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At Body Sculptors in Louisville, KY, helping people look and feel better is our major goal. We strive to help you find ways to get better results in less time by using scientifically based workouts and healthy eating habits. One question that often is asked is whether it makes a difference what or when you eat when you workout. The answer is a resounding yes. After a workout, you need to replenish your body and one thing that helps is the consumption of bananas.

Your body depletes its stores of energy during a workout.

During a workout, you not only sweat, which means you have to hydrate, you also use stored glycogen. Your body has to replenish both stored glucose and electrolytes that help muscles to contract. The muscles have micro-tears that also need repair. That means it needs amino acids, the building blocks of protein, to help rebuild the muscle tissue.

To get those much needed nutrients, you need a quick snack after a workout.

The food shouldn’t be junk food, but something rich in nutrients. Not only does a banana contain high amounts of electrolytes lost in sweat, it has high water content and stores of natural sugar to replace the glucose. There’s nothing artificial in the banana, nor additives like added sugar, artificial sweeteners or preservatives. It has fiber, so the sugar content doesn’t cause the blood sugar levels to rise quickly. One study showed that if trained athletes ate a banana and hydrated after working out intensely, it increased levels of natural anti-inflammatory metabolites. It does the same thing NSAID medications do to deter inflammation.

The anti-inflammatory metabolites released also provide another benefit.

The rise of the metabolites may also decrease soreness often felt after a workout by enhancing recovery. Bananas also improve immune function with bioactive compounds, such as carotenoids, phenolics and biogenic amines. Bananas contain all these benefits, plus vitamin C, which aids the immune system and B6, necessary for changing food into energy for the body.
A banana chopped into Greek yogurt with a glass of water could be the perfect combination of carbs, protein and rehydration. Other options are a banana, water and a handful of nuts.
When compared to sweetened sports drinks, bananas were just as good at replacing nutrients, while preventing after workout inflammation. They also provided more nutrition.
Rather than using ibuprofen, many athletes now find bananas are better to prevent pain. Unlike ibuprofen, they don’t cause cell damage that later causes inflammation.
Not only are bananas a good post-workout snack, they’re also a good option to consume before you workout when combined with a source of protein.
For more information, contact us today at Body Sculptors Personal Training

Did you want to start eating healthy this year, but you’re not sure where to start? We can help you. While some people love to dive right into a project and make all the changes at once, others like to dip their feet in the water and change a little at a time. We work with all types of people and understand that. For those that love doing everything at once, just check out our healthy menus on our Fit Meal Formula plan. If you want to start with tiny steps, here’s how you start.

Give up sugar and products with added sugar first.

There’s nothing like doing the hardest thing first and working from there. Giving up products with added sugar is definitely one of the toughest for many people. One of the reasons is that sugar is addictive. Not only does it affect the same receptors in the brain as cocaine, which bring you pleasure, but the more sugar you eat, the less sweet it tastes, so you have to eat more and more for the same enjoyment.

Find ways to add more vegetables to a meal.

Use vegetable noodles, like zucchini instead of lasagna noodles or enjoying the flavor of spaghetti squash instead of pasta. Make up vegetable soup to act as a meal starter or for a warming lunch. If you’re making a sauce, such as spaghetti sauce, add a few extra veggies, like some bell peppers or a little spinach. Add veggies to your smoothies or use a veggie and fruit smoothie for lunch. Roasted veggies or kabobs are delicious and can fill you up, not out. Increase the amount of vegetables you eat and you’ll reduce the amount of higher calorie foods.

Skip those processed foods and eat more whole foods.

All food is processed, since washing food is processing it. We’re talking about highly processed foods. Those types of food have additives, chemicals and often very little nutrition. If you want a snack, opt for fresh vegetables with dip or yogurt with fruit. In fact, you can make a delicious parfait by layering Greek yogurt, frozen cherries chopped in pieces and walnuts or sliced almonds.

