My Foray into Kombucha Brewing

One of the Ironworks Gym owners (Dickie) is a big Kombucha drinker, and after a few tastes, I became hooked on it too. I decided one day to start brewing my own and here we are several months later, with another batch on the counter and a bottle ready to drink in the fridge.

And along comes Dickie and asks me to write about my experiences with Kombucha and brewing my own... and that's how this blog post came to be.

I tried making Kombucha for the first time after buying several very overpriced bottles from the store. Wasn’t exactly rocket science from what I could figure. Take some tea, some sugar, a little bit of an old bottle of Kombucha and *poof* some magic happens and you have this wonderful elixir that helps with digestion and tastes good. After a few failed attempts at getting a good batch that tasted like the wonderful concoctions the store sold me instead of straight up vinegar, I decided to ask for a little help.

Enter Dickie with his simple advice:

1. Get a glass jug with a spigot
2. Use more sugar than you think
3. Put it in a warm, dark place to ferment
4. Taste it often

Let me back up. I gave Kombucha a try because, like most people, I wanted to see what the hype was about. I read all the stuff about how it’s good for your gut, but never from a lifter… it was always some skinny guy that looked like he was afraid of the gym. I wanted to see if it actually did anything for me. And then I finally got a few bottles on sale. There were all sorts of flavors, but I found the less exotic sounding bottles tasted better… and made me feel better. By better, I mean the stomach issues most heavy lifters get with a diet heavy in protein. After a few weeks of drinking 4-6 ounces per day, I noticed a lot of foods didn't give me the same problems (Why do you eat food that gives you problems? Because I like it. That's why!) and that there was a difference in what I craved. The downside? It's super expensive (a cheap bottle was $2 for 2 servings) and I was spending a lot of money for something I can make at home. And for $10, I could make enough to last 2-3 weeks.

Since I'm not a doctor or a scientist, I can only give you my experience.

Back to the failed attempts. I did several things wrong, that you can easily avoid. I didn’t use enough sugar. I fermented it in the fridge. I didn’t clean my SCOBY. I used only flavored tea bags.

Since then, I’ve learned to do a few things to make the batch better. 

The vessel and the giant SCOBY with a fresh batch

1. ½ Gallon of filtered water
2. 2 cups of sugar
3. 4 tea bags, no more than 1 flavored (be careful with flavors as they get strong, quickly)
4. Keep ½ cup of the previous batch in the jar
5. Clean your SCOBY with warm water every few batches
6. Create a SCOBY vault to keep in case something goes wrong

I’m no expert, but with a few extra minutes of research and a freshly cleaned starter SCOBY, I started making fresh batches every few weeks and have learned to tweak them to taste just like I like them.

Here’s my process for making my own Kombucha:

• Boil the water, sugar, and tea until the sugar is fully dissolved.
• Allow the tea to cool to room temperature. It takes a few hours.
• Clean your vessel with hot soapy water, being sure to get all soap residue out.
• Every 2-3 batches I will clean the vessel again.
• Add 2-3 tablespoons of white vinegar and swirl around the vessel and then dump out.
• After the tea is cooled, pour it into the vessel and add approximately 4 ounces of unpasteurized kombucha from a bottle or the last batch. The acid in the previous batch will help ward off the bad things we don’t want.
• Add your Scoby if you have one. If you have one, it ferments faster, if not, you can order one or just go get a non-pasteurized bottle of Kombucha from the store.
• Cover the mouth of the vessel with a coffee filter or paper towel.
• Place in a warm, dark area.
• Check it every 2-3 days for taste.

What I use to store my batches for drinking

My personal favorite is made with 3 bags of green tea and 1 bag of lemongrass tea. I’ve also tried using cinnamon tea, orange tea, and mint. Be sure to taste the tea often as it doesn’t take long to go from sweet, digestion helping tea, to vinegar. And no matter what you’ve read, vinegar is not something that tastes good as a drink. If you want to add in some additional flavor after you're finished the brew, you can add some fresh berries, melon, etc.

