Category: nutrition

I’ve long told my fat loss clients to eat a high protein breakfast in order to help their fat loss efforts. What happens when a lot of people eat a carb-based breakfast is that they feel full at first. But if they eat breakfast at 8am, they are usually hungry again by 10am, meaning they will snack before lunch and that adds up to more calories. A high protein breakfast will usually help you last until lunchtime without eating a mid-morning snack.
Also, since you didn’t eat at night, your body needs protein first thing in the morning in order to maintain muscle mass. A high protein breakfast will help you keep your gains. It will also assist in burning fat since you aren’t eating carbs for energy.
No time? I tell clients to go to their neighborhood breakfast place and ask for 2-3 scrambled eggs and 2 strips of bacon. Usually people ask for sandwiches or other carbs here in Taipei but the breakfast place will make this if you ask.

Many people think they are so and some people even think that they are a rip off. And honestly some supplements really do take their marketing too far by promising you’ll get huge or lose a ton of fat just by taking their pill or powder. So a healthy sense of skepticism is good. Don’t believe everyone who is just trying to sell you something.

But even though some supplements are a scam, that doesn’t mean that they all are. Many basic supplements actually have a ton of research behind them that shows how safe and effective they are. Many of these supplements have stood the test of time by continuing to be on the market for years and they’ve been used by millions of people. Usually these are the ones you want to stick with.

A good example is creatine, which is made naturally in the body for use in energy production byt the cells of the body. However, supplementing the amount of creatine you make naturally with an external source can have positive effects of your energy levels, strength, and can increase the amount of lean body mass that you have. Meat naturally has creatine in it and if you’re eating a lot of it then you might be getting enough creatine already. However, cooking meat lessens the amount of creatine in meat, meaning that even if you eat some meat, you could still benefit from increased creatine in some cases. Anyone who doesn’t eat meat for whatever reason can certainly benefit from increased creatine intake since no plant source of nutrition contains creatine – it’s only made by animals.

Contrary to popular belief, creatine is NOT a steroid and has never been shown to cause any harm in any amount that a normal human could sanely consume. Thousands of studies have shown it’s safety and effectiveness for a variety of populations, yet you rarely hear of anyone but bodybuilders taking it. That’s really too bad since anyone who is aging is likely losing muscle mass every year to sacropenia – muscle wasting due to aging.

Fortunately, a supplement like creatine isn’t very expensive and isn’t difficult to take. Taking just 5gm a day, every day for several months then cylcing off of it for a while can provide you with most of the benfits of creatine with almost no risk. So rather than considering a supplement like creatine as a rip-off, we might see it as a low-cost way to boost our physical training with little downside.

So why do people think even useful supplements are rip-offs? Because they expect them to replace hard work in the gym and when they don’t, people feel ripped off. The fact is no pill or powder is going to put tons of muscle on you or rip the fat off your body so stop expecting it to. Put in the hard work and only use supplements to help out a little. That’s the path to fitness success with supplements.

I have programmed low carb diets for years for clients but not until recently have i tried it out myself. This is a big mistake, as I’m constantly telling my trainers. you don’t undrstand a process fully until you’ve gone through it yourself! The only reason I made it myself is that I like to try out everything I find interesting (I experiment on myself a lot) and I was doing lots of other things before this. So the time came around for me to try out a fat loss regimen and low carb seemed to fit the bill, so here we are.

There’s a ton of variety even in the low-carb community. There are different approaches to the diet — Atkins, paleo, keto, primal, paleo+dairy, Neanderthin (fruit friendly), etc. And those are just off the top of my head. I never knew there was so much to learn in doing low-carb and by actually doing it myself, I’m weeding through the literature and seeing what’s what.

So far I have to say there are definite ways to screw it up, some people might not have thought of. For example, it does seem possible to eat too much protein, which will apparently keep you out of ketosis. I was getting 200g of protein a day and the fat did not budge! Yes, I’ve been weighing my food. It’s interesting, believe it or not. Kind of like a new hobby. you have to get into this stuff to really appreciate it. But when you do, you might find that your body doesn’t respond like the books say. So the idea of “eat as much protein and fat as you want to” is a little off IMO. Over-eating the protein (say above 150g a day) causes the body to turn anything over 150 into glucose, preventing you from getting into ketosis. Lovely.

However, the idea that it’s difficult to eat over around 2000cal on a low-carb diet is true. It is hard unless you go nuts with nuts. For example, eating 200g of protein from real meat every day was pushing it for me. But then again, do the math: 200g protein x 4cal/g = 800 cals! Not a lot of calories there. Get another 1000cal from fat and some residual carbs and you’re likely golden.

So I’m gonna continue my low-carb education and get back to you on the my on-going self-experimentation. Stay tuned!

I used to have lots of trouble sleeping. I had trouble falling asleep. I woke up a lot during the night, and sometimes I would just get up and start doing work since I couldn’t fall back asleep. The lack of quality sleep was starting to interfere with my workouts and was making me very irritable during the day. I had heard about ZMA and decided to give it a try. ZMA is a mix of zinc, magnesium, and the amino acid arginine. A lot of men are deficient in zinc and magnesium and that lack interferes with out sleep. Without quality sleep, we don’t release testosterone, which interferes with our lives as men in many ways. Taking three tablets a night before bed worked immediately for me. I fall asleep faster, sleep deeper, and sleep longer than before. And I’m lifting heavier weights than ever before. So if you’re having trouble sleeping, maybe try ZMA. And by the way, no, we don’t seel ZMA so this isn’t an ad for us. 🙂

A lot of people think I’m anti-supplement since all we carry in the gym is protein powder. Over my now 13 years in Taiwan, I’ve talked to countless people who think a single greasy chicken leg a day provides all the protein they need. After pulling my hair out over this, I decided to carry the best protein powder I could find and I told people to drink it once a day. So the need for a protein supplement was blazingly clear to me.

The need for other supplements is less clear, so I don’t have a pharmacy at the gym. The main reason is that for most any other supplements to work, someone’s training and diet have to be squared away. Is your’s squared away?

Think of it as a hierarchy: training first, diet/nutrition second, rest and recovery third, supplements fourth. Thinking like this clears it up. I don’t care what you eat or how much sleep you get, you’ll never be fit if you don’t train. Training is ALWAYS number one in my book. We just don’t move enough. I’d rather you have a bad diet and awesome training than the other way around. You can burn off a donut or cookie but you can’t eat your way into muscle or cardio benefits.

People with solid training should then look at diet. This is an area that screws many people up but it’s effects are profound. Then are you getting enough sleep? Are you trying to recover while all stressed out?

Only when these elements are in place will supplements help. And even then, it’s a big maybe. Believe it or not folks built muscle before creatine or NOX was on the market.

Think of adding a nitro system to a car. The nitro only works when the engine, transmission, tires, etc. are in top shape. Putting a nitro system on your broken down Buick station wagon isn’t gonna work.

It really pains me when people who are obviously not doing the work or eating right ask me why I don’t carry more supplements. I usually want to tell them the truth — they don’t need them and should train smarter and more first.

So keep that in mind when the magazines try to sell you the latest product.