Resolutions Rebooted

Target by Bill Frymire

New years resolutions rethink:

Successful goal setting

Every week I see people in clinic with goals. Some may not know they have goals, others have definite goals but they may be the wrong ones for that moment. I often spend a lot of time with people focusing on their aspirations and plans and sorting through what they want to achieve, the motivations for these aims and how they fit into the big health and lifestyle picture.

A goal is the picture you have in your head of where you want to be. Taking them from merely thoughts and notions and making them reality means first defining them in a few ways, giving them the qualities they require to be of use to you. This means asking a few questions and giving your goals some important characteristics; transforming them from just hope and dreams on a piece of paper into a lynchpin of long term success:

Are they pointless?

Giving up crisps and cakes for January may be a healthy gesture, but what in the great scheme of things is this going to accomplish other than a) making you want crisps and cakes a LOT more and b) using up all that willpower that could be better spent.

If however, it changes a behaviour long term i.e. eating a lot less snacks foods then it has been beneficial but ask yourself, is it really going to achieve this?

Are they the right ones?

Read more..

Food pyramids of the world: from the sublime to the ridiculous

Food pyramids can be a useful tool for both advising people on what they should eat and also to represent what people actually ARE eating. Here’s some from around the world…

This is the bog standard food pyramid (source USDA).

I’m sure most of you are familiar with this. It’s the old USDA food pyramid giving the weightings of the foods to be consumed in the day based upon number of portions.

However it was felt that is needed to be redrawn to emphasize variety in food as well as throwing some emphasis on exercise as part of the picture. All very commendable but as far as I am concerned it’s neither use nor ornament.

Why?

Because you usually get this:

The new USDA ‘Food Triangley Thingamebob’

But to make any sense out of it at all you need the notes: Read more..

Top tips you definitely don’t want to follow…

Dodgy diet and fatuous fitness advice busted.

"January, sick and tired, you've been hanging on me
You make me sad with your eyes
You're telling me lies"

Last night I was having dinner with a mate of mine, he was telling me about the great advice his wife received from a colleague at work, it was this: any time you eat something naughty (a doughnut, in this case) just have a glass of water after and it cancels all the badness out.

Great. That’s me out of a job then. Nutrition problems solved.

Or maybe not.

This got me thinking about all the bad advice you get and further to my 10 fat loss tips post yesterday, here’s 10 tips I have found around the web that you would be a fool to follow…..

1. Drink 5 liters or more of water each day – this helps flush your body of fat.

WHAT THE F…?! Read more..

More broccoli, less chips?

My 10 top tips for fat loss

It’s that time of year again. Oh yes,  New Year’s resolutions.

Too much turkey? Feeling guilty about all that Christmas cheer/beer? Feeling the need for renewal and refocusing of goals?

It seems everyone is looking at how to shift a few pounds and make themselves feel a little better after the over indulgence of the holidays. And of course around now there’s a plethora of ‘top tips’ floating around the web giving you suggestions for ways to loose fat, but often they’re not much more useful than ‘cut the carbs’. So what counts? Let’s get to the bottom of the top tips.

Here’s the point: focus on WHYs and HOWs, not WHATs

Your health, fitness and body shape is the expression of your behaviours and actions and what they do to your body over the months and years. You have to change WHY you’re doing things, not just WHAT you’re doing otherwise you’ll fail in the end. Many ‘top tips’ don’t recognise this.

So in my years as a nutritionist, what do I think are the 10 ten tips? As I say it’s about actions, behaviours and habits.

Actions

1. Figure out why you’ve been slacking on the health and fitness front.

2. Write down goals and a defined plan and tell people about them. Read more..

Nutrition News Round-up. Issue 1

A weeks worth of nutrition news collected and collated for your delectation…

You have it easy.

Me?

I’m a nutritionist.

I sit in front of people answering random questions on all facets of diet, nutrition and health. What’s more I’m a Registered Nutritionist, so I can’t just make shit up when answering these questions.

It’s interesting, it’s fun, I love it. However in order to do my job I have to keep up with all the developments in the field, both important and unimportant, that’’s no small job.  I paddle furiously just to keep my head above the sea of new nutrition information produced each week. Here’s a small selection of nutrition news stories from the last 7 days!

Happy reading.

