Protein bars (made with protein powder)

Hi there!

I currently like to eat protein bars as a snack, because they’re easy to take with you, they’re tasty and the ones I’m eating (clean protein bars from http://www.bodyenfitshop.nl) are also quite filling. But also very expensive! So I was looking to see if I could make them myself using protein powder, which is less expensive. I combined some ideas I saw online and came up with these tasty, easy to make and no-bake bars:

Recipe is for 8 bars:  
1 bar is 2 sp for you ww people out there

1 bar contains 106 kcal, 6.4 gr carbs, 2.8 gr fat and 12.6 gr protein.

Ingredients:

• 1 banana
• 100 ml (1/2 cup) of unsweetened almond milk
• A splash of liquid sweetener (to taste)
• A few drops of vanilla and rum essence (or whatever tastes good to you)
• 50 gr coconut flour
• 20 gr unsweetened peanutbutterpowder
• 100 gr of coconut flavour whey protein powder (I use whey perfection)
• 15 gr raw cacao nibs
• 20 gr psyllium fiber

Mix the liquid ingredients with the smashed banana, set aside. Use a sieve for the flour, peanutbutter powder and protein powder, and mix with the cacao nibs and fiber. Throw like a teaspoon of this mix in your pan/mould to ease removal afterwards! Now pour the liquid mix on top of the ‘dry’ mix, and mix until it becomes like a dough. If it’s too dry, add a bit of extra almond milk. It shouldn’t be too wet, because it will not really dry up anymore. Press the dough into a pan, a mould or whatever has a shape that suits you. Put in the fridge for a couple of hours, remove, cut into 8 pieces and use a bit of baking paper to wrap them, because they’re still a bit sticky! Store in the fridge, enjoy!

Veggie lasagna

My mom gave me the Jamie Oliver’s superfood cookbook for Christmas and I’ve been using it to get some new ideas. Of course I’m not going to completely copy somebody else’s recipe, but I like to use it as inspiration to come up with something that fits my lifestyle, so here is the veggie lasagna recipe everybody’s waiting for 🙂

It contains 291 kcal per portion, 26 gr carbs, 11 gr fat and 24 gr of protein. It’s 6 sp on weightwatchers!

Ingredients for 2 portions:

• 1 squash/pumpkin (the long type)
• 1 zucchini
• 1 onion
• 2 tomatoes
• 2 hands of fresh spinach
• 20 gr sunflowerseeds
• 200 gr cottage cheese
• 20 gr parmesan grated
• salt, pepper and italian herbs

Preheat your oven to 340 degrees F or 170 degrees C. I use a silicone cake-shape baking mold to get it in the shape I want. Use a cheese slicer or any other tool to make very thin slices of zucchini and squash. When you reach the middle of the vegetable, it won’t give you nice slices, so cut those piece up and use it in the sauce. Lay the nice slices out on some plates (you’ll also get some bad slices, use them in the sauce!) Sprinkle some salt on the slices. It’ll draw out some of the water which you can remove with some kitchen towell. Repeat once. In the mean time, cut the onion, tomatoes, zucchini and pumpkin pieces and fry it in a nonstick pan. Add the spinach and let it shrink. Make sure it get’s thick and most of the moisture is gone! Add the salt, pepper and herbs.

Start layering your ingredients, start with pumpkin slices and use your imagination to make the rest of the layers. Be aware that normally the pasta plates absorb a lot of moisture. Making lasagna without the pasta will create a lot of moisture, so make sure you drain the cottage cheese before you use is and make the sauce as thick as possible. End with the pumpkin slices again and sprinkle with the parmesan cheese.

Put it in the oven and bake it for about 30-45 minutes, check it regularly for getting too brown. After this, remove from the oven, cut it in half and remove. Let it drain a bit on a plate to remove some of the excess moisture and enjoy!

