Go take a look at your dishes for a second. Do your bowls look like you should be using them to mix cookie batter? Should you take your plates out and start a good ultimate frisbee game? Well, if that is the case, you could be on your way to a much bigger waistline.

Do your plates really make that big of a difference?

In a study done by the Journal of the American Medical Association, a bunch of researchers had a Super Bowl party. Talk about a cool study. At this party they had two all-you-can-eat buffets. (This just keeps getting better huh?) They had the same foods at each buffet, filled with typical Super Bowl faire. The only difference was the bowl size. Those bigger bowls, caused the party-goers to take 53% more food and eat 56% more than those smaller bowl eaters.

Don’t ask for seconds

In another study done by Obesity Research they served soup. For the study, they had two groups. One group, they served soup in normal sized bowls. The other group, they served in normal sized bowls as well, with one small difference. They filled those bowls up non-stop, and the eaters just kept on eating. The group without self-filling soup were allowed to get seconds but they just had to ask for some. What did they find? The soup-eaters with a self filling bowls ate an average of 73% more soup.

The bonus result: The eaters who ate from those same bowls also underestimated the calories they ate by 140 calories, whereas those who had to ask for seconds only underestimated by 32 calories.

It’s not just limited to dishes…

In 2004, Brian Wansink grabbed a group of people and sent them home with either a two-pound, one-pound or a half-pound bag of M&M’s. They were also given a videotape and told to watch and just munch away. By the end of the movie, Wansink took the bags back. It was found on average that the people with the small half-pound bag of M&M’s ate an average of 63 M&M’s. Those with the one-pound bag hit around 120 M&M’s. The larger bag, more still. They did the same test with popcorn. Again, the bigger the bag, the more popcorn that was eaten.

So what does it all mean?

With all the studies done, there is a common theme. The more you put in front of you, the more you are going to eat. So think about that next time you supersize your meal or cut an extra large piece of cake. Whatever you get, you are going to probably chow down.

So what can you do about it?

1. Be conscious of every bite – The participants who just ate soup without thinking just kept eating and eating and really didn’t know how much they put away. If you think about every spoonful you put in your mouth, you might not eat as much.

2. Split it up – When I go out to a restaurant I almost always have dessert. Life isn’t worth it without dessert. But it usually gets split into one plate and two forks. I’ll do the same for supper sometimes. Just ask for two plates. (Small ones!)

3. Go shopping – Go grab some cheap plates and bowls and try it out. If you need seconds, go knock yourself out, at least you’ll be a little more conscious of going back to the stove to fill-up.

Images by JunkbyJo, PatrickYeung, and arianacasellato

Comments: What kind of tricks do you use in order to control your portion control?

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This week, we will be addressing the only 7 fluids you should be drinking. Let’s kick it off.

1. Water

Calories per 8 fl oz (220 mL): 0

Recommended servings per day: as desired

This should be a given. I drink a glass as soon as I wake up, which is a lesson I took from the founder of Brazilian Jujitsu. Although I don’t force myself to drink 8 glasses a day, I highly recommend keeping a bottle at hand. Drink when you need to. Overhydrating is also extremely rare, so please don’t let that stop you. As well, if you are counting up to 8 glasses per day, count tea, coffee, and juice as half a glass. If drinking water sounds boring to you, try jazzing it up with some lemon or lime.

2. Tea

Calories per 8 fl oz (220 mL): 3 (No sugar, no milk)

Recommended servings per day: as desired

Tea comes in many varieties and forms, all which have many benefits. It is loaded with antioxidants, has anti-inflammatory properties, and helps protect us from a wide range of health issues from cancers to high blood pressure. The true teas- black, green and white are all the same, just different ways of processing. White tea has the least amount of processing, and hence, the most polyphenols. Black has the least amount of polyphenols and green is in the middle. I would recommend one to three glasses a day. Just be wary about how much sugar you add.

