Hi Friend!
Great day to you!
Yesterday I wrote about eating 5 things @ most every meal and today I wanted to share The Big 4. One of the big 4 became a staple in my weekly meal plan back in the day when I started to focus on performance and later it got tenure when I learned of all it's health benefits. Another was something we had on occasion growing up and 2, I don't recall seeing as a youth. Wanna know what they are?
The Big 4 1. Oatmeal 2. Sweet Potato 3. Brown Rice 4. Quinoa
Why are they the big 4? In The Weight Loss Triad by Dr. Thomas Halton, he talked about these 4 starches as having a low glycemic load, with glycemic load defined as "...a measure of how quickly and how severely the carbohydrate containing foods in your diet elevate your blood sugar." So these 4 won't raise your blood sugar quickly or severely.
Why is that important? If you're looking to have sustained energy, performance, hunger, blood sugar, moods, consistency, you don't want to be all over the place. Foods that digest rapidly are great before, during or after high energy activities, as they can give you a quick burst of energy, but it's short lived and causes you to crash, so you'll need to eat again to keep your performance up. This is normal if you're living the performance lifestyle because your metabolism is high as is your activity level, so you're going to have to eat often and a lot anyways. If you're not that active, sedentary or have a slowing metabolism, you want foods that last. You don't want to be hungry between meals. You want to put a nice oak log on the fire and enjoy it for a while vs. putting kindling and paper on the fire, which burn quick.
If you have to eat more often, than 3 meals per day, your risk for overeating increases, so having a stable blood sugar and being satiated can help you make it from meal to meal without snacking or grazing and that's what these big 4 can help with as they have staying power.
Muscle Glycogen and Boot Camp When we're in boot camp we don't burn body fat for energy, we use primarily stored muscle glycogen. It takes a while to tap body fat reserves, as in over an hour of exercise, so it's important to continually build our muscle glycogen storage capacity and replenish it. And these Big 4 can help replenish your reserves and provide energy in advance of participation. What boot camp does do is help to elevate your metabolism for the next 24-72 hours so you can burn more calories at rest and most of those calories are fat calories.
Oatmeal The two best options are non-instant Steel Cut Oats and non-instant Rolled Oats. Steel Cut are the Long Cooking Irish Oats and Rolled Oats are the roughly 5minute Old Fashion Quaker Oats kind. Oatmeal become a staple in my diet in my mid 20's when my energy output got really high and I needed a way to keep my performance high with a growing personal training business and all the training and sports I was playing in the evenings. Steel cut oats are like rocket fuel and man their staying power is long. They take more time to cook and in my opinion are best if you're cooking a big batch because of the time commitment. Rolled oats are great because you can get a hot meal in about 5-10minutes. Of course if you dress them up like I will, it takes a little longer. I have my oatmeal with spinach, egg whites, mixed nuts and either peppers or fruit.
Sweet Potatoes !Yumbo. My favorite way to eat sweet potatoes is Mexican style. Basically substitute the taco shell / fajita wrap with sweet potatoes and serve the ground beef, turkey, chicken, shrimp, ... on top with diced peppers & onions, tomatoes, olives, scallions, shredded lettuce, hot sauce, salsa and some avocado or guacamole. Yumbo!
Brown Rice I've gotta give my bride the shout out for this recipe. Usually when I'd eat brown rice in my bachelor days, it'd be with chicken broth and peppers & onions mixed in, but she came up with substituting pasta with brown rice. So put the red sauce on top of the rice and add whatever veggies and proteins you like.
Quinoa You can do the same with Quinoa, but I use Quinoa in a risotto or more commonly as a breakfast change of pace, in place of the oatmeal.
Strength Days vs. Cardio Days I aim to eat more starches on my strength days or leading into my strength days and less starches, more legumes on my non-strength days or cardio days. For me that looks like M / W / F, which are my strength days, I eat oatmeal for breakfast (with egg whites, spinach, nuts, fruit & water) and on my non-strength days, T / Th / Sa or Su, I eat egg based breakfasts (whole eggs, greens, beans, nuts and water). Most of the time I try to have a starch with my meal post workout , but sometimes I don't. Definitely on Mondays because that's my long day.
Since its a new year, and most of my client, readers and myself are looking to jumpstart our health and get back on track to being our best selves, I've emphasized nutrition more with the nutrition habits, 5 things to eat at most meals and the big 4. I figured this would be a good way to prime our thoughts around health, body transformation and performance. What do you think of these 3 newsletters so far?
Living and feeding the active life,
Coach Mike
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