So here I am during my new year holiday with my brother in law’s son (age 5 months).

Its awesome that there is no happy response to sweets and ice cream! Next time I see him I will try to make him smile with “vegetables” – possible a harder task! haha

Bak Kwa, yummy but no, not a great idea for a meat replacement

As many of you know, most of our personal training and Singapore fitness boot camp clients at Genesis Gym are usually asked to increase their protein intake with healthy meat sources.

Meat has a good amino acid profile, and it also digests slowly. Improving blood sugar management, and feelings of fullness (so you don’t eat so much bad food).

Since Chinese New Year is coming, one of the common chats in our Singapore gym, goes like this:

Client: “Hey coach, you say we should eat meat right?”

Genesis Coach: “Yes”

Client: “So Bak Kwa is good right? CNY is coming and I love bak kwa!”

Genesis Coach: “Did a caveman have Bak Kwa?”

Client: “No”

Genesis Coach: “So there you have your answer”

Now for the more in depth explanation.

This comes from one of our coaches Chris, who actually wrote this nice article on the Genesis Gym coaches blog last week.

One of his relatives owns a business specializing in selling bak kwa.

The key thing to take note of, is the ratio of meat (which is minced and you can’t be sure of its quality), to sugar.

It’s roughly 2:1 ratio. That means that for each kg of meat, there is half a kilo of sugar.

This makes bak kwa pretty much meat flavored sugar!

I love bak kwa too but turns out its not a great CNY food…

However, a more reasonable recipe is to put a small pieces of bak kwa on your egg omelet. This reduces the total amount of bak kwa and makes a very tasty omelet dish.

Here is what I bought for my family this Christmas. Staub brand cast iron pans. They have super good coatings, no chemicals on the pan, and a lifetime warranty. They are also SOLID iron and will improve my grip strength ( and my wife’s too!) I may just put a fat grip on it to increase the training effect.

There is a pan, and a grill, I also got the optional presser at the back to make great steaks!

I will use them for a few weeks and report if they are worth it. Not horribly expensive for a life long, safe, high quality cooking tool. Always pay for quality because its cheap in the long run.

I may even place a mass order for our personal training and fitness bootcamp clients.

I recently got a comment on my blog asking if eating organic food is the best way to lose weight.

Is organic food better? Yes it probably is. No so much because of nutrient content although it is superior there as well, but because it has less bad stuff in it. Less pesticides, anti-biotics less pollutants etc.

However eating organic is not going to help you lose weight by itself. You still need to make good choices. As you all know I suggest a paleo type diet of meat, veggies, nuts, a little fruit and lots of water!

If you eat organic bad choices such as… wheat, soy or corn you will still be fat!!

The non-profit “Environmental Working Group” has listed the most and the least important foods to try to find organic. The “Dirty Dozen” are the foods you should try to buy organic, and the “Clean 15″ are those which are ok to buy regular.

Here is a recipe for a healthy post workout snack or anytime snack for those of you who are already lean. Most chips are bad for a long list of reasons – Unhealthy oils, processed salts, fast digesting (and thus, fat storing) white potatoes, genetically modified crops (if its corn based).

So, lets solve theses issues.

• The oil we use is coconut oil, stable in heat and with anti-bacterial properties for your digestive tract
• We use sweet potatoes which are slower to digest and don’t raise blood sugar as much as white potatoes
• We use sea salt which is unprocessed (make sure it has some color, like pink, grey etc)
• And we don’t heat to too high a temperature so the stuff doesn’t oxidize and cause as much free radical damage.

After chopping, Before cooking

Ingredients:

• Sweet potatoes
• Coconut Oil
• Sea Salt

Method:

• Skin the sweet potatoes
• Chop sweet potatoes to either strips or thin circular slices, I like the slices as its easier to get a nice even crisp
• Heat Pan with about 5 tablespoons of coconut oil
• Put about 1 teaspoon of sea salt  per 2 sweet potatoes.
• Put in the sweet potatoes
• Heat till brown
• Take out the pieces and let the oil drain off onto paper towels.

Finished product, nice and crispy - Try not to eat them all at once, they are that yummy:)

If you don't have time to make this, you need to work on time management skills!

The most problematic meal that clients have to deal with when they change from the fat-storing, death inducing, regular Singapore diet,  is usually breakfast. I am a busy guy too, and here is an example of an instant breakfast.

Ingredients

• Pre cooked Smoked duck breast – you can use the roasted ones too, find them at Cold storage.
• Orange
• Cucumber

Slice them up and eat them together. Yummy.

Add a handful of nuts to this and you get a great breakfast that is as quick to make as pouring allergenic milk into fattening cornflakes.

