Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss?

If you just started an exercise plan or are getting your butt in gear by working out more consistently, you may need to change how you fuel your body to get the most out of it. Common nutrition mistakes such as drinking your calories or eating too much post workout may be the reason why you can't lose weight (or inches) even though you're giving it your all. Although getting fit isn't just about the scale, it's still an important factor, so we'll break down 5 common problems—and how to fix them—to get you back on the path to results. 
 

Problem 1: You have no idea how many calories you're really eating

It's common to think more exercise = more calories. But if you're trying to lose weight, you may be adding on as many calories as you're burning—or more. "Think about the food that you're eating to fuel your workouts and ask yourself how it fits into your total calorie allotment for the day," advises Felicia Stoler, MS, RD, a nutritionist and exercise physiologist. Just because you hit the cardio hard today doesn't automatically mean you can supersize dinner. "Most people have no idea how much they're really eating." To get honest with yourself about your calorie needs, write down everything you eat for a day (yes, even that handful of nuts you're holding right now) or use a site like MyFitnessPal®. You'll probably be surprised by your final number.

Problem 2: You're hydrating with a sports drink

If you're doing a hard, prolonged workout, then hydrating with a sports drink can be a good thing, but for your standard, at-home program, you're usually better off with water. Sports drinks contain about 50 calories per 8 oz., and 14 grams of sugar (about 3.5 teaspoons). Your body will probably burn though that in an hour-long workout, but then you won't be mobilizing fat stores as much. As for the electrolytes, yes, an hour-long program depletes them, but it's nothing a good recovery drink can't fix.

Problem 3: You're addicted to that pre-workout snack

As long as they're getting enough balanced calories in their diet, the average person should have all the glycogen stores they need to get through an hour-long workout, even first thing in the morning. Eating something beforehand might give your performance a little boost, but if you skip it you're better off—teaching your body how to mobilize fat stores for energy (just like in Problem 2). The exception to this is if you "bonk" or run out of glycogen and blood sugar partway through your workout. When this happens, you don't just feel a little pooped; you feel as though you've just run into a brick wall. If this happens, 50–100 calories of simple carbs, 10 minutes before you start, should fix it. Half a banana would be ideal. If you're looking for a boost with minimal calories, Beverly International Up Lift and Fast Up  or a strong cup of coffee are three great ergogenic aids.

Problem 4: You're eliminating all carbs

So many exercisers try to eliminate starchy carbs—including whole grains and starchy vegetables like potatoes and corn—when they're trying to lose weight. But it's water weight you're losing, not fat. Not only that, the strategy can backfire. Depleting carbs from your diet means that you have to tap into your lean protein stores for energy, which ultimately can decrease your lean muscle mass. Muscle is critical for upping your metabolism—and burning more calories even while you sit around—so you may see your weight plateau. The lesson? Don't be afraid to incorporate some whole grains and starchy veggies into your daily diet.

Problem 5: You're not working out hard enough

If you notice you come home from a run only to find that you're noticeably hungrier, consider upping the intensity of that run. A recent study in the International Journal of Obesity looked at sedentary, overweight men who either worked out at a moderate pace for 30 minutes or completed a high-intensity interval workout for the same amount of time.1 Those who did the intense interval exercise ate less at a subsequent meal, as well as the next day. Not every workout should be an intense interval session, but fitting in one or two a week can help turn the dial down on your appetite.

Eliminate these problems and see if your weight loss gets back on track.  If you still need help, consider making an appointment with one of our nutrition specialists here at PROMATx Health Club.  Get your life back on track!!

Grilled Tilapia with Tomatoes and Kale Recipe

(Makes 1 serving) 

Make flaky, delicious tilapia in minutes with this easy recipe and save the seasoning blend to use in other recipes for chicken, fish, and vegetables.

Total Time: 17 min.
Prep Time: 10 min.
Cooking Time: 7 min.

