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!

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!

One of the more common ailments that my Singapore personal training, nutrition coaching and fitness boot camp clients have when they first start their fitness programs at Genesis, is gout.

Here are the tips that have really helped many of my clients (and my own dad) get rid of gout once and for all.

Water is important for everything and speeds up elimination of toxins. I prefer filtered, alkaline water. I finally found a good contact for water filtration systems in Singapore. So if you are interested in getting one, please contact me with the subject “water filter” I can get you in touch with a trust-worthy seller.

So getting high quality water aside… here is what you need to do to fix gout.

Stop eating processed meats. Its not meat that gives you gout, its CRAP meat. Please note that…chicken nuggets are NOT meat, bak-kua is NOT meat, sausages are NOT meat. Eat meat, just not the nonsense kind, it has to look like it was recently part of an animal!

The world’s highest rates of gout is in Germany i.e. land of sausage (crap meat)

Also you need a proper multi-vitamin that boosts liver detoxification. For clients with gout at my center, I use Multi-Intense. Why? It has the best content quality that I have found, and the tablets dissolve well so you don’t wast ingredients that are not dissolved for digestion. In fact when you touch the tablet with even a moist finger, they start to break down. This is wonderful because it means that the nutrients will easily break down in the acidic environment of your stomach. For men and post menopausal women, choose the iron free version. For ladies, the version with iron works best.

My own dad had gout for many years especially while working in the middle east (crap meat) but once hes back home he eats alot better and no gout attacks for 2 years following the steps above.

One thing that personal training and Singapore fitness bootcamp clients miss when trying to eat the right stuff for weight loss and fat burning, is desserts. While it can be hard at first, here is one suggestion for a dessert that is far less likely to add inches to your waistline. The reason for this is that the berries are low in glycimic index, glycimic load, and insulin load. This means that they don’t cause your body to turn on its fat storage mechanism. To make things better, I added heavy cream (sometimes called thickened cream) which is a source of healthy fats. The fats slow digestion even further so that they glycimic index is lowered further. Finally I added cinnamon which is a spice that increases insulin sensitivity. This means that your cells will receive the nutrients better – and not let them end up in the fat cells.

And best of all, it tastes yummy!

Ok, many of my Singapore personal training and fitness boot camp clients as me if fruit juice is ok for them to drink… I mean, fruits are healthy right? so why not just juice them and get all their goodness… and as an added benefit you can have so many fruits in one glass… my answer (after a short chuckle)…NO, No, NOOOO…unless you want to get fat, diabetic and brain damaged!

Clients come to me to lose weight, burn fat, get healthy and improve their performance and strength… so of course NO is the answer.

Pretty Nice Ads, Pretty Ugly Results

Why?

Firstly fruit juice is high in sugar and low in fiber (even the most organic, healthy ones) – that means that it’s just as bad as any other processed and overly sweetened cola or syrup based drink. Almost nobody can get a healthy and lean physique drinking those… and nobody can get a great physique drinking fruit juice either.

It combines all the “bad parts” of fruit – the high sugar, concentrates it and gives you many servings of this in 1 glass – it takes several apples (4-5) to make 1 glass of apple juice. When was the last time you ate 5 apples in one sitting? Thats the amount of sugar you are taking in!

It takes away the good stuff – the skins and fiber in fruits is gone! These actually slow digestion if you eat the whole fruit. That makes the impact of the sugar less on your body when it is digested slowly and released slowly into the body.

Most fruit juices in coffee shops and hawker centers are “enhanced” with sugar syrup – oops thats not in real fruit!

Finally fruit juice commercial production is EVIL. Fruits are very heavily sprayed with poisons to protect them from bugs (its actually because the soil they are grown in is so bad that artificial fertilizers are used which do not provide the plant the nutrients to be healthy and have its OWN defense against bugs – thus pesticides are needed)…

Do you think fruits are lovingly plucked and gently squeezed one by one to make juice? Of course not. They are crushed by the thousands, skin and rind and all and the juices drained out. Oops some pesticide is left on the skin… oops… its in your juice.