3. Coffee

Calories per 8 fl oz (220 mL): 3 (No sugar, no cream)

Recommended servings per day: Caffeinated: 3 Decaffeinated: as desired

I never drank coffee until a few years ago when I worked in a restaurant serving tables. Now, I enjoy it every once and a while, but don’t use it as a crutch. If you need a coffee to get you through the morning, you really need more sleep. I wouldn’t recommend more than three cups a day, unless you are okay switching to decaf  or half-caf if you really can’t kick the sweet stuff. Also, watch your stomach. Caffeine is recommended as one of the first things to go if stomach pain, bloating, diarrhea, or heart burn arise.

4. Vegetable juice

Calories per 8 fl oz (220 mL): 50

Recommended servings per day: as desired

If you are a juice drinker, I’m afraid you are now stuck with only vegetables. Most vegetables don’t have that insulin spiking effect that fruit does, so you are safe. I have my own juicer, so if I want to sweeten it up a little, I throw in some carrot juice.

If you are buying vegetable juice in the grocery store, watch the sodium. I recommend V8 low sodium. I like to put in a dash Worchestershire sauce to spice up the taste. And don’t be fooled by fruit juice with an added serving of vegetables. They are still fruit juices.

Note: Vegetable juice is not a solid replacement for whole vegetables, but it does help. Treat as a supplement, not a substitute.

5. Wine

Calories per 4 fl oz (110 mL): 124

Recommended servings per day: 1

There are many reasons why a glass of wine a day is good for you. I found a list of 6 good ones here. I would adhere to only one glass per day because, after that, the negative starts to outweigh the positive. So remember to drink in moderation.

6. Chocolate milk

Calories per 8 fl oz (220 mL): 90 (skim) 207 (whole)

Recommended servings per day: 1

Ditch the protein powder. Stop with the supplementation. For a solid post-workout meal, try a glass of chocolate milk. It will help speed up work-out recovery and has anywhere from 8-11 grams of protein. If you are lactose intolerant go for chocolate soy milk. It will work just the same.

Askmen did a good post about why you should choose chocolate milk as your post workout drink here.

7. Your call (in moderation)

Here you can choose whatever you like. I love a great ginger ale (Canada Dry) or a cold Corona. Nothing is wrong with moderation. But the object is to keep it in moderation. Be smart about the beer brand you choose. I also stopped buying cases of ginger ale and switched to singles. Sure it costs me a couple cents more, but the temptation to have a couple a day is gone. Don’t deprive yourself completely, just try to cut back a little.

Your Digital Trainer,

Jeremiah

Images by shioshvilli, kankan, avlxyz, ajawin, seeks2dream, blmurch, and flasporty

Comments: Would you add anything else to this list?

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The trouble with jogging is that the ice falls out of your glass.
- Martin Mull

Average Read Time: 00:02:48

About a year ago I was training this guy named Will. He was in university at the time and he was a fat guy. Probably had about 30-40 pounds to lose. So during our initial workouts together the topic of diet and nutrition came up.  We decided that for one week, he should record his diet and then come back and we would discuss his food choices. Now this guy was part of a fraternity, so he told me up front that he drinks rather often. I made sure that he recorded everything he would eat or drink, including alcohol. So one week later, he gave me the list of what he had consumed…

The diet was fairly normal. Pizza on the weekends, rez food during the week. Then I saw the alcohol consumption. During the week, Will had averaged out about 3-5 drinks a night. As the weekend hit, for 3 consecutive nights, he went through just over 70 beer! He said that this was around his school year average. No wonder there is a freshman 15!

So how many calories are we talking about anyway?

Well, let’s use a good Guelph, Ontario-based beer for our calculations. Say he is a true Guelphite, and loves a good cold doctor-recommended Sleeman. Sleeman Clear averages about 90 calories a bottle so with his average of 85 beer a week we are looking at an average of 7,650 calories or just over two pounds of fat. Two pounds of fat every single week! I think we found our weight problem.

