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?

Today is the day.  New adventure is awaiting.  

I’m writing this from Houston, TX.  

It’s our last day here before we set off on a new adventure that’s taking us to Boise, ID with a few stops along the way.   

We’ve been in Houston for a long time.  Blakley for over 30 years and Jonathan for over 20.  We met here.  We got married 18 years ago here.  We’ve owned homes here.  We’ve had beloved pets born and pass here.  Our friends of over 20 years are here. Blakley’s parents and brother are here.  Our beautiful baby niece is here (you have seen Blakley holding her).  We’ve had careers here and started our own businesses here.  

We have roots here. 

But without change, there can be no growth.  That’s what growth is after all.  A change.   

I’d like to say that we had some grand master plan for this new chapter of our life and that we’ve executed flawlessly to make it come to fruition but that is far from the truth.  It’s been an evolution that has unfolded step by step and opportunity after opportunity no doubt orchestrated by God.  

OH. MY. GOSH. THIS. CAKE. I. MADE. IS. AMAZING.

You have to have a piece.

“Thank you so much but I’m already pretty full from dinner.”

“No, I’m serious. You HAVE to have a piece.”

“You know, I’m trying to cut back on my sugar.”

“One piece won’t kill you.”

“I’m really trying not to eat when I’m not hungry but thank you!”

“PLEASE, I went to a lot of trouble to make it.”

“Ok.”

Has this happened to you? Was it a friend pushing you to eat something that you didn’t want to? Was it your spouse? A parent or grandparent?

It doesn’t really matter who it was. What it boils down to is a situation where you’re faced with a decision.

I’m not here to tell you which decision to make. I’m not in your shoes and don’t know your friends/family.

But what I can tell you is that you do not need to own that guilt that others try to put on you.

This article was born out of our own curiosity on the subject. We’ve taken ibuprofen (Advil) for years for things like aches and pains, muscle soreness and cramps. We don’t take any other medications so we thought it would be smart to dig into the research a little and see what the short and long term effects of taking ibuprofen are.

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.

We eat a lot of eggs. We really should get some chickens.

Since we eat eggs for breakfast just about every day we commonly get questioned about the cholesterol in them.

The question behind the questions is usually based on the notion that since egg yolks are relatively high in cholesterol, eating them regularly could lead to having high blood cholesterol and higher risk of heart disease.

Truth be told, I bet if you walked up to 20 people on the street and asked them if the cholesterol in eggs is dangerous, just about all of them would say yes, even though they aren’t really even sure what cholesterol is and how people end up with high cholesterol.

So let’s dig in and see if we can clear up some of this confusion.

There was a time that I believed this.

We’ve been doing this for a long time and there have been plenty of “bro-science” claims like this made during that time. Luckily, research and science have come a long way also and we can speak with much more certainty about both pre and post workout nutrition thanks to that research and our understanding of the human body.

To understand pre and post workout nutrition we need to talk both about the body and the food we put into it.

We all have different goals when it comes to what we are trying to accomplish with our workouts. Some of us desire to run long distances. Some of us want to get as strong as possible. Some of us want to be well-rounded and generally fit for life, and some of us want to grow bigger stronger muscles. You might have to goal to get bigger muscles and not even know it. Many of our clients want to look more “toned”. Toned is code for having larger (not massive) muscles, that you can actually see because they’re visible under low body fat percentages.

If you want to make your muscles grow, your training needs to be biased in that direction and it needs to have a few key components and considerations which we will dive into today.