Late Night Snacking...

Diet Dilemma: Late Night Snacking

If I had a dime for every time I heard the following (sigh):  “I was so good all day, but then I couldn’t stop eating [fill in the blank] all evening.” Evening or late-night snacking can derail the most dedicated weight-loss efforts, but if this is your biggest dietary weakness, planning ahead will help to incorporate those snacks right into a healthy diet plan.

 

I know, I know...you're not supposed to eat past 6, or 7, or whatever.  If it doesn't work into your lifestyle, you won't be able to stick with it.  For example, many evenings, I work over the dinner hour.  It's too early to eat before I leave, and too late to eat when I come back, so should I just skip dinner?  No.  The trick is to plan out what your food choices will be, regardless of when you eat them, although if you let yourself get too hungry, you may find yourself grabbing for a bit too much food.  Below are a few tips to help you keep in line with later snacks or even a late supper.

 

1.  Plan your day.  Have the food ready to go in a Tupperware container, or pre-measured if you are following a specific plan. 

2.  Plan in snacks and enough protein to keep you satisfied, so you don't want to overcompensate at the end of the day.

3.  Make regular trips to the grocery store for fresh fruit and veggies, so you have them on hand for snacking, if necessary.

4.  Particularly easy this time of year, taking a walk in the evening after dinner can really help to keep you away from the snack foods.

5.  Stay away from "fluffy" white foods late at night:  bread, cookies, processed food, sweets, cakes--these should be in short supply in your home anyway, but particularly harmful when you ingest them at night!

Have a fantastic week!

Melissa

 

 

Melissa Abramovich

ACE CPT, NASM CGT, CPT,

AAHFRP Medical Exercise Specialist

"Excuses are the nails that build houses of failure"

Exercise can be an important part of coping with a chronic disease or recovering from an injury; It can increase longevity and quality of life, improve energy, strength, balance and coordination, and act as a potent pain reliever and antidepressant. But many people don't know what exercise guidelines to follow for optimal health and management of their disease or disorder. Coordinating with your healthcare provider and a personal trainer certified (as I am) as a Medical Exercise Specialist can help you to recover fully and cope with your health challenges.
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From Physical Therapy to Personal Fitness

Graduating from physical therapy is a good reason to celebrate and there’s no better time to start a fitness program, even if you’ve never been physically active. Regular exercise will help you maintain your therapy results and will keep you feeling good for a long time. Create a plan to stay active and fit, even when you don’t have a therapist watching your every move.  A personal trainer can help you to design a program, and help you implement it for optimum results.

Use It Or Lose It

When your course of treatment is over, you’ll want to get back into the swing of your usual activities. For many people, this means returning to a sedentary lifestyle, but that is one of the worst things you can do. Instead, commit to a regular physical activity program to boost your strength, cardiovascular health, and flexibility. Staying active year-round helps your body and your brain function well. It also increases your odds of staying healthy.

Start Smart

 

Physical therapists usually discharge patients with home exercise instructions. Before you finish therapy, ask any questions you have about exercises you should and shouldn’t be doing. You should have a clear understanding of which exercises to do, how to do them, how often, for how long, at what level and how you should feel while exercising.  As you begin exercising on your own, go easy. Follow your therapist’s instructions to increase your exercise level to avoid injury and discourage setbacks.

The benefits of exercise last only as long as you stay active, so keep a copy of your exercise plan where you’ll see it every day. Track your progress to keep yourself honest. Otherwise, you may end up right where you started, with pain, limited function or injury.

Manage Symptoms

Your therapist can tell you about symptoms to watch for and how to manage them. You may be able to manage some symptoms at home, but others may need to be evaluated by a medical professional.

At Home

Beginning your post-rehab personal fitness program at home is a great idea for convenience, privacy, and affordability. Set up your home exercise space with safety in mind. Clear your floor of slipping and tripping hazards and make sure you have a stable surface to sit, stand or lie on and something to hold onto for balance.

