Tag Archives: lifestyle

Is drinking coffee bad for your health

So you think your morning coffee an OK option on your healthy eating plan? Is drinking coffee really bad for you or is it actually good?

Healthy Caffeine in Coffee?, I get these questions about coffee and health all the time and as a coffee drinker myself, it is smart to take a look at both the good and the bad and learn how to drink coffee safely..

Now, I’m not here to tell you that coffee is good for you. (I’m here to tell you the facts). If I did, I would be telling only the good side of the story and I’m no politician. I am here to give you the good and the bad and tell you how you can incorporate your favorite coffee or tea into your healthy meal plan.

The bad side of Caffeine

Most coffee and tea contains a lot of caffeine. This is usually the primary reason people make coffee their drink of choice in the morning. Caffeine is a drug and comes with a long list of side effects. Have you ever tried not having your coffee in the morning? The headache that comes on when you try and kick this habit can be brutal (just like with any other drug), and creating a dependency and addiction like this is harmful to the body.

Second, coffee is extremely acidic. Our bodies function at optimum levels when they are slightly more alkaline (the opposite of acidic). It is best for us to greatly reduce any foods that will drive our body’s pH to be more acidic and eat more foods that are alkaline (like fruits and veggies). An acidic body pH is like a magnet for all kinds of illnesses. Also, an alkaline body has a much stronger immune system, thus making illness much less likely to occur.

Last but not least, the caffeine in coffee and tea is abuse to your adrenal glands. Your adrenals release your “fight or flight” hormones basically giving you a nice “boost” when needed. Unfortunately, people who drink coffee all day long are consistently beating on their adrenals. This is the equivalent of whipping a tired horse even when he is exhausted. Eventually he will not move at all, the result is adrenal fatigue, leaving you with no energy, think of chronic fatigue.
Research on the effects of caffeine on the adrenal glands

The good side of Caffeine

Coffee tastes so nice and makes me feel great in the morning.

Many studies have shown that drinking coffee can help towards the prevention, and treatment of diseases and illnesses as varied as Alzheimer’s disease, liver disease, skin cancer, diabetes, parkinsons’s disease and many more. Although, I don’t believe coffee is the cure all to these diseases, many ancient cultures did rely on the coffee bean to cure a long list of ailments. But also, small doses of caffeine can increase performance and mental focus.

Green tea is a great drink with a long list of benefits. Green tea is a wonderful source of antioxidants which are important in cancer prevention. Green tea has even been found to raise the body’s metabolism and aid in fat burning. However its effects are really minor when compared to the effects of sound nutrition and a good exercise plan. Now that I’ve said that, don’t think you can eat junk food and just wash it down with green tea!

What is a coffee and tea drinker to do?

1. Limit your coffee and tea intake to 2 – 8 oz cups per day. Not 2 of each, 2 in total. Any more than that is considered as a addict.

2. If you are currently dependent on a lot of caffeine each day, replace at least 1 of the cups of coffee with green tea instead. Green tea is lower in caffeine than coffee, and will help combat the ugly detox symptoms.

3. Do not jack up your coffee with sugar, milk, syrup and whip cream . Use stevia or xylitol to sweeten and avoid all the empty, harmful calories. A teaspoon of half and half won’t hurt either. Please do not use any of those flavored creamers. They are closer to a students chemistry experiment than they are to real food.

4. Make sure that your food choices are healthy. Avoiding other acidic foods like sugar, artificial sweeteners and processed foods will lighten the acid load on the body.

5. Make sure the coffee you drink is organic. Conventional coffee is contaminated with pesticides and various chemicals and should be avoided.

There is no need to pass on your morning coffee but it is important to drink the right types of coffee, without the added unhealthy extras and, as with most things, in moderation.

Eat Potatoes White Foods – for a Leaner-Body?

I think it about time we started a little discussion about carbohydrates… and in particular, “white foods” including potatoes. One reason I wanted to talk about this is because so many health and fitness professionals trash talk potatoes about being a bad carbohydrate choice because of the high glycemic index. Some people are saying such ridiculous things as “avoid any and all white carbohydrates”.

