Weekly Motivation – Page 9 – The A.L.I.V.E. Experience

The rules are simple, and you can be there before you know it. Eliminate sugar from your diet, entirely, and cut out the possibility of putting on fat; you’re addressing the hormonal imbalances your body has brought on since you developed insulin sensitivity, and you’re re-stabilizing your body without all of the inflammation that processed sugars create in our bodies.

Eliminating sugar, while rehydrating, stimulates an increase in cellular metabolism while simultaneously eliminating energy crashes, excess-sugar fat deposits that happen when you consume more sugar than your body can process, and abnormalities in blood pressure and heart rate response that take place with dehydration. In turn, your body realizes its ready for change, and it responds.

There is a lot of controversy about whether or not you should do cardio, interval training, build muscle before you lose fat, or do high repetition-based exercise. The fact of the matter is that all approaches help people with weight loss, but let’s compare and contrast these four methods for a greater understanding and increased likelihood of success:

	Cardio For Weight Loss	High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT)	Building Muscle For Weight Loss	High Repetition/ Intensity-Based Exercise For Weight Loss
Burns Calories During Workout	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Burns Calories After Workout Is Over	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Helps Body Burn More Calories Over Time	No	Yes, with plateau effect	Yes, no plateau	Yes, with effect plateau effect
Uses “Carb-Based Calories” To Burn Fat	Yes, tons.	Yes, tons.	Barely	Yes, tons.
Uses “Protein-Based Calories” To Burn Fat	No, barely.	No, barely.	Yes, tons.	Some
Uses “Fat-Based Calories” To Burn Fat	Yes, if greater than 40 minutes.	Yes, but only in afterburn effect.	Yes	Yes, but not quite as much as muscle building
Leads To Higher Exercise Tolerance For Increased Workout Capability Over Time	Slowly	Rapidly	Moderately	Quickly
Functional Carryover To Weight Loss Through ADL’s	None	Depends on whether or not this is done outside or on a machine	Often, but not always.	Often, but not always.
Increases Risk of Injury With Workout	Yes, but usually not during cardio.	Yes, when over VO2 max or 20 minutes.	Yes, especially without a spotter	Low, but possible

Now that we’ve listed out the various benefits of each form of weight loss exercise, let’s discuss the importance of each row above in your weight loss efforts:

Weight Loss Factor:	Importance For Weight Loss:
Burns Calories During Workout	Calories In vs Calories Out still determines your overall ability to lose weight, but this doesn’t take into account the necessity to discuss ‘nutrient density’ in your caloric intake.*
Burns Calories After A Workout	This is the result of an ‘afterburn effect’ (EPOC) that takes place when your body craves oxygen after a workout, and it forces repair of injured muscle tissue used to train. Muscle naturally gets injured in a small way when you do high intensity exercise or you lift weights; repairing this muscle, and ridding it of lactic acid, is what leads to burning calories for days after a workout.
Helps Body Burn More Calories Over Time	Building muscle leads to an increased metabolism by increasing your muscle:fat ratio. Your muscle:fat ratio ultimately determines your metabolism, as increasing muscle mass forces your body to work harder to feed itself, ultimately burning more calories throughout each day.
Uses “Carb-Based Calories” To Burn Fat	Generally speaking, people overeat carbs, so it’s great to have a solution that burns through your sugars and carbs when you need to. However, the better advice would be to do the minimum amount of exercise needed to burn excess carbs, and then work on utilizing your other macronutrient categories for caloric burn and weight loss.
Uses “Protein-Based Calories” To Burn Fat	Biasing protein-based calories for weight loss means that you are building muscle, which ultimately affects your muscle:fat (muscle to fat) ratio.
Uses “Fat-Based Calories” To Burn Fat	Oddly enough, these aren’t the most important calories to burn during a workout, as this will often mean that you are losing the main benefit of your workout. Fat-burning calories get affected with low-load, high-duration exercise, or after a workout that involves the ‘afterburn effect;’ this is when your body is continuing to burn calories, but at a lower heart rate and with less work.
Leads To Increased Exercise Tolerance For Increased Workout Capability Over Time	Increasing exercise tolerance, or VO2 max, is one of the most important factors for someone who is just starting out or who hasn’t reached his/her fitness potential. If your body has the ability to tolerate more work (i.e. more reps, more weight, longer workouts, etc.), your body has the ability to get more results from every workout.
Functional Carryover To Weight Loss Through Activities of Daily Living (ADL’s)	When you choose exercises that “remind” your body of your workout during your day, your body naturally engages your muscles a bit more, remembers postural setting, and believes it needs to grow to survive. From a practical example, when we were hunters and gatherers, running more meant that we needed to be able to run further to find food; similarly, lifting heavy rocks meant that we needed to build a home, so we needed more strength. Our bodies are smart, so they respond.
Increases Risk Of Injury With Workout	Avoiding injury is paramount in your exercise success. Not only is injury avoidance important for sustainable results, but it’s also important to help with your motivation levels. Finally, an injured muscle/joint remembers the injury for longer than the expected time period, and it causes muscle imbalances to take place. Without specifically reversing these muscle imbalances, your results will naturally plateau over time, or even reverse in some situations.