 




Ingredients:
1    1 (4-oz.) raw tilapia fillet
2    ½ tsp. Italian Seasoning Blend (recipe below)
3    Nonstick cooking spray
4    1 clove garlic, finely chopped
5    2½ cups chopped fresh kale
6    1½ cups cherry tomatoes, cut in half (or 2 medium tomatoes, chopped)
7    1 tsp. extra-virgin olive oil

Preparation:
1.    Season both sides of tilapia with Italian Seasoning; set aside.
2.    Heat large nonstick skillet, lightly coated with spray, over medium heat.
3.    Add garlic and kale; cook, stirring frequently, for 1 to 2 minutes.
4.    Place tilapia fillet on top of kale mixture; cook, covered, for 1 minute.
5.    Gently turn tilapia over. Top with tomatoes; cook for 3 to 4 minutes, or until tilapia is cooked through and flakes easily when tested with a fork.
6.    Place kale, tilapia, and tomatoes on a serving plate; drizzle with oil
 
Tip: The Italian Seasoning Blend can be stored in an airtight container for use in the future.
 
Italian Seasoning Blend
1    4 Tbsp. dried parsley, crushed
2    4 tsp. dried onion flakes
3    2 tsp. dried basil, crushed
4    1 tsp. ground oregano
5    1 tsp. ground thyme
6    1 tsp. garlic powder
7    1 tsp. sea salt
8    ¼ tsp. ground black pepper
9.    Place all ingredients in a medium bowl; mix well.
 

Nutritional Information: (per serving)
Calories - 279
Fat - 8g
Saturated Fat - 2g
Cholesterol - 57mg
Sodium - 195mg
Carbs - 27g
Fiber - 6g
Sugar - 6g
Protein - 31 g

Beat the Second-Week Slump

Last week, you were feeling gung ho and ready to tackle your weight-loss goals head-on. This week? Not so much. You're tired, you're hungry, and you're aching in places you didn't even know existed. But before you lose all motivation, take heart—the second week is supposed to suck. In week two, your body is generally in a state of severe breakdown. After all, you're eating less, going hard, and your body needs some time to adapt to your new lifestyle. Here are a few slump-proof strategies for pushing through Week 2.

Don't Panic if You Plateau

You've busted your butt all week and been downright virtuous about your diet. So when you hop on the scale, you're ready to see the results of your hard work. But here's the rub: During Week 2, it's not unusual to get stuck or even gain a pound or two. "As your body adjusts to exercise, cortisol—a performance-enhancing stress hormone—is released," says Edwards. "Part of cortisol's function is to promote water retention as a defense mechanism for survival. This causes you to feel puffy and gain some weight."

So, let's recap. You're achy, you're starving, and the number on the scale is now moving in the wrong direction. It's no wonder you feel discouraged and are tempted to bail altogether. But hang in there, because your body will eventually get the memo. It's a necessary part of the process. Sometime between Weeks 3 and 6, once you adapt to your exercise program, you stop producing cortisol and flush the excess water, which leads to you feeling and looking fitter, and losing some weight.

Track Progress, Not Just Weight Loss

While there's plenty of science behind your plateau, that doesn't make it any less frustrating. So when the number on the scale isn't budging, how can you tell if you're still on the right track? Start recording your healthy habits—whether that means keeping a workout log or posting Instagram shots of your meals—so you can see all the changes you've made. "Track the behavior, not the outcome," says Joshua Klapow, PhD, Chief Behavioral Scientist for the health incentive company ChipRewards and author of Living SMART: 5 Essential Skills to Change your Health Habits Forever.  According to Klapow, “track the food you eat, the steps you take, and the calories you burn, and make those your markers of success." Seeing these changes can give you just enough motivation to power through this week's plateau, and Klapow says that's all that matters: "Think of motivation like a tank of gas. The tank doesn't need to be full to move, but you can't run on empty."