Western diets turning on fat genes.

Read more..

How much protein should I eat?

Protein can aid recovery, better body shape and support muscle mass but how much do you eat?

If you’re worried about strength, athletic performance and body shape you have probably thought about your protein intake at some point. There’s a lot of info out there and a lot of opinion – most of it revolving around the issue of muscle mass. So how much protein do you need?

When you ask this question you’re really asking

• How much should you eat? And,
• How much protein can you eat in a sitting?

Reasons to eat more protein: It’s more than just about your muscles you know!

“Question: I’ve read that you don’t need any more than 20g of quality protein in a sitting to get maximum stimulation of muscle protein synthesis, so I shouldn’t bother with any more, no?”

When you eat quality protein the concentrations of amino acids in the blood rise. This rise, if big enough can stimulate the body to lay down more protein in the form of muscle tissue. We like this. A lot. However, recently studies have shown that protein synthesis plateaus out at about 20-25g of protein in a sitting. With many nutrition protocols and professionals advising you to eat maybe double or more per sitting, why would you consider eating any more? Read more..

Sleep Hacks

Increasing quality and duration for better health and recovery.

...like a baby

Whilst it’s hard to put a finger on the actualities of sleep, everyone knows when they haven’t had enough. So what you do you do to increase quality and duration aiding both mental and physical processes?

When sleeping, the body goes through processes that help you deal with stress, both physical and mental. Information is processed, a hormonal milieu is produced – including growth hormone and testosterone.

Sleep has been shown to have an effect upon short term markers of health like ability to mentally focus, coordination, reaction times, as well as longer term effects such as body composition, glucose metabolism and of course the ultimate – life expectancy itself.

What s sleep and how does it work?

Sleep is akin to a reboot and defrag that you might use on your laptop. It is partway between clear out & indexing, mixed with a physical overhaul. The brains ‘programming’ takes it thought a series of cycles whilst sleeping, indeed it has been suggested that it is not duration that counts, but rather the number of cycles you go through. Read more..

The world class warm up Part II: An example

A good warm up stands between you and much safer, much more effective training. But what does one look like?

..no…not like this

In part one I went over the components of an elite warm up but off the  back of that I was asked  for a sample warm up – here’s what I often give out to strength athletes it is good for bodybuilers of most people weight training.

Fist raise body temperature

This aids oxygenation, mobility of muscle tissue and joints and generally prepares the body for work

• 5 mins incline walking or light, flat jog
• 5 mins ergo/rowing machine
• if you have it you can push a sled as well for 3 sets of 50 feet with 30 second rests

Second is tissue quality

Foam rolling the hot spots or problem areas on the body, this will ‘free up’ the muscle to fire more efficiently which means more work and more work = a better body: Read more..

World class warm up Part I: Components

A seriously effective warm-up can transform your training. Are you guilty of skipping over this important part of training?

Question: when was the last time you read a sample workout routine or article that included a detailed warm up? Last month? Last year? Never?

Your warm up prepares you for the training or competitive session ahead, it’s a soup of ingredients aimed at preparing the muscular, nervous and cardiovascular systems for action allowing them to function at a higher level. A good warm up makes a training session not only safer but more effective. So why don’t more people write about it?

Whilst plenty of column inches taken up discussing different training sessions, training cycles, periodisation etc the warm-up is generally skipped over.  Think about it though, it’s the thing that ties all your training sessions together, it includes the movements and drills you will practice most often through the year!

So what ingredients should you include and in what order? Read more..

The vegan shopping list

What foods do you buy to safeguard body composition and health whilst following a vegan diet?

Where is the steak? My kitchen top after a vegan food shop

I’m currently following a flexitarian diet. It’s been, uh, interesting.

Flexitarian means you eat as few animal products as possible so, meat once a week or once a month depending on how hardcore you are. In practice I’ve been eating only vegetable based products at home and when eating out I go with meat choices – this makes life a lot easier as vegans are so poorly catered for in restaurants.

However, given the fact that if you go vegan you’re not going to be eating a lot of food we were (arguable) designed to eat, what do we do to guard against nutritional deficiencies? By structuring our diet choices and looking at macronutrients and the sources and types of micronutrients that we’re getting from our diet we can try to cover the bases and work from there.

Missing Micronutrients Read more..

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