Now while I agree that white bread and refined white sugar are two of the worst things we can be feeding our bodies. I don’t believe in avoiding any and all “white carbohydrates”.

Believe it or not “White Foods” aren’t always the enemy.

It’s true that colourful foods are great, but it is also a big mistake to specifically avoid white foods! There are plenty of white foods that have specific nutrients that are hard to find elsewhere. Let’s take a look at a few examples…

Onions and Garlic

What about onions and garlic? They are both white and they are chock full of protective phytonutrients, vitamins, and trace minerals that aren’t easy to find elsewhere in a normal diet… such nutrients as allicin, quercetin (an important flavonoid), chromium, and other unique anti-inflammatory nutrients.

Cauliflowers

Here is another example of something white, that is great for you is cauliflower. Cauliflower is full of vitamin C, trace elements, fiber, and special compounds such as glucosinolates and thiocyanates, which are abundant in cruciferous vegetables such as broccoli, cauliflower, kale and cabbage. One little-known fact is that some of the compounds in cruciferous vegetables help to counteract other estrogenic compounds in our food supply and environment and can help prevent excess belly fat. So eat up that cauliflower!

Mushrooms

Not many people realize this, but even white mushrooms have high levels of unique nutrients and antioxidants. Ordinary white mushrooms are high in antioxidants called polyphenols and ergothioneine.

Potatoes

Now that also leads us to another example – white potatoes. Many health professionals claim that potatoes are a bad carbohydrate because they are thought to have a high glycemic index. If you’ve read my Truth about Six Pack Abs book, you will understand that glycemic index is not necessarily the most important factor in choosing your carbohydrates.

While making the assumption that most low glycemic index carbohydrate choices will help you lose body fat easier than high glycemic index choices, it is not all that it’s cracked out to be. There are many other factors that determine how your body will react-to and process the carbohydrates you ingest, such as glycemic load and also how you combine the high GI food with other foods.

For example, using glycemic load as an example… it is known that watermelons have quite a high glycemic index. However, the glycemic level of a normal serving of watermelon is just way too low for your body to start packing on body fat just because you ate a high glycemic index fruit. You would have to eat such an enormous quantity of watermelon just to get enough grams of carbohydrates to have any negative glycemic effect, that’s just not logical.

Not to mention that watermelon is also a great source of vitamins, minerals, and lycopene. There’s just no reason to avoid it simply because it has a high GI. The point that I am trying to get across is… candy bars, cupcakes, and donuts etc make you fat. Not because they contain fat but because of all the added sugar… NOT watermelons, carrots or potatoes… French fries excluded of course.

Also, as i mentioned, food combinations are important in how your body processes the carbohydrates and the associated blood sugar and insulin response you receive. e.g if you mix a high glycemic index carbohydrate with an extra source of fiber, and healthy fats, or even certain proteins, effect of the increased blood sugar and glycemic response will be slowed down considerably by the way you combined the food. I talk in great detail about this topic in my book.

Back to my point that white potatoes are actually a healthy carbohydrate as long as you eat them in the right form… with the entire skin, and please don’t ruin them by deep frying them into french fries either! French fries or Chips whatever you want to call them, are one of the most evil things ever invented for your health, but only because we ruin them by soaking them in a scorching bath of trans fats in the deep fryer from the hydrogenated oils that are typically used.

Will eating 8 potatoes per day make you fatter? of course not.

On the subject of potatoes not being bad after all, I don’t remember where I read this, but I saw a study that had participants eat at least 7-9 whole potatoes per day for several weeks.
At the end of the study, the potato eaters had consistently lost weight! I’d venture a guess that the reason the people lost weight is that they were probably so full from eating all of those potatoes. They consumed less calories than normal! An average sized potato has about 100-120 calories, and I can imagine you’d be constantly full from eating 7-9 potatoes each day.

