FitnessQuests

The single best fat burning exercise there is

What is the single, best fat burning exercise there is?

I recently had lunch with a friend of mine, fellow fitness enthusiast John Romaniello. For those of you that don’t know him, John is the author of a very successful advanced fat loss program called Final Phase Fat Loss. John was a chubby teen, but turned himself into a highly successful fitness model as well as a personal trainer for many very successful NYC models. I don’t get to talk to John often, so when I do I always pick his brain a bit.

 
John being John

 

Because John’s expertise is in fat loss (particularly stubborn fat loss), I was curious what he felt is the single best exercise for fat loss. I honestly didn’t expect much of an answer as it’s kind of a loaded question, but I was surprised when he emphatically answered and then backed it up with reasoning. The truth is, his actual answer was something I’d known from my own experiences but I’d never really put the whole picture together before. Today, I’d like to put it all together for you.

Dynamic Training

There’s something called dynamic training that is used by many of the most successful fat loss coaches in the world. Usually if some Hollywood star needs to lose weight and tone up for a role in a hurry, it’s some form of dynamic training that’s prescribed. The reason? Dynamic training works. So why haven’t you seen it recommended everywhere? The reason is simply that it’s not an easy sell. Dynamic training works better than almost anything you can do, but it’s hard work. People don’t buy programs that promise hard work. People buy books and programs that promise 8-minute abs even if you spend the other 23 hours and 52 minutes of the day sitting on your butt eating delicious cake. 

John is a master of dynamic training (or what he calls dynamism), which is one of the reasons why his program has been so successful. It’s the principles behind dynamic training that also have a lot to do with why this single exercise is so effective at burning fat. Before I get to that though, I want to tell you a little bit about dynamic training; then we can talk about this exercise and why it is so important in your arsenal against stubborn fat.

Dynamic training is all about fast-paced, compound movements that build balance, athleticism, power, and speed. They are big, energy expensive movements that involve as many muscles as possible, and your workouts are often set up in circuits that alternate exercises based on body part. For instance, you may do a leg exercise, immediately follow it with a shoulder exercise, and then finish up by going straight into an exercise for your back.  As you can see, dynamism calls for very little rest between movements.

The idea in these circuits is to rotate through your fresh muscle while keeping your major energy systems working non-stop. This not only burns more calories, but it does amazing things for your body’s efficiency—which means everything works better while weight loss and exercise become easier. In other words, your conditioning goes way up.

To sum up: the idea behind dynamic training is to utilize fast-paced, full-body, controlled movements. These moves require balance, momentum, awareness, and strength, and are highly taxing to all major systems.

Which brings us back to John’s answer to when I asked what single exercise identifies with all these principles and more?

The lunge.

The lunge is one of the most complex movements the body can do, yet is very simple for most people.

It’s heavy.  It’s dynamic. It’s expansive. A front lunge requires your entire body to move forward, catch your weight balanced, stop your own momentum, and then use your largest muscle groups to drive you back to starting position. All lunges (and especially reverse lunges) require balance and complete awareness of your body.

A lot of people love squats and dead lifts, and these moves are great. They are very important, especially if you’re trying to really pack on the muscle.  With squats and dead lifts however, your feet stay locked in place—you never even lift them off the ground. Your entire body stays locked in place except your hips and knees. With a lunge, everything has to move: you take your entire body off balance before pushing off to get back in position. You stretch yourself out and decentralize your force. You can add weights or twists or presses, making it a very cardio intensive move. You can do front lunges, side lunges, reverse lunges, walking lunges, rotating lunges, weighted lunges, etc. The variety is basically endless.

Plus it’s not just a great fat-burning exercise. It is also a top muscle-building exercise, which makes it one exercise that no one should leave out of their arsenal. I would try to include some variation of this exercise in each and every fat loss workout I do.

A few pointers about the lunge:

1.    If you don’t do a lunge correctly with proper form, they can damage your knees which can lead to serious injury. Make sure your knees are strong enough to handle this. See your doctor.

2.    Lunges put all the emphasis on movement and balance. Go as fast as you can with good form, but go as slow as you need to in order to maintain that good form.

3.    If you’re not holding weights, try bringing your hands up in front of you as if you were in fighting stance, with elbows in and arms totally vertical and parallel to one another. It helps you find your balance.

4.    Keep your core and glutes tight for better balance and a straighter spine

5.    When you lunge forward, you want “mid-foot balance.” This means you don’t land on your toes or heels, but your mid-foot. Another way to look at it would be your whole foot coming down at once without forward momentum. Imagine your foot coming down on ice so that it has to drop straight down and not be moving forward, or it will slip out from under you.

6.    If you’re doing reverse lunges, at least 70% of your body weight should remain on your front leg. Your back leg should have feather weight on it.

7.    With reverse lunges it is also vitally important that you keep your body straight. If you need to turn to look at your positioning, make sure your body is stabilized first.

8.    When pushing up, push through your heel to activate your glutes. Your glutes should be doing more work than your quads, and way more than your calves.

9.    As with squats, your toes shouldn’t go past your front knee on the lunge. This includes your front leg when doing reverse lunges.

10.   Check with your doctor before performing this or any other exercise or routine.

If you’re trying to lose weight or build muscle and you’re not using this exercise, you’re likely not getting the results you could be.  The lunge is the one powerhouse movement that can bring real change to your routine.

Until next time,

Kris

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Stop Complicating Your Diet If You Want Results.

If you’ve been reading for any amount of time, you know that I’m all about diet. To me, a healthy diet is not only extremely important to maintain but it’s also truly fascinating to learn more about. This said though, I’m going to say something that might seem a little surprising.

Some of you are worrying about the details way too much.

I keep a pretty close ear to the chatter in the health and fitness community and I have to say that more than ever before, the details really detracting from the main message of nutrition.

I get questions from readers and potential clients all the time about the tiniest nuances of a healthy diet that they’ve heard debated ad nauseam. There’s nothing wrong with learning or implementing something that is good for you but the truth is, most people are paralyzed by all of these tiny questions. They can’t see the forest for the trees.

 I had a guy who eats McDonald’s 5 times per week ask me how he could manipulate his carb to fat ratio for better performance and weight loss. I had a woman that starts each week buying two 12 packs of Diet Coke ask me if blueberries would really help her lose belly fat. I have people on a regular basis come to me that have given up fruit because of the sugar but they see nothing wrong with living primarily on “Healthy Choice” meals.

This is nothing new. There’s always an attention sucking villain that detracts from a healthy society. For years it’s been fat, or carbs, or calories altogether. I guess what bothers me now is the fact that with the internet, it’s become more specialized and segmented. It seems everyone has their own crusade against some food or nutrient. If you don’t have a crusade against something, you probably have one food you think is the cure all.

There are millions of people that replace “evil milk” with soy in their 24oz venti cup of coffee they drink with their breakfast donuts.

Here’s the point. Most of the nutrition you hear discussed is very elitist and holds no value to your average person that eats a diet soaked in processed chemicals and hormones. The majority of it is merely driven by the fact that someone selling a book needs to have a new angle to come at you with.

 

 
Mistakes are easy when chasing details.  

If you’re diet consists of fast food and TV dinners (do they still call them that?) you really don’t need to obsess about the sugar in fruit or whether or not agave is a healthy sweetener. You don’t need to know which brand of fish oil is the best. If this is you, it shouldn’t matter if the latest study says milk helps to burn stomach fat. Just stop listening to all the chatter and get the basics down.

