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Eggs are the Perfect Muscle-Building and Fat-Loss Food

Eggs are the perfect muscle-building food: They’re protein-dense, promote fat loss, and the bad cholesterol image they’ve been saddled with was completely overblown!

Eggs offer the most complete source of protein from food (as opposed to supplements); in fact, they’re the yardstick that all other foods fail miserably at measuring up to. The “biological value” (BV) of the egg is 100 on a scale of 1 to 100. Cow’s milk, for example, comes in at 91 while beef comes in at 80 (wikipedia).

On a side note, whey protein isolate (from cow’s milk) comes in at a whopping 104! This is the primary reason that you should be ingesting, and investing in, whey protein powders mixed with milk.

Coupled with its small size, the egg gives you a lot of protein for its small weight. In other words, it’s protein rich and nutrient dense.

Don’t worry, either, about the fat or the cholesterol in eggs (if you’re a healthy individual): You will not increase your body fat or cholesterol levels by ingesting several eggs a day. In fact, you could probably eat a dozen eggs a day for several weeks in a row (if not months) and not suffer any ill consequences.

The egg is an ideal source of protein, offering all of the essential amino acids your body needs. Plus, eggs have an incredible anabolic effect on a person’s body. Old timers like the late Vince Gironda used to prescribe dozens of eggs a day to his pupils during their brief (3 to 6 weeks) “bulking up” phases. This super food causes an outpouring of human growth hormone, which helps immensely in BOTH muscle-building and fat-loss efforts.

In short, you will build muscle and drop bodyfat by making intelligent use of eggs in your diet.

Give them a try! You’ll like the results.

Do you know how to hard boil the perfect egg?

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Why Nutrition Science is Often Confusing and Misleading [Infographic]

I subscribe to Precision Nutrition’s newsletter and today, they sent me a whopper of an infographic.

It gives 9 reasons why nutrition science is often confusing and misleading. I’d post the infographic here, but for some reason, it’s not rendering correctly on the page.

So here’s a link.

9 reasons:

1. Nutrition research is still in its infancy – vitamins were discovered just about a 100 years ago.
2. Funding goes to disease treatment – prevention gets very little funding.
3. Conflicts of interest – if a soda company does a study on sugar’s effects on health, what do you think the outcome will be?
4. Too many variables – the scientific method requires controlling all variables and making changes to just a few. There are thousands, maybe millions of variables and nearly none of them are controllable, or even known.
5. Nutritional studies are observational – they rely on people remembering or describing accurately what they ate a week or two ago.
6. Measurement tools have limitations – many food labels are wrong. So how do you know how many calories you consumed?
7. What you eat doesn’t affect you right away – it could take 30 years for a six-pack of beer a day habit to ruin your liver and jack up your metabolism.
8. A study’s findings may not apply to you – many studies rely on obese people, or extremely fit athletes – because they’re available for studies. The findings may not apply to you if you’re just 10 pounds overweight or lead a very sedentary lifestyle.
9. Reporting a study’s findings is very difficult – if you think the research is difficult, try summarizing the findings!

It’s a great graphic that shows exactly why you and I are both often confused when we hear or read about the “latest & greatest” in nutrition information.

Remember when whole eggs were bad for you? Now, not so much.

Remember “paper or plastic” bags the grocer offered you? Now, they charge you a dime for a paper bag and plastic isn’t even an option.

Remember when saturated fats were bad and polyunsaturated fats were good? Today, turn that upside down.

Crazy, right?

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How to Rev Up Your Metabolism

Getting Lean by Revving Up Your Metabolism
by Dr John M Berardi, CSCS

I remember the day I got the bad news. I was 20 years old and I was in the middle of a nearly impossible squat session. Between sets, while trying to catch my breath, an “older” personal trainer (he was probably in his thirties) came over and offered some “advice”—unsolicited, of course.

“Ya know,” he said, “I used to look like you. But just you wait. After 25, the metabolism slows down, and it’s all downhill from there, buddy. You’d better enjoy it while it lasts.”

Then he turned and walked away.

I wasn’t sure what to make of this guy. After all, he didn’t look that great. Sure, he was a trainer and he did look better than most folks his age; but just barely. And he had a lot less muscle and a lot more fat than I did.

But the critical question was this – was he right? Did the metabolism come to a grinding halt after age 25? Was I doomed to lose my prized physique? Worse yet, was I destined to look like him? I had to find out. After all, if middle age spread was an inevitable consequence of aging, why bother?

So I asked around. I spoke with personal trainers, gym owners, and nutritionists, who all confirmed what I had heard. I spoke with some instructors at my local community college. They said the same, although with less certainty since at that time not much research had been done about the matter.

I looked around, studying the physiques of people I ran into at the gym, grocery store, mall, and elsewhere. The evidence was all around me. Younger people were leaner and seemingly in possession of faster metabolic rates than older individuals.