*NOTE on ‘Nutrient Density’: All calories were not created equally. At the end of the day, calories in vs calories out will let you know if you are in a caloric deficit, which leads to weight loss. However, protein-based calories are known to consume 20% of themselves, so these calories don’t count for as much. Also, all excess calories derived from any macronutrient group that go unused ultimately turn to sugar and get deposited as fat. Therefore, if you ate 2000 calories of only carbs, your body would store much more fat than if you ate a blend of carbs, proteins, and fats.

Awesome! So now you know that cardio can be an effective way to burn calories in the moment, and it helps you get rid of carbs, but it might not be the best way to burn calories long-term. Also, it is not the most efficient way to lose weight, although it does work.

Next, you understand that interval-training is an effective way to burn calories both now, and after you go to the gym; but alone, it will lead to plateau. The reason for this is because your body needs to build muscle to sustain an increased metabolism. There are two ways to increase your metabolism:

Lower your bodyfat
Increase your muscle mass

Interval training does a great job of lowering bodyfat, as you rid your body of all of its excess sugars, bias protein and fat-burning for days to come, and increase your exercise tolerance. However, it will not lead to increasing your muscle mass, whatsoever. So, interval-training, alone, is not the answer.

Building muscle is great for #2, above, but often times these workouts force you to increase your caloric intake in order to grow muscle. Also, long rest breaks are important for muscle building, so you need to factor in a decreasing heart rate response to exercise that takes place with interval training.

To come full circle, let’s discuss high repetition/intensity-based exercise as a plan to lose weight at full speed. In this case, we’ll eventually plateau if we don’t build muscle, but we will accomplish both #1 and #2, albeit more of #1 than #2. Your body will have the same response as interval training, in terms of bodyfat response, because you can actually train with intervals while lifting lighter weights. Naturally, since you are lifting weight, you will build a bit of muscle as well.

When it comes to losing 10 pounds and sustaining those results, high intensity-based exercise is the way to go in my opinion, but now you can decide for yourself. Your body needs to crave an increased exercise tolerance, consume its own carbs on a daily basis, and bias protein-breakdown for increasing your muscle mass over time. Ultimately, you should periodize this type of program to alternate with muscle building every 4-6 weeks for the best effect, but this is how I’d recommend you lose ten pounds, especially if you’re in a hurry.

Noe sure of what to eat click here

How I Recommend You Lose 10 Pounds Read More »

Why Food Keeps You In Pain

Nutrition, Weekly Motivation

If you’ve been reading this blog for some time, it should be pretty clear by now that food can cause disease or heal your body from pretty much anything you throw at it.

Today, I’ll be talking to the millions of people who are in constant pain.

In the US, that’s a whopping 100 million people — roughly a third of the entire population — who are suffering from chronic pain… (1)

Pretty. Bad. Statistics.

Do You Even Know Where Pain Comes From?

If you live in North America, chances are that you’re stuck in this health system where docs have about 15 minutes to assess what your problem is, and then prescribe you something to help you out.

But when was the last time someone took time to tell you exactly what the cause of your pain?

It’s not like docs don’t want to help you. But their reality is that they get so little time with patients that it’s pretty hard to find out what your exact problem is in a matter of minutes.

Let me help you with this pain 101 class.

There are 3 types of injuries that cause pain:

1) Serious injury: that’s when you hit your foot on the corner of your bed and lay down in a fetal position afterwards, or any kind of other intense, one-time injury like a muscle tear, torn ligament or even broken bone.

2) Overuse injury: that’s when you do the same thing for hours, and end up feeling pain because of the stress it caused to your joints, ligaments or muscles. The classic example is computer work that gives you wrist pain, or jogging that can make your knees swell.

3) Dietary injury: that’s the one injury that people rarely talk about. That’s when certain foods cause chronic inflammation inside your body, and put you in a state of chronic pain. (2)

30-Second Inflammation Crash Course

I’ll keep this very short and to the point. Here’s what you need to know about the inflammation that’s a normal consequence of injuries.

Normal inflammation:

You experience one of the above injuries
Your body is signaled to send specialized cells to the injured area and cause inflammation
Inflammation causes that redness, heat and other classic symptoms
This environment helps you heal faster and ward off disease
You heal, and then inflammation decreases
Conclusion: inflammation is GOOD and ESSENTIAL

Chronic inflammation:

You have a repetitive injury
That causes inflammation
The repetitive injury keeps your body in a constant inflamed state
The inflammation gets out of hand and your immune system gets triggered
You never really heal because of the repetitive stress, and feel pain all the time
The pain and inflammation never decrease and stick around forever
Conclusion: too much inflammation is BAD

Your Gut May Be Leaking As You’re Reading This…

Sounds gross, I know.

But the truth is that most people intestinal linings are damaged by their food choices and a ton of other factors that screw up your gut like…

Chlorine in water
Sugar
Artificial sweeteners
Pesticides
GMOs (potentially)
Etc.

