Drugs, The Way to a Better Future
If you watch TV at all, you’ll have noticed that over the last ten years or so it’s become pretty common to see ads for prescription drugs, usually along with a couple of yards of fine print. Advances in medicine have led to the impression for many people that you can just pop a pill for whatever ails you, and it will be fixed overnight.
The more cynical among you will have noticed that no major diseases have been cured in the last forty years or so, but there sure are a lot of treatments available. Given a capitalist system, I suppose that’s somewhat inevitable, since treatments produce more revenue. With regards to weight loss, there are a couple of simple rules:
1) If it produced amazing results, you’d need a prescription to get it. (Or it might become an illegal controlled substance like steroids)
2) There is no miracle pill, cream, or injection that will make you fit without proper diet and exercise.
3) The vast majority of things you can buy are worthless, overpriced, or both.
So now that I’ve pissed off most of the supplement industry, who make billions every year pandering to peoples desire to lose weight without effort, is there any value to using supplements as part of your weight loss efforts? It turns out that the answer is yes, but the results you should expect are incremental only. If your diet and exercise plan are otherwise good, supplements can give you a 5%-10% boost in your rate of progress.
So what supplements are worthy and why? Well the first category is synthetic food, we already knew that food choices are incredibly important in your weight loss effort, and there are a few products that can be helpful in this area:
Protein Powders - Your basic choices here are whey, a moderate speed protein, and casein a slow acting protein. Protein powders aren’t anything magical, they’re just condensed protein like you’d get from eggs, milk, or a steak. There are two main advantages here, first since it’s a dry powder you can add them to things you’re cooking in order to raise the protein content of the recipe, and second when consumed in liquid form they take effect on your system much faster than solid foods. We’ll talk about that more later when we discuss pre & post workout nutrition.
Branched Chain Amino Acids - Essentially pre-digested protein fragments that are very fast to be absorbed. They can be useful to prevent catabolism (muscle wasting) during periods of fasting, or as a way of increasing your nutrient uptake around your workout.
Post Workout Drinks - Generally a blend of fast acting carbs (sugar), proteins, and amino acids designed to take advantage of the anabolic window created after a workout.
Fish Oil - The modern diet is strongly weighted towards omega-6 fatty acids due to the grain feeding of cattle. A healthy omega-3 to omega-6 balance can help with nutrient partitioning and fat loss metabolism, as well as easing joint pains. Fish Oil helps you to consume more omega-3 fatty acids, without having to eat four tons of Salmon.
Multivitamin - A shotgun approach to nutrition that helps prevent you from developing serious vitamin and mineral deficiencies that can cause all sorts of nasty conditions like scurvy, rickets, and other forms of malnutrition.
The second category is performance enhancers, these products help you to make better progress than you would with just food:
Creatine - Pretty much the one supplement everyone agrees is effective. The basic effect is to allow you to lift heavier weights in the gym. No, this won’t make you like the hulk, able to rip apart doors and throw cars around, but you will experience a small but noticeable increase in your poundages over time, and that leads to more progress.
Green Tea - Produces a mild affect on your metabolism that assists you in losing weight.
Fat Burners - This covers a wide variety of products that claim to boost your metabolic rate. Some are more effective than others, but even if you do everything right, you shouldn’t expect to get more than about a 2%-3% increase.
Testosterone Boosters - Both men and women produce testosterone and estrogen, it’s the ratio between the two that’s important. Testosterone production is a significant factor when attempting to build muscle tissue, and natural production tends to slow as you get older. There are several over the counter supplements that claim to help raise this natural rate, and if you have a serious deficiency, there are prescription treatments as well.
Be wary of any product that claims fantastic results in a short period of time, but intelligent use of the above mentioned items can definitely help you to reach your goals.
Tags: Supplements