Reasons or
Results!
Fitness Nutrition Training
Sovereign
Michael Valentine
SPN,
CFT, Eft, Yft, Cft, SSc, GFI, CMCht, Reiki Master
206.225.9647
email: sovereignmv@gmail.com
web:
bnbbs.myshaklee.com
Part of the
“I see you
to succeeding”
series
|
|
Special
Report #5
Part of the
series
Functional-foods…huh?...what's dat?
The
quickie answer: Certain kinds of
drink mixes: Use ‘em
to get the fastest, safest and most permanent loss of fat and gain of lean
mass, strength & endurance...as well as ward off dis-ease.
The complete answer: As
you know from my mini-seminars, I consider whole-foods, functional-foods and
concentrated food supplements to be the holy-trinity of applied nutrition. Without them
you simply aren’t getting the results you could be and you’re likely to be
working harder than you have to…harder vs
smarter.
Yes, you have to have whole foods as the
foundation of your fat-loss, fitness and muscle-building activities. That is
where I agree with your basic, run of the mill registered dieticians…you just
have to have them. But where I part ways is when dieticians say we can get all
we need from good food alone. In my personal experience it just isn’t true. In my experiences, most dieticians dispense
what I consider theory-based nutrition…in other words it sounds really good,
but it doesn’t hold up in real life. It's as if they dispense information they
“think” is correct but have not tested on themselves. It's as if they never
follow up with their clients to find out if what they preach actually worked.
In
my experience, both personal and with my clients, I have found that whole foods
are important, BUT, if you have found yourself overweight, underweight, out of
shape or struggling with health problems, whole foods alone probably will not
do the trick fast enough. You’ll likely regress back to dys-functional patterns of eating before you’ll experience the kind
of results that will motivate you from within enough that you stick with your
program long enough to get your intermediate and longer term goals.
So
a simple definition of functional-foods are foods with higher levels of
nutrition.
In
my experience, and as you have heard me talk about, stabilizing the blood sugar
level is one of the major keys to burning fat (if not THE most important
factor in fat loss), building lean tissue, including bone mass and re-building
health when dealing with chronic health conditions that we hear people talking
about everyday. Functional-foods, at least the good ones, do their job and fat
mysteriously melts away with far less exercise than one would normally think
required. In fact, when functional-foods are used correctly, as little as 10
minutes of exercise a day is enough to burn off 45 pounds of fat in eight
weeks. (low quality supplements will not provide this kind of results).
Often,
whether on TV or in print we hear that to lose more than two pounds a week is
not safe. And for people who are under-nourished or relying on whole food as a
sole source of nutrition (or counting calories as a way to lose weight), I
would agree. You have to be more careful at the rate you lose weight because
part of the weight will likely be lean mass, including bone, organ and muscle
tissue. The more you rely on whole foods alone to burn fat, the more food you
will have to eat to get enough nutrition for your body to release fat from
storage and use it as energy. And that is a second place where I part ways with
traditional nutrition advice.
You
see, if a registered dietician or physician does not believe in supplementing
with functional-foods, they are certainly not likely to gather information
about how well they work,…they believe
they don’t work! If they don’t believe they work, it is unlikely the will
use them on themselves….therefore they will say they don’t believe in them or
that the functional-foods are not necessary. It's their belief, not necessarily
their experience nor are they necessarily reflecting the current science which
I rely on.
And
if I didn’t have so much personal experience I might not either. But what I
have found is that my clients who use certain functional-foods are more likely to burn fat
and gaining / retaining lean mass as well as improving their blood chemistry
numbers, e.g. cholesterol, blood
pressure, triglyceride levels, HDL and LDL as well as A1c,…measurable
improvements!
Whereas
people who rely on whole foods alone have to do a lot more exercise, take a lot
longer to burn fat and build muscle (more often losing muscle and bone mass),
and often their blood chemistry levels show no change or even get worse, e.g. cholesterol increases, HDL decreases,
LDL increases and blood sugar level increases.
Not to mention they require a lot
longer to recover between workouts because whole foods take so much longer to
digest and get absorbed by the body.
And
what I consider the truest test of all (body composition) shows that those who
don’t use functional-foods lose lean mass…they might appear smaller, they say
their clothes fit better, but their health has deteriorated and they have used
up their healthy tissue in the process. In addition, maintaining that kind of
weight loss is unlikely…since the nutrition levels are too low, cravings end up
taking over and the weight comes back on seemingly overnight.