Great nutrients in a crispy package

Ingredients

1. 500g Pork Belly in thin strips – shabu shabu (hey more is fine, you are just limited by the size of your pan)
2. 1 Tablespoon Coconut oil. Butter would work too, but coconut oil just gives a great flavor with curry.
3. 1 Tablespoon curry powder
4. 1 Onion
5. 1 Tablespoon chopped garlic

Method

1. Heat pan with coconut oil. Fry pork in pan till it turns crispy
2. Put in Onions and Garlic into pan
3. Separately put curry powder with about 1/2 cup of water
4. Once the pork is CRISPY put the curry mixture into the pan and let it simmer for a few minutes. Don’t put it in too soon or the pork boils instead of crisps.
5. Pour it all out into the serving bowl. Ideal with lettuce or cucumbers.

This is a low carb, high fiber, high healthy fat meal. I’m having it for breakfast. But its ok any time! Crispy fried food, without the side effect of sudden death from heart attacks!

I finished reading this book in 2 long sessions over 2 days. That should be the first sign of how intersting I found it. Some other medical books that I read are a chore. But this one was exciting because it seems to relate closely to the problems some of our personal training and fitness bootcamp clients face.

Some clients do their best but get slow results. And there are many gems in this book that help explain why.

The author, Dr Mark Schauss writes from the perspective of both a scientist, as well as the father of a child suffering from seizures that no one else seems to have a clue about. So that sets him upon his journey of learning with great passion and enthusiasm.

Because of his wide range of experiences in the “health industry” while finding help for his daughter, I feel he has a very balanced viewpoint about both the pharmaceutical as well as the alternative fields of health care. His points are made in (nice!!) short chapters so you could probably pick up this book and read it from any point instead of front to back.

Even less excuses for not reading it.

One (out of the many) nice points that relates to body composition i.e. weight loss or fat loss, is that because of the toxic world, we accumulate toxins in our body. To reduce the amount of damage done by these toxins, our body slows down its metabolism to minimize the toxic effect.

No wonder people with toxic issues that lead to hormonal disturbance (seen in both our functional testing, and bio-signature results) can’t lose weight. Their bodies are in slow down mode.

He also likes the accuracy and quality of Metametrix labs which I have also found to be good.

All in all, this is a great guide for anyone who is interested in maximizing their health and productivity despite a toxic world.

BTW Dr Schauss has a free and very useful podcast on itunes. You can find it here.

I was in Sweden over the last week on a private internship with coach Poliquin for personal trainers and fat loss specialists. We learned alot about the customization of nutrition and training for rapid fat burning. One of the main things that I learned that has already helped me customize my own supplementation methods, is the use of supplements to improve neuro-transmitter balance. Different people have different dominant brain functions and when we realize this, we use different nutrients to help each person perform better.

Better brain function, better sleep, better motivation, better growth hormone output, better training focus, better results.

Results is what all our training programs aim to deliver!

Take this test called the “braverman” test. Print it out and do it honestly – after all, its for your own improvement. And tell me what your scores are in the comments below:)

NOTE: Most of my caucasian and foreign friends can’t stand the smell of durians, so this post may not apply to them. I remember on a trip with a basketball team from the USA a few years ago, our coach, a 6 foot 4, 120kg man ran out of his hotel room like he saw a ghost after we left durians in there as his “birthday gift”.

I have always suspected that durians are not that fattening. Beacause the causes of fat storage are more often the hormonal response of the body to the food, rather than the raw number of calories, durians don’t seem to be as “fattening” as people think.

It is a fruit, it is rather fatty (like an avocado) and it has fiber. These factors slow down the release of sugar into the blood stream, making the insulin response (that causes fat storage) less.

So I actually asked one of our coaches Chris, to dig around and see what he could find out about the glycimic index of durians.

Hey good news! In the 2008 Asia Pacific Journal of Clinical Nutrition, a study was done Titled: “Glycimic index of common Malaysian fruits”.

They tested durian, papaya, pineapple and watermelon. Turns out durians had the lowest GI among them all at about 49. Probably due to its high fat content which slows the speed of gastric emptying. That is within the “Low GI” category (below 55)

While GI is not the whole story, with Glycimic LOAD and Insulin LOAD (which take into account portion size) being better indicators, it shows that durians are certainly not the the evil that many people think they are as long as you keep portion size in check.

It’s certainly not an “unlimited” food like meat or veggies, but it can certainly fit into the lifestyle as part of a “cheat meal” or for a person who is already fairly lean or carb tolerant.

But no matter what, hearing that durians aren’t evil should make our individual personal training and fitness bootcamp clients happy!