Q&A Saturday 26th January 2013

Thought i'd give people a chance to ask some questions where i could answer in more detail than on twitter:

Russell Graham All bran any good and is all green tea the same. eg tetley green tea as good as twinings.

Answer: All bran is not bad at all but then again it wouldn't be on my list of choices for breakfast alone as cereal only is not enough to start the day. Yes all commercial green teas are basically the same, you can howeve buy loose leaf green tea which is superior as it doesn't have the stem residue like green tea bags. I personally wouldn't hunt it out though if just enjoying a few cups a day.

Daniel Bond 3 breakfasts you recommend on a ketosis diet ?

Answer: 

1) steak fried in coconut oil with crushed almonds and asparagus

2) chicken breast burgers with gaucamole and lettuce leaves for the burger

3) Omlette made with omega3 eggs, spinach and peppers

All because they are easy, filling and will fit in to your ketosis plan 

Lee Jones-Freeman Psnl Is grass fed beef alot different / better than non? Is it ok to have 3-4 cups of normal tea per day or will this impact your results?

Answer: Grass fed beef is superior to grain fed. Most people cite the fact it has higher omega 3 however the more accurate reason would be that the n3:n6 is much more in line with the recommended optimal ratio. Here's an enjoyable blog post with a couple of charts on http://praguestepchild.blogspot.com.es/2010/09/omega-3-and-grass-fed-beef.html

3-4 normal cups of tea will be fine, just go easy on the sugar, sweetner would be better.

Richard Schenk any suggestions for a "before bed time" meal?

Answer: This obviously depends on your goals, however i'd opt for for some form of carbohydrates which set off signals for the brain to release serotonin, eating carbs at night will not make you fat, thats simply a myth. Adding in a tryptophan high food will increase serotonin and melatonin. Tryptophan high foods are eggs, seeds and some fish.

Vicky Jowett How can I get really toned?

Answer: find a huge printer and put yourself through it. On a serious note however, to attain the lean defined look often referred to as 'toned' you need at least some muscle and low body fat to display the striations and seperations between the muscles. A mix of weights and intervals along with a good healthy diet and above all consistency is what's needed.

Alex AzurTraining O'Connor Pros and cons of a low carb diet?

Pro's:

initial quick 'weight loss' helps improve power:weight to aid increase i fitness

simple to follow

help to curb cravings

better brain function once in ketosis

feeling of increased energy

reduced blood glucose 

improved insulin sensitivity

improved triglycerides 

weight loss 

increased HDL cholesterol which is the good one

helps lower blood pressure

con's 

hard to adapt to going in to ketosis, many people struggle and quit which leaves them deflated and not just of glycogen

poor in relation to performance for sports

the quick weight loss is predominantly water weight, this can lead to dehydration and cramps early on

lack of fibre - supplement is almost always needed such as pysillium husk

lack variety - a lot of people eat the same foods day in day out

fatigue quicker during exercise

if protein is not kept high then you could lose muscle rapidly - this can be a pro under the right circumstances though

lack of phytonutrients and antioxidants from cutting out fruit

some scientific reseacrh has shown the long term low carb dieters have increased risk for high cholesterol and heart disease, however this is more to do with the foods they do eat rather than not eating carbs.

Chia Seed dessert

While away on training camp with Kell Brook the diet focus is always on performance food and weight loss, however that doesn't mean it has to be boring and bland. I'm always looking for ways to make the meals interesting and full of flavour and yet keep them within the macronutrient requirements for the day as well as sticking to the key diet principles of lean and clean.

I have over 8000 recipes on my pc, some days i simply sit when i have an hour looking for recipes with key foods and add them to my folders so i always have options and recipes to try out when my diet gets a little boring. When it comes to dieting myself i miss dessert, i have a sweet tooth which i can ignore but i don't feel like i should, therefore i look for healthy alternatives and with this Chia Seed recipe i definitely found one!

