Jeff's Thoughts

• The Big 5 for Weight Loss – No 3

  20 April, 2011

  3. Breakfast

  They say breakfast is the most important meal of the day for health. But I would not only include health, but also fat loss in there as well.  One quick walk down the breakfast isle one you will see that cereal companies do not have your best interests at heart (As a personal trainer I cover my face with my cap when walking down the cereal aisle of any Wellington supermarket). With sugar being the second ingredient in most breakfast cereals, I take the believe that breakfast cereals are something that should be had once a week as a treat and not as our stable food that builds a generation (maybe that could help to explain why as a generation we are getting sicker and fatter). Eating any food that has an insulin effect on the body sets the body up to not only be storing bodyfat but to rely on the sugar hit for the rest of day. This sets up dangerous sugar spiking peaks and then troughs which sends you looking for that mid morning snack to lift when your blood sugar levels drop. People live day to day moving from one sugar hit to the next relying on more coffee and more sugar over the years while the whole time their bodyfat is increasing. So for optimal weight/fat loss, anything with a second ingredient of sugar should not be part of that equation.

  When you wake up in the morning you want to turn on your digestive system and have a low insulin hit causing the body to turn on its natural bodyfat burning hormones (glucagon).  So this is where I am looking for protein and healthy fats to start the day. Red meat forces the digestive system to work harder, so red meat in the morning is the best option with a handful of nuts to increase your healthy fats for optimal weight loss.

  Serotonin is associated with mood regulation, gut motility, sleep and appetite. A person who is deficient in serotonin may experience depression, feel overwhelmed and be unable to fall into a deep sleep. Serotonin is synthesized from tryptophan.
  Meats, such as turkey, beef and lamb, provide a rich source of tryptophan. So breakfast including these things will help to increase your serotonin levels for the day.

  So if you want to trim up and also have the side effect of getting healthy, throw your breakfast cereals out (and yes that even includes the porridge) and start eating red meat, beef, chicken, fish with some greens and a handful of nuts. Eggs are a great source of protein but buy organic eggs from hens allowed to feed on insects and green plants as they can contain omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acids in the beneficial ratio of approximately one-to-one; but commercial supermarket eggs can contain as much as nineteen times more omega-6 than omega-3.

  Remember when your flight or fight mode is on (sympathetic nervous system) your digestive system is slowed down. Find the time in the morning to take 5 – 10 minutes to sit down and relax to eat your breakfast. Do not eat it on the run, otherwise you will not be digesting the food you eat properly.

  So, if you want to lose weight or fat, the breakfast has to change.

  Tagged under: Health, Nutrition

  133 Comments »

• The Big 5 for Weight Loss – Part 2

  17 April, 2011

  Juices

  Often people are having juices for health, as some sort of detox or simply a time factor. However as an owner of a  personal training facility based in Wellington I dont believe these are needed for any of the above and indeed may actually take us away from the health that we are truly seeking. Quite simply it is the sugar in these juices that make this a formula for weight gain. When sugar is undeniably the cause of the obesity epidemic, whether they are natural or not, sugar is sugar and the fruits in the juices cause fat to be stored via the release of insulin.

  If having a juice in the morning to replace breakfast is being done as a health choice it can actually be doing the opposite. When your body detects nutrients need to be broken down, it releases Hydrochloric Acid (HCL). This helps to break down the food. However with a juice or shake their is no food to be broken down, and so this can cause the stomach lining to be eating away which can lead to leaky gut syndrome. This is only a problem with people replacing food with juices or protein drinks, especially with Juice detoxes and also people who replace breakfast with a shake or live on 2 – 3 shakes per day. If you wan to get lean – take the juice away.

   

  Tagged under: Health, Nutrition

  106 Comments »

• The Big 5 for Weight Loss – Part 1

  14 April, 2011

  I have always been asked what someone has to do to lose fat. Frustratingly so the question is often asked at parties while the person is drinking alcohol and eating a slice of pizza. Although the answer is often more complicated than “eat less and exercise more”. Sometimes insulin sensitivity, toxicity, stress – both physical and hormonal, quality of sleep, inflammation and various other components play a crucial role. However as a personal trainer in wellington I thought I would bite the bullet and give the dogmatic answer to a complicated question (How do I lose fat?). If I do think about it, the clients that have achieved great things with me have all done certain things in common, and here they are,

  Part 1.

  1. Alcohol.

  This was not supposed to be in order, but any personal trainer in Wellington will tell you there is a reason why this is first. Because it was what was at the top of my mind. Yes I am sorry to say that alcohol is a major component in weight gain. Several things make alcohol a notoriously bad weight gainer.

  The sugar in both beer and wine helps to increase blood glucose (sugar in the blood). As a result insulin is released which helps to distribute the sugar around the body including putting it to fat.

