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"How To Design A Nutrition Plan To Gain Muscle And Lose Fat All Year Around"

By Chris Hill

How To Design A Nutrition Plan To Gain Muscle And Lose Fat All Year Around.

Educated business people are usually successful,but not always when it comes to designing a nutrition plan that will allow them to gain muscle and lose fat. They have learned that educating themselves, seeking the advice of others, and looking for more opportunities are the keys to prosperity. We say "generally successful" simply because many intelligent business professionals frequently overlook their health while on life's journey to become wealthy. On the whole, most working people have erratic schedules and let their fitness and dietary plans suffer.

Attacking your fitness program twice a week with the same tenacity as making a business move will likely lead to injury. Instead, you should have a well-planned and moderate fitness program that is completed three to four times per week. Moderation and consistency are the key to any long term fitness plan. I cannot stress this enough. Without a shadow of a doubt, you will increase results, decrease body fat, lower cholesterol, and have more restful sleep when you follow a moderate and consistent fitness plan.

There are some important questions to consider when making the decision to get fit. Most people begin by lifting too much weight in the beginning stages of their weight training program. Learning correct technique is much more important than throwing around 15-20 extra pounds of weight to impress others. When it comes to cardiovascular training, the common mistakes include using improper shoes for running, and operating a "cardio" machine at too high of an intensity level and using improper form.

A mistake that will dilute any hopes of a bikini body is the idea that cardiovascular exercise is all you'll need to acquire a lean body. There is enough data to fill an entire book to prove that you need weight training to optimize your fat loss. You need to complete both weight training and cardiovascular exercise for the best and most expeditious results.

Without going through a fitness assessment it is virtually impossible to know about you as an individual, it is not possible to tell you the specifics of how your program should be developed. You must seek the advice of experts in whichever type of program that interests you. When you research a personal trainer, look at his or her education, years of experience, certifying organization, personal appearance and references.

Your trainer should have a degree in a health-related field and/or certifications in his or her area of expertise. Practical experience is equally important. I have hired trainers with master's degrees who have a difficult time teaching. As for their appearance, they should be well-groomed, fit, and well-spoken. If your trainer takes pride in himself or herself, they will transfer those traits to your training program and the respect they give to you.

References are a great way to gain knowledge of an individual's fitness training business practices. Ask your friends or physician. Many business clients have atrocious eating habits. I have found over the years and after working with hundreds of clients that eating habits are the number one reason for failure in attaining optimal health and fitness. The habit of eating a balanced satisfying meal is very often the missing link in optimal health and fitness for busy professionals.

How can a busy professional gain muscle and lose fat? Who should you believe when seeking nutritional advice? To answer this question, first consider the difference between a Registered Dietitian (RD) and a nutritionist. Because we are bombarded with so much nutritional information it is very hard to decipher whether the source is legitimate or not. So be careful and let results of your trainer be an indicator of their knowledge.

What and when should you eat? There is so much contradictory nutritional information out there including: eat carbohydrates or don't eat carbohydrates; eat before going to bed, do not eat three hours before bed, or do not eat after 6 p.m.; combine foods, or do not combine foods. It appears that there is no end to this litany; hence, you should ignore the folklore and the hype and get your nutrition information only from an expert in the field.

Many of my clients travel frequently. These clients are constantly eating on the run. My clients usually come to me with the same goals: loose weight, tone up and increase their energy. Although one may think that these are mostly aesthetic concerns, the truth is that body composition or one’s body fat percentage is a true measure of health as opposed to how much they weigh.

You may even be surprised to find that a pint of water (two cups) weighs a pound; and that you may gain or lose a pound or more during a strenuous workout session. Thus, your success or progress cannot be based on your body weight. In fact, as you start to exercise, your body starts to store more "glycogen" in your muscle cells.

This can be called our fuel, which is simply many glucose or blood sugar molecules hooked together and stored in your muscles and body cells for later use. These glycogen molecules are so highly concentrated that your body must also store water in your cells along with glycogen in a ratio of 1:3 (one molecule of glycogen to three molecules of water). Because water weighs a pound for every pint and glycogen also weighs considerably, your weight is sure to increase as you increase your exercise levels, and your glycogen and water storage increases in response to the increase in exercise.

The more you exercise, the more your body begins to store glycogen and water. In the body there are thousands of cells that fill up with glycogen and water so you can use it as fuel next time you exercise, causing an increase in body weight, but not necessarily in body fat. The only way to know the difference is to measure your body fat percentage regularly.

