Building muscle is part of every fitness journey. While strength training plays a big role in achieving ripped abs, strong calves, or Popeye biceps, sufficient high-quality protein intake is essential for weight loss and optimal muscle growth. This is because amino acids in protein act as building blocks to repair muscle tears that occur during exercise, support muscle tissue, and help you feel full longer which fuels muscle mass development.
Research shows that proper protein intake is important for muscle growth because it increases muscle mass, optimizes the metabolism when consumed at the right time, and burns fat layers under the skin to help with better muscle definition to show off those gains.
Check out the 3 ways adequate protein intake can boost your muscle growth.
Being a fitness trainer is an exceptionally challenging job that not only requires your expertise in helping others to achieve their fitness goals but also demands that you look after your physique on a daily routine. As a busy personal trainer, I am always searching for the best grab and go snacks that I can consume regularly to maintain my healthy appetite.
The perfect diet does not exist but with an evaluated plan that effectively contributes to your health, you can easily manage to get your fitness right on track just like a personal trainer myself. Let me take you through my day-to-day snacks and meals that make me maintain a balanced diet while helping in my fitness journey.
You are a hardworking person who gets up early, works a full day, exercises, and takes care of the kids at night. Life sure is easy, right? Riiiight… Something is already telling me you could use some tips to manage cravings during your weakest hours.
OK, maybe your story is a little different, but most likely you are living a busy life, full of stress, anxiety, and deadlines. While you sit at your desk or drive your car, your daydreams shift to thoughts of salty chips or a smooth, sweet chocolate bar. You most likely are not thinking about healthy foods.
Don’t fret, it’s perfectly normal to have food cravings. When you constantly give in to your cravings and overindulge, is when you pay the price. Go ahead and accept your cravings as part of life, but also be aware that you can take action to prevent going overboard.
It might be a shocker for many people, but not all salads are good for weight loss food. The modern-day fitness industry has created this aura around salads, claiming that salads are the “ideal health food”. Not only this is not the case for many types of salads, but this approach also hurts people who eat salads genuinely trying to lose weight, only to see no results.
In this article, I will tell you about 3 steps to make your salads healthier and actually help you with weight loss. But before talking about ways to fix the problem, let’s figure out what the problem is – what makes many weight loss salads unhealthy?
Protein ice creams are produced with all-natural ingredients and are usually 100% vegan. They taste as good as any other sugar-loaded ice cream but are way healthier. The best part about protein ice cream is that it can be served at lunch, dinner, or even breakfast, as it is light, fluffy, and nutritious.
Protein is uncountably the main component of every cell in our body. It doesn’t only help in repairing and building tissue muscles but also makes our hair and nails shiny and long. All body chemicals and enzymes need protein to function properly. Hence, people on a diet often take a high-protein diet to fulfill their body requirements.
Let’s look at how easy it is to make protein ice cream with a few ingredients in just a few simple steps.
Just in time for the new year! Lose fat quickly and safely on this 21-day fat-loss shred diet!
Disclaimer: the author is no longer a certified nutritionist and has not been a certified nutritionist since the mid-2000s. Use these diet guidelines and meal plans at your own risk.
To spare you from having to read this entire post to learn the premise, here is a quick summary of the Project Shred Diet:
A PDF that you can print out, containing meal plans that you can easily follow.
A strict diet is used to lose fat in 21 days.
A guideline for your post-diet lifestyle eating habits.
A detox diet is used to clean out your system of processed garbage.
A higher protein diet potentially allows muscle gains while losing fat.
Input from no less than 2 certified sports nutritionists.
Judging by a recent Swole Poll, most Project Swole readers want to build muscle – 53% to be exact. However, 33% of you are looking to lose fat and I’d wager a guess that at least 50% of the muscle-builders will, at some point, switch their goals to losing fat. Therefore I can say that if you are one of the 60+% of Project Swole readers that will eventually want to lose fat, then this article is for you.
The Project Shred Diet is, in fact, a diet plan that you can follow for the recommended 21 days or longer. There are 7 days of carefully planned out meals – 3 full meals and 2-3 optional snacks per day. Each of the 7 days can be switched and swapped around as you prefer. To get the most benefit try to hit all 7 days before repeating. Some food substitutions can be made within reason. I’ll tell you all about the rules in a moment.