• Make sure you have a healthy protein with your meal. Healthy protein can come from animals or plants. Fish, eggs, poultry, nuts, beans and lean beef are good examples. Protein leaves you feeling fuller longer, so you eat less.
• A simple way to ensure you get the maximum amount of your vitamins each day, make sure you have a rainbow plate of food at each meal. Choosing fruits and vegetables that have a wide variety of color means they offer a wide variety of nutrients and phytonutrients.
• Do you drink soft drinks? Change to water. Even diet cola can affect your waistline and put on visceral fat around your middle, according to recent studies. Visceral fat is the worst type of fat and hardest to lose.
• When you’re ready, we’ll be ready with healthy menus, shopping lists and an easy way to ensure you’re eating healthy every day. We make it easy for you to stick with healthy eating.

For more information, contact us today at Body Sculptors Personal Training

No matter how hard you work your abs, if you have a layer of fat covering them, nobody can see your hard work. While spot exercises create strong underlying muscles, when you lose weight, you lose it all over your body, not just in one spot. So finding the cardio that burns belly fat the best is actually finding one that burns the most calories.

Cardio may not be the best way to lose belly fat.

The truth is, the best fat burner is a combination of strength training and HIIT—high intensity resistance training. Strength training builds muscles as it burns calories and muscle tissue burns more calories than fat tissue does. HIIT isn’t a type of exercise, but a way of doing any exercise. It bounces between going at top intensity for a short period, such as 30 seconds to two minutes and then dropping back to a recovery intensity for the same amount of time or longer. You can use this technique with any cardio workout.

Take it easy and go walking or running, but modify it to a HIIT workout.

You probably put walking on the back burner, thinking it’s far too easy to burn tons of calories, but what about power walking. In fact, you can set your calorie burning ovens on high by making it a HIIT workout and adjusting the intensity. Not only does HIIT burn more calories in a shorter period, it burns extra calories longer. It increases your metabolism longer after you’ve finished exercising.

Bicycling can also be a HIIT workout and burn fat quickly.

No matter what type of exercise you do, including bicycling, using the HIIT technique helps burn more fat and that includes more belly—visceral—fat. In fact, some studies show that people doing HIIT workouts three times a week for a 20-minute session, lost not only fat, but inches around their waist, indicating belly fat disappeared, too. Burning off the visceral fat is not only good to flatten your stomach, but also important to your health. It’s the most dangerous type of fat to your health.

• If you need to lose belly fat—which translates to losing weight—but have bad joints, try an elliptical workout. It’s a good cardio workout that doesn’t pound your joints like jogging and other types of exercise.
• Remember to make your daily life more active to burn fat. You can run up and down stairs to burn calories and those burnt calories mean fat loss, which can also cause you to lose belly fat.
• Create circuit training to burn belly fat. You can create a workout that burns fat more quickly. Just shorten the time between exercises to maximize the results.
• No matter what type of exercise you do, what you eat is important. In fact, to get rid of belly fat, eating healthy should be your first step, with exercise forming the second.

For more information, contact us today at Body Sculptors Personal Training

You might be surprised at how many diets without meat there are. If you think of vegans immediately, it isn’t too surprising. That’s what people normally consider, a diet that has absolutely no animal products. Vegans not only cut out meat, fish, eggs and dairy, they also exclude food that contain those products. That includes food that has gelatin in, which is made from animal parts. Sweets, fruit snacks, many confections and even the frosting on Pop Tarts has gelatin. Any food with milk or eggs in the ingredients are not in the diet.

A lacto-vegetarian diet includes milk.

If you’re a lacto-vegetarian, you don’t eat meat, poultry, fish or eggs, but you do have dairy in your diet. Milk is allowed, so is cheese, yogurt and butter. If eggs are added to the diet, it’s a lacto-ovo-vegetarian diet. By adding milk and eggs, it makes it easier to get all the types of protein that otherwise requires combining plant proteins for a strict vegetarian to achieve a completion. In the same vein of thought, ovo-vegetarians include eggs, but not dairy.

Pesco-vegetarians eat fish and seafood.

