Will This Help Me Lose Weight for Good or for the Time Being? Navigating the "Nutrition" Indursty

Hello Internets

I’ve looked over my blog statistics and decided that this week I was going to continue a topic from my most viewed post, concerning what you should eat to accomplish your goals.

As the title suggests, I’m going to talk about navigating the multibillion dollar industry of losing weight! My goal is to help orientate you in a world of mixed messages and leave you with some practical tips that I have found to work over the years for myself and my clients. I apologize if some of the things I talk about are deflating, but someone has to speak the truth about this stuff in a world of predators just trying to keep you fat so you buy their products. 

1. Weight Loss Products: If it’s too good to be true, it probably is!

When looking to lead a healthier lifestyle, my first advice is to look for longevity and sustainability in your health goals (in general and nutrition specific). Therefore, if you are looking to lose weight and a program offers a “metabolism boosting shake, or pill” plus diet plan, be careful. I know lots of people that have been on these programs and lose weight but then pile it all back on (if not more). This is because the program is unsustainable.

 Beware of the following red flags;

• ·         Metabolism Boosters: These ultimately slow down your metabolism when you go off them. It’s essentially like taking a mild form of speed or cocaine. Plus they can lead to complications involving your heart, digestive system, and more. Stay away! One of the worst is hydroxycut.

• ·         Unsustainable Dietary Restrictions: Any diet that involves you going from eating like you normally do to massively restricting is bad news bears in my books. So how do you know if it’s an unsustainable restriction? Well there are some ways. For example, when all you are consuming is juice/soup, one type of food (e.g. no carbs) or staying below 1000 calories a day... that is unsustainable, you will relapse and gain the weight back and probably then some.

• ·         Pre-Packaged Food: Diets that involve the companies sending you all your food sounds awesome from a time perspective, but shitty from a health perspective. This also includes products like Lean Cuisine, 100 calories snack bite things, ect. Sure, they are usually the right caloric content for weight loss but are filled with preservatives and chemicals, which have been linked to negative health consequences like cancer and heart disease. My philosophy is, it doesn’t matter if you are a size 2 if you’re dead.

That being said, there are some very effective programs/resources that I would suggest.....

·      

•    Precision Nutrition: This is one of the finer programs out there. I’m not employed by them, nor have taken any of their courses (yet), but know from experience in the field that they are top notch. Essentially, any program prescribed by someone that has training backed by science and not speculation is a good call. PN courses are based on science and sustainability, so are any programs given by certified nutritionists.

•   Origins Nutrition and Wellness: Origins is definitely doing it right! They provide expert nutritional advice and tailor personalised lifestyle solutions to improve the health of their clients. They offer one-on-one consultations and run workshops for small and large groups. During a consultation they work with clients to develop meal plans, identify lifestyle habits that would benefit from change and provide a supportive environment so the transition to optimal health is smooth and effortless. Here is a quote from the founders...

“We like to keep it real….to lose weight and keep it off you need to change your lifestyle! This doesn’t have to involve overnight changes it can take place over weeks or months. It also doesn’t have to mean eating bland food; we think food should taste good and be enjoyed! Moderation is the key!”

 

When it comes to nutritional products/programs, it’s all about navigating through the proverbial bull-crap. If you’re unsure, ask someone that has credible education to help you. These can include doctors, nutritionist, Human Kinetics/Kinesiology graduates, and fitness professionals with credible certifications (CSEP, PN). 

2.  Do fat burning foods actually “burn fat”?

We hear this all the time in the news and fitness industry. “This just in, food X has been shown to burn fat!!!” So obviously we must all run out and buy said food! 

Well, before talking about whether certain foods have been linked to fat loss, we first must first investigate this term “to burn fat”.

If you think about your tissue make up, you consist of varying amounts of a) fat (i.e, adipose tissue), b) muscle (cardiac, skeletal*, smooth), c)  nervous tissue (i.e., your brain and nerves), and d) connective tissue (i.e., ligaments, bone, and facia).

So obviously, fat burning means to burn adipose tissue, and thus if you consume foods linked to burning fat then you will burn off fat, right? Well it doesn’t work that way necessarily.

  

 Essentially, your body will “burn” or metabolise fat tissue during different times and in different situations. For example, when at rest, your body’s major source of energy is fat. Also, when you are out of carbohydrate stores when exercising (or in general), fats come in to save the day (this is the basis of the Atkin’s diet, which I do NOT recommend for reasons listed here).

When the fitness and “nutrition” industry uses the term “fat burning” what they’re really trying communicate is that fat burning strategies (food or exercises) will increase your basal metabolic rate. (For more on what BMR is click here). Therefore, these “fat burning foods” have been linked to an increase in your BMR following consumption

.

