Bodycomp News & Views Issue#28 June 2012

In this issue:

  1. Compound Interest on your Body
  2. Breakfast shoot-out: 3 hard boiled eggs versus 500ml Orange juice

 

Breakfast shoot-out:

 

Orange juice vs hard boiled eggs
 

protein (g)

carbs (g)

fat (g)

 cal

OJ

500ml

 4 49 2 230

Egg

3 med

 17.5 0.9 13.2 192

 

Winner - eggs by a landslide. Much more protein and fat to keep you going with minimal carbs to keep you from crashing before noon.

 

Orange juice (1 cup or 250ml) - let's be honest. You would have had twice this much.

 

Hard boiled egg - one medium - they don't stink nearly as badly if you don't overcook them.



Compound Interest on your Body:


One of the concepts that I try and get across to my clients is that there's an enormous benefit so small changes to diet and fitness that stay with you. A classic example of this would be switching out a glass of juice for water at breakfast. A 500ml glass contains 50g of fructose that wouldn't satisfy your appetite but would use up half of the suggested daily carbs for those trying to reduce body fat.

That same 200 calories could allow for the consumption of two scoops of protein powder at equivalent calories or three medium hard boiled eggs. This simple little switch would look the same calorically, but could promote gradual but significant changes to body composition, especially if the individual was deficient on protein intake as many of my clients are.

Now where does the finance angle come to play? It's the cumulative increase in lean mass on your body - lean mass that is burning more calories at rest, allowing you to push harder and stronger in your workouts, and allowing you to enjoy the metabolic effects of excess post-exercise oxygen consumption.

Now it's unlikely that one will gain lean mass with just an increase of protein at breakfast unless the body is seriously lacking nutritionally. However, it doesn't take much duration of body weight exercise to trigger this effect. If you are incredibly crunched for time, I would suggest that introducing 25 burpees in the morning and building to 75 per day is one of the best uses of your time. They are free, require no equipment, work most major muscle groups and make you look and feel good.

Crossfit burpee demo on youtube

That's my simple but relatively appropriate financial analogy. While some individuals will make massive transformations to their routine, I prefer to adapt small quality changes that I plan on keeping with permanently. This seems to maximize gains in my world, but like investing, takes time, patience and an effort to stay away from "day-trading" with your health.

 

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