Zucchini crust pizza recipe

It’s been a while, but I’m still alive and doing well! Today I’m uploading a recipe for a great zucchini crust pizza. I’ve combined some things I’ve seen on the internet and sprinkled it with some own ideas 😉 Be aware, this is not a ‘low fat, carb free, whatever whatever’ recipe. I LOVE cheese, so there’s a lot of real cheese in this recipe. Of course you can change it to your liking. Personally, I believe that if you crave real pizza, go and eat real pizza! One pizza won’t make you fat, just as one salad won’t make you skinny. Myself, I don’t care too much for the wheat based crust, I care for the cheese, so that’s why this pizza is great for me and right now it’s zucchini season so I can get a lot of them for free from my parents garden or from my own balcony. (Unfortunately my round zucchini plant suffered from the storm we had over here 2 weeks ago, it might not give flowers anymore, boohoo)

Ingredients for 1 big ass pizza (you can definitely use this recipe for 2 smaller pizza’s!):

Base:

• 2 store bought zucchini’s (or 1 large one)
• 30 grams of goat cheese flakes (or parmesan cheese) full fat
• 40 grams of coconut flour (or use regular whole wheat flour or almond flour, you might have to add more of it though, because coconut flour is really dry)
• 2 eggs
• Salt, pepper, garlic powder (or real garlic)

Toppings:

• A 7-8 biggish grape tomatoes or 2-3 normal ones, sliced
• A cup of mushrooms, sliced
• A small tin of tomato paste
• 50 grams of blue cheese full fat
• Italian herbs

Instructions:

Preheat the oven on 180 Celcius or 350 Fahrenheit. Grate the zucchini and put it in de microwave for about 2,5 minutes, stir with a fork and then another 2,5 minutes in the microwave. You’ll see a lot of fluids coming from the zucchini, that needs to be drained. Let it leak through a dish towel, or use a strainer or anything that will let the water flow away. You can also squeeze it a bit to remove most of the water. Now put it in a bowl and add the other ingredients for the base. Stir, if it’s too watery, you can add a bit more flour. Put the ‘dough’ on a ovenplate, I use baking paper. Push it around untill you have a pizza base shape, make sure you don’t leave it too thick and make sure the edges aren’t too thin (the edges will burn first!). Now put the oven plate in the oven and bake for about 20 minutes. You check the base to see if it’s a bit firm. Now I do the magic trick, I put a grill on the base (do you call it a grill? Check the pic!) and turn it around, so the base now lies on the grill and can be baked properly in the oven. I usually bake it for another 20-30 minutes, check how it looks, if it gets darker too fast reduce the temperature a bit.

Now remove it from the oven, add your toppings and put it back for about 10-15 minutes. I usually use regular tomato paste, then add the herbs (if you put them on top, they might burn), then the mushrooms, then tomatoes and finish with the cheese.

Nutritional information:

Kcal: 811, Carbs: 49 grams, fat: 44 grams, protein: 54 grams. (adjust when you change the ingredients!)

Enjoy!

Mealprep week 11

Many people tell me that eating the same thing for a couple of days is boring to them. I can imagine that, personally, I don’t find it boring, but that’s just me. This week, I want to show you that by just some minor adjustments, you can make it less boring. Let’s start with an overview of this weeks food:

• Breakfast: superseed oats with pb and fruit
• Snack: 4x protein-bananabread, 2x bellpepper and cucumber, 2x radish and carrots
• Lunch: 4x sweet potato, 2x chicken, 2x sausage, 2x broccoli, 2x cauliflower
• Snack: 2x apple, 1x pear, 1x orange
• Dinner: 4x yellow brown rice, 2x chicken curry, 2x Indonesian chicken liver, 2x sweet/sour salad, 2x veg stir fry.