What are the basics? If I had to boil it all down to the only concept you need to know about diet it’s quite simply, get rid of what’s not natural. This means nothing processed, genetically altered, filled with hormones, or laced with manmade chemicals. Once you get that down you can start to look into whether or not grains are good for you, check out raw foods, see if you should be supplementing with vitamin D, or look into your metabolic type. However, if you can’t do that, paying any mind to the latest health study/trend is probably just holding you back.

Until next time,

Kris

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Are your genes making you fat?

Is being fat in your genes?

Genes can be terrible and mean things. They can make you short or bald or give you a couple extra fingers. They can make your arms too short, your torso too big, and now we’re finding that it can even give you a lame personality! But can they make you fat? Do “fat genes” actually run through our blood lines? Well, let’s ask ourselves a few questions and maybe get a few clues.

1.    Do some people have a harder time than others getting excess weight to come off?

2.    Do some people have a harder time than others keeping the weight off?

3.    Have scientists ever found anything that resembles a “fat gene”?

4.    If so what were the implications?

5.    How do the implications of that “fat gene” compare to reality?

OK let’s have some fun with this. First two questions have very obvious answers. Yes, some people gain weight easier than others and those same people usually have a harder time getting that weight back off their bodies. So far, we’re looking like a “fat gene” is just around the corner!

For the answer to #3 we’ll head back a few years to 2007, when it was reported that scientists from Oxford University found a link between type II diabetes and a gene called the fat mass and obesity associated, or the FTO gene.

In their tests they took a sample of the genome from 2000 type II diabetics as well as 3000 healthy adults and compared them. What they found was that an overwhelming majority of diabetics shared the same FTO gene. Curious about a possible link to obesity, they cross-referenced the same data but found that there was no connection between being overweight and this FTO gene.

Here’s where it gets interesting. After they found no statistical evidence with a 5000 person study that there was any connection to obesity, they decided to compare the data with 37,000 participants from 13 other studies. This time they discovered that the FTO gene has an “obvious” connection to obesity and weight gain.

What were the implications? They found that people with the particular FTO variant weighed approximately 6.6lbs more than those without it. This caused them to be 67% more likely to be obese and 40% more likely to contract type II diabetes. (Notice how there is a greater link to obesity than diabetes but in the first study they could find the link to diabetes but not to obesity? A little strange isn’t it?)

OK so yes science did find a “fat gene” and those are the implications of having it. So now let’s answer the last question of just how the implications of the fat gene compare to reality.

This study was done in the UK so we’re going to use their statistics for this. At the time of this study 1 in 3 women in the UK were considered overweight as well as half of all men! To make matters worse, 1 in every 4 adults were actually considered obese! Let’s go ahead and take a look at the men. The average height for a man in the UK is about 5’10” or 178cm. Now let’s take a look at BMI (body mass index) numbers for someone that is 5’10”…

128lbs or below is considered underweight

129 to 174lbs is considered healthy weight <45lb spread>

175 to 209lbs is considered overweight. <35lb spread>

210lbs or Greater is considered obese.

OK so we know that someone with the active gene should weigh about 6.6lbs more than someone without the active gene which accounts for a 67% greater chance of being obese. Take another look at the numbers above. There is a huge 80lbs spread between the bottom healthy weight and the first tick on the obesity scale. You can be anywhere within that 80lb window and not be obese. You have 45lbs to not even be overweight!  Many people aren’t just sitting at the first tick on the obesity scale either. Many of them have far eclipsed it and that number of people is growing daily. The common link between people in this group is more lifestyle than it is genes.

 

 

Desperately trying to lose that last 7 pounds for 6-pack abs but his genes are in the way.
 

 

In fact, most people that lead active healthy lifestyles can fluctuate 7lbs and not become obese no matter what genes they possess. With current estimations that this gene may actually affect over 50% of us, it’s impossible that this gene just popped up within the last 100 years, yet prior to then, obesity was extremely rare. Honestly it wasn’t until the 1960’s that it really started to skyrocket. It’s not the genes folks. It’s a combination of our food supply and our lifestyles. The only people a gene should be significant to are the ones that want to use this to “prove” to you that you should be on another pill for the rest of your life.

If you want to solve this obesity problem it’s simple. Go back to nature. Stop worrying about calories and fat and carbs and start worrying about eating what nature intended. Meat should be grass fed, fruits and vegetables should be organic, milk should be raw, grains and sugars should be kept to a minimum, soy should be kicked to the curb, processed foods should never be in your home, and most vegetable oils should be eliminated. Add to that some high intensity resistance training with a touch of cardio and you will melt fat from your body.

If this sounds overwhelming to you, I recommend you pick up a copy of my buddy Mike Geary’s program “The Truth About Abs”. There are a million tricks and diets out there in the world that will have you jumping on one foot while rubbing your belly and patting your head and maybe actually knock a few pounds off your body but I can never recommend those programs. Weight loss is not complicated. I’m not saying it’s easy but it’s certainly not complicated. If you follow the simple rules I’ve outlined above, not only will losing weight become a lot easier but you will feel better than you probably ever have. The reason I like Mike’s program is because it is based around the same simple rules. It just serves to give them some structure so you can maximize your results.

Until next time,

Kris

 

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The Food Pyramid is Killing You! (Not what you think)

As most of you know, the Food Pyramid is the USDA's guide to healthy eating. It involves the classification of foods into groups while giving recommendations as to how many servings you need from each group for optimal health. What you probably don't know is that it's a top source of our obesity problem and it's killing you.

In 1978 the FDB (a consumer co-op in Denmark) created the food pyramid. In 1992 the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) adopted this system to replace the antiquated “food groups” system which had been in place in some form since its introduction in 1916.

In 2000, the food pyramid was altered and the MyPyramid program as established. This new pyramid did more to promote exercise and healthier options than its predecessor but also left its instruction more vague and complicated to follow.  In 2005 there was another alteration which brings us to the current version.

There have been several other forms of the pyramid created by other entities. For instance in 2009, Harvard School of Public Health created the Healthy Eating Pyramid which focused more on exercise and separating food groups into their healthiest forms.

Sounds pretty boring and straight forward right? How could this be anything but helpful? Here comes an awakening.

For many of us, the food pyramid represents our first understanding that something called nutrition actually exists other than your parents telling you to finish your vegetables. It also has much to do with the curriculum taught to nutritionists and dieticians. This makes it highly unfortunate that much of it is either very vague and misleading, or flat out wrong. So let’s take a look now at the pyramid.

For our example we’re going to use the one I grew up with which was introduced in 1992. Believe me, the new one might look better but it has its own unforgivable weaknesses.

I started school in 1985 in Florida. When in first grade, my school put it in the curriculum to begin learning about nutrition. This was all very simple stuff really. We learned things like Mr. Apple was a fruit and therefore he was in the fruits and vegetables group and is therefore, good for you. Anything that was in one of the four food groups was considered good for you.

The four food groups were breads & cereals, fruits & vegetables, meat, and the milk group. There was later a fifth group added called the fat and sweets group. In the next several years it was drilled into our heads to only eat from the four food groups and try to not eat too much food from the fifth food group.

Then in 6^th grade (1992) they introduced the Food Pyramid. Honestly this changed very little. It was really nothing more than a visual representation of what they’d been preaching for years. They split up fruits and vegetables and added more emphasis on number of servings but they were so vague that they only served to confuse.

How are you supposed to know what 6-11 servings of bread and cereal, 2-4 servings of fruit, 3-5 servings of vegetables, etc look like at the end of the day? Seriously, 2-4 isn’t a range, it’s a 100% shift. Also there were further complication is that 2-4 was to be a minimum while 2-3 in the meat group was a maximum although they didn’t print that on the pyramid.  So now 2-4 is not even a range but somehow a minimum? And what kind of OCD person could follow this?

