This is reasonably good advice and yet over simplified. For most of us the only reason that carbohydrate consumption ever becomes a problem is for these two reasons:

1)     The abundance of food processing or additives used in food preparation contains countless grams of hidden sugars you never realize you’re consuming.

2)     Most people don’t understand the differences between a starchy carbohydrate and a fibrous carbohydrate and how each has its distinct benefits.

No matter what your belief about carbohydrates if I could urge you to make one positive change in your own nutritional habits today; it would be to reduce processed food and food additive consumption. By doing everything you can to eliminate as much or all processed food and keeping dining out to a minimum you will eliminate many food additives. This decision alone will potentially reduce your daily caloric intake by 15-25%, all of which will be primarily sugar and fat. We’ve seen new clients at One-to-1 Fitness lose as much as 8lbs in their first week as their bodies detoxify from all of these hidden sugars and additives.

Next if steady weight loss is your goal it’s important that you understand the differences between starches and fibrous carbohydrates and what they mean to your goals.

Starchy carbohydrates include potatoes, rice, oatmeal, other grains, and vegetables like peas and corn. When you consume a starchy carbohydrate it is quickly devoured in the stomach. This quick reaction results in an equally quick elevation of blood sugar prompting an insulin release. Insulin, in our body, is like the master key, it unlocks any door to any cell. Once blood sugar is elevated insulin quickly goes to work unlocking doors and allowing the blood glucose to enter, first to muscle cells, then to our liver. Once the liver is topped up the excess blood sugar cannot remain in the blood stream it must go somewhere. The body’s want not, waste not attitude begins to assemble left over blood sugar into triglycerides which become just as you expect, body fat.

So in this simplified word picture you can perhaps see the basic component of managing the shape of your body, we simply need to find ways to manage our blood sugar ensuring we never do more than top up the liver with blood sugar.

One of the ways to use excess blood sugar before it’s assembled into triglycerides is of course to exercise or be active, something we all need to do for a variety of reasons. But we can also add to your fitness and weight loss strategy another form of efficiency, fibrous carbohydrates.

Fibrous carbohydrates consist primary of your dense vegetables such as Celery, Broccoli, Cauliflower, Peppers, Asparagus and so on. Fibrous vegetables in comparative volumes to their starchy counterparts don’t contain nearly as many calories, additionally those precious energy calories are very difficult to extract. Within the stomach the body must often expend more calories than it receives breaking down fibrous vegetables. This means you’ve effectively turned your stomach into an engine to consume some otherwise excess blood sugar, in fact when your nutrition is balanced your 24/7 hard working stomach can become one of the best fat burning tools available to you.

Now that you understand the basics you can see why eliminating processed foods and food additives; as well as combining starchy carbohydrates with fibrous carbohydrates may be a helpful addition to anyone with a weight loss goal. Your body is much like an engine making it perform optimally or change physically is much about finding the right mix of fuel, and taking it out for a drive (exercise) on a regular basis.

Visualization is a strong tip for success

I am going to share with you one of our absolutely most powerful training tools we use with all of our clients at One-to-1 Fitness. This one tool will take up less than 5 seconds of your time on a daily basis and I guarantee you will have an incredibly dramatic impact on your success. Aptly named we call it a Success Chart. If you have a current calendar handy than I you already have a simplified version of our Success Chart at your finger tips. Here’s how it works.

1)     Set a monthly goal. We all know how goals are important but if you even doubt it for a second I just want you to envision having 15 minutes to get somewhere in down town Toronto, you know it’s not far but you don’t have a road map. Without monthly goals you are as likely to reach your fitness objectives as you are to reach your Toronto destination on time, not very. Make your monthly goal realistic and attainable, something like losing 5-6 lbs or one pant/dress size.

2)     Set a daily exercise and nutrition goal for each week. Again these small goals are critical, but only if they are simple and realistic. So don’t plan to change everything tomorrow, rather simply look at your current lifestyle habits right now and decide what small steps you could make this week. An example might be if you always skip breakfast and then go out for a big lunch your weekly nutrition goal might be to always have something, anything, for breakfast and to pack a lunch a minimum of three days this week. Fitness might be to meet with a personal trainer 1-2 times or complete 3-4 different classes as well as going for a walk at least four days this week.

3)     X’s but not O’s! Here’s the magic. Your Success Chart is one of the simplest and most effective types of journals. Each day you meet your nutritional goal for that day/week you draw a line diagonally through the day. If on that same day you exercise as you’ve outlined for that week then you draw the other line to make the X. At the end of each week if you’re not making progress simply look at how many X’s you have on your chart. We often don’t realize when we are off course until it’s staring us right in the face.