If you see a gain in muscle and a loss in fat you know you have a perfectly designed fitness and meal plan. If you see a gain in muscle and a gain in fat, you know the meal plan includes too many calories. Finally, if you see a gain in fat and a loss in muscle you know you are either not eating enough protein, or not eating enough calories, or over exercising. This is why it is critical to log your foods and let your trainer help determine a "baseline" on how your metabolism is working and how it reacts to the nutrition and exercise plan designed for you.

Typically, four to six weeks of observation is enough time for making adjustments until the right trend is established. At that time, you may reduce your food log to one week out of every three. After you have reached your muscle mass goals and body-fat goals, you can meet once every four weeks with your trainer about nutrition to make sure you continue down the correct path and/or establish a maintenance program, depending on what your goals are.

As trainers we help you achieve their goals of gaining muscle and losing body fat by teaching them three basic rules of success that are easy to follow no matter where they are. Before we discuss the rules, let's review how fat is stored in our body. Food consists of three macronutrients, namely, carbohydrates (CHOs), fats, and proteins.

Whenever we eat CHOs they first go to the stomach where they are digested, and then proceed to the intestines where they are absorbed into the bloodstream in the form of glucose (blood sugar). As blood glucose levels rise, the body secretes insulin, a hormone that is responsible for storing glucose in muscle and organ cells in the form of glycogen. Normal blood glucose levels are between 80 and 120 mg/dl, and whenever blood glucose levels fall below 80mg/dl we feel hungry.

If the glucose concentration were to fall well below 80 mg/dl the body would react by slowing down its metabolism to save energy. Of primary importance to us, however, is the fact that whenever our blood glucose levels rise above 120 mg/dl the residual glucose is stored as fat. So the secret to dietary success is to control blood glucose levels throughout the entire day as a means of maintaining high metabolism and therefore minimizing fat storage, while at the same time avoiding overeating.

Because blood glucose control is very important in controlling diabetes, many studies have been conducted to determine how different foods affect blood glucose levels. One study is the "gastric emptying time test," or how long it takes food to leave the stomach. The reason this is a very important study is that the faster something leaves the stomach, the faster it causes blood glucose levels to rise. Usually, the faster blood glucose levels rise, the more effectively glucose gets stored as fat (due to larger insulin secretions), and therefore, the more quickly blood glucose levels drop causing hunger pangs.

Gastric emptying time studies show that the longest time that CHOs will stay in the stomach is one hour. In contrast, protein will stay in the stomach two hours, and fats from three to five hours. This is why you find yourself getting hungry 20 to 40 minutes after having a piece of fruit, or some bread, pasta, rice, veggies, or even some cereal. And this is also why you feel stuffed for four hours after having a high fat meal.

We also found that when you combine a protein with a carbohydrate, both the protein and the fat (since most proteins have some fat in them) cause the carbohydrate to stay in the stomach longer (approximately three and a half to four hours), which basically means that this increases gastric emptying time, a good thing, because a longer gastric emptying time also means a slow and controlled increase in blood glucose, which lessens the chances of storing a large portion of this meal as fat due to a fast rise in blood glucose. A longer gastric emptying time also means mild successive increases and decreases in blood glucose levels caused by the longer time that it takes for food to leave your stomach. As a consequence you are satisfied longer, doing away with your sweet cravings which usually arise as a means of raising low blood glucose levels after a quick drop.

With this understanding, it makes sense to eat protein every time you eat a carbohydrate. This will increase the gastric emptying time, lessen blood glucose swings, and satisfy your appetite. This raises the question, "what is a protein?" Even today after all those fad protein diets, people are still confused about the difference between a protein and a carbohydrate.

One way to remember is: If it walks, swims, or flies, it is a protein; if it comes from a plant, it is a carbohydrate. Indeed beans are high in protein, as are many other legumes, plants and even some vegetables. However, in an effort to simplify things and to justify our generalization, we have looked at the largest component of a food, and grouped foods based on this component.

Therefore, even though a 1-cup serving of beans has 15g of protein, it also contains 40g of carbohydrates - beans are therefore categorized a carbohydrate. In an analogous fashion, although an avocado is a fruit, because of its high fat content it is considered a fat. And although milk and yogurt come from cows' milk, following the same logic, both milk and yogurt are categorized as a carbohydrates.