I would never recommend going to those extremes, but my point is that an occasional potato is not going to affect your efforts to get leaner, especially if you combine it with some other fibrous vegetables, and maybe a healthy fat, and some protein. Let me share with you one of my favorite recipes for you to try, using potatoes.

Mikes’s Lean-Body Potato Side Dish

* Desired quantity of baby potatoes (I like to use this mixture I found recently at a health food store… it is a mixture of white, red, yellow, and purple baby potatoes)

* 1 red pepper

* 1 green pepper

* 1 yellow pepper

* 1 or 2 onions

* a couple cloves of garlic, finely chopped

* 1 or 2 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil and / or coconut oil

* a little salt and pepper to taste (I like using a sea salt instead of normal commercial salt)

Cut the baby potatoes into smaller pieces and place in a steamer until soft all the way through. Slice up the peppers and onions into strips and add with the chopped garlic into a pan with the olive oil. Slowly fry the peppers, onions, and garlic until tender, and then add the steamed baby potatoes. Mix together and serve. Its is a delicious and healthy side dish that goes great with chicken or red meat.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this little topic today about potatoes, healthy carbohydrates, glycemic index, and my healthy potato recipe idea!

Mike Geary

Certified Personal Trainer

Certified Nutrition Specialist

Truth about Abs

Jason Ferruggia build bigger traps

When you ask the question of how to build big traps, the discussion usually starts and finishes with dead lifts. This is the number 1 mass builder, and it will pack huge slabs of beef on your traps faster than any other exercise there is. Take a look at power lifters, and you will see that you cannot avoid building huge traps when you do a lot of dead lifts.

While the dead lift is definitely the king of all trap building exercises, an argument could also be made that Olympic lifts are equally as effective. I would tend to agree with this, if it were not for the fact that Olympic lifts are much harder to teach and learn than dead lifts are, which moves them down to second place on the list. Just about everyone can do at least a partial range dead-lift properly. Not everyone is able to clean or snatch properly.

Finally, you have shrugs. While it’s supposed to be a very simple and straight forward movement there is actually a great deal of confusion over how to build big traps with shrugs. Can you believe that few people seem to be able to agree on how they should be done. On the one hand you have the camp that says you need to go as heavy as possible, and do partial reps, just by heaving the weight up. Of course there’s the camp that says you need to go light, by getting a full range of motion, try to get your shoulders as close to touching your ears as possible, and hold it for at least a second.

So who is right and who is wrong? – they both are!.

To try and understand where the answer lies lets take a look at the athletes with the biggest traps: power lifters and Olympic lifters

Power lifters have huge traps because of all the dead-lifts they do. Dead-lifts are heavy duty. There is no shrugging movement at all. Olympic lifters usually lift relatively lighter weights explosively, and with a range of motion that does indeed have them bringing their traps to their ears.

Looking at these two groups, what does this tell us about shrugs and the proper way to do them?

What it tells us is, the best way to get huge traps is to dead lift and also Olympic lift.

BUT… what if you can not do either of those exercises due to back or shoulder problems, or you just want more to have more variety in your trap training routine? Then you have little or no choice but to shrug. Traps are the most important, the most intimidating, and the impressive body part there is and you can’t walk around with none.

So then, exactly how do you do shrugs and which camp is right? To a certain extent they both are. Occasionally you should try going heavy for low reps, cheat the weight up. Then on another day of the week go lighter for higher reps with a complete range of motion and exaggerated contraction and hold at the top.

I suppose another option is to do both variations in one workout. You could always start with a lighter weight, doing about 10-12 reps, bringing your shoulders as high as they can comfortably go. With each set add extra weight, and work your way down to the point where you can only get five partial reps, with a little cheat at the end. You could start with the heavier sets first, and lighten them as you go.

Dead lifts and Olympic lifts should always be your first answer to the question of how to build big traps. But sometimes shrugs can be very effective as well. Be sure to go straight up and down, and don’t roll your shoulders back and forth. That’s for idiots who don’t have a full understanding of how gravity works.

