An everyday healthy diet should include some forms of fats, preferably the “good” ones, as they can be beneficial to your heart health. There are many different kinds of fats found in foods and it can sometimes be confusing, so let’s look at them and figure out which ones you can keep in your diet, and which of those we should eliminate.

There are 2 main types of fats: unsaturated fats (good fats) and saturated fats (bad fats). It is recommended by many health organisations worldwide that for a healthy or low fat diet you should include foods that contain good fats.

Unsaturated fats are “good” fats as they can help to improve blood cholesterol levels, reduce inflammation and maintain a healthy heart. Unsaturated fats are predominately found in plant foods like; vegetable oils, nuts, seeds and fish. There are 2 types of unsaturated fats: monounsaturated fats which help to lower LDL (low density cholesterol, the bad cholesterol), and raise HDL (high density cholesterol, the good cholesterol). Foods such as olive oil, canola oil, avocados, some nuts (almonds, hazelnuts, pecans), and sesame and pumpkin seeds are all high in monounsaturated fats. Polyunsaturated fats are great to help prevent heart disease, lower blood pressure and aid in brain development. Great food sources include flaxseed oil, sunflower oil, soya beans, walnuts, and oily fish. Both types of unsaturated fats should be included in your diet, preferably instead of saturated fats.

Saturated fats are the “bad” fats and having too much of this in your diet will cause your body to increase its total cholesterol levels by increasing your LDL levels, thereby increasing your risk of heart disease. An important point to remember is that the mix of saturated and unsaturated fats in your diet, not the amount of cholesterol you eat from food, is what has a greater influence of your total cholesterol levels. Saturated fats are mostly found in animal products like meats and chicken with skin, and full cream dairy products (milk, cheese and ice-cream). There are a few plant-based products which are high in saturated fats, namely coconut oil and palm oil. These types of food should be limited in your diet and always try to opt for a low fat option.

The best piece of advice in reference to fats is to try to limit the amount of saturated fats (from red meats and full cream dairy products), and replace them with unsaturated fats. This way your body will receive the important fats it needs to function efficiently.

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Since our last nutritional post we have had a lot of our clients asking us about the best snack choices.

So that is the theme of this weeks nutritional post.

You might be thinking that snacks are what you need to stay away from if you are trying to look after yourself. However they are crucial in helping you achieve long term health and weight control.

Whether you are after muscle gain, increased performance or weight loss, ensuring you have adequate fuel through out the day and a consistent blood sugar level will prevent you from getting overly hungry. When we are hungry and haven’t planned adequately we tend to snack on the wrong types of foods to give ourselves a quick kick of energy. This is what we are trying to avoid.

So what are the best things for us to snack on?

Well particularly for body fat loss, as that is what most people want to know about, protein is one of the best options to help you ward off hunger. But it is important to remember what we brought up in our last nutritional post. Relying on supplements and foods that are artificially produced is not the best option. Look for unprocessed whole food sources of protein first! Portein bars and powders definitely have their place, especially when we are talking about rapid uptake post exercise. However as a general rule you need to focus on real food when snacking just as much as at your main meals.

Now we need don’t want to get stuck on just eating protein when snacking. It is not a magic bullet. We need to address the other macronutrients as well (macronutrients are your grouped nutrients of carbohydrates, fats and protein). Would your dinner consist entirely of protein? A steak or chicken breast on it’s own is no one’s idea of a complete meal option (and if it is that’s got to change pretty quickly), so why should your snacks be any different. Snacks should have a little from each macro nutrient group.

Remember carbohydrates are not the enemy. Your body wants and needs to run on it. But as we mentioned last week in “Eat real food and your body will see real benefits” you need to make your body work for the energy it is to get. Your snacks need to be viewed in the same way. Go for things with as little human intervention as possible. Things your body needs to work at to unlock the energy.

It is also important to remember all of your snacks need to be just as controlled in their portion size as your main meals are. Get carried away and you will be fighting an up hill battle and may end up putting on body fat.

If you are someone who is not currently eating snacks and you want to add them into your diet something will have to give. It is not enough just to add a morning and afternoon snack into your day or you are just eating more each day. You will need to cut back the size of your breakfast, lunch and dinner. The plan is that you will be able to do this without getting hungry as you will be stabilising your blood sugar level across the day and avoiding a big drop off in energy.

Remember we want you to combine carbohydrates, proteins and fats for the ideal snack options.

