01 Sep Fast Food Excuses
One of the challenges I face as a Personal Trainer is clients telling me they don’t have time to eat properly.
Well the one thing we all have in common is the same amount of hours in a day, the same amount of minutes and the same amount of seconds.
I can tell you about two executives I’ve worked with. Both have families and both under time pressure at work.One is very successful… the other from what I could gather (we no longer work together – I sacked him), isn’t quite so successful. One makes time to exercise and watches what he eats, the other complains all the time he hasn’t got the time and it is too hard to find decent healthy food. One looks great, the other doesn’t.
Which category do you fall in? Do you manage your life or do you allow your life to manage you? Are you in control or out of control? Do you want to look, feel and perform great or do you want to make excuses.
One of the great training ethos’s I subscribe to is CrossFit. Following is an article about an experiment they performed in America. It first appeared in the CrossFit Journal.
Fast Food
One of the more common explanations for bad diet is being “too busy to eat right.” On the face of it this may seem plausible. There are a multitude of things that we are each too busy to do. It seems logical that there are more things that we don’t have time for than we do have time for because there are an infinite number of things to do, but we can only experience a finite number of them.
But because eating is not optional, the important question is not how much time it takes to eat right but whether it takes longer to eat right than to eat wrong? We thought an experiment was in order.
We sent two teams out at lunchtime. Team A, the “too busy to eat right” team, headed for a popular fast food outlet and Team B, the “not too busy to eat right” team, went to the local grocery store.
The eatery is right across the street from the grocery company so differences in travel time was not a factor in timing the two approaches.
We instructed our “too busy to eat right” team, Team A, to order a meal that was not “right,” simply because the “too busy to eat right team” doesn’t “eat right” by definition. We are of the opinion that even the worst eatery can be made better by better choices, but that is the stuff of another article.
Team B was instructed to select for nutrition and convenience.
Again, our chief concern was about time to serving because we’re testing the claim that eating poorly is quicker than eating properly. But, we couldn’t help wonder, what are the cost differences and how profound can the nutritional choices be?
The fast food team, Team A, the one that was too busy to eat right, got their food in 17 minutes and 45 seconds from leaving the gym to food in hand.
The grocery store team, Team B, the one with the extra time to eat right, got their food in 14 minutes and 23 seconds, beating the busy guys by 3 minutes and 22 seconds.
The fast food was a double cheeseburger, large fries, and a chocolate shake. The cost was $6.12.
The grocery store food was 6 ounces of turkey breast from the deli counter, two Fuji apples, and 1 ounce of roasted cashews. The cost was $5.39, edging out the Dairy Queen by 73 cents.
CrossFit Journal Dec 2002
Everytime you eat you must get a cross section of ALL three Macronutrients , Protein, Fat and Carbohydrates – choose your fat from healthy sources and choose your protein of light meats, choose your carbohydrates from real live living fruit and veggies.
Stuck for a quick snack? Try ¼ cup of low fat cottage cheese, ½ an apple and a few almonds.
If you’d like to know more about CrossFit go to www.crossfit.com or contact me about the Conditioning sessions I am running
Joe Bonington
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