Breakfast: Many people eat the same breakfast day after day. A way to make oats a bit different is adding different types of fruit. Personally, I always add a banana with some berries, but you can mix and match different types of fruit and add cinnamon/vanilla or other flavors to spice it up a bit. A great thing about this is, that you can prep a basic oatmeal breakfast and still safe time, but have different toppings every day. (Recipe for this oatmeal breakfast is over here)

Snacks: Making different types of bananabread could be possible with using small trays and adding different ingredients. Personally that’s too much work for me, so I stick with the same (yum) bananabread every day (recipe is over here). I tried to have some variation with the veggies and fruits, which doesn’t cost extra time at all. (It does cost extra money, because buying 1 orange and 1 pear etc. is relatively more expensive than buying it in bulk and eating the same fruit every day).

Lunch: I chose to keep my carb source the same, but to mix up the meat and veggies. I chose the meats that are easy to prepare, I always pop the chicken in the steamer and the sausages are fried with some turning over from time to time. I eat cauliflower raw and I lightly steamed the broccoli in the steamer at the same time together with the sweet potato and chicken (I love that machine!).

Dinner: Again, kept the rice the same for all the meals, but chose different meats and veggies. My mom has Indonesian ancestors and has the best Indonesian chicken liver recipe (yum!). It goes well with sweet and sour cucumber/orange pepper/tomato salad which I’ll make when I’m going to eat it (cut tomatoes don’t stay well, I didn’t show the cucumber in the picture, because it messes the beautiful balance, lol!). The other dish is chicken curry with vegetable stir fry. I fried the chicken with some onion and garlic and added a bit of red curry paste and 3 tablespoons of coconut cream. I fried the veggies with onion and garlic, spices and mustard seeds. I love my non-stick Stonehenge pans, because you really need almost no oil!

I prepped everything in about 1 hour and 45 minutes! I went like a tornado through the kitchen, but what really helps is planning ahead. So for example; start with making the bananabread, because it needs some time in the oven and also needs cooling down before the cutting. I always start with that, then I’ll pop my stuff in the steam cooker and move on to the next thing. If you think about your planning before you start, you can safe so much time!!

Mealprep week 8

If you want to start mealprepping/mealplanning yourself, I uploaded a printable mealprep planner on my mealprep page for you to use, have fun!

Another week, another mealprep! I´ll write something about my experiences with the raw vegan week soon. To be short about it: I loved the meals I made, but totally binged in the weekend. I find that restricting myself too much leads to the opposite! 

So now about this week: I wanted a simple, but nutritious mealprep with a bit more vegetables and fruits (one of the things I learned from my raw vegan week). I always eat extra food on the days I go to the gym! If you want to calculate your exact needs, go to http://www.iifym.com.

• Breakfast: Superseed oats with raspberries, blueberries and a banana
• Snack: Questbar, carrots and cucumber
• Lunch: steamed sweet potato, steamed chicken breast and steamed broccoli
• Snack: walnuts, 1/2 bell pepper, apple
• Dinner: yellow spicy quinoa, minced lean beef with mushrooms, onion and kale, sugar snaps and grape tomatoes
• Snack: a pear

I took it super easy, not making bananabread and chosing meals that are cooked quickly. This way it is possible to make it really fast. This is how I did it:

I started in the morning making the breakfast oats, for the recipe look here. I always make it for 5 days and eat one right away. I divided the berries so I won’t be left with only a few on friday 😉 I shopped for my groceries which were super cheap this time! I started with putting the chicken, sweet potato and broccoli in the steamcooker. I cook the chicken for 60 minutes, but remove the layer of broccoli after 15 minutes and the layer of sweet potato after 20 minutes (I really adore this machine). In the meantime I cook the quinoa with maggi, curry powder and tumeric powder. I fried the onion in a nonstick pan together with the mushrooms. After this, I added the minced meat and only in the end 2-3 hands full of kale. When everything is cooling down I cut the veggies and put them in the tubs. Divided the rest of the meals in the tubs and of course made pictures!

