Most of us start out with good intentions of continuing training and eating well, and somehow end up a month later making a “fresh start” with the same old New Year’s resolutions to train harder and eat better.

Some of us give up after the first overindulgence and continue the overindulgence only to welcome in the New Year feeling unfit, heavy, and a little bit disgusted in ourselves. For others the holiday season will be a cycle of restriction then binging with far too much thought going into food, a whole lot of anxiety and guilt thrown in.

Neither is a great way to spend the holiday season, nor are they going to have you feeling relaxed, satisfied, and happy with your body come New Year’s Day.

Remember the Big Picture

To avoid getting trapped into the binge-restrict cycle and welcome in the New Year feeling our healthy best, it’s important to have a little perspective and a plan. Christmas dinner is one meal out of the whole year. It’s not going to make a shred of difference to your long-term health, fitness, or body composition no matter what you do. Your body will not physically allow you to consume enough food to undo months of training hard and eating well.

Remember that it’s what you do on a daily basis that defines your results, not what you do on one day of the year. Yes, you’ll probably have a terrible carb hangover (or just a regular hangover) the next day, and feel bloated and sluggish if you overindulged, but it’s no reason to beat yourself up and continue the overindulgence.

Make a Plan and Put It In Your Calendar

The problem with the holiday season is that it’s never just the one Christmas dinner, not only are there leftovers to contend with, but more troublesome is the lead-up month full of events involving delicious food and drinks.

It’s easy to see why we can get ourselves into trouble, and is why those of us who struggle with naturally finding balance, need a plan to follow in order to force some balance into the festive season.

Take a look at your schedule over the holiday season and come up with a realistic plan about how you’re going to manage your training and nutrition. This might sound a little OCD, but when you put something in your calendar you make it a priority and it more often than not happens.

Mark in your non-negotiable training sessions, making sure they fall on days you can 100% commit to. You may find you have time for more training, but at the bare minimum you’ll have these non-negotiable sessions that you’ll get done no matter how festive things get.

Allow Yourself to Celebrate

Also mark in a few days that are going to be celebration days, where you know food and drink is going to be all about enjoyment (e.g. Christmas). Some would call them “cheat days,” but since they’re part of the plan you’re not really cheating, right? So it’s not something to feel guilty about. The idea of these days is to give yourself permission to celebrate without food being an issue.

A celebration day isn’t an excuse to eat everything in sight just because you can. It’s about enjoyment of what you’re eating! I’m going out on a limb here in saying that indulgence is a natural and healthy part of being human. I mean, we have taste buds for a reason, right? The key point is the difference between indulgence and overindulgence.

A slice of pudding with ice cream and custard after a delicious roast with all the trimmings is indulging. But going back for seconds and thirds of the roast and dessert, then eating the remainder of the box of shortbreads and washing it down with leftover eggnog just because you might as well since “you already ruined your diet” is overindulgence.

The distinction between the two isn’t just in the amount consumed, but in the reason for the consumption. Overindulgence happens when we stop listening to our body’s reaction to the food we’re eating (the smell, taste, and texture of the food) and continue eating past the point of it feeling good. In a perverse way, guilt is often a driver of overindulgence.

The first few mouthfuls of anything are always the best, so eat slowly, savor your food, put your fork down between mouthfuls and enjoy the indulgence. It’s part of the plan, so nothing to feel guilty about.

Think 80/20

Finally, here are a few guidelines for planning your celebration days. Ensure a minimum of 80/20 ratio of regular to celebration days, and avoid back-to-back celebration days. If it’s impossible to avoid back-to-back days, then try to schedule a workout in between to put some of those calories towards building muscle rather than being stored as fat.

Absolutely most importantly, the morning after a celebration day, get right back to your regular way of eating. No “one last slice” of Christmas pudding or, on the flipside, punishment in the form of starving yourself or long bouts of cardio to make up for the extra calories you ate. Simply wake up, take off your party hat, and put your healthy hat back on!

The post A Healthy Approach to Holiday Eating appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Hunger is sometimes just plain old, garden-variety hunger – your body’s way of telling you that it’s been too long since the last time you gave it some fuel. If this is the case, logic will generally drive your decision at the fridge door and you’ll reach for the leftover chicken. But other times, your hunger can be a craving for something else altogether.

Water

Has your body been telling you for the last three hours that it’s thirsty? Sometimes thirst is easy to ignore, especially if you’re on the go all day. Hunger is often thirst in disguise. Eventually your body gets so sick of its thirst signals being ignored that it changes up its tactics in order to get some hydration. Since you didn’t listen the first time around, your body decides to send you messages that you’re ravenously hungry and this usually has an end result of you consuming something – but possibly not something particularly nutritious. Many people will find they crave foods with high water content (such as fruits for example) when they’re thirsty, or salty food when they’re dehydrated. While there’s nothing wrong with satisfying these cravings sensibly, it’s a means to an end. Walking around dehydrated isn’t doing you any favors from a general health and performance perspective.

Sleep

Would you actually kill for a quick nap right now, but since it’s not really an option at 3:00pm on a busy workday, you’re after a quick energy fix in the form of food?A lack of sleep changes the way we experience hunger by way of two hormones: leptin and ghrelin. Ghrelin is responsible for signaling hunger and stimulating appetite, and leptin is responsible for signaling satiety. Lack of sleep has been shown to increase levels of ghrelin and decrease levels of leptin in your blood. So when you’re sleep deprived you’re likelier to be hungrier and less able to tell when you’re actually full. A good way to work out whether you’re actually craving sleep is to ask yourself whether you’d prefer to snuggle up under the duvet and doze off, or if you actually need food right now.