We recently talked about the sweet Omega 3 and antioxidant benefits of pumpkin seeds. Since autumn is upon us and Halloween fast approaches, you are going to want to cook pumpkin seeds, so I thought it appropriate to discuss some Pumpkin Seed Recipes.
Every time you carve a jack-o-lantern you end up with a Halloween decoration and a bowl full of stringy, slimy, pumpkin guts that don’t look the least bit appetizing. To make them appetizing, follow these instructions, and you’ll end up with a really healthy Halloween snack that everyone can enjoy.
Once considered to be trashcan fodder, we now know you can roast them, toast them, or nuke them; and you can season pumpkin seeds with a wide variety of flavors. Check it out!
High in protein, and low in fat and carbs, this fun Halloween recipe is both delicious and nutritious. Eat your bloodshot eyeballs as a snack or serve them to the kids for some good laughs.
Another great gross-out Halloween snack for you and the kiddies. Looks like someone just squeezed a zit! Arrange these Protein Pus Pockets on an hors d’oeuvres platter as the recipe says, and you will have a fun and healthy treat for a Halloween get-together.
You could also make a handful of these and keep them in the fridge for a quick snack or a small meal. They are also easily taken to work for lunch because they are small and very portable.
High Protein Kitty Litter Cake Recipe for Halloween
This is one of the more disgusting Halloween recipes I’ve found. It is also not the healthiest recipe on Project Swole, but it is definitely fun for the kids. Just don’t let Fluffy near the final product or you might end up with more ‘Tootsie Rolls’ than you thought.
In an attempt to get as much protein into this recipe as possible, I am literally adding scoops of protein powder to everything and substituting protein bars for candy whenever possible. The recipe might not come out that great if you use every one of my substitutions, but you can pick and choose which substitutions to use based on personal preference.
I’ve also listed several substitutions for the cake recipes. If you use them all, the cake might not be that great, but using applesauce in place of oil never seems to ruin any recipe that I have ever tried.
There’s lots of sugar out there. Some are just plain unhealthy to consume, others, like fructose, should have a place in your diet, even if sparingly. So what is fructose?
Fructose is one of the three foundation sugars that are found in our foods. Fructose combines with glucose and galactose to form the sugars that we see on the ingredient lists. When fructose is combined with glucose you get traditional sugar which means that sugar is 50% fructose.
Fructose, aka fruit sugar, is what makes fruit taste sweet and helps to intensify the flavor of the fruit. However, the fructose in fruit varies depending on the fruit. The fruit with the most fructose is the common apple, though some people mistakening believe it to be the banana.
There are numerous considerations when planning an exercise routine; what type of exercises will you partake in? What clothes should you wear during said activities? How hard you want to push yourself and for how long, among other factors. One concern many people may overlook is the importance of how long to wait to exercise after eating or snacking.
Eating too much beforehand can make physical efforts seem unbearable, leading to pain and potential health hazards such as cramps or constipation.
So, how long should you wait after eating before exercising? Will exercising make it harder for your body to digest food? What are the benefits of waiting before taking a workout break?
This guide will discuss how much time you need to wait between meals and working out.
There are several reasons to start a vegan diet, but each person’s motivation will be unique. Some people may choose to be vegan because they feel there is a connection between a vegan diet and chronic degenerative illnesses. Other people choose to be vegan because they care about animals. Other factors may include the environment, religion, weight reduction, and so on.
Whatever goals you have currently to motivate you, you will end up broadening the circle of compassion in this world and raising your mind and body to new heights! Being vegan, as they usually say, is like drinking a truth serum, because living an honest, healthy, clean life alters your mindset.
Let’s take a moment to think about the essential aspects you’ll need to start a vegan diet plan for weight loss and general good health.
This original post was all about the Shakeology product. Let it be known I no longer use Shakeology and instead, I use Muscle Milk, which is a far better and less expensive product that also tastes better. Muscle Milk is a protein powder that tastes great mixed with water.