So, in my 20-year-old mind, the message seemed clear: I’d better make the most of my youthful body and metabolism because I was destined to lose it.

Fortunately, I was dead wrong!

Deceiving Father Time

Since that day, I’ve accomplished quite a bit in the exercise, nutrition, and fitness realm. In the late 90’s I won the NABBA Jr USA Bodybuilding Championships. I’ve also spent 10 years studying at University – eventually earning a PhD in Kinesiology with a specialization in the area of exercise and nutritional biochemistry. Finally, I’ve developed an exercise and nutrition consulting company called Science Link, with the mission of taking advanced exercise and nutrition research and translating it into meaningful, usable information for people who are not quite as sciency as I am.

Yet throughout, I’ve always come back to that question – is it inevitable – must we lost large amounts of muscle and gain large amounts of fats once we hit our late 20s? Well, I, for one haven’t suffered this fate. Firmly entrenched in my 30s, I’m just as active as ever and, interestingly, just as strong and just as lean as I was during my twenties. But my story aside, I’m also happy to report that the metabolism does not have to slow down with age – for any of us (assuming we’re healthy).

Yes, it’s true that when you’re young, your body finds a way to balance energy expenditure and energy intake. It’s true that, as you age, you’ll have a much more difficult time maintaining what you’ve got. It’s true that studies have shown that 1/3 of all North American adults are at least 20 percent over their “ideal weights.”

These truths, however, don’t seal your fate. Just because some folks spend their lives engaged in a frustrating battle of eating less only to gain more, that doesn’t mean you have to. I’ve skirted around those so-called truths. I eat just as much food—if not more—than I did in my twenties, yet I have no more body fat to show for it.

I’m no anomaly. Over the years, I’ve trained countless clients, ranging in age from 25 to 65. It didn’t matter how high their body fat percentages, how slow their metabolisms, or how scrawny their muscle mass when they met me—they were all able to turn things around – without drugs. Consider the following impressive stats:

• Robert, age 41: Lost 18 pounds of fat and gained 8 pounds of lean mass (lean mass is made up of muscle, bone, and other non-fat tissue) over 3 months
• Kenneth, age 31: Lost 27 pounds of fat and gained 2 pounds of lean mass over 6 months
• Lynn, age 57: Lost 24 pounds of fat and gained 8 pounds of lean mass over 7 months
• Danielle, age 32: Lost 14 pounds of fat and gained 17 pounds of lean mass over 5 months
• Ben, age 21: Lost 14 pounds of fat and gained 29 pounds of lean mass over 10 months
• Gail, age 26: Lost 9 pounds of fat and gained 6 pounds of lean mass over 2 months
• Jason, age 45: Lost 11 pounds of fat and gained 3 pounds of lean mass over 3 months
• Kelly, age 38: Lost 22 pounds of fat and gained 15 pounds of lean mass over 6 months
• Mike, age 26: Lost 12 pounds of fat and gained 11 pounds of lean mass over 2 months
• Rachel, age 24: Lost 23 pounds of fat and gained 3 pounds of lean mass over 7 months
• Vivian, age 38: Lost 15 pounds of fat and gained 8 pounds of lean mass over 5 months
• Amy, age 38: Lost 29 pounds of fat and gained 10 pounds of lean mass over 9 months
• Joseph, age 42: Lost 4 pounds of fat and gained 38 pounds of lean mass over 13 months

As you can see, it doesn’t matter how old people were when they decided to get serious and turn things around. Whether they were 25 or 45, their results were the same: They changed their body composition, replacing their flab with lean, metabolism boosting muscle. You’re never too old to boost your metabolism.

If that’s not enough to convince you that you have what it takes to rev up your metabolism, shed fat, and build muscle, then consider the research. When I was in my twenties, few scientists had tried to answer the questions that were nagging me. At that time, no one really knew for sure whether metabolism slowed down with age and, if it did, whether anything could be done about it. Now a group of applied scientists have looked at those questions and uncovered some surprising facts.

These scientists had noticed that the metabolism does seem to slow with age, but they refused to believe that there was nothing anyone could do about it. Today, as a result of their efforts, we’ve got plenty of evidence demonstrating that your metabolism slows with age only if you do nothing about it. If you eat properly, exercise, and take the right supplements, you can maintain your metabolic rate over your life span! Even if you’re 40 or older and things have already slowed down, you can reverse the trend and regain the metabolism of your youth. In fact, you can create a metabolism that’s even faster than the one of your twenties!

Is it easy? No. Does it take hard work and dedication? Yes. But it can be done. I’m living proof. So are my clients, and so are the thousands of people who have participated in hundreds of studies conducted in the United States and around the world.

Of Age and Metabolism

So why does maintaining a healthy weight get tougher as we age? Well, although most people eat less as they age—to compensate for moving less at their desk jobs—their activity levels generally decrease even more than their energy intakes, resulting in fat gain.