Relaxation

Similar to lack of sleep, stress also changes the way we experience hunger by changing our hormonal balance. Our body produces cortisol in response to a stressful situation. Cortisol not only been shown to stimulate appetite, but packs a double whammy and tells our body to store any energy that’s not needed immediately (that means fat stores). So next time you think you might actually be craving relaxation instead of needing fuel, perhaps consider a soothing cup of herbal tea and a few minutes of quiet time before you crack open the ice cream.

Emotional Expression

Most of us, at some point in time, have experienced emotional eating, otherwise known as eating your feelings. The science behind this emotional eating shows that consumption of certain foods (particularly sweet foods) sets off a chain reaction resulting in the release of serotonin, your “happy hormone.” When you’re feeling anxious, depressed, bored, and surprisingly sometimes even happy, you can end up delving into a tub of ice cream in an attempt to even out your hormones. Physiologically it might work, but the feeling of a bloated belly full of ice cream is probably not going to make you feel any better, plus the fact that you haven’t actually expressed the emotion that started this whole thing. It’s a tricky one because the last thing you feel like doing when you’ve had a terrible day is sitting down and actually dealing with your emotions. So it may be the perfect time to do something active that will give you the serotonin hit you’re craving, and deal with the underlying emotion when you’re riding the post-exercise high.

It sounds simple, but sometimes taking a few seconds to step away from the fridge, breathe, and actually think about what you’re hungry for will tell you a lot about your body, habits, and emotions. Not only is that going to help you get a long way towards your performance and body composition goals, but it will also help you avoid that disappointed, “Why did I do that?!” moment gazing at the empty ice cream tub.

The post What Are You Really Hungry For? 4 Things Other Than Food You Might Be Craving appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

So this is how a fitness vacation plays out. You’re lounging poolside at the resort sipping a fresh green coconut as a warm breeze blows through the palm trees. Your biggest concern is whether you should read your book or call for a massage later this afternoon. Sounds like bliss, right? But as you head into the café and look out onto the street a fit young man runs past, struggling for breath as he hauls a truck tire along the street with his buddy egging him on. Perhaps a little less blissful, but it’s a timely reminder that your second training session of the day will start in an hour or so. It’s all part of your vacation plans.

Once upon a time, it was only serious fighters who’d come to practice muay Thai or MMA in training camps in Thailand. Some would stay for a couple of weeks to prepare for a fight, others for a few months to get serious about training and hopefully get a fight or two in. Accommodation was basic, usually dorm style, and training was best characterized as “old school,” consisting of long runs, pad work, sparring, and having your stomach pummeled with a medicine ball.

Nowadays there are still the hardcore fighters, they’re the ones out running in the midday sun with their sweat suits on, and there are still the old-school training regimens, but there’s also a new crowd – the fitness vacations crowd. Some are here to lose a few extra pounds, some are here to try out a new sport, and others are here to enjoy in a tropical paradise and stay fit and active as they do it. And it’s not just martial arts on offer now, there’s CrossFit, yoga, weightlifting, spin classes, circuit training, and more, which means there’s something for pretty much everyone.

One recent addition to fit street is Unit 27, the first total conditioning facility on the street. Unit 27 is operated by father-son team Dayle and Robert Hallam, and officially opened last December. When I spoke to Dayle, who is a strength and conditioning sports coach and structural kinesiologist from England, about how he came to be in a tropical paradise doing what he loves, his answer was simple. He’d been making regular trips here as a muay Thai fighter for training, and simply realized there was a need for a strength and conditioning facility with structured and modern approach to getting people fit.

Commenting on his clientele he said, “We see all types, from people who are out of shape and want to kick start on their fitness journey, to top rugby players looking for a vacation that will actually help rather than hinder them in the pre-season.” The facility is built to train anyone from an elite athlete to an out-of-shape middle-aged vacationer. MMA fighters such as Mohammad Fakhreddine and Australian NRL rugby player Sandor Earl spent time training at Unit 27, but the people that trainers and clients alike are most excited to talk about are the success stories.

In just a few months there are already a handful of impressive stories of people who have turned their health around, gotten crazy fit, or lost body fat training at Unit 27. It’s these stories that everyone seems most motivated by. And while there are some crazy-fit people training at Unit 27, there’s no elitism. Everyone trains in the same space and encourages one another to be their very best. There’s a healthy dose of competition to keep things interesting, but overriding it all is a real sense of community.

And this is a big part of why people get results here. Everyone is here with a health focus, and many of the distractions and temptations of everyday life have been taken away, giving people a chance to focus on training, fueling, and resting. The street is lined with juice bars full of protein shakes and going to restaurants with your newfound friends will always be full of healthy food options. Of course if you are carb loading for a run up the big Buddha (a 3.5km uphill run/walk that is the fit street equivalent to a CrossFitter’s “Fran” time), it’s also not hard to find a delicious pad thai for dinner and banana protein pancakes for dessert.

Here, there are no staff meetings with endless supplies of pastries. There are no traffic jams that prevent you from making it to training on time. In fact, training is just a few hundred meters down the street. All the obstacles are removed and the tools are provided for you. It’s just up to you to show up and do the work. If you want to make it even more foolproof, you can ask the team at Unit 27 to book your accommodation and a personally designed meal-plan as well as your training, before you even leave home.

