Mmmm, breakfast.

I was pretty shaky after my exercise this morning, I guess green tea alone just doesn’t cut it for me for Nordic Walking. In the past, working out in a fasted state was believed to burn a lot more calories but I just googled it and found that those findings were controversial. I am linking (see related articles below) to 3 articles that reach different conclusions. Anyway, I had to come in after 45 minutes because I was too dizzy to continue, so I’ll probably go with “lightly fed exercise” myself unless I am just doing a 20 minute run or something. But… it is all OK because I made this!

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Pineapple mylk

Ingredients:

almond or soymilk, 1 cup

flax seeds, 1 tsp

frozen or fresh pineapple, 1 cup

sweetener as desired, I use 3 drops of Stevia

Process:

I used the VitaMix. If you don’t have one you should probably use flaxseed meal because my regular blender never ground the seeds up well enough for my taste. Essentially, that is the difference between a VitaMix and a blender. A strawberry smoothie made in a blender will still have strawberry seeds in it, the smoothie made in the VitaMix will not.

You can bet I’ll make one of these before I walk out the door tomorrow.

Mark’s Daily Apple recommends fasting before intense exercise, referring to a study in which the subjects were eating a diet containing 50% fat. He also notes, “Lifting heavy things while picturing the pounds of meat to come is, for lack of a better word, kinda Primal. The hunger fuels my performance.”

BuiltLean recommends a light meal before exercise. He says, “The group that ate before the moderate cardio session continued to burn significantly more calories up to 24 hours after the exercise bout. The authors concluded that “when moderate endurance exercise is done to lose body fat, fasting before exercise does not enhance lipid utilization (fat use); rather, physical activity after a light meal is advisable.”

The New York Times: Phys Ed: The Benefits of Exercising Before Breakfast which states, “Exercising in the morning, before eating, the study results show, seems to significantly lessen the ill effects of holiday Bacchanalias.”