Month: February 2015

Well I have to preface this post with a warning that what I am about to write about is a high fat high calories snack that anyone trying lose will want to always avoid.

Okay, Peanuts and raisins.

This is a great snack for people that have trouble gaining and people that are tying to bulk up. I know that most people are not too interested in bulking up, instead they will want to lose weight.

I remember back a few years working out a lot with weights and having friends that could not gain muscle trying anything to get the calories needed.

What is often the case is that people working in construction or other very intensive outdoor jobs will have trouble gaining weight because work is already burning a lot of calories.

And what you need is a really positive number of calories to gain muscle, so what is the best thing to eat?

Peanuts and Raisins as a Snack

If you eat a cup of peanuts and a cup of raisins together in a bag and eat them you will get about 1200 calories in one fairly small snack.

There are good nutrients in this mixture and bad.

A two cup mixture of peanuts and raisins has about 43 grams of protein, 139 grams of carbohydrates, and 72 grams of fat. These numbers are for non salted peanuts which are a little better for you but the balance of this snack is interesting.

Raisins are high in fueling up carbs, with no fat and no protein. Peanuts on the other had are full of fat and protein with no carbohydrates.

So if you are looking to jump start some gaining this is an interesting, cheap and easy way to gain quickly but if you are not getting lots of exercise in this will be a great way to get fat.

I used to like eating this peanut nad raisin mixture but it has been many years since I have done it myself.

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With kids in the house and priorities everywhere I decided that this year the only way that I would be able to get workouts in would be to keep them short and increase the intensity. Here were my thoughts on the perfect workout for me.

I am not 20 anymore so I knew that I had to be realistic about my goals

I need a quick workout

I wanted to do my whole body in one day

I wanted to be able to recover from workouts but still be able to do cardio on a lot of the exercise days of the week

My Mini Weight Workout

I ended up coming up with a quick 25 minute workout that would be as hard as I could and feel a little wiped for an hour or so but still have my evenings free to spend with my wife and kids.

So here is what I came up with: Circuit training with weights in about 20 minutes.

Warmup, 5 minutes of cardio, either a bike with some lightweights or the elliptical machine

1. Warmup set of really light bench press, shoulder press, and one armed bent over rows across my bench.

2. A long set of the following

• 10 reps Bench press
• 10 reps each of alternating front laterals (front of shoulders), side laterals (side of shoulders) and bent over rear laterals (back of shoulders)
• 10 reps one armed bent over row across bench for each arm
• 10 bicep curls
• 10 tricep extensions
• 10 squats
• 25 each of crunches and leg lifts

This is one long set that takes about 7 or 8 minutes and each exercise is done to exhaustion. I am really winded at the end and it took a bit to figure out how much each exercise should use so that I was done at 10 reps or so

3. Repeat step two – Maybe twice. This means that I am doing two or three circuits in total

4. Stretch a bit, and I am done

This workout has worked really well for me, it is quick and hits every muscle group, actually each muscle group is really hit hard and I am pretty shaky by the end of the workout.

I do this workout three times a week on alternating days and it does not really cut into my schedule much.

Of course this is only one kind of workout, you would want to change things up exercise and rep-wise and probably change to a longer workout at times during the year to really shock the muscles on a regular basis.

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Breads and Vegetables? What do these have in common? Not much. The reason that we want to consider these two staples of a diet is for opposite reasons.

Are All Carbohydrates bad?

Breads are a nightmare for many people trying to cut down on the carbs in their diet. There is good reason to cut the carbs as most people are taking in to many carbs in the first place.

In saying that cutting down carbs is good I am not writing about a zero carb policy like with the Atkins diet but instead just talking about cutting a quarter or half of your carbs out and not replacing them and thus you will have cut your calorie intake quite substantially.

Bread as any diabetic can tell you is a very addictive food.

To most people the cutting of bread from their diet is one of the biggest sacrifices they can make and once it is out of your diet for a week or two you will feel better and will not have those cravings anymore.

I know this from experience as I have a bagel every morning (equivalent to 5 slices of bread) and for a week I went without and felt badly in the morning but by the next week I was not missing it at all.

Vegetables are a great Carbohydrate

Vegetables are also carbs but are much better for you and in the typical North American diet most of us would be very short of the six or so servings that we should have. The advantages to increasing your vegetables are threefold.

1. First vegetables are fairly high in Water and fiber which helps your body to keep everything running smooth.
2. Secondly vegetables are a great source for most of your vitamins and minerals and..
3. Thirdly vegetables are filling and will keep you from getting up after your meal to grab something sweet.

So when you are trying to figure out what the differences are between carbohydrates, and you certainly aren’t alone in this, every diet seems to day either high or low carbs and sometimes diets are not clear on differentiating between carbs.

You can also think about the living or non living test. If you were to bury a loaf of bread in the ground there is no way it would grow (well maybe seeds on top if there are any) the bread would just rot.

If you were to put a vegetable in the ground you would think that there is a chance that it would re-root itself – think of carrots and celery. So this is a great method to think about the idea of living an non living foods

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