And then after a tough day of training and chilling out by the pool there’s plenty of fun stuff to do too – a quick trip to the beach or to jungles with waterfalls, weekend night markets, and plenty more of the infamous Thai nightlife to balance out all that healthy stuff. But being surrounded by people who are here to be healthy means the simple life of train, eat, sleep, repeat is an easy and enjoyable routine. Particularly when you add in a bit of lounging by the pool into the mix.

The post Training in Paradise: Take a Fitness Vacation to Thailand appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

So how are you doing with yours? For the few of us who are on track to meeting our goals, power to you! Great job and keep up the good work. Then there are those of us who somehow forgot about our resolutions between the beginning of January and now. For us, perhaps now is a chance to reconsider and take a slightly different approach to goal setting this time around.

The Problem With “SMART” Goals

I’m all for setting goals, without them we wouldn’t achieve much. Especially SMART ones, that is, goals that are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-Bound – for example, the resolution of losing 5kgs by the first of May. You probably read a lot about SMART goals last month, so I’m not going to get into the specifics (read here if you want more details), but basically this goal is a great goal. So, ready, set, go! Right?

The question is, go do what? The big thing missing in all of this is the action plan of how you’re going to get there. If your current nutrition and exercise are progressing well and you’re on track to achieve your 5kg weight loss by May, fantastic! But if not, which is usually the case for most New Year’s resolutions, (otherwise why are we making them?), then something needs to change. As they say “doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is the definition of madness.” So what are you going to change? Eat a “healthy” breakfast every day? Eat 80/20 paleo? Count calories? Do thirty minutes of cardio five days a week? And what is your crisis plan when you’re at risk of falling off the wagon?

Why You Need to Have a Plan

If you want to achieve the goal, you need a plan. Having a goal without a plan is just a wish, and will probably result in you making the same resolution in eleven months’ time, accompanied with a little bit of regret, guilt, and frustration that you didn’t achieve it last time.

Breaking your goal down into a plan means you break it down into daily chunks. Instead of thinking you’re going to “eat 80/20 paleo for ten weeks,” you’re going to think, “I’m eating 80/20 paleo today.” You can make a plan for each day that involves all the aspects of your goal, be it sleep, nutrition, or exercise. This way you have something you can go to bed each night feeling successful in having achieved. Instead of focusing on the fact you haven’t reached your goal weight yet, you can focus on the fact that you followed your plan today, and are therefore one step closer to your goal. It makes the journey not only a lot less intimidating. Approaching your goal in small bits is also more rewarding because you can pat yourself on the back along the way.

Of course the end goal is the driving inspiration behind the whole plan, but live in the present and celebrate your successes along the way. Each day you execute your plan, you’re one step closer to that end goal. The other great thing about focusing on the plan is that you’re not limiting yourself to your goal. A funny thing happens when I focus on the daily plan rather than the goal and that’s that I find myself making leaps and bounds towards my goal, and getting there much quicker than I’d estimated. So, go ahead and make your SMART goal, but then do some planning – and go get it!

Photos courtesy of Shutterstock.

The post Resolution Check-In: How to Get Back on Track appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

When I first heard the saying “strong is the new skinny” I loved it, but since then, I’ve kind of grown to hate it. Let me explain.

Strong is strong. According to the Oxford dictionary, strong is “having the power to move heavy weights or perform other physically demanding tasks.” It describes a physical ability. Incidentally, it’s also a word I like to use interchangeably with awesome, but that’s another story altogether.

Skinny is skinny. According to the Oxford dictionary, skinny is “unattractively thin,” which is at odds with the Urban Dictionary definition of “something a lot of girls want to be. Otherwise known as perfection.” Either way, I think we can agree that skinny is used to describe a body composition or aesthetics, not that body’s physical abilities.

When I first heard the saying “strong is the new skinny,” I was pretty excited. I was thrilled that we were finally going to start celebrating bodies, and particularly women’s bodies, for what they could do rather than how they matched up against whatever ideal they were supposed to look like. Appreciating physical feats of strength rather than purely aesthetics seemed like such a healthy, and long overdue, approach. I had visions of women admiring one another for how many chin-ups they could do, or how much they could squat, rather than what size jeans they could squeeze their skinny-fat butt into (oops…did I say that?!). And perhaps finally the capabilities of our bodies would rein supreme, and we’d all start exercising, resting, and fuelling appropriately to support our amazing bodies.

But how wrong I was

Someone in the Facebook marketing department (I figure that’s where all these motivational posters originate) got things a little confused and perhaps read it to be “muscles are the new skinny,” because they started attaching the slogan to a bunch of photos of fitness models who were probably too dehydrated and calorie deprived to lift much more than their own body weight at the time the photos were taken. Now, I’m not saying that some of the women that this slogan has been used to describe are not incredible athletes, possessing both determination and amazing bodies, nor am I saying they are not strong. But, I’ve never come across a photo of four-time world Strongwoman winner Aneta Florczyk (pictured below) or powerlifting world record holder Becca Swanson with the slogan superimposed, so what gives?

Instead of attaching the slogan to pictures of women accomplishing genuinely impressive feats of strength, most of the time the slogan is attached to a model with little body fat and showing more muscle than your average woman, as a way to represent strength. But in doing so we’ve simply replaced one aesthetic ideal of “skinny” with another of “lean and muscular,” and come up with a new reason to obsess over instead of celebrate our bodies.