What’s the solution?

Not all beers are created equal. They can range anywhere from 90 calories (Sleeman Clear) to an astounding 340 calories (Sam Adams Triple Bock)! The average is around 150 calories, but as a general rule, the less alcohol in the beer, the less calories it contains. So if you are a heavy drinker, consider choosing a beer lighter in alcohol and calories. You want to see what kind of a difference it makes? Let’s go back to Will for a second.

Bud vs. Bud Light

Let’s say that Will is a Budweiser drinker (143 calories). This means that if he stuck with his consumption of 85 beer a week, he would put on 12,155 calories worth of alcohol, or roughly 3.5 pounds. If he made the switch to Bud Light (95 calories) he would consume 8,075 calories (about 2.5 pounds) worth of alcohol in a week. This can mean up to a pound of weight loss each week for this guy! Now most of you probably don’t drink this much on a weekly basis. However, if you drank a beer a night and 6 on the weekend (12 per week) you can still see a difference. Drinking Bud (1,716 calories a week) is still more than Bud Light (1,140 calories a week). If you were to make the switch, you would lose a pound in 6 weeks. Just from switching to light beer, no exercise, nothing else.

I will never switch from a good cold Corona

Personally, I love Corona (148 calories). I will never switch beers for the sake of trimming calories. For me, it just isn’t worth it. I tend to find it easier to cut back on my alcohol consumption. I prefer to go for quality over quantity. Make sure that you find a good balance for yourself and take care of your health, but don’t sacrifice all the good things in life. For me, Corona = Good things in life.

Beer Resources

If you are interested in looking up your favorite beer, go to http://www.realbeer.com/edu/health/calories.php. I got the numbers from this site, and they probably have your beer of choice on there. You should also check out a couple posts at Andrew’s blog www.gohealthygofit.com. He has put out a few good posts about healthy beer and mixed drink choices. As well, check out the calorie counting beer mug I posted yesterday, it uses the 150 calorie measure and certainly makes it easier for those calorie-counting drinkers out there.

Your Digital Trainer,

Jeremiah

Image by dotbenjamin

Comments: What is your beer of choice? Do feel you are better off cutting back or changing brands?

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Average Read Time: 00:02:43

In discussing your salary, your boss gives you two options. For one month he will either pay you $100,000 every single day for 30 days or you can get a penny on the first day, two pennies on the second, and four pennies on the third, and on and on, until day 30. What would you choose?

Well, lets do some quick math and decide.

Ok, so it has been over 20 days, and Salary B has barely cleared 10 percent of Salary A. I’ll give you chance to change your mind before we keep going…

Salary B has more than tripled Salary A! This a great lesson in compound interest. Now, I know what you are thinking. What does this have to do with health and fitness? Well the same thing applies to weight loss and calorie expenditure. Let me explain. Let’s say every day you hop on the treadmill and run about a mile. You are burning around 100 calories, or roughly 2 pieces of box chocolate that you have leftover from Christmas. If you do that every single day, you will burn roughly 3,000 calories in a month. A pound of fat is 3,500 calories, so you have almost lost a pound of fat.
But we can try a different approach, within that one month you were able to pump some iron and try to gain muscle instead of running. You were able to gain a respectable amount of one pound of muscle for males or 1/2 a pound of muscle for females. Now for weight training, you can burn calories while exercising, but the big change comes once you already have the muscle on your frame. Each pound of muscle burns approximately 35 to 50 calories every day. Whether you workout that day or not. Let’s put that into a table and see how that would look.

We can do men first:

Now Women:

Don’t get lost in the details. I know metabolism changes, and that these values probably won’t apply to everyone. Just focus on the principle of this exercise. First off, remember how Salary B was only 1/10th of Salary A by day 21? Did you see how it compounded over the next nine days? Think of the caloric expenditure for years to come.

