Breakfast, the most important meal of the day?

I've heard over the years that, on average, we will lose 7 years off of our life if we don't eat breakfast almost every morning. I'd have to say breakfast is THE most important meal of the day. I'm not your average person, I eat 6-10 times a day and lift weights 5-7 days a week with heavy cardio worked in. Being into bodybuilding, the affect on my body if I do not have breakfast is more than amplified. My body would be damaged if I didn't eat right when I wake up.

When asleep, we're in a fasted state. However long you're asleep, you aren't eating anything. Just because we're asleep, it doesn't mean our body isn't burning calories. Our BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate) is the rate at which our body burns calories to maintain the same size it is. You can search "BMR Calculator" on Google.com and you'll get multiple calculators, any one of them is fine. Your BMR is how many calories your body burns if it was laying in the same spot for a 24 hour period, it does not take extracurricular activities into account.

My BMR is approximately 2,000 calories. So, if you divide 2,000 by 24 you see that I burn about 83 calories an hour maintaining my current weight. Like I said, I eat 6-10 times a day. I don't go much longer than 2 hours without eating. If I slept for 8 hours, my body has burned approximately 665 calories. If I skipped breakfast and didn't eat until 3 hours after I woke up, my body burned 916 calories. That's a lot of fuel my body is using that I haven't put in, so it starts taking the energy from places in the body that need the energy.

Our body is designed to store back up energy in the form of glycogen (instantly usable energy) in our muscles that it uses if we've exhausted the energy that we consumed. Once this glycogen is used up, the body targets the primary fuel source in our brain. That's right, your brain can stop working properly if you don't eat enough energy. This isn't going to happen if you cut a few hundred calories but it can happen if you do extreme dieting and exercise.

In short, breakfast is the most important meal of the day because our body needs the proper recommend energy to start the day. If we don't eat breakfast, we risk having a more stressful day. Somethings I would  to eat for breakfast include:

Oatmeal with raisins
Peanut butter
Milk
Wheat toast
Whole-grain cereals
Eggs

These are very basic HEALTHY foods that I would recommend eating for breakfast. They're slow digesting and give your body the energy it will need for hours to come. I'm learning how to write articles more and more so I'm sorry if this is a bit sloppy, I will produce better and more informative articles as time goes by. Thank you for taking the time to read this and I hope it helps you out a little bit. Don't forget to eat breakfast!

Simple carbohydrates, the enemy?

Hey everyone! I wanted to type up a quick post on why I believe simple carbohydrates are our enemy. Simple carbohydrates are sugars with only one or two chain molecules. Since food is only turned into energy once it's digested the sugar turns into energy very quickly. If that spike of energy (calories in the sugar) aren't used quickly in some sort of physical activitiy, those calories are more likely to be stored as fat.

Here are a few fun facts about Americas consumption of products that have mass quantities of sugar in them:

• The average American consumes approximately 30 teaspoons of sugar a day, equivalent to 100 pounds a year. 
• The average American consumes 44.7 gallons of soda per year compared to 28.3 gallons of water per year...that's approximately 70,000 calories in soda!
• According to CDC.gov as of 2010, approximately 33.3% of Americans were overweight and 35.9% of Americans not overweight are obese. That means approximately 69.2% of the American population is fat...
• Being overweight/obese leads to many more health concerns including diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and some types of cancer.

Isn't this enough to persuade you to cut back on sugary products? I was about 230 pounds at my heaviest (5'9) and drank at least 2 sodas a day and had multiple packaged snacks and crappy meals on the regular. I was fat, depressed, and insecure with myself. Girls, no matter how nice you are, don't like a fat boy. It's the sad truth but that's what motivated me to lose weight. When I was about 16, I cut all the soda and sugary products from my diet and dropped down to 205 within 6 months. By the time I was 18, I was at an "in alright shape" 190. I'm now 20 years old, weigh 186 at 5'9, and am happy as can be. I've come a long way and hope I can influence people to lose weight and get healthy simply by cutting back sugar and exercising a little bit. 

                                                       April 3rd, 2012 (195 pounds)

                                                                      March 3rd, 2013 (185 pounds)

Typical simple sugar products include:

-Candy

-Maple syrup

-Packaged snacks

-Soda

-Fruit juice (avoid juice sweetened by "High Fructose Corn Syrup" PLEASE!)