So while I’m definitely happy that we’ve shifted the focus away from everyone trying to be skinny, because that usually translates to women trying to survive on as little food as possible and spending hours doing cardio when they could be using their body for fun stuff like practicing handstands or dancing. I’m less than impressed that we’ve simply replaced skinny with another ideal. I think we missed the point!

Skinny is okay. Some women naturally have low body fat and little muscle mass (while doing little cardio, eating plenty, doing handstands, and dancing to their heart’s content). Some of these women are also pretty amazing athletes.

Chubby is okay. Just because someone doesn’t have a rippling six-pack doesn’t make her unhealthy or unfit. Some women feel and perform better with a little bit of extra fat on their bodies. Some of these women are also pretty amazing athletes.

Muscular is okay, too. Some women put on muscle easily and naturally have low body fat. It doesn’t make them manly, or fitness fanatics, or any better or worse than the skinny girl on her right who can run laps around her on the track or the chubby girl who can back squat the both of them. No surprise here, but some of the muscular women are pretty amazing athletes, too.

And while I personally use the word strong interchangeably with “awesome,” I also think flexibility, endurance, and balance are also pretty cool too (although I was endowed with a little less of these of these variants of awesome, so I’m a little biased towards strength) – and this is what we should all be celebrating! Of course our body composition is important, both from an aesthetic and performance perspective. We all want to look as amazing and healthy as we feel, but “amazing and healthy” comes in many shapes and sizes.

My wish for everyone is that we focus on movement and celebrating the amazing capabilities of our bodies, and that we get out there and lift, run, jump, swim, handstand, dance, and enjoy. Strong is still strong, and skinny is still skinny.

Aneta Florczyk photo by Artur Andrzej (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 or GFDL], via Wikimedia Commons.

The post Strong Is Still Strong, Skinny Is Still Skinny appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

A while back I went through a phase of being particularly restrictive with my salt intake. After sweating my way through daily workouts, I’d find myself craving salty foods (and we’re talking anchovies and olives, not junk foods). After consistently eating my way through jars of anchovies and olives on a nightly basis, I knew this was more than a passing craze, and there was something more going on here. As soon as I stopped restricting salt, the cravings went away.

But, I was still a little concerned. Even though it’s natural, salt is bad for you right? Was I being led astray by my taste buds or was my body actually craving salt for a reason? Was being back on the salt-train a one-way ticket to high blood pressure and heart disease? Well, turns out the opinions of the experts are pretty mixed.

The popular belief that salt intake should be restricted all started in 1972 when a study was conducted examining the effects of dietary salt on rats. The study appeared to show increased salt intake was positively correlated with hypertension. But, when we look a little closer at the details of the study, the rats were given doses of salt equivalent to a human consuming more than 500g or 4.5 cups daily. Compare this to the average intake in the United States of around 3.5g per day. I’m pretty sure even something as healthy as kale would produce some pretty bad health effects if you consumed seventy bunches a day!

Then in 1988 the INTERSALT study claimed to support this correlation. The study looked at various populations, taking their average salt intake and their average blood pressure. The study showed a few outliers with low salt intake and low average blood pressure, but generally a cluster of results showing no significant correlation between salt intake and blood pressure. It’s normal practice to remove outliers from a statistical analysis of results before searching for a correlation, however this wasn’t done in this study. An example of one of these outliers was the Yanomami Indians, who certainly did have lower rates of hypertension, as well as lower average salt intake. But they also led physically active lives, ate a diet low in saturated fat, and had virtually no obesity or alcohol consumption, and somehow salt still got the blame!

Which brings us to an important point: Blood pressure is affected by so many variables, from lifestyle factors such as stress levels, physical activity, and sex, to dietary factors such as caloric intake, potassium, and calcium. Salt or sodium is just one of these factors!

More recent studies have failed to show a correlation between salt intake and heart disease. The DASH (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) study shows that while a large reduction in salt intake may minimally lower blood pressure, there is no clear correlation between this reduced salt intake and a lowered risk of heart disease. Furthermore, a study from 2003 showed that American salt intake has barely changed in the past fifty years, so if we think about it logically, it doesn’t make much sense for salt to get the blame for the increasing rates of heart disease. In fact, more studies tend to support the idea that potassium and/or the ratio of potassium to sodium is actually more important than sodium levels alone when it comes to heart disease.

Even though it’s been demonized somewhat, salt actually plays a pretty vital role in our bodies, and there is mounting evidence it can be harmful to severely restrict it. So long as our kidneys function normally, our bodies are pretty good at regulating our fluid balance when we eat slightly more or less salt than required, but when we go beyond these levels it can be problematic, actually increasing the risk of cardiac-related death. Salt is particularly important for athletes to replace electrolytes lost during sweating, as well in the general population helping in the regulation of blood sugar and digestive processes.

So, while the evidence is far from conclusive, I’m happy to accept my anchovy and olive cravings as my body’s way of telling me not to take it easy on the salt shaker.

Photos courtesy of Shutterstock.

The post The Shakedown on Salt: Is it Good or Bad for You? appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

On one hand, milk is the stuff most of us were literally raised on – mother’s milk. (Although there are some significant differences between human breast milk and the milk you find in supermarkets.) Surely something that took us from a helpless bundle to the beginnings of a fully functioning human being couldn’t be bad for us right? Having grown up in dairy farming country, drinking milk like normal kids drink water (or soda these days), I certainly found it hard to wrap my mind around the idea milk might not be ideal nutrition.