One of the biggest things I had to get over was the yeast growth. After the first batch and the first cleaning, the yeast growth subsides. It is perfectly natural to have some yeast growth and if you are grossed out by the idea of drinking a strand of yeast, you can always run your Kombucha through a filter before placing it in a bottle for storage. One thing you have to be very careful of: MOLD.  Mold is not ok in any stage. If you see mold (and you know what mold looks like), get rid of the batch and start over.

If you're interested, here are a few good resources to help you get on your way:

The Kitchn

Cultures for Health

Food Renegade - I personally don't do the double fermentation, but if you want fizzy, this is the way you have to go.

The Problem with Nutrition Labels and Macros

Probably once a week I see a post from somebody that’s a rookie to counting calories asking how the calories on the label don’t add up. Well, there are two very simple answers if you are in the US: the product is mislabeled (intentionally or not) or they are following the FDA labeling standards and regulations and making the product more desirable to nutrition conscious people.

Addressing the first scenario, it isn’t a unique or unusual problem to have a product “mislabeled.” As other posts have explained far better than I can, the concept of a calorie is flawed. You can read about it here in Scientific American. The tl;dr version of why a calorie isn’t just a calorie can be summed up to just a few parts:

• Calories are measured in isolation, meaning with just that food. This does not account for what we have eaten previously or at the same time as our meal. By combining foods, like most people do, we change the time needed for digestion and how hard our body works to perform digestion. This changes the Thermic Effect of Food.
• Different people react to different foods differently and take different amounts of calories from them based on their unique body chemistry and gut bacteria. This blog post explains further based on a study done with mice.
• Calorie labels on prepackaged food are “averages” and may be higher or lower than your actual meal. Since many prepackaged foods are mixes of several different foods, the exact amount of each ingredient is rarely precise. When the amount of each food isn't precise combined with an inexact range of calories, chances are, you aren't getting what the label says. 

With the second issue, it’s a matter of the FDA giving more than a loophole, but leaving a canyon of ways to trick the consumer. Here are just a few of the ways labels can be manipulated to read as lower or more desirable.

• According to the FDA, if there are less than 5 calories per serving, the total calories can be declared as 0. That means if I create something like coffee creamer and claim a small serving size, like a tsp. and it has 4 calories, I can promote it as a 0 calorie product.
• If the product has 50 calories or less--Round to nearest 5-calorie increment: Example: Round 47 calories to “45 calories”
• If the product has above 50 calories--Round to nearest 10-calorie increment: Example: Round 94 calories to “90 calories”
• Alcohol brings up another anomaly to the calorie counter.  Carbs are 4 calories per gram, fat is 9, but alcohol falls in the middle at 7 calories per gram.
• Lastly, fat can be labeled as 0 fat when there is less than .5 g per serving. So a product with .4 g of fat per serving is fat free.

As you can see, there are a few ways a manufacturer can make a pre-packaged food into something it really isn’t and throw off your most dedicated efforts to eat on plan.

Let’s take a look at something many people use every day, coffee creamer. If we’re trying to be a macro-magician, we might be super concerned with the exact measures so we pick a “Fat Free International Delights”. On the left side, the Canadian label; on the right, the US label.


Same product, same calories listed… one label tells you their best average per serving and the other hides some information because the FDA allows it through rounding.

Let’s take this further. Since there are no restrictions on what is considered a serving size, one product can list a different serving size to make it seem more appealing. Doesn’t seem like a big deal, but it can add up over all your different meals throughout the week, especially if you don't check the serving sizes.

