by Chris Shugart
Eat a Lot, Stay Healthy
Love food? Here's how to stay as healthy as possible if your least favorite exercise is pushing away from the table.
In a T Nation Instagram poll, 93% of people said they needed to lose 15 pounds of fat or more. Weirdly, they were all responding to a fitness account that does nothing but provide free info to help them do it. What's up with that? Judging by the comments, it boiled down to, "Man, I just love to eat!"
Well, eating is necessary to sustain life, so that's understandable. I just love to breathe, too. I do it, like, all the time. Food is a funny thing. You've gotta eat to live, but the type and amount you eat can also send you to an early grave.
"Yeah, but man, I just love to eat!" Okay, I hear you. But let's at least fight off the maladies that come along with loving food a little too much.
Supplements for People Who Just Love to (Over) Eat
1. Cyanidin 3-glucoside (C3G)
C3G, a naturally occurring anthocyanin, shrinks fat cells and limits fat storage while increasing and enhancing calorie-burning brown fat. This flavonoid enhances insulin sensitivity, controls insulin signaling (so that glucose and nutrients are partitioned into muscle cells), blocks elevation of leptin, and increases fat oxidation. C3G even compares favorably to a prescription glucose-disposal agent.
Take 300 mg of C3G to undo some of the damage and maybe even improve your body composition. That's four capsules of Indigo-3G (Buy at Amazon) before your biggest meal of the day.
2. High-DHA Fish Oil
Extra body fat is the soil in which diseases grow. Name the disease or condition and extra body fat "incubates" it, from heart disease and diabetes to cancer. In short, hauling around too much fat increases systemic inflammation, leading to a mountain of problems. Douse the flames with high-dose, DHA-rich fish oil.
DHA:
- Decreases natural systemic inflammation
- Supports cardiovascular health
- Boosts metabolic rate
- Increases insulin sensitivity
- Switches the body to prefer burning fat over glycogen
- Increases leptin, which decreases appetite and cravings
It takes a big dose, especially if you "just love to eat," with most positive studies using 2000 mg or more. Biotest's Flameout (Buy at Amazon) contains 4200 mg of fish oil per serving, so you're covered.
3. Casein-Rich Protein Powder
I don't mean to be too hard on the "I just love to eat!" guys. Heck, I'm one of them. I like desserts and pancakes and peanut butter cups, and I don't like to finish a meal feeling hungry.
To satisfy my appetites, I use a protein powder packed with filling micellar casein. Among other benefits, this helps me meet my body's protein threshold – the amount of protein needed before the body sends the "I've had enough to eat today" signal. Plus, I can use this protein powder to make hunger-squashing, healthier versions of all my favorite fat-boy foods… without becoming a fat boy.
How much protein do you need? Here's a good rule of thumb:
Estimate your ideal body weight and eat that many grams of protein daily from food and supplemental protein powder. So, if you weigh 210 and think you'd feel better at 195, shoot for 195 grams of protein per day.
Use MD Protein (Buy at Amazon), which contains micellar casein and works great in shakes or decadent recipes, like these (on YouTube).