The reasoning in support of milk is that in its raw form it is a complete nutritive source, providing almost equal parts protein, fat, and carbohydrates, as well as plenty of calcium as icing on the cake. Some would say it’s relatively natural since we drank mother’s milk as babies, but the amount of processing modern milk goes through leaves it in a far from natural state.

On the flipside, one of the biggest reasons you would want to exclude milk from your diet is if you are either allergic to casein or lactose intolerant:

Casein is one of the proteins in milk and has a similar structure to gluten. Many opponents of milk suggest casein has the same effects on our guts to those of gluten, destroying our intestinal lining and causing autoimmune diseases (and not just in celiac individuals). Symptoms of casein allergy include nasal and sinus congestion; skin rashes; swelling of the mouth, face, and throat; and anaphylaxis in more extreme cases. Some people are also allergic to the other protein in milk, whey, and experience similar symptoms.

Lactose is the sugar in milk, and there is evidence to suggest many of us are not adapted to digest lactose after age four. This also explains in part why babies can drink their mother’s milk without any problems, but then lactose intolerance shows up later in life. On the flipside there are also some of us who can consume milk with no ill effects. So how do you know which group you fall under? Well, some of us have pretty obvious reactions to lactose, such as rumbling tummy, explosive diarrhea, and cramping and bloating. But for many of us the reaction is much more subtle, so the easiest way to tell if you suspect you might be intolerant is to cut out milk for a month and see if your symptoms change.

The third main reason why many avoid milk is the effect it has on our insulin response. Milk is highly insulinogenic, meaning it stimulates your body to produce insulin. This can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on who you are and when you’re drinking your milk. If you’re a hard gainer, the Gallon of Milk a Day (GOMAD) program might be an option for you, purely from a body composition perspective. Drinking milk post-workout will spike your insulin, which assists transport of protein and glycogen to muscles in need. However, if you’re trying to lose body fat and drinking milk throughout the day without any workout stimulus, that insulin spike is storing energy as fat rather than your muscles. So if you’re trying to lose weight, milk might not be a good idea.

Similarly, if you have skin problems or acne, you might reconsider milk consumption. Milk not only increases the production of insulin, but is also linked with higher levels of insulin like growth factor (IGF-1), which in turn is linked to acne. The evidence is far from clear cut, but it’s growing, so if your skin isn’t looking as great as it could, milk might not be for you.

So, still not much clearer, are we? Well, to cut a long story short, if you’re not where you want to be either body composition or health wise, or even maybe if you are, it’s worth having a milk-free month and seeing how you feel at the end of it.

Photos courtesy of Shutterstock.

The post Clear as Milk: The Pros and Cons of Milk Consumption appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

The paleo jury is still out on paleo sweets. Whilst for some they’re a healthy treat, the key word here is treat, and these food items definitely need to be approached with caution depending on your goals. After all, we are still talking about what are often very high calorie density and insulin-spiking foods here. So, here are a few questions to ask to work out whether paleo sweets are a good addition to your diet:

1. Are you happy with your body composition?

If you’re looking to gain muscle, paleo sweets might just be a great addition to your diet. The extra calories, carbohydrates to spike your insulin post training, and some extra protein are probably all going to help your cause. But for many paleo followers, this is not their goal.

If you’re looking to lose body fat, paleo treats might not quite be the answer when you’re feeling peckish. Certainly a paleo pancake here and there is not going to hurt, and it’s definitely still possible to lose body fat eating paleo pancakes for breakfast every morning. But the energy density and higher carbohydrate content of these treats aren’t working in your favor, so the key here is moderation. These foods still fall under the category of “treats” even though they’re paleo.

2. Can you stop at one?

Or even two? I was always amazed at my college roommate who kept packets of chocolate biscuits in her cupboard for months on end, and ended up sharing simply because the biscuits were about to pass their “best before” date. Those suckers wouldn’t last more than a few study sessions in my cupboard! Without going into the details of the reasons we eat (for that, refer to my What Are You Really Hungry For? article) suffice to say, some of us have a problem stopping at one, so cooking up a big batch of any type of high energy-density sweet treats, be they paleo or not, is probably not a great idea.

If this scenario sounds familiar to you, there are a couple of ways around the problem. One option is to modify your recipes so you’re just cooking one serving at a time, or alternatively buy pre-made paleo treats that are portion sized. But sometimes you don’t have a choice. For example, my paleo chocolate nut balls are better than most, and it’s just not realistic for me to spend the time and effort involved in making them if I’m only making two for my own dessert. I’m making a batch, or I’m not making any at all. So I make sure I tell everyone at work and the gym before I make them, promising to bring in some samples. I can’t go back on a promise, so it usually limits me to consuming three or four nut balls.

3. Do you have intolerances or allergies to certain non-paleo foods?

If the choice for you is that of a paleo sweet or a box of cream-filled donuts, as opposed to no treat at all, then that’s a different discussion. If you know you want a treat and you know you have food intolerances or allergies, then it paleo sweets make sense. In this case I’d argue, even if you are trying to lose body fat and have a track record of not stopping at one or two, the lesser of two evils is definitely the paleo sweet.

While paleo treats are definitely not for everybody all the time, there are still positives for the occasional indulgence. You know exactly what’s in the food, so no scary chemical preservatives or additives. From a macronutrient perspective paleo treats are much lower in sugar than their traditional versions, plus from a nutrient perspective the paleo treat is probably high in good fats, antioxidants, fiber, and lots of other good stuff. And last but not least, even if you have to resort to promising to share your latest creation to avoid eating the whole thing yourself, a tasty paleo treat is a good way to make friends at work and at the gym!