Jason Ferruggia is a world famous fitness expert who is world renowned for his ability to help people build muscle as fast as possible. He is the head training adviser for Men’s Fitness Magazine where he has his own monthly column dedicated to muscle building. For much more info on How to Build Muscle Fast, check out muscle gaining secrets.

C-section to Bikini Ready, 7 day jump start recipe

Testimonial-Courtney21
Hi my name is Courtney, and I can’t believe I am actually going to feel good about wearing my new bikini on vacation in April! Considering where I was less than a year ago. Since giving birth to my beautiful baby daughter. I have been following the guidelines to the 7 day Jump start recipe program for 5 weeks now. I have lost the last 12lbs from my pregnancy and I’m keeping it off! My baby is now 10 months old and I am so happy! I didn’t think I would get back in shape after a difficult pregnancy, gaining almost 65lbs, and then an emergency c-section! I have got the diet down!
That is when I reached out to my friend Natalie Jill. Who is a licensed sports nutritionist and personal trainer.

Natalie has been a close friend for over 6 years, and I had done here make-up on several occasions the past year or so when she started fitness modeling. I have seen first hand how passionate she is about health and fitness. She works incredible hard and is a mother herself. I knew Natalie would understand my needs, fears and concerns.
She introduced me to her Jump Start recipe program. Eventually I reached my goal of being under 140, I have exceeded it and am now 135lbs, and I lost roughs 12 lbs. I am not trying to be a fitness model, just a mom wanting to be the best I can be for my Daughter and Me.
Natalie Jill Fitness 7 day jump start recipe
Thank you so much! I now live a much healthier lifestyle – Courtney

Eating Coconut Oil can help you Lose Fat

Coconut Oil is a wonderful healthy food that has been shown to increase metabolism and assist in burning unwanted fat off your body. It is a wonderful superfood, that has been around for centuries and a great addition to any fat burning meal plan.

Unfortunately, some people have a really hard time believing that coconut oil is not “fattening” or “dangerous”. Including many in the health industry, but thankfully that’s all changing.

We have all been falsely led to believe that fat. Especially saturated fats, are the cause of our weight gain and health problems. This is only partially true. There are some fats like hydrogenated oils and vegetable oils can contribute to heart disease, and weight gain. But good fats, such as coconut oil, butter and olive oil, are actually great fats for our bodies. Just consider how much healthier people were in the late 1800’s and very early 1900’s. Heart disease was almost unheard of over a hundred years ago.

Let’s put some of these bizarre MYTHS about coconut oil to bed right now, once and for all.

Myth 1 – Coconut Oil contains a lot of fat so it must be fattening.

Truth – Not all fat makes you fat (I want to get this printed on a t-shirt). Certain fats do cause you to put on weight, but other good fats will actually burn unwanted fat off your body, and accelerate your metabolism.

Myth 2 – Coconut Oil contains almost all saturated fat so it must be bad for you.

Truth – Saturated Fat is not the cause of heart disease, weight gain and high cholesterol. It has been falsely accused, and it is SUGAR that is Enemy Number One.

(To read more details about how fats can be healthy and the history of dietary fats, read my  post Butter: Good Fat or Bad?)

Myth 3 – Coconut Oil should be avoided by those who are at risk for heart disease

Truth – The fat in coconut oil is one of the healthiest oils you can consume (yes, even for those with heart disease). It is rich in lauric acid, approx 50% of the fatty acid content. Which is well known for its anti-viral, anti-bacterial, and anti-fungal properties (lauric acid is also contained in cow’s milk). Also it contains no trans fat. The saturated fat in coconut oil is different, in that it is of the medium-chain fatty acid (MCFA) variety. The body digests MCFA’s more easily and sends these fats directly to the liver where they are immediately converted into energy. Also the brain loves to use MCFA’s. Now isn’t that great? A fat that is used to make energy instead of storing it on our bodies.

Recently in this update Coconut oil is being used by some people to treat their elderly relative for Alzheimer’s disease, see this UK newspaper report.