Gym Time

You may wish to exercise at a local gym or recreation center, especially if you already belonged to one before you underwent physical therapy. If your home exercise plan calls for using exercise equipment or machines, working out at a gym is a convenient way to go.

Step It Up

When you’re ready to move beyond your post-rehab exercise program, schedule a few sessions with a certified personal trainer specializing in post-rehab training. Doing so decreases your risk of injury and pain as you continue to build strength and fitness.

Speak Up

Once you begin your personal fitness program, you may have some questions. You might try some of the exercises and realize that for some reason, they don’t feel right to you. Instead of ditching the entire plan, contact your physical therapist or trainer. Some simple adjustments to your routine could make all the difference.

 

Have a great week!

Melissa Abramovich

ACE CPT, NASM CGT, CPT,

AAHFRP Medical Exercise Specialist

"Excuses are the nails that build houses of failure"

High Intensity and CrossFit type workouts, are they for you?

High Intensity and CrossFit type workouts, are they for you?

Rope climbing, barbell clean and jerks, kettlebell swings, and heavy medicine ball throws are just a few examples of older style exercises that have experienced a resurgence. CrossFit and other workout programs like boot camps and fitness training camps tend to emphasize high intensity and power training.  These moves were typically used by strength coaches working with elite athletes who needed to perform at the highest levels for competitions. The re-introduction of these high intensity conditioning programs include explosive lifts that are designed to push the human body to it's very limits. 

Created in 2000 by former gymnastics coach Greg Glassman, CrossFit has tapped into an unprecedented consumer demand for results by using challenging strength and power exercises combined with bodyweight gymnastics and plyometric movements. In its definition of “World-Class Fitness” CrossFit advocates:

“Practice and train major lifts: deadlift, clean, squat, clean and jerk, and snatch. Similarly, master the basics of gymnastics: pull-ups, dips, rope climb, push-ups, sit-ups, presses to handstand, pirouettes, flips, splits and holds. Bike, run, swim, row, etc. hard and fast. Five or six days per week mix these elements in as many combinations and patterns as creativity will allow.”

This isn't in and of itself a bad outlook, but use caution:  any program that doesn't allow for modifications and a slower, safer pace, mixed with good form is one that requires wariness.  If you go into a program, and the exercise is pull ups, but they want you jerking your back up to get there, take heed:  you need to build to these exercises!  The foundation of strength and power is basic stability.  If you don't already have a baseline of fitness, you are setting yourself up for injury.

Ask for modifications, research good form, ask a personal trainer for a program to get you started, and you will soon be having a great time in these more intense workout formats.  You are you own best advocate for your health and fitness!

What's the right way to get fit?

So, this week, I'm getting questions about exercise structure, and food intake to achieve specific goals. So let's take a quick peek at what you can do to change up an exercise program if you want to build muscle. We would be looking to lift heavier weight, with less repetition, at a higher intensity. So, taking a 1 RM (repetition Maximum, or the amount you can lift 1 rep with good form, but only 1) estimate, I can extrapolate 75%(depending on your tolerance), and we would design a program to develop a balanced physique utilizing a smaller set size (6-8, 8-10, 10-12), to achieve your goals. But listen, there are literally hundreds of ways to change up a program. You can change the exercises. You can progress the exercises to a harder form of the same basic exercise. You can split your week into body areas or zones to lift daily. You can add intervals (HIIT, High Intensity Interval Training, one of my favorites for weight loss!)

Along with this, proper nutrition is crucial. There are many out there right now who have the "correct" answer. The Paleo people insist meat and vegetables, but no grain, legumes and dairy is the right answer. The Vegan people insist that a diet high in vegetables fruits, grains, and legumes is right, but eschew all animal products. So what do you eat? You pick a balanced diet that is high in natural food. You eat real food, not too much, and not too little. Stay away from too much of any one thing. Variety is the spice of life, and you body will thank you for it. If you are inadvertantly losing weight, add a serving or two more of lean protein and fruit or veggie (like another mini meal). If you are gaining weight, take a look at how much you are eating, and what foods you might be overindulging in--writing it down in a diary can be helpful to keep you honest. Use your common sense, and don't fall into the trap of the latest FAD diet.