Now that all of that is said and done here is my list of snacks that get my tick of approval:

• Fruit
• Fruit salad (always a better option as variety will help, but watch your portions)
• Dried fruit
• Fruit balls
• Berries
• Olives
• Naturally fermented pickles
• Tuna
• Sashimi
• Smoked salmon
• Shredded turkey
• Shredded chicken
• Lean ham
• Nuts (unsalted!)
• Hard boiled eggs
• Simple omelette
• Seaweed salad
• Sunflower seeds
• Pumpkin seeds
• Trail mix
• Avocado
• High quality natural full fat yoghurt (yes full fat, not low fat and full of refined sugars)

Remember to watch your portion size with all of these as it is easy to get carried away. Take your snacks to work with you daily in tupperware containers so as you take only as much as you need for morning or afternoon. Otherwise you might end up polishing off a whole packet of almonds or something similar.

Suggestions for the list?

Questions about things I have included? Let’s hear em!

I hope you had a refreshing break and are raring to get stuck into some training.

For todays workout we are going to see just how strong you are with a 1RM (1 Rep Max) strength test. So for this one make sure you have a partner to spot you.

We are going to do 3 exercises

Bench Press –  Lay flat on the bench, lower bar down towards your sternum, stopping about 5cm off your chest, press the bar back up.

Deadlift - Start with the weight on the bar on the floor, with knees bent and back flat. Rise to an upright position while holding the bar.

Chin Up - Hold onto a chin up bar and pull yourself up until your chin is over the top of the bar. 

After a good warm up, start with a challenging weight and do 1 rep, if you can complete the rep add more weight on and repeat after a couple of minutes rest. Your final result will be the last weight you can successfully lift on your own. Ideally your starting weight will allow you to find this within 4 or 5 attempts.

You can add weight to the chin ups through the use of weight belt,chains, powerbands and a few other aids.

Remember to post you results below

This is my story about the transition that I undertook to change my life.

Well… Where do I start… I have been a big person for most of my life. From at least the age of 10 onwards I have always struggled with my weight…

I’ll cut the story a little short or we would be here forever. Let’s just say I had tried everything under the sun when it comes to weight loss. You name it and I tell you, I have done it.

In the year of November 2002 I got married at the weight of 108kgs. I had actually already lost 10kgs for my wedding at that point. My struggle with my weight became especially hard after I got married. I managed to gain another 32kgs in the next 4 years. I was pushing the 140kg mark. I thought that I was happy, but deep down I really wasn’t. My personality changed in those years of weight gain.

At the time I was trying to fall pregnant but something just wasn’t working. I went through the first couple of stages of the IVF program three times to see if I could make it work. In the end it didn’t. The only thing that was left to do was to try to lose weight and take care of myself first, on the inside and out! Something I should have addressed years earlier.

At the time l did a lot of research, about how to lose weight and how to better take care of myself. Finally l found something that I knew in the end would change my life for the better. I decided to get a Lap-Band, which in other words means Bariatric Surgery. But I knew that if I was going to do this, it wasn’t going to be easy at all. If this was going to help me fix my weight problem forever, it wasn’t going to do it on its own. It was going to be very hard work. That’s how personal training came into my life and helped me get to where I am today.

When I decided go ahead with the surgery, after all of my research, I knew that it wasn’t going to do it all for me. I had to do the hard yards to make it work. Knowing the type of personal I am, and the fact that I had tried almost everything else out there, I looked into personal training. I knew this would force me to make the commitment to myself that I desperately needed to make. I went through the Yellow Pages and trawled through the internet for over a month before the operation. I made A LOT of phone calls. In doing this I asked a lot of questions of everyone I contacted. One of the main things was that I needed someone that would help me through this process from start to finish, no matter what! I wanted a mobile personal trainer. I wanted to be trained at home and to have someone with knowledge about the lap-band surgery and what I needed to do to recover from the surgery and move forward healthily. I wanted to ensure exercise and a healthy lifestyle was something I continued with, for the long term this time!

Finding the right person was not an easy task to achieve. Just when I was giving up hope I called Luke Scott from Revolution and talked to him about my situation. At first as Lap-Band surgery was quite new back in 2004 he mentioned he didn’t know a lot about the surgery. He was willing, however, to find out as much as he could about it and how it would impact on my training before he started working with me. We could tackle this big problem together!

Well, I thought l’m going to give this guy a go, and got him to come and see me at home to discuss what, when, where and how we were going to get me to where I so desperately wanted to be!

