Meet Karin
NutriGen is a range of nutritional sports supplements developed by Karin Paquay following many years of research and clinical trials in sports nutrition and weight loss.
A sports nutritionist in private practice for the past 25 years, Karin’s aim was to ensure that her products were formulated to include two major criteria: the supplements had to include macro and micronutrients which provide immediate energy during training and events, and they had to support and maintain long-term cellular health.
For many years I searched for the optimal replacement meal for my athletes. Either the carbohydrate values were too high or the protein values did not meet my recommended
standards. It became increasingly difficult to provide the correct nutrition.
Based on the many years working in sports nutrition | decided to create my own formula. I’m thrilled with the results and so are my clients.
Karin Paquay Profile by Daryn Basson for Fitness Advisor online magazine
I recently read that a panel of experts in nutrition and fitness examined the recommendations and ‘advice’ found in online forums, online communities in environments like Facebook, etc. and found that somewhere in the region of 90% of what was written and recommended was either inaccurate, incomplete – in that a lot of the mitigating factors that need to be taking into account weren’t presented – and in many cases, would actively sabotage your efforts in losing weight, reducing body fat and gaining lean muscle mass.
It’s also true that great advice for one person is not necessarily great advice for you.
I was on an eating plan that dictated a 3-egg-omelette every morning and a protein shake to be taken post-workout that included 5 raw eggs only to find out from a homoeopath later down the line that I’m allergic to eggs. Who knew you could be allergic to eggs?
Turn out I am, and to make matters worse, I recently started a 12 Week Winter Challenge and after the first 4 weeks of training super hard and sticking to a ‘nutrition plan’, I’d put ON weight and INCREASED my body fat percentage from 27% to 30.5%, leaving me absolutely clueless as to why I was achieving exactly the opposite of what I was working so hard toward.
Karin was recommended to me by a friend, and I’ve been working with her over the past 3 weeks toward my weight loss and performance goals. In that time, I have dropped from 30.5% body fat to 24% body fat, with a drop in subcutaneous fat from 90mm to 64mm which has me super motivated and back in the swing of things again.
HOW?
Karin believes that habits make people fat, and she works on teaching her clients new habits through ‘brain-mapping’ which then creates new patterns which the body recognises and responds to accordingly.
Where strength and conditioning coaches refer to ‘muscle memory’ – the process that has been used synonymously with motor learning, which is a form of procedural memory that involves consolidating a specific motor task into memory through repetition – Karin speaks of ‘lifestyle memory’ which operates according to the same principles.
“If you think of a piece of open veld, and imagine people walking to and from specific places, you’ll start to see ‘paths’ being formed. Slowly, those paths start to cut deeper into the veld to produce ‘highways’ that result in people finding their way from point A to point B in the most effective and efficient manner possible” says Karin, “if someone steps off the path, they struggle to find their way yet the moment they re-encounter the path, they immediately find their way to their destination quickly, effectively and efficiently”.
Brain Mapping and Lifestyle Memory are the same thing.
Karin creates ‘paths’ within your life that lead to success and the achievement of your goals, and whenever you lose your way, she’s the person that gets you back onto the ‘paths’ that lead to your best results and most consistent performances.
Many of her clients find that when they go away on holiday, they actively start to crave the healthy and performance fuelled nutrition ‘paths’ and that’s a great sign for her that the new pathways have made the transition to the ‘lifestyle highways’ that inform and guide their decisions and habits.
Like any map, it starts with a point of departure and a destination in mind, and that’s what the initial consultation with a Sports Nutritionist effectively is.
It’s an analysis of where you currently are, a conversation about where you’d like to be, and Karin’s expertise lies in creating the paths, habits, and plans that are going to take you from where you currently are to where you desperately want to be, in the shortest, most effective and sustainable manner possible.
EFFECTIVENESS
She recently had a professional cyclist with 38 years of experience come into her office challenging her to provide him with a plan that would shave 2.5kgs off his already incredibly lean frame for an upcoming event.
He’s a guy who knows his way around nutrition, trains something fierce and from all appearances, simply doesn’t have 2.5kgs to lose.
After analysing his muscle mass – and ensuring that he had 2.5kgs to lose without sacrificing muscle mass or compromise his health in any way – she set up a plan that enabled him to lose those 2.5kgs within a week.
It earned her a new client and a heap of respect from him.
When I asked her how she had achieved that, she told me that in the case of people who are professional sports people, it’s often simply a case of ‘tweaking the 10% they simply aren’t aware of’. It’s small changes that lead to big results and I guess it’s a little like the butterfly effect in that way.
To Karin, the difference between working with professional or aspiring professional sports people versus working with the average person that has 10 Kgs to lose, is that the sports person’s mindset is already geared toward healthy nutrition, lots of exercises and a solid commitment to training.