The rationale behind this is;

Consume “fat burning foods” = Increased BMR = Increase in calories burned at rest = Increase the amount of fat burned for fuel

This does make sense from a scientific perspective. For example, spicy foods have been shown to “speed up” your system, so you burn more calories. However, I caution that if you are eating these foods thinking they will burn fat and that’s all you need to do, unfortunately, that is far from the case. Basically, yes your BMR will increase, but not at a significant enough rate for fat loss. You need to combine other strategies to get what you want.

In my opinion, a better way to approach increasing your BMR throughout the day is to eat good food, and eat often (i.e., every 3 hours), rather than to look for a magic fruit to save the day.

* Note: Another awesome way to increase your BMR is to increase your skeletal muscle composition as it is very biologically active (i.e., eats more calories) then other tissues.

So, I think I will leave it there for today. I hope I have shed some light on what to look out for when you hear all these messages coming your way about what to do to get your “beach body”.  As always, if you have any questions, comments, or concerns let me know!

Stay Strong

Byn

**Disclaimer: I am not a nutritionist, nor claim to be. The following tips/ideas come from the courses I have taken on nutrition and obesity as part of my B.H.K, from personal experience, and my own life philosophies.

Climbing Warm Up and Core

Hello Internet Readers

This blog post is a dynamic warm up and core workout that I've constructed for my local climbing gym's girl group. This warm up can be used for pretty much any work out (other than the climbing part!). For the core workout you need a pull up bar.

Do the following exercises for 45seconds-1minute. For a longer warm up, cycle threw the circuit twice.

1. Shoulder Complex "Swings": Keep arms parallel to the floor with the elbows slightly bent. Cross your arms in front of your body then swing them back closing your shoulder blades. Make sure the core is activated (i.e., contract your abdominals) and you focus on contracting your back and pec muscles.

2.  Lateral High Step Oblique Warm Up: Touch your knee to your elbow on the outside of your body, alternate right and left sides focusing on the height of your foot rather than bringing your elbow down to meet the knee and balance on one leg.

3. Diagonal Oblique Warm Up: Bring your knee up and across your body and touch to opposite elbow. Focus on one leg balance.

4. Butt Kicks: Hands behind your back kick your knees to your bum. This is to get your heart rate higher.

5. Forwards and Backward Arm Rotations: Do 8-10 forward cycled with 8-10 back. Make sure you focus on engaging your shoulder and abdominal muscles rather then just swinging your arms.

Wall Warm Up

* Finish your warm up on the wall doing the following exercises....

1. First, pick a climb that is 2-4 grades below your max effort (e.g., if your max is 5.9, climb 5.7 or lower)

2. While climbing focus on the following..

•  Climb as slow as possible, paying specific attention to foot and hand placement
• Try to keep your arms as straight as possible the entire time, focus on body rotation and foot placement to move you up the wall (climb like a sloth)
• Down climb if possible or quickly (safely) lower and re-climb the same climb 2-5 times using the same technique.
• When re climbing climbs, try to get to the top using different strategies to wake up your movement patterns for climbing.

Now you're ready to send!

After you crush that 5 *insert desirable grade here*  you've been working on for the past 3 months it's time to do some core.

Core Work Out

*Do each exercise until fatigue (or 30sec-2 minutes)

1. Static Lock Off Leg Raise: Grab the pull up bar in whatever grip you are strong enough to lock off in (close grip palms towards you is the easiest, palms away close is harder, palms away wide is harder still). Slowly do a pull up and lock off (i.e. stay in a static position at full pull up). Extend you legs infront of you and hold until fatigue.

• Modification 1: Just raise your knees if holding your legs out is too difficult
• Modification 2: Do not do the lock off if you are not strong enough yet
• Modification 3: This entire exercise can be replaced with leg raises on the floor if you are a beginner.

2. Hanging Sit Ups: Using the pull up bar (and a spotter) hang upside down by your knees (easier) or feet (harder). Perform crunch (easier) or sit up (harder) in this position.

3. Plank: Hold the standard plank until fatigue.

Repeat each exercise 3-4 times


There you go! I hope this helps

Any questions/comments/concerns let me know!

Byn

Let’s Get Self Efficacious!

Hi Interweb People

This week I will be continuing my posts on how to increase your self- efficacy (SE) to be physically active.  As I mentioned last week, the strongest way to increase your SE is to engage in mastery experiences. You can read more about that by clicking here.

However, there are also several other suggested (e.g., Bandura, 1975) sources of one’s SE to initiate and maintain physical activity. I will focus on two more today, which will include (a) vicarious experiences and (b) verbal persuasion.

In this post I will explain how each of these dimensions can potentially affect your SE in regards to physical activity, and how to use them to your advantage!

