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Would you REALLY like to know how many calories you are taking in on a daily basis?  The truth is that it is difficult to determine this by using “estimation” software programs or by entering the food you’re eating on a website.  Probably the most accurate way this can be done at home is to use a food diary, food nutrition labels labels, and a website like http://www.nutrientfacts.com/ along with a food scale.  You might give this method a try if you’d like to get your fat loss or muscle gain program down to a science.  Here’s how this works.

First step: Weigh and Journal all of your food.

Journal All Food!

So, let’s say that you’re going to have a turkey sandwich made up of two slices of whole wheat bread, turkey meat, cheese, mustard, light mayo, tomato, and spinach leaves.  Take the two slices of bread and weigh them on your food scale.  If the two bread slices weigh 86 grams, then jot down “2 slices bread - 86g” in your journal.  Then, repeat this weighing and journal recording process for each food item (the turkey meat, cheese, mayonnaise, mustard, and spinach).

Weigh Food for Caloric Accuracy

Weighing the condiments can be a bit more challenging, but here’s how to get the weight of the mustard and mayo.  You’ll have to weigh the bread, spread on the mustard, then take the difference in weight afterward (e.g. if the bread weighed 43 grams before spreading on the mustard, then 53 grams afterward, then there is 53 - 43 = 10 grams of mustard on the sandwich).  Also, some scales have a “zeroing out” feature that will allow you to put the bread on the scale, hit the “zero out” button, and cause the scale to go to zero while the bread is still on the scale.  You can then pick the bread up, spread on the mustard, set it back down on the scale, and the scale will give you the weight of the mustard only.

Second step: Calculate caloric content using food labels and/or calorie content websites.

Food Nutrition Label

After you’ve completed weighing each item of food, then check the food’s nutrition labels to see how many calories are in a serving (usually the serving size is given in grams).  Or, if there’s no nutrition label available, e.g. for fresh cut chicken breast, then you get the calorie information from the web.  There are lots of different websites that give calorie content for different foods.

Using the grams per serving on the food label, you can determine the caloric content of each food item in your meal.  To determine the number of calories of any food you’re eating, take the number of calories per serving and divide it by the number of grams per serving.  Then take the answer you got and multiply it by the number of grams you’re eating.  Let’s consider an example in which there are 85 grams and 38 calories per serving.  If you ate 50 grams of the food this label represents, then the number of calories of that food you’d be eating would be 38÷85, which equals 0.45, times the number of grams you’re actually eating.  In this example, that number is 50.  So, the total number of calories in 50 grams equals 50×0.45, or 22.5 calories.

Is this manually intensive.  Yes.  Does it add time to the preparation of your food.  Sure.  However, once you get the procedure down, it only adds 2 - 5 minutes to the prep time of a meal.  Also, it is accurate, and after you’ve done this for a few weeks, you will KNOW how many calories you are taking in.  This gives you great power when it comes to changing your fat or muscle levels.  YOU become the master of what your body composition is doing.  In addition, as a side bonus, you’ll develop a sense for how many calories are in many meals without having to weigh and calculate the meal.  I did this method of calorie calculation for about a 3 month period and found it to be ultra beneficial!

Darryl

BAD Fast Food!

Is the term “healthy fast food” an oxymoron?  Somewhat surprisingly, if you order certain types of foods at certain fast food restaurants, the answer is “no”.  Food at fast food restaurants can indeed be healthy.  Even Mickey D’s (McDonald’s) has some food choices that can fit into the health and fitness-minded person’s diet.

If you’re out and about and you’re hungry, just follow these general guidelines and your healthy eating habit should remain pristine.

1. Go grilled.  If the restaurant has a grilled chicken or fish option, this is usually more healthy than any fried options.

2. Avoid the sauces.  Can you stand to eat the grilled sandwich sans sauce, or with just a little to add flavor?  If so, your meal will contain much less sugar and many fewer calories than if you lard the sandwich up with a bunch of sauce.

3. Ask for whole wheat bread.  If your meal contains bread (e.g. a sandwich), see if you can get whole wheat bread.  This type of bread causes less of a blood sugar spike and resulting insulin response than white bread does.

4. Eat the fruit instead of the fries.  Does the restaurant have a fruit option that can be substituted for the usual fried side dish (e.g. french fries, onion rings, waffle fries, curly fries, etc.).  If fruit is available, go for it!

5. Drink water rather than soda.  Or, if they have it, go for a 0 calorie diet soda.  Regular soda is loaded with calories and sugar.  Avoid it.  Go for the water.  Also, consider going without ice cubes.  I heard that the ice cubes in fast food restaurants were bacteria laden (google this for more info).

Follow the above general rules, and you should be in good shape when it comes to eating at fast food restaurants.  By the way, the best fast food restaurant I’ve eaten at, as far as healthy food options are concerned, is Chick-fil-a.  Try out the grilled chicken sandwich on a wheat bun along with a fruit cup and water.