Italian Dressing	1 tbsp	2 tbsp
Calories	50	80
Fat	6g	7g
Carbs	1g	4g
Protein	0g	0g

If you’re grabbing one of these dressings off the shelf and you’re just looking quickly at the label for the one that reads the “healthiest”, you might overlook the serving size and go right to the nutrition counts. Take into account that very few of us ever use just 1 or 2 tablespoons and the 30 extra calories for 2 tbsp starts to add up. Yes, this is a small example, but it happens on a larger scale, too. Just imagine this with Peanut Butter or some other "treat" that you enjoy.

Moving on.

The calorie counting problem is a complex one complicated by a lack of precise labeling regulations in the US and the rounding of both macros and total calories. Further, the ability to manipulate serving sizes allows manufacturers create certain labels and make a less healthy product more appealing. If you really are going to be precise (which I don’t recommend unless you want to drive yourself crazy or are a top level competitor) you need to really read carefully and do the math instead of just trusting the companies that play within the rules to look better.

And if you want a better solution, give yourself a margin of error, say 4% of your total calories. On a 2,000 calorie diet, that’s 80 calories. At the end of the day, you might slow down your progress just a little bit, but you won’t drive yourself insane along the way.

Lastly, if you’re brand spanking new to healthy eating, take baby steps; start with just making some better food choices and just writing down what you eat. There will be a time to make things more detailed, but in the beginning, just get started!

Why MFP could be holding you back

For years, MyFitnessPal has been the nutrition and fitness tracker used and recommended at brolific rates among new to calorie tracking and fitness people looking to get their diet in order and achieve a weight related goal. As we’ve mentioned and you’ve more than likely read about, weight loss, weight gain, and body transformation is largely a product of our diet, so it only makes sense to know what’s going into our body on a daily basis. While some advocate “extreme” calorie counting and others shun the idea completely, I am somewhere in between. I find it extremely helpful for myself and my clients to see the foods they are consuming and an estimate of how much they are consuming. For many people, this means using some form of tracking app.

As tracking software goes, the vast majority are the same, especially at the free level. You can set your own goals, track your food, the quantity, add new foods, see the macronutrient and micronutrient breakdown, and add new foods not already listed in the database. MFP is not much better or worse than any other tracker out there as far as the tracking apps go other than some really poor entries of food done by people that either misenter or only enter what they care about. With the big time bankroll of Under Armour, it is pretty to look at and has a large number of features. Where MFP starts to fall apart is their recommendations for how much a person should be eating and their process.

The following picture is taken directly from MFP for me, a 5’11”, 210 lb, approximately 15% bodyfat individual that trains 6 hours per week. This is their recommendation for me to eat to maintain weight.

3,030 seems like a good number to eat in a day, but what is this second number, 2,770 calories per week? That is what MFP determines your fitness goal to be, approximately 692 calories per workout and an additional amount of calories you can eat IF you burn those calories. If you know anything about MFP, this very small line between Nutritional Goals and Fitness Goals is overlooked and misused - “So the more you exercise, the more you can eat!” Essentially a statement that they suggest “eating back” calories that you have burned off in order to reach your goal.

Now, let’s take the calculator on our ZStrength website, which uses five popular estimations, and then takes the average. Using the exact same numbers I entered into MFP, I receive the following result:

Looking at the output, the estimated average intake I need to maintain my weight would be 3,329 calories per day. Like the line below our calculator says, it is an estimate and could be off, resulting in needing some adjustment up or down...just like MFP could (and almost always does) need adjusting.

Now looking at some of the math:

MyFitnessPal	ZStrength Calc
7 days at 3030 = 21,210 calories per week Workout Calories = 2770 Total Calories per Week = 23,980 Average per Day = 3,426	Average per Day = 3,329

That’s right, assuming you actually burn those 2,770 calories per week, you could eat an average 3,426 calories per day and the numbers aren’t that different. But is this clear to the average person just starting? Probably not and that’s what creates the problem.

The problem, and it’s a BIG PROBLEM that has happened time and again with clients when they use MFP, they either don’t know that MFP sets them low and wants them to eat back their calories or they know it and over-eat their exercise calories. The result is chronic over or under-eating because they are following the suggestions of MFP.