If you are looking for a pure protein powder, check out Muscle Milk. Muscle Milk protein powder comes in about 20 different flavors, and is available in 1 lb, 2 lb, 5 lb, and 10 lb containers. Learn more about Muscle Milk. Finally, a protein powder that tastes great mixed with water!
Maybe you prefer all-natural whole-food protein bars. Visit RX Bars for awesome tasting bars. My favorite is Maple Sea Salt.
“Like eating 3 egg whites, 2 dates, and 6 almonds. With no B.S.”
The Healthiest Meal of the Day
Please note: you’re about to read my original story from 2011.
So I was hungry the other day at work and didn’t have many meal choices. The cafeteria was closed, I didn’t have any money for the vending machine, no protein bars, and only a couple of packets of Sweet & Spicy Tuna in my desk drawer. I’d already eaten tuna earlier that day, so I wasn’t in the mood for more.
When you need to drop fat quickly to get shredded, you might have to say, “screw healthy lifestyle eating habits”, and take a more aggressive approach. It’s great to eat healthily and maintain low body fat. But what if you only have 2 months to lose 20 lbs? What if you are trying to get from a decent 12% bodyfat to a ripped 6% bodyfat? Well, now it’s time to talk about jumping on a hardcore diet to melt off the fat and show those hard-earned abs.
Let me preface this post by saying: “I eat these foods.” Yes, it is true, I do eat about 50% of the foods listed. Especially peanuts, Smartfood, and some of the carbohydrate foods listed at the bottom. Despite calling them all out as unhealthy foods, they aren’t all technically that bad for you, it’s just good to examine the nutritional details and figure out where we can make the best decisions.
If you take this list literally, it will just aggravate you, so take it with a grain of salt… or maybe a grain of whole wheat.
There are many terms that are misleading in the food advertising industry today. Think of how many times you see healthy phrases plastered all over food containers. Don’t allow yourself to be swayed by these words of trickery, none of these catchphrases mean ‘healthy food’ inherently – you have to read the labels.
Let’s take a look at some of the most common attempts to convince consumers a food is healthy when perhaps it’s really not.
Eating a balanced diet may sound cliché. Who doesn’t know that every meal should have carbohydrates, proteins, and vitamins? Even the laziest of people can whip up a healthy balanced meal.
Here are 5 tips you can use today to start transitioning your lifestyle to a healthier balanced diet.
The Paleo diet is intended to be similar to what our ancestors and forefathers ate thousands of years in the past. When you start a paleo diet you can be assured you are eating like your ancestors, even if you don’t know exactly who they are. Although it is hard to know exactly what our predecessors ate in various regions of the world, scholars assume their diets were mostly up of complete foods.
The hunter-gatherers apparently had a considerably lower incidence of lifestyle illnesses such as obesity, and heart diseases because they followed a whole-food-based diet and lived physically active lifestyles. As a matter of fact, multiple studies demonstrate that this diet can result in considerable weight loss (without calorie tracking) and significant health advantages.
We provide you with a basic introduction to the paleo diet, including a meal plan and other important information.
If you think that lighting heavy weights on its own is enough to build muscle and maintain progress, you couldn’t be more wrong! A successful body builder diet is crucial, some would say 75% responsible, for gaining/maintaining muscle while also losing fat.
Building muscle is hard, and maintaining your progress is even harder.
It’s not enough to just go to the gym a few times a week. You also need to make sure you have the right body builder diet if you want to see results.
But don’t worry. Keep reading because this article will teach you everything you need to know about bodybuilding nutrition so that you can finally achieve the physique you’ve always wanted.
Vegetarian diets are becoming increasingly popular. The reasons to start a vegetarian diet vary, but they all have health benefits, such as lowering your risk of heart disease, diabetes, and several cancers. Research studies estimate that vegetarians account for up to 18% of the world population.
However, some vegans eat far too many processed meals, which can be heavy in calories, fat, sugar, and salt. Furthermore, they may not consume enough fruits, whole grains, vegetables, and calcium-rich meals, depriving themselves of the minerals they supply.
A vegetarian diet, on the other hand, may suit the needs of individuals of all ages, including toddlers, teens, and pregnant or breastfeeding women, with a little preparation. The goal is to be aware of your nutritional requirements so that you can develop a diet to satisfy them.
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