it makes me wish I’d known then what I know now.