Now, I know you won’t gain a pound of muscle a month every month for the rest of your life, but if we were to only maintain the 6-12 pounds of muscle gained, by let’s say, weight training 2-3 times a week,  you would burn 2 – 5 times more calories the following year than if you ran a mile 7 days a week.Remember burning calories doesn’t necessarily start and end with the treadmill. Try something different and hit the weights for a change!

Your Digital Trainer,

Jeremiah

Images by liroi, tracy_olson

Comments: Do you usually run on the treadmill just to burn calories? Do you see weight training in a similar light as compound interest?

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Average Read Time: 00:06:04

I am heading back from Nova Scotia on Christmas day and I get a call from my brother. He had forgotten to give me my Christmas present before I left.  He tells me that he’s donated a few chickens to a family in Africa on my behalf. I always like these gifts, and was grateful. Before we end the call, he reminds me that it wasn’t 11 chickens but he hopes it will do the job, I laugh. Good memories.  Let me share the story with you.

My first protein powder
I used to workout at a gym next to my high school almost everyday. I usually would workout with a couple buddies from football, but today I was hitting the weights with my brother, Kip. When we ended our workout we decided to check out the supplement store to try out some protein powder. We have no idea what we are looking for, so we talk to the salesman, a 300 lb man who could tear us in half like a phone book. Obviously, he knows a few things about getting big. So we ask him, which kind of protein powder is good for us?

He explains that protein powder should supplement the diet, not replace it. To this day I still think this is a fair statement. Then he asks us a question that has long been a running joke between Kip and I, “You are eating the standard 11 chicken breasts a day right?” Kip and I look and stare at each other blankly, and we breakdown and both start laughing. I think the last time I had 11 chicken breasts in a day was when when we had a 20 piece bucket of chicken from KFC. Probably not what this guy was talking about. So why did this guy suggest 11 chicken breasts? How much protein should you have in your diet on a daily basis?

How much protein did this guy actually recommend?
I went to my 1st year nutrition book, Discovering Nutrition (2006) by Insel et al. for this one. On average, a chicken breast weighs roughly 100 grams and contains about 30 percent protein or 30 grams. This however, is dependent on how the chicken was raised and fed. Free-range chickens can have 30-40 grams of protein where battery farmed chickens can have anywhere from 20 to 30 grams. Let’s go with the average.

So how much protein did this guy tell me to take? 30 grams x 11 pieces a day…… 330 grams. For my once 150 lb frame. In doing some math, this works out to be roughly 2.2 grams of protein per pound or 4.8 grams of protein per kilogram (for us Canadians).

Sounds ok but what do the experts think?
For the answer I decided to scour a few fitness and health blogs to see what they had to say:

The IF Life
Mike over at The IF Life recommends between 0.6 and 0.8 grams per lean pound and 1.0 to 1.5 grams per lean pound if you are trying to build muscle.

Mark’s Daily Apple
Mark over at Mark’s Daily Apple recommends the following with his Primal Eating Plan: A minimum of 0.5 grams per lean pound, 0.7 to 0.8 if active and as much as 1.0 grams per lean pound if trying to build muscle.

Women’s Diet and Fitness
Angie at Women’s Diet and Fitness recommends 0.9 grams of protein per pound to ensure your body burns fat, not muscle. She also recommends 1.0 to 1.5 grams per pound if trying to build muscle.

So each of the blogs have roughly similar recommendations.  Let’s see what my first year nutrition textbook recommends. Discovering Nutrition (2006) by Insel et al. suggests 0.4 grams per pound, and 0.5 grams per pound if pregnant or nursing. What about if you’re an athlete or trying to put on muscle mass? Well, they also recommend 0.4 grams per pound. The text also has a catch though:  if your caloric intake is extremely high, follow what is called the AMDRs or the Acceptable Macronutrient Distribution Ranges. This is similar to a Zone Diet in principle, but the AMDR recommends 20-35% of calories coming from fat, 45-65% coming from carbs, and 10-35% coming from protein.