I’m so looking forward to spring/summer! I’m going to have a vegetable and herb patch on my balcony, I will keep you people updated! Here is a picture of my broccoli seeds getting ready to sprout! 🙂 Have a nice day everybody!

How to get abs…..

Surprise, you already have them! Or you are some kind of freak of nature, born without abdominal muscles, which would really suck, sorry! Look at this hot example of abs, click on it if you want, it takes you to a great article that I also refer to later in this post.

I read the sentence ‘I just want abs’ all the time and it always creeps me out. Why? Because there is a whole industry based on a lot of nonsense ways to ‘get abs’. The abroller, abtronic, even my gym has its hourly ab-15 minutes. You go to fitness sites and they’ll tell you to do a certain amount of exercises for a certain amount of days and you’ll get abs as a result. Let me tell you, this is all BS!

First of all, by saying ‘I want abs’ most people mean, ‘I want to have a flat and tight stomach with some visible abdominal muscles’. Most abs are covered by insulation (aka fat) so they’re not visible. Training your abdominal muscles till you drop will NOT automatically melt away your stomach fat and show some shizzled abs. Why? Well, abdominal muscles are just like any other muscle: you give them regular heavy training and in time (yes, time….) they will grow a bit and get more definition. Bigger muscles burn more energy, that’s true, but in comparison with the whole body, the abdominal muscles are just tiny and won’t contribute that much to fat burning. You will need other ways to lose your fat and show off your amazing midsection!

Abs are made in the kitchen

Many people write this and though I understand and agree with the thought behind it, technically it is not correct, because you already have abs. The thing is, you need to eat healthier and less calories to lose your fat and at a certain fat % your abdominal muscles will show. This is different for everybody, the same can be said about the way your abdominal muscles look (4pack/6pack)! A much better sentence would be: Abs get trained in the gym and will show itself when you stop putting so much crap in your mouth.

Personally, I would rather call it ‘core muscles’. A strong core is very important for a fit body! Having a strong core will give you great posture and prevent injuries. Training lower back and side muscles is equally important as training your abdominal muscles! Did you know that by doing a lot of free weight and (standing) single arm/single leg exercises, you already train your core? Did you know that doing endless sit-ups doesn’t really take you anywhere? You can read a great article about ab-mistakes over here. If you ‘want abs’ go and read it!

Oh, and if you don’t feel like doing those exercises and reduce eating crap, you can always get ab implants:

 

Swimming makes you fat??

Today I want to write something about swimming. To start, I LOVE swimming, always have and always will. My mom called me a water rat when I was young (in a loving way of course). On holidays I could spend hours in de pool, playing, swimming, doing water ‘acrobatics’. Later on in life, I started speed-swimming when I had my knee injury and couldn’t do normal sports out of the water. I was actually not bad, but stopped due to time and motivational problems.

Last year, when I started my weightloss and getting fit journey, I started swimming once or twice a week before work. I did it for 45 minutes and then felt really accomplished. Until I read an article with the title ‘swimming makes you fat’. I was like: What?? I thought I was being very good by swimming, it’s easy on the joints for a very obese person, but if it makes you fat then why should I do it? I read the article and did some of my own research and found the following:

Swimming on itself doesn’t make you fat, BUT: most people who go swimming to lose weight, do it in a slow pace and because of the weightlessness you actually don’t really get your heart rate up so you don’t burn more than when you sit at your desk. The problem is that people THINK they had a great workout, and tend to eat more to compensate the calories they never burned, so they can actually gain weight.