If you’re scratching your head right now trying to figure out why they would make this so vague and confusing, the answer is simple. Anytime the regulatory agencies try to do anything good for the people they’re trying to protect, they are met with screaming lobbyists that don’t want their companies to look bad or be forced into expensive changes. Usually the end result of the lobbying is watered down guidelines and wordings in new laws that are easy to get around. There is a great example of this in my “What is Yellow #5 (tartrazine)” post.

You’ll also notice that most of the wordings make it seem like it’s good for you to eat more. Tell me you haven’t heard things like “It’s a great way to get in all of your recommended servings of vegetables”. It’s all worded to make you eat more because then the companies the lobbyists represent can sell you more food. When you hear something like, need to be getting in 6 to 11 servings of bread and cereal, the automatic association is the more you get in, the better. You’re working all day to get in your 11 servings of bread and cereal (which is the base of your recommended diet). An extra large bowl of Froot Loops is great because that’s like 4 servings of cereal out of the way in one swoop.

This leads us to another huge problem with the food groups and pyramid system most of us grew up with. They don’t differentiate between good and bad foods. Whole wheat vs. white, bologna vs. chicken, fruit vs. fruit juice; it’s all the same. Froot Loops are just as much part of the “healthy” bread and cereal group as steel cut oats and ketchup is in fact a vegetable (fruit?)

Here’s your Smart Choice reminder that you’re being healthy.

 

Checking out the USDA.gov website, you’ll notice that there is no mention of differentiation at all. If you look into breads by clicking on that section of the pyramid, you’ll see a single recommendation that says to make some of your selections products that are “made with” whole grains so you can get your fiber. That’s it. No emphasis at all and everything but fiber is ignored. They didn’t want you to know about all the other differences so you could make a wise choice. Also, "made with"? Look around the rest of it. They make no effort to give you almost any advice other than avoid fat like the plague. Choose skim milk and fat free yogurt. Eat lean meat and trim off any fat you see. Always choose low fat or fat free options. Here’s my favorite paragraph on the page…

“Be sure to eat at least the lowest number of servings from the five major food groups listed below. You need them for the vitamins, minerals, carbohydrates, and protein they provide. Just try to pick the lowest fat choices from the food groups. No specific serving size is given for the fats, oils, and sweets group because the message is USE SPARINGLY.”

A couple things I want you to notice there. First is the beginning wording “BE SURE (psychological authority) to eat AT LEAST THE LOWEST number of servings from the FIVE MAJOR FOOD GROUPS” Obviously written to make you feel like you’re not eating enough.

The next thing I want you to notice is the leaving out of fat in what you get from your food. We know that fat is a vital nutrient (even saturated fat). Without it, your body will not be able to perform many functions including cell creation. Also, your hormones will go completely out of whack. Dietary fat is incredibly important!

Then they go even further and flat out tell you that fat should be avoided. They even used cap locks in telling you to avoid it. Don’t you think they knew in 1992 that fat was important to you? After all, just 8 years later they added “oils” into the new version as a necessity. Believe me, the USDA did not learn this in those 8 years. Here’s proof. In 1942 the USDA came out with the 7 major food groups. This lasted until 1955 when they decided to make it less complex so they whittled it down to four.

The Seven Groups (1942)

• Milk
• Vegetables
• Fruits
• Eggs
• Meat (Fish, Poultry, Cheese)
• Cereal
• Butter ßBAM!! Butter was a food group!

Shocking? Wrong? Stupid? We were so naïve back then? No! Butter in many cultures used to be celebrated for its amazing health giving qualities. There were winter festivals surrounding the harvest of the rich orange butter created from the healthy mineral rich grass fed cows. The butter was given first to the children and pregnant women because they needed the nutrients the most.

In fact, you should take a look at Dr. Weston A. Price’s book, ‘Nutrition and Physical Degeneration’ for some shocking information on this topic. After reading that book you will want to scream, cry, or possibly kill someone over all the lies you’ve been told and all the damage it’s done to you and your family. Did you know human beings following a healthy diet that live active lifestyles should be able to weather temperatures just above the freezing point without bundling up and without severe discomfort? It’s not just about sick, sad, and stupid. It’s not even about breaking bones, needing braces, asthma, and ADHD. We can’t even comprehend just how weak we are anymore because there is no example of what real health even is in the modern day.

So yes, butter was a food group and it wasn’t changed due to new research. It was only removed as they decided to make the guidelines simpler. Notice eggs on there as well? In fact, if you pay attention you’ll notice that four of the food groups (milk, meat, eggs, and butter) are all loaded with fat and cholesterol. Now consider that the FIRST study on cardio vascular health and disease (heart disease anyone?) wasn’t published until 1958 (three years after this was changed) and the obesity rate was under 10% in the US. Today over 60% of us are overweight and heart disease is the #1 killer. What happened? More interesting data was that between 1960 and 1980 the obesity rate stayed stable. Then in the 80’s we went on an anti-fat crusade (see above) and our obesity rates skyrocketed all the way until today.

The point is, the USDA has always known that fat is healthy. In fact, the healthiest indigenous societies have diets up to 60% in saturated fats and cholesterol. It’s quite a flip then to go from that to NO FAT!! USE SPARINGLY!!

Folks, the FDA and the USDA don’t care about you. Grain is cheaper and more profitable than meat so you should ignore the meat eating teeth that god gave you to get to the nutrients in the meat we’re supposed to eat and go eat seeds and berries instead. Are we supposed to eat fruits and vegetables too? Of course we are but you may notice that many seeds, nuts, and other vegetation such as corn and lettuce ends up whole in your feces. It’s because your body isn’t optimized to digest it so you’re not absorbing the most of the nutrients. Think about it. If pieces of whole food are going through you without being broken down, how much of what looks broken down actually got completely broken down so you could truly absorb the nutrients? It may sound disgusting but when was the last time you pooped chicken?

Now that I’ve completely ranted I have one last topic. This was the topic I actually wanted to talk about in the beginning of this entire thing; the education factor and why it’s messing you up.

For millennia, human beings have been much like other animals. We scavenged around and we ate whatever it was that we found that was edible. We ate whatever we could kill or scavenge. We ate the big, the small, dangerous, the furry, and even the six-legged. When vegetation was in bloom and accessible we ate anything that was digestible and not poisonous. When it wasn’t, it was all about whatever we could store that wouldn’t go bad and the animals we could kill. The point is, we ate what we had and as long as we had enough we were quite healthy.

We didn’t have supermarkets and specialty stores with thousands of options. We didn’t have 6-11 grains, 2-4 fruits, 3-5 vegetables, 2-3 dairy, and 2-3 meat servings. Honestly, the natural world wasn’t set up for that to be possible as you never traveled more than a few miles away from your home. What were the chances that wild broccoli was growing next to some wild carrots and tomatoes? What were the odds that you had a super berry growing next to your cave over by the spinach? There aren’t many places in the world that you could naturally eat a large variety of foods before agriculture. The fact is we weren’t built to need all this variety. We CAN eat it but it’s not what we were designed for and if it’s not what we were designed for why are you being told now that you MUST do it to be healthy?

The point is not to stop eating a variety of foods but that the USDA has gone out of their way to create rules around something that nature never thought necessary. In fact, the only rules of nutrition are to eat the things that were designed to be food for you by god and the environment around you and not by man. Here are 2 rules. If it wasn’t a major food source for people 10,000 years ago, it still isn’t. Rule #2, don’t eat so much that if a lion were suddenly chasing you, you’d be too full to run and grab your spear.