Luke did come to see me, and I tell you, it was the best thing l have ever done in my life. It was true that it was going to be a learning process for both of us.

I started doing things that I never thought I could. I started training with Luke 3 times a week and on my own on the days that we didn’t train. He made me keep a diary of food that he would check it every time he saw me, he would ask me questions regarding my eating, my sleep, my energy levels, my water intake. There was none of this “I feel tired today, I can’t exercise” crap that I had convinced myself of in the past. He would not have a bar of it. Rain, hail or shine I exercised my butt off!

At the end of all this, if Luke told me to jump, I would say how high! All jokes aside, I haven’t been so happy and fit in my life for a very long time, and for this I owe Luke a huge thank you for getting me to where I am today. So if you are struggling with anything regarding weight loss or self esteem I would recommend seeing someone from Revolution Personal Training, and have a crack at changing your life forever. Trust me when I say it does work, but only if you want it to work and are prepared to put in the hard work and sweat. It doesn’t work on its own, you need to help it along to get where you want to get to be.

From doing this, now I have moved on with my personal life; I’m the happiest I have ever been. I am about to remarry my first true love of my life in February 2012!

I hope you enjoyed my story and that maybe I have inspired you to do something for yourself.

Connie.

Here are some photos of my transformation:

In 2011 I discovered that especially with our Group Personal Training customers, you were all working incredibly hard both within your sessions and with your homework, but falling over when it came to probably the most vital thing that was standing between yourself and your goals. Your nutrition.

Our One on One Personal Training clients seemed to fare much better than our Group Personal Training clients in the nutritional stakes as they have the opportunity week in, week out, to pick our brains with the most important questions they have on nutrition, and trial what works and what doesn’t work for them. Wether it be for weight loss, increased performance, muscle gain or just over all well being they can ask the questions and get the answers they need. This has seemed to be a little harder to do effectively in a group environment.

So this is the first step in trying to fix this.

We want this to be interactive! We want you to ask questions here on our blog in the comments section so as others can see the issues you are having and we can respond to them. I’m sure many others have the same questions and problems you are having. Don’t worry you can do it anonymously if you wish! Just make sure you come up with a witty screen name, not something like “Ben Dover”.

So to kick things off, one of the most important things we believe you need to focus on for long term health and wellbeing is to eat unprocessed whole foods.

This means eating as little out of a packet as you can. Stay away from anything that has had human intervention wherever possible as a basic rule. Or as I’ve heard a few times, stick to the outside isles of your supermarket. Never stray down the inner isles as they are evil! The outside isles are where you will find all of the best things for your body, fresh fruit and vegetables, meat and fish.

Why should you aim for unprocessed whole foods? Well, through the processing process of most foods some of the nutrtients are lost and part of your bodies job in digestion has been done for you. So essentially all your digestive system needs to do is act like a bit of a vacuum and suck up whats left over. Foods that are very highly processed have an extremely fast update into your blood stream.

This might sound like a good thing, and in some small cases it is. As a general rule however it is a bad thing. To put this in context think of a bag of glucose lollies, one of the fast things your body can absorb. The reason a small child is bouncing off the walls almost immediately when they eat a whole packet of glucose lollies is because it has had an immediate effect of their blood glucose levels and they are running on rocket fuel! Their small bodies have less of a potential to lower that blood glucose level as quickly as an adult and therefore some crazy behaviour will be the result and possibly a headache for their parents. What we want to do, particularly for those of you who are after weight loss is provide you with a slow and constant drip feed of energy, not a shot of “Nos” like the glucose lollies.

By eating foods that your body needs to work for to get energy out of the digestion process itself will slow the release of the nutrients into your blood stream. This way you can hopefully use these nutrients more effectively as they are released.

So for long term health as well as for weight loss and body fat regulation we need to make our bodies work for their nutrients. We need our digestive systems to stop being sluggish. We need to eat whole foods.

A good way to think of it is this. Can you imagine what you are eating as a living thing? A beautifully cooked salmon fillet isn’t too hard to imagine as something that was swimming out in the ocean a day or so earlier, a birds eye fish finger how ever, well thats a bit of a stretch…

So for week one of your training for 2012, week two of this new year, your focus is to be on eating as unprocessed as possible, wherever possible.

Eat real food and your body will see really benefits.