I wanted to see if this was true, so I bought a heartrate monitor that could get wet and works in pool water. I measured my heartrate during my 45 minutes in the pool and guess what, I didn’t even get into the first zone on the monitor. I was shocked, I thought I had some great workouts in the water, meanwhile I could’ve just laid in my bed (ok, I admit, I’m a lazy person). So instead of quitting swimming, I changed my routine. I did some reading and read a lot about HIIT (high intensity interval training). I did the following: I started with 5 minutes higher tempo swimming, the kind that will raise your heartrate to level 1. Then I did 30 minutes of HIIT. Normally you use the clock for HIIT, like 30 seconds fast and 30 seconds slow, but that’s kind of difficult in the pool. I chose to swim my fastest (the type that will leave you out of breath) from one side to the other and then swim medium speed back to my starting point then did this until 30 minutes were finished. After 30 minutes I did a 10 minute cooling down swim. This way, I burned about 300-400 kcal during this 45 minutes.

Currently I don’t swim anymore as weightlifting and climbing takes all of my time. I do think swimming can be a great cardio workout for very obese people or people who have injuries (and the elderly), because it’s easy on the joints, tendons and muscles. What you need to remind yourself of (if you want it to be a workout), is that it’s only a real workout when you raise your pace and get a bit out of breath. Personally, I’ve stepped away from the cardio-only view and started weightlifting to aid my weightloss. You can read about it in this post. I also wrote something on how to start weightlifting in this post. As you all know, exercise is great, but if you don’t control what you put in your mouth, it won’t make you lose weight: you can’t outtrain a bad diet!

Recipe for stuffed pepper with mashed sweet potato

This dish had me in heavenly bliss. It is so incredibly delicious! Especially the combination of these two dishes is very tasty, the strong flavor from the cheese mixed with the sweetness from the potato mash…. Yum! Make sure you calculate your macro’s and pp with your own ingredients, as they may differ from the ones I used! (especially the coconutmilk, there are so many different types, ranging from 60 kcal per 100 ml to 200 kcal per 100 ml)

 

Sweet potato mash: (5pp per serving, makes 4 servings)

1 serving: 249 kcal, fat: 7 gr, carb: 35 gr, protein: 4.5 gr

500 grams of peeled and diced sweet potatoes

1 teaspoon of olive oil

2 onions, cut finely

1 clove of garlic, squeezed/finely cut

2 teaspoons ginger powder

2 teaspoons cinnamon

100 ml of coconutmilk (or 200 ml skimmed one)

1 cup dry white wine

4 heaped cups of cut kale

Salt and pepper

 

Instructions:

Boil or steam the sweet potato until very soft. In the meantime, heat a non stick pan very slowly, with the olive oil. Add the onions and caramelize in about 15-20 minutes. Add the garlic and after 2 minutes the wine. Let it simmer for 5 minutes. Then add the coconut milk, the spices, salt and pepper and the kale. Stir and add the potato. Mash with a fork or a mashing spoon, but make sure it is not completely smooth. Finished!

 

Stuffed bell pepper: (6pp per serving, makes 4 servings)

1 serving: 279 kcal, fat: 20 gr, carb: 5.5 gr, protein: 20.5 gr

4 bell peppers

300 grams of lean minced beef

1 onion

2 cloves of garlic, squeezed/finely cut

1 teaspoon of olive oil

100 grams of Roquefort cheese (or any other strong blue cheese)

1 tomato

1 teaspoon Italian herbs

Salt and pepper

 

Instructions:

Heat your oven to 190C or 275F. Take a non stick pan and glaze your onions in the olive oil. Add the minced beef and garlic and stir until loose and fried (5-10 minutes). Add the Italian herbs and salt/pepper to taste and take the pan from your heating source. Cut the top from your bell peppers and clear the insides. Now, divide the cheese by 4, and divide the beef mixture by 4. Now fill your peppers with some beef and put some cheese in between. Put a slice of tomato in the middle. Now put in your oven for about 30 minutes, make sure to check once in a while to make sure the peppers are not becoming too brown. Put the ‘pepper lids’ in the oven after 15 minutes to bake along.

 

Enjoy!

Are fat people just lazy?

There is a woman, I’m not even going to give her google hits by trying to find out what her name is, who claims that overweight people are just lazy. To prove her statement, she gained weight and then lost everything again. There is one very big flaw in her thinking process: the mind!