Combine the flaws of MFP with even the best non-clinical calorie burn estimators have a margin of error of at least 10%, and you can begin to understand just how bad this could turn out. Assuming one of the closest estimations of 10% and 692 calories burned per day could be 761 or 622. PN did a piece about how bad calorie estimators are: [http://www.precisionnutrition.com/problem-with-calorie-counting-calories-out].

As someone that works with clients to help them build the body they want, I have problems with the lack of clarity and relying on measurements with a known margin of error. MFP is going to take an inexact science (estimating calories in food) combined with another inexact science (how many calories you burn) and add an even less exact science (how many calories you burn in exercise) and convince you to eat that amount. Further, MFP only includes CARDIO calories in what you should eat back, so if you weight train for an hour and “burn 500” calories, you are still to eat 2730 according to them, but if you do an hour of cardio and “burn 300”, you get to eat 3030.

And a simple scenario to hammer home the problem:

You are training to lose weight at a rate of 1 lb / week. MFP gives you a 500 calorie deficit and a count of 2,530 + 1,500 calories of exercise per week. At 5 days per week of exercise, that’s 300 extra calories. Training day total: 2,830.  Off-day total: 2,530.

You train and log your workouts on MFP, which only logs your cardio burn. You train an hour with weights, burning approximately 550 calories + 30 minutes of cardio burning 150 calories.

In addition to being at a 500 calorie deficit to start, you are now an extra 550 calories short because MFP doesn’t know what you burned lifting weight. That’s over a 1,000 calorie deficit and 25% below your maintenance calories. It goes without saying that that large of a deficit isn’t good for you, especially in the long term.

Is MFP really that bad? No. Can this scenario be avoided? Yes, if you are knowledgeable (which most people just starting out aren’t) or if you know how to work MFP like a pro (which most people don’t). And an even easier yes; don’t rely on MFP to determine how many calories you should eat. There are hundreds of calculators and formulas to help you estimate your needs, which can then be plugged in to MFP. As mentioned before, we have one that on our site that uses 5 of the most popular formulas and provides an average. You can find it here at: http://zstrengthfit.com/tools/calculator.html

Truth in Fitness Advertising? What is Real Anyway?

The fitness industry relies on advertising and hyped-up dreams to keep you buying products and spending your money. We all know the BS scams that are out there marketing over-priced and under-performing supplements and quick “fixes”. And now, you too can be a part of our great company and get rewards for everybody you swindle as a Brand Ambassador / Coach / Used Car Salesman. Since virtually anybody can be a “representative”, the way to grow your business and the company giving you kickbacks is through misleading and faked posts which attract customers. Recent events have brought more attention to the increasing deception and false advertising, rekindling the skepticism and distrust I have for the supplement industry. From the FTC, “federal law says that ads must be truthful, not misleading, and, when appropriate, backed by scientific evidence.” By accepting the use of manipulated and photoshopped images to sell product, the fitness industry is accepting false advertising. I have seen the argument that magazines and other entities do similar all the time, however, they are NOT selling a product or deliberately attempting to deceive potential buyers.

Some companies pull out the empty study with the non-representative population under not-so-strict conditions and determine that the slightest glimmer of hope is a positive result of their over-priced product. Do all companies do it? No, but the ones that do tend to be the loudest advertisers in all the magazines and websites. Think about all the supplements that really work. Do you find out about them on the twitstagrambook? No, your friend or somebody at the gym tells you, not somebody getting a “kick-back” for convincing you to buy the product with their “Special Code”.

In “Fitness Industry Deception” I talked about using best case scenarios and images for advertising. The first time I remember this happening, a brand rep that was truly jacked was asked if the supplement he was repping made him that way. He responded with “You’d have to be an idiot to believe I got here just by taking this.” He was terminated shortly thereafter for telling the truth. Shredz rep Devin Zimmerman aka Devin Physique brought all of these techniques back. Not only did Devin “touch-up” his photos to create a better look, Shredz solicited and used before and after photos of amazing transformations claiming credit for the transformations despite those people never using Shredz. The reaction: an “apology” and claiming others do it as well. This isn’t totally new, but with social media explosion, this is happening more often with more companies.