Photos courtesy of Shutterstock.

The post Paleo Sweets: They Might Be “Healthy” But They Still Might Be a Bad Idea appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Imagine for a minute where all the ingredients for this feast came from, and I don’t just mean the supermarket shelves – I mean before that. Imagine if you had to hunt and gather the ingredients for yourself. From a geographical perspective, the shrimp, papaya, and coconut can all be found in one climate, but we’d be hard pressed to find our sheep chilling out under a coconut tree in the tropics. Nor would we find asparagus, apricots, and butternut squash there either, so we’d have to head to more moderate inland climates for these items. And then from a seasonal perspective, we’d have to arrive in spring for asparagus, late summer for the apricots, and winter for the butternut squash. This dinner party just got complicated!

Back to reality and the fact that our supermarket shelves are laden with almost any food item our taste buds desire. We’ve developed extremely elaborate ways to ensure we have produce ripe for us whenever we want it. But, when you think about it on a broad level, we actually had almost everything we needed (although perhaps not that our taste buds desired) before our food was so globalized. On the sub-tropical beach we had protein from the shrimp, carbohydrates from the papaya, and fat from the coconut. Similarly, living further inland we would nourish our bodies through a cold winter with the fat and protein of lamb and carbohydrates of the likes of butternut squash.

There are certainly a few upsides to the globalization of the food industry – we can source almost anything we want, whenever we want it. From a nutritional perspective the variety means plenty of different vitamins and nutrients available to us. But there are a few potential downsides too, which make you question whether perhaps eating seasonally makes more sense.

First, perhaps the abundance of options leads us to overeat, particularly when it comes to carbohydrates. Fruits and vegetables are broadly considered healthy options, and certainly are in moderation, but it’s also possible to have too much of a good thing.

In nature, it’s pretty rare to find an abundance of carbohydrate sources lined up beside one another as you do in a modern supermarket. If you live in the tropics, you have tropical fruits like papayas, mangoes, and bananas, and of course cane sugar to satisfy your sweet tooth, plus plantains and a few root vegetables for your starches. But if you live in a harsh cold climate, you have none of these and you’re more likely to get your carbohydrates from root vegetables such as carrots, parsnips, and swedes (rutabagas), plus potatoes. The only fruits available are things like apples, pears, and strawberries during the warmer seasons.

Today we can have all of these fruits and starchy vegetables year round and still assume we’re eating healthy since we’re not eating carbohydrates in the form of donuts and baked goods. So whilst we think we’re eating healthy, the variety makes it possible for us to easily overeat carbohydrates.

But it’s not just the variety that can lead to overconsumption. We’ve all had that experience where although it looked like a banana and was labeled as a banana, what you bit into was some tasteless, somewhat banana-ish, textured substance. Something I’d call a “banana-like item” apparently designed for human consumption. This is an example of how the foods produced out of season don’t quite match up to the ones grown naturally. They have been fed a bunch of chemicals and raised in artificial conditions and then “frozen” for weeks or months for shipping or storage, eventually being chemically ripened just before they make their way into your lunchbox.

It makes sense this banana-like item is not going to taste quite the same as a banana that’s been ripened naturally by the hot Brazilian sun. The whole experience of eating one of these banana-like items leaves me unsatisfied, and wanting something more. The logical next step is to reach for the strawberries you bought today, and if they’re a bit sour you can always try one of the nectarines. Before you know it, three or more servings of fruit are consumed when all you wanted was a real banana.

So, if you’re keen to give eating seasonally a try, where do you start? There are plenty of resources online to show you what produce is seasonal in your area, however the easiest way to start without spending hours researching is to check out a farmers market. Most produce you find there will be fairly local and in season. It’s worth giving a go – your waistline and your taste buds will thank you for it!

Photos courtesy of Shutterstock.

The post How Fruits, Veggies, and a Lack of Seasons Contribute to Overeating appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

But once you’ve decided that eating to fuel your performance is the way forward, the next logical question is how to eat? What do you actually eat in order to fuel your performance?

Of course this depends on what “performance” means in your given sport. For example carb loading for your early morning yoga class probably isn’t necessary, but then nor is starting a triathlon in ketosis a great idea. However, there are a few basics that all athletes will do well to consider:

1. Eat Enough

Firstly, and most importantly, eating adequate amounts of food to support your activity level is vital to performance. It seems like a no-brainer, yet it is one of the most commonly overlooked pieces of the puzzle. If you’re wondering why you’re not making any progress athletically when you’re eating barely enough to sustain your vital functions, this is the first thing you need to fix. Whilst your body can use existing protein (muscle) and body fat as fuel, to solely rely on these to fuel your athletic performance isn’t an optimum strategy, especially when your body kicks into survival mode assuming food is scarce since you’re depriving it. The combination doesn’t set you up to reach your performance goals.

2. Eat the Right Things

So, once you’ve made sure you’re eating enough to fuel your performance, you can start looking at the macronutrient breakdown. When it comes to energy sources, the two main macronutrients our body can use are carbohydrates and fats. Protein can also be used for energy, but this is a last resort. Unless you’re tired of walking around looking awesomely fit and healthy with all that muscle mass you worked so hard for and want to get rid of some of it, you don’t want to be fuelling your workouts with protein. (Note: What I’m referring to here is your body using your own muscle mass as fuel – it’s not a good idea from a health, metabolic, or aesthetic perspective, the only context in which it is a good idea is when it comes to pure survival.)

