6 Keys to Mastering the Evening Meal

Part One: Keys 1 & 2

Mealtime, a once honored and treasured family experience, has become challenging with our demanding and fast-paced lives. Between the demands of work, time spent commuting, responsibilities as a parent, etc., etc.; it is often hard to find the time or energy for preparing a meal. Cooking, however, can actually be a pleasant way to unwind and can have, as its end, a nutritious and satisfying meal that everyone will enjoy.

If you buy into the goal of getting a healthy and nutritious meal on the table for your family, then let’s explore six keys (just the first two today) for making mealtime an experience that you’ll look forward to and enjoy.

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“Fat-burning” workouts: founded in fact or fiction?

At some point you’ve probably heard the term “fat-burning,” and if you’ve ever set foot on a piece of cardio equipment it probably had a “fat-burning” mode. The implication is that there is something especially important about burning fat in maximizing weight loss.

Weight loss however, is a function of creating a calorie deficit (taking in fewer calories than you burn), and not the substrate (carbohydrate, protein, or fat) that your body is fueling on. In fact your body is always burning both carbohydrate and fat. As the intensity of the activity that you are engaged in increases the percentage of fat you are burning decreases, while conversely, the percentage of carbohydrate (and total calories) you burn increases.

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Information you can trust? Or, your daily dose of misinformation?

You probably already know that you can't trust what you read about weight loss, or dieting, and that has never been more true than it is today with the internet where anybody can write anything (and they do, every day)!

Combating the misinformation in this area could be a fulltime job! Here are two examples from this morning:

Misleading Article #1 - The best fat-burning breakfasts

This article misleads in two ways:

a. Does "eating breakfast really crank up your metabolism?" Any time you eat, the process of digesting what you ate, creates what is called the "thermic effect of food." The thermic effect of food amounts to an average of 10% of ingested calories on a balanced diet, or about 13% of ingested calories on a high-protein diet. There is however, no increase in your underlying metabolic rate, as the "eat breakfast and boost your metabolism" notion promotes. Eating breakfast has long been associated with lower BMIs (body mass index, a weight to height measure) however, researchers suspect that that's because people who eat breakfast have a generally more healthy lifestyle than non breakfast eaters. For instance, "night eaters" tend to eat one (huge) meal a day, and they don't eat breakfast.

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Is Strength Training Really the Key to Weight Management?

It’s not uncommon to hear or read claims that, “if you gain one pound of muscle you will burn about 50 extra calories per day.” If only it were that easy...

In fact, the resting metabolic rate of skeletal muscle is frequently confused with the resting metabolic rate of the lean body mass as a whole. Lean body mass however includes all our organs (liver, brain, heart, and kidneys) which burn 15 to 33 times more calories by weight than skeletal muscle.

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What do You Really Know About Your Metabolism?

You may not be aware that the resting metabolic rate (RMR) associated with a given body weight can vary ±20%. Like many things in nature metabolic rates fall into a "normal" bell curve. The middle of the bell curve is the "expected" or average metabolic rate.

Another way of saying this is that 80% of you have a metabolic rate that is ±10% of the middle of the bell curve (for your gender, height, weight, and age).

Where you fall on the curve is based (mainly) on the genetic "hand" you were dealt.

The chart here shows an example for a 150-lb. 32-year-old female, using the World Health Organization's formula for metabolic rate

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