Focus on the Process

Sure, your biggest motivation might be squeezing into smaller jeans. But this week, it can help to focus on all the touchy-feely stuff instead. "Reframe the way you think about working out so it becomes your escape, your path to wellness, something you do for you," says Kim Chronister, PsyD, a health psychologist and author of The Psychology Behind Fitness Motivation. "Our thoughts can powerfully affect our ability to tackle a new weight-loss routine." If you're too focused on the scale, a second-week plateau may feel like a huge failure; if you focus on the "me time" you get while working out, you'll achieve that no matter what.

If that doesn't help, just acknowledge that this week won't be your favorite, and keep on trucking. "Belief in the process helps at this stage," says Edwards. "You cannot make a total body composition change without suffering through a period where all of your goals seem like they are going backwards." He compares it to scaling a mountain or running an Ironman—miserable while you're in the thick of it, but insanely rewarding once you're done. So hang in there, because it'll be next week soon enough.

How Music Can Boost Your Workout

Making music — and not just listening to it — while exercising makes the exercise easier, a remarkable new experiment finds, suggesting that the human love of music may have evolved, in part, to ease physical effort.

Researchers and exercisers have long known, of course, that listening to music alters the experience of exercising. Earlier studies have shown, for instance, that briskly paced music tends to inspire equally briskly paced workouts, and that music also can distract and calm nervous competitors before a race or other high-pressure situation, improving their subsequent performance.  

But to date, no one had thought to investigate whether creating — and not merely hearing — music might have an effect on workouts, let alone whether the impact would be qualitatively different than when exercisers passively listen to music pumped through gym speakers or their ear buds.  

So, for the new study, which was published online in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognition and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, and other institutions began by inventing an electronic kit that could be integrated into the internal workings of weight-training machines, transforming them into oversize boom boxes. Once installed, the kit would produce a range of propulsive, electronic-style music with a variety of sound levels and rhythms, depending on how the machine’s weight bar or other mechanisms were manipulated during workouts.  

The researchers installed the kits into three different workout machines, one on a stair-stepper, the other two weight machines with bars that could be raised or pulled down to stimulate various muscles.  They then recruited a group of 63 healthy men and women and divided them into groups, each of which was assigned to use one of the musically equipped machines during a strenuous though brief six-minute exercise session.  

As the volunteers strained, their machines chirped and pinged with a thumping 130 beats per minute, the sound level rising or falling with each individual’s effort and twining with the rhythms created by the other two exercisers. “Participants could express themselves on the machines by, for instance, modulating rhythms and creating melodies,” said Thomas Hans Fritz, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute who led the study.  The groups were, in effect, D.J.’ing their workouts, creating sounds that echoed their physical efforts.  

During a separate exercise session, each group used the same machines, but minus the musical add-ons, while elsewhere in the gym, other volunteers sweated at the musically equipped machines, meaning that one group was passively listening to sounds created by another.

Throughout each workout, the researchers monitored the force their volunteers generated while using the machines, as well as whether the weight lifters’ movements tended to stutter or flow and how much oxygen  the volunteers consumed, a reliable measure of physical effort. Afterward, the scientists asked the volunteers to rate the tolerability or unpleasantness of the session, on a scale from 1 to 20.  

Tabulated afterward, the results showed that most of the volunteers had generated significantly greater muscular force while working at the musically equipped machines than the unmodified ones. They also had used less oxygen to generate that force and reported that their exertions had felt less strenuous. Their movements were also more smooth in general, resulting in a steadier flow of music.  Creating their own rhythms and melodies had lowered the physiological cost of exercise and greatly increased its subjective allure compared with when the exercisers passively listened to virtually the same music, Dr. Fritz said.  

A similar dynamic may have motivated early humans to whistle or hum while they hunted or tilled and later to raise their voices in song during barn raisings and other intense physical labor, he said.  

