By Guy Lawrence
This is a great video and well worth the watch. Slim is simple is a not-for-profit group of researchers, doctors, professors, and donors whose mission is to make being healthy and fit simple again by transforming peoples understanding of how nutrition and food intake works through entertaining, practical, and proven scientific evidence. Continue reading
By Guy Lawrence
Guy: I met Angeline Norton (pictured above) at Sydney’s Filex fitness expo earlier on this year. With enough protein supplements and chemical potions to make your head spin, it was refreshing to meet a sports/fitness model who was passionate about what they put in their body and doesn’t buy into all the hype.
Impressed with her approach to health and sports modelling and an all round great girl, I asked Angeline if she would share some of her tips on what it takes to get that sports modelling look… Enjoy! Continue reading
By Guy Lawrence
Do you hang out in cafes? We do! Do you drink soy lattes? Mmm, we don’t.
This post was inspired by a conversation I had recently in a cafe (of course …) so let me paint a quick picture for you.
The one thing I’m finding as 180 Nutrition continues to grow is that Stu & myself seem to be involved in more meetings. This is actually a compliment and we are always looking at different ways to make them fun and worthwhile.
Our usual criteria is:
Just last week we had the NSW Police S.W.A.T team sitting next to us in a cafe. One of them approached us and it turned out that he uses our 180 protein supplement and also trains CrossFit. We hung out with them for 20min talking everything from CrossFit to diet and gave them bar samples and a t-shirt… relevant? No… Seriously cool? Oh yeah!
I try and stick to one coffee a day and anything after that I reach for the tea – but never the soy.
Turning up at these meetings, I can’t help but notice what different people order. Now I’m a live and let live kind of guy, as I certainly don’t like to judge. But it doesn’t take long before I get asked questions on health and nutrition, it simply comes with the territory.
During a recent conversation, I happened to mention that I ate 1 – 2 avocados a day as I have them in my 180 smoothies. The person I was meeting seemed quite shocked and their instant reaction was ‘what about the fat?’ They felt counting calories and a low fat diet was the way forward. This was said whilst they sipped on their soy lattes with honey (you can read my thoughts on honey & fructose here).
Without wanting to sound like a tool, my reaction was simple. I said I would rather eat half a dozen avocados a day than drink that soy latte. Naturally I had to explain myself, and here are my thoughts on why I don’t drink it… Continue reading
By Guy Lawrence
‘For all but the last few hundred years (a heartbeat on the genetic evolution time scale), really sweet foods have been difficult to find.’ – David Gillespie
Sugar… It’s a delicate topic. Unless you’ve been living in a cave lately, you will know that sugar has been copping a lot of flack from the media over recent times (and rightly so I feel). But even with all this media attention, it still washes over many people’s heads and gets thrown into the all too hard basket, with my mate included.
I’ve been guiding my mate now for quite some time with the misconceptions of weight loss and his health kick. He felt that eating fruit salad would help his weight loss plan, counting calories and drinking diet sodas was a healthy choice, following the food pyramid was beneficial and hours and hours of running a week was going to improve his health. Then I challenged him and his way of thinking and asked him to reconsider his approach, and thankfully he has so far.
We caught up for a cuppa and a chat recently, and as he puts a great big spoonful of honey in his tea, he looks at me and says “this is ok isn’t it? I mean, it’s natural right?”
He then tells me he’s stirring lots of agave syrup into his porridge in the morning too. O’ dear… Continue reading
By Guy Lawrence
“Health is a resource for everyday life, not the objective of living.” -
… Health Promotion
My mate was faced with something that he felt was a serious problem, his job demanded lot’s of hours, blood, sweat and tears on a weekly basis. He loved his job but his health was beginning to suffer. He’d been at it for four years and whenever he fitted exercise into his routine it became too much and simply exhausted him.
When we met up one evening, he told me that he had a 6.30am spin class that morning with a jog lined up for the following night. He also looked like he was going to have to crawl home like a lizard as he was that tired! I did feel for him.
After discussing the food pyramid at length and coming to the conclusion it sucked, I really felt we’d need to look at his exercise regime too.
I asked him why he was exercising?
After a bit of a dumbfounded look he said he wanted to be fitter, leaner, toned and healthier. He was feeling like a slug with no backbone when he sat in his office chair and he desperately wanted it to change.
From where I was sitting, his road to greater health wasn’t looking pretty. All I could see for him was fatigue, burnout, frustration, possible injury and an attitude that said ‘screw you’ to exercise with a million justifications on why he can’t do it anymore.
Do you like the idea of exercising less & becoming a lean mean health machine in the process?
He did… Continue reading
By Guy Lawrence
“…an 8 oz /230g serving of hamburger daily, is technically permitted under the pyramid.” - Harvard nutritionist Dr. Walter Willett
Have you ever had one of those moments… Someone asks you a question which seems to be really simple, yet you know if you answer it, it opens up for a 100 more questions?
After explaining to my friend about my feelings on why counting calories doesn’t work (you can read my thoughts on calorie counting here), I think he was having a little bit of a paradigm shift regarding his health, nutrition and weight loss. I had just created a monster and I knew more questions would come flying at me!
The penny had dropped and all was not as it seemed in the world of weight loss and marketing. He began to understand that nutrient dense food was of the upmost importance when it came to weight loss, not counting calories. He also began to realise that most of his daily diet consisted of food that was not nutrient dense. It was loaded with refined grains, white flour and starch like breads, pastas, rice etc.
