Hello and welcome again,
Today I’m going to talk about food and supplements. Do we really need supplements and which one? By supplements I mean protein powders, pre-workouts, glutamine and creatine as these are most commercialized lately.
To be clear, I’m not nutritionist and I’m writing from my personal experience with one or each of them.
If you are not a professional athlete or following special diet (e.g. vegan) or don’t have certain medical condition (e.g. diabetes or celiac) you DON’T NEED supplements. You can reach everything you need from real food. But it’s not that simple, of course.
Basically there are macro-nutrients and micro-nutrients. Macro-nutrients are the nutrients we need in larger quantities that provide us with energy. Macro-nutrients are protein, fat and carbohydrate. Micro-nutrients are mostly vitamins and minerals and are equally important but consumed in very small amounts.
Assuming that you are consuming a variety of fruits, vegetables, grains and proteins, most adults naturally consume adequate amounts of macro-nutrients and most vitamins and minerals. You don’t need to track food or count numbers, but you need to be familiar with nutritional values for common food.
My favorite pre-workout and post workout meal
I don’t track my food and I certainly don’t count calories but I’m aware of nutritional values of food that I eat. Well, most of the time 😊
I workout 5 times a week (here is an example of my workout plan https://my-fit-corner.com/weekly-planner/) and I use protein powders from time to time, not every day and not after every single workout. Pre-workouts, creatine and glutamine are not my thing. I’ve never tried any of these. And I have nothing to write about them as I don’t have any experience with these supplements.
As I workout in the early morning, I prefer a coffee and 2 rice cakes with seed or nut butter and half of banana as pre-workout.
For breakfast after workout I like to eat real food, usually 2 pancakes with eggs, turkey breast or tuna fish depends of the mood or day.
I don’t like sweet breakfast, but sometimes I eat combination of these two – pancake and peace of banana bread or marble cake. And these banana bread/marble cake are less sweet than regular one.
Usually, most of them contains some of unflavored vegan protein powder like rice, peas, pumpkin or hemp and high protein flour like almond, oat, millet flour.
For the rest of the day I eat meals with all three macro-nutrients and fruits, nuts, dark chocolate and again banana or marble cake for snacks.
Even though I workout regular, I don’t use protein powders as main and/or only source of protein. I always choose real food over supplements and I’m not in lack of any macro or micro nutrients.
I’m not against supplements, but protein powders and other supplements are not real food and definitely not the only way to achieve fitness goals, whatever they are. All of the supplements needs to be used as an addition to real food and not as an substitute for the same.
Here is my recipe for a gluten free protein marble cake. As I said earlier, it’s not sweet as regular one, so be free add more sugar or honey, whatever you like.
Marble cake recipe – real food
- 4 eggs
- 1 cup of gluten free flour – I used millet flour
- 1 and 1/2 cup of almond flour
- 1/2 cup of unflavored rice protein
- 1/3 cup of oil – I used sunflower oil
- ½ cup of sugar
- 1 teaspoon of baking powder
- 1/3 cup of cocoa
- 3 tablespoons of coffee
- 1 stick of chocolate for frosting
- Almond for decoration
Mix eggs with sugar, add oil, flours and baking powder. Put 2/3rd of mixture into pan and in the rest of the mixture add cocoa and coffee. Mix it again and add dark mixture into pan over the light one.
Bake it in heated oven for 30 minutes on 200 C.
Melt chocolate with one tablespoon of oil. When the cake is done, put the melted chocolate over the cake and decorate with almonds.
Enjoy the cake with coffee or tea.
My fitness corner