See, in making all of these rules they have you in a state where you are now easily marketed to. I once had a guy tell me that he could eat all the cotton candy and Skittles he wanted and be healthy because they had no fat in them. Sad thing is, Skittles have been known to put “a fat free food” on their paikaging and they only do that because it sells! As a kid I once made a white bread, bologna, and American cheese sandwich that I added ketchup to in order to make it fit all four food groups. Based on USDA and school teaching, I truly was being healthy.

If there weren’t a bunch of rules like no fat, no one would ever look at Skittles as healthy and Froot Loops could never have a Smart Choice check box on it. They’d be laughed out. If you weren’t told to watch your calories no one would be fooled into buying 100 calorie paiks of Oreo’s and if you weren’t so concerned about being a good boy or girl that get’s in you recommended vegetable servings, you may have paid more attention to the fact that vegetables have become a genetic science experiment instead of a healthy food.

People ask me why I don’t write articles like “The top 10 super foods you must include in your diet” or “Feeling depressed? Try these five foods to beat those blues!” These articles get views. They get forwarded around. These are what the doctors and professional write that get published on MSN and in magazines. This is the stuff that is eaten up by your average Joe and Jane but it’s only because the average Joe and Jane is used to being confused. It started in school and it continues today.

We don’t need a food pyramid and we don’t need a super berry from the side of a remote Tibetan mountain. We need to stop eating genetically modified processed garbage and sick grain fed animals and get back to eating what we were created to eat. Do that and we will be healthier and we won’t be fat. Or, we can go grab ourselves some reduced sugar Smart Choice Toaster Strudels “now with real fruit” and wonder why we're fat, sick, stupid, ADHD, diabetic, depressed, impotent, sterile, and sleepless.

I have so much more to say but at 6 pages, this is by far my longest post and it needs to end. You know I’ll be back soon though with more.

Oh, if you didn’t see it, Food Inc is the #5 best selling DVD in 2010 so far on Amazon! People are waking up! So, as always, I’ll keep putting out the info if you keep bringing in the readers. Together we absolutely CAN change the direction of this ship and take our health back for good.

 

Until next time,

Kris

 

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Does eating meat make you fat?

"Does eating meat cause weight gain? Some say this hotly debated question holds the key to weight management success in our modern day. Well, after a five year European study, we finally have an answer for you. Read below to learn about the study, the findings, and what those findings mean for you." 

 

 

Lately it’s been all over the news that eating meat is a major cause of weight gain. In fact, I’ve been sent several articles like this from readers in the last few days asking my opinion.

These news reports are the result of a recently held 5 year, 360,000 participant European study. The study controlled for total energy intake, physical activity levels, education, dietary patterns, age, sex, and smoking habits. After all of these controls, the final outcome was that all calories are not created equally and in fact, eating meat does cause weight gain.

At the end of the five year study, the average meat eating subject gained 4.4lbs (2kg) in comparison to the person that ate little to no meat.

Based on these findings, various news outlets have taken to saying high protein diets are not conducive to weight loss. Some even say that high carb diets are best for fat loss.

While this has been all over the health newswires, the study (which allowed for red meat, poultry, and processed meat) may not be quite as cut and dry as the media has been portraying it to be. Let’s take a little closer look at some of the potential problems with this study.

Self reporting…

The study claimed that two people with the same habits and caloric intakes would differ in weight gain based on meat consumption. In order to keep track of 360,000 people for 5 years, the participants (that self reported their weight) also self reported their diets, caloric intake, and physical activity levels. It’s long been known that vegetarians typically over estimate their total caloric intake while your average omnivore typically under estimates their intake. Therefore, any study that does self reporting is flawed from the onset.

That said, meat has considerably more calories than say broccoli which has only 20 calories per cup. 

Body composition…

Being that weight was self reported, one thing that wasn’t required was body fat percentage. Typically, meat eaters will have considerably more muscle on their body than their vegetarian brethren. Since muscle is far more dense than fat, it would make sense that they would weigh more overall. In this case, added weight would not be a negative. However, since this widely quoted study didn’t take this into account, we’ll never really know.

Meat quality…

The last thing worth mentioning is something I harp on often. Was this meat even something you should consider food? Was it from a humanely raised healthy animal that spent it’s like out in the sun, happily grazing the fields or pecking the dirt for seed and insects or was this the fat, sick, genetically altered, hormone and drug filled “meat” they try to pass off on us that is unfit for human consumption? I guarantee you it’s the latter. It always is because that is what they make available. Once again, this one vital piece of information is skipped as they make their case that food is bad for you.

 

While the media touts this as the final answer we’ve all been waiting for, the truth is the study is heavily flawed and the determinations that have come from it have no basis in fact. Even if it weren't flawed, by leaving out such information as to whether the added weight is muscle or fat is enough to render it useless in terms of health. Unfortunately it is this style of testing and reporting that leads to so many of the myths regarding our food and health. Flawed study comes out and the media jumps on it and while adding their own twists. Then fitness and nutrition "experts" read it and repeat it enough times that it becomes the "truth". Then you hear it, try your best to follow it, and then get discouraged when you fail to reach your goals and damage your health. It should be a crime.

I want to thank the many of you that sent in these articles. There is a lot of amazingly inaccurate information out there and as always it is my intention to make sure the truth is just as easily accessible to you.

 

Until next time,

Kris

 

PS: If you found this article helpful, please click the “Like” button below for Facebook or subscribe at www.facebook.com/fitnessquests

Six ways to keep your muscle while dieting

"This article explains some key reasons why most people who are successful dieting gain back all of their weight and then some. It also give six great ways to make sure it doesn't happen to you."

How the energy balance affects your results.

The energy balance is one that many people don't understand. Outside of extreme cases the body can normally only burn about 2 pounds of fat per week. So how then are there so many people out there that can claim to have lost a large amount of weight in a short period?

The answer is in the energy balance. I've found that many "experts" repeatedly throw out the 3500 calories is a pound mantra but that just shows that they don't understand the whole story and that means you're not getting the whole story. Let me explain... 

 
  Eh, it kind of works

 

The way most gurus explain it, since 3500 calories equals 1lb of fat, the act of burning or avoiding an extra 3500 calories lead to 1lb of fat loss. This is wrong. 3500 calories does equal (around) 1lb of fat. 1lb of muscle however is only 600 calories. This means that same 3500 calories could equal a loss of almost six pounds of muscle! It’s much easier to lose muscle than it is fat so when you hear someone lost 20 pounds in a month, you can be sure that most of it was water and muscle; not fat.

Remember, you'll never lose all muscle or all fat. If you dropped 3500 calories & lost half in each, that's 1/2 fat but almost 3 lbs of muscle!This is why these these extreme diets always end with more weight gain. You get to the end and you've lost all your muscle, your hormones are out of whack, and your body feels attacked & starved. You get hit with cravings and slower metabolism and all that weight and then some, piles back on.

So how do you keep your muscle when losing fat? Well you're almost always going to lose a little muscle but here are a few tips to maintain as much as possible.

1. Eat 5 small nutrient dense meals daily each w/protein.

2. Don’t go too low on carbs or fat (especially fat) as it will kill your hormone balance.

3. Make tough resistance training a part of your routine so your body has a reason to hold on to the muscle.

4. Work large muscle groups with compound exercises such as squats, lunges, dead lifts, bench press, close grip rows, pull ups, push ups, etc.

5. Do interval training instead of endless cardio. You can do some traditional cardio but most of it should include intervals.

6. Finally, never try to lose more than two pounds per week. Losing more than two is going to be water or muscle.

 

There you have it. Another truth about fat loss that you never get to hear.