To your lifelong health,
Melissa

Endurance--building it from scratch!

Endurance.  How do you build it?  And is endurance just about how long your body can last, or does it have a component of mental toughness?  How do some people seem to be able to run for hours and hours easily, while other struggle to just run a mile?

First, let's get the genetic component out of the way.  Clearly, there are people who are just genetically compatible with long endurance related activities, in part due to their muscle fiber make-up.  Some folks have a larger proportion of slow twitch muscle fibers, which makes endurance work easier for them.  And some have more fast twitch fibers, making them better suited to sprint work and explosive sports which require quick starts and stops and not continuous movement.

But, let's say you do want to build whatever endurance you can, with what you've got.  This can be done, with diligence and hard work.  And some mental toughness is required, since the road isn't necessarily and easy one.  Let's say you want to be able to run, and you've never been able to--how do you start?

The first rule is not to add too much to fast.  Ok, let me backtrack just a bit--first make sure you have good supportive shoes that are appropriate for the activity at hand.  If you are unsure, place like InStep can help you with the proper footwear.  Then, you are going to pick a one mile route.  Pick places where you can try a light jog, and places where you can walk;  In my neighborhood, we have a winding road that attaches a court system, so you can walk the main road and run the court, or vice versa.  Or you could pick a number of houses or mailboxes--I'll run to the 3rd mailbox, and walk 4 mailboxes/houses, and then run again.  Then go home and stretch.

The second rule (it's my own rule based on my experience, I don't think it's written anywhere but here)--you need adequate rest in order to move forward and to avoid injury.  So if you get overly ambitious, and don't allow your body to adapt, you are going to be sorry.  I set to much volume and not enough rest, and ended up with a sore foot and sharp pain in one knee that set my training back a week and a half.  So, maybe you do this pattern above, 3-4 times the first week, and then give yourself a new goal.

The next week, you see if you can jog a bit more--set the goal to jog more houses, or walk only 1/2 the court, and run the rest, plus the parts between courts...you decide.  The goal here is to get that mile to all running, so you are trying to do just that little bit more.

The third week, you try to jog the whole mile, knowing you may need to stop a couple of times along the way to catch your breath, but pick a pace that keeps you pretty steady, so you don't have to, even if that looks like my old golden retriever--old man running I call it--you look like you're running, but it might be just over a walking pace.  That's ok, you're doing a great job, and your body is doing it's best to keep up and make the changes you are asking for.  You might be a little bit uncomfortable.  

Sometime around week 4, you should be jogging this entire mile route.  Yea!  You rock!  Now, your initial goal of running a mile is complete, and if you want to, you can add a bit more to your route.  Not a lot, mind you--maybe you go for extra time, like 5 more minutes, or maybe you think about adding 1/4 mile this next week.

If you go about this systematically, and you do the work consistently, you will see the results.  Don't compare yourself to anyone else, this is for you.  Work on your dreams one at a time, with a systematic approach, and you will accomplish them.

Have a great week!

--

Melissa Abramovich

ACE CPT, NASM CGT, CPT,

AAHFRP Medical Exercise Specialist

"Excuses are the nails that build houses of failure"

Jump-start Your Metabolism

The very best way to increase your metabolism is to become physically active. There is a wide berth in calories people burn during their daily activities, ranging from sedentary people, who may burn as few as 100 calories a day in activities, to very active people, like competition athletes, who can burn 1,000 extra calories a day. It was said that Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps was burning over 10,000 calories per day!

Physically active people burn more calories, even when at rest, because they have more muscle tissue. Muscle is "active" tissue, meaning it burns calories; fat is "inactive" tissue, because it burns almost no calories. So, the more muscle you carry on your body, and build through exercise, the more calories you will burn, even at rest.