  However alcohol also decreases the conversion of androgens (male sex hormones) to testosterone. This will increase the amount of estrogen that someone has (both females and males). If someone has high levels of estrogen, according to the bosignature hormonal profile test, they distribute their body-fat on the chest (estrogen is a female sex hormone) and if this site is increasing in bodyfat (man boobs) then that is a sign that there is so much estrogen (the body is converting the androgens into estrogen instead of testosterone) in the body and that the body is literally becoming feminine. This is what causes unusually large bodyfat on the chest for guys. With high levels of estrogen and low testosterone you will struggle to lose body-fat and have man boobs (which is not cool).

  The wheat in beer may also cause an allergic reaction in most of the population due to a wheat intolerance. This does not mean you start sneezing but could cause lower abdominal swelling, bad skin and create the inability for you to absorb essential nutrients and vitamins. Because of the lower abdominal bloating, you will look fatter that what you are.

  I have also noticed I have not even mentioned the amount of calories yet which is a significant factor. Alcohol has to be dropped or at least reduced if you want results. How much you reduce it depends on how much results you want.

  If you are going to drink (which I am not promoting) Pinot Noir has got the best reputation for health. It has the highest level of antioxidants and lowers your testosterone the least.

  Part 2.  Next Week – Juices (yes sorry, they are bad).

   

   

  Tagged under: Health, Nutrition

  121 Comments »

• The power of fish oils

  12 April, 2011

  I am often asked about supplements from many angles – What should I take for fat loss to what should I take to build muscle. For me their is always a simple answer. Fish Oils. Infact I dont even believe taking a multivitain and fishoils are even supplementation. They are a necessary adjunct to a healthy nutrition plan. Omega 3 Fish oils are made up of 2 elements:

  Fish oil, or more particularly the omega-3 fatty acids can be broken down into 2 different components EPA and DHA. They do two key things to help radically improve body composition (help us to get build muscle and lose fat). Firstly they turn on the lipolytic (fat burning) gene whilst turning off the lipogenic (fat storage) gene, and secondly they make our body more insulin sensitive, allowing for the muscles to be more receptive to insulin thus reducing how much is stored as bodyfat. Think for a second about this last point – less fat AND more muscle in one fell swoop. I have 8 – 10 grams of pharmaceutical grade fish oil everyday and have added up to 30 grams to many overweight clients’ supplement protocols and seen them not only drop bodyfat, but feel better and have more energy and even greater concentration. Sometimes it really is that simple.

  As if this wasn’t compelling reason enough to start supplementing regularly with fish oil, let us not forget that it has been clinically proven to be beneficial to a myriad of diseases, both physical and mental. The positive benefits include:

  A reduction in the systemic inflammation that is responsible for everything from muscle and joint soreness, tendonitis, excessively high blood pressure, asthma and ALL cardiovascular diseases, including sudden cardiac death and also it has been linked to a decrease in some forms of Cancer. Inflammation is truly an underlying key to a decline in health.

  An increase in our natural production of serotonin (the “feel good” neurotransmitter), resulting in decreased carbohydrate cravings and decreased incidence of depression. All from one supplement.

   

   

  Tagged under: Health, Nutrition

  119 Comments »

• Welcome to the first Studio 41 Blog

  6 April, 2011

  We hope to be able to change your view on health and nutrition by keeping you up to date with new thoughts that are out there, and continually try to challenge the media on their misguided attempts to make people healthy. This week we are doing an in house presentation on cholesterol so I thought I would share some of these things we are talking about.
  Here are some interesting facts that have come from Sherry Rogers book – The Cholesterol Hoax

  1. You need cholesterol to make sex hormones like testoeterone, estrogen and progesterone
  2. Higher cancer rate among people taking chlesterol-lowering drugs
  3. Cholesterol is essential for all membrane structure and function, hormones receptors, cytokine release for fighting infection, cancers and autoummune disease.
  4. Cholesterol helps to put out inflammation, There fore it is not the cholesterol that is the problem. Heart disease starts when your arteries become damaged or inflamed. Thus LDL cholesterol shows up to repair these inflamed segments (which is what it is supposed to do) and can sometimes get stuck, thus becoming rancid over time causing the build up of plaque.
  5. It is inflammation that is doing the damage, eat foods that have a low inflammatory response, i.e no gluten, no pasta and especially white sugar (this includes all refined carbohydrates)!!!!
  6. There has also believe it or not,  never been prove making a correlation between high cholesterol and heart disease in any study. In fact the opposite is true

  “To date there have only been two relevant double-blind studies and neither showed a connection between saturated fats and heart disease”.

  Big Fat Lies, Sutter, 2010.

  So basically take refined sugar and refined carbohydrates out of your diet, dont be scared of eggs and red meat. They have been around for 1000s of years and it is not these things that have give rise to the huge incidence of heart disease.
  Take a look at Tom Naughton during this presentation. He tackles the very complex subject very well.

  Tagged under: Health

  152 Comments »

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