Food Health

Blake and Gwen Beckcom

The meal that kick starts your day that should be the highest calorie meal of your day is BREAKFAST. I know, you don’t have time, you never have eaten breakfast, you hate eggs, you’re not hungry, you’re a grab n go coffee type. I get it. But start somewhere. Your body as it slept last night repaired itself from the damages you laid in to it yesterday, and prepared itself for the next round today. But it takes work to do this. IT IS hungry. Your last calorie intake was last night sometime, be it early or late, good or bad content? Your body then works all night burning the midnight oil to get you ready to take on today. Breakfast breaks the fast of no nourishment during sleep, while your body continued toiling over your repair and preparation. Do with out a “break the fast” meal, and the body slows down metabolically working at a less than optimum calorie burn, robbing you of results.

Start simple but start somewhere. A meal replacement shake to begin the day’s journey is simple, and easily obtained from a variety of sources and can provide balanced nutrients and calories. It’s a start. Get in the habit of at least this. Perhaps in a week or two you’ll find that you ARE hungry when you awaken, and you can add a cereal, oatmeal or bagel to the line up and pretty soon, you’ll be a full fledged breakfast eater. Your body learns and adapts to what you teach it in the gym or at the table.

If you do the same things in the gym, over and over, and teach your body just that, you limit results as your body has adapted to what you taught it to do. Teach your body to go hungry by not eating breakfast, it learns to live with it, that is, it adapts. “Learns to live with it” does not mean it should live with it, as breakfast jumpstarts today’s calorie burn.

Outside of good and frequent eats, to get the most from your calorie burn, you must commit to cardio with regularity and change. People reply often when asked about cardio exercise “well I walk.” That’s great of course, but my reply is “your body knows how to walk.” Simply put, it is not being challenged by walking as it already acquired that skill. It is familiar with walking. But what if you walked as if you were late to a meeting? I mean late, as like your gonna be the VERY last person to walk in to a crowded “all hands” meeting where every one goes silent and looks at you as you enter the meeting, with that, “I’m glad I am not YOU” look on their faces, jaws agape. Now there, you have something. A brisk walk can raise your heart rate enough to give it a cardio vascular benefit. Just walking is just that….JUST walking. Have you ever tried walking backwards, or on uneven surfaces, or sand? Give it a go and see what it tells your body. It’s all about proactive cardio change, shaking up your norms to get gains.

Take your age and subtract it from 220. That result represents your maximum heart rate (MHR). The goal is to train such that your heart rate has a sustained period of time in the 65 to 85 percent range of that MHR number found by taking your age from 220. The lower end of that range; 65 percent is more in tune with fat burning and the upper end; 85 percent more for high end cardio endurance building. For an added boost use resistance training in combination with cardio. Weight lifting has its own cardiovascular benefits and the combination of the two is a powerful weapon. Using cardio for a warm up followed by a weight session then closed out with a cardio session can be most effective. During weight training your body will burn through most of its stored fuels and when you hit the cardio post weight training, it has to reach deeper in to your fat stores for energy. Call us at Fitness Together and we’ll help you get started. There is also great content on our blog at BetterbodySanDiego.com.

Category: Life Style