-Honey

-Jelly, etc.

You can limit the amount of sugars you consume by looking at the back of a nutrition label and under carbohydrates it will tell you how many of those carbohydrates are soda. Simple sugar is not filling and has very little nutritional value. An alternative to simple sugars would be products or foods containing complex carbohydrates. Complex carbohydrates are sugar molecules with multiple chains, they take longer to digest. As I stated earlier, food is only turned into energy once it's digested. The slower it's digest the longer the energy is going to last and the less likely it is to be stored as fat. Complex carbohydrates are also much more filling and most contain fiber, which helps with the digestion process. Here are some foods and/or products that contain complex carbohydrates:

-Green vegetables

-Whole grains and foods made with whole grains: oatmeal, wheat pasta, whole grain wheat bread.

-Starchy vegetables such as: potatoes, sweet potatoes, corn, squash, pumpkin, etc.

-Beans, lentils, and peas. 

These are not only complex carbohydrates but FULL of nutrients and vitamins that the body needs. Unlike simple carbohydrates, many of these foods have healthy fats and protein that the body needs to rebuild itself.

Take it from me, I've done A LOT of trial and error with my body and have learned quite a bit. I'm not a professional so take my advice with a grain of salt, but I only want to help others and I've done quite a bit of good for myself by cutting a lot of sugar from my diet. I currently try to consume sugar when I first wake up (because our body is in a fasted state and can use a little bit of quick digesting calories) and after my workout when my body also needs energy. Even then, it's only about 15-30 grams of sugar at the most; the rest comes from complex carbohydrate sources. 

I hope this is informational and helps a little bit. Feel free to leave comments or follow my blog, I'm here SOLELY to help others and would love to have followers to read my blogs as I come out with them so I know I'm helping others. Thank you for your time and have a nice day! :D

America the...starving!?

So, according to CDC.gov approximately 68% of America is overweight and over 1/3 of Americans are obese! After taking history and political science classes, I've learned quite a bit about my country's history. (I know people from other countries will read this.) Many English settlers traveled across the ocean to find a new and hopefully improved life in the Americas. Many of these settlers died because their body's were too weak to fight off illnesses, hunger, or the weather. It took many, many trips of settlers to come over until we were finally able to learn how to "colonize". We learned how to have enough food and survive by working together with the land.

Today, America continues to starve. Our "prosperous" country has a lot of food and for good prices, but is this food nutritious? Up until about the late 1980's there were no such thing as "fat kids" in school. You might have your occasional overweight or chunky kid but nothing like we see today. Today, we live such a fast paced on-the-go life that we would much rather go for the more convenient food rather than the healthy more time consuming food. I believe technology has gotten us so lazy to the point of death. Kids would much rather sit on the computer than go outside. They'd much rather play video games than ride their bike. Parents don't understand that they are raising a very, very unhealthy generation.

Food these days is terribly un-nutritious. I'm not one to complain about preservatives or ingredients in food but the number one thing on my list that I believe is killing our youth is high fructose corn syrup. It's a super concentrated sugary syrup that is in pretty much everything you eat or drink that is sweet, even JUICE! That's right, 95% of the juice we drink isn't even actual nutritious juice. It's sugary syrup with added vitamins.
A 12 oz can of coke contains 39 grams of sugar. Who actually only drinks 12 ounces of soda? I usually drank 32 oz or more. That's about 150 calories of energy ALONG with the meal you're eating. The reason this high fructose corn syrup is so bad for us is because it contains fructose, which has been known to cause insulin resistance and diabetes.

The reason we get fat is because we have too many calories that our body doesn't need. Sugars digest VERY quickly and turn into energy FAST. If we don't use that energy, our body naturally stores it for later. This is a survival technique that our body's have developed over thousands of years to survive times of little to no food. The problem with this survival technique, our country consumes WAY TOO MUCH SUGAR and we don't do enough CARDIOVASCULAR ACTIVITY. Just a little something on my mind that I needed to rant about.

This isn't VERY informative but over my years of bodybuilding/diet altering, I've come to the conclusion that many people are unaware of what I've outlined in this very unorganized blog. I promise my next one will be much more organized and detailed, but for now...Carpe Diem!