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From Emotional Eating To EMPOWERED Eating

Some delicious pancakes I made the other day.
Pancakes are good for you.
I posted this elsewhere and didn't feel it was getting enough love, so here's a little cut n paste job.

Eating is wonderful. I think people should be emotional about eating. It is a joyous occasion.

The problem is that we start to associate feelings of guilt or shame with eating "bad foods" and a negative cycle begins. We start to believe that we can't get in control of our eating habits and can't stop eating bad foods. There is perhaps no worse emotion than that feeling of not being in control, of being powerless.

How we can address this situation is by changing the way we think about food. Food is fuel. We're supposed to eat it and we're supposed to enjoy it. These facts are indisputable and universal. Now we do have a modern problem of lifestyles that are too sedentary, which mean that our fuel requirements drop quite dramatically. Of course, this is easily fixed with a productive training program. Again though, think less about "exercising to burn calories" and think more about "training to get healthy and strong". We train to put those calories (aka fuel) to good use. There is nothing special about this either... all we are doing is putting back in what modern lifestyles have taken out.

Now with a more active lifestyle and an effective training strategy our fuel requirements go UP. Of course there is a limit to how much fuel we can utilise but up to that limit it is ALL FUEL that our body will put to use. Even the ice cream. ESPECIALLY the ice cream!

Of course we do encourage each other to consume more nutrient dense foods regularly... but if you decide that you want to indulge a little to make up for a rough day (or for no reason at all) you can make an empowered decision to do so, knowing there is nothing to feel bad about.
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Nutrition Myth Busting: It's not HOW much you eat, but WHAT you eat.

I wrote a nice post over on my Lose Weight No Bullshit site the other day about "what if the conspiracy theory was the actual conspiracy?" which I guess in other words you could translate to "you're being lied to about being lied to". It's all in reference to these tin foil hat wearing nut jobs claiming the food pyramid and all other guidelines put out by actual real nutritionists is all a conspiracy to prop up "big agriculture" and whatever else they dreamed up.

It's very much the same whenever I read "myth busting" type posts on people's blogs or facebook or where ever else. So often, they're busting one myth by creating a new one. Usually this is a marketing ploy some scumbag is using to deliberately confuse you into thinking you need to buy their product or e-book or whatever it is, and they actually know it's a load of hogwash. Sometimes though they actually do mean well and have good intentions, but the information they're pushing is still wrong. And as far as diet advice goes, in a world of confusion it's not good enough to just have good intentions... putting wrong information out only creates more confusion and therefore is harmful to individuals and collectively.

So I've been thinking about this and not to be deliberately horrible about it but the issue is that you've got people who aren't actually as smart as they think they are, who've read something, or done something for themselves, and decided everything else is a lie and that's the only way you can do it. Usually the main element in this is that "calories don't count" or in other words "it's not how much you eat, it's what you eat". Good foods vs bad foods.

What's going is that people's logic is backwards. I did it this way, therefore that way doesn't work, for example. There's a complete absence of logic in that sort of statement. Here's a bunch of crap I just read on facebook, and then the logical interpretation.

Exercise doesn't help people lose weight. There are LOTS of people in the gym every night who never lose weight, because they're not eating the right foods.

Half true. Those people are in the gym with the intention to "burn calories". They're consuming an inappropriate (usually excessive) amount of calories, and then trying to make up for that on the treadmill or cross trainer. Whether they realise it or not, they working with a strategy to merely reduce the amount of weight they gain, or at best stay exactly where they are. In no way, shape or form does any of this imply that an effective training program matched with appropriate calorie intake and macronutrient balance will not produce results.

Before, I was suffering from [insert medical conditions] and was overweight, now I'm in great shape. This proves that it's not about calories, it's about food choices.

For YOU, maybe.

I saw this one today and the implication seemed to be something like "I require a specialised diet to manage my (actually quite uncommon) medical condition, therefore if you don't follow the same diet you'll have all the same issues that I did". That might seem logical but it's a bit like telling a kid who doesn't have asthma to take ventolin so he doesn't start getting it. The absence of treating a medical condition is not the cause of the medical condition, you follow? What's happened in this example is that you've done what's necessary in terms of a specialised diet to manage your condition, and now you're getting the same results anyone else would expect from the training strategy you are following.

Total calories isn't the issue. These here bad foods with sugar don't trigger your body's satiety signals, so you end up over eating.

