Balance In your Life

You know it is hard to balance a lot of things in your life when it comes to losing weight, eating right, exercising, work, friends and everything else that goes with it.

For example. I am in Sydney at the moment, well Glen Innes really and yes it is freezing, but I am down here for the Scottish “Celtic Festival” and I had such plans of grandeur. I bought down my studying stuff so that I can continue my learning, I have a new script that I am developing as well as a few re-writes on my old one, and one that I have already half written but want to change. I have books that I want to read and of course there is the all important training that I need to complete, which goes hand in hand with my studying. But where do I have the time to do this?

I am working from 2pm till close, which is usually around 9 or 9:30, and like many of you when you get home all you want to do is just relax, watch some mindless TV or just veg out! So you get up extra early (like 6am) to do your training which is great, and then you decide what you want to do for the rest of the day before you work.

It is hard to keep balance, but something I have learned from trial and error is that the only way to balance something is ‘to plan it out’. If you want to train every day then you need a succinct program. You need to know before hand what it is you are going to do. Once you have that program you don’t waste time getting into it. You get up you do your workout then you have a shower, bang done all in the space of about an hour.

Once the workout is over, you can go and decide what it is that needs to be done first. Study, writing, work chores etc…

But something that can assist you in your daily routine is the addition of making your workouts ‘fun’. By doing this you are able to kill 2 birds with one stone. If you decide that your gym workouts are boring then play game with yourself, challenge yourself to something new. Make your next workout to go rock climbing indoors, play a sport that you don’t usually play. You will know pretty much the next day if you did something worthwhile because most of the time you will use muscles in a different pattern and end up sore. THis is fantastic, it is another shock that your body needs to ensure that you keep fit and healthy.

Of a night-time, if you are going to watch TV, which I do as well, try not to watch it too close to when you go to bed, because the constant flickering of the TV keeps your brain active for quite some time before sleep. Try reading a book or doing something that relaxes you rather than stimulates your mind when it should be preparing for bed.

Just a couple of little things to think about.

Metabolic Typing

I really wanted to try and structure my blog posts and put them neatly into little sections and have them done in order, but to tell you the truth I have no chance of getting what is in my head right now down onto paper in any kind of semblance of order. So I am just going to start back at the old blog with what ever is in my head at the time.

So here goes.

Metabolic Typing.

Metabolism: Described in texts as the sum of all physiological and chemical processes in your body working together to keep you alive (that is the simple version). This statement is so very accurate, but people just don’t see the importance of food. If we break down the complexity of how the body works into simple chemical reactions, we would be here for days describing the different happenings inside your body at any ’1 second in time’. So many people I talk to will spend and hour or two getting ready for a date, a big night out with the friends, shopping for birthday or engagement presents, but will not spend 30 minutes a day to keep their own body functioning to its optimum. This astounds me, it really does.

Every time you put something into your mouth and swallow, there is a reaction to that food. On a cellular level your body needs certain amounts of macro-nutrients (proteins, carbs and fats) and micro-nutrients ( vitamins minerals etc) for continued bodily functions. There are literally trillions of cells in your body that are continually changing every second, absorbing nutrients, expelling nutrients, ensuring different levels of toxins in your body are correct and if not they work to expel them etc.. basically your cells in your body are created ‘perfectly’. They have a genetic code they adhere to and perform the tasks they are meant to. BUT! if you decide that you want to put something into your body that distorts these cells, that makes certain cells work 100% faster and harder than they usually would, or clog those cells up with food matter that just isn’t supposed to be there, then the resulting issues that arise in your body present themselves as symptoms. These symptoms are then diagnosed by medical professionals, a lot of the time incorrectly.

Before I go further though, let me explain ‘incorrectly’. A lot of the medical profession today are ‘symptomatic diagnosticians’ ie: they are presented with symptoms or issues, relate them to what a deficiency may or may not be, prescribe a drug or vitamin supplement to alleviate the problem and send patients on their way. This is called ‘allopathic medicine’.

Allopathic medicine has been the dominant medical paradigm in the western world for the last 100+ years. It is a ‘quick fix’ solution to underlying problems that go far deeper than a ‘vitamin c’ deficiency, or a ‘iron’ deficiency. What makes it harder is that the patients continue to suffer in bouts of pain or unhealthy living for many years to come. What is needed to see what is happening on a ‘whole’. There is definitely a place for allopathic medicine, it is better suited to acute health problems, but when someone comes in with chronic fatigue syndrome, or extended bouts of IBS and other digestive disorders, you need more than ‘mylanta’ to fix the problem. That is where metabolic typing comes in.

