Moss Tae Kwon Do

Nutrition + Exercise = Results
-UBC director

To achieve maximum fitness, both nutrition and exercise must go together. Many people do well sticking to their nutritional plan, but slack off on their workouts. Others love to exercise, but don’t watch what they eat. One without the other doesn’t add up.

Tips:
1. Track your intake: Studies show that those who track what they eat consistently lose more weight and maintain that weight loss far better than those who don’t. Tracking points in your UBC manual, or keeping some form of food log is crucial for success. Accountability to yourself!
2. Food Availability: We all have moments of vulnerability when we crave certain foods and can be tempted to eat (like late at night after seeing one of those diabolic pizza commercials!) If you know your favorite trigger foods are in the house, sooner or later you’ll eat them. Don’t keep unhealthy foods in your house.
3. Hydration: Drink lots of water. This helps satiate your appetite and helps your energy level.
4. Intensity: You must exercise with great intensity. With regular exercise we “condition” our bodies to be stronger and endure more. Once our muscles become conditioned to the demands we put on them, much less energy is required to repeat the same effort. So we must continually ask our muscles to do more than they want to do. When we push our muscles to the point of fatigue, the body not only grows stronger, but also begins burning unwanted fat for energy. Whether you are using resistance bands, free weights, or doing fitness kickboxing class, always try to push yourself to the highest level of exertion, even if only for a few seconds. Push yourself intensely for short intervals during the kickboxing classes. If you can do the repetitions with one band, move to the next color. Doing five difficult pushups on your toes is better than doing 20 easy ones on your knees. Remember, “You can do anything for 10 seconds”.

Water: hydration for health and weight loss
By Gay Poe (nutritionist and advisor for UBC)

What are the benefits of drinking more water? As a whole, we are made up of 70% water. Muscles that are hydrated look more toned because they are made of 70% water. Not drinking enough water is similar to depriving that less-than vibrant plant you water every few weeks. The plant will survive, but at what expense.

Other benefits to drinking water include:
• Helps digest food
• Lowers blood pressure
• Reduces constipation
• Lessens Asthma
• Eases Depression
• Metabolizes fat
• Supports healthy hair and nails
• Carries more blood and oxygen to your face
• Eases irritability
• Regulates body temperature so you don’t get too cold or too hot
• Suppresses appetite
• Prevents water retention
• Reduces stress

There are so many aches and pains that most people attribute to being old, sick or tired, when in all actually, it’s probably just a case of dehydration. What about those painful joints that we complain about? Water works as a lubricant. The two opposing surfaces (for example, the femur and the tibia at the knee) will glide freely and minimize friction damage, causing less pain.

Metabolism and You
By Gay Poe (nutritionist & UBC advisor)

1. Eat Whole Grains (especially Oats):
The B vitamins are the biggest contributors to the metabolism. Where are B vitamins located in grains? On the outside part of the grain so when you eat enriched grains, you aren’t getting any of the very necessary B Vitamins. Vitamin B will give you more energy and increased metabolism.
2. Eat berries, berries, berries:
Berries will rev up your metabolism and have a whole load of other health benefits.
3. Breakfast is the key:
You have to get your body out of ‘starvation’ mode and let it know that it’s going to consistently get fed or otherwise it’s going to start storing fat, not burning fat.
4. Strength training is as much a key to weight loss as kickboxing (cardio). By adding strength training to you workouts you increase you lean muscle and increase the size of you fat burning engine.
5. You have to eat within 45 minutes two hours after strength training.
6. You need to get sufficient sleep. If not, a hormone called Grehlin will become stimulated and this is the hormone that signals hunger. We don’t want that hormone! If you’ve reached a plateau, it’s most likely from the misinformation regarding nutrition.

Nutrition: 8 Rules to follow when it comes to making health food choices:

1. Focus on first 3-4 ingredients when reading labels: When reading a label, if the first 3-4 ingredients are enriched flour, sugar or high fructose corn syrup, don’t buy it.
2. Avoid refined sugar at all cost: White sugar and high fructose corn syrup have no nutritional value.
3. Avoid corn (for 10 weeks): Corn is what they feed pigs and cattle to fatten them up, AND, if they can make a syrup form corn, that tells you something!
4. Avoid white flour or enriched flour: These are empty calories with little-to-no nutritional value. Avoid it at all cost.
5. Count sugar grams: If something has more than 6 grams of sugar in a serving, don’t eat it.
6. Don’t be fooled by advertisers: Many food items like cereal, cereal bars and yogurt are advertised as healthy food choices, but in reality they aren’t. Too much sugar!
7. Don’t let fat-free fool you: If it says fat-free, they most likely added more sugar to make up for the loss of taste. Exceptions: cheeses and sour cream. Choose fat-free on these since no extra sugar is added when the fat is taken out.
8. Drink low-fat or skim milk: Whole milk has loads of saturated fat. Look at the sugar count on all milks; they can have up to 11 grams of sugar or more per serving. If you’re trying to lose weight, keep milk to a minimum until you’ve reached your goal.