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Weight Loss Exercise

Should You Limit Carbs on the Paleo Diet?

No two people lose weight in the same way. This is why it is hard to determine how many carbs each person should consume every day. Some people may find that they can lose weight while eating 40 grams of carbs each day, while others have to limit their choices to fewer than 20 grams.

In order to find how many carbs you should be consuming you will need to track your weight loss results. Start off by keeping a food and exercise journal. This way you can review it each week and see exactly what you ate and how many pounds you lost.

You should also take into account your exercise level as well. If you are an athlete training for a sporting event you can eat more carbs than a person who is trying to lose weight.

Even though you have your list of recommended foods for the Paleo Diet they each contain different amounts of calories and carbohydrate levels. Just because a food is listed doesn’t mean you can eat them all day in huge quantities. You should take your overall calories into consideration as well.

A good example of this would be nuts. Yes they are allowed on the Paleo diet but they are also very high in calories. Nuts are best used as a snack and limited to a small handful, around 10-12 nuts each day.

Another area to be careful with carbs and sugars is with fruit. Again fruits are healthy and good for you, but some fruits contain large amounts of sugar. If you are trying to lose more than just a few pounds limit your fruit to one or two pieces per day.

Sweet potatoes are another recommended Paleo food but are also high in calories. Eating a sweet potato is a good choice for lunch if you are planning on an afternoon of high activity, such as gardening. Your body needs energy to perform this task and by eating before exercising you can burn off the calories. It is best to avoid eating sweet potatoes for dinner. You are less likely to be active in the evening and the calories will just sit on your body.

When starting out on the Paleo diet limit your choices of high carbohydrate foods and choose those which are rich in fibre such as vegetable. This will help maximize your weight loss efforts.

By keeping track of how many carbs you consume you can see how your body reacts. If you aren’t losing each week then cut back on your carbs and fruits. As you reach your desired weight loss goal you can slowly add these back in.

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Weight Loss Exercise

Is Creatine The Best Body Building Supplement?


Choosing a body building supplement is not always easy, just because there are so many possibilities. Before you go to the store or go online with credit card in hand to order a truckload of products, check out our guide to creatine. Who should take it and who should not?

Why Take Creatine Body Building Supplement?

One reason for taking creatine is that it gives many of the same benefits as a protein supplement. It is excellent for increasing muscle mass. It is also a natural substance that occurs in the body, so we are not introducing anything new to the body here.

Vegetarians tend to be low on creatine so this is definitely something to consider if you are a vegetarian bodybuilder. Of course you would want to find a vegetarian form of this body building supplement. But it is not only for vegetarians! Anyone wanting to increase muscle mass may benefit from this if not contraindicated for medical reasons (see below).

How Does It Work?

Creatine increases the availability of ATP or adenosine triphosphate. This is the main energy source that muscles use for their power. So if you have more ATP available, you can perform more reps and lift more weight than you otherwise would. This means that you can grow your muscle faster.


Turbulence Training

In other words, creatine does not directly bulk the muscles, but allows your training to be more effective.

How To Take It

Creatine is found in significant quantities in red meat. It would be possible to increase your creatine levels by eating a lot more steak, but of course that comes with a lot of fat and other substances that you might not want in your diet. For this reason, many people prefer to take it in isolated form as a body building supplement. In many cases it comes with aminos, dextrose and other good substances for increasing muscle mass.

There are several different types of creatine body building supplement. Creatine monohydrate was the first type to be developed and is still very popular and effective. Creatine phosphate and citrate are newer variations that are usually more expensive if you compare creatine content gram for gram. That does not necessarily mean they are more effective.

Whatever type you get, it is usually best in powdered form. It is flexible when you want to experiment with your dosage (difficult to do with tablets or capsules) and easily absorbed. You will see liquid creatine on the market but be aware this can be very unpredictable in terms of the amount of creatine that it contains.

The best way to take creatine is to cycle it. Four weeks on and two weeks off is a recommendation that you might want to try.

Who Should Not Take It?

Creatine is not recommended for people with kidney or liver disease. It may affect insulin action so it is best not taken by those with diabetes or other blood sugar related disorders. Like many supplements, it is not recommended for pregnant women or nursing mothers because it cannot be proved safe for them.

Early fears that creatine was dangerous for the general population have been shown to be unfounded by a large volume of research now. It has been shown to be safe for normal healthy individuals. However, anybody considering taking a body building supplement should check it out with their medical advisor.

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Weight Loss Exercise

Keeping a Food Journal for Weight Loss Success

Food Journal

Food Journal

Many of the better, and most successful, weight loss programs either come with a food journal or recommend that you keep one. If you take out a few minutes each day to write down what you eat, when you eat it, how you’re feeling, and other information you may like to include, you can have significantly more success with your weight loss efforts than people who don’t keep a food journal.

Why to have a Food Journal

It’s not necessary to keep a food journal for the rest of your life. After a couple of months, you should have an idea of which foods keep you feeling better and more energized, and which foods cause you problems. You should also have fine-tuned which amounts satisfied you and when you ate too much and how it made you feel.

Here is a list of some of the things you may want to track in your food journal. Remember, no one is going to see this journal but you, so be accurate and honest. That is the only way you will benefit from what you record.

  1. What you ate and in what quantities
  2. Calories, grams of fat, grams of protein, grams of carbohydrates, fiber
  3. Were you really hungry or just craving something?
  4. What time of day did you eat?
  5. What were you doing that may have triggered your desire to eat?
  6. How did you feel right after you ate? Satisfied, over-full, still hungry?
  7. How did you feel about two hours after you ate?

There are many food journals online that you can download and use if you do not have a diet program that includes one. A spread sheet, like those you can make with Microsoft Excel are also good. You can create as many, or as few, columns as you wish and expand the columns to fit any notes you might like to include.

What You Can Learn From a Food Journal

If you are subject to “emotional” eating, or eating when you aren’t really hungry, it is important to identify why. What was the emotional experience you were going through when you felt you needed to eat? Did you enjoy the food, or just bolt it down? Maybe you were having bad feelings that you wanted to suppress, and food worked to “push” down the feelings.

The important thing here is to tie the emotional eating with a particular situation. Then, when you are not caught up in this emotion, calmly think of a way you can satisfy whatever situation the food was solving for you with a non-food response. You may be amazed at how much you mindlessly eat when you are in the throes of an emotion and not really hungry at all. But you won’t get these connections if you don’t keep track in a food journal.

Keeping a food journal is not hard to do and it will go a long way towards insuring your weight loss success.

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