So, what’s a lean pound?
Both Mike and Mark made their recommendations as a gram per lean pound. Bet you didn’t notice that. But my textbook didn’t bother mentioning a difference.  A lean pound is your weight if you were to trim the fat. So if you are roughly 30% body fat, and 200 lbs, that would leave you with 140 lean pounds. So if we are in that weight lifting crowd (as you should be) let’s see how the recommendations all come together.* As a side note, let’s put them in terms of chicken breasts too:

*For a 200lb, 30% body fat, non-pregnant, non-breastfeeding male.

Should I be eating 2.7 chicken breasts or 11?
As you can see, we have a pretty big discrepancy over how much protein we should eat. If you are new to this nutrition game, let me catch you up to speed on how your body uses this protein. I like step-by-step, so  let’s do that.

Step 1 – Eat a skinless, boneless, tasteless, chicken breast.

Step 2 – Your stomach and small intestine use enzymes and acids to breakdown the proteins into peptides and amino acids.

Step 3 – The important amino acids get absorbed into the blood stream where they go to the tissues (to build muscle, etc.) and to the liver to manufacture important substances.

Step 4 – Some amino acids stay and float around the body. These are collectively called, the amino acid pool. All the leftover amino acids go to the liver and turn into ammonia.

Step 5 – Amino acid pool stays. Ammonia goes to the kidneys and leaves the body.

Piece of cake right? Now this is where it all comes together. Now the average body needs about 300 grams of protein everyday. I will explain in a minute how scientists came to that conclusion. But now you are thinking, geez, is my bodybuilding buddy right? There is one major catch. The body recycles it’s amino acids. By using that amino acid pool I talked about, the body recycles an average of 200 grams of protein a day! Doing some quick math, we can see that the body really only needs an average of 100 grams of protein (3.3 chicken breasts) from your diet. Go recycling!

Nitrogen balance
All the used up and leftover amino acids go into the liver and turn into ammonia. Ammonia is nitrogen and hydrogen mixed together, the downside to ammonia is that it is toxic to cells. The body has to get rid of it. So if you eat too much protein, it just comes out in your urine, feces, mucus, hair, and nail cuttings. Now this can be calculated, and from that measurement we can determine our nitrogen balance. So scientists can see how much protein goes in and how much comes out. This is how they found out that your body uses up roughly 100 grams. Now if we exercise and look at our nitrogen balance then we can assume that if we use more protein, our nitrogen balance is going to be negative, less will go out than go in. Many studies have been done on this and the results have not been conclusive enough to sway the American Dietetic Association. However, if you have good kidney function this has been no evidence to support the fact that eating slightly more protein than recommended will cause any long term damage. If you want more information on this, search for nitrogen balance and exercise. You can definitely find quite a few journals on the topic.

What I recommend
I would not recommend to ever take more 1.0 grams per pound of body weight. Stick with the 0.4 and bump it up anywhere from 0.5 to 0.8 grams per pound if you are exercising.  I try to stick with 20-30 grams of protein per meal (Breakfast, lunch, supper) and the same 20-30 grams of protein for an after workout snack. Here is a sample of how much protein to eat throughout the day. I would throw in a couple more fruit and vegetables than this, but this briefly sums up a sample daily meal. Nothing too fancy.

So here we have 115 grams of protein. For my 220 lb frame, I’m looking at 0.5 gram of protein per pound. That’s ok, muscle will come with that. Don’t think you need to spend a fortune on protein bars, powders, or shakes. Your diet will suffice. But that, is a post for another time.

Your Digital Trainer,

Jeremiah Bell

Images by midiman, dnorman, djevents, trekkyandy

Comments: Do you feel you get enough protein in your diet? Do you feel that 2.7 chicken breasts is too little? Is 11 too much?

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2. Your dishes are making you fat. Go buy new ones.