1. Vicarious Experiences:

 

Let’s face it people, we all engage in some form social comparison on a daily basis. Usually, the idea of “comparing yourself to other people” is looked down upon within society and is typically viewed, in general, as almost a sin. 

However, SE theorists suggest that one can increase their confidence to perform a given task (i.e., SE) through positive comparison with other people.

Now, this can be a slippery slope (in my opinion) as too much comparison or comparison with the wrong perspective can actually de-motivate you. So, as always, I have some tips to help you utilize this construct effectively.

A) Compare yourself with people who are similar to you: When looking to increase you SE through comparison, look to those you consider at or below your physical level. For example, if you see a co-worker of yours that you would consider in equal or less shape than you successfully going to the gym 3 times a week, use this as motivation that you can do this too.  Essentially, don’t compare yourself to your neighbour triathlete if you are just starting out.

B) Keep comparisons positive: This sounds almost counterintuitive because of the bad rap social comparison gets from positive/holistic psychology. However, there is a way to socially compare with good intentions.

 Take the above situation in point a). First, you could view the situations as negative (e.g., “oh my gosh my co-worker is so fat and lazy, if they can do it, then I must be able to go to the gym”). I would not recommend this for several reasons. 

First, although social comparison can increase you SE, it can also set you up for psychological failure if you view the person of interest through negative eyes.  For example, if you end up not achieving your goal, the negative way you view the other person may actually de-motivate you to continue.

Second, when we think negative things about people around us, we typically become negative ourselves. With a negative viewpoint, it’s really hard to get anything done effectively. For example, during your workout if you are comparing yourself to everyone in the gym with a negative tone, you will likely have a crap workout. 

Finally, it has been shown that if you voice negative comparisons to other people you actually project those negative things onto yourself in others eyes. What does this mean? Well if you tell your friend, Sarah,  that you think you can go to the gym because your co worker does and they’re soooo lazy, Sarah will then likely (subconsciously) project laziness onto you! 

So try and keep your comparisons positive. For example, if I see a climber in the gym who started only 6 months ago bustin’ out hard, I say to myself when roping up “if they can work as hard as they do only 6 months in, you can too Robyn!” Try this out, and see if it works for you :)

2. Verbal Persuasion 

Although this is my favourite source of SE, it is its weakest predictor. Those of you that know me in person know that I like to talk.... a lot. So naturally, while in my little world of trying to help people become active I’d like to hope that my relentless verbal persuasion is going to change people’s lives....unfortunately, this is so not true.

I’m bringing this up essentially for those of you who are instructors/personal trainers/physicians or have a significant other (or are one) who likes to nag you about “working out more”.  It is shown that trying to persuade someone to become physically active is weak at best at increasing someones SE.

You might be saying, crap, I’m a fitness professional/work out all the time, how am I going to get people to become physically active if I can’t talk them into it (Essentially, this is the goal of my blog, how deflating). Well, there are 3 things that make people more likely to increase their SE if they are being verbally persuaded. 

These are if the source of verbal persuasion/message sender is perceived as (a) trustworthy, (b) an expert, and (c) attractive (not esthetically as I’ll explain) to the message receiver. 

A) Trustworthiness: Essentially, if the person you are trying to persuade to become physically active does not view you as trustworthy, they are less likely to buy into what you are saying. This is if a person views you to be giving them accurate and truthful information with their best interest in mind.

This is why it is important for fitness professionals to be certified by reputable organizations and have a background in exercise psychology. When counselling people in behaviour change, the communication of what you know and how you know it is imperative to someone believing what you are saying as true.

B) Expert: This ties into point A). The message receiver must view the message sender as an expert in the area of behaviour adoption. This can be for anything really (e.g., smoking cessation, drug rehabilitation, physical activity). The long and the short of it is, if the person doesn’t view you as knowledgeable then you’re out of luck trying to get them to change by this method. 

This is how the caring spouse trying to get their partner to become physically active often gets into trouble. Unfortunately, in this situation the spouse is likely to be viewed from a psychological reactive stance. 

What this means is, the message receiver will react negatively to the persuasion (because they may view their partner as being condescending or a know it all) and will be more likely to do the opposite or worse (depending on their emotional state). 

Because of this phenomena, I advice partners to use mastery experiences or vicarious experiences (e.g., continue to workout yourself and set a good example) than trying to persuade your partner (although this can be hard).

C) Attractiveness: This isn’t how hot the message sender is (although some social psychologist would argue this plays an important role). What SE theorists mean by the attractiveness of the message sender is whether the receiver views where the message is coming from as a valuable source. Again, this ties into the first two points. For example, someone may view a message for increasing their physical activity as more attractive coming from someone of a similar shape, size, sex, and background as them then someone they cannot relate to.

So there you have it! Hopefully there is some valuable information you can use as a fitness professional or as someone on the road to changing their life. As I always say, we can’t change what we do not understand.