I know this doesn’t sound like the answer to that missing link in your nutrition, it’s not that magic tummy tucking exercise, heck it’s not even a direct plan. Though the Success Chart may be none of those things it can easily outperform them all by providing the most important component of any fitness and weight loss program, rigid, trackable, consistency.

Don’t doubt the power of this tool, trust me and try it, 3-4 weeks of mainly X’s and there is absolutely no way you will not have modified your lifestyle and experienced physical change.

For many people the over-indulgence of sweets and endless snacking during the holidays is not the likely the cause of the weight gain we generally fear. Rather the unlikely culprit is one most people don’t suspect—alcohol, and it has nothing to do with the calories of the alcohol consumed.

Few people realize the full effects of just a couple of ounces of alcohol on their bodies. Alcohol is a nervous toxin and seriously disrupts many functions of the metabolism, namely fat loss. One to two drinks can reduce the body’s ability to burn body fat by more than 70% according to the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition[1]. To make matters worse these effects may be sustained for a number of hours after consumption and the more you consume the greater and longer the effect is. As an added bonus alcohol consumption has also been linked to the stimulation of appetite which makes or holiday feeding frenzy even worse.

If you are looking to survive this holiday season without the unwanted extra weight I’m not saying you have to be a social stiff but keep in mind how these things may affect your body and your long term goals. Choose your occasions and activities accordingly and just remember that it’s about balance, everything in moderation. Be healthy and enjoy the upcoming holiday celebrations!

[1] Siler, S.Q., Neese, R.A., & Hellerstein, M.K. (1999). De novo lipogenesis, lipid kinetics, and whole-body lipid balances in humans after acute alcohol consumption. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 70, 928-936

To continue with this frightful math our poor individual now carrying 17lbs of unneeded mass decides to get ambitious upon reading this article and is determined to offset this consumption with exercise to ensure they don’t need to spend the winter months looking for larger pants. Each hour spent at a fast walk on our beloved treadmill burns approximately 500 calories. At 3500 calories a pound all those wondrously sweet morsels have now committed our hero to a mere 119 hours on the treadmill. So book the time off work now or slot your treadmill holiday into your child’s schedule in place of the next summer vacation now. 3 weeks on the treadmill in mid-July sounds like a fun family time for sure.  So all of my horrifying humor aside, Halloween is a tough holiday to provide healthy alternatives for. The very nature of the holiday centres around the immortal words “Trick or Treat” and these days tricks likely don’t earn the respect and admiration they maybe once did. As a “Treat” is pretty much the standard expectation for every goblin and ghoul that graces your steps it’s difficult to have their best interests at heart. The more desirable the treat, likely the worse it is for them and should you opt for a “healthier” treat you are still stuck providing something that is securely packaged which is synonymous with processed and full of preservatives. It really is a lose-lose situation at best.

Now hopefully I haven’t painted myself to be too big a target for all the rotten eggs but on Saturday when all the ghosts and ghouls are gone it’s important to remember that one of the scary truths about Halloween may stick with you a lot longer. As they say a moment on the lips…

Major increases in energy expenditure and nutritional restriction may at first produce good results when it comes to weight loss but it’s almost certain that these results will not be lasting. As fitness professionals we will attempt to teach you that it’s not about the immediate action you take but rather about the cumulative effect. Let’s take exercise for example. When we complete a cardiovascular exercise with a sustained elevated heart rate for a period of time after a while our body responds with a cascade of hormones that elevates our metabolic rate. Once this occurs continuing to exercise at the same intensity will burn more calories but not have significant further effect on metabolism. This elevated state of metabolism slowly begins to decrease back to the previous but over a span of hours. (This period of elevated metabolism can also be further lengthened with the addition of an effective weight training program completed on a regular basis. The effective use of weight training creates a further complimentary hormonal cascade that provides additional enhancement to your metabolism.)

So the key to weight loss is consistency. It’s common for us to have someone explain that they diligently complete long cardio sessions but only a couple times of week. We’re always busy so it makes sense that on certain days you would just make a bigger commitment and get it out of the way, unfortunately this is not nearly as effective. If you are someone routinely completing 60 minutes of exercise 3 days per week I can guarantee that your results will be dramatically increased by reducing to 20-30 minutes per day for 6 days per week. Mathematically you could burn the exact same number of calories but it’s not about the number but rather the cumulative effect.

