Skip to main content

Energy To Burn


menshealth.com
What to eat and when to eat it to boost your metabolism and fight fatigue all day long

Energy management should be one of the principal concerns of the working man, and yet the average guy fuels his body the way he gases up his vehicle: when it's running on fumes. It's a red-warning-light response, and it usually triggers a pit stop for a café au lait and a croissant. Why we eat like the French when there's work to be done, we'll never know.

But there's a better way to wake up that doesn't involve overpriced coffee: Eat smart. And eat often. More specifically, snack often. By snacking on the right foods at strategic times, you'll keep your energy levels stoked all day, says sports nutritionist Nancy Clark, R.D. Here's what to eat when, with the prep time you've got.

7 a.m.: Jump-Start Your Body
They call it breakfast for a reason: You haven't eaten for at least 8 hours. Your blood-sugar level is at its lowest ebb, and now it's time to fuel up with protein and some fat, but mostly with complex carbohydrates.

At home: Grab a bowl and mix together a three-to-one ratio of Fiber One cereal plus Cap'n Crunch's Peanut Butter Crunch. Add 1/2 cup of 2 percent milk. That'll give you fat, protein, and long-burning fiber, plus a little sweetness to spike your blood sugar and help wake you up. Researchers at Cardiff University in Wales gave 150 men and women either high-fiber or low-fiber cereal every morning for 2 weeks. At the end of the study, those people who ate the most fiber also reported feeling the most energetic. "Fiber helps slow down the absorption of food in the stomach, so you have more energy over a sustained period of time," says Elizabeth Kunkel, Ph.D., R.D., a professor of food science at Clemson University.

In the car: Munch on a pack of Frito-Lay Trail Mix. These single-serving tubes of nuts, raisins, and chocolate chips cost just a dollar, and you can dump one right into your mouth while you navigate rush-hour traffic. The raisins provide potassium--a mineral your body needs to convert blood sugar into energy. As for the nuts, they're high in magnesium. When magnesium levels are low, your body hikes its production of lactic acid--the same fatigue-inducing substance that causes your muscles to burn when you're pushing yourself to crank out that third superset.

At your desk: Dig into Knudsen Cottage Doubles while checking your e-mail. These to-go bowls of cottage cheese come with a side of fruit. Eat them separately or stir the fruit into the cottage cheese to make it more flavorful. Besides being high in muscle-building protein, cottage cheese is a good source of calcium and phosphorus, two minerals that help build your muscles' energy reserves. Researchers in Denmark found that men who replaced 20 percent of the carbohydrates in their diet with a high-protein food like cottage cheese not only had more energy, but also revved up their metabolisms, increasing the number of calories they burned each day by up to 5 percent.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Soy Products Can Reduce Sperm Counts!

By: Heather Hajek Published: Friday, 25 July 2008 www.healthnews.com C alling all men who want to become fathers! Soy products may reduce a man's sperm count. Based on a recent study, men who consume soy products may have lower sperm counts than those who don't. The study was based on a small group of men who visited the Massachusetts General Hospital Fertility Center from 2000 to 2006. Even though the study found that some of the men who ate soy products on a regular basis had lower sperm counts, the researchers conducting the study are not saying that soy products were the cause of the lower sperm concentrations. The men who had soy products in their diets recorded lower sperm counts than those that didn't, but their counts were still within the normal range. Researchers don't deny that during the study men who consumed soy products had lower sperm counts, but they want people to realize there are other factors other than soy products that may have played a role in th...
Post a Comment
Read more

Obesity linked to quantity of sleep!

P eople who sleep fewer than six hours a night - or more than nine - are more likely to be obese, according to a new US study that is one of the largest to show a link between irregular sleep and big bellies. The study also linked light sleepers to higher smoking rates, less physical activity and more alcohol use. The research adds weight to a stream of studies that have found obesity and other health problems in those who don't get proper shuteye, said Dr Ron Kramer, a Colorado physician and a spokesman for the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. "The data is all coming together that short sleepers and long sleepers don't do so well," Kramer said. The study is based on door-to-door surveys of 87,000 US adults from 2004 through 2006 conducted by the National Centre for Health Statistics, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Such surveys can't prove cause-effect relationships, so - for example - it's not clear if smoking causes sleeplessn...
Post a Comment
Read more

Biggest explosion!

Thu Feb 19, 3:58 pm ET WASHINGTON (AFP) – The US space agency's Fermi telescope has detected a massive explosion in space which scientists say is the biggest gamma-ray burst ever detected, a report published Thursday in Science Express said. The spectacular blast, which occurred in September in the Carina constellation, produced energies ranging from 3,000 to more than five billion times that of visible light, astrophysicists said. "Visible light has an energy range of between two and three electron volts and these were in the millions to billions of electron volts," astrophysicist Frank Reddy of US space agency NASA told AFP. "If you think about it in terms of energy, X-rays are more energetic because they penetrate matter. These things don't stop for anything -- they just bore through and that's why we can see them from enormous distances," Reddy said. A team led by Jochen Greiner of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics deter...
Post a Comment
Read more