Your body reacts to eating proteins carbs and fats in different ways, and I am going to get to that in coming posts when I am more specific about the chemistry and the function of each, I will also show research that contradicts what has been popular for the last 60+years, that saturated fats give you heart disease and put weight on. This is just not true, but as I said, we will get to that in coming posts.

Metabolic typing at its simplest level works on creating ‘every single meal’ to be balanced in macronutrients, based on your metabolic type.

There are 3 metabolic types:
1: Protein Types
2: Carb Types
3: Mixed Types.

These three metabolic types react differently when macronutrient combination are eaten.

Protein types: These guys love to eat. They need to eat a lot more protein than Carb types. They metabolize carbs fast, so they need to balance out their food intake by eating more slow metabolizing proteins. The types of proteins their body works better on are the darker meats of the thighs and wings, which are high in an enzyme called ‘purine’ the ration of Carbs:protein:fats should be in the vicinity of 35:45:20. This is a basic relationship that works best for them

Carb Types: These guys ‘generally’ tend to handle sweets a lot better than a protein type. They also tend not to eat as much, a little food seems to go well longer than the protein types. Their metabolism is generally slower than protein types which is why the higher GI foods help to keep them working at optimal range. Be careful though, just because you work a little better on carbs, doesn’t mean you can go and scoff down your total daily food intake as sweets and lollies. The ration for carb types is carbs:proteins:fats = 60:25:15

Mixed Type: well guess what, you get the best of both worlds.

As a simple start to Metabolic typing the above information gives you an insight into the fact that people work differently on macronutrient ratios. But as we go deeper and deeper into Metabolic Typing, we see that even specific foods have a different effect on different people.

We look further into the Nervous system, where we find there are 2 distinct differences in how food affects this bodily system. There is the Autonimous Nervous system which is divided into 2 parts. Sympathetic and Parasympathetic. The Sympathetic Nervous system is responsible for actioning parts of the body in stressed situations, known predominantly as the ‘flight or fight’ responses. The Parasympathetic Nervous system is responsible for basically the opposite to the Sympathetic Nervous System, it relaxes and aids in promoting digestion. A person can be either ‘Sympathetic Dominant’ or ‘Parasympathetic Dominant”. By having one of these dominance’s, your body reacts in certain ways to specific foods. I will post more on this in up coming blog posts.

Want to know what type you are? Just send me an email and I’ll send you out a mini questionnaire that will allow you test your metabolic type, and start you on your way to a healthier, happier body.

thanks for  reading

Bret

The Journey of the Carb

I am going to start off this blog with a series of information about carbs, starting with what they are, what they do and how they journey and react through the body.

They will each be titled specifically according to the information about each carb and its usefulness to the body.

Once I have established a line for the carbs from putting it into your mouth to getting rid of it, I will move on to Protein, and then finally fats. I am going to be looking at a minimum of 1 post per week, but if I get time and have my writing up to scratch I may put up 2.

Anyway, only a few of you following for now, so invite all your friends along to follow, and hopefully we can learn a lot of new stuff together.

bret.

The energy Systems of the Body and how they work in relation to weight loss

How the body works.

The body is a complex and phenomenal machine. With a collection of 206 individual bones in the adult skeleton, and approximately 640 muscles that support and move the skeleton, it can easily be seen how people can get bogged down with so much information that basics in human physiology can be overlooked when trying to deal with weight loss and the management of a healthy lifestyle.

When you talk about weight loss, it is not a lost cause, and definitely you do not need a degree to understand it, it can be easy to simplify things just a little, so that everyone can learn to live a much healthier and stronger life. Lets look at how the body works in general.

Every time you move a muscle, twitch a finger, walk, run, bend over or any other movement of a muscle, those muscles use energy. The amount of energy that is needed to make that gesture depends on that movement. Eg: The amount of energy taken to walk one step, is significantly more than the amount of energy required to raise your right arm parallel to the ground.

Why?

Because of the number of muscles involved in that particular movement.

By knowing just this one piece of information, you are already loaded up with the knowledge that doing exercise that incorporates more muscles or body movement, is going to be overall more beneficial for the average person.

How though is this energy created and used in the body? Well, the body has 4 different means for converting and using energy to facilitate movement.

The Energy Used in the Body.

The body is made up of 4 energy Systems.  These systems use body fat and carbohydrates in order to facilitate muscle movement.  How the muscles move is described in a section of theory called “The Sliding Filament Theory” and for those who want to really know how your muscles move, you can follow the link I have placed here.

http://www.ivy-rose.co.uk/Topics/Muscle_Sliding-Filament.php

Each of these energy systems plays a specific role when you are doing sport and it will depend on the type of sport you are doing as to which particular energy system you will use.