Fat is a great source of fuel for getting you through the day. Assuming everything in your body is in pretty good working order both dietary fat and body fat can be used to fuel your body throughout the day quite well. It is the basic energy source that we have used to sustain ourselves for generations. Whilst body fat is seen as something negative in this day and age, from an evolutionary perspective your ability to store body fat to live off could literally be the difference between survival and death in a particularly barren winter. Whilst the landscape has changed significantly, our bodies haven’t that much, and we can still live pretty well off fat. With regard to dietary fat, different types of fats are more readily available energy sources than others. For example, MCT oil is known to be a readily available energy source. From a health perspective, choosing your fats wisely is important. So eat plenty of avocado, omega-3s, and coconut oil, but steer clear of any vegetable oils or trans fats.

3. Carb Up if Your Sport Demands It

It is however generally more difficult for our bodies to meet high energy demands rapidly using only fat, so for challenging athletic pursuits (triathlons, team sports, CrossFit, weightlifting, marathon running, and most others you can think of) it often makes sense to pre-load our bodies with the most readily available energy source, carbohydrates. This is what many people refer to as carbing up or carb loading.

The general concept is to get as much glycogen into your muscles as possible so they’re ready to go when you need them. This is usually done in the lead up to a big race or competition by athletes, and involves intake of significant carbohydrates days before the event. But the same concept can also be used effectively on a more regular basis in preparation for hard training sessions, because the harder you can push yourself in training, the better results you’ll see. This is usually done with a more moderate carbohydrate intake on a more frequent basis (several times a week), simply to ensure that glycogen stores are available but trying to avoid intake of excess carbohydrates that would be stored as fat. The amount of the carbohydrate loads and frequency are different for each individual, based on his or her training regime and sport of choice. But with some experimentation and listening to your body, you can refine to suit your performance goals.

Then finally there is the choice of carbohydrate sources – from naturally occurring fruits and vegetables to highly processed junk. Whilst I’m not one to demonize an occasional indulgence, carb loading should not be an excuse to consistently make poor food choices. Nature provides plenty of good quality starches for our consumption, so my first preference will always be for the natural sources, rather than products with a scarily long ingredients list of unidentifiable extras. Generally starchy carbohydrates are considered to be a better option than fruits when it comes to carb loading because they tend to load glycogen more efficiently. So my top pick to carb up when I need to fuel my performance is, without a doubt, sweet potato.

So there are your three nutrition basics for fuelling performance. It doesn’t have to be too complicated. Eat enough, eat the right things, and carb up (intelligently) if your sport demands it.

Keep an eye out for my next article where we’ll talk in more detail about my favorite carb source, the sweet potato.

Photos courtesy of Shutterstock.

The post 3 Simple Steps to Properly Fuel Your Performance appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

The reason for this is that most diets today are focused on fear in one way or another – fear of fat, fear of calories, fear of carbs. Not to mention the fear of high GI foods, sugar, anything artificial, or fear of eating the wrong ratios of macronutrients, not eating every three hours, not eating breakfast, or eating carbs after 7:00pm. The list goes on. I don’t think I’m saying anything groundbreaking by suggesting perhaps these diets aren’t quite working out well in the longer term, since we’re all still on diets. Not to mention if you tried to combine them all you’d probably find yourself on a not so exciting (and not so nutritious) diet of organic, grass-fed low-fat beef jerky, with a side of organic non-GMO lettuce, unless you’re vegetarian that is.

Then on top of all the diet rules, we add your athletic goals into the mix, be it improving performance in your sport of choice, building muscle, losing fat, running faster – or for the ambitious folk, all of the aforementioned. So you train and train and train, and if you hit a plateau you just train harder and dedicate yourself to following an even stricter version of your diet. If you weren’t losing weight on 1,400 calories a day, the logical next step is to go down to a miserable 1,200, right?

End result: you’re more tired than ever, trying to get motivated to train whilst your undernourished body raises all the strength it has to fight off the latest flu going around, eventually leaving you bedridden for a couple of days (and possibly curled up with a nice pile of comfort food, and back to square one).

Even starting off with the best intentions of a balanced approach we find ourselves getting that little bit stricter in the hopes the results will come faster, and this is where a lot of people get themselves into trouble. And it’s not just for the low-calorie folks out there, the same applies whether it’s low-carb, paleo, Zone, or whatever your chosen diet.

But I’m going to suggest perhaps the problem is not that you’re not being strict enough – it’s that you’re being too strict.

So, lets take a step back and consider ditching the diet, losing the fear of whatever it is, and coming up with a plan to nourish our bodies and support our athletic performance. After all, real food is the sustenance of human life. It makes no sense to be fearful of it. But how do we do this?

Firstly, give up the idea that you’re going to lose 10lbs of fat or gain 10lbs of muscle in the next two weeks. Embrace the idea that you’re about to start nourishing the amazing body you’ve got.

Secondly, follow some basic guidelines on what you should be eating. Note the use of the word guidelines not rules. Hence, it’s a general idea of what you should be eating most of the time, not a five-step test for everything that passes your lips, only to beat yourself up about when you “fail.”