You get a wider variety of food as a pesco-vegetarian, also known as pescatarians. These people do not consume poultry or meat, but do include fish of all types in their diet, including shellfish. They may or may not include eggs and dairy, besides the fruits, vegetables and grain they consume. This type of diet tends to mirror a Mediterranean diet. It’s considered one of the healthiest diets by some and probably the easiest to follow. The Omega-3 fatty acid from the fish is just one reason for that.

There’s even a word for people that eat meat, but not much of it.

If you’re a flexitarian, you’re more of a vegetarian than a carnivore. You eat meat, but tend to eat more plant based protein than animal protein and get most of your calories from plant sources. While you aren’t restricted to fish or strictly vegetables, that tends to be what is on your plate. Cutting back on meat, having several days a week that are meatless, tends to be done more for health reasons, than moral or environmental reason. It’s far easier to design a balanced diet for a flexitarian than it is for other types of vegetarians, since everything can be consumed. It’s just a matter of how much.

• Even if you aren’t a vegetarian, having a meatless Monday might be a boost to your health, but only if you’re replacing that meat with a healthy option.
• Some people start out with one day a week meatless for their health and find out it makes a big difference in their budget and extend it to more days for even more savings.
• Meatless meals and diets are catching on across America. You’ll find that even fast foods offer meatless options.
• If you’re going vegan, eliminating all animal products, from your diet, study how to get a complete protein for each meal by making food combinations. Peanut or nut butter on whole wheat bread is one way and whole grain rice with beans is another.

For more information, contact us today at Body Sculptors Personal Training

We focus on all aspects of fitness at Body Sculptors in Louisville, KY. Not only is working out important to get to your proper weight and level of fitness, so is eating healthy. In fact, most trainers feel that a great body starts in the kitchen, not in the gym. To make eating healthy easier, planning your meals and preparing them ahead is the best option, especially for busy people. If you don’t know how to meal plan, it’s a process where you create menus, cook ahead and have the meals ready to warm every night. We make it easier by creating the menus for you, but you can do it on your own.

You need to plan ahead so you have all the ingredients.

Creating the menus for the week is probably the hardest part of meal planning. It’s also one of the reasons most people fail to do it more than a few weeks. Finding food you like that has the right number of nutrients, contains fewer calories and uses only healthy ingredients is tough, but still doable. The internet offers a variety of menus from which to choose. However, if you want to save time and have a less stressful way to do it, just use our app. It contains meals designed by nutritionists based on your personal input.

Taking a few hours on the weekend can save time during the week.

If you’re too tired to think about what to eat after a long day of work and often opt for carryout, planning a weekly menu and preparing food ahead is perfect for you. In fact, it’s often quicker than waiting in line at a drive-through. Chop all your fresh vegetables at once for every meal that week. If you’re having melons or other fruit, get it ready, whether it’s dessert or a snack. Use everything. If you’re making a dish with chicken, use the bones to make a broth for a soup later. Bake two main dishes in the oven at the same time, which will cut your time in the kitchen.

Pack your food in individual serving sizes.

Is portion control a problem? If you meal prep ahead it doesn’t have to be that way. When you’re hungry, it’s not the perfect time to decide how much you should eat, nor is it the best time to shop for the week’s groceries. That’s why shopping is done in one day, after you’ve eaten and portions are determined when you cook on the weekend. You can ingredients in a main dish one day, such as green beans, and as a side dish another day.

• Don’t forget that leftovers, especially fresh cut vegetables, can go into a soup if they’re not eaten during the week. You can make the broth from left over meat and bones.
• Some people save money by checking the food on sale and using in season fruits and vegetables when they plan menus.
• Meal planning can save money, since you can include the ingredients in other items that week so nothing goes to waste. You also can make enough for extra servings and freeze it for later.
• Planning meals ahead and cooking them over the weekend, lets you get the whole family in on the process. You can take your list to the grocery and have the kids help, while also getting them to help you cook on those days. It’s a good lesson on healthy eating and great family time.

For more information, contact us today at Body Sculptors Personal Training