Are you a vegetarian or thinking about becoming a vegetarian but also want to build and maintain muscle?

Has someone told you that it’s impossible to do?

Let’s set the record straight.

If you’re reading this you probably have some interest in health and fitness. You might have even taken steps to get in shape by exercising. For some this might mean taking the stairs instead of the elevator and for others it might mean going to group classes several times per week. You might remember those first few weeks and months of fast progress where you were stronger every time you stepped into the gym and likely even saw some changes in the mirror pretty quickly. But then progress slowed down and those quick gains didn’t come so quickly. Months might of even gone by without you noticing any changes in the mirror.

We know what the problem is because we've been in your shoes and we've seen it play out in ourselves, friends and client’s lives time after time.

You’re fighting a losing battle by working against yourself every hour that you're not in the gym. It’s a “two steps forward, one step back” thing. It’s not that you’re lazy, it’s just that you don’t see what you’re missing because you’ve never been taught the importance of one thing and then put that knowledge into practice.

I’m talking about your nutrition. The food you eat and the drinks you drink.

I know what you might be thinking… “But I work out!” Or maybe you’re thinking “Yeah yeah, I know… Don’t eat pizza. Don’t eat bread and certainly don’t have alcohol”.

This is the lack of understanding that I referenced earlier.

You don’t even know what you don’t know yet.

You don’t know what and how much to be eating to see the physical changes that you want.

If I had a magic wand I would wave it make and make all of our clients lose their initial pounds in their bellies and thighs.

We’d have a never ending stream of praise and testimonials and we’d raise our prices to $1,000 per month because of this superpower. Then Blakley would buy a new MasterCraft Ski Boat and I would buy the fanciest T-shirts on the Rogue website.

Ok, back to reality.

The fact is that often times the places we want to lose fat the most are the places that it seems to melt off of last.

For men that tends to be our bellies and our love handles. Even at my leanest at ~8-9% body fat I could grab some fat on my love handles even though the rest of my body was pretty lean.

Ladies tend to lose their last few lbs of fat in their hips and thighs.

So why the heck would this be?

One thing we commonly see across nutrition clients is that they are under eating protein.  It definitely takes work to get in all of the protein grams your body needs in a day especially if your goal is to maintain a healthy body mass and it is even more important as we age.

We want to challenge YOU to 14 days of getting in 20g of protein at breakfast.

As they say, breakfast is the most important meal of the day and kicking your day off with a healthy serving of protein sets you off on the right track for whatever else your day brings.

We’ve got a few ideas for you. 

We know that calories are our energy source.  

The main factor in weight gain or loss is calories in vs calories out (it’s really that simple).

If you want to maintain your body weight you need to eat around the same number of calories that you are burning.  

If you want to gain muscle you need to be eating more calories than you are burning.

If you want to lose fat, you need to be eating less calories than you are burning.

Even though we know all of these things we still may not know how much and what to eat!

We’ve been working-out a lot lately. I’m not talking about lifting weights or doing pull-ups, I mean that since we sold our house and haven’t moved into our new place in Boise we’ve been working from a lot coffee shops and breakfast places.

We’re oddly productive when working out of coffee shops despite all of the distractions. Anyway, you get to do some pretty good people watching / observing in these places. As nutrition coaches we are always noticing people's choices when it comes to the foods that they go for.

From what we see, a common breakfast for people is a pastry and a sweetened coffee drink. The pastries are usually something like a muffin, croissant, scone or donut. The coffee is usually a mixture of coffee and cream (or milk) and a sugar or honey sweetened syrup mixed in.

Let’s talk about why this is a suboptimal breakfast routine.

The global supplement industry is poised to bring in an estimated 220 BILLION dollars by 2022. That’s BILLION, with a “B”.

If that many supplements are being sold around the world then that probably means that you should be taking some right?

Here’s the deal.

You don’t need supplements.

I mean, even the name tells you that. If you needed them they’d be called “necessaries” or “mandatories”.

So why are they so popular and obsessed over?

Getting fit, losing fat, and gaining muscle are simple. It’s a completely linear process. If you tracked your progress on a graph it would be a perfectly straight line headed from the bottom left to the top right with no deviations. One day you’d decide to reach your goal and eventually you would get there with zero issues.

Annnnnnd cut!

THAT was the Hollywood movie version of what it looks like to get healthy.

Let’s get real here.

We’re human.

We’re busy.

We get sick.

We get distracted.

We go on vacation.

We get off track.

Other people demand our attention.

There’s a constant stream of things in life that can easily thwart our plans for progress. Inevitably ALL of us take a couple steps back somewhere in our journey. It’s just part of the process, and that’s ok. So what should you do if you need a reset or to get back on track?

The best advice I can give you is to start small.