Chia Seeds are a great food and very versatile, some of the benefits include:

• high omega 3 content 
• good protein content with19 essential amino acids
• high in fibre
• good source of calcium and iron
• low in carbohydrates

Now the protein and omega 3 content can be debated as the absorption of these may not be great compared to say oily fish for omega 3 or chicken for protein but the important point is they're a seed and their content is a bonus to what is already a very healthy product.

As mentioned they're also very versatile, for this recipe you leave them to soak as the seeds form in to a gelatinous mix.

Chia Seed dessert:

2tbspn chia seeds

1/3 can of coconut milk

1teaspoon cinnamon

1 tablespoon honey

Method:

Add all ingredients into a bowl and mix together, leave in fridge for at least 30 minutes and then split in to 4 servings.

Here's the macro breakdown for 4 servings:

Calories: 352kclas

Protein: 4g

Carbohydrates: 26g

Fat: 27g

I added a tablespoon of blueberry quark too as i needed to use it up, got to say this was a great dessert enjoyed by Kell, Dave Hembrough and myself!

Here's a photo i took of mine!

I will be adding fruit such as blueberries and cherries next time i make this.

As always any thoughts you have on this let me know!

David

Sleep That's Sound - As featured in Alpha Fit

You work out, you play hard. So if you aren’t getting the kind of sleep you deserve, follow David Stache’s advice on which supplements – if any – might solve the problem

Any longstanding gym goer will often quote you the following: “Weight training is 30 per cent gym, 70 per cent diet. Abs are made in the kitchen, not the gym.”
As someone who works in the field of nutrition you might expect me to be sat nodding my head at such a statement. But I don’t.

Yes, the claim holds a lot of truth and nutrition is more important than gym time, but it doesn’t paint the whole picture. In fact, it misses the third key component of looking good, performing better and leading a healthier life: rest and in particular a good sleep.

When people think about improving their health it is exercise and diet they focus on, in the same way that most young men see the gym and protein powder as being synonymous. Rarely do people think about how the quality and quantity of their sleep affects their health or results from the gym (and from the kitchen, for that matter).

But this is definitely an area you shouuld address because poor quality sleep has been shown to affect your results. In fact, research published earlier this year has shown that sleep variability is an independent risk factor for weight gain. And there are many other reasons why you should be looking to improve your sleep.

Here are just a few of them:

Poor sleep lowers testosterone, DHEA and growth hormone levels
Lack of sleep can lower your sex drive
It can also affect your memory.

Little helpers
Aside from the obvious advice of bed time rituals there are supplements on the market which you can use to improve your sleep. These, it must be said, are not solutions to serious sleep disorders and should not be used in that way. So if you have periods of very poor sleep you should consult your doctor. If however you are looking for better quality sleep then below are my top three recommended supplements currently on the market.

Valerian root
If you have trouble nodding off then this may be the one for you. Valerian Root is thought to increase gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) which in turn calms your brain down as it is the primary inhibitory neurotransmitter – its main function is to reduce brain activity. Nature’s Aid ‘Sleepeazy’ is a product I highly recommend.

5-HTP
This compound is derived from the amino acid L-Tryptophan which is a supplement also used to enhance mood. It works by crossing the blood-brain barrier and increasing the neurotransmitter serotonin, which your brain needs to regulate sleep activity. An interesting point of note is that while melatonin (a hormone we produce naturally) was banned in supplement form in the UK in 1995, 5-HTP also promotes the release of melatonin from the pineal gland which assists in regulating the sleep cycle. Lamberts 5-HTP is one that I usually recommend as it is 100mg per tablet compared to most which are 50mg.

Magnesium
This primarily helps maintain normal muscle and nerve function. If they aren’t working properly, you can become stressed and nervy which is not ideal for a good night’s sleep. Magnesium has a calming affect on the nervous system. There have been many research studies which have looked at the benefits of supplementing with magnesium on a better night’s sleep. The more exercise you do – and you probably wouldn’t be reading this if you weren’t doing quite a bit – the more magnesium you need.