GOOD Fast Food

That’s a meal that’s delicious and nutritious!

Darryl

If you know the number of calories or the amount of food you take in to maintain your weight, you will be able to add to your calories if you want to add muscle, and take away calories if you want to become leaner and lose fat.

There are many methods of calorie counting that you can do at home.  For example, there are software programs into which you can enter the foods you eat; you can actually weigh your food and calculate your caloric intake with fairly close accuracy (we’ll cover this method in a future post); and there’s the method we will discuss in this post — using a food journal.

A plain notebook with or without lines is great for a journal.

Keeping a food journal isn’t really calorie counting, but rather just keeping a log of the food you eat…ALL of it.  That includes EVERYTHING that goes into your mouth and into your stomach.  Breakfast, lunch, dinner, desserts, snacks, all non-water drinks or drinks that have more than 0 calories, chewing gum, condiments, that handful of peanuts you ate while passing the time at your desk, the peppermint out of the candy bowl at work — everything.

Keep the journal for a month or more and weigh yourself once per week.  Then make adjustments to your future food intake based upon your past food intake and your body composition goals.  If your weight remains constant, then you will know that the amount of food you recorded in your journal is an amount that equals your calorie expenditure.  If you gained fat, then go back through your journal to find places where you could reduce your food intake a bit (how many calories to adjust your diet by for fat loss and muscle gain will be covered in future posts).  If you lost fat (1 to 2 lbs per week is ideal) and that was your aim, then all is well.  If you wanted to gain muscle but did not AND you didn’t gain any fat, then increase your caloric intake a bit (these examples assume you are exercising regularly).  Use a skin caliper to determine if you’ve lost or gained muscle and/or fat.

A food journal relies on the fact that we humans are creatures of habit.  We generally eat foods that we know and are used to.  So once you’ve recorded your food over some time period (e.g. a month), you’ll have a good idea of what your eating habits are and how much food it takes for your body to maintain itself.  Use this knowledge to your advantage.

Darryl

Greetings fit achievers.  A couple of posts ago, writer of one of the best motivational blogs in the world, Duane Cunningham asked the following: “How does one gain muscle and loss the fat at the same time then?”  The answer is, “either not efficiently or not at all”.

There have been some studies conducted where participants lifted weights, lowered their caloric intake, and performed cardio, and wound up with a loss of fat and a muscle gain at the end of the study.  You’ll see this with people just starting an exercise program, with people resuming working out after a layoff, and in people that start out fairly overweight.  The leaner a person becomes, the more difficult it is to achieve this.  Why?

To gain muscle requires that you have excess calories for the body to carry on it’s normal daily functions, support your daily activities, AND add additional muscle mass.  Adding muscle requires building materials over those needed for your daily maintenance.

To lose fat requires that you consume fewer calories than you need for your daily maintenance.  When your body does not get the energy it needs to fuel your daily maintenance and activities from the food you ingest, it will get the energy from within itself, i.e. from carbs and/or fat and/or protein, depending on what you’ve eaten and the type of activities you are doing.

So, the two goals — gaining muscle and losing fat — require opposites.  One a surplus of calories; the other a deficit.

The best, most efficient way to lose fat and gain muscle is to concentrate  on each, one at a time.  This can be accomplished by eating a surplus of calories for a period of time, then following that with a calorie deficit for some amount of time.  You’ve probably heard of fitness athletes and bodybuilder that go through a “bulking phase” and then a “cutting phase”.  They are eating a surplus of calories while “bulking” and a deficit while “cutting”.  By the way, the muscle building and fat loss periods can be as long as a few months, or as short as a few days.  When a person eats more calories than they need for 3 days a week, then eats fewer than they need for 4 days per week, it is possible for that person to concentrate on muscle gain during the 3 day period and fat loss during the 4 day period.  It will appear as if he/she is gaining muscle and losing fat at the same time.  But, doing this over such a short time period takes planning.

We’ll get into some muscle building and fat losing eating plans and workouts in the future, once the full-fledged darrylpace.com comes out.

Darryl

A cool guy from the UK (I think) with a unique name — JJ Jalopy — and an awesome blog, asked the following question:

“What do you think of those body-fat measuring scales? Are they accurate?”

Body fat measuring scale

The answer to this question, in a word, is “sometimes”.  Here’s the skinny on these fat measuring devices.

Those scales use a process called “bioelectrical impedence analysis” (BIA) to calculate body fat levels.  BIA is based on a mathematical formula called Ohm’s law, which quantifies the volume of water in the body, and from this, the percentage body fat.  The weakness in this method is that the amount of water in your body will affect the accuracy of the device.  Also, skin temperature, which is affected by the temp in the room you’re in affects BIA body fat measurement.  Oh, and BIA tends to over-predict body fat levels in lean people and under-predict body fat in obese people. For these reasons, skinfold measurements via a skinfold caliper is a better, more accurate way to go.