Your cravings get stronger than ever and with your stomach is growling so loudly the person next to you has started to glare at you funny.  When this occurs, it’s hard to turn down whatever food crosses your path.  When this is the situation at hand, it’s important that you come up with a few quick strategies that will help you handle this and still maintain your diet.

Here are a few quick ways that you can beat your cravings head on.

Drink Some Water

The old saying is true, if you’re dehydrated, you may begin to mistake this for actual hunger.  It’s very important that you’re maintaining adequate hydration levels throughout the day so be sure that you’re not overlooking this factor.

Ideally you should be drinking 8-10 glasses of water or other clear fluids each day in order to keep yourself feeling your best and prevent cravings from setting in.

If you do find you’re experiencing a craving, first drink a glass of water and then wait ten minutes.  After doing so you’ll often find that that craving passes almost immediately.

Chew Some Gum

Second, another quick way to battle those cravings is to chew some gum.  Often what’s sparking the craving in the first place is that you just need something to chew on so gum is the perfect solution.  It’s calorie free and since it keeps your mouth busy, you definitely won’t be putting other food in there.

Some people do find that peppermint flavoured gum also helps to take the edge off their appetite (and boost concentration levels as well!) so you may just want to consider this
flavor first.

Ensure You Don’t Go Hours Without Food

Another smart move if you’re trying to take care of cravings is to make sure that you aren’t going hours without food.  Whenever you let yourself get too overly hungry, that’s when it’s going to be that much harder to handle the cravings that are being thrown at you.

Instead, keep yourself on an even keel by having one meal every three hours or so.  In addition to that, make sure that you also include protein within that meal as this is the most satisfying nutrient to consume.  You’ll easily keep blood sugar levels and hunger under control by doing so.

Find Something To Replace It With

Finally, the last strategy to beat your cravings is to find another food that you can have in its place.  While it may not be a direct replacement as far as taste is concerned, if you can find something that comes fairly close, this often can solve the problem.

For example, if it’s a pint of ice cream that’s calling your name, consider some low-fat, low-sugar vanilla yogurt drizzled with a small amount of chocolate syrup.  This should be enough to tame that craving and will also provide you with good nutrition as well.

So keep these quick points in mind. If you can implement them into your day, cravings should be a thing of the past for you.

If you have ever grown a garden of any kind consisting of any vegetables at all there are usually a couple of truths with the food you grow or produce. When it is first picked, cut, or harvested it usually has a much more vibrant smell than any similar food you buy in a grocery store. When we grow our own food it is also usually consumed within days or, at most, a couple weeks from its harvest date. In both cases this makes the food we’ve grown or produced far fresher than the grocery store counterpart. The fresher it is the more alive it is, the more alive it is the more nutritious it is. This is an oversimplified but very true simple analogy of maintaining high quality nutrition.

Back to the grocery store, as suggested in the paragraph above it would seem I have indicated that even the perimeter perishables are not as full of nutrition or good for you as they should be. The truth is, compared to home grown they are not, but they are far better than anything processed and located on the inner isles.

The more processed it is, the longer the shelf life and the more dead it is. The longer the shelf life the less nutritionally active it is, and the harder our body has to work to extract the little nutrients that remain. What’s more any food processing alters the chemical structure and integrity of the elements of any food we consume. As perfect as our body is, its delicate machinery was not designed to handle these new chemical variables. Like every good learning, living organism our body adapts the best it can, unfortunately this has lead to many ailments we now consider common: type II diabetes, crones disease, irritable bowel syndrome, to name a few.

If you are unaware your body is right now hard at work replacing every cell and tissue in your body. It does so with rapid efficiency on a very frequent basis. In a more graphic sense think of it this way, the very tissue and cells that make up your heart and lungs, working hard to keep you alive as you read this, have been recently replaced. Those tissues are now comprised of the food (raw materials) you’ve consumed in the recent months and weeks. You truly are what you eat, I don’t know about you but I think it’s pretty important to ensure the best raw materials are used when building my heart and lungs. Food for thought.

As these are some of the most prominent health issues facing the general population I think that understanding and being able to easily perform a self-assessment for risk factors could be a useful tool. Sometimes staying motivated or facing the challenges of changing lifestyle habits is more easily faced with a practical measuring stick.

