Category Archives: Healthy Recipes

Best Way to Shrink Your Fat Cells, Calories and Your Last Diet Ever! Eat by Color

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Best Way to Shrink Your Fat Cells, Calories and Your Last Diet Ever! Eat by Color!

Fat Cells. Once you have them you have them. The only way to get rid of them is surgery. What you can do is make them smaller. Check out the video above a great analogy. Fat cells are like a zip lock back. If you blow the bag up and zip it shut it is larger than if you let all the air out. In both cases you have the bag but they are different sizes. Now the air is like fat or energy and the bag your fat cell. If you are at a caloric deficit (from nutrition and exercise) you can let the air (energy) from the fat cells making them smaller. The bag (fat cell is still there) but is deflated and much smaller.

Calories

Calories are a measure of energy. This is true. The impact calories from different macronutrients has to be taken into account especially for those not super shredded, ripped, or about to get on the bodybuilding stage.   If you have a higher body fat percentage insulin does not work as well as if you were lean. As a result, you may be more likely to store extra calories or more specifically calories that dramatically raise insulin like those found in simple carbs as fat.   So where the calories come from matters for the average person.

The next thing to keep in mind is will power. Let’s be honest if you open that bag of cookies, box of pop tarts, or any other high simple carb and fat food you are not going to stop at one or two. Highly motivated physique competitors getting on stage in the near future are the exception here….they have the motivation to say no after a reasonable serving. The rest of us forget it. This is the second reason where the calories come from matters.

Diets and magazines.

Remember the last diet you will ever be on is the one you can do forever. In reality this means it is not a diet but a lifestyle. People find Eat by Color so powerful and life changing for this reason.   With Eat by Color they drop pounds and inches and most importantly they can Eat by Color for the rest of their life.   If a diet promises a 20 lb. loss in 6 weeks… you have to ask if you can keep that weight off. If not it is a diet and it will not work.

Magazines, we have three of the same magazine, different issues, each with a cover story about the last diet you will ever be on. So basically each month for three months in a row they had a story on the last, best, or only diet you will ever need. If that was true the diet story would not have changed. J

 

So what do you do for nutrition? The simplest thing, Eat by Color! No counting anything. No calories, macros, points or anything else to count. Simple better nutrition decisions based on foods you like to eat. Eat by Color is NOT a diet. Click for a FREE consult to learn more.

@fitworkzdekalb @eatbycolor #eatbycolor #iifym #fitmom #fitdad #fitkid #SSMF #antidiet #flexibledieting

Ray Binkowski is the owner of FitWorkz a hybrid training gym in DeKalb, IL, author, and trainer. He has lost over 60 pounds and kept it off for over 15 years. He has worked with thousands including professional athletes, police/fire/military, physique competitors, even corporations like 3M, and most often people looking to make a long term change in health, wellness, and weightloss. Plus the Get Fit and Live Healthy podcast.

Follow us for daily exercise, motivation, and recipes!

Over 900 Videos on our YouTube Channel!!!

Youtube.com/FitWorkzDeKalb

 

Yes You Can Lose Fat While Gaining Muscle, Best Advice for Working with a Trainer, and More!

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Yes You Can Lose Fat While Gaining Muscle, Best Advice for Working with a Trainer, and More! Yes you really can lose fat while gaining muscle and it does NOT take as much time as you think in the gym. We just featured Emily in a post. She has lost 12 lbs of fat while gaining 8 lbs of muscle. The best part she still had the occasional glass or two of white or red…as well as pizza. Plus she only spent about three hours a week exercising. Seriously three hours a week. That is it. Emily follows Eat by Color and is using our affordable training app for her workouts. Not only does she has a plan, our training app allows her to record her sets, reps, and rest. Most importantly the app shoes her progress in each exercise…. Remember progress is very motivating. Want to learn more about our app or what Emily is doing we would love to hear from you!

The best advice when working with a trainer. If you feel light headed, dizzy, nauseous, etc. STOP! Sit! and tell the trainer! Sipping a Gatorade will help alleviate the nausea. There is no working through these things and no million dollar contract for trying to.

Raymond M. Binkowski is the owner of FitWorkz a hybrid training gym in DeKalb, IL, author, and trainer. He has lost over 60 pounds and kept it off for over 15 years. Ray’s books Eat by Color, Get Fit and Live Healthy, and Exercise Galore can all be found on Amazon! He has worked with thousands including professional athletes, police/fire/military, physique competitors, even 3M, and most often people looking to make a long term change in health, wellness, and weightloss. Plus the Get Fit and Live Healthy podcast. The podast is FREE on Itunes.

Over 900 Videos on our Youtube Channel!!!