 

ATP-PC or Creatine phosphate system.

In your muscles, which are predominantly made up of protein, there is a certain amount of ATP (adenosine try phosphate) stored for an immediate muscle contraction.  ATP is ‘THE’ fuel that is used when you perform any type of movement. It is the fuel that your muscles use to contract for whatever reason.

If you were to do an activity that employs this system such as sprinting, swimming or climbing, and you performed this activity as fast and as hard as you can, the amount of ATP stored in your muscles “in general” would last only for 6-15 seconds, depending on the person.

Here is a little experiment for you to try out, fit or unfit. Go to your local oval and start at one end, set your stopwatch then run as fast and as hard as you can for as long as you can until you physically can’t move. That doesn’t mean slowing down until you can handle it, it means running flat out until you can not go any longer, and then check your stopwatch. You should see that you would fall into the 6-15 second band. Your muscles start to burn around 6-10 seconds as you completely expel all of the ATP that is stored in your muscles for contraction.

What is happening in this experiment is that you are constantly contracting and expanding your muscles to run, but your body is unable to reproduce enough ATP to continue the muscle contraction therefore you slowdown and tire very quickly. The ATP system lasts about 20-30 seconds, but as you pass this timeframe one of the other three energy systems in your body will start to take over.

Anaerobic Glycolysis

Around the 10 second to 15 second mark the ATP system begins to fade and what’s known as “Anaerobic Glycolysis” takes over.

For activities lasting anywhere from 30 seconds to 3 minutes, this anaerobic energy system is usually where the body get its energy supplies from. How the system works is it breaks down the muscle and liver glycogen stores without the use of oxygen.

A by-product of this system is called ‘lactic acid’. Contrary to popular belief lactic acid is not responsible for the pain that you feel after intensive exercise 24-48 hours later. The pain you feel is the excessive mechanical force that you employed during your workout which resulted in damage to the muscular or connective tissue.  The pain you feel, is the stimulation of sensory nerve endings as the body begins to repair the damage done during exercise. That is why this usually occurs when you first start an exercise programme or when you train at an unusually high intensity level.

Lactic acid is usually dispelled within 30 minutes to an hour after exercises finished.

Aerobic Glycolysis.

After about three minutes of exercise aerobic Glycolysis is the dominant energy system.  This energy system produces energy by breaking down muscle and liver GL stores with oxygen present. Because oxygen is present when the system is in use there is no build-up of lactic acid.

This system does not produce energy as fast as the ATP system or Anaerobic Glycolysis system, and therefore the intensity of this particular exercise cannot be as high. This system has the capacity to produce energy for about an hour or more.

Oxidative Phosphorelation

This energy system provides energy during the long, moderate to low intensity exercises. The system breaks down the body’s fat stores to supply energy to working muscles. As the intensity of exercise decreases the body relies more on this energy system. This energy system can supply virtually unlimited supplies of energy. Endurance sports such as cross-country running swimming soccer and lacrosse all rely heavily on their system.

The easiest way to explain how these systems work in real-life situations is to use running. Let’s say you were on a 400m track. If you were to run as hard and as fast as you can for as long as you can, you would last anywhere from 6-15 seconds. The energy system you have just depleted is your ATP or Creatine phosphate system. What would happen is you would deplete all of your glycogen stores in your muscles in 15 seconds and you would physically not be able to move your legs until that energy was replenished.

If however on the starting blocks you decided to run at 80-90% of your maximum energy output, you could keep going around the track from anywhere from 30 seconds to three minutes, depending on your fitness level. You would deplete the energy in your muscles but after 15 seconds Anaerobic Glycolysis would kick in and help to replenish ATP in your muscles. This would only last for around 3 minutes.

Again if you decided to run from the starting blocks at 70-80% of your maximum energy output, you would be able to circle the 400 m track for anywhere between 50 minutes to an hour or more, again depending on your level of fitness.

And finally if you were to run from the starting blocks at anything less than 70% the Oxidative Phosphorelation energy system would be the system that is used predominantly here and you could run for hours.

 

So those are the 4 energy systems that you use at one given time during your exercise routines. You may not know the exact workings of each system, but if you have this little bit of knowledge, you can easily work out if you are doing exercise that is going to recruit more muscle fibres, which will in turn increase your metabolism and continue to burn fat after you have finished training, or if you are really working on your cardio and that the fat burning won’t continue on quite as long as a workout designed for muscle strength.