So here came the next question… What about the food pyramid? He was actually eating in no greater quantity than what is recommended by the somewhat vague prescription advocated by the food pyramid. Yet he wasn’t losing weight.
This was my answer to why I thought the food pyramid sucked. Here’s why… Continue reading
By Guy Lawrence
I’ve recently been reading David Gillespie’s book – Big Fat Lies. It’s certainly a book I’m happy to recommend. It make’s some interesting points on counting calories, weight loss and the general public perception of it all (points that I happen to agree with I may add). This got me thinking as I have never counted a calorie in my life, and I have no problem with my weight or health.
So after walking through Sydney Central Station tunnel to meet my friend with David Gillespie’s book in hand, I was blown away by how many people had some form of diet soda in their hands. I’m quietly thinking to myself: are they drinking it because they think it’s healthy? Seeing my friend make the switch to diet sodas because they are ‘zero’ calorie (learn more about the switch here), got me thinking it’s very possible that they do.
It was good to see my friend had stopped the diet sodas after my last blog post. As he sat there drinking his herbal tea he started picking my brains about calorie consumption. The serendipity of me thinking about counting calories and my mate quizzing me was to coincidental.
After his ‘diet’ soda incident and aspartame he began to realise not all was as it seemed in the world of weight loss and calories. Hence this blog post. Continue reading
Award-winning science writer Gary Taubes. Taubes, in his 2010 book Why We Get Fat and What to Do About It, debunks the common theory that people gain weight because of character defects – because they eat too much and exercise too little. He shows why focusing on counting calories does not solve the underlying problem. He explores the science of how and why calories are stored in fat cells. He draws us in to the radical conclusion that the way to lose fat and correct our metabolism is to eat more fat and protein, avoiding carbohydrates, especially refined sugars and refined flours.
How can you lose weight by eating more butter and less potato?
Taubes explains that insulin is the carrier molecule that gets sugar into a cell, so that it can be used for energy. Carbs, and especially refined sugars and refined flours, flood the blood stream with sugar, which prompts the body to release a lot of insulin.
When the muscle and organ cells are threatened with an oversupply of sugar, they rebuild cell walls to “resist” accepting the insulin carrier. They become barricaded against the excess sugar – this is what is called “insulin resistant.” The fat cells, unlike the muscle cells, do not become insulin resistant. When the muscle cells are resistant (or when the blood is overloaded with sugars for any reason), the insulin carries the sugars into the fat cells, where they are converted to fatty acids. This is good in the short run, because high blood sugar is dangerous. But in the long run, we gain undesired weight.
Fat cells release fatty acids for the cells’ use as energy, but only when insulin levels are low. This normally happens at night, when we’re not eating and blood sugar levels dip. It also happens when we eat protein and fat, with few carbs to stimulate insulin. Unfortunately, when we are insulin resistant, the body begins to over-produce insulin in order to get enough sugar into the resistant muscle cells.
The underfed muscle cells (remember that the sugars are being swept up by the fat cells) clamor for food, resulting in hunger, more consumption of carbs, and another release of too much insulin. Then the cells respond in a vicious cycle with more insulin resistance, and more storage in the fat cells. The cycle is broken when we stop stimulating insulin release with carbohydrates. When insulin levels fall, the body can (and must) release fatty acids for energy use.
The push for a low-fat diet has been a national fiasco.
The emphasis on eating low fat appears to have contributed to the increase in obesity and diabetes we’ve seen in the last few decades. Eating low fat means eating more carbs, and we have replaced a lot of fat calories with calories from refined sugars. Our national per capita consumption of sugar has skyrocketed to over 150 pounds per year!
We owe a debt of gratitude to Gary Taubes for painstakingly reviewing over a century of research and clinical experience around issues of weight and disease risk in his previous book, Good Calories, Bad Calories. It’s a fascinating story of how hypotheses, clothed in flimsy supporting data, were enshrined as public health doctrine. Public health doctrine then controlled funding of future research, preventing the exploration of other more plausible hypotheses.
If you want to improve your diet, check out 180 natural protein superfood.
You can read the full article here.
The basic idea behind the paleo diet is that food production has evolved much faster than our bodies have. Therefore, paleo people say, we should try to mimic the eating habits of our ancient ancestors, sticking to lean meats and vegetables and skipping bread, artificial sweeteners and alcohol. Devotees say they lose weight and feel great.
“It works for many people, particularly if you hold onto a lot of belly fat,” said Chicago nutrition consultant Sherry Belcher.
She says the diet also can help lower cholesterol and blood pressure, as well as offer other health benefits.
“Removing any and all of these [nonpaleo] foods will have nothing but a positive effect on the body,” said Sheena Lawrick, a former Olympian and coach at Windy City CrossFit in Lakeview, where members are encouraged to combine a paleo diet with their workouts. Lawrick also notes that paleo isn’t so much about counting calories — it’s about feeding your body good food.
“A well-respected nutrition expert once told me, ‘Food is fuel, food is not reward.’ That stuck with me,” said Jon Callahan, 39, of Andersonville, whose whole family — including his wife and three children, ages 3, 5 and 8 — eats paleo. Callahan says he is sharper and has more energy since shifting to a paleo diet two years ago.
You can read the full article here.
If you want paleo food at you convenience, why not try our 180 SuperFood.