My statement is that losing a big amount of weight (and keep it off) is not so much about learning how to eat healthy or adopt an active lifestyle. It is foremost a psychological process. We’re going to explore this more, but let me first tell you something about my own experiences.

As you can read in my weight loss story, I started becoming overweight when I was a child. I was put on diets and as a child, I would rebel against it and buy candy secretly. Being overweight brought me a lot of negative emotions, but also negative attention (and a lack of positive attention). The popular and skinny girl in school got the boys, the fat girl was bullied. I started to have negative feelings about myself, not feeling worthy and guess what: food was there for me, it helped me cope and feel better. Shortly though, because after eating a lot of bad food I would feel disgusted by myself and angry at myself because I did this, making me feel negative again and the whole cycle of negative feelings and eating starts again. This became such a fixed pattern in my life, that though I tried diets and exercise, it never changed the way I thought about myself and in that way, the cycle of negative feelings leading to eating. So, it didn’t matter how much weight I lost during those attempts, it always came back to bite me in the behind. Society doesn’t help either, by bullying and the bad image fat people have. So how did it change for me? First of all, I started working and after studying for so many years, it really gave me an accomplished and proud feeling. It helped that I started working in psychiatry. Most of my work wasn’t related to this, but knowing more about how the mind works, really helped me to see it more clearly. I also felt very loved by colleagues and coworkers, which helped my journey even more by feeling that you are good as you are. What helped me the most, is not feeling mad at myself anymore. I’m human, I make mistakes and I can feel guilty about that, but hey, why beating yourself down? It doesn’t help a bit and it only makes things worse. There are also a lot of other aspects of looking at your diet, I’ll talk about that in another post.

So, when I look at this problem in general, I might say that self love and self acceptance is very important in a weight loss journey. But how do you do it? Because, yeah, you want to change, want to become fit and healthy, so you cannot accept and love yourself right now… Or can you? Can’t you love yourself for being so courageous to take this step? Self love is much more than just saying I love myself. It’s being kind for yourself, not beating yourself down after a mistake, finding yourself important enough to take care of, or accepting you have a flaw.

So, I started this story with the woman who says fat people are lazy. For me, it’s easy to talk about my own story, because I broke my own cycle. It is not easy though, to break that cycle! It takes a lot of time and insight, and also the knowledge that this is the problem. So, for everybody who thinks losing weight and getting fit is easy, I’m telling you: yes, everybody can eat less and exercise more, but that is not the issue! The issue is in the mind and please, let us all be more kind to each other, it can make a huge difference in somebody else’s life, and in yours too!

The Factory

So let’s say you are a factory owner/manager. Your factory has a couple of machines and you have some employees, you produce goods. Your buildings heating/lighting and the machines run on fuel, so one of your biggest priorities is to make sure you have a daily fuel delivery. Times are good, you usually use 6 barrels of fuel daily, but your delivery sells you 20 barrels a day. You like it that way, better have some storage for when bad days are coming.

At one point you have more than 500 barrels in storage, you had to extend your storage facilities, which also needs more maintenance, lighting and heating, so your daily fuel usage grows to 8 barrels a day, so you’re storing 12 barrels a day! Your factory is thriving; your storage is still growing and it’s even 1000 barrels now.

One day, disaster strikes. The economy crashes and your daily fuel delivery falls to 2 barrels a day. You’re not worried. Your storage is so big, you can withstand a little hitch like this. You go through 8 barrels a day for some time (6 from your storage and 2 from the daily supply), and after 2 months, you see that your storage has declined significantly. But, you’re not too worried, the economy will become better, so you continue like you always do. After another month you become a bit worried. You have 460 barrels left in storage and if you continue like this, you’ll be out of fuel in less than 3 months. So you decide to change some things. First of all, your big storage is not really necessary anymore, so you shut down part of it, which will decline your fuel usage to 6 barrels a day. But, still a bit worried, you also shut down some machines and fire some of your employees, so your daily usage has come down to 4 barrels a day. 2 from your storage and 2 from the daily supply.

