Meal timing for weight loss and health

What is the best meal timing for weight loss and health? This question comes up quite a bit online. It is one I find very hard to answer in a simple Facebook post, so I decided to dedicate a full podcast episode to it.

What is the best meal timing for weight loss and health? This question comes up quite a bit online. It is one I find very hard to answer in a simple Facebook post, so I decided to dedicate a full podcast episode to it.

I view eating windows as a continuum much like the political spectrum.  There are different approaches and people are very passionate about defending their place.  Few people are able to objectively look at the full spectrum and see the benefits of each.

The meal timing for weight loss and health spectrum is:

• Six small meals – timing multiple small meals throughout the day to avoid getting hungry.
• Workout meal timing – having carbs before the workout and carbs and protein immediately after the workout.
• Three main meals – having three meals with no snacking permitted.
• Intermittent fasting
  • 16/8 Intermittent fasting – limiting eating to an eight hour window each day.
  • 5×2 Intermittent fasting – eating normally for five days and having two very low calorie days per week.
• Extended fasting – fasting for 24 hours or more.

Most people approach meal timing for weight loss.  Before you can effectively lose weight, you'll have to manage your hormones.  Understanding your hormone profile will help you decide where you should be on the continuum.  Most of the approaches are focused on managing blood sugar and thereby insulin.

Lifestyle also plays a big role in determining which meal timing works best for you.  I am often on a 16/8 intermittent fasting approach.  I opt to skip breakfast and have a good lunch and dinner because it would be odd to not be eating when my wife is taking dinner.

All this said, being a sugar burner or fat burner will have the biggest role in determining which meal timing approach you can stick with.  Frequent meals spaced throughout the day works best for sugar burners.  Fat burners are often more comfortable with intermittent fast and extended fasting.

Another episode you may enjoy

Fasting for weight loss with Dr. Jason Fung and Jimmy Moore

11 of my health and fitness pet peeves

Here are a few of my biggest pet peeves related to health and fitness:

1. Stuck on calories in/out – All of these calorie measurements are estimates. Eat good quality, nutritious food and let your body tell you when it’s full.
2. Barbie reps – Not burning calories or building muscle. Not getting benefit of a true resistance program that includes a challenge on the muscle.
3. Food puritans – Food choices are often limited anyway. Do the best that you can. Food is about replenishing our body and making the best choices possible given our circumstances.
4. Bro science –Don’t always follow the crowd, because sometimes the crowd is wrong. Do a little bit of research on your own.
5. Pre-workout stimulants – Avoid these. If you’re getting proper nutrition, that is all you need.
6. Fat loss supplements – If you’re eating a good diet and you’re moving around, your body will begin to burn fat without these supplements.
7. Flat stomach machines – Your body has a natural rhythm to how it wants to store fat. These machines will not be the difference maker.
8. Incomplete nutritional information in apps – You must do your own diligence to be sure what you’re eating is a true serving compared to the information within the app.
9. Ignoring food, stress, and sleep – You cannot ignore these, as you need them in your program just as much, if not more, than exercise.
10. Scale worship – The scale is not a good measure of health and fitness, but a measure of body mass. Focus on how you look and feel.
11. Irresponsible headlines – Misleading headlines cause people to make health decisions without understanding the real implications.

 

Another episode you may enjoy

How to shop for good food

Health and Fitness Foundations

When I first launched 40+ Fitness Podcast, I posted an episode each Monday for the first ten weeks that was a lesson that touched on each of the health and fitness foundations in my Forever Fitness Personal Training Program.  These are the principles I share with my clients to help keep them progressing and meeting their health and fitness goals.

Commitment

I start with commitment because without it, you'll never see success.  Willpower fails, motivation wains and resolutions are dropped.  When you know your “why” and a vision of what health and fitness looks like for you, you can put these together to make a vow.  This vow paired with self-love makes all the difference.  If you really want it, go past making a decision and commit.

Sugar

We get fat because of sugar.  The average American eats 150lbs of sugar per year.  Sugar raises your insulin, which is the core hormone for fat gain.  The only way to successfully lose weight is to reduce your sugar intake.   Aim for 50 grams or less per day and you're going to see great results.