Remember we would love to hear your comments and we will respond as best and quickly as we can to help you with your eating. Don’t forget next week we will have another topic for you to focus on so any suggestions would be welcomed!

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For your Christmas workout we are going to be using 2 of every ones favourite pieces of equipment, the Sled and the Kettlebells.

As for the workout, well thats is pretty straight forward.

You have 10 minutes to do as many rounds as you can or the following

50 x Kettlebell Swing (Hold on to the kettlebell with both hands. Using your hips to drive the motion swing the kettlebell in a pendulum motion. 

10 x 10m Sled Push (Pretty simple, get down low and push the sled)

Enjoy the workout, comment below to let us know your time. 

From all of us at Revolution Personal Training South Melbourne have a Merry Christmas!

So what did the members of Team Revolution do… Walked 50 km’s! The Upstream Challenge is a 50km walk from Docklands to Donvale raising money for Camp Quality, Disability Sport and Recreation, Entrust Foundation and Leprosy Mission Australia.

We kicked off at 7:00am from the Docklands. The walked started with the rain staying at bay – but at about 10km’s the heavens opened and we got saturated. From then on the day just got more wet with no opportunity to dry out. The walk was a really great experience but also a mentally exhausting challenge.

After our clothes dried out, and our body and blisters recovered we had forgotten the rain and remembered how fun the 50km walk was. Next year Team Revolution will be doing it again with the goal to beat this year’s placing finishing as the 9th team, completing the walk in 8 hours flat. We will also aim to beat our fundraising effort next time around.

Thank you to all of our supporters: fundraisers, support crew along the way and a Team members mum picking us up at the end! Team Revolution raised $460.00 and finished the walk in 9^th Place! So next year join Team Revolution and be part of something great for charities that need our help!

Another great benefit of eggs is that they are good for eye health; eggs contain a high level of 2 important carotenoids: lutein and zeaxanthin. They are essential for our body and help to prevent macular degeneration and cataracts, eye diseases that come with age.

Eggs are also great for healthy hair and nails. As they contain a high amount of the compound sulphur (and other vitamins and minerals), they are reported to help your hair grow faster, stronger and healthier. You can either consume more eggs in your diet; around 1-2 a day has been reported as ok, or even use eggs as a mask to wash your hair.

There have been numerous studies that state that people who consume eggs for breakfast on a regular basis are more likely to experience weight loss. People are more likely to lose more weight than those who consume a carbohydrate breakfast, as well as increased energy levels and a feeling of satiety.

Now the most important point, eggs (the yolks) are high in cholesterol; however you don’t need to be scared about eating them. Many recent studies are now stating that eggs are ok to include in your daily diet as it is saturated fats, not cholesterol found in eggs, that will increase your blood cholesterol levels. So eggs are the good guys here – they are a great source of good fats.

Like most foods, the way you cook eggs will affect their nutritional value. When the yolk of the egg is broken (and scrambled) and cooked, the proteins and fats are damaged and destroyed. Therefore vary how you have your eggs, boiled, poached, and occasionally scrambled and you can enjoy the many benefits that eggs have to offer.

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The workout for this week is:

10 Rounds for time of:

10 Chin Ups  (Reaching to a bar above head height pull your body weight up until chin is about the bar)

10 Push Press (Hold a barbell in a rack position across the front of your shoulders, perform a shallow squat, as you forcefully raise also push the bar above your head.)

10 Deadlift (Start with barbell of the floor, bend from hips, knees and ankles. Keeping your heels on the floor hold onto barbell and stand)

Do 10 rounds of theses exercise and post your time below.

Good Luck

For todays kettlebell training session you will need to set yourself up a timer, set for 10 minutes. In the 10 minutes you have to try and do as many reps as possible of the sequence below.

Kettlebell Swing: Hold the kettlebell in one hand with your arm straight down, pull your hips back and thrust forward, using the momentum to keep the kettlebell travelling up to level with your shoulders.

Kettlebell Clean:  Use the same thrusting motion as the swing but this time rather than keeping your arms straight bend your elbow and pull the kettlebell in and hold in front of your chest.

Kettlebell Press: Press the kettlebell above your head.

Kettlebell Overhead Squat: Continuing to hold the kettlebell above your head perform a squat

Kettlebell Snatch: Again using the hip thrusting motion, but this time getting the kettlebell to a position straigh aboce your head, with you arm locked out.

Go through this sequence once and then change sides and repeat. do this as many times as possible in 10 minutes, remember to post your times below.