This post originally came from a three part tip of the day series I'm starting for my Facebook fans. I added it on here because I figure many people didn't catch the whole thing and I felt the information really needed to be shared further.

Fans on Facebook will be continually getting more and more bonus stuff such as tips, exclusive articles, and links to great articles from around the web that I feel can be helpful. I also have some more plans that I will be putting in place soon that I really think will help you to lead happier and healthier lives. On top of that, Facebook fans are told immediately when I post something new here so if you're not a fan, please visit www.facebook.com/fitnessquests and become a fan now.

 

Until next time,

Kris

 

PS: If you enjoyed this article, please hit the "Like" button below for Facebook. Also I'm currently accepting StumbleUpon love as well :)

Are Whole Eggs or Egg Whites Better for You?

Today I have a guest article from well respected fitness author Mike Geary. Mike is a storehouse of knowledge and he practices everything he preaches. Personally I think everyone can learn from him-myself included. I you didn't pick up the free fitness ebook from last week, please go now and get it. It's free and it's definitely worth the read....

  

Are Whole Eggs or Egg Whites Better for You?

by Mike Geary, Certified Nutrition Specialist, Certified Personal Trainer
Author - The Truth About 6-Pack Abs 

I was on a weekend trip with some friends recently and one of my friends was cooking breakfast for the whole group. I went over to see what he was cooking and saw he was getting ready to make a big batch of eggs.

Well, to my shock and horror, I noticed that he was cracking the eggs open and screening the egg whites into a bowl and throwing out the egg yolks. I asked him why the heck he was throwing out the egg yolks, and he replied something like this...

"because I thought the egg yolks were terrible for you...that's where all the nasty fat and cholesterol is".

And I replied, "you mean that's where all of the nutrition is!"

This is a perfect example of how confused most people are about nutrition. In a world full of misinformation about nutrition, somehow most people now mistakenly think that the egg yolk is the worst part of the egg, when in fact, the YOLK IS THE HEALTHIEST PART OF THE EGG!

By throwing out the yolk and only eating egg whites, you're essentially throwing out the most nutrient dense, antioxidant-rich, vitamin and mineral loaded portion of the egg. The yolks contain so many B-vitamins, trace minerals, vitamin A, folate, choline, lutein, and other powerful nutrients... it's not even worth trying to list them all.

In fact, the egg whites are almost devoid of nutrition compared to the yolks.

Even the protein in egg whites isn't as powerful without the yolks to balance out the amino acid profile and make the protein more bio-available. Not to even mention that the egg yolks from free range chickens are loaded with healthy omega-3 fatty acids.

Yolks contain more than 90% of the calcium, iron, phosphorus, zinc, thiamin, B6, folate, and B12, and panthothenic acid of the egg. In addition, the yolks contain ALL of the fat soluble vitamins A, D, E, and K in the egg, as well as ALL of the essential fatty acids (EFAs).

And now the common objection I get all the time when I say that the yolks are the most nutritious part of the egg...

"But I heard that whole eggs will skyrocket my cholesterol through the roof"

No, this is FALSE!

First of all, when you eat a food that contains a high amount of dietary cholesterol such as eggs, your body down-regulates it's internal production of cholesterol to balance things out.

On the other hand, if you don't eat enough cholesterol, your body simply produces more since cholesterol has dozens of important vital functions in the body.

And here's where it gets even more interesting...

There have been plenty of studies lately that indicate that eating whole eggs actually raises your good HDL cholesterol to a higher degree than LDL cholesterol, thereby improving your overall cholesterol ratio and blood chemistry.

And 3rd... high cholesterol is NOT a disease!  Heart disease is a disease...but high cholesterol is NOT.  Cholesterol is actually a VERY important substance in your body and has vitally important functions... it is DEAD WRONG to try to "lower your cholesterol" just because of pharmaceutical companies propaganda that everyone on the planet should be on statin drugs.

 

In addition, the yolks contain the antioxidant lutein as well as other antioxidants which can help protect you from inflammation within your body (the REAL culprit in heart disease, not dietary cholesterol!), giving yet another reason why the yolks are actually GOOD for you, and not detrimental.

To help bring even more proof that whole eggs are better for you than egg whites, I recently read a University of Connecticut study that showed that a group of men in the study that ate 3 eggs per day for 12 weeks while on a reduced carb, higher fat diet increased their HDL good cholesterol by 20%, while their LDL bad cholesterol stayed the same during the study.  However, the group that ate egg substitutes (egg whites) saw no change in either and did not see the improvement in good cholesterol (remember that higher HDL levels are associated with lower risk of heart disease) that the whole egg eaters did. 

So I hope we've established that whole eggs are not some evil food that will wreck your body... instead whole eggs are FAR superior to egg whites.

But what about the extra calories in the yolks?

This is actually a non-issue and here's why... even though egg yolk contain more calories than just eating the egg whites, the yolks have such a high micro-nutrient density in those calories, that it increases your overall nutrient density per calorie you consume.  Essentially, what this does is help to regulate your appetite for the remainder of the day, so you end up eating less calories overall.  In addition, the healthy fats in the egg yolks help to maintain a good level of fat-burning hormones in your body.

Overall, this means that the extra fats (healthy fats) and calories from the yolk are so nutrient-dense that they actually HELP you to burn off body fat!

Also, your normal supermarket eggs coming from mass factory farming just don't compare nutritionally with organic free range eggs from healthy chickens that are allowed to roam freely and eat a more natural diet.  Your typical cheap grocery store eggs will have lower nutrient levels and a higher omega-6 level and lower omega-3 level.  On the other hand, the cage-free organic eggs from healthier chickens allowed to eat more natural feed and roam freely will have much higher vitamin and mineral levels and a more balanced healthier omega-3 to omega-6 fatty acid ratio.

I recently compared eggs I bought at the grocery store with a batch of eggs I got at a farm stand where the chickens were free roaming and healthy.

Most people don't realize that there's a major difference because they've never bought real eggs from healthy chickens... The eggs from the grocery store had pale yellow yolks and thin weak shells. On the other hand, the healthier free range eggs from the local farm had strong thick shells and deep orange colored yolks indicating much higher nutrition levels and carotenoids... and just a healthier egg in general.

This is due to the fact that a free-roaming hen allowed to roam on plenty of land will eat a variety of greens, insects, worms, etc transferring MUCH higher levels of nutrients to the eggs compared to an unhealthy hen that is trapped inside a dark factory farm hen house in horrible conditions and fed nothing but piles of corn and soy.  It's a DRASTIC difference in the nutrition that you get from the egg.

So next time a health or fitness professional tells you that egg whites are superior (because of their "fat-phobic" mentality towards dietary fats), you can quietly ignore their advice knowing that you now understand the REAL deal about egg yolks.

And can we all please STOP with this sillyness about eating an omelete with 4-5 egg whites and only 1 egg yolk... If you want real taste and real health benefits, we'd all be better off eating ALL of our eggs with the yolks.

After all, do you REALLY think that our ancestors thousands of years ago threw out the yolks and only ate the egg whites?  NOT A CHANCE!  They intuitively knew that all of the nutrition was found in the yolks.  But our modern society has been brainwashed with misinformation about fats and cholesterol.

Another interesting study about eggs...

I read a study recently that compared groups of people that ate egg breakfasts vs groups of people that ate cereal or bagel-based breakfasts.  The results of the study showed that the egg eaters lost or maintained a healthier bodyweight, while the cereal/bagel eaters gained weight. 

It was hypothesized that the egg eaters actually ate less calories during the remainder of the day because their appetite was more satisfied compared to the cereal/bagel eaters who would have been more prone to wild blood sugar swings and food cravings.

