How does food make you feel and what does this mean?

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Your body IS communicating with you… Every minute of every hour of every day it is telling you whether what you have eaten is right or what you have eaten is wrong for your health, fitness or weight loss goals. I’m not just talking about the common sense stuff and that little voice inside your head saying, ‘don’t eat the doughnut it’s bad for you’.

I’m talking about the important stuff, headaches lethargy, weight gain and illness. If you know how to listen you can start formulating a better diet - one more suited to your body; one that is more suited to your genetic makeup. This is a tool that we use with our nutrition clients to help them become experts in what foods are good for them and moving them towards their goal and what foods are bad for
them. People are often surprised by which foods make them feel great, full for hours and full of energy.

This simple tool will also allow you to cut through all the rubbish that the press pushes on us calling it health and nutrition advice and enabling you to make an informed decision as to whether a food, or diet is actually good for you.

The tool that we use is called a daily check record sheet (DCR). It is a way of keeping a food diary but is more comprehensive than just writing your foods down. Here is a an example of a section of a daily check record sheet;

REACTIONS TO YOUR METABOLIC TYPE DIET

FOOD INTAKE - List all foods & drinks consumed
TODAY’S DATE:

Place a check to the left of all descriptions that describe your experience 1 – 2 hours after each meal
Time Breakfast

APPETITE SATIETY CRAVINGS

   Feel full, satisfied   Feel physically full, but still hungry
  Do NOT have sweet cravings   Have desire for something sweet
  Do NOT desire more food   Not satisfied, feel like something was missing
  Do NOT feel hungry   Already hungry
  Do NOT need to snack before next meal   Feel the need for a snack

ENERGY

LEVELS

   Energy feels renewed   Meal gave too much or too little energy
  Have good, lasting, “normal” sense of energy   Became hyper, jittery, shaky, nervous or speedy
    Felt hyper, but exhausted “underneath”
  Energy tanked from meal – exhaustion, sleepiness, drowsiness, listlessness or lethargy

MIND

EMOTIONS

WELL-BEING

   Improved well-being   Mentally slow, sluggish, or spacy
  Sense of feeling refueled, renewed and restored   Inability to think quickly or clearly
  Some emotional upliftment   Hyper, overly rapid thoughts
  Improved mental clarity and sharpness   Inability to focus or concentrate
  Normalization of thought processes   Apathy, depression, withdrawal or sadness
    Anxious, obsessive, fearful, angry or irritable

How to use the DCR?

Fill in the left hand column with what you have eaten; just like a regular diet diary.  Then, 1.5 hours after consuming the food, use the tick sheet to determine whether the meal was good for you or bad for you; whether it had a positive effect on your mood, concentration and energy levels or a negative effect.

Why 1.5 hours?

It does not have to be exactly 1.5 hours, you can do anywhere between 1.5 and 2 hours. This time gap between eating the meal and filling in the tick sheet allows your meal time to be digested and absorbed. It should therefore be affecting you on a cellular level. How you now feel is a direct relation to how the cells of your body are feeling and operating.

Keith Tucker

Muscle Soreness (DOMS)

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Many of you boot campers and personal training clients have woken up over this last week as sore as F?#k! sorry for the language, lol but more than one or two of you have had a colourful word or 2 to say we levering yourselves out of the car before your boot camp session.

Many of you have been in even though you were sore. Well done and kudos to you!!!

Many wondered if you were doing the right thing and I’m sure that many more of you avoided coming training. Although it’s a little counter intuitive research has show that it is fine to train on stiff and sore muscles if they are suffering from D.O.M.S.

D.O.M.S stands for delayed onset muscle soreness and can last from 3 to 5 days. Many of you know this already!

The studies have shown 2 things;

1. Full metabolic recovery occurs within 48 hours even if still sore

2. Training on muscles suffering from DOMS does not affect their recovery time

As far as weight loss in concerned you want to be back in training the very next day so that you keep stoking up your metabolism and burn twice as much fat. If you do a training session and then take the next 5 day off you are never going to get the metabolism of its ass and doing its job. FAT BURNING!

The painful truth is the more you train the less you’re going to suffer in the long run as your body adjust and therefore gets used to it.

For myself I rate the quality of the training session on how stiff and sore I am. If I’m not it was not a good session and not as productive as it could have been.

What can you do to relieve the pain?

Many people have asked me what they can do to relieve the symptoms. The honest answer is that your body has to do it in its own time but you can help it to do its best job by doing the following;

1. Eat good quality foods

2. Make sure that your meals are based around good quality protein

3. Drink plenty of fresh clean water

4. Plenty or rest and good quality sleep

5. Have a hot/warm bath

6. Light massage of the area

These will either bring you light short term relief (bath or massage) or will help the repair process, therefore shortening it slightly.