I highly recommend everyone use unrefined, organic coconut oil for their cooking. About a single table spoon is more than enough for most cooking. You can even use it raw if you like as I think, it tastes amazing! I usually have about 2-3 total table spoons per day which is a perfect amount for a fat burning eating plan.

If you have a hard time finding coconut oil in your local supermarket, Available here for readers in the U.S.A: http://wildfamilynaturals.com

Now go right ahead and start enjoying your coconut oil and reap the fat burning effects right away.
Why not see what Mike Geary has to offer on such foods whilst dieting in his fat loss program.

Does juicing provide nutrition when dieting

Juicing works – of course it does:

Apart from the fact that juiced fruits and vegetables have very low calories and no fat (just make sure you make them yourselves), they are loaded with a variety of vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and enzymes that help your body to perform at its best. Our bodies spend a lot of time trying to detoxify, repair and protect cells. When we are undernourished our bodies go into protection mode and store fat for survival. But, when your body is functioning at its peak condition and getting all the nourishment it needs, it can focus energy on fat loss. Juicing delivers a concentrated healthy cocktail straight into your body. No extra effort is needed to break down the juice and so it is absorbed quickly and starts working magic immediately.

Keys to weight-loss success while juicing:

Juicing vegetables and herbs while reducing fruit. Yes, of course fruit makes it taste so delicious. Yes, fruit sugar is healthier than refined table sugar… but it’s still sugar and will still cause spikes in your insulin and if your body cannot clear those sugars out, they will convert to fat stores. Also, watch how many carrots you use, believe it or not they have a lot of sugar as well.

Save juicing fruits for before and after your workouts. For the same reason as above, when you work out your body becomes primed for using glucose.

Skip snacking and start juicing. It seems that people always get hungry between meals. The solution to avoid binging on things you probably shouldn’t be eating before dinner, is to juice up a big green glass of nutritional goodness. Hopefully the liquid will tide you over until your next meal, or at least it will get your brain thinking about health-conscious snacks.

Snack while juicing. Not on cheese and crackers or anything man-made but on the vegetables you are getting ready to juice. Sometimes our brains like chewing and feeling food in our mouths and stomach’s, so give it that satisfaction while nurturing you.

Healthy habits don’t end with juicing. Whether you are having 1 juice a day or 5, remember that beyond your glass jar, you need to be eating healthy all day long. It defeats the purpose of juicing for weight loss when you eat a big bowl of sugary cereal for breakfast, pizza for lunch, and burgers for dinner.
Fill up on fresh juice before meals or going out. Even though juice is digested quickly, you will soon feel hungry again. Your hunger may be quenched by the nutrients more than the feeling of full.

Alternate your veggetables. Two ways that this works: you don’t get bored and you get a variety of nutrients.

Add some barley grass powder, spirulina, chia seeds, avocado, or olive oil. Healthy fats and fibers are not only good for you, but will keep you fuller longer. Have you seen my article on Coconut oil. Try some.
No one wants to diet, or spend their time with someone who is dieting, who has a big hungry monster in their stomach.

Create lasting habits:

Remember juicing for weight loss is not a diet. It is the basis for a much healthy lifestyle. If you are taking the time to clean, chop and juice fresh fruits and vegetables then you should be making time to prepare and cook healthy homemade meals.

Some people like to test the water with one glass of juice slowly adding more as they feel necessary. If you prefer to start the day with a balanced, nutrition-rich eating regime, you will find that having at least one glass of vegetable juice per day will make it easier to reach your weight loss goals in the long run. Have you thought of replacing your morning, afternoon, snacks with a juice, then you are well on your way!

Why not see what advice, Mike Geary has to offer on such foods whilst dieting in his fat loss program.

In the mean time why not try.

Morning-time: 1 beet, 1 pink lady apple, 1 small slice of ginger

Before dinner: 4 tomatoes, 2 green onions, ½ green pepper, 2 carrots, 2 celery ribs, Handful of parsley, 1 peeled lemon

Before bed: 2 cucumbers, 4 romaine lettuce leaves, Handful of mint