A waist girth assessment can be performed easily with any soft tape measure. It’s preferred for the most accurate result to have someone perform the measure for you. Begin by placing the tape across the navel. Make sure the tape lies flat around the circumference of the waist and is level across the body. Preferably the tape should be placed over bare skin for the most accurate measurement. Avoid the temptation to pull the tape too tight but measuring at the point of the end of a slow exhale would be typical and produce a consistent result.

Be forewarned that this measure will most certainly be greater than your pant size. For some time now many clothing manufacturers have been slowly making their sizes bigger without actually adjusting the “size” to accommodate our growing population figuratively speaking.

So once you are through the initial shock of the measure it’s time to understand what it means. The American National Health Institute suggests that a measure of 35+ inches for women and 40+ inches for men would indicate high risk. It’s also suggested that a healthy waist girth(lower risk) would be less than 33 inches for women and 35 for men.

For every inch in excess of the above low risk suggestion related studies have shown that for every 1 inch increase in the waist circumference in men the risk for:

• High blood pressure increases by 10%
• High blood cholesterol level increases by 8%
• Low HDL cholesterol increases by 15%
• High blood fats (TG) increases by 18%
• And metabolic syndrome increases by 18%

Firstly, what is an antioxidant? An antioxidant is a molecule capable of inhibiting the oxidation of other molecules. What is oxidation? Oxidation is a chemical reaction that transfers electrons from a substance to an oxidizing agent. Oxidation reactions can produce free radicals- these radicals can start chain reactions that damage cells. Antioxidants terminate these chain reactions by removing free radical intermediates, and inhibit other oxidation reactions. Examples of antioxidants include vitamins C, E, and A, and other substances including beta-carotene, lycopene, glutathione, Lutein, Selenium, Resveratrol. Antioxidants have been linked to reduced risks of cancer, cardiovascular disease, gum disease, etc. In summary, antioxidants are good for our health.

How is an antioxidant measured? Dr Cao of the National Institute of Aging developed a test called The ORAC (Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity) Assay in 1992 to measure the level of antioxidant protection of a product as well as the duration of the protection. 
ORAC measures the degree, which a product inhibits the action of oxidative agents and the length of time this inhibitor occurs. The ORAC Assay integrates the strength and duration of antioxidant protection for a product into a single numerical value (called the ORAC score) and has been shown to highly correlate with the level and the time of protection in cells, body tissues and blood levels. In others words, there is a near perfect correlation between the ORAC value and the antioxidant and immune system protection in the body. This is important because oxidative stress has been demonstrated to accelerate the aging process in both cells and blood vessels. Oxidative stress also increases the risk of certain types of cancer, coronary heart disease and many other health maladies.

You get antioxidants in the food that you eat- primarily your fruits and vegetables, but given the busyness of modern life it is very hard to get enough antioxidants on a daily basis- not to mention degrading food quality. This is one of the reasons antioxidant juices have come about, as a convenient way to get the antioxidants your body needs. Some key things to look at in an antioxidant juice:

1)      Superfruit- Every juice WILL have a superfruit in it- and will be heavily marketed on that fact. The 3 main ones are: Acai Berry, Goji Berry (also known as the wolfberry), and the Mangosteen Fruit. Here is a list of some of the antioxidant values of the top scoring fruits.

Although the fruit itself may score high- when it is processed into a product it may lose some of its antioxidant value. Also, the drink should include whole parts of the fruit- a puree – not just extracted fruit juices.

2)      Filler Juices – Every juice will have the superfruit- but what else is in the drink? Some warning signs of an inferior product are sugary, high glycemic index low antioxidant value filler ‘junk’ juices like apple, pear, and grape. These contain very little antioxidants themselves, and are cheaper to include in the beverage. Not only do they have a lower antioxidant value- they are high glycemic index- meaning they will have more of an effect on your blood sugar levels- and are probably not diabetic safe either. You should be looking for juices that are lower glycemic index, high antioxidant value that contribute to the synergy of the juice- taken from the list above, some good ones to look for are raspberry (black or red), blueberry, pomegranate, boysenberry, plum, etc.

3)      Sweetener- Look for low glycemic index sweeteners, such as Organic Blue Agave, stevia, etc- avoid all artificial sweeteners such as aspartame, sucralose, etc. And of course, avoid sucrose- sugar increases inflammation in the body amongst other things, and should not be a predominant sweetener.

Keep in mind all of the things above when looking at a product- you will be surprised at how many products you come across that do not meet all the criteria- put your antioxidant juice to the test and see if it meets the criteria! As per usual, contact me with any questions you may have, I’m happy to help you decipher antioxidants further.

Adam Green