Success Keys (Persistence, Progression, Patience)

Persistence is what keeps you going, Progression is what keeps the results coming.  Patience is where you're going to face this challenge over the long-term.  Applied together, these three keys are what all successful people have.

Sleep

Our body goes through some very important functions while we're asleep.  Our hormone cycle is driven by our sleep.  Memory development and muscle repair also occur during this time.  You'll want to get 7 – 9 hours per night, but focus on quality rather than quantity.

Water

The liver is responsible for dealing with toxins.  It makes its job easier by pushing the toxins into the fat.  Now that we're losing weight (aka burning fat), we're releasing these toxins and the liver is forced to deal with it.  Beyond not adding more toxins, it is important to give the liver plenty of water.

Our brain, joints and skin all use water to perform well.  If you are dehydrated you're going to look and feel worse.  Your

Plateaus

Our bodies were built to find balance.  For this reason, we will often find ourselves hitting plateaus. You can build in strategies to break through plateaus or avoid them all together.  Periodization can be effective particularly in muscular strength, muscle mass, or endurance.  Or you can look for a way to push past it.  Just don't quit.

Lab Rat

You are a unique individual.  As a result, what works for someone else may not work for you.  Don't be afraid to experiment to find the things that will work for you.  Take the time to educate yourself and then apply and tweak your programming and food.

Fitness Modalities

Recognize that there are different fitness modalities and you should consider most of them.  Focusing on one at the detriment of the others will keep you from meeting your goals or accomplishing your vision.  A few fitness modalities to consider follows:

• Muscular strength
• Muscular mass
• Mobility
• Endurance
• Balance
• Agility
• Speed

Strength

Of all the fitness modalities, the one I almost demand my clients do is strength training.  Strength is the most important factor to being healthy and fit.  Heavy lifting boosts testosterone production (libido) and helps maintain strong bones.

Lifestyle

Once you've seen success, it is important to shift from this being a project to it being a lifestyle.  If you've made good healthy habits, this becomes easy.  Avoid language like diet.  Diets are temporary and when you go back to eating the way you did before, you'll go back to what you were.  Health and fitness is a continuum.  You can always get better.

Health and fitness is a state of being, not a destination.

We are 100! Best of the past.

 

Susan’s Success Story

Susan, a Forever Fitness client, comes to the 40+ Fitness Podcast to share her success story.

Susan reflects on her decision to work on her health and fitness when she turned 43.  She started by walking during her daughter's practiced volleyball.  She progressed from that to a group class after a friend won a free boot camp program and gave it to her.  She discovered that being in a community made doing the exercise much easier.

When she began focusing on weight lifting, she noticed how seeing others working hard gave her motivation to push herself.  She joined Forever Fitness Personal Training when she was looking to accelerate her progress.  She didn't always like the recommendations but she saw the results. Having a coach motivated her to push on.

Having a thyroid issue has always made it easy for her to gain weight.  Through managing her food and exercise, she managed to lose 40 lbs.  Her doctor was very impressed.  Her blood work looks much better and her need for thyroid meds has reduced.

 

Patty’s health choices

Patty was on a quest to change her health. But it wasn’t just weight she wanted to lose. Patty also needed to kick her smoking habit. In her 40s, Patty was morbidly obese, topping the scales at 350 pounds. She was on four different medications and was smoking a pack and a half of cigarettes each day. She knew she needed help.

Patty’s daughter saw the My Fitness Pal app and encouraged her to download it onto her phone. It sat untouched for two or three months. Truthfully, Patty was scared to begin. Once she did, she found exactly what she needed—information and support.

She started eating less and moving more. She began with walking and religiously tracked the food she ate and the exercise she did through the app. After a while, it even became easy. She has the tools at her fingertips.

In her first year, Patty lost 115 pounds simply by eating less and moving more. By her second year, she was off all of her medications. This was great, but she knew there was one more hurdle to overcome—quitting smoking.

