The Journey of Fitness and Nutrition

 Welcome to the fitness section! This is the fun section here, maybe you already read through nutrition and realized just how crazy this is going to be. Well boys and girls, put your seatbelt on because we are in for a trip. Rule #1: you can’t outwork a bad diet. I’ve tried it, it can’t be done. Maybe you’ll get jacked or lose weight but you won’t have the definition you want amongst other things. You are what you eat.  Rule #2: we all got to start somewhere. If that means bench pressing the bar for three sets of six then that’s what you gotta do. Ain’t nobody gonna walk in and bench 315 right out of the gate.  Rule #3: your heart is more important than your biceps. Do your cardio.  Now that we got all that figured out and laid out we can really dive into the deep end here. So  how does a new person or any person go to the gym day in and day out and make any kind of progress? Well, one of the easiest ways to really make some progress is to find a program that wo...

Nutrition labels are a blessing and a curse. They provide you with nutrient information for what’s in the food or drink but it also provides lies. Pretty hard to believe?  Nutrition labels are aloud to be off +/- 20 percent. When you look at the calories and it states that one serving has 100 calories, it could really have 80 to 120 calories. So how do you figure out what is actually the caloric makeup of this food or drink you’d like to consume?  If you read my nutrition 101 then you may remember that protein has 4 calories per gram, carbohydrates have 4 calories per gram as well and fats have 9 calories per gram. When you look at a nutrition label you can take the grams of protein and multiply it by 4, take the carbohydrates and multiply it by 4 and take the total fats and multiply by 9. Then you take the results of those 3 and add them together and you get your total calories for one serving.  The tricky part comes with fiber. You can subtract your fiber from your tota...

 Maybe you already viewed my profile but if you haven’t found that page and came across this one first, let me take a moment to say welcome and I appreciate you for stopping by and taking a gander of this very amateur but hopefully informational piece of literature. So here’s a little about me and my journey. My name is Kevin, born and raised in the suburbs of Des Moines, Iowa. I didn’t really do fitness until I graduated high school but I was very limited in my knowledge at the time. At that time I was doing stuff like P90X with a buddy. It’s a great program and I highly recommend it if you want that high intensity cardio style training. So that’s where I started, between that and running 6 miles a day, that was my workout routine and just having a see food diet. I was 18 and knew exactly zero about fitness and nutrition.  So let’s fast forward a couple years to around 22 years old. Still didn’t know squat about nutrition but I had a gym membership now. Granted I probably had...

Calories and protein are all we care about... The question everyone wants the answer to is, how any calories can I eat and lose weight? Unfortunately this is not a one size fits all answer. There is a wide range of variables that go into answer but to keep it simple we can say the average person should consume 10-12 calories per pound of body weight to be in a deficit. For an example, I weight on average 160lbs. and for me to be in a deficit and lose weight, a good starting calorie range for me is 1600-1920 calories. From personal experience I would like to be as close to that 1920 as possible, maybe a little over even. Well how could I eat more to remain in a deficit? This is where the wonders of exercise come into play, or maybe you have a really active job that you work at so you need a little more fuel for the fire. Anyways, any time spent doing any type of exercise that is intentional, like at a gym or fitness center can help increase the caloric deficit range. But Kevin, I\"...