Enjoy your eggs and get a leaner body!

 

About the author-

Mike Geary is a Certified Nutrition Specialist and Certified Personal Trainer
He is also the Author of the best selling The Truth About 6-Pack Abs 

Here's a free thank you gift to my readers.

Hey guys and gals!

I just wanted to take a second to thank all of you that have been reading my blog and spreading the word to others. Although the reading base is still low, it seems to grow a little everyday as you guys continue to pass the important information on to your friends and loved ones. For that and for being pretty much the coolest people ever, I thank you.

So, instead of a post today, I wanted to give you something a little better. I just picked up an ebook written by Mike Geary who is a fitness and nutrition author that I greatly respect. Mike, like me, is a big advocate of using better health to have a better body. He's used that formula to write what is now the best selling six-pack abs book on the internet called "Truth About Abs". You can pick up a copy here Fatlossessentials.com if you're interested. It really is everything it says it is.

A few minutes ago though I got my hands on another book of his called Training & Nutrition Insider Secrets for a Lean-Body. It's normally about $18 but Mike has decided to let a few of us give it away to our readers and I was lucky enough to get on board for you guys. It's pretty substantial too. Its about 65 pages and touches on a bunch of helpful topics. To grab a free copy just click the link below and it will open in your browser in PDF form. I recommend you save it to your hard drive cause you'll want to have a copy to look over later.

Download free ebook here!

If you know someone else that might be interested you can send them here or you can simply email them the book. I hope you enjoy it and get something great out of it! I'll be back with some new stuff in a couple days.

 

Until next time,

Kris

 

PS: Don't stop spreading the news now!Hit the like button below and give others a chance for some free stuff. Also, if you haven't subscribed yet the Facebook like button toward the top right-hand side of the page will get that done. You can also retweet, Digg, Stumble, bebo, myspace, email, or send the link by carrier pigeon if you want to. Whatever gets the word out :)

Why all the health misinformation? Also milk revisited!

 

I read an article today on RealAge.com entitled “Not seeing workout results? Drink this.” It says that a 12 week study showed that drinking 8-16 ounces of non-fat milk after a strength training workout burns five times as much fat and builds twice as much muscle as drinking sports drinks.

The article goes on to say that apparently the perfect combination of calcium, vitamin D, and healthy proteins is just what your body needs after a workout. The problem with this study building a case for milk is that it didn’t compare milk to nothing or milk to water, it compared milk to sports drinks (or salty Kool-aid). It then says that because it worked better than sports drinks, it must be all of its wonderful features and benefits that make it so wonderful.

I’ve used this analogy before but it’s similar to calling Pepsi a healthy beverage because it killed 99% less people when consumed than heavily radioactive material.

After going on for a while about it they do throw in a quick sentence that I was surprised to see that said strength training with water may have the same effect but this is only after they’ve made their case for drinking milk after a workout.

Now, don’t get me wrong. This is not an anti-milk campaign I’m launching here. I just want to point out how these studies get twisted around to mean things that they don’t actually mean.

The really interesting thing to me though is not the article, but the comments. As of the time I’m writing this, the article has 3 comments. These are what I’m more interested in because it shows the state of the people that have to listen to this constant barrage of misinformation. I hope you’ll find it interesting as well.

First we have Alfalfa14394 who says:

Drink this… I agree with the docs. I am a 51 yr old woman and when I do any work out hard or not I find that when I drink a glass of 1% milk or a 8oz glass of kefir I feel better and the hunger pangs stay away. I live in the desert and all fluid is good, especially milk.

Next there’s Bayleaf15965 who says:

Drinking milk… Non fat or regular milk is not good for anyone except babies. I go along with Dr. Frank Lipman who gives many reasons why we SHOULD NOT DRINK MILK. For that matter dairy products are not healthy generally either. And for me there is an ethical reason. The way we are raising our cows today is very cruel and an abomination. Soy milk is fine for me as well as soy cream cheese and sour cream. Healthier and I don't cause any innocent animal suffering.

And Last we have Set2Go7238 who says:

I was told recently that you cant build muscle unless you are training like an elite athelete or a body builder? is this wrong? I was told that I can make my muscles stronger but not build them? I am a 45 year old women doing regular resistance excercise. Are you saying that it is possible for me to build muscle? I am a little confused :-)

OK, so why am I bringing your attention to the comments? Because I know that they are not alone. I know that many of you may be floundering in the same pools of misinformation that just leave you stuck. Now I’m going to go through them.

Notice the difference between the first and second one? One says, I agree with this and milk is great and the other says, no one but babies should drink milk for both health and moral reasons. So who’s right?

Well I have to tell you that if I had no other knowledge of milk than just this I would go with the first one. I don’t care that one of them got their information from someone that had a lot of schooling and can put some letters around his name. The reason I would go with the first one is because she says that it works for her. It makes her feel better. The other commenter has just jumped on someone else’s crusade and has no information to offer of her own based on her own experience.

If you need to know my take on it it’s this. Milk is an incredibly healthful food with an amazing amount of health benefits. I would go so far as to call milk one of the few real “super foods”. However, just like almost all other natural foods, once you start screwing with it, you can turn something from healthy into poison. Milk is no exception.

When you give animals a nutrient deficient and health damaging cheap diet, load them up with hormones and antibiotics so they produce several times as much milk as they should and don’t die from the conditions they’re left in, let them stand in their own feces, and keep tubes connected to their udders that cause sores to form that leak into the product, you’re going to have a bad product. Then when you pasteurize it cause you now have to kill the disease you’ve caused which destroys the once healthy proteins and then homogenize it so it’s nice and smooth thereby damaging the once healthy fats, the end product doesn’t even begin to resemble what it could have been.

So is milk bad? No, milk is fantastic! Is mass produced garbage milk from damaged animals that is then processed to get rid of all the diseases and germs healthy? Probably not so much. If you want good milk, get it raw from a farm that comes from pasture raised, grass fed, organic, healthy, social cows. One taste and you’ll know that the flavorless, watery crap you get at the grocery store is not really milk. Also, this takes out any moral dilemma as the animals are actually well taken care of. If you can’t get raw milk, the next best thing is something like this.

 

It doesn't have to be this brand but this is what's in my fridge right now. The important things are Non-homogenized (fat isn't damaged), grass fed, (healthy diet+free roaming happy cow) and organic (no hormones or excessing drugs) is what you’re looking for.

Now for the last commenter…  Notice she didn’t even mention milk? She just wants someone to be straight with her as to whether or not it’s possible to build muscle! This is simply a product of too many people spouting out too much nonsense in order to sell a product as well as people like this, making studies about things they’re not really about to get people to read their articles.

Remember the title of this article? “Not seeing workout results? Drink this.” Obviously it’s meant to get people curious enough to click on it and that’s fine. I have no problem with that. The problem I have is that they’re being dishonest in their selling of the story.

The title should have read, “Find out which beverage is 5 times more effective at burning fat than sports drinks.” Now people that don’t know how this works and skim through the article are duped into thinking that all they have to do is drink milk after a workout and they’ll build a bunch of muscle and burn a ton of fat. It’s not even what the article is about but you have poor, confused Set2Go7238 that just can’t make heads or tails of it and just wants a straight answer!