She had been wanting to quit smoking for so long. When she first tried to run, she couldn’t breathe and her lungs hurt. She made the decision to quit and after two months of not smoking, she ran her first 5K and felt great doing it.

Her biggest tip is that even if you think you can’t be successful, you can be. You have to want it bad enough and have a strong reason as to why. For Patty, it was being able to be active with her grandchildren.

Though she did put on a little more weight after quitting cigarettes, she now knows how to take it back off and will do so. Now, Patty knows that adopting a health and fitness lifestyle is forever and she is committed to staying healthy for life. To get in touch with Patty directly, contact her through My Fitness Pal as Pattydi.

Julie gets fit

 

Music used for the podcast Intro and Outro: http://www.bensound.com/royalty-free-music

Self love for health and fitness | Kim Knight

Today, we have Kim Night. Kim is a health and personal transformation coach living in Auckland, New Zealand. She shows people how to identify and resolve the absolute root cause of chronic physical pain or fatigue without medication or supplements. She also specializes in stress and anxiety with action. 99 percent of her work with clients is carried out remotely over phone, through online webinars, and online self-help programs. Her professional training and client experience are extensive.

Unable to work for over 10 years, her own recovery from CFS, anxiety and clinical depression led her to try over 160 different therapies on her journey back to health.

Kim says she dealt with a lot of people and she includes herself in that list. When she was a kid, she loved doing sports. She talks about limiting beliefs deep in the unconscious that make her feel bad. She thinks our limiting beliefs limit us from being happy or healthy. That’s why she feels it’s important to identify these limiting beliefs. Limiting beliefs such as “I am unworthy” kind of destroy us. I am unworthy and I am not good enough are common limiting beliefs among many.  That’s why she believes we need to re-empower ourselves. We are designed to be happy, healthy and joyful. That is our natural state. If you have these limiting beliefs running in the subconscious, it does not matter what you say in your conscious level and will stop us every time.

Kim believes we need self-discipline and willpower to push ourselves through into good practice and do whatever makes us happy. She says we need to understand it’s about self-love and self-respect. When we do good things for ourselves like eat well or exercise, we are loving, caring and respecting ourselves.

So, when we want to achieve something or anything, we have to have self-love.

Here are relevant links:

Qigong website: www.taohealthqigong.com

Facebook https://www.facebook.com/KimKnightArtofHealth

The love diet | Dr. Connie Gutterson

Music used for the podcast Intro and Outro: http://www.bensound.com/royalty-free-music

Be a lab rat to find health and fitness

Want to know how you can get the best results for you? Become a lab rat to find your path to health and fitness! You can evaluate study data to see what might work best for you. Be wary of advice you see in the press or attention-grabbing headlines. Some of this is often based in fear-mongering to grab your interest. To be successful, you need to reflect about the true nature of the study. Usually, there is a test and control group to do a compare and contrast of results, from which statistically valid conclusions are drawn.

Some studies are metastudies. This is where several studies are evaluated and data is extrapolated to develop a new conclusion or bolster a prior conclusion. Look at how they were designed and pick apart why one was different than the other.

Some studies may have general assumptions. Analyze the data and think critically about the information that is presented. Some studies may include a very limited number of participants. The backbone of a good study will have a large pool of participants. Other studies may have bias or influence. In fact, some supplement companies will pay for a clinical study to be done. Be cautious of this as well.

All this being said, you have the opportunity to do experiments on yourself to be well-controlled. First, you must define your experiment. Determine how you will go about it and what your criteria will be. Do you want to lose five or 10 pounds in four weeks? Write that information down and keep track of your data. Want to try a low fat diet? Be clear on what that means to you so you can assess properly.

In the end, if you use common sense and do your research, you will be able to apply study findings to your own journey. Test something that you can sustain over time. If it works for you, systemize the program and make it a part of your daily life. Think of yourself as your own experiment—a lab rat on a journey to better health and fitness!

When what works for them doesn't work for you

 

Music used for the podcast Intro and Outro: http://www.bensound.com/royalty-free-music