Nepal Pics & Nutrition Q & A

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Here's yesterday's video chat. It begins with a short recap of the Nepal trip, both Everest trek and the Yak Attack bike race. Followed by Denis and I's standard fitness and nutrition Q & A. There will be a stage by stage Yak Attack recap later, but this should get you primed for that.

Back With A Video Chat

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By popular demand I'm posting again here on Blogger. The transfer to the new site's turning out to be more complex than expected so posts will henceforth resume here until the new site is deemed acceptable. If you comment and it doesn't come through please try again as I'm having a lot of trouble with spammers lately.

Business has been charging along as usual, with the somewhat major addition of a trip to India and Nepal that's effectively tossed a crazy wrench into what's already a filled-to-the-gills schedule. I've been keeping news items worthy of critical review, which I'll get to (most probably after my trip) once I've caught up on the backlogging what I've been up to.

The Yak Attack, catalyst for upcoming voyage, will also merit some attention and I'll try to do it justice. For now, let's re-conveine with Denis and I bantering for an hour. The chat opens with immune talk, given our entire office is currently sick, and then moves into standard q and a.

PS - you can access this blog via steveedwardsfitness now and, since the site will be moving there, you might as well get used to that being the home page.

Salt & Sugar: Video Chat

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Here's yesterday's chat, the more robust version of this article. The odd opening came to Keith in a dream, and who are we to deny such a vision? I'm sure there will be more chat dreams/themes in the future. If you have further questios, ask away here.

Salt & Sugar: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Silent killer or manna from Heaven? What’s the straight dope on the role of salt and sugar in your diet? These nutrients, so vital for sustaining life that historical lore could fill the History Channel for a month, are also the root of the world’s obesity epidemic. Next week, these two misunderstood nutrients will be the topic of my live video chat q & a with a longtime sidekick, or colleague if you will, Denis Faye.

Here’s a little teaser:

Most of us are aware of the evils of sugar. Modern food companies have been adding more and more of it into packaged foods to the point that they’ve created an imbalanced sweet tooth for many consumers. This has led to an overindulgence problem that is the spearhead of the obesity epidemic.

Sugar is a high-density food, meaning that it doesn’t give you a lot of bang for the buck in a nutritional sense because it has a lot of calories with few nutrients. In nature, where it exists only one part of a whole foods picture, it aids in transporting the other elements of those foods into your system efficiently, as well as providing energy on its own. The problem is that we’ve isolated and now put it into things where it serves no purpose than to fill you up and make you crave more of it.

Salt you’ve heard of too. Your doctor probably tells you to lighten up on it because overconsumption can lead to a myriad of diseases. It makes the news regularly, under the name of one of its ingredients, sodium (salt is sodium chloride), when we learn things like a single dinner entre at a food chain contains more sodium than the RDA states you need in a week.

Salt is nutrient dense as it’s a vital electrolyte with no calories. We can’t live without it. Because of this we tend to crave it, which food companies know so they chock food full of it in order to fuel our desire to buy more and more of their products.

If these stories sound similar it’s because they are, the net of which is to sell you more foods that cost little to make. These foods, both high in calories and low on nutrients, have the unique ability to make us both fat and malnourished at the same time. We’ve been swindled into terrible eating habits and, worse, created an epidemic addiction for two things that are clearly killing us. Yet...

These are two of the most important foods on the planet.

Try to perform at your highest level and you’ll quickly understand the marvels of sugar. Sugar turns to glucose in your blood and glycogen in you muscles and this fuels your body and brain far better than anything else. If you run out of sugar in a long athletic event your body will slow down and, at some point if you don’t stop, die. Used at the right time, sugar is the most powerful performance-enhancing substance known to man.

run out of sugar during a race and you'll quickly learn its merits

Salt is even more important and less understood. Most of us consume far too much of it but, oddly enough, the inverse is a big problem in healthy populations who can be too strict about limiting it. Salt is absolutely vital for life on any level but the more active you are the more you need. 500mg a day is enough for an average sedentary person but a cyclist racing on a 100-degree day can burn through 2,000mg in an hour! Those who eschew all salt find themselves at risk for hyponatremia, an electrolyte imbalance that will kill you swifter that a bite from a black mamba. There’s a good reason salt has been the catalyst of many wars throughout history.

gandhi used salt to thwart the british

Join us Thursday, October 25, and 2PST (5EST) and have your questions ready. Links will be posted on all of Beachbody’s social feeds and the chat page here.

Video of “To Beast Or Not To Beast”

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Here’s the follow up to last week’s post about our Body Beast program. Denis and I go over the questions I received and answer even more. If you’re not sure what Beast is, whether it’s the right program for you, or how to work it into your existing training plan you’ll want to check it out. We had over 700 viewers and got to all of their questions so we’re betting there’s a good chance you’re covered.

Just Another @#$%! Video Chat

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Me n' Denis' latest ramblings on fitness and nutrition. Today for some reason we had an all-star cast of names. Even if they were all made up I'm giving the crowd props for creativity. Enjoy!

BEEP Chat

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This week's Beachbody's Eating and Exercise Police (BEEP) chat feature's a 30-minute cooking show with Ani and Steph (Julia Child's got nothin' on us) followed by Denis and I answering questions on our rendition of a talk show set.

Questions, Answers, and Song

Denis and I did an impromptu video chat this afternoon that you might find entertaining. Since no one was around at first we began with a bit of movie banter. As the word got out we progressed to a standard fitness and nutrition q and a session until a little challenge got Keith the Dude to provide a human beat box for one of Denis’ old high school raps.

My chats have changed to video format recently. They are generally full of detailed information that stays pretty much on topic. Today was different. You’ll have to decide if it was better or worse but it was certainly a lot more fun.