The Protein Corner

How To Practice Mindful Eating You’ve likely heard about the benefits of mindful eating, but you may be wondering how to practice mindful eating.  The mindful eating movement has recently taken the health, wellness, and nutrition realm by storm. Based on how successful our members have been after utilizing mindful eating, I’m here to say it’s for good reason, too! If you’re looking to learn how to practice mindful eating in a realistic, sustainable way, you’re in the right place.  Why It’s Important to Practice Mindful Eating  When you hear mindful eating, you may picture this meaning chewing your food really slowly or meditating before you eat. While it can look like that if you’d like, that doesn’t truly capture the essence of mindful eating. The purpose of mindful eating is to guide you to be in tune with your body and meal experience so you can make intentional food choices based on what your body is needing, what you’re wanting, and the right amount of balance...

Have you ever heard that you should never eat fewer than A NUMBER of calories every day, like 1,200, 1,500 or 1,800? If you do eat less than this, legend goes, many misfortunes can befall you, including . . . Metabolic damage Extreme hunger Malnutrition Hormonal disruptions Muscle loss Mood disturbances Menstrual irregularities The list jabbers on. I often hear from people who are concerned by this theory because an evidence-based formula or calculator is telling them to eat what they believe is a “dangerously low” number of calories every day. Fortunately, a true universal caloric minimum would be much lower than this because many people simply don’t burn as many calories as they think they do, and even when calories are inappropriately low, the purported consequences are often overblown. For example, a 5’5”, 130-pound woman who exercises 1-to-3 hours per week burns about 1,700 calories per day, and if she wanted to lose about 1 pound of fat per week (moderate weight los...

  In this podcast, I interview Tara, who read Thinner Leaner Stronger and used what she learned to lose a total of 80 pounds, going from “morbidly obese” to super fit. She didn’t just lose a ton of fat, either. Tara gained quite a bit of muscle and got super strong in the process. Before finding TLS, Tara was 204 pounds at 5’5”, and her doctor told her she needed to lose some weight. Like many people, Tara wanted to get in shape, but didn’t know how to do it correctly.  She didn’t know what to eat or what to do in the gym, and like many women, started to do hours of cardio every day. She successfully lost over 60 pounds, but she was skinny fat and even more unhappy with her body than before. Fortunately, she found my work through a conversation she overheard at the gym, and she read TLS. She learned all about macros and lifting weights, and started to train. The weight continued to fall off, and now Tara’s body composition was improving. She was getting stronger and gaini...

Foundational Five Sweet Potato and Greens Bowl This Sweet Potato and Greens Bowl is a delicious way to enjoy a combination of fall flavors and textures!  Sweet potatoes and greens are a staple in many households for their versatility and because they’re readily found in most grocery stores and farmers’ markets. This bowl features a delicious fall ingredient that you may not think to purchase as often — figs.  Not only do figs add a nice sweet flavor to balance out the salty and savory ingredients, but they’re also incredibly fiber-rich, both with soluble and insoluble fiber that help our digestive systems stay regular and keep our blood sugar stable. Figs are also rich in minerals such as manganese, magnesium, calcium, and potassium; all of which are important for cardiovascular health, bone health, and reducing blood pressure. The combination of ingredients in this bowl will hit almost all of your taste buds!  Using the Foundational Five to Create This Balanced Swee...

If you’re “searching for things on the Internet” or “watching YouTube videos” or “reading articles,” some say you aren’t “doing your own research” but merely “consuming content.” This plays well with the peanut gallery because, as Aldous Huxley noted, the opportunity to maltreat others with good conscience, to misbehave as a form of “righteous indignation,” is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.⁣ What is “research,” though?⁣ The hecklers will often say something like, “it’s skillfully reviewing every study you can find on the matter and determining the balance of the evidence.”⁣ If you consult a dictionary, though, research is “studious inquiry or examination.” Ferreting around on the internet to find things to watch, read, and listen to is in fact “doing research,” then. The crux, however, is how you go about it. Are you doing good research? ⁣ And that requires more than just scientific literacy. ⁣ So, can you “do good research” if you’re no...

How many times have you heard that you need to constantly change your workout routine to continue making progress?  That you have to “confuse” and “shock” your muscles into growth by regularly subjecting them to new exercises and workouts? This sounds sensible.  If we want to improve something, whether it be a skill or some aspect of our fitness, we have to continually push boundaries and tackle new challenges.  Wouldn’t that imply, then, that we’d have to regularly subject our muscles to new types of physical demands?  That doing the same workouts every week would result in stagnation?  This is the rationale for changing your weightlifting exercises frequently.  For example, for your leg workout, you might do squats one week, leg press the next, lunges the next, and so on. For your chest workout, you might do barbell bench press one week, dumbbell bench press the next, machine chest press the next, etc.  Although many people train this way, re...

