Convenient Muscle-Building Snacks

Canned Tuna

This is probably one of the best and easiest snacks for building muscle. Available in convenient 100 g cans (or there about), it can provide around 17 g of protein, and the spring water varieties are also very low in fat. Canned tuna is easy to eat on the go, all you really need is a small spoon. If you can eat this sitting, you can have some wholegrain crackers with the tuna for a more complete snack. The only caution I have is that if you work in an office environment, tuna can be quite pungent and consistently eating it will be a sure way of making you a lot less popular among your co-workers, lol.

Canned Chicken

Some people are not aware that chicken can be purchases in cans, in the same way as tuna. This has pretty much the same benefits of canned tuna, though it of course does not have the same distinctive fishy smell, which makes it more office friendly.

Boiled Eggs

This is one of my favorites. The high quality protein in the white is excellent for muscle building. If you exclude the yolk, each egg is very low in fat and provide around 3 to 4 g protein. If you include the yolk, the protein content doubles, but be aware that you will also be eating almost equal amounts of fat. Having a few pre peeled boiled eggs in your lunch bag is an easy way to get some high quality proteins quickly.

Nuts

Nuts and other legumes are higher in protein than most other non-meat sources and also contain a range of health promoting nutrients. Almonds are a particularly impressive nut worth mentioning. In a serving of 22 nuts, almonds provide around 6 g protein, as well as healthy fats, and antioxidants. A serving of 35 peanuts provide almost 7 g protein, and are also high in heart healthy fats and antioxidants.

Jerky

Jerked meats such as beef and turkey jerky are excellent sources of protein. They are essentially dried and flavored pieces of meat. They are convenient to eat, straight out of the packet using your hands and provide high quality meat proteins. **However, depending on the brand, they can be quite high in sodium, so it’s worthwhile shopping around for the healthiest one.

Protein Shakes

Other than all the mentioned whole foods, there are of course a variety of supplements that are quick and convenient to use when you do not have the time for a sit-down meal. Generally speaking, these can provide an excellent source of protein, and even carbohydrates, vitamins, minerals, and a variety of other nutrients. A major benefit to having a protein shake is that it is far less bulky than solid foods. So if you struggle to meet your daily calorie requirements this is a sure way to increase your total intake. Just be sure to research the brand you select to make certain it’s not packed with calories and fillers you don’t need.

Protein Bars

It’s pretty difficult to find a protein bar that isn’t loaded with sugar and/or other unnecessary calories/fillers and they’re typically more expensive than any of the items listed above BUT, in a pinch, better to keep one of those on hand than to just not eat OR to eat a cancer patty at the local grease pit.

Staying Fit & Healthy On The Road

Whether it’s for business or pleasure our normal routines get completely thrown out the window when traveling. If you work out in a gym, suddenly you might not have access to any equipment. If you run around your neighborhood, suddenly you no longer have a familiar path to follow. If you usually prepare your own meals, suddenly you don’t have a kitchen or fridge. If you’re used to a good night’s sleep, suddenly you’re sleeping at odd hours in different time zones.


We are creatures of habit. While working a normal day job, we can stick to a routine pretty easily (wake up at the same time, eat all meals at the same time, work out at the same time, go to sleep at the same time).  However, when we are traveling, nothing is familiar and the slightest speed bump can be enough to throw things off.


You have to create a specific action plan that you can take with you on your next trip, whether it’s for a day, a week, or a month. Here’s a few things to consider: 




Make It Your Constant

Your exercise needs to become your constant while traveling – make a commitment to yourself that you will find time to exercise – NO EXCUSES.  Add it to your calendar, set up an email reminder, do whatever it takes, but don’t take no for an answer.  You might need to wake up early one day to fit it in or you might need to exercise at 11PM at night on another day. Just freakin’ do it! Understand the importance of keeping up your routine even while traveling, and you’ll be able to come back to your regular daily routine without skipping a beat.

Use Body Weight Exercises

Maintain strength training with increasingly challenging body weight exercises. Make it your mission to find one of these things:

•A pull up bar or swing set

•A sturdy tree branch

•A building or bus stop overhang

As long as you find one of those three things, you can complete a full workout of pushing exercises (push-ups and burpees), pulling exercises (pull-ups and chin-ups), leg and butt exercises (lunges and squats), and core exercises (planks and hanging knee tucks). If you can’t do pull-ups (YET!) or can’t find a tree branch, do dumbbell rows with your suitcase or other heavy object. Everything else you can do with just your body.

Where To Workout

You might have a decent hotel gym or you might need to work out in your room, or maybe you need to find a park or school playground somewhere.  Go for a walk; pick a direction and try to find a small patch of land to do your push-ups, squats and you can also jump rope or use resistance bands (both are easy to pack and light to carry).