If you’re interested in reading the article btw, here’s the link below…

http://www.realage.com/blogs/doctor-oz-roizen/not-seeing-workout-results-drink-this?cbr=TWTTR01

In closing…

Many people ask me why I write this blog and I’d have to tell you, it certainly isn’t for the money. I write this blog for two reasons. First is my love for the topics, and second is because I feel an obligation. Health is a wonderful and important thing and it should be treated that way. I have a passion for being healthy and feeling better and I’m shocked daily by the amount of people that treat it solely as a source of income. Hey, it’s fine to make money in the health field, but if you’re going to take money for anything, provide a proper product or service to the people paying you. Today, the field that I love so much is tainted with mountains of bad information and snake oil. Half the people that think they’re giving out good information anymore have been so tainted by it all that they are inadvertently giving wrong advice themselves.

Because of this, I feel that it is my obligation to do what I can to set the record straight. Maybe I can’t stand up to the mountains of new fad diets coming out daily but I can get to a few people and they can maybe get to a few more until a difference is actually made. This is why I say, if you like the articles, share them on Facebook or Stumbleupon, retweet or Digg them, or even just send an “old fashion” email to a friend. You do something to get the word out and I’ll keep telling everyone the truth.

Until next time,

Kris

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What does naturally sweetened by dehydrated cane juice really mean?

Are products naturally sweetened by dehydrated cane juice really any healthier?

Have you ever wondered what all of those ingredients on the side of food containers actually are? Have you ever actually wondered what exactly yellow #5 or red #40 is? What does it look like? Does it have a flavor? How do they make it? Is it poisonous?

How about high fructose corn syrup? Sure, it’s in everything and you hear the arguments about its adverse health effects. But have you ever wondered what exactly it is? How do they make it? What does it look like? Why do they insist on using it? What’s the difference between high fructose and regular corn syrup? Etc…

If you’re like most people, even if you have had these questions, you simply haven’t had the time to actually sit down and do the research. For this reason I’ve decided to start a new intermittent series of posts to dissect just what exactly these ingredients are and how they affect your health and fitness goals.

For the first post in this series I’d like to address something I’ve been seeing more and more on health food packaging. The companies that have been rightfully moving away from HFCS and cancer causing artificial sweeteners seem to have found new healthy ways of sweetening their foods. In fact, you’ve probably seen some labels that say stuff like “naturally sweetened by dehydrated cane juice”. Have you stopped to think about what that means though?

This chinchilla has warm fuzzies about foods naturally sweetened by dehydrated cane juice.

 

  

Naturally sweetened by cane juice… It sounds so nice doesn’t it? It’s very natural and healthy sounding. Kind of gives me warm fuzzies and makes me want to type little emoticon smiley faces like this one J. The truth is, it should make you want to as well if for no other reason than it’s a million times better than foods sweetened with high fructose corn syrup or other artificial sweeteners.

Why not just use sugar though? Is dehydrated cane juice really superior to sweetening with regular old table sugar?

You may have figured out already that this is sort of a trick question. It would be impossible for dehydrated cane juice to be superior to regular table sugar because all table sugar is, is dehydrated cane juice.

When sugar cane was originally discovered in Southeast Asia it was mainly just chewed on by the natives for its sweetness. It had very few sweetening applications. However in about 350AD, the people of India discovered the secret of dehydrating the juice from the cane into crystal form which was easy to transport and cook with and allowed it to easily spread throughout the rest of the world. It quickly replaced honey as the number one sweetener used across the known world and the rest is history.

So next time you see “naturally sweetened by dehydrated cane juice”, you’ll know that this is just a feel good fancy way of saying, “We’ve added a bunch of sugar to your ‘health food’ but we’ve found that if we change the wording, you’ll still consider our junk food to be healthy and you’ll buy it!”

Nice huh?

 

Until next time,

Kris

 

PS: If you got something useful out of this article, you can help others find it by hitting the Facebook "Like" button below and/or by Stumbling this post on Stumbleupon. If you would like to be notified of future articles, please hit the Facebook "Like" button at the top right side of the page or you can go to www.facebook.com/fitnessquests where I give free quick tips on how to reach your health and fitness goals. You can also follow me on Twitter @Easywhey. Thanks for reading!

The importance of home for your diet

Out of all the insights that I’ve had over the years that have helped me to grow and to keep myself healthy, this has been one of the biggest. It has been a pillar of my strength and will power and has served as a constant reminder of what I should be doing at all times. Quite simply…

Respect your home.

The place in which you hang your hat is your territory.  It’s your environment you create for yourself. It’s your home. Home is a place to recharge and seek nourishment. This means nourishment of your body, your mind, and your soul. It’s where all can be exposed with no worry of being hurt or ridiculed; you can let your guard down. It’s where you can surround yourself of constant reminders of who you are as an individual. It’s the one place that you personally control and nothing should be allowed inside it that’s negative or can sabotage you in any way.

Your home is the only place in the world that you have this kind of control and that should absolutely be respected.

This means not allowing others to bring anything into your home that you don’t want there (including drama). Not allowing them to bring anything in that could hurt you in anyway. It even means being selective of what you allow from radio and television to come into your home. All that is in vain however, if you are not mindful of what you bring into your home.  Anything you bring in should be nourishing to you and nothing should be damaging. You have complete control of what’s there. No one else does. So if you allow yourself to be sabotaged in your own home, how do you plan on having success outside the home?

 

There is an obvious correlation here with food. If it’s important to you to be healthy, fit, and well nourished, you should be actively bringing in an abundance of nourishing foods into your home, while blocking access to damaging and harmful foods.

The one true place that you can have complete control of what goes into your body is in your home. Once again, if you sabotage yourself here, you have no chance of controlling it anywhere else in your life. This should be a constant thought when you are in the grocery store figuring out what you are going to be bringing back with you to your home. If it goes in your cart, it will end up not just in your home but in your body, so don’t put it in the cart in the first place.

A tip to make this easier while grocery shopping is to stay in the perimeter of the store as much as possible. The more you stay out of the aisles the better. It’s the aisles that are filled with the chips and cookies and frozen foods while the perimeter is loaded with fresh fruits, vegetables, meat, eggs, and dairy products. Granted not all of these are good for you but they are a lot better than most of the processed garbage found in the aisles.

On occasion, your cravings will get the best of you. There will be special occasions and get-togethers when some junk food will be part of the occasion. The purchase of this type of food, as a practice, should never be included in your regular grocery shopping though. If one night I get a craving for something that just won’t go away, my life is designed so that I have to go out of my way to fill that craving. I have to get up and physically leave my house to go get it. It’s not in my house already because my rules of grocery shopping prohibited me from buying it. This helps me to avoid the pitfalls of sabotaging my diet in my own home. I have to justify it to myself much more if I can’t just go to the freezer and grab the ice cream. 

 

If you practice looking at your home as a place of nourishment, it will have a great effect on your life and your health.

As a side note, I understand that some of you might be saying that this doesn’t work if you have a roommate or a significant other that has their own ideas of what they want to bring into the house. Clearly you can’t stop them from making their home their own as well?

Of course there will always be some truth to this. But if you’re in a situation where you have say a roommate or BF/GF living with you that stops you from having your own space and allowing yourself to have a spot to recharge and just be yourself, you should probably take that as a sign that its time to move on. It’s that important to have your own environment.

If you’re married and things just aren't that simple, I suggest you try to reconnect on the grounds you originally came together on and talk about it. Most people marry because they have commonalities and respect for one another. While people change over time, these things shouldn’t really change. Connect on this level and then explain yourself and what it is you need from your home that you’re not getting. Then find out what they need and make it a joint project to find ways to help each other obtain them. There’s always a way. You just may have to get creative.

Until next time,

Kris

  

  

PS: If you got something useful out of this article, you can help others find it by hitting the Facebook "Like" button below and/or by Stumbling this post on Stumbleupon. If you would like to be notified of future articles, please hit the Facebook "Like" button at the top right side of the page or you can follow me on Twitter @Easywhey. Thanks for reading!