Any questions/comments/concerns are always welcome.

Stay Strong

Byn

Increasing Your Confidence to Succeed!

Hello Internets

               

 Today I’m going to talk about one of the “heavy hitters”, so to speak, in the world of behaviour change psychology.  This theory stems from social cognitive philosophies, and is strongly linked to exercise behaviour across age, gender, ethnicity, and health status. The purpose of this blog post is to get you thinking about your “thinking” when on the road to becoming and maintaining a physically active lifestyle.

What I’m talking about is self efficacy, which simply put is “situation specific self confidence” or your perceived capability in performing a task (Bandura, 1977) . 

For example, if I am self efficacious in regards to climbing the grade “5.9”, or running for 10 minutes, that means I have high confidence that I can successfully perform those tasks. On the other hand, I may have low self efficacy when it comes to running an hour or boxing. 

Although this concept is logical when we think about it in regards to exercise behaviour (i.e., the more confident I feel about my abilities in regards to this type of physical activity- the more likely I am to do it), increasing one’s self efficacy in regards to a particular activity (e.g., running, climbing, biking), can seem like a daunting task!

So, in a 3 part series I will be talking about some sources/strategies that are effective, and some not so effective, and increasing SE in regards to physical activity. 

Note: When applying these strategies they must be focused at a specific task and not just physical activity in general. For example “my confidence in running for 15 minutes”, “my confidence in making it to the gym 3 times this week” rather than “my ability to become more physically active”.

Strongest Source of Self Efficacy: Mastery Experiences!

Mastery experiences have the strongest effect on one’s SE. This is essentially the positive psychological benefits one achieves by successfully performing a task. This is an important concept for both people doing the physical activity and those helping others to become physically active (i.e., trainers). Why? Because if you adopt this principal as a primary goal when training (either as the client as the trainer), the one attempting to adopt physical activity is more likely to continue the behaviour.

So how does one ensure mastery experiences? Well there are several different strategies that may be helpful...

1.    Pick activities you are naturally inclined to do: 

This means pick activities you are more likely to view yourself as successfully performing. If you like being outdoors start hiking, trail running, or climbing. If you played volleyball in high school, sign up for a league. If you’ve had previous success with a personal trainer, try that route. Put yourself in situations you’re more likely to be successful in, rather than setting yourself up for failure. (Note: this takes acknowledging the fact, that, as wonderful as you are, you are NOT good at everything).

Like the outdoors? Like heights? Go climbing!

2.    Look for previous mastery experiences and use them as motivation:

 

An awesome way to increase your SE is to look for previous experiences when you have been successful and using them to motivate you. Haven’t been to the gym in 3 months, well look back to a time you were regularly attending and say “If I could do it then, why can’t I do it now?” It’s important to frame this in a positive way instead of a negative critical way, which will un-motivate you.  

A good way to do this is to write it down. For example, say your goal is to regularly attend the gym 3 times a week, and you have done this before about a year ago. When those barriers come up that prevent you from going to the gym (i.e., you’re too tired, too busy, ect), write down that you know you can overcome come this barrier because you have overcome it before. This should increase your SE to perform the task at hand!

3.    Acknowledge and capitalize mastery experiences when they happen! 

This sounds like a no brainer, but it is very commonly over looked. For whatever reason, I have repeatedly found that people (including myself) tend to focus on their failures instead of their accomplishments, and this can zap your SE faster than you can say “holy potatoes”.

This relates to a previous post of mine on perception and negative selftalk, because essentially you have to change the way you speak to yourself when you do fail and when you do succeed to increase your SE.

I’m going to use rock climbing, because I see this all the time in climbers (aka me). It comes along with the sport as climbing involves a lot of failure...over and over... in order to get better. So, say you are on a climb that you have done before and you fall. An initial reaction could be to say to yourself “I suck, I did this before, I shouldn’t have fallen, I’m the worst rock climber ever!” This will lead to a decrease in motivation to continue the task (either that day or indefinitely depending on the situation).

It's all part of learning!

Alternatively, you could focus on the accomplishment that a) you’re rock climbing and being physically active, b) you’re being social and having fun, and c) You are training, and the fall allowed you to learn what you can improve on. Focusing on these accomplishments will increase your SE regarding rock climbing, and you will be more likely to continue.

This scenario can be applied to any situation. However, changing negative self talk and acknowledging your accomplishments is easier said that done. Hopefully, this blog helps prime you to recognize when these situations happen and jump all over them.

Well there you have it. Try these strategies out. In subsequent blogs I will talk about other sources to increase your self-efficacy, which include a) vicarious experiences, b) social persuasion, and c) physiological and affective states.

As always, comments, questions and suggestions are always welcome!

Stay Strong

Byn