Category Archives: Nutrition for Weightloss
Keep it Convenient, Execute, and don’t Waste Time with the Boogeyman
Is the boogeyman part of your process or attempted process to lose weight, get in shape, or accomplish anything else for that matter? The boogeyman represents that thing that steals time and energy from you. The boogeyman stands in the way of conveniently executing your plan to reach your health, wellness, and weightloss goals. So the boogie man in the
world of health wellness fitness nutrition this came up no less than two times in the last three hours right here in my club. The boogeyman represents the giant maybe, or what if, or this bad thing can happen.
Take organic foods. Let’s say we draw a link in the sand. On one side we have organic the other not organic. If the organic food next to the line any better than non-organic food just on the other side of the line? I mean how different are they? Boogeyman. Don’t get hung up on the small stuff like this organic that much better. The reality is we do not know. I’m not saying that processed food is as good as whole naturally occurring through I don’t want to get into that aspect but what I am saying is if all of the things that are supposedly that bad where are all the overwhelmingly sick people? We just don’t see them statistically speaking. If non-organic food was that bad there would be a huge numbers of people that eat XYZ not organic food gets this disease we don’t see it.
The boogeyman here is stealing time and energy for a debate or worry over organic food. Energy and time that can be spent executing plans and working toward goals. Energy and time focusing on all these possible what ifs and maybes and everything else
Energy and time is better spent focusing on what you do know. Eat small meals throughout the day. Make sure you have protein at every meal and don’t exclude entire food groups. For example, the complete elimination of carbs and fat from your diet. You need some carbs for training and fat is the back bone of every hormone in the body. If you can only get four meals a day, great. Don’t worry about not getting the 5 or 6 meals in. Again don’t fear the boogeyman.
Prepackaged foods versus doing it yourself. Here the boogeyman is worrying over not prepping your own food. Let’s say you are on the go and have a crazy busy life. Congrats you are normal. We all think our lives are hectic. Some will stress over not having the perfect food for on the go. This came up in discussion with my training staff this week. A person chooses to buy prepackaged vegetables instead of buying, washing, cutting, and repackaging them. Sweating which is better becomes the boogeyman instead of just executing. Get what is convenient and make it happen. Convenient means you will execute.
Same discussion covered oatmeal. Individual packets or the big container of quick oats. It is cheaper to buy the big container AND you can control what goes in it the oatmeal…huge for the IIFYM or flexible dieting crowd. The packets though portable often have tons of sugar in them. If you get the individual plain oatmeal packets and they are convenient and allow you to execute, go with them. Don’t sweat the boogeyman and give time and energy to a debate of which is better. Make it convenient and execute.
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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.
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Don’t be Duped by Supplement Ads, Train Less for Faster Gains, and Food Addiction
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 isn’t.
Twice in the last few week’s 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 fiver 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 below and share.
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.
Best Way to Shrink Your Fat Cells, Calories and Your Last Diet Ever! Eat by Color
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.
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Yes You Can Lose Fat While Gaining Muscle, Best Advice for Working with a Trainer, and More!
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
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.
Are Your Supplements Really Doing Anything?
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
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.