Is Your Gym Making you Fat?

Hmmm….have you checked the fat and calorie content of what you’re choosing to eat after your routine? “To be honest with you I don’t even really look, I know it’s probably quite a bit cause I’ve been adding a lot of weight which I don’t really don’t want to do. But it’s kind of like what my gym has so, that’s what I’m just drinking,” says Rob Kormoski, a frequent gym-goer.

Careful, though. Just because it’s at the gym, doesn’t mean it’s doing you right! “People say to me all the time I’m working out and not losing weight. So you have to really look at what are they eating and what are they doing workout wise,” says Cindy Sherwin, a fitness expert, says be careful about gym food, or anything that appears to be perhaps a health fitness related choice.

“Something really bad that you might not want to even look at in your gym, would be something like this bar, which in just this small amount of food would give you 380 calories and 19 grams of fat.” Cindy says watch out for things with saturated fat--which is not good for the arteries. And many drinks are loaded with calories.

“They would get over 1000 calories, again unless somebody is training for some kind of real endurance event, this is so excessive in calories, um that I couldn’t ever recommend something like this,” states Cindy. She warns watch out for juices and smoothies; they can be low in fat and calories….or not.

“The other thing I see people doing a lot recently are Jamba Juice, which on it says that its natural and made with fruit, and um seems to be a healthy option, but when you’re looking at 500 to 1000 calories. Muscle milk is something that I see everywhere now. And clients are asking me about it, trainers are asking me about it. What I see when I look at something like this is 330 calories, 16 grams of fat, and 32 grams of protein. If somebody’s looking to replace protein, they probably don’t want to get it with 16 grams of fat.”

 Trail mix can contain candy….so that’s not healthy. And yes, those nuts have healthy fats, but they’re still fat, with 9 calories per gram, compared to 4 calories per gram for a carbohydrate…so the nuts in excess can be a huge calorie load, which can create body fat. Unless you are a workout fiend, you don’t necessarily need protein after your workout, you only need maybe some complex carbs to give you back fuel. So after a workout, how about fruit….like an apple, a plain old apple, or a banana, or an orange? You don’t need fat, so read the label, and anything high in fat….take a pass.