She doesn’t need to ‘remap’ their lifestyle at all, they’ve already done that. It’s simply a case of sports science, the nitty-gritty details and the tweaks that yield gains in both performance and overall wellness for them.
In another case, she had a girl who is to compete in an international karate event consulting her for a nutrition plan to make sure she could meet her weigh-in limit for the weight group fighting category her coach had designated for her.
After analysis, Karin determined that there was absolutely no way that she should or could be fighting in that weight category, based on her muscle mass, and influenced the decision to escalate her to a higher weight-group category that allowed her to sustain muscle mass, good health and operate within safe parameters.
So it’s not always just about achieving what you’re setting out to achieve, there’s an intelligent approach to nutrition that takes a number of different factors into account and produces a blueprint for success that’s unique to you. It’s not always about what you want, it’s instead always about what you need.
Sustainability is probably the best way to describe the ‘golden thread’ that runs through everything Karin advocates and recommends. Whilst sports science and working with professional sports people are something she adores, her real passion lies in helping guys like me, and people like you.
When she spoke of the 2 rowers (Donovan and Ramon) she helped to achieve their goal of a Bronze medal at the Olympic games, and Annemarie Wentzel who achieved a Silver Medal at the World Cycling Championships, and a host of other stars she works with, I honestly felt like ‘the weakest link’ in her client base, but for Karin, it’s people like me that she’s most passionate about helping.
“Losing 15kgs will change your life in every way imaginable”, says Karin, “regardless of who you are or what you do, you’re a completely different person, in every sense of the word, when you’re lean and healthy. If you’re carrying less fat, you have more energy and everything improves, especially concentration and the ability to focus.”
That’s where the real rewards lie for Karin, the ability to help people change their lives for the better, experience the kind of life they’ve always dreamed of yet never believed was within their grasp.
Childhood obesity, sedentary lifestyles, and lack of motor skills are contributing to increased issues with kids, teens and family units today and it’s an area Karin hopes to play an increasingly more influential role in the future.
In her view, family units are the key. If she’s working with an aspiring sports professional, and that family unit hasn’t bought into the concept of healthy nutrition, it’s incredibly difficult for her to achieve results for her clients.
“If you get home and there’s a girlfriend or a wife that’s prepared Lasagne, what are you going to do? If you tell her you can’t eat that because it’s not in alignment with your goals, you’re going to get the kind of response that leads to confrontation and one of you has to yield in order to maintain the peace. In many cases, the person that yields is going to be you, and you’re simply not going to achieve your goals as a result. In the case of kids, it’s even worse. They simply have no say or choice when it comes to meal times”, says Karin.
In many cases, she’s now asking her clients to bring their parents, boyfriends, girlfriends, wives or husbands into the consultation with them so she’s able to impress a lifestyle path onto the family unit that results in ‘buy-in’ from everyone and yields far greater lifestyle benefits for the entire family unit.
She believes this approach helps combat childhood obesity and other lifestyle-related ‘dis-ease’ and diseases when parents live the brand they’re espousing to their kids.
“When you’re growing upwards, you can’t and shouldn’t try to bulk up”, says Karin with a degree of frustration and irritation. There’s a natural process of growth and in the formative and critical years, the focus is not on great nutrition and performance like it should be, but instead on ‘bulking up’ and gaining mass that just isn’t healthy or achievable for teens through sustainable and safe methodologies”.
Encouragingly, she’s seeing an increase in the number of parents who are consulting her for a nutrition plan that caters for a budding young rugby or tennis player, yet includes the whole family in the process.
They have identified the risks of influences advocating things like ‘supplements’ and steroids in high schools, and they’re actively trying to combat that by ensuring their kids understand the value of nutrition, natural growth and performance-driven supplementation.
She’s educating kids, teens, aspiring professionals and family units about the dangers they face, and working on informing, educating and empowering them to make better decisions. Decisions that improve their overall wellness and employ sustainable practices that yield increased and exponentially greater performances.
Karin aims to change the whole structure of your life through modification eating and preventative approaches that make the system super healthy and support the immune system. In doing so, she eliminates the factors that lead to illness, the need for medication, and any one of a thousand expenses that are associated with poor health.
Karin has also launched a series of practical cooking courses, bi-monthly, that aim to teach people how to cook nutritious and tasty food for everyday schedules.
It’s a great course to attend, especially if you’re a busy executive, working parent or someone who finds it difficult to buy, prepare and cook healthy meals. It’s another great way in which Karin aims to connect with her clients and teach them new habits and lifestyle patterns that are both sustainable and fun.
Consulting a sports nutritionist, dietitian or nutritionist effectively SAVES you money. Both in the short term and especially in the long terms, which is why it’s ironic that one of the primary reasons people don’t consult healthcare professionals more frequently is based largely on ‘affordability’.
In my opinion, after working with and speaking to Karin Paquay, the question isn’t whether you can afford to work with her, or someone like her, it’s instead a question of whether you can afford not to.