Yahoo! photo.
Would you agree that this is a pretty average daily food intake of a Singaporean?
- Breakfast: Bread with kaya, milo
- Morning snack: Biscuits from the office pantry or a curry puff from the store downstairs
- Lunch: Cai-Fan from the food court
- Afternoon snack: More pantry food
- Late dinner: Noodles from the food court
From hundreds of fitness bootcamp and personal training Singapore client interviews per year, these are the answers my team and I at Genesis Gym have encountered.
"Well its what everybody does" is the main reason for eating this way. That is the way an average person eats. True. But remember...
Average is not the same as normal.
This is not the way you should be eating normally for maximal health or weight loss/fat burning results.
"But I have counted the calories, and it's within my recommended daily intake"
Calorie counting is useless if you have not got the correct food type first.
That is because food is not just calories. It is not even just nutrient content like grams of protein, fat or carbohydrates.
In fact, food is information to tell your body what to do.
The bread and kaya and Milo are high in refined carbohydrates which tell your brain to relax and fall asleep.
Breakfasts like this are part of the reason many people have poor energy in the morning, and can't be productive at work. A better choice is a piece of meat with a few nuts.
Or at least some food with protein like Greek yoghurt or eggs. Nuts and protein improve your concentration and memory.
The biscuits and curry puffs at snack time are usually full of refined carbohydrates (we just talked about those) and refined vegetable oils.
Those oils signal your cell walls to become more resistant to nutrients entering the cell. This not only "starves" the cell, but makes your blood sugar higher (if the nutrients can't go into the cells, they stay in the blood), and eventually these nutrients end up being stored in fat cells (which are always ready to accept them).
A much better snack choice are some nuts (healthy fats) and perhaps some veggie sticks (lots of fiber which does not raise blood sugar).
At lunch, besides the high refined carbohydrate content of white rice, the food quality is often compromised by unwashed vegetables and bad oils used in meat preparation. We have covered bad oils and refined carbohydrates, but the unwashed vegetables in many food stalls still contain toxins. These toxins signal your body to slow its metabolism and store fat.
This is actually good, because if you have lots of toxins, which are mostly stored in your fat cells, it is a good idea to have them diluted (more fat!) and circulating less (lower metabolism).
However it's not a great solution for long term health or weight loss. So ideally bring your own food to work. Or at least get some of those pre-bagged veggies from the supermarket.
Finally, the late dinner signals your body to go into "digestion mode".
That is fine for most of the day, except that your liver is heavily involved in digestion and is not able to perform it's night time functions of detoxification and activating of hormones which repair your body and burn fat.
This is why I suggest going to sleep slightly hungry.
As you can see, food tells your body what to do, and that means food plays a huge part in determining what your body becomes.
Quoting my mentor in nutrition and functional medicine, Dr Bob Rakowski, "The new science of nutrigenomics has proven that food is not just calories and micronutrients, it is information that drives genetic expression. All proteins -structural and enzymes are created by what we put into our body."
That is why 1,000 calories of meat, nuts and veggies is very different from 1,000 calories of french fries!
Make good choices and tell your body to do the right things.
Coach Jonathan Wong is the owner of Genesis Gym Singapore which aims to provide the best personal training and fitness services in Singapore.
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