You’re a bit relieved, with this rate, you can maintain your factory and have some output, and can continue for almost 8 months if nothing changes. After 5 months, you have 180 barrels in store, and guess what, the economy is in a rise and your daily delivery has come back to 20 barrels a day! So what do you do… you hire new employees, you go back to your old capacity and you start storing those excessive barrels again. But you don’t need the big storage yet, you’re still at a low point, so you can store up to 14 barrels a day!

The factory = your body (simplified)

So now let’s translate this to our body. The factory is the body, the fuel is the energy that comes in through food. You can see that when more food comes in than you need, the body will store the energy (fat). You can also see that when your storage grows, your body will need more energy, a bigger body needs more fuel to maintain than a smaller body.

When the fuel delivery declines, so when you eat less energy than your body needs, it will take energy from the storage, from the fat. But…. your body becomes smaller with less storage, so it will need less energy to maintain it. You’ll see at that point, the amount of energy you’ll take from the storage will decrease. If we translate this to weight loss: if you lose weight very fast with a diet of 1800 kcal, you’ll lose weight slower once you lost a significant amount of weight, because your body needs less energy to maintain it and will take less fat. BUT the body always wants to preserve as much as possible, so in order to maintain for some time, it will shut down a bit, a bit less energy is needed and losing weight will even go slower, because it takes less fat from your storage.

Ok, so what if you were the factory manager, and instead of getting 2 daily barrels, you got 4 daily barrels. What would you have done? Would you have made the decision to lower the factory ouput? I wouldn’t, I would’ve kept going, kept the same output and kept taking 2 barrels from the storage. Your body also works like that. If you keep that energy coming, it won’t shut down that much and will go in ‘preservation mode’ less fast. Lesson number one: Don’t forget to fuel your body with good energy. Less is not more! Eating not enough can lead to your body shutting down (hairloss, feeling tired, feeling cold all the time, dry skin and a lot more, sometimes subtle symptoms).

So, you can see when the economy was rising again, (or in other words, you stop eating less and go back to your old ways), the body starts storing the energy again, so you start gaining fat. But your body is less big than it was when you started your diet, so you’ll even store your fat faster, because your smaller body needs less energy!

More output = more fuel needed

So now you’re the factory owner and 3 times a week you want a bit more output during an hour. So you stimulate your employees to work very hard during that hour, your machines work on maximum speed, your output is big and you use more fuel in this hour to make everything run. After this hour, your employees go back to their normal speed and the machines run as they normally do. But you know, if you do this too much and don’t take time to rest, build and maintain your machines, they can eventually break down or run less well then they used to do. Your output will decline and your fuel usage will also decrease.

What if you would start building some new machines, it takes some time and energy to build them, but when they’re finished and running, you’ll have a bigger output throughout the day (and a bigger fuel usage) without your employees even having to work harder! And if you would push your employees to work harder for an hour in this situation, your output would even be bigger!

Maybe you already guessed, but this is a simplified version of cardio and weightlifting. What you see is that your body will burn more energy during cardio, but after cardio it will go back to it’s usual state. If you do a lot of cardio, and don’t properly take rest, build and fuel the body, it can breakdown some muscle, which will make your daily energy usage decline. Good for preserving energy, not good for losing weight. So with the weightlifting, you build extra muscle, which will burn more energy throughout the day without doing anything special. If you do a mix of both, you’ll even burn more. Lesson number two: it’s important to do a mix of both weightlifting and cardio to burn energy and to build your body, but equally important is to have enough rest and fuel your body right.

 

IMPORTANT: this is a simplified way of looking at your body. There are more facets to how the body works. If you have any specific questions, just ask!