Tricks and Tips to Make Sure We Eat the Foods We Should Eat, Eat by Color

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Tricks and Tips to Make Sure We Eat the Foods We Should Eat, Eat by Color.  We all know we should eat our fruits and vegetables.  The fact that they are good for us is readily accepted.  The problem, even though we should eat them, if we buy them and still do not eat them we are better off not even buying them.

Get Great Eat by Color Recipes Here

The real trick is buying the fruits and vegetables we will actually eat.   They have to be convenient and in many cases portable.  Plus they can not go bad before we can eat them.  We stopped by our local Hy-Vee in Sycamore Illinois and chatted with registered dietician Lisa Brandt about this very thing.

Check out the video for some great tips, and tricks.  :-)

Interesting in learning how Eat by Color can help you? Click here an then the FREE consult.

 

Raymond M. Binkowski is the owner of FitWorkz a hybrid training gym in DeKalb, IL, author, and trainer. He has lost over 60 pounds and kept it off for over 15 years. Ray’s books Eat by Color, Get Fit and Live Healthy, and Exercise Galore can all be found on Amazon! He has worked with thousands including professional athletes, police/fire/military, physique competitors, even 3M, and most often people looking to make a long term change in health, wellness, and weightloss. Plus the Get Fit and Live Healthy podcast. The podcast is FREE on Itunes.

Salt is NOT the Enemy

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There’s a lot of folklore today regarding the amount of sodium someone should consume in a day, particularly within the body building community. There’s a belief that an excess of sodium will cause the body to retain water and as a result strange and unhealthy tactics have been used to reduce this effect, such as salt and water depletion. Now this is true to an extent but an excess of sodium won’t cause you to look bloated and fatter than you actually are. We’ve prepped many competitors and have paid no attention to sodium intake, meanwhile they look just as “shredded” if not more so than their competition. The only difference is that our athletes aren’t dehydrated, fatigued, and cramping on game day. In fact, a low sodium intake can have quite the negative effect on weight training. When you deplete your sodium intake, your body will struggle to hang on to potassium which in turn will cause muscle cramping/fatigue. A little fun fact: soldiers in Afghanistan would consume sodium phosphate pills on a daily basis to prevent cramping and fatigue in the arid climate. Knowledgeable weight trainers often consume 5,000mg or more on a daily basis because of the correlation between sodium intake and your muscles ability to contract to their fullest extent. Now I’m not saying to grab your salt shaker and start pouring salt down your gullet.  What I am saying is to not worry and obsess over how much salt you’re consuming in a day, that is unless you have a medical condition wherein it would be required to do so. Let’s be honest, chicken is bland enough as it is. Put on as much seasoning as you want and don’t think twice.

 

 

This article is the courtesy of Raymond M. Binkowski former fat guy, author of “Eat by Color”, personal trainer and owner of FitWorkz.  Its intent is to be shared.  If sharing the previous following statement MUST be included any time this article is reproduced in part or entirety.  So please feel free to share, you just might change a life!

FitWorkz.com * Eatbycolor.com * Twitter @eatbycolor * facebook.com/EatbyColor * Facebook.com/FitWorkz.DeKalb

 

Don’t be Duped by Supplement Ads, Train Less for Faster Gains, and Food Addiction

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Supplement companies dupe customers into buying their products. A client makes more gains by training less (second client in a few weeks to report this), and food addiction.

So today I got an email from a client we train online. She is absolutely rocking it progress wise. She is middle age and looks easily a decade younger than she is. Her email included a recipe for a protein shake. The recipe supposedly turned the signal on in your cells to burn fat, fights hunger, raises metabolism and a ton of other stuff. The recipe is really an extremely well written advertisement written to market a protein powder. The problem is that to most it looks like nothing more than a great recipe. This is one way that the supplement industry dupes people to buying their products. Be aware of what you are reading. If it promises the world and seems to good to be true it likely is.

Twice in the last few weeks, clients have reported making better progress even though they are training less. Yes you read that correctly. Clients are training less and making major progress. This is all too common. Enough of the right exercise produces awesome results. Too much of the right exercise can often be too much and slow your progress. How much is enough? Many find 2-3 hours a week of exercise perfect if it is spent 70% on weights and 30% High Intensity Interval Cardio.

Food addiction is real. Here is why. When some foods are consumed dopamine, the feel good chemical in the brain, is increased. Take chocolate, many crave chocolate when they are down in the dumps. Why? Dopamine. Same thing with many foods, especially those higher in simple carbs and fats, we crave them because they make us feel good. This is why in Eat by Color I wrote that food is the most addictive drug on the planet and a five year old can manipulate it in the kitchen. If you really crave something, like chocolate have it. Research indicates that trying satisfy the craving with something else will not work. That is a major take home point. It is better to have a piece of chocolate then have something to curb the craving only to have the chocolate anyways.

