Fitness & Litness: Running, Food & Alcohol

It’s the festive season and that means a whole lot of food and liquor for many households. If you mismanage the situation and overindulge ma New Years resolution ya za vutako. I want to help you avoid entering the new year looking swollen while maintaining a decent baseline of fitness.

Listen,
I enjoy a pint just as much as the next man but I still haul my butt out of bed and get ready to rumble when it’s time to get a workout in. During the festive season I switch to Castle Lite and embrace a ‘nutty lifestyle’🥜 where I keep nuts on hand. Castle Lite represents a low calorie beer option and various nuts offer a filling snack option to prevent overeating junk food (hello cake🎂). With nuts I eat the most readily available options such as groundnuts, walnuts, cashew nuts, almond nuts etc in short intervals. This practice helps suppress my appetite and as a man it helps with other obvious things that I won’t explicitly mention but just know it’s beneficial. Women can benefit greatly from nuts as well, and nuts may very well be the answer to “How can I fight off cravings?” 👉🏾eat nuts. You’ve heard.

Advice for beer benders🍻
Embrace the ever popular Castle Lite beers or any other ‘Lite’ beers such as Windhoek Lite, Bud Light, Amstel Lite, Heineken Light to keep your caloric intake from alcohol relatively low. For the uninitiated, Lite/Light beers are essentially a diet beer with less sugar and fewer calories than regular beer. 

Advice for wine drinkers🥂
Look to consume dry wines (both white and red) because the drier the wine, the fewer calories and sugar it contains. Alcohol/wine has 7 calories per gram, so higher alcohol wines are higher in calories. You can test this by checking for the alcohol by volume (ABV) listed on the label and only consume those with an alcohol by volume of less than or equal to 13%. The lower the percentage, the better. So, dry wine with a low ABV should be your first choice if you’re a wine drinker. Love sweet wine? It loves you back and tends to display it’s love on your thighs, hips & bellies - Lobe!

Advice for Whiskey (and other spirits) lovers🥃
Mixing - Mix your preferred spirits with plain old water, soda water or Coke Zero only. Ngati ndiwe chikali drink your spirits neat. Avoid mixing with soft drinks, ginger ale, lemonade, Red Bull and tonic water. Take the time to read the nutrition labels on your favorite mixers and your jaw will drop! Specifically look at the carbohydrates coming from simple sugar per can/per 100ml. Take tonic water for instance, despite its bitter taste it contains a whooping 10 grams of sugar per small can on average.
Spirit type - Where possible, consider opting for clear colored spirits such as Vodka, Gin or Tequila (shots anyone?). They’re lower calorie options and will do less cosmetic damage to your bodies. Lastly, avoid cocktails🍸 except maybe Martini’s and Bloody Mary’s. The rest are meshed sugar bombs.

Other tips:

• Drink reasonably at any and all events regardless of occasion and drinking capacity. On the upper end this means no more than 4 beers, or 3 glasses of wine and 4 shots of a spirit.
• Sleep sufficiently😴. If you don’t have anything seriously pressing the day after a drinking session or party then you should go to bed without an alarm and a silent phone in order to let your body wake you up when it’s ready. Insufficient sleep wreaks havoc in your body and negatively affects your hormones. You will very likely eat junk the day after a short nights sleep. Shoot for at least 7 hours of sleep per night if you insist on setting an alarm. 
• Hydrate. Drink a glass of water (250mls) for every alcoholic beverage consumed e.g. 1 castle lite = 1 glass of water. This is to avoid dehydration.
• Move your body. Take a walk🚶🏿‍♂️ or run🏃🏿‍♂️ outside for at least 30 minutes the day after drinking to speed up the revival process and keep you close to your fitness aspirations. Additionally, getting a workout in will help stimulate digestion and get things moving.

For more general guidelines & tips, check out my alcohol and fitness playbook here. Alternatively, call me and let’s talk about it.

Drink responsibly and eat in line with how you want to look.

Happy drinking!