troy, Author at ANTIFRAGILE Fit

November 25, 2018May 20, 2020

BLACK COFFEE CHALLENGE: Lesson 4 – Sleep

You’ll sleep when you’re dead, right?

Not so fast.

You can survive for a long time without food and a shorter period without water. Although it’s unclear exactly how long humans can survive without sleep, it isn’t long before the effects of sleep deprivation start to show. Even one bad night can do damage.

Sleep is the deal breaker of all deal breakers.

If you’re not getting enough sleep, you’re not the best version of yourself the next morning — it literally effects every part of your body and mind.

So how can you make coffee and fasting work in your favor when it comes to sleep?

Caffeine curfew
Caffeine naps (say what???)
Fast earlier
Enjoy morning sun

Have a caffeine curfew. Caffeine is a powerful nervous system stimulant and has a long half life of five to six hours (the amount of time it will take for your body to burn through half of the caffeine dosage you ingest). If your nervous system is lit up, you can forget about getting high quality sleep. Set an unbreakable curfew stop time to make sure that your body has time to remove it from your system. For most people, it’s generally going to be before 2 p.m. But if you’re really sensitive to caffeine, then you might want to make your curfew even earlier, or possibly avoid caffeine altogether. You could always switch to decaf or tea after 2 p.m.

Take caffeine naps. If you’re feeling sleepy and want to wake yourself up — and have 20 minutes or so to spare before you need to be fully alert — give this a try. It’s more effective than drinking a cup of coffee or taking a quick nap. It’s drinking a cup of coffee and then taking a quick nap. If you caffeinate immediately before napping and sleep for 20 minutes or less (this is important), you can exploit a quirk in the way both sleep and caffeine affect your brain to maximize alertness.

You need to drink the coffee quickly, to give yourself a decently long window of time to sleep as it’s going through your gastrointestinal tract and entering your bloodstream. If it’s tough for you to drink a lot of hot coffee quickly, good options might be iced coffee or espresso.

Fast early. Try to eat dinner and start your fast three hours before bed. This will not only improve your sleep it will also improve your health. Insulin is high after a meal and you don’t want it to be high when you’re sleeping. Additionally, you want your body to focus it’s energy on repairing your body and mind while you sleep, not on digesting food.

Enjoy morning sun. If at all possible, enjoy your morning cup of coffee outside or at least near a window so the natural light can reset your internal clock. Getting direct sunlight outdoors on your skin for at least half an hour has been shown to produce the most benefit. But even taking in the natural light through your eyes can help. This sun exposure during the day can help you sleep at night by signaling your your body to “wake up.” in the morning which will trigger the proper hormones at night to help you fall asleep.

To purchase my favorite coffee, both regular and decaf, I recommend Purity Organic Coffee. It’s the healthiest coffee on the planet…no GI issues, jitters or toxins. Just pure, clean energy. Use code EVOLVEDNS for 10% off. http://troydelaney.com/coffee

Disclosure: The above link is an affiliate link so I do earn a small commission, at no extra cost to you. Thanks in advance if you do choose to go through the link above! If you have any questions about this product, let me know and I would be happy to answer them for you.

November 25, 2018May 20, 2020

BLACK COFFEE CHALLENGE: Lesson 2 – Exercise

Today we’re sticking to the theme from previous emails: coffee and fasting. But I want to throw exercise into the mix to maximize the benefits of these two.

Fasting + Exercise
Moderate exercise such as walking of jogging in a fasted state allows your body to tap into stored body fat as fuel. Incorporating weight or resistance training into your exercise can increase fat loss even more. A 2008 study showed that cardio plus resistance during a single workout significantly improves fat loss. The cardio plus resistance group not only burned fat and built muscle at the same time, but the amount of fat they burned was a tenfold increase over the amount burned by the groups that did cardio or resistance training only. Adding the exercise to your morning can also jumpstart your metabolism, and working out on an empty stomach can help you burn up to 20 percent more body fat, which is more likely to be achieved in the a.m.

According to a recent study, after eating, adipose (fat) tissue “is busy responding to the meal and a bout of exercise at this time will not stimulate the same [beneficial] changes in adipose tissue. This means that exercise in a fasted state might provoke more favorable changes in adipose tissue, and this could be beneficial for health in the long term.

Click here to get a Fat Loss Accelerator workout.

Coffee + Exercise
With regards to fat loss, having caffeine specifically RIGHT BEFORE YOU WORKOUT is shown to increase your body’s rate of fat loss by up to 29%, according to research published in the American Journal of Physiology.

But it’s also a potent performance enhancer — caffeine is a powerful stimulant, and it can be used to improve physical strength and endurance.

Caffeine is one of the best-tested ergogenic aids (substances that enhance an individual’s energy use) and is known to help athletes train harder and longer. Caffeine stimulates the brain and contributes to clearer thinking and greater concentration.

There are more than 74 good studies on the use of caffeine for both endurance exercise and short-term, higher intensity exercise. The vast majority of the studies conclude that caffeine does indeed enhance performance and makes the effort seem easier.

The average improvement in performance is about 12 percent, with more benefits noticed during endurance exercise than with shorter exercise (eight to 20 minutes) and a negligible amount for sprinters. More benefits are also noticed in athletes who rarely drink coffee, hence are not tolerant to its stimulant effect (which is one reason why I recommend the caffeine reset).

If you’re looking to hit the gym when your caffeine boost is at its most powerful, you’re going to want to down a cup roughly 45 minutes before working out. Studies show that maximum caffeine concentration hits at about 45 minutes post consumption. Additionally, drinking caffeinated coffee (3 cups) pre-workout can reduce muscle soreness (DOMS) from intense training.