Would love your comments, questions and feed back! Post on our social media sites and share.

 

 

 

Ray’s books can be found on Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com. 

Nook, Kindle, and iBook are also available for your favorite digital device. 

EatbyColor.com #EatbyColor @EatbyColor FitWorkz.com

Over 800 videos exercise, motivational, and nutrition can be found on Youtube

Also check out the Get Fit and Live Healthy Podcast on iTunes and go mobile.

 

This article is the courtesy of Raymond M. Binkowski former fat guy, author of “Eat by Color”, personal trainer and owner of FitWorkz.  Its intent is to be shared.  If sharing the previous following statement MUST be included any time this article is reproduced in part or entirety.  So please feel free to share, you just might change a life!

FitWorkz.com * Eatbycolor.com * Twitter @eatbycolor * facebook.com/EatbyColor * Facebook.com/FitWorkz.DeKalb

 

Are Your Supplements Really Doing Anything?

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Supplements today are a rather hot topic. Everyone seems to be taking them and swears that the brand they’re taking is the best thing since sliced bread, when in reality most of what they experience is a result of the placebo effect. The supplement industry is a multi-billion dollar industry that feeds off of modern society’s obsession with vanity and the desire to look like “insert famous person here.” So before you go and dump hundreds of dollars into your local supplement store, it may be worth your time to ask whether or not the desired “fat burning this” or “muscle building that” is actually going to deliver what’s promised on the label.
For starters, the majority of supplement companies are primarily in the business of marketing, not nutrition. At the end of the day their bottom line is what’s important. Ever hear the expression “buy low, sell high”? Most products are designed to sell for the most money possible, while at the same time minimizing the costs to the producer to the greatest extent possible. This is done at the expense of using quality ingredients and in the proper amounts. A great example of this is “nitrogen spiking” protein powders which I discuss in a previous article.
Now I’m not saying that there aren’t any supplements that work. Quality supplements in conjunction with proper nutrition can help you achieve better results in a shorter amount of time, the only problem is that quality supplements among today’s brands are few and far in-between and typically come with a much higher cost than what you were probably expecting. That old adage “you get what you pay for” has never been more accurate in this case. We also need to remember that supplements are not drugs. They will not provide instant gratification like a drug and will not give you the body of your dreams in the short time frame of a month or less. Your fitness idol’s physique is the result of years of proper nutrition, training, and discipline (assuming they are truly natural).
Another reason people will typically “buy into” a supplement is because the public figure or celebrity they idolize recommends or sponsors them. This is the biggest grab for young men ages 18-25. People will purchase the products their idol uses in the hopes of emulating that specific physique, without knowing that the vast majority of these shredded fitness models are using low doses of anabolic steroids to attain their physique. This is highly misleading and isn’t very ethical, but that’s a discussion without an end.
At the end of the day, there is no replacement for proper nutrition. People have attained incredible physiques and won competitions without supplements in the past. If you’re not eating in way that is conducive to building muscle and burning fat, all of the supplements in the world won’t make a difference.

Don’t Sweat the Nitrates

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A few weeks ago I had a client tell me they were avoiding all convenient and portable lunch meats because of the rumor that added nitrates in some of these meats cause cancer. Being such a bold statement, this prompted me to look into the subject a little further. Now before I talk any further, I’d like to point out that I’m not talking about cheap name brand bologna; I’m referring to fresh turkey, roast beef, chicken, etc. that you purchase from your local butcher.
So what are nitrates? Nitrates are compounds consisting of nitrogen and oxygen atoms. They are frequently added to processed and cured meats to prevent the growth of harmful bacteria, along with maintaining color and freshness. Once you consume nitrates, they are quickly converted to nitrites by the bacteria in the mouth or other enzymes in the body. From nitrites, one of two things is going happen: nitrites will convert to either nitric oxide (NO) or nitrosamines, which is a known carcinogen. Nitric oxide is a good thing nitrosamines are a bad thing. Nitric oxide is a molecule that enhances cellular communication (not cell phones, FYI) throughout the body’s seemingly infinite amount of cells. Among other benefits, nitric oxide supplementation has been shown to improve cognitive function, improve sleep, improve circulation (it’s a vasodilator), assist in rigorous physical activity (some bodybuilders use this to achieve that ever desired “pump”) reduce inflammation, and many more.
What determines which path these nitrites will take? The answer is heat. Exposing nitrates to extremely high heat will cause a chemical reaction to occur that turns nitrites into nitrosamines, which contain documented cancer causing properties. So the main point here would be to not cook your lunch meat to the point that it’s black and crispy (which I doubt you’re cooking your lunch meat to begin with). If you must cook bacon, using a lower temperature and cooking for longer duration is supposed to limit the amount of nitrosamines created, as well as not cooking the meat until it is black and crispy.
Nitrate regulation has increased over the last decade as well. The amount of nitrates put into processed meats has decreased drastically from what it once used to be due to this regulation. On a side note, approximately 80% of your dietary nitrates come from vegetables. That’s right, vegetables! So by saying nitrates are bad for you then by that logic vegetables would be bad for you, which we all know isn’t true.
So what’s the bottom line? Don’t sweat the nitrates. The more you focus on trivial matters such as this you prolong focusing on what’s actually important in life. If lunch meat keeps you on track, then by all means use it. Forcing yourself to stay up an hour late every night to cook chicken, beef, or fish when it’s something you really don’t want to eat for lunch the next day anyway will set you up for failure. You need to enjoy what you eat in order to make a positive lifestyle change.