These decreasing activity levels result in yet another problem: muscle loss. Researchers have determined that, starting between the ages of 25 and 30, most people lose roughly 5 to 10 pounds of lean body mass during each decade of life. As muscle is a metabolically active tissue. That means that in addition to burning calories to move your skeleton through space, it also burns calories to maintain itself. So age-related muscle loss can cripple your metabolism. The average person who becomes less active and, consequently, loses muscle experiences a 20 to 25 percent reduction in 24-hour metabolism (measured as the amount of energy your body burns in 24 hours) by age 65. This adds up to a daily metabolic drop of more than 500 calories.

It’s tough to cut 500 calories off your daily menu to compensate for that metabolic drop, so most people end up packing on the fat.

Of course, this scenario holds true only if you do nothing to prevent it. Why do most people lose muscle as they age? Because they don’t use it. When it comes to the human body, what you don’t use, you lose, and muscle is no exception.

Studies of people older than age 60 show that you can—at any age—reverse muscle loss and regain the metabolism of your youth. In fact, according to research, individuals who—through exercise and smart eating—maintain their lean mass (muscle, bone, and other non-fat tissue) as they age experience only a 0.36 percent drop in metabolism per decade compared to the 5 to 7 percent per decade drop that most adults experience. Add a few key supplements to the mix and you can even prevent that 0.36 percent drop, and possibly even rev your metabolism higher than it was during your youth!

So metabolic slowdown is not inevitable. You can prevent it. And you can reverse it using a three-pronged approach including eating, exercising, and supplementing the right way to get a series of all-natural “metabolic advantages.”

With these metabolic advantages, you can expect to:

BUILD THE MUSCLE NEEDED TO SPEED UP YOUR RESTING METABOLISM ALL DAY AND ALL NIGHT LONG.A gain of 5 to 10 pounds of lean mass muscle will rev up your resting metabolism—the number of calories your body burns to maintain life—by roughly 100 calories – each and every day.MAXIMIZE SOMETHING CALLED THE “AFTERBURN.”Through targeted strength training and energy system training, you can increase the number of calories you burn during your workouts (about 300 to 600 calories per day depending on your body size and workout duration). However, assuming you integrate high intensity efforts, you can also blow through another 100 to 200 calories per day – a post-exercise energy burst that eats up calories even when you’re sitting on your butt.

INCREASE THE NUMBER OF CALORIES YOUR BODY BURNS AS IT DIGESTS FOODS.Prioritizing metabolically costly proteins, metabolism-boosting fats, antioxidant-rich fruits and veggies, and the right carbs at the right times (nutrient timing), can boost your metabolic rate by another 100 to 200 calories per day.

ENCOURAGE YOUR BODY TO WASTE CALORIES.The right combination of food choices and supplements can turn you in to a much less efficient calorie burner. Much like a car in need of a tune up, your body will consume more fuel than it needs to operate, wasting away the excess as heat. Unlike with your car, however, when it comes to your metabolism, inefficiency is a good thing. It will coax your body into burning more calories – and more fat – for fuel.

BOOST THE NUMBER OF CALORIES YOUR BODY BURNS THROUGH MOVEMENT.Thanks to that desk job, family commitments, and great lineup of must-see TV, most of us move less at ages 30, 40, and beyond than we did during our teens and twenties. By training at least 5 hours each week, you can increase your calorie burning by about 300 to 600 calories per day.

All told, with the right combination of training, nutrition, and supplementation, you can expect to increase your daily calorie burn by between 40 and 60 percent within just 8 weeks. In other words, a guy who currently burns 2,500 calories a day would rev up his metabolism to a 3,400 to 4,000 daily calorie burn! That’s enough of a boost for you to see a 10-to-15-pound drop in body fat during those 8 weeks above. And for those at a beginner/intermediate level of training, you can expect muscle gain too.

Muscle gain and fat loss simultaneously? Yep, it happens all the time. Time to revisit my examples above.

Even more important, when you get these things right, you will simultaneously improve your health. In addition to speeding your metabolism, building muscle, and shedding fat, you can also expect to lower your blood cholesterol, blood pressure, and blood sugar. So not only can you live look better, you can live longer. So, in the end, I’m here to tell you that a large-scale metabolic decline isn’t inevitable as we age.

If you’re young and haven’t seen the affects of father time, that’s excellent. But that doesn’t mean you wont! Make sure that you use a combination of smart eating, training and supplementation to keep that metabolism reving for life.

And if you’re older and your current lifestyle has negatively impacted your body, know that it’s not too late. Turn things around now and you can reverse the damage that’s been done. I’ve seen it happen time and time again.