As a final parting, shot, here’s a take home message: if you are having trouble sleeping make sure you get in to a good routine and try to de-stress before going to bed. If you are having long term sleeping problems then consulting your doctor should be your first port of call. But if you can relate to some of the issues highlighted in this article then the supplements listed could help you with better quality sleep. That in turn will give your health a boost and help you perform better in the gym.

Dealing with hunger - Fasting and training yourself

Nobody likes to go hungry, it's certainly not a nice feeling but we're lucky in that we live in a part of the world where real hunger is not a great issue for the majority.

The issue of nutrition and our relationship with food is complex and hunger plays a big part of the foods we choose to eat when we have a feeling of hunger.

Recently i decided to embark upon a 24 hour fasting period, this was for a few reasons, those being that i have read a lot about IF (intermittent fasting) in the last few years as well as played around with it, i had however never fasted for more than 16 hours. I was also having some issues with hunger and cravings and so wanted to mentally reset myself for dieting.

Research has shown that you can train yourself to identify true hunger and respond accordingly, whereas the hunger most people feel is not real hunger that those in 3rd world countries deal with on a daily basis. This study published in the Journal of Nutrition & Metabolism http://www.nutritionandmetabolism.com/content/3/1/42 concluded that subjects could be trained to recognise when their blood glucose levels were low in relation to their hunger levels. When you choose to eat X amount of meals/snacks a day you become conditioned to carry this on and will eat in regards to the feeling this gives rather than when you are actually hungry, ultimately becoming mentally hungry over physically hungry. In my experience very few people can describe what hunger actually is in terms of physiological responses, similarly very few people go through what real hunger is.

By understanding hunger and how your body feels you will be in a better position to eat accordingly rather than overeat. If you can be conditioned to associate hunger with low glucose and as we know stable glucose levels are beneficial to weight loss it will be easier to lose weight and control the weight loss once off.

Throughout my fast i had up's and down's, it was hard to be around food in the first part of the day but after a while i had a strong well being feeling, towards the end i felt alert and the feeling of being physically tired had also passed. At times yes it was tough but it sounds harder than it is, which is because we automatically think fasting = being constantly hungry which is not the case, you simply go through phases of feeling hungry, get past those and you have a tool which will help reset hunger feelings, give the digestive system a rest, give you mental clarity and focus as well as a host of physiological benefits from fat loss to reducing inflammation.

This is something i would recommend to try if you feel you can fit it in to your lifestyle, however make sure you plan it correctly, a busy day with meetings at work may not be the best day to start. Keep yourself busy and the day will pass quickly, you'll get more done too as you wont be taking time up to make and eat food! As with all dieting methods research them properly first rather than just jumping on expecting it to be a quick fix, this is a tool to use, not the holy grail of fat loss.

As always any questions then feel free ask here or via my Facebook page  

Book review - Mike Dolce 'Living Lean'

Book review – The Dolce diet – Living Lean

Mike Dolce is arguably the go to guy when it comes to nutrition and making weight for mma fighters and as I have worked with quite a few mma fighters in prep for their fights I admired how he had positioned himself and his client base. However what put me off buying the book was what I’d read on forums about it, that it was nothing of note and that many of Dolce’s claims in the book about what he’d achieved were actually massively overblown and it was mainly an ego flexing book and not a worthy nutrition book. Still, following Dolce on twitter and Facebook I thought while away on a training camp I’d be able to sit down and give it a good read (it took me a mere 2 hours!) and for only £6.23 on Kindle I chanced it wouldn’t be a great loss and I’d maybe pick a few nuggets of advice I could use or try myself, after all I’d read 3 weeks to shredded and liked some of the principles such as mindfully goal setting and writing goals down to encourage progress, both of which are good tools everyone dieting can utilise to good effect.