Given the fast gastric emptying time of carbohydrates, no wonder you can be hungry by the time you get to your office after having a bowl of cereal with milk, several pieces of toast with jam or jelly, and a glass of OJ! These are all carbohydrates that leave your stomach quickly, raise your blood glucose levels quickly, causing an insulin secretion that most likely stores everything you ate for breakfast as fat, all the while rapidly lowering your blood glucose levels. You then go until 1 or 2 p.m. without eating, further slowing down your metabolism (remember, low blood glucose levels cause your metabolism to put on the brakes) which will most likely cause you to overeat at lunch or if you are "disciplined enough" and just have a salad for lunch, by the time you have dinner at around 7:30-8:00pm you find that you are ravenous and cannot be satiated no matter what or how much you eat.

But stop! Haven't you heard that you are not supposed to eat after 6:00pm? So, you might as well go to bed hungry. After all, once you fall asleep, you won't need any energy, will you? The truth of the matter is that the human body will do anything to survive. Since fat is long-term stored energy, the human body will forgo burning fat and will go through a process called "gluconeogenesis," which simply forms new glucose."

Sounds harmless until you realize that the pathway by which new glucose is formed is by secreting cortisol, a hormone responsible for breaking down muscle tissue and turning it into sugar or glucose, so that you can continue to breathe, walk, talk, think, exercise, etc. So even though you think you are not eating, you are eating the most important tissue we use for fat loss - you are eating your own muscle -slowing down your metabolism, and storing fat.

This is completely opposite of what we need to happen. Because muscle weighs more than fat (muscle takes about two thirds less room than fat for the same weight), as you eat your muscle you lose weight, so, there is no reason to weigh and get excited about seeing lower numbers on the scale! In the worst case, your body may be entering a downward spiral of continual fat storage and suppressed metabolic rate...hmmm, something to think about.

Based on gastric emptying studies and blood glucose control we've come up with three basic rules to help you keep your muscle mass, and get rid of fat.
Rule No. 1 is to eat every three and a half to four hours whether you are hungry or not.
Rule No. 2 - the most important rule - is to eat protein every time you eat a carbohydrate. Of course, we want the protein to be low in fat.
Before getting to the third rule, let's discuss carbohydrate servings. As blood glucose control is the most important aspect of a nutrition and exercise program, and given that the only macronutrients that really have an effect on blood glucose levels are carbohydrates, we must be able to determine in some fashion what is an appropriate portion of carbohydrates. Along with a portion of carbohydrates, we also must determine a portion of protein and a portion of fat so that we can not only control blood glucose levels but also control our calories.

There was a study conducted by the American Diabetes Association that determined how small a carbohydrate dose it would take to raise blood glucose levels a noticeable amount. It turns out that it took exactly 15g of carbohydrates to do it. Because the word "serving" had already been used by millions of manufacturers of food products we could not just redefine the word.

The ADAs decided to come up with their own name for a serving and decided to call a 15g-serving of carbohydrates an "exchange." Therefore, even though an entire English muffin may be one serving, since it has 30g of carbohydrates it is considered two exchanges. So, instead of having a cup of oatmeal every morning, you're actually having two carbohydrate exchanges. You may very well choose oatmeal, bread, cereal, pasta, rice, potatoes, pancakes, muffins, etc., until you reach the prescribed number of 30g of carbohydrates or two exchanges.
Rule No. 3 is to become aware of what an exchange is and how many you need per day as well as in what combination.

A nutrition professional can simply use a formula to estimate your basal metabolism rate (BMR). This formula takes into account your gender, present weight, height, and age. Once your BMR is calculated, the next step is to calculate your sedentary activity calories, or simply put, how many calories you burn in a day that has no exercise.

The next step is to determine how many calories you do burn while exercising. Once we figure all these calories out and add a few other constants based on your body fat percentage, frequency and duration of exercise, we move on to designing an ideal meal pattern for you.

A qualified nutritionist can put together a sound meal plan based on your BMR and your exercise activities. The number of carbohydrate exchanges you will be eating per day depends on your weekly cardiovascular and daily living activities. In contrast, the number of protein exchanges that you will be eating per day depends on your body weight as well as the type of exercise routine prescribed for you. Finally, the number of fat exchanges that you will be eating per day will be the equivalent of 15 to 30 percent of your total caloric intake. Such a balanced meal plan will ensure that you attain your goals of gaining or maintaining muscle mass while losing body fat.

About the Author:

Chris Hill is a NSCA certified personal trainer. He is the owner of Personally Fit by Chris Hill Inc. His website is www.personallyfitbychrishill.com