The post How Bob Used Bigger Leaner Stronger to Lose 56 Pounds and 14% Body Fat appeared first on Legion Athletics . https://ift.tt/eA8V8J September 26, 2021 at 06:00PM Legion Athletics

4 Steps to Take to Stop Binge Eating and Feel Peace Around Food Are you trying to stop binge eating? By developing a balanced relationship with food, you can stop binge eating and experience more ease around food.  Binge eating is the most common eating disorder in America. Research shows that 1.25% of women and .42% of men have Binge Eating Disorders. Because of this, many of our members are struggling to stop binge eating when they first join our Mindful Nutrition Method community. Often times they come to us feeling confused, frustrated, and helpless. We never want our Method members to feel this way, and we don’t want any of our community members to feel this way either.  So keep reading to learn about what binge eating is, and how to stop it.  How to Stop Binge Eating After you uncover why you’re binge eating , you can use these steps to support you in breaking this cycle and finding more balance with food.  1. Listen to Hunger and Satiety Cues Our hu...

  I’ve churned through over 150,000 emails, social media comments and messages, and blog comments in the last 6 years. And that means I’ve fielded a ton of questions. As you can imagine, some questions pop up more often than others, and I thought it might be helpful to take a little time every month to choose a few and record and share my answers. So, in this round, I answer the following question: Is reverse pyramid training a good way to train? If you have a question you’d like me to answer, leave a comment below or if you want a faster response, send an email to mike@muscleforlife.com.   Lastly, if you want to support the show, please drop a quick review of it over on iTunes. It really helps!   Timestamps: 3:24 – What is reverse pyramid training (RPT)?   10:56 – Is reverse pyramid training effective?                 14:02 – What are the advantages of reverse py...

You’ve probably heard that if you want to build the body of your dreams you need to front the gym, day in, day out, and give it your all. And that’s true . . . to an extent. You see, if you punish your body with intense workouts for months on end without taking breaks your journey will be marred by . . . Regular plateaus Overuse injuries Lack of motivation Lackluster workouts And that isn’t an effective, efficient, or enjoyable way to go about things. But that’s where deload weeks come in. A deload week is a planned period of rest and recovery that’s designed to help you avoid the pitfalls of constant intense exercise. Implement them correctly, and they’re one of the most effective ways to prevent injuries, plateaus, and burnout. Execute them badly, however, and they’ll either fail to adequately boost recovery, or simply waste time that could be spent doing just about anything else. In this article you’ll learn everything you need to know about how to make deload weeks ...

  Most of us lead busy, hectic lives and we have to face the fact that we’re doing to die with a long to-do list. “Ain’t nobody got time for that,” after all. So it’s no surprise that when life throws you a curveball and your time is suddenly strapped, your training might have to take a backseat.  Other times it’s not obligations that get in the way, but perhaps you just want to spend less time in the gym so that you have more time and energy to devote to other pursuits. Or maybe you’re someone who’s just getting started in the gym and doesn’t want to devote hours every week to getting fit. No matter the reason, the good news is you can easily maintain (or even gain) muscle and strength with surprisingly little training. In this podcast, I interview Dr. Brad Schoenfeld, who recently released a narrative review of what the scientific literature says about time-efficient training.  That is, Brad and his colleagues evaluated the research to determine the most effec...

To unravel the relative value of compound and isolation exercises, it helps to understand what each of these terms mean.  A compound exercise is one that involves more than two joints or muscle groups, such as the barbell squat, deadlift, or bench press.  An isolation exercise emphasizes one joint and muscle group, such as the barbell curl (the elbow/biceps), the leg extension (the knee/quadriceps), or the back extension (the hips/spinal erectors).  Compound exercises are fantastic for gaining muscle and strength. However, some people put them on a pedestal as all you need to fully develop every major muscle group (a group of muscles highly involved in pushing, pulling, and squatting) in your body.  Isolation exercises, they say, may be fun, but they’re superfluous if you do enough squatting, bench pressing, deadlifting, and overhead pressing. Who’s right?  Can you maximize muscle growth and whole-body strength by putting your faith in compound exercis...