First of all it should be made clear that this book is not specifically aimed at fighters at all, if anything it is merely a book for the average person to who needs a nudge in the right direction or needs some fresh diet ideas to kick processed foods out of their diet and just wants to lose weight, nothing wrong with that right? Well it wouldn’t make a good book review if I wasn’t slightly honest about just how I felt about it, would it.

So the book starts with Mike Dolce’s life story, from his childhood and how he was inspired by the magazines featuring arnie, frank zane et al and his family’s poor health to hit the gym. It’s here that the tone is set, Mike Dolce reminds me of the kid who wanted to be liked by everyone, some things may have happened but all stories you take with a rock of salt because nobody is that awesome, but this book is about ‘Living Lean’ right so let’s not dwell on my opinion of the author too much.

The book’s first 6 chapters are all about Dolce, I’ll save you the time of reading them, he’s fricken awesome bro….  as he’d have you believe. As the book gets to the real important bits of educating you on diet and helping you plan meals around your daily activities, the paragraphs and chapters become smaller and the content a little less catchy. All of a sudden it seems Mike Dolce ran out of things to say.

The diet principles Dolce preaches are great though, however they are nothing more than Paleo principles and we all know that cutting out processed foods is a very positive step to losing weight and you must be creative with food if you’re to ‘live lean’ as boredom easily overrides good health in nutrition these days, hence we reach for a high fat/high sugar snack all too often. Eating clean is a huge part of controlling calories BUT Dolce like many others states calories don’t count. This is where it becomes obvious this book is not aimed at anyone competing in sports at all, calories really do count if you’ve got to make a specific weight (that’s for another article though). Switching from eating what is now a standard diet for most people to the principles Dolce instils will help you lose weight, it will make you feel better physically and mentally too because you’ll be taking control back of your diet and eating much better foods. But that’s a no brainer surely, this is nothing new. Stop eating crap and prepare your meals, cook them yourself and eat a wide variety and you will function better than if you ate highly processed foods.

The meal plans outlined in the book are scarce, there’s just the 1. So that’s one meal plan for every person reading it, the same meal plan for those 100lbs overweight and the one’s 10lbs overweight. That ignores so many variables you need to consider when dieting, added to the fact he gives you no inclination on how to manipulate these factors and again it shows the real information needed is a little light. It’s the same with the recipes, although it’s now apparent why this is so as Dolce has released a new book titled ‘Living Lean – Cookbook’ with all of his recipes in them, which you're expected to buy, the recipes however will be easy to find on the many Paleo blogs.

So on to the training section, which is quite comprehensive, however for anyone that trains skip to the dumbbell deadlift photo demonstration for a quick look at what’s in store!

The routine’s look simple enough, there’s reference to an mma HIIT training sessions which must have been thrown in there to add some credibility. It doesn’t though. The training plans are nothing new, easy to follow and will get results to a certain extent as most readers will be sedentary and any sort of training os better than no training, just ask the P90X fans about that. in Living Lean however there’s no overall training plan or advice on how to structure your week. There’s also zero mention of pre or post workout nutrition which I find really odd considering the proven scientific research out there on these hotly debated areas of performance nutrition and Dolce’s positioning in MMA.

So there you have it, my view on Mike Dolce’s Living Lean book. There are some great principles for the average person in there but that’s it, there’s not much you can actually take from the book. Eat healthy non-processed foods and get creative in the kitchen, that’s about it.

The rest is about Mike himself, who obviously likes himself and is proud of what he’s done, maybe if he didn’t choose this path he would be selling second hand cars, that’s the impression I get of him.

I would recommend ‘The Paleo diet for athletes: a nutritional formula for peak athletic performance’ for fighters or athletes who are looking to drop weight and get in shape. This is a much better resource than the dolce diet.

For anyone else looking to eat well based on the same principles as Mike Dolce then look no further than the 1000’s of blogs out there on the Paleo principles of eating.  Rob Wolff would be a great start point.

As always I welcome your comments.

Next up will be The Renegade Diet by Jason Ferruggia