See you at the next boot camp session

Committed to your success

Keith, Clare and the team

When 10 more minutes in bed is more important than a proper breakfast

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Is that extra 10 minutes in bed worth missing breakfast for?

As the days get shorter and it gets colder, I don’t know about you but I find it harder to get up. The snooze button comes out of retirement to help me stay in bed for just a bit longer.

For many people including myself at times it often seems like a good plan to have more time in bed and either miss breakfast or have something quick on the run.

Honestly, a good quality breakfast is worth far more than that extra 5/10 minutes between the sheets.

It has been shown in studies time and time again that people who miss breakfast make up the missed calories later on in the day or they get through the day by taking stimulants.

Neither of these approaches are good when it come to either losing weight or improving health.

Most people who miss breakfast end up feeling nibbly throughout the rest of the day, which is made worse by the high sugar snacks which is often the first thing that they have to eat.

For example one of my clients used to miss breakfast, waiting until she got to work at 9 where she would have a croissant or toast with jam and a coffee. By the time an hour had passed she was feeling nibbly again so had a high sugar snack and a coffee at 10 / 10.30ish. By lunch 1.00pm time she would be hungry again and would have a sandwich, fruit and a drink. This would satisfy her more, but by 3 pm she was ready to nibble again so she would only have 1 biscuit and a tea. She would manage to get through until dinner at 7 which would be a stir fry on a bed of white rice, but then throughout the evening she would have a glass of wine…. or 2 and some chocolate/biscuits/crisps and then to bed for 10.30/11pm.

The calories that she missed at breafast were made up plus extra throughout the day. Over a 3 year period she put on 3 stone!

The changes we made to her diet were simple but effective. If you’re not doing these, make a list and start.

  1. Plan your food knowing what will happen throughout the week
  2. Start your day with a protein based breakfast such as an omelette with meat or vegetables in or cold meats with some cheese and fruit
  3. Take a snack with you such as goat’s cheese and grapes, olives, small meat chunks left over from Sundays roast or mixed nuts.
  4. Cut the coffee and drink water
  5. Take a lunch with you so that you do not buy sandwiches. Prepare it the night before possibly by cooking more dinner. Place it in a container in the fridge and take it with you for lunch. See how much money you will save over buying lunch everyday
  6. Only have 2 or 3 spoonfuls of rice with your dinner. To make up the amount on your plate increase the amount of meat and vegetables

On these guidelines most people nibble less throughout the day and the evening, their health improves and they lose weight. If you don’t then you need to take things a little more seriously, come along to the boot camp or book a consultation to find out whats best for you.

Committed to your success

Keith

Will doing crunches give you a six pack?

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judi

Have you ever noticed how doing sit ups or crunches never seem to give people a six pack no matter how many they do. You may be one of the people who are experiencing this problem.

For most people it makes sense to them that if they exercise a specific muscle surely they should lose the fat from that area….. They are often surprised to find that 1 year of doing sit ups later they can do 1000, have a bad back but still have not shifted the extra weight on their stomach that they were hoping to.

You CAN’T spot tone!

I know, it’s a complete bugger but your body just doesn’t work like that. I want you to think about it in a different way. Think of your muscle as engines and your fat cells as the fuel tanks. For good consistent weight loss you need to make all of your engine work so that they all have increased fuel demands…. Let me explain;

If your arm is working hard and requires more fuel to keep working, fat will be broken down from where ever you store it, let’s say for instance round your waist. The fat is transported by the blood to the liver the liver turns it into glycogen and transports the fuel to the arm where it is used to keep the arm moving.

If all your muscle require more energy the fuel (fat) is taken from your reserves to feed them.

Working one muscle or muscle group like you abdominals is not going to use up enough calories to make a difference to the fat reserves around your body. Your body will also choose which fuel (fat) site to take the fuel from, therefore no spot toning.

The best exercises to use to burn the fat from your body are those that require your whole body to do them. Exercises such as dead lifts, cleans, walking lunges, lunges with dumbbell presses, pulls and raises. These exercises burn up tones of calories and require you body access its fuel stores.

At the fit body boot camp we use exercises that get some increasable results. This is because they are full body, full on, fully committed exercises. This is not to say that they are only for fit people, they aren’t. In your free body diagnostic we will identify your level of fitness and injury risk so that in every boot camp session you can work to your maximum potential with the exercises that are right for you.

The fit body boot camps combination of full body movement and interval training we will get you the results that you are looking for.

To see a video of the Sunday boot campers then click on the link below

www.fitbodybootcamp.co.uk

And then sign up and join in the fun!

Committed to your success

Keith, Clare and the Team