SEE ALSO:For more great training and nutrition wisdom, check out John’s complete system, Precision Nutrition. Containing system manuals, gourmet cookbook, digital audio/video library, online membership, and more, Precision Nutrition will teach you everything you need to know to get the body you want — guaranteed.And what’s more, your online access allows you to talk exercise and nutrition 24/7 with thousands of fellow members and the Precision Nutrition coaches. Find out more about Precision Nutrition.

Order Precision Nutrition now and get $50 off!

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5 Quick and Easy Lunch Ideas

by Brian St. Pierre, CSCS, CISSN

Lunch is definitely one of those meals where people often have the best intentions, but things often go awry.

If you don’t prep and pack your lunch in the morning for the day, and instead, rely on your ability to make good decisions when you are starving and faced with multiple opportunities to stray from your usual intake, you are in trouble.

While some people do have an iron will, resist the temptation and make good choices, that is not most of us! This is where packing your own delicious and healthy lunch can come in and prevent that from ever being an issue in the first place.

Since time is always an issue, here are 5 quick lunch recipes that you can make in 10 minutes or less before you head off to work and take with you.

One quick note is that many of these recipes call for pre-cooked chicken breasts, as this can be a HUGE timesaver.

In a large Pyrex dish, cook chicken breasts that have been cut in half (so they are half as thick) or chopped at about 350°F for approximately 20 minutes, or until done. To retain moisture, cover dish with tin foil. Season these breasts to taste with sea salt, garlic powder, Montreal chicken seasoning, or anything you like prior to cooking.

Read more.

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How to Consume More Protein Without Supplements

Food supplements can be very expensive. Whey protein powders are all the rage. They’re made from milk, are easily digestible, and hit the bloodstream very quickly.

However, they are fairly expensive.

For the guy or gal who wants to build quality, lean muscle mass, the typical guideline is to take in at least 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight, preferably 1-1/2 to 2 grams in a mass-building or bulking up phase. Without breaking the bank (and all the banks seem to be broken right now, yes?), you can consume this much protein only by consuming a ton of milk (see these two articles, “Gallon of Milk a Day” program and GOMAD), beef, poultry, fish and… …the incredible, edible EGG.

How to Consume More Protein Without Supplements

Eggs are a complete protein, containing all the “essential” amino acids, and provide about 6 grams per egg. As far as food goes, eggs offer the highest “biological value” protein there is (this is a fancy way of saying that the protein is easily assimilated by the body). In short, eggs are a MUST HAVE menu item! Especially if you’re laying off on the expensive supplements. But how do you eat enough eggs to make a difference? Hard boil them.

Here’s How to Hard Boil an Egg

• Take a dozen eggs and a really big pot mostly filled with water.
• Place your oven on high. Put in the eggs and bring to a boil.
• Once the water is boiling, cook the eggs for 10-12 minutes.
• Then, pour out the water, replace with cold water and let stand for 15-30 minutes.
• Refrigerate.

Now, you can eat these just as they are (without the shell, of course) or you can add them to virtually anything, like salads, sandwiches, and as additions to your meals and snacks.

If you’re trying to add weight, eat them whole and eat 2 eggs with every snack. That will get you 6 eggs a day, or an extra 36 grams of protein per day.

This, in effect, replaces about one protein shake a day.

Of course, your snacks ought to add up to between 20 and 30 grams of protein (depending on body weight), so you’ll have to supplement with milk. Lots of it!

In fact, to get to 20 grams per snack, you’ll have to eat 2 eggs plus one 8-ounce glass of milk.

All other things being equal, you can replace 3/4 of a cup of milk with each egg while on the GOMAD program. Which means that you can really cut back on your milk consumption! (This is a good thing, for the most part.)

Alternatively, you can keep drinking your gallon of milk a day PLUS the eggs and you’ll gain more weight than ever before. If you do spring for some whey protein powder, you’ll be even farther ahead of the pack.

In the “old days,” trainers like Vince Gironda prescribed dozens of eggs a day for his pupils during their mass-building phases (3 to 6 weeks at a time, tops, plus every 4th day, go to a regular diet — see Cycling for more information on this important concept). Eggs seem to have an extraordinary anabolic effect on the body, increasing growth hormone production, and driving your gains like crazy. A few notes:

• Eat the whole egg. Don’t throw anything but the shell out.
• Space your meals to be 2 hours or so apart.
• If you do use food supplements, invest in digestive enzymes. Eating more than a couple eggs a day gives a lot of people some serious gas problems. The aid in digestion is worth the money. Your co-workers will thank you, too.
• Don’t fall for the “organic” nonsense with eggs. There is no proof that there is any difference between eggs produced by chickens in pens, free range, no hormones, or “extra hormones.” I have this theory: Chickens fed growth hormones probably pass those hormones to their eggs and consequently to those who eat them.

I do believe you can make serious gains without supplements. However, like anabolic steroids, you can “get there” faster with supplements.