Quality
of functional-foods means the difference between “getting it” or not. Dr. Phil
and Oprah call it an “Ah-ha”, moment and Oprah considers the brand of
functional-foods I use and share as one of her "favorite" things. When
you thought you knew what someone was talking about but then when you get it in
your cells and truly experience the difference and realize that all that time
you thought you got it, or thought that what you were being told wasn’t that
big of a deal.
Like
everything else on the market available to consumers there are good, better and
best products, services and programs. 1) There are products designed for those
of us who value saving money more than getting results. 2) There are products
designed for those of us who want to hear the products are better, but don’t
really take the time to do the research to really find out if the claims made
by the manufacturers hold up. 3) And then there are products that are first and
foremost designed to build health first, burn fat or build muscle second in as
non-toxic, health producing ways possible.
Generally,
the first category products are the ones you find being sold in the grocery
store, gym and drug store and smoothie-bars. They cost the least and are the
most readily available. The second category are products being sold via
marketing companies, claiming they have the best stuff and that they have a ton
of research to prove it. Unfortunately, when you really check into their
research it either does not exist, they used another company’s research results
and didn’t follow the guidelines in the final data to produce their own
products or they mis-represent the data of the study…e.g. they actually did a study but were less than truthful about the
results.
Then
there are companies who have an idea about what the body needs, theorize about
what might work, put together a product that meets the needs of the body, have
it independently tested (by someone else), and if it does not do what it is
suppose to do they scrap it and start over, where other companies sell it
anyway. These are what I consider “value” based products. They can cost more
upfront, but the health improves so much it is near impossible to quantify the
price at all…it's as if you get so much out of it that it is basically
free…there is cost, but once you use them you would pay anything to have them.
This
third category is often more expensive up front. But as you can probably guess
what I am about to say next, over my life of experiences and helping my clients
it works better for everyone involved is to spend more money in the beginning
(on higher quality products and services). That way you don’t waste time and
energy going through the motions and not getting the results you want month
after month.
And
that is part of the reason you may have tried products that may have been
promoted to do something, but didn’t provide the kind results you fantasize
about…a lot of these companies are marketing companies…not nutrition companies.
Now,
to make something more complicated, I’m not saying that you always get what you
pay for. When I managed the GNC store, there was a supplement that only
contained Vitamin C and Zinc and cost $113.00, for 30 tablets. What I am saying is
that one of the benefits of having me as your trainer is that I have been doing
this stuff so long that I know what is real and what is marketing hype. As you
know, I don’t believe in advertising specific products to the masses just for
the sake of promoting, but within my private practice I do work with specific
products that I know to do more than what they claim to do, for the people who
want to get results in the least possible time frame.
The
speed at which you burn fat and gain lean muscle has a lot to do with how
quickly your body gets nutritionally balanced. We know its balanced when you
are burning fat for energy (body composition improves ~ body fat decreases). So
if you are concerned about how quickly you burn fat, it might make more sense
to rely more heavily on functional-foods from the beginning. That way your
metabolism doesn’t have to wait until you learn how to cook and portion foods.
The downside being if you are going to rely on functional foods, during the
first couple weeks they make up a lot of your daily calories and if you throw
in regular foods it will throw everything out of kilter to the point that I
can’t even make sense of it…a strategy
for gaining fat!
From
my seminars, you know that I look at one of my jobs as a personal trainer is to
help you get what you want for the least possible cost. The easier you make it
for me to train you, the less it will cost you. I make the most money from
referrals of happy, satisfied clients and the happiest clients are the ones who
just do what I show and say to do. The unhappiest people are the ones who want
to argue, dispute and dis-believe
what I teach them, before they are willing to actually DO the actions, because
that’s what it's about, isn’t it? The people who don’t apply what I teach spend
a lot of time trying to figure out how to NOT DO what I’m teaching them, but
still get the results they proclaim to want, while complaining that they aren’t
losing fat or gaining muscle. It’s a DOING thing, not a knowing thing.
How
I learned to do what I do is because every time I learned something new, I DID
IT before thinking, arguing or disputing it. From there, after applying it
consistently enough to objectively evaluate it, drew an opinion based on
experience, not an idea in my mind I hadn’t tested in real time.
In
my book Results! New Leaf Fat-loss
Program, I demonstrate how to integrate functional-foods in your
routine…how to lose up to 45 pounds in eight weeks, while optimizing your health
and learning the differences between trying to starve the fat versus feeding the
muscle.
For examples of
what I consider valid, real, guaranteed functional-foods, copy and paste the
links below. I guarantee results and offer a 15% - 25% discount to satisfied
clientele.
No comments:
Post a Comment