You can Make Breakfast for the Week in less than 5 minutes!

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5 Breakfasts in 5 Minutes

5 Breakfasts in 5 Minutes

 

 

I just made breakfast for the entire work week in less than 5 minutes and so can you.

A few weeks ago I saw posts on facebook for cold oatmeal that you made in the fridge over night.  This is something I had done years ago as it is a great way to have fast, easy meals ready to go when you get up in the morning.  The problem with what I was seeing on facebook is that most of the suggested recipes were overloaded in carbs and sugar.

So I thought why not share some really easy, low sugar and high protein ways to do this.

So here you go.

Here is the recipe:

1/2 Cup of oatmeal, I used the quick oat variety and you can use the steal cut, slow cook but personally I see NO benefit in doing so

2 scoops of protein powder, I like the UMP from Beverly International

Cinnamon, the pure ground not sugar added kind

Mix dry ingredients in your bowls.  Now, add water to one of the bowls and place in the fridge.  This is your breakfast for tomorrow.  Tomorrow night, grab the next bowl, add water…you get the idea.

Calories 370

Carbs about 30 grams

Protein about 40 grams

Fat about 2 grams

Want to get real crazy?  Add some fresh berries, nuts, or even flax seed.

 

 

This article is the courtesy of Raymond M. Binkowski former fat guy, author of “Eat by Color”, personal trainer and owner of FitWorkz.  Its intent is to be shared.  If sharing the previous following statement MUST be included any time this article is reproduced in part or entirety.  So please feel free to share, you just might change a life!

 

FitWorkz.com * Eatbycolor.com * Twitter @eatbycolor * facebook.com/EatbyColor *

 

 

Tips to Boost Your Immune System Via Your Digestive System!

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A Healthy Digestive Track and your Immune System!
Did you know that 80% of your immune system is affected by your GI’s (think digestive system) health?  Well it is and a healthy digestive system means a strong immune system.  Immune system health is important to fight off illness and disease.  Especially during the cold and flu seasons!  During times of illness anti-biotics often play a role in restoring health.  Unfortunately anti-biotics can kill both good and bad bacteria.

Good Bacteria?  You bet.  Like the kinds found in your digestive system assisting with the complete digestion and absorption of the food you eat.  The good bacteria’s ensure that your digestive system is healthy, which means your immune system is healthy.

How can the good bacteria be increased?

Two ways…..Pre-biotics and Pro-biotics.

Pre-Biotics:  Ferment in the stomach to produce good bacteria.  Great sources are yogurt and believe it or not whey protein.

Pro-Biotics:  Pro-Biotics differ from the Pre-Biotics because they will survive stomach acid and move further down the digestive track.  Pro-Biotics can be found refrigerated at quality health food stores and most chiropractic offices.   Real Pro-Biotics will have 10^9 (1 billion or 10 billion) bacteria.  The products do have a shelf life and MUST be refrigerated, check both.

Try using both Pre (Yogurt…Greek Yogurt is high in protein as well) and Pro-Biotics (from health food store):

Pre-Biotics + Pro-Biotics = Synbiotics

Zinc, Vitamin C, Glutamine (it’s the most abundant amino acid in the body and under stress the immune system can use extra   glutamine, and rest can all help with a healthy immune system as well.

Other things that can help are washing your hands often, don’t rub your eyes, keep your hands out of your mouth and fingers out of your nose, and as temp drops and the heat kicks on a humidifier is not a bad idea.


This article is intended for informational purposes only.  It is not intended to treat or cure disease of any type.  Consult a physician with questions and before trying on your own.

 *This article is the property of FitWorkz.com and Ergoteknix Inc.  Feel free to share but make sure you include FitWorkz.com and EatbyColor.com!