Uhhh... that may be correct but by use of the term "over eating" you're verifying that the issue is total calories. There are certain foods that I know if I even get a sniff of them I'll end up eating until they're all gone and then start looking for more... but let's say there's only ONE available and I eat it without blowing my daily targets... is it going to main fat gain? Of course not.

Insulin drives fat storage, not calories. We need to manage insulin. 

I saw this moron in a video this morning explaining how "if you eat sugars and grains there's only so much you can use and the rest results in raised insulin levels to store the excess as fat" and i thought... yeah, so make sure you don't HAVE any excess by following a realistic total calorie and macro plan. What's so hard about that to understand? They even say it themselves, these carbphobic cretins, but fail to grasp the meaning of the words coming out of their own mouths. Insulin is the method the body uses to move excess energy to fat stores... but the issue is with having excess energy to begin with. There's an insulin response to eating any food as the body moves the energy and nutrients to where it needs them, but there is only fat storage if there is excess energy (calories) that the body doesn't have a use for. Again, it comes back to total calories.

You get fat from eating carbs, because of the insulin response.

See above. Also, there's a virtually identical response to eating protein but no one seems to see that as a problem.

You can't get fat from eating fats, because there is no insulin response.

A notion so ridiculous I can't believe anyone takes it seriously. If it you end up with more fuel than you have a use for (carbs, protein OR fats) it will end up stored as body fat. What else could possibly happen? And conversely, why would your body store anything as fat if it could be otherwise utilised?

So here I've covered some stuff that is just "false science" based on either a poor understanding of how the body works and how it deals with different fuel sources, or based on having read and believed certain texts on the subject that are (quite deliberately I might add) full of glaring inaccuracies and misinformation. The rest could be described as "the tail wagging the dog" or reverse logic as described earlier.

It is amusing (although also frustrating) to me that people with a low carb or similar agenda will point out that some people are not seeing results from hitting the gym, as if that proves that effective exercise and overall activity levels is of no consequence in weight management. They'll point out that some people may have a medical condition or an unfavourable response to certain foods which means the usual rules go out the window a bit, as if that means that the usual rules are incorrect and don't work for anyone.

And yet apparently no one notices all the people out there who "eat really healthy but still aren't seeing results". Why might that be? It's because they're still not eating THE RIGHT AMOUNT, even though their food choices may be impeccable.

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More reps, or more weight? Which is better?

The answer to all such questions is usually "it depends".

Today however, I thought I'd have a crack at this bench press challenge which is a part of a training system or "gym sport" that is becoming popular in the UK. The creator of this is a bloke I know from my professional network.

Now... the idea is a bit different to conventional weight training in that it is all against the clock, and the idea is to get as many reps out within the time limit as possible. And of course you would make progress by increasing the amount of reps you can do at the same weight within the same time limit.

So here's a video of me having a crack at the bench press portion, recorded at Doherty's Gym where I operate as a Personal Trainer, in Brunswick. That's 50kg for 3 minutes, as many reps as possible.



I will say this; it was harder than I expected. I mean... I knew I could pump out 40 reps at 50kg as a nice warm up, but I really expected I'd be able to pump out another 40 after a short 15 - 30 second rest. I figured I'd get 100 reps or at least 90... and I pulled up a little short of that.

So a bit short of what I hoped for, but still a respectable total especially first time out. I wanted to test a theory that when you train heavy with conventional rep ranges, you'll be able to match it with most people doing ultra high reps with less resistance. That is, you'll be able to match the people who only train that way, even though it's not the way you normally train. Am I making sense here? Good.

Here's what I think. The point of training is to produce an adaptation, and therefore you should always choose the training strategy most suited to producing that desired adaptation or outcome. When we choose resistance training, it is usually with the desired outcome of becoming stronger and improving body composition. That is; adding muscle at the expense of body fat stores.

In my opinion, the best way to do so is by progressively increasing the amount of weight we can move through traditional rep ranges. Now, when we train with the same amount of weight but with a focus on pumping out more reps within a time limit... there is still an adaptation but it is not about increasing strength or muscle mass. Simply put, you're training to get better at training. I'd also argue that technique is compromised in these circumstances as can be seen in my video above... if you've ever seen one of my other bench press videos with a heavier load for say 10 or 12 reps, my technique and tempo is pretty good if I do say so myself.

SO, what's better? Well it always depends on your goal. But decide upon your goal first, and then choose the approach that is most conducive to reaching it.

With all that being said, this was a hell of a nice warm up before getting down to the serious business of going as heavy as possible for 10 - 12 reps.

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