Track Your Progress

Many people forget to do this when they’re traveling but if your goal is to be better today than you were yesterday, this is incredibly difficult to do if you don’t know how you did yesterday! It DOESN’T MATTER where you start, no matter how weak you think you are. What matters is that you’re better than you were last time. If you could only do one squat and half a push up yesterday, aim for two squats and one full push up tomorrow.

Maintaining Healthy Eating

You cannot out-run poor food and drink choices, and you can’t out-train it either. Even if you’re living out of a backpack, here’s some cheap and easy items to choose from: almonds, apples and bananas, peanut butter (or almond butter) sandwiches. While out, try fitting in spinach salads with walnuts (or sunflower seeds if you’re allergic to nuts) and grilled chicken or fish. Teddy Roosevelt said it best: “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”

Plan Ahead

If you know you’ll be traveling without the benefit of a cooler, pack some healthy snacks with you in your bag – apples and almonds are a fast and easy go-to. I would include bananas but you don’t want to get them bruised up bouncing around in your bag.

If you’re going out to dinner with your friends/family, find the restaurant online then browse the menu and “pre-order your dinner” in your mind so you know what to order when you get there.  Order the “meat + veggie + potato” option on the menu, and ask for double veggies instead.  Aim for something like grilled chicken or salmon.

If you’re traveling with others, let them know that you’re making a concerted effort to eat better and that you’d like their support.

Stay Active

I don’t care if you’re walking laps in the airport during a layover, or doing burpees at a bus stop – FIND A WAY TO BE ACTIVE EVERY DAY. Even if it’s 5 minutes of jump rope, it’s better than doing nothing, and will get you in the proper frame of mind. Take a run around the town, go for a hike, toss a frisbee in the park, go swimming in the ocean, whatever it is, just do something!

Bottomline

Eating right will be 80% of your success or failure and that means you need to be ON with how you eat every day. Try to maximize the good stuff (meat, vegetables, fruits, nuts) and minimize  the bad stuff (junk food, processed grains and carbs, sugary beverages). Maybe you’ll get made fun of by your unhealthy friends, or peer pressured into eating/drinking bad and skipping workouts, but what I have to say about that is, SO?! Two thirds of this country is overweight and out of shape. The number of diseases that can be avoided by proper nutrition and exercise is too long to list. So my question is, why would you want to be like, “everybody else” anyway?

High-Protein, Low-Carb Diets Explained

For the record, I don’t promote or follow any crash diets, weight loss pills, or meal plans that require you to cut whole food groups out, but I was discussing this with friends yesterday and to remain objective I wanted to present these types of diets from a purely factual and physiological point of view.

High-protein, low-carbohydrate diets, like The Atkins Diet, have been widely promoted as effective weight loss plans. These programs generally recommend that dieters get 30% to 50% of their total calories from protein.

By comparison, the American Heart Association, the National Cholesterol Education Program, and the American Cancer Society all recommend a diet in which a smaller percentage of calories come from protein.

How Do Low-Carb Diets Work:

Normally your body burns carbohydrates for fuel. When you drastically cut carbs, the body goes into a metabolic state called ketosis, and it begins to burn its own fat for fuel.  When your fat stores become a primary energy source, you may lose weight.

High-Protein Diets:

High-protein diets are a close cousin to the low-carb diet. While diets like Atkins focus on an intense restriction of carbohydrates, high-protein diets are centered on lots of protein-packed foods that leave you satisfied and satiated. High-protein diets, which in many cases are low-carb diets in disguise, have their own set of pros and cons – like any other short term diet out there.

The Risks of High-Protein, Low-Carb Diets:

Some experts have raised concern about high-protein, low-carb diets, like causing high cholesterol. Some protein sources, like fatty cuts of meat, whole dairy products, and other high-fat foods can raise cholesterol, increasing your chance of heart disease.

Kidney problems. If you have any kidney problems, eating too much protein puts added strain on your kidneys. This may worsen kidney function.

Osteoporosis and kidney stones. When you're on a high-protein diet, you may urinate more calcium than normal. Some experts think this could make osteoporosis and kidney stones more likely.

Unhealthy metabolic state (ketosis). During ketosis, the body forms substances known as ketones, which can dull appetite and cause nausea and bad breath. Ketosis can be prevented by eating at least 100 grams of carbohydrates a day.

Is a Low-Carb Diet Right for You?

If you're considering a high-protein diet, check with your doctor to see if it's okay for you. He/She can help you come up with a plan that will make sure you're getting enough fruits and vegetables, and that you're getting LEAN protein foods.

Remember, weight loss that lasts is based on changes you can live with for the rest of your life, not any that are found in a temporary diet.