November 25, 2018May 20, 2020

BLACK COFFEE CHALLENGE: Lesson 1 – Food (and lack of)

Improved mood and health, smoother energy and focus, appetite reduction, fat burning, increase in growth hormones, lower insulin levels, improved athletic performance.

How are there some many benefits from a simple change?

Three reasons:

Coffee
Fasting
Protein

Let’s dig into each of these.

Why is coffee so good for you?

Coffee is the world’s most consumed beverage, after water – and one of the most “well-researched” food products on earth. In fact, over 19,000 scientific studies have been conducted on coffee and health.

Research has shown that 3-5 cups of coffee per day has an astonishing array of health benefits. In fact, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announce in 2012 that “older adults who drank coffee—caffeinated or decaffeinated—had a lower risk of death overall than others who did not drink coffee.” Coffee drinkers were less likely to die from heart disease, respiratory disease, diabetes, injuries and accidents, diabetes, and infections!

Coffee can also assist in weight loss. Caffeine can mobilize stored fat and burn more adipose tissue. The caffeine found in coffee can elevate fat-burning by as much as 15 percent.

Additionally, coffee is a great source of anti-inflammatory antioxidant compounds — in fact it’s the worlds largest source of antioxidants!

Several other well conducted studies show that coffee drinkers live longer overall and have a lower risk of premature death from any cause. In two very large studies, drinking coffee was associated with a 20% lower risk of death in men and a 26% lower risk of death in women, over a period of 18-24 years. And research has linked coffee to improved mental health as you age.

If coffee causes side effects such as anxiety, tremors or irritation of the digestive system, try a good quality decaf (code EVOLVEDNS for 10% off). You can still get many of the benefits. High-quality coffee contains higher amounts of a compound called chlorogenic acid (CGA) which, among other health benefits, blocks the jittery effects of caffeine.

Coffee is also one of the few bitter foods consumed which makes it even more essential to include it in your diet. Bitter foods help moderate both hunger and blood sugar. Bitter foods also affect health in that they stimulate the liver to produce bile, which is an important part of optimal digestion. Bile emulsifies fats and renders nutrients – especially fat-soluble ones such as vitamins A, D, E and K – making them more available.

Time-Restricted Feeding (TRF)
TRF is a form of fasting and fasting has been shown to improve health in many ways. Your body has been conditioned to eat 3 square meals a day (plus snacks). Fasting is a great way to reset your body so that you are more aware when you are actually hungry and not just eating because of another reason (stress, habit, etc.).

TRF has health benefits, from improving your insulin sensitivity (or a healthier response to carbs) to shifting your body into burning fat instead of sugar for fuel. It also has a hormonal response that causes your body to release more growth hormones, which help to preserve lean tissue and increases utilization of stored body fat. In this TRF study, participants reduced total daily energy intake and reduced fat despite ad libitum food access. One study found that when overweight women followed a TRF approach, they lost more weight and body fat and improved their insulin resistance compared with women who followed a more traditional diet of limiting calories seven days per week.

In addition to fat loss, TRF’s potential benefits include improved cholesterol numbers, promotion of cellular housecleaning, increased lifespan (in animal studies), improved immunity, better athletic performance, and better appetite control.

Tip: Use the app Zero to track your fast. Aside from tracking daily start and stop times, Zero also helps track nighttime eating. It does this by fetching your location to calculate local sunset time. For example, if the sun sets at 6pm, and you began fasting at 8pm, Zero would automatically log two hours of nighttime eating.

Protein
Protein first thing in the morning is important because it boosts your metabolism and it triggers leptin, your satiety signal, keeping you full longer preventing the likelihood of binging on junk food later in the day, and decreasing carb impulses. It also boosts dopamine, a brain chemical usually associated with feelings of reward. Plus, your body uses amino acids from protein to build lean muscle, which makes you more toned and helps burn calories when you aren’t being active.

You are more insulin sensitive in the morning which means, if you start with a high carb breakfast like cereal or waffles, your body is more likely to store the breakfast as fat. In a novel but small study from Greece, restricting carbohydrate in the morning, in addition to a low-calorie Mediterranean diet, led to improved weight and fat loss, lower body mass index (BMI), and a reduced waist circumference compared with the Mediterranean diet alone.

Click here for some great high-protein meals.

May 20, 2018June 2, 2018

10 Ways to Optimize Your Daily Walk

Walking often was a critical part of human evolution. Yet most of us don’t do it nearly enough. Instead, we sit for long periods of time, staring at the computer monitor, tv or smart phone. This is great video on how sitting for long periods of time effects your body — “Our bodies aren’t designed for being sedentary.” Recent research has revealed maintaining a regular fitness regimen cannot counteract the accumulated ill effects of sitting eight to 12 hours a day in between bouts of exercise. When you stop moving for extended periods of time, it’s like telling your body it’s time to shut down and prepare for death! Additionally, there is strong scientific evidence that walking can have long-term effects on serotonin levels and mood throughout the day.
Continue reading “10 Ways to Optimize Your Daily Walk”

January 12, 2018May 20, 2018

The Kettlebell – An under $20 Investment that will Transform Your Body

In Nassim Taleb’s book Antifragile, he describes Antifragile as “beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.”

We want to help YOU become Antifragile fit — by getting fit and becoming unbreakable.

To get you started, we want to introduce you to a critical Antifragile tool that will transform your body…

the kettlebell.
Continue reading “The Kettlebell – An under $20 Investment that will Transform Your Body”