Justin G. Walls, Certified Personal Athletic Trainer

Enjoy the foods you already like to eat! It's about taking things you would normally have and use them more effectively 1 Start using butter again! Butter has gotten a bad reputation for over a generation as being a leading cause of heart disease related to its saturated fat content. Studies and books have been recently published challenging the idea that saturated fat only has a downside. When properly incorporated into your diet, foods like butter, cream, sour cream and cheese can contribute to a greater feeling of satiety than low fat foods full of fillers and sugar 2 Try to have fish, meat, or chicken with your meals.  Animal proteins have the highest amount of protein per serving, and that helps you feel more full when eating a meal. You'll want to eat about a fist size of food to get enough protein for your body to build lean muscle, and that can help manage your metabolism and burn calories all day long.  Photo courtesy: Guard your Health ...

Is Butter Better? Read On! AHA Guidelines May Not Be Based On The Best Research  New Book Casts Doubt On Years Of Common Methodology Investigative reporter Nina Teicholz has just released a book this week challenging our thoughts about how we structure our diet. In a WSJ article , Ms. Teicholz outlines her issues with AHA guidelines  that recommend less animal fat (or saturated fat) as part of ones diet. She contends that the reduction in saturated fat has led to the increased consumption of carbohydrates, which has cascaded into another entirely different set of health issues such as type 2 diabetes. Her book is available at http://www.thebigfatsurprise.com/ Here's a few other articles that support this contention From NPR:  The Full-Fat Paradox: Whole Milk May Keep Us Lean Why Milk Is The Ultimate Post Workout Food Butter Is Back Behind The Headlines: Saturated Fat and Heart Disease 'Uproven' Is Beef Bad For You? Or The Envir...

What's Trending This Week In Fitness? Because another Polar Vortex is crushing the east coast again! Testosterone Warnings Becoming A Reality Public Advocacy Group Asks FDA For Warning About Heart Attacks here  and  here Other Hormonal Factors Could Contribute To Low Energy and Low Libido  here Concern's Raised About Testosterone Replacement Therapy  here Workout Motivations In Bad Weather Simple, At-Home Workouts In Bad Weather  here Music Is a Great Workout Buddy  here Fast Five Minute Workout!  here 15 Minute Arm Crushing Workout  here Some Winter Meal Suggestions, Get Ready For Spring 10 Winter Comfort Food Meals, Fast And Easy  here Simple Quinoa Recipes  here Mix It Up With Some Great Lentil Recipes (lots of Protein!) here

Every once in a while (or for some of us, it's every weekday), we're up late and feel the need to eat something, and it's just too hard to say no. Well, fortunately, we don't always have to withhold ourselves from those late night munchies. According to a short article from  Women's Health , the expert advice is to eat something that won't spike blood sugar, make you more hungry, or be too calorie rich. Sorry Jimmy, that just won't do The best snacks are kept to about 100 calories, with no more than 15 grams of sugar, and about 3 grams of fiber. It's also good to wash it all down with a little water (flavored slightly with either lemon juice or another splash of fruit juice flavor- it helps curb the cravings). Some suggestions are: One cut up fruit in a 1/2 cup yogurt or sour cream A cup of berries in that same 1/2 cup of yogurt or sour cream 1/4 cup salsa and about 10-12 corn chips (low-sodium is better)  6-8 carrot or celery sticks with h...

There are some serious studies being conducted to confirm the efficacy of tree nuts as a weight maintenance food. The Purdue University study (you can read about it  here ) is testing to see how such a calorie rich food can help control appetite and contribute to weights loss. There are the obvious suggestions that it is rich in fiber and protein which help satiate, but the study is trying to see if there's some neurological or sociological response to their consumption which can keep people coming back to them instead of going for  candy bars. Another diet trend has its roots in ancient practices.  A new trend to weight loss, blood glucose maintenance, and a possible Alzheimer's reducer, is to conduct fasts twice a week. This practice is referred to as 5:2 fasting. The Wall Street Journal recently talked about it , and you can read about it's implementation here . Basically, it's about having zero to 500 calories on fasting days twice each week and eating no...

Over the years, we have thrown around words like 'VO2 Max', Resting Heart Rate, Oxygen Intake, and so on. I actually blogged about this about a year ago  How to ACTUALLY go from Couch to 5k , and I had some funny pictures of Homer Simpson running and a cool chart showing oxygen intake and deficit relationship. Today, I am going to give you some tools on how to calculate VO2 Max, make it meaningful to you, and have you start making any necessary changes to your lifestyle to get you feeling your 'fitness' age. What's your fitness age? Let's start with VO2: this is the volume of oxygen your body will use in one minute. It's the ratio between the amount of oxygen in the air you inhale divided by the amount of oxygen in the air you exhale, all during the course of one minute. To save you the thousands of dollars it would cost to measure this with specialized equipment, some fantastic sport scientists have developed some simple formulas that you can use to...

Last week, there was yet another article  in the WaPo Health section about the benefits of going gluten-free. Sports Illustrated had an article about gluten-free athletes  a couple of years ago, touting the benefits of freeing up your body's metabolism from the breakdown of gluten in the intestine to more athletic performance work (reallocating scarce resources in the body makes sense right?). I shoulda eaten more carbs... To be fair, nobody is advocating carb-free diets for athletic performance. In "Endurance Sports Nutrition", Dr. Eberle points out that the science is pretty straight forward on this: you need carbs to perform and keep you going for the long haul until the body can access glycogen stores, but carbohydrates are the main thing that will keep you in the long races. You can read more about this  from the publisher's website What we are discussing is whether gluten, being a difficult protein to break down, can slow you down just a little. In...

A Calorie May Not Be Just A Calorie Recent Studies Show That Genes or Bacteria May Affect Matabolism A recent article in the Economist gives a synopsis of four very fascinating studies into how different people may metabolize glucose in different fashions. The metabolic pathways could change based on either certain genetic features of the person (or mouse in the study) or the presence of certain types of bacteria. Fat Mouse, Healthy Diet! There is another more extensive article in the New York Times looking more closely at how diets higher in fruits and vegetables but lower in saturated fat would not only result in weight loss, but also correlated in a change in the types of bacteria present in the mice that were losing weight in the study: the fat mice started to have similar bacterial compositions as the lean mice.  Eating healthy is an important part of changing the stomach flora, and we have discussed on this blog about some important dietary changes that you...

Rituals make our food more flavorful - some simple gestures, not necessarily related to the food, make our involvement, and therefore our enjoyment, of the food, much higher. Nutrients are better on a plate than in a bottle - the food-first approach is everyone's best recommendation. Living on pills isn't. Get Informed! - know what to look for and what to know about supplementing your diet without risk of side effects or wasting your money on stuff that won't get absorbed. Get the app! -  have all your nutritional information on your smart phone Another "things you might be getting wrong" list - this focuses on weight perception and weight loss Best points about meals and weight loss: Only eat when you know what you're eating- so try to make the food yourself  Foods higher in fiber and higher in flavor go best together- like broccoli and garbanzos Watch the dressings on your salads- vinegar and olive oil are best bets for low calorie fla...