1. Eat a wide variety of natural and unprocessed foods as often as possible. It’s a dummy’s way to ensure you’re not eating anything too poisonous, and you are getting lots of vitamins and nutrients. If it grew on a tree or in the ground, or had a face once upon a time, chances are it’s okay to eat. If it’s organic, hormone-free, and grass fed, then great. If not, that’s okay too – remember, guidelines!

2. Eat according to your energy expenditure. Quite simply, how big are you and how much do you move? Now make sure you eat around about the right number of calories to support this. Consistently eating significantly more or less will get you into all sorts of trouble in the long run. (And for those of you who just thought, “Oh so if it’s only troublesome in the long run, I’ll shoot for 1,200 calories just for a few more weeks until I drop a few pounds, then switch to a more moderate approach,” remember to bookmark this page so you can come back to read this when you’re curled up in bed with the flu next month.)

3. Avoid things that make you sick. This one is where listening to your body comes in. Sometimes our body is very vocal about what makes us sick (think back to your last hangover), but sometimes it’s subtler. Bloating, skin problems, sinus issues, and inflammation are all signs of your body not being too happy about something. If you suspect it’s food related, remove the potential culprit from your diet for a month and see how you feel.

4. Actually listen to what your body is telling you, and I mean really listen, not just to the stuff you want to hear. More often than not your cravings are telling you something. If you’re a low-carber and after a workout all you can think about is something sweet, maybe your body is trying to tell you it needs a few more carbs. Or perhaps that coffee hit you want so desperately is actually just leaving you with an upset stomach and has you craving your next hit in a few hours.

5. Eat primarily to nourish your body and to fuel your athletic performance, but every now and then eat for pleasure. We were given taste buds for a reason!

I certainly don’t believe there is one perfect human diet out there that everyone should be following. We are all individuals. Our bodies are different and what we ask of them is different. But for most of us, following these five guidelines and tweaking as required on an individual level will not only get you a long way towards the body and performance you want, but leave you with a much healthier and happier relationship with food.

Photos courtesy of Shutterstock.

The post Stop Fearing Your Food: How to Create a Healthy Relationship With Your Nutrition appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Needless to say, we’re a pretty competitive bunch, and proud of it too. We know that competition is what fuels results. Athletes keep going far beyond the point where they’d normally quit because they’re keeping up with the person next to them, or trying to better their back squat. Adding a little competition into the mix is what pushes “regular people” to achieve amazing things. Competition makes you accountable for your work and gives you something to beat next time.

But for all its positives, competition can be a double-edged sword, and an often-criticized part of CrossFit. From a safety perspective, when you’re competing with the guy next to you, you’re more likely to compromise movement mechanics to get those extra couple of reps in, or put an extra few pounds on the bar when you know your form was already breaking down in your last attempt. Also many would argue being in a constant state of competition gets in the way of proper periodization in programming, which is important for athletes both physically and mentally. At best, you or your coach will recognize the signs early and give you a reality check, and at worst, you’ll end up failing to progress and getting injured, which is the last place a competitive individual wants to be.

Much of this can be avoided by asking a few simple questions, and doing some appropriate goal setting. Here are three questions every CrossFitter should think on every day:

1. Who are you competing against?

Am I aiming for the podium at next year’s regionals or winning a local competition in six months time? Or am I competing against the person I was yesterday and working to enhance my health and fitness? For the vast majority of us, I’d say the answer is the latter, and sometimes the competition element gets the better of us and impedes our progress. For someone who is training to compete against others (at regionals or in competition) teetering in that grey area between working at your maximum capacity and overtraining is probably somewhere you need to be if you’re pushing yourself to achieve. But for the rest of us, pushing ourselves to do a double WOD when we’re sore and tired and running on four hours of sleep really isn’t going to help our health and fitness.

2. What is your body telling you it wants to do today?

In my experience most CrossFitters don’t have a problem with motivation or finding time to get in a workout. Rather the problem is generally the exact opposite, CrossFitters end up pushing themselves when their body is saying (or sometimes yelling and screaming) to take a break. If you’re genuinely sore, tired, and running on four hours sleep – why are you at the gym? Unless you’re there to mobilize and stretch, go home! Pushing yourself when your body clearly isn’t up to it results in a lackluster training session and poor recovery. How can you expect to train at high intensity when walking from your car to the gym is an effort?

3. What is your goal in this WOD?

If it’s to put “Rx” next to your name on the whiteboard no matter what, perhaps it’s time to reconsider your approach. If that “Rx” means you’re going to be staring at the pullup bar for five minutes for half your workout, you’re probably not getting the stimulus your coach intended. Scale it with a band, and practice some “Rx” pullups after class. As general rules, your lungs should be screaming at you at the end of a met-con, your muscles should be screaming at you at the end of a barbell complex, and your form should not completely go out the door just so you can lift heavier. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that every once in a while you shouldn’t go heavier at the expense of losing a bit of speed or technique, and we all remember the first time we wrote rx next to our name on the whiteboard. It’s a proud moment, even if we were the last to finish. But consistently going too heavy or failing to scale for the sake of competition isn’t helping you. If you’re unsure, then ask your coach.

I’m certainly not saying don’t go hard, quite the opposite in fact. I’m saying, set yourself up by resting and scaling appropriately in order to go hard, every single training session, over and over again. And certainly, adding some healthy competition with your fellow CrossFitters into the mix is a great way to do it – just do it intelligently.

Photos provided by CrossFit LA.

The post 3 Questions Every CrossFitter Needs to Ask Every Day appeared first on Breaking Muscle.