Becoming more active will certainly begin the process of burning that furnace of yours at a higher temperature, but strength training specifically builds muscle tissue. Performing a variety of weight bearing exercise, and changing up your program regularly will begin to build that tissue, and help to rev up your metabolism. Be sure to work with precision, slow and controlled movement, and pain free range of motion. You will begin to see results in just a few weeks!

To build muscle, you need to tire them out, which will mean different weights and repetitions for different people. You can try starting with a 5 pound dumbbell, and start with a basic 3 sets of 12 reps of your exercise of choice, but fine tuning may be needed to actually find that tiring or fatiguing point.

Once a strength training routine becomes comfortable, you need to introduce different movements and/or add more weight. Weights should not be so light that they don't challenge your body to build muscle. If you can do 20 reps with your weights, then they are too light and you need to switch to heavier ones.

While arguments have been made on both sides for the best time of day to exercise, the differences are slight, and the best time of day is whatever works into YOUR schedule! So, whether you like to work out in the morning or the evening, be sure to include some activity in every day! The time to start moving is now.

Life Changing Bread

The Life Changing Loaf of Bread (with some small adjustments)

-- This was a recipe I found on the internet, and though I'm usually a calorie counter, I went out on a limb and made this, even though it has a lot of nuts and seeds, which are a bit higher in calories. I am so glad I did! It's tasty provided you enjoy the ingredients, although many can be substituted, and very equalizing for the gastro-intestinal system! And, if you are a paleo diet follower or low carb, this fits the bill perfectly, minus the oats, which you could replace with coconut flour if you like.

The website is www.mynewroots.org for the original recipe, but I made a few changes. I wanted it for breakfast, so I added a 1/2 cup of chopped raisins, and I felt that mine was still a bit crumbly, so I added a bit more psyllium and a bit more water.

Ingredients:
1 cup / 135g sunflower seeds
½ cup / 90g flax seeds
½ cup / 65g hazelnuts or almonds
1 ½ cups / 145g rolled oats
2 Tbsp. chia seeds
5 Tbsp. psyllium seed husks (4 Tbsp. if using psyllium husk powder)
1 tsp. fine grain sea salt (add ½ tsp. if using coarse salt)
1 Tbsp. maple syrup (for sugar-free diets, use a pinch of stevia)
3 Tbsp. melted coconut oil or ghee
1 ½-2 cups / 350ml water

Directions:
1. In a flexible, silicon loaf pan combine all dry ingredients, stirring well. Whisk maple syrup, oil and water together in a measuring cup. Add this to the dry ingredients and mix very well until everything is completely soaked and dough becomes very thick (if the dough is too thick to stir, add one or two teaspoons of water until the dough is manageable). Smooth out the top with the back of a spoon. Let sit out on the counter for at least 2 hours, or all day or overnight. To ensure the dough is ready, it should retain its shape even when you pull the sides of the loaf pan away from it it.
2. Preheat oven to 350°F / 175°C.
3. Place loaf pan in the oven on the middle rack, and bake for 20 minutes. Remove bread from loaf pan, place it upside down directly on the rack and bake for another 30-40 minutes. Bread is done when it sounds hollow when tapped. Let cool completely before slicing (difficult, but important).
4. Store bread in a tightly sealed container for up to five days. Freezes well too – slice before freezing for quick and easy toast!

Caloric counts for the measurements above.

Sunflower seeds--799

flax seeds--387

almonds--421

oats--910.50

chia seeds--120

psyllium--225

maple syrup--52

coconut oil--351

total per loaf: 3265.50 but, you are going to divide this into about 16 slices, so: 204 per slice of VERY filling, VERY healthy, sugar equalizing, gut stabilizing, gluten free, non-inflammatory "bread".

Melissa Abramovich

ACE CPT, NASM CGT, CPT,

AAHFRP Medical Exercise Specialist

"Excuses are the nails that build houses of failure"