10:01am | If one of your family members was addicted to crack-cocaine and you found them waiting in a long line for their next hit, what would you do? Sadly, we fail to look at drugs and food the same way.
In excess, both food and drugs can kill you. Perhaps due to the erratic behavior that a far-gone crack-cocaine habit creates such as stab wounds, spinning in circles aimlessly and singing to dead birds, we see less crack parties and more food parties.
Large, sedentary and shameless. The last three words described most people, most lines and most attitudes at the third annual Long Beach Street Food Fest held last Saturday at Rainbow Lagoon Park. Call a spade a spade.
Don’t get me wrong — everybody, including myself, had fun. Actually, if I had to rate the event on the amount of fun I had, I’d throw two thumbs way up. The music was great, people were friendly and I developed a sun tan. It was a great community gathering, and a sense of community is a very, very good thing.
However, my concern is not so much about my community as it is my community’s health. As I counted the number of people waiting in line for a sandwich that easily surpassed 800 calories, I couldn’t help but wonder how many folks may have been on a calorie-restricted diet plan during that week or for longer. In other words, how many of the overweight folks in line were still making efforts to lose weight?
Let’s assume that less than half of those in line were still making efforts to drop pounds. Well, in support of the majority of those who may have no to very little knowledge about how to address their weight problem, what if Long Beach began to embrace the idea that all food events should be, and can be, paired with a preliminary exercise event? This question is based on the notion that if people engaged in a combination of resistance training with aerobic exercise before heavy eating, they could justify the caloric- dense foods they were waiting in line for — within reason.
It is agreed that we all have muscles, right? We have roughly 850 in the human body, to be exact. Common names include quadriceps, hamstrings, obliques and deltoids. Before we get any deeper, think of each our muscles having numerous gas tanks. Well, inside all those gas tanks is gasoline in the form of sugar, more specifically glycogen. The bad news is, if we haven’t moved the human engine and our gas tanks are still full from the prior fill-up, the sugar we ingest from the carb-loaded present meal will be stored somewhere besides our tanks — it will be diverted, instead, to our fat cells.
Adenosine triphospate (ATP) is the only molecule that your muscles can use to move the skeletal frame. Interestingly, we have a limited amount of ATP, so when we run out of ATP we have to use other fuels (glycogen) in our bodies to make more ATP. Back to our gas tanks holding glycogen: According to the National Strength and Conditioning Association, more than 80 percent of all ATP production during resistance training comes from our glycogen (gasoline) stores.
What exactly am I getting at? If the folks waiting in line were to have used their muscles before eating, the carbohydrates ordered at the food trucks would have ended up in the gas tanks instead of the fat cells.
Nutritional science dictates that .5 grams of carbohydrates per pound of body weight is adequate to restore glycogen (fuel) when consumed 30 minutes after exercise. For an individual with a respectable body fat percentage, the body’s fuel may be even more optimally restored when following a 4:1 carbohydrate to protein ratio. In an obese person who has high amounts of body fat, the practitioner may want to recommend the same ratio based on lean body mass (muscle) and not overall weight.
For instance, a 300-pound person who is 30 percent body fat would have 90 pounds of body fat and 210 pounds of lean body mass. Following the .5 grams of carbs per pound of lean mass and the 4:1 carbohydrate to protein ratio after exercise, this would equal 105 grams of carbs and 26 grams of protein.
All of the sudden with an hour’s worth of body weight resistance training and aerobic exercise, the three hundred pounder can justify eating that generously sized teriyaki bowl.
Bottom line, we as a community must begin to appreciate the fantastic science that goes into optimizing health and look more carefully at the societal norms that we have begun to accept and integrate without much thought.