BLy82 Member

You usually aren't going to burn a ton of calories during a weight lifting workout. On the other hand, weight lifting will typically burn extra calories over time because your body has a lot of work to do later repairing all of the muscle damage you just created. If you're scared of pushing your heart rate above 150, try…

Pick which one is more important to you. Remember that your real gains from exercise come from the recovery after the exercise, not the workout itself. If your body is already sore and exhausted, and generally seems to be struggling to keep up with the load you're putting on it, stacking long distance running on top of…

Yes, absolutely. If you are consuming a lot of plain water, particularly at a time when you've been sweating (such as with a workout), you can throw off the electrolyte balance in your blood. It's not necessarily the water doing it, there are other reasons you can feel a bit odd after exercise, like if your blood pressure…

I'm going to attempt to explain where I *think* the misunderstanding is, so I hope this will be helpful. There are special formulas designed to calculate your BMR, which is the calories you'd burn while comatose, basically. Obviously, though, these formulas aren't even attempting to predict how much you're *actually*…

You should probably not be trying to stay under 1200 every day. 1200 is actually the number it's generally recommended that women not go below (occasionally is okay) unless they're on a medically supervised diet because it's very very difficult to meet your nutrient needs at that kind of calorie count. At the very least,…

Being absolutely honest, it does happen to me. When I'm eating healthier food and keeping track of what I'm eating, I sometimes get to the end of the day at something like 700-900 calories and don't really feel hungry at all. Usually I'll find something nutritious that I can force myself to eat to get to a more reasonable…

Cow's milk is completely unnecessary to being a healthy human. While the huge budget of the dairy industry is constantly pushing the idea that we need cow's milk, the actual fact is that many of the people on earth are not even capable of digesting it. They're getting along just fine. In fact, in many of those places…

You have it mixed up. Countries where more soy is consumed (real soy foods, including tofu, soy milk, edamame, etc) tend to have lower rates of things like breast cancers. When people do make the claim that soy consumption is tied to higher cancer rates, it's probably largely based on the fact that soy pops up in so many…

In most ways, all types of oats are roughly the same nutritionally. The main difference between the different types of (plain) oats is how thinly they're cut/prepared (and some can be pre-cooked a bit). The thinner they're cut/prepared, the faster they cook. Also, the faster they digest. The blood sugar increase that you…

The people in the documentary who were doing the juicing were in a very very very bad health situation. Like... on massive doses of Prednisone (very very nasty drug to be on long term) with auto-immune issues, stacks of prescription bottles, etc. The reason they went for juice was that it would be next to impossible to…

That's a possibility. I mentioned in my post that some people feel better if they take probiotics because that's the bacteria that's meant to be snacking on the chicory root extract in your intestines. The same stuff is in yogurt :) (You probably don't need to have yogurt with it every time though... your body should build…

If you try to increase your calorie intake tremendously in a single day, there's a possibility you'll get an upset stomach from it. Heck... just a little earlier today I was really hungry and made a bigger meal for myself than I normally would, got 2/3 of the way through and realized there was NO hope I was going to be…

This is true in many cases, but I'm not sure I'm comfortable going quite so far as saying 'nearly all'. There are some people out there who are genuinely trying, but really somehow don't get the idea that not washing your vegetables is not an adequate way of getting B-12. There are also people who are eating vegan for 100%…

There actually is research that shows that people on a balanced vegan diet are as a group generally both skinnier and healthier than the typical person who eats meat as a part of the standard american diet. I've never actually seen a study where someone had compared people who eat vegan to omnivorous eaters in the same…

The reaction that you are having is almost certainly due to chicory root extract. It is a form of fiber which is put in foods because it is easy to add without disrupting the taste, plus it has a reputation as a prebiotic. This means basically that it is a favored 'food' for the helpful bacteria that lives in your…

No, it's not. Plenty of people have been university students without engaging in heavy drinking. There is no diploma requirement that you must have binged on alcohol a certain number of times. You are certainly welcome to make your own choices, including choosing to go out and binge drink. It's your body and that's your…

This is definitely a 'talk to your doctor' situation. Also, have you ever paid close attention to see if it's not just eating 'healthy' but some specific healthy food that your body is hating? Just a thought. There's a possibility that some experimentation would help you narrow it down to particular foods or some kind of…

Exercise is what creates size and definition in your abdominal muscles, but you'll never be able to see the muscles if you don't remove the layer of fat that covers them. The vast majority of fat loss is achieved by watching what you eat (particularly reducing calories). Basically, it means that the vast majority of…

Honey is basically just sugar. It is certainly sugar with a small amount of nutrients in it, which makes it definitely better than white sugar, but it's not as much better as people like to think. On the other hand, one teaspoon is probably something like 20 calories. That's not exactly going to make or break you :)

Actually, to be fair, the ability to drink lots of water safely is a consequence of modern sanitation. Beer, wine, etc used to be much more typical drinks because they were safer than water. Also, the average age was pulled down tremendously by the tendency to die in childhood. Benjamin Franklin, for example, lived to be…

Your family is completely wrong. The only nutrients that you will naturally tend to come up short in eating a good vegan diet are B-12 and Vitamin D. B-12 is made by bacteria and used to be found more on vegetables and in water, but since we now chlorinate and wash everything much more carefully you'll need to supplement…

Yes, absolutely. Banana allergies do happen. In fact, you may want to be somewhat cautious of latex as well and bring this up with your doctor. Supposedly allergies to latex and banana are closely related, and there's a risk that if you have one you also have (or will develop) the other. Latex allergies are a big deal…

Sedentary means a person who does little to no exercise and does not have an active occupation. It could very well include things like spending 8-10 hours a day working at a desk job. That's why it's roughly 1.2 x BMR. It gets you an extra 20% to cover what little moving around you do. Lots of people actually fall into the…

You're mistaken. BMR is estimated partly based on assumptions about lean mass and what the body needs to support itself, but lean mass is most definitely not the sole determining factor in establishing your BMR. The numbers produced by the BMR calculators that you can find online actually are an estimate. People who really…

Strictly speaking, each pound of fat has a theoretical maximum number of calories that it can release and that the body can use under optimal conditions. This is a big part of why it's considered to be 'safe' to lose larger amounts of fat per day when you have a very large amount of fat from which the calories can be…

Actually, no. That's not a valid paraphrasing of what I said at all. To my understanding, there are no scientific studies and consensus clearly demonstrating that maintaining lean body mass during fat loss is specifically tied to the BMR calorie requirement. To say that eating more calories has a tendency to protect your…

BMR is the basic number of calories required to get you through the day if you do absolutely nothing other than breathe and maintain life, correct. What you're forgetting is that your body is entirely capable of running its basic functions making use of the body fat calories it is holding in storage. In fact, any time that…

So long as you feel all right, more fiber is fine. I've heard estimates as high as 100g of fiber a day for how much humans might be expected to eat if they were consuming a completely wild and unprocessed diet (which is what we would have evolved to be able to handle). That's not to say that you necessarily need 100g, just…

There is actually always some variation in how many calories you absorb from food. Digestion isn't just done by your body (meaning the human cells). It is also partially carried out by the bacterial colonies that live in your gut. Some people have bacterial colonies that do better at digesting certain foods than others (my…

Too much protein actually CAN be a problem. A bigger problem is too much lean protein in the absence of other calories (this is sometimes called 'rabbit starvation', this is very very unlikely to happen to someone who is eating food from our modern food supply though). You are, however, relatively unlikely to actually…