As it becomes irritated with this constant flow of offenders, your gut lining’s cell walls become spaced out and allow food particles to pass through to your blood along with the essential nutrients you’re absorbing. That’s called “leaky gut”.

It causes a cascade of bad consequences:

Your immune system starts attacking food particles, which causes food allergies, intolerances or sensitivities
The inflammation gets out of hand, and won’t go away until you stop feeding it
The more of these allergenic foods you eat, the more allergic you become – a never-ending spiral that usually just gets worse over time

That’s why I’ve been repeating over and over that health starts in your gut.

Even if leaky gut is still a controversial condition that’s not “officially” recognized in most of the medical community, it’s very real.

Once your gut is leaky, even healthy foods may start to…

Trigger your immune system
Which leads to more inflammation
Which leads to more PAIN

On top of the constant pain a dietary injury causes, your hormones are directly affected.

Serotonin: 95% is produced in your gut. Reduction of your serotonin means impaired mood, mental focus, and sleep cycle quality, but also reduction of your growth hormone (GH).

Growth hormone: your leaky gut contributes to the reduction of this key hormone, which means bad carb tolerance (you store carbs as fat very easily), and reduced ability to burn fat and build muscle.

Should You Just Pop A Pill?

Pills might be useful short term if you suffer from a serious injury, but taking even the so-called “harmless” pain pills like ibuprofen may screw you up pretty good over the long term.

Ibuprofen is known to impair a function of your intestine, which could in fact INCREASE your inflammation. (3)

In another study, 800 milligrams (a fairly common prescription dose) of ibuprofen before exercise was enough to cause exercise-induced small intestinal injury, worsening gut barrier damage. (4)

NB: Wait, it gets even worse. Studies have shown that even intense exercise can cause short-term small intestinal injury and gut barrier dysfunction. (5)

That doesn’t mean that you should stop exercising, but that’s just another factor that’s keeping you in pain.

The Top 4 Pain-Causing Foods

Pretty much all foods can contribute to your dietary injury and pain.

But certain foods are known to be a problem for most people.

1) Milk and dairy products

Like I’ve said in my “Is Milk Healthy or Not?” article, about 60% of all adults can’t digest milk properly because they lack the enzyme to do so. (6)

That’s just one of the many reasons that people report a better health and less pain after either reducing or eliminating pasteurised dairy from their diet.

It’s no wonder that milk is one of the most common allergens around.

2) Gluten-containing grains

Going “gluten-free” is NOT a fad.

Between 10 and 60% of the population is intolerant to gluten, depending on what expert you listen to. (7)

The problem is – only one in 80 gluten-intolerant people will ever be diagnosed. (8)

That’s why a lot of professional athletes like cyclists found that a gluten-free diet improved performance through better sleep and faster recovery times. (9)

Removing gluten-containing grains (wheat, barley, bulgar, couscous, kamut, rye, spelt, triticale) from your diet for a while and putting them back will help you figure out if gluten is a problem for you.

3) Sugar

Sugar is terrible on all aspects of your health.

Natural sugars like honey are OK and even beneficial in small quantities — about 1-3 tsp. per day — but remember that they can still screw up your gut and make your entire body inflamed if you consume too much.

4) Foods you’re allergic to

You can develop allergies or intolerances to pretty much any food if your digestive system is screwed up.

Make sure you get tested for allergies if you think that’s your case, but also be aware of how you feel after eating certain foods.

Conclusion

Food can either heal you or cause you pain.

What is terrible about this food/pain relationship is that even very healthy foods can contribute to your pain if you developed specific allergies or intolerance to them.

If you’re one of the dozens of millions of people who suffer from constant pain, here’s what I recommend you do for the next two weeks:

1) Cut out all sugar, gluten and dairy from your diet for 7 days.

2) Reintroduce dairy for one day at each meal and see how you feel. If nothing goes wrong after 2-3 days, keep consuming dairy.

3) Then, reintroduce gluten containing-grains like wheat for one day at each meal and see how you feel. If nothing goes wrong after 2-3 days, keep consuming gluten.

4) If this experiment doesn’t reduce your pain at all, make sure to get tested for allergies asap.

Why Food Keeps You In Pain Read More »

Dinorah has lost over 60 lbs and still going…………. (her story)

Weekly Motivation

‘One pound at a time.’ You have to invest in yourself and expect nothing less than hard work and dedication. Know that the journey won’t be easy but the pounds lost along the way are worth the personal gains that come with the effort. The personal satisfaction and exhilaration you will feel will be priceless. You can get there, will get there…just have to work and sweat to achieve.

The Alive Experience is more than a training program. It’s a holistic approach aimed to assist in making a healthy life change. It’s helped me learn not only how to properly exercise but to listen to my body and modify my eating, exercise and even life habits based upon its response. J’ean has been instrumental in my journey. He helps me stay focused and roots for me even when I may not be feeling 100%. He’s not only my trainer but my friend. I would recommend The Alive Experience to those willing to take a chance on finding a better version of themselves.

This is her after a 5 mile walk…. we’re smiling because it’s cold, but she did it……………..ARE YOU ALIVE!!!!!!!!

Dinorah has lost over 60 lbs and still going…………. (her story) Read More »