Darryl

Do you want to want to gain some muscle so that you look like a stud for the beach or pool this summer?

Be a stud at the beach

Or, would you like to reveal your inner six pack (abs, not beer!) by losing some fat?  Well, to do either it will be necessary to make some adjustments to the number of calories you are taking in.

To gain muscle it is necessary to take in MORE calories than your body needs to maintain itself.  To lose fat you must take in fewer calories than your body needs to maintain itself.  So, how do you know if you’re taking in more, less, or the same number of calories your bod needs for maintenance?  The only way is to take measurements.

Here are a couple of tools every serious fitness guy or gal should have in his/her fitness toolkit:

Skin Caliper

1. Skin caliper - this is perhaps the most important body composition device you can get for yourself.  It tells you what your body fat percentage is.  Did you know that it is possible to gain weight, yet be less fat than you were at the earlier, lighter weight?  It is.  It is also possible to lose weight and yet be more fat on a percentage basis than you were at the heavier weight.  A scale won’t tell you whether you’ve gained or lost muscle or fat.  A skin caliper will.

Weight Scale and Tape Measure

2. Weight Scale - speaking of a weight scale, it is important.  A weight scale in combination with a skin caliper can be used to tell you if you’ve lost fat, lost muscle, gained fat, gained muscle, or some combination.  If you weight is higher and your body fat percentage is the same or lower, you’ve gained muscle.  If your weight is higher and your body fat percentage is higher, then you’ve gained some fat (and possibly some muscle).  Weight loss accompanied by an unchanged or lowered body fat percentage means lost muscle and possibly gained fat — not a good combo.  Weight loss with decreased body fat percentage means fat loss.

3. The tape measure, of course, let’s you know what you’re doing as far as inches are concerned.  Probably the best measurement to take is of your waist.  Measure across your belly button.  In general, if you’re losing fat your waist size will become smaller; if you’re gaining fat, then your waist size will grow.  Also, if you’re trying to build a body part up to a certain size (for example, 17-inch arms or a 45-inch chest), then the tape measure helps you know where you are.

Darryl

Ah, calories!  They’re lots of fun to consume, but they’re a pain when they start to collect on our body in the form of fat.  But what is a calorie, really?  To be exact, 1 calorie equals the amount of energy required to heat 1 kilogram (1 liter) of water by 1 degree Celsius.  So, if a slice of bread contains 100 calories, that slice of bread contains enough energy to heat 100 liters of water by 1 degree Celsius.

The approximate number of calories in fat, protein, and carbohydrates is 9, 4, and 4 calories per gram, respectively.  So a gram of fat contains a little over two times the number of calories than does a gram of carbs or protein.  This is one of the reasons we should watch how much fat we eat.

Now, the cool thing about calories is that if we get a grasp on how many we need to maintain our weight, then we can adjust the number of calories we take in to either lose fat or gain muscle.  It’s really cool.  We’ll discuss this more next week.  Until then, enjoy your weekend!

Darryl

Greetings health, fitness, and success studs and studettes.  I’ve been working feverishly behind the scenes to create a more user-friendly and enjoyable darrylpace.com website.  That site is nearing completion.  Once the new site is up and going, the address for this blog will change to http://darrylpace.com/blog.  Once the date for the change is set, I will post several notices on consecutive days to let you know.  I also may email you.

The new site will contain full length articles on how busy people like you can efficiently achieve fitness, maintain high levels of fitness, increase fitness level, build muscle, lose fat, eat for health and fitness, achieve certain fitness objectives (e.g. six pack abs, break through plateaus in weight lifting or fat loss, or increased aerobic endurance), and adopt health & fitness as part of a successful lifestyle.  In addition there will be product reviews, a news letter, videos for exercise technique and instruction, and links to other cool sites.

Because of the extremely bright future, shades are a necessity.

Anyway, this post is just a heads-up on what’s coming down the pike.

Talk with you soon.  Over and out!

Darryl

Howdy dudes and dudettes!  This will be a very short post today because I’m hitting the hay.

When is eating high glycemic index foods ideal for you?  There are 2 very good times.

1. When you are engaged in a prolonged high intensity workout.

2.  Within the first few (4 or so) hours after an intense workout.

In the first case, your body will use the carbs ingested as fuel and will not store them.

In the second case, your muscles will be carb depleted from your workout, and they will “soak up” the carbs and store them as glycogen.  It is also during this post workout period that your muscles are very receptive to using protein to repair and build themselves.  So, consume some protein with your post-workout high glycemic index meal.

Until tomorrow!

Darryl