Think back to the days when there were paid endorsements on TV for all sorts of things...same thing here, just without the pay until you punch it that special little code or buy the totally not-custom meal plan and $100 workout plan they copied from the July ‘87 Fit Muscle Rag. It’s moved from buying the magazine with “Arnold’s Latest Workout” to searching social media for a hot or jacked person selling a plan. *Side not, most of Arnold’s workouts were fabricated so they would look new, despite him doing the same routine for years.*

Don’t think this is just targeting men. With the surge in physique “competitors”, women are getting sucked into the same supplement / shortcut / bullshit as the men. Paige Hathaway has also been accused of manipulation and deception for her part in the Shredz scam. Women are particularly susceptible to this kind of advertising because of the push for the perfect bikini body and the rise in physique competitions. Just a quick trip through instagram and a few directed searches and you can find over 50 posts per week that are aimed at women.

In my piece last week, Progress Picture or Exotic Dancer Audition?, I began going after the over-sexualized outfits and posing that mimics an exotic dancer or film star more than a fitness professional. The industry advertising has led us to believe that photoshopped images aka “Adobe Gains” are real and possible using their products. We’ve gone down the rabbit hole so far that brand ambassadors with no real experience or qualifications beyond a “sale code” have joined in on the photo manipulation. I pointed out Shredz and their reps, but they aren’t the only ones relying on naivete and deception. It seems like every time I flip into Insta-famous, I see another coach posting their fantastic transformations and trying to get me to use their product sale code or join their team. (I’ll explain how these things work in a moment for those that don’t know.) And when I look at the photos, I can see signs of tampering, things like doorframes bending, televisions twisting, hard edges on muscles, etc. Some are really obvious, others, not so much. Some of the hardest ones are taken on plain color backgrounds. Even something as simple as applying a filter can change the whole physique of a person.

I’m not bitching about the Average Joe or Jane using filters or touching up their photos. Hell, we all dream of obtaining the perfect body and showing off our hard work. My complaint is with all the people that manipulate their images to generate sales of their scam product. If the product was that good, they wouldn’t need to manipulate images or sell you on it. When your product / MLM scheme can’t produce the results you advertise and you have to solicit images from others you’re falsely advertising. When you have to create bullshit contests where the “winner” didn’t even know they were part of the contest, you’re a fraud. And just because you created a program using a “stock photo” doesn’t excuse you because you know damn well that photo was probably touched up prior to you getting it.

So here’s how the “Brand Ambassador” thing works with sale codes:
-Buy product from said company and possibly pay for a “package”

-Receive code to distribute to your friends and followers

-Have a minimal internet presence to distribute code and post obnoxiously about it

-Possibly create your own “page” or tell friends / clients to check it out

-Stage some photos with the product

-Have people use your “discount code” when checking out to receive a percentage off

-The code registers back to you and you receive a certain percentage of their total purchase, like a sales commission

Seems just like standard sales, except more than a few of these ambassadors have no qualifications and no knowledge. It’s like asking a cashier at Wal-Mart about the best tires for your car; they may know something, but chances are it’s only what the company tells them to know. So before you run off and spend your hard earned cash, take a look at who represents them and consider their trustworthiness, as a company and as a representative. Look at their advertising pictures and mumbo jumbo. Do they use filters? Are they using perspective tricks to look better? Are they quoting “studies” as proof? If they are, they’re trying to trick you for a reason and they’re one of the bad parts of the industry.

I think this is a great post on youtube by Jason Blaha about the industry and how the sensationalized, misrepresentations are hurting everybody in the community - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACMHaUcwY-o.