But why orchestrating your own soundtrack should have more physical benefit than merely hearing similar music in the background is not altogether clear.  “We think that the observed effects are most probably due to a greater degree of emotional motor control,” when you actively engage in making music, Dr. Fritz said. Emotional motor control, as opposed to the more workaday “deliberate” type that normally guides our muscular movements, he said, operates almost below consciousness. Your body responds to it with little volition and you move, he said, with reduced effort and increased joy. This is “musical ecstasy,” Dr. Fritz said, and it seems to have permeated, to some degree, the gym where the exercisers composed music while sweating.  

Unfortunately, the musical kits that Dr. Fritz and his colleagues have developed are not available commercially, although they may be in the future. For now, he said, you may need to content yourself with purposely ignoring the supplied soundtrack at your local gym and instead singing to yourself. Perhaps harmonize, no matter how tunelessly, with a workout partner.  Disdain naysayers and music lovers. You will be, in the felicitous phrasing of Dr. Fritz, “jymming; that’s like jamming, but with a ‘y’ from ‘gym.’”

Dear Hard Work......

Here's a little motivation for you from trainer, April Crosby.

Dear Hard Work,

I used to hate you.
When you called my name,
I heard it but ran away from you.
When I knew you were coming,
I used to hide from you.
When you influenced others to talk to me,
I quickly made excuses to get away from you.

Afraid, of the pain, because I didn’t want to get hurt.
Afraid to fail, so I didn’t even try.
And afraid of your name,
Because of what you have done to others.

Who do you think you are?
Making me so afraid of who you are?

Reflection in the mirror,
Shadow behind me,
I take one step and you’re still ahead of me.

Sweat on my face,
Tears in my eyes,
I keep on going,
I heard you tell no lies.

You turn the poor to rich,
F to A’s.

Is there anything that you can’t do?

Now look at me.
You made me who I am today.
And because of you,
I have this never losing, never giving up attitude.

Quitting?
That’s not in my vocabulary.
When they quit, I keep going.
When they sleep, I work harder.
When they say that I can’t,
And count me out,
I show them that I can.

When I tell them about my dreams and they laugh,
I make sure I laugh last.

I’m a dream chaser,
That means I chase my dreams and no one else’s.
Only I can defeat me.
It’s me against this work you put on me.
There is no losing.
I will not lose.

I came this far,
And I’m not stopping now.

O Hard work,
My dad was right about you.
You do pay off,
And because of that, I love you.
How can I not?
I’m no longer hiding from you. 
I’m waiting for you.

Matter of fact,
Where are you?

I need you. 
Because in hard work – I trust!

Love,
Me

Antioxidants: Are Your Cells Wearing Their "Superhero" Capes?

Today's blog comes from our resident nutrition superhero, Carrie Covington.  Here's what she has to say about antioxdants.

So we hear all the time the benefits of fruits and veggies, but why?  One big reason is because they help fight diseases such as Alzheimer’s, cancers, atherosclerosis, arthritis, anxiety, and more.  Let’s learn what happens to make this occur.
 

First let's take a little chemistry lesson.  When a molecule loses an electron it becomes a free radical, which must steal an electron from another molecule to re-balance itself.  This in turn causes another free radical to form.  It is estimated that each of our cells get hit by a free radical 100,000 times a day. Wow!  Free radical damage is happening every second.  Some of this damage is due to natural cellular activities but also by pollution, smoking, fried and processed food, and even physical stress.  Poor eating habits actually speed up free radical production.  Some of this we can help and some, unfortunately is out of our control.

If free radicals are overabundant, oxidative stress will occur and then we see inflammation in the body.  When the immune system is constantly battling inflammation, the body becomes fatigued, weakened, and deficient in nutrients and enzymes.  That is when many terrible disease can occur… cancer, atherosclerosis, and arthritis are just a few. 

The good news is oxidative stress and inflammation can be fought by antioxidant nutrients which repair and prevent this cellular damage.  Check out the list below and see what foods are "super disease-fighting" foods.  I challenge you to add one food from the list each week. 