Most pesticides are nervous system and brain toxic. That is BAD.

I prefer to have full nerve function and brain function. I prefer to be lean and healthy. I don’t drink fruit juice!  And any Singapore personal trainer who knows his/her nutrition facts won’t tell you to either.

I know that we need about 8-12 servings of fruits and veggies to stay healthy, alkalanize our body, and get a  wide spectrum of anti-oxidants. That is why I use a organic veggie and fruit extract that keeps the nutrients but does not give us the high sugar content. I also use a variety of organic fibers to keep the digestive tract healthy. We used to be able to get great nutrition from fruits… but fruit today is not what it used to be – its low in nutrients, genetically modified to be sweet, and covered in pesticides… we should all use a greens/fruit supplement and a fiber to stay healthy. Contact us to see if we have any in stock so you can get the nutrition your body needs to maximize its potential.

I have been away from home for 11 days! Every day is 10 hours of lectures and training. Specialized training for stressed people, ladies, children and how to heal back injuries. Coming up over the next 7 days – nutrition and detox, anatomy and power training

Am doing my best every night in the hotel with revising and reviewing my (so far) 25000 words of notes. Coming back soon with better knowledge and ability to help clients. I look forward to it!

Learning From Coach Poliquin How To Treat A Forearm And Elbow Problem

I will be away for more than 2 weeks starting tomorrow. I will be another set of 25-30 hour trips to the Rhode Island where the temperature is currently -2 to -8 deg C… I’m not even sure I have the right clothes for this! But its ok:) all for the love of knowledge.

There will be a series of seminars about various topics.

• Training of special warfare guys like body guards and commandos (and learning the best methods for handling shift work!)
• Special considerations for training females
• Special considerations for training kids
• Developing power for sports
• Healing back injuries FAST (80% of people will have back pain some time in their life)
• Training Busy Executives (lots of these in Singapore!)
• Anatomy
• How to do better nutrition consultations.

Do I think I’m currently BAD at these things… probably not… but these courses are taught by various instructors who are at the top of their field in the world! So I know I have much to learn. Braving the cold will be a small price to pay.

This is why the clients in our fitness training, performance training and Singapore fitness bootcamps get such great results (check out the mens and womens testimonial page or the video on my Singapore personal trainer homepage).

Study, experience and practice.Put them together and you get results!

Unfortunately most personal trainers in Singapore work with only a few clients at a time. But at my center, my staff and I work with over 160 clients at one time. We have their nutrition information, their flexibility and body fat measurements, their health indicators and their training program logs. This means we know with great certainty what works and what does not.

Eat as you please... they are great for you

Many of my personal training and fitness bootcamp clients ask “how many eggs can I eat each day?” This is a good question because eggs are affordable, versatile as a food, and very importantly… YUMMY!

Myth 1: They are high in cholesterol – true… However cholesterol in iteslf is not bad. Without cholesterol you would … die. It is the building block of vitamins, hormones and cells. Your body is so dependent on cholesterol that each of your cells can produce some of its own. Eating more or less of it doesn’t affect you much. Short version: Eating cholesterol has nothing to do with your blood cholesterol. (more on cholesterol in a future post).

Myth 2: They are high in fat – ALSO true! But eating fat and less refined starches makes our body fat adapted and that means we burn fat for fuel. And that means you will burn your own body fat sooner! – Just because your body is better at using fat as fuel (a safe and efficient source I might add…)

Eggs are created as an excellent food source. Eat them whole. The yolk has many nutrients and in fact, the fat content of the yolk slows digestion of the entire egg to make it less blood sugar spiking. That means less likely to store as fat! People who eat egg whites alone are more likely to get fat. (nobody comes to my personal training center or joins our bootcamp fitness class to get fat!)

Finally, the ONLY reason you would not eat eggs is if you have an allergy or sensitivity to them. If you eat eggs then feel bloated, or have lower energy about an hour later, then eggs are not good for you and should be avoided.

If you are not allergic, eggs are great and eat them as you please!