HIIT vs. Cardio Machines

We all would concede that most people aren’t really fans of long, monotonous exercise. I know I’m not. Still, it’s impossible to go to a gym that’s not packed with people spending hours at a time on the various treadmills and elliptical machines. Yet most of them aren’t there because they enjoy it. They’re there because they think it’s the most efficient way to burn fat and lose weight.

But here’s the thing, that’s not true. While the cardio machines may tell you you’re staying in the ‘fat burning zone’ when you’re running at 5.5 mph for 60 minutes, the truth is you’re burning less calories overall than if you worked harder for a shorter amount of time.

If you’re like me, busy, busy, busy, then I know you want to maximize the calorie burning effectiveness of your exercise time, and you can actually burn more fat and calories when you work out for less time instead of more. Because with high intensity interval training, you burn calories more efficiently than you would by running for hours, and it takes way less time to complete.

So what is HIIT? For those of you who don’t know, High intensity interval training (HIIT) is an advanced form of interval training and an exercise strategy alternating periods of short, intense anaerobic exercise with less intense recovery periods.

In plain English, that basically means you’ll be working as hard as humanly possible for a short amount of time, doing a recovery exercise instead of resting, then working hard again. An entire HIIT session usually only lasts for 10 to 30 minutes.

Here’s a closer look at why HIIT works more proficiently and takes way less time to burn fat and calories than the cardio machines at the gym:

1. Efficiency

You’ve probably realized this already but HIIT is one of the most efficient forms of exercise you can do and that makes it perfect for: Busy people, Lazy people, Efficiency aficionados, Anyone who wants to get in better shape but doesn’t want to spend hours doing it. In fact, research shows you can make more progress in just 15 minutes of HIIT than you can running for an entire hour! HIIT will improve your VO2 max, too. According to a 2011 study presented at the American College of Sports Medicine Annual Meeting, just two weeks of HIIT improves your aerobic capacity as much as six to eight weeks of endurance training!

2. Burn more fat

Looking to lose some extra body fat? Of course you are! HIIT can take care of this faster than any other form of exercise. The effects of all that hard work from HIIT actually kick your body’s repair cycle into hyper-drive mode, meaning you actually continue to burn fat in the 24 hours after HIIT, not just during your workout.

3. Burn more calories

Just 10 minutes of HIIT can burn more calories than a half an hour on the treadmill. Plus, just as your body burns fat for 24-48 hours after interval training, you’ll also burn more calories during the time after HIIT as well.

4. Get a healthier heart

If you’re working hard enough during HIIT you should actually feel like your heart is trying to jump out of your chest because it’s beating so hard (the technical term for this is called the anaerobic zone). But working this hard has it’s pluses, including being crazy good for your heart. In one 2006 study, researchers found that after eight weeks of doing HIIT workouts subjects could bicycle twice as long as they could before the study while maintaining the same pace. Plus, it’ll keep your ticker running smoothly well into old age.

5. No equipment necessary

One of the coolest things about HIIT is that you can still get a killer workout even if you have absolutely zero equipment. That means even if you don’t have access to a gym, don’t have a kettle-bell or resistance bands, or if you travel a lot, you can still do HIIT. Sprints, burpees, high knees, air squats – there are so many bodyweight possibilities for HIIT!

6. Lose fat, not muscle

Anyone who has been on a diet knows it’s nearly impossible not to lose muscle mass along with fat when you’re cutting calories. But while steady-state cardio seems to encourage muscle loss, studies show that both HIIT and weight training preserve muscle mass while still ridding the body of excess fat. And since muscles are way sexier than no muscles, this is pretty awesome if you ask me.

7. Increase your metabolism

A faster metabolism means that you can eat more and your body will still burn it off (sweet!). And HIIT will give that to you. Studies show that HIIT stimulates production of your Human Growth Hormone (HGH) by up to 450 percent during the 24 hours after you finish HIIT!

8. Don’t get bored

One of the biggest complaints I hear of long, steady exercise is that no matter what awesome podcast or pumped up music the person is listening to, they eventually get bored from working at the same pace for a long period of time. But though I get bored quite easily, even I find it hard to get bored with HIIT workouts. Since they’re constantly changing and always forcing you to work as hard as possible, the workouts are over before you know it and leaving no time for boredom. As a side note: if you are getting bored during your HIIT workouts, it’s time to amp up your intensity level.

9. 100% portable

Since it’s such a simple concept, going at maximum effort for a short period of time followed by a recovery period and repeat, you can adapt HIIT to whatever time and space constraints you have. That means that even if you’re in a tiny apartment, in the middle of the woods or on a rooftop in Mexico, you’ll never have any real excuse not to do HIIT.

10. Push your limits

HIIT forces you to work harder than you ever thought possible. It gives you the confidence you never knew you needed. It makes you stronger and fitter than ever before. HIIT pushes your limits, which reminds me of that quote, “You will never know your limits unless you push yourself to them.” – Author unknown