Rank	Food item	Serving size	Total antioxidant capacity per serving size
1	Small Red Bean (dried)	Half cup	13727
2	Wild blueberry	1 cup	13427
3	Red kidney bean (dried)	Half cup	13259
4	Pinto bean	Half cup	11864
5	Blueberry (cultivated)	1 cup	9019
6	Cranberry	1 cup (whole)	8983
7	Artichoke (cooked)	1 cup (hearts)	7904
8	Blackberry	1 cup	7701
9	Dried Prune	Half cup	7291
10	Raspberry	1 cup	6058
11	Strawberry	1 cup	5938
12	Red Delicious apple	One	5900
13	Granny Smith apple	One	5381
14	Pecan	1 ounce	5095
15	Sweet cherry	1 cup	4873
16	Black plum	One	4844
17	Russet potato (cooked)	One	4649
18	Black bean (dried)	Half cup	4181
19	Plum	One	4118
20	Gala apple	One	3903

 
So it's time to help your body put on it's superhero cape and fight the cellular damage from free radicals.  Step up, choose one of these fruits and veggies and revel in the power against disease!!

For more information on antioxidant nutrients and how you can help your body, set up an appointment with one of our nutrition specialists.  It's your body...take care of it from the inside out!!

Sprinter or Distance Runner...What Do You Relate To??

Are you a better sprinter or distance runner?  Many people believe that having more fast or slow twitch muscle fibers may determine what sports athletes excel at and how they respond to training.

Let's have a brief anatomy lesson so you understand what muscle fibers are all about.  Skeletal muscle is made up of bundles of individual muscle fibers called myocytes. Each myocyte contains many myofibrils, which are strands of proteins (actin and myosin) that can grab on to each other and pull.  This shortens the muscle and causes muscle contraction. It is generally accepted that muscle fiber types can be broken down into two main types: slow twitch (Type I) muscle fibers and fast twitch (Type II) muscle fibers.  Fast twitch fibers can be further categorized into Type IIa and Type IIb fibers. 

These distinctions seem to influence how muscles respond to training and physical activity, and each fiber type is unique in its ability to contract in a certain way.  Human muscles contain a genetically determined mixture of both slow and fast fiber types.  On average, we have about 50 percent slow twitch and 50 percent fast twitch fibers in most of the muscles used for movement. 

Let's break down each type of muscle fiber so you get a better understanding of what we are talking about.

Slow Twitch (Type I)

The slow muscles are more efficient at using oxygen to generate more fuel (known as ATP) for continuous, extended muscle contractions over a long time.  They fire more slowly than fast twitch fibers and can go for a long time before they fatigue.  Therefore, slow twitch fibers are great at helping athletes run marathons and bicycle for hours. 

Fast Twitch (Type II)

Because fast twitch fibers use anaerobic metabolism (e.g., metabolism in the absence of oxygen) to create fuel, they are much better at generating short bursts of strength or speed than slow muscles.  However, they fatigue more quickly.  Fast twitch fibers generally produce the same amount of force per contraction as slow muscles, but they get their name because they are able to fire more rapidly.  Having more fast twitch fibers can be an asset to a sprinter since she needs to quickly generate a lot of force.  

Type IIa Fibers

These fast twitch muscle fibers are also known as intermediate fast-twitch fibers. They can use both aerobic and anaerobic metabolism almost equally to create energy.  In this way, they are a combination of Type I and Type II muscle fibers.

Type IIb Fibers

These fast twitch fibers use anaerobic metabolism to create energy and are the "classic" fast twitch muscle fibers that excel at producing quick, powerful bursts of speed.  This muscle fiber has the highest rate of contraction (rapid firing) of all the muscle fiber types, but it also has a much faster rate of fatigue and can't last as long before it needs rest.

So, with that being said, are you a sprinter or a distance runner (even if in theory)?  Take a look at the different body types in various sports and you'll begin to understand the difference in muscle fibers.  And that, our friends, is your anatomy lesson for the day!!