My New Personal Three Month Challenge…

My New Personal Three Month Challenge…

The Post…

This post is all about a bet I made with a friend that keeps accountability for both of us in reaching our fitness and weight goals. I’m including it for those that want to get some ideas on some ways to keep motivation. Plus, I’m going to be giving weekly updates on my results here so I figure you should all know what I’m talking about! Plus, weekly updates here keep me even more accountable as I know that hundreds of people are watching me either succeed or fail. This should be interesting…

In the beginning…

I was talking to a close friend of mine today who came to me for some advice about fat loss. Like many people, she’s struggled with her weight for a little while and has decided that her best option is to set a goal and a date to achieve it by (great idea btw!). Her goal is to lose 20lbs of fat by September 4^th which gives about 3 months. Since this is a lofty goal (but very doable) she came to me for some advice and I’m doing what I can to help her set up a fitness routine and nutrition goals. She’s great with the food she eats already so it should just be some portion sizing and nutrient timing which should be pretty easy.

Anyway, it got me thinking about my own goals and it gave me an idea…

The wheels start spinning…

As of right today I’m 153lbs and standing 5’11”. According to the BMI (body mass index) scale, I’m pretty much right in the center of my healthy weight range which is between 133 to 178lbs. While I’m quite proud of my body, I must say that I’m a little sick of having to shop in the kids section for a belt that doesn’t wrap around me twice.

It’s actually always been on my mind to try to gain some size and as long as I can remember I’ve had a goal of 175lbs while still maintaining my 6-pack. With the way I train and eat though, my metabolism is always in hyper-drive which makes it difficult to gain weight in a healthy manner. Not impossible but very difficult. Since I’m quite healthy, I’ve never prioritized it high enough to go through it although it is something that’s been in my head for years. I’ve tried a few times but never made it past 162lbs before giving up. Six big meals per day is a lot to keep up with…

The Proposal…

So, I made a proposal. Since I have about 20lbs to gain for my major goal and she has 20lbs to lose for hers, we entered into a little contest pitting us pound for pound against each other. It’s going to work like this:

How it works…

Each of us have weighed ourselves and put down a starting weight. As I said, mine is 153. I won’t mention hers though as she is a lady (which means she has claws and might use them). On September 4^th we weigh in with each other again and compare ourselves to where we started.

Up to our goal weight, each pound lost for her or gained for me is worth $10. So if I gain one pound, she would owe me $10 and vice versa. At the end we tally up the weight and determine the victor. Then of course the loser pays up! The amount owed will be based on the difference in weight so for instance, I she loses 16lbs and I only gain 10lbs, I would owe her for $60 for six pounds. Of course if we both hit our goals no one owes anyone and its huge celebration time!

 

This picture has nothing to do with this post. Enjoy! 

 

My personal conflict…

The interesting thing in this for me is going to be playing coach for the opposing team. I have to say that I love using the knowledge and experience I have to help others reach their goals and even more so when they are friends, but this is going to be weird! Every pound I help her lose means that much more work for me and every time I gain some muscle weight, as her coach I’m going to have to jump in there and kick some behind to make sure she doesn’t lose! To make things weirder yet, I don’t like to lose. I’m highly competitive. One second I’m going to be talking trash and the next I’m gonna be pushing her to beat me.

As strange as it’s going to be though, I think these dynamics are going to be a huge advantage to both of our success and motivation in accomplishing our goals. While I definitely want to win, the desired outcome would of course be a huge celebration for both of us at the end for meeting the goals we’ve set for ourselves.

The more the merrier…

I encourage any of you as well to join in. Of course I’m not trying to start a gambling ring here so no money but if you want to set a goal for yourself (doesn’t have to be 20lbs, could be less but I wouldn’t make it much more than that either way) and post it below, I’d love to follow your progress too. Plus if you do and you have questions for me, I’ll do my best to answer them and keep you on track. Remember though, you will be held accountable to weekly updates in the comments section.

You keep me accountable…

So once again, today is June 2 and I weigh in at 153lbs. My promise to you is that I will do everything in my power to reach my goal of 173lbs while maintaining a reasonable 6-pack and will give weekly updates on my progress and any insights this process gives me. My next update will be next Wednesday, June 9^th and to be on track I should be at least 156lbs. Wish me luck!

 

Until next time,

Kris

 

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Will crunches work to get rid of my belly fat?

This question is one for the ages. Yesterday, in my Illusion of Health article, I talked about all the crazy infomercial ab gadgets out there that promise you a firm chiseled stomach in just minutes per day and the reasons why they don’t work. Today I want to tackle an even bigger misconception regarding crunches and something called ‘spot reducing’.

The idea behind spot reducing is simply that one can burn fat from a certain area of their body by working that area or part specifically. Examples of this would be doing crunches to lose belly fat or tricep extensions to slim down arms. While the validity of spot reducing is a hot and oft contested topic, common sense should tell us this doesn’t work. Think about it, how many overweight people do you see that are sporting trim waists for all the crunch-a-thons that go on? My guess is none.

That's crunch-tastic!

 

I’m not alone in my assessment of spot reducing either. Ask virtually any fitness expert or personal trainer out there and they will tell you the same thing. Spot reducing doesn’t work.

This raises the question then whether you should do crunches and sit-ups at all while you’re focusing on fat loss. I would say the answer in most cases is no. Crunches and sit ups just aren’t very effective fat burners because they burn so few calories. They also do very little to rev up your hormones or your metabolism for greater fat loss. Honestly, they have no great benefit at all for weight loss.

So what exercises should you do if your goal is weight loss? Well there are libraries full of books on this very topic. The breadth of possible answers is amazingly vast and different things do work better for different people. However, the one thing I know to never fail if mixed with a proper diet is a good old-fashioned mix of resistance training and cardio. More specifically, compound movement resistance training and cardio. What I mean by compound movements are exercises that work large portions of the body all at once such as a squat or bench press. These movements work large muscles groups and require a huge amount of energy to properly complete.

As an added benefit, compound movements are great at releasing fat burning and muscle building hormones such as testosterone into the body. Don’t worry ladies, you won’t grow a beard or turn into a she hulk but it will help you reach your goals of a trim and toned body. Some other good compound exercises are lunges, dead lifts, rows, pull ups, pushups, military presses, and cleans.

Likewise, if your goal is weight loss, you should avoid wasting much time on isolated exercises such as curls, tricep extensions, front and lateral raises, crunches, shrugs, leg curls and extensions, etc. Anything that works just one muscle or small muscle group should basically be avoided during this phase.

If you set up your workouts around exercises like this, throw in a few days of cardio, and maintain a healthy diet, not only will the fat begin to melt away but the body that begins to shine through will be stronger and more beautiful than ever.

Train hard and expect success,

Kris

 

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The illusion of health and how its holding you back

I’m often asked why I think it is that with all the information and diets out there, people are more obese and out of shape than ever. My answer is always the same. It’s our mindset. Now stay with me, this isn’t some woo-woo article where I tell you to think about your fat melting away to make it happen. This is more than that. It’s about what people want vs what they need.

To illustrate this I’d like to talk about something I call the “illusion of health”. The illusion of health is what most diets and exercise gadgets promise us that we just can’t help but to chase. When you watch some late night commercial about an ab machine that promises to melt the fat away from your midsection and have you displaying a gorgeous set of chiseled abs in just minutes a day, what they are promising you is the illusion of health. There is no way doing some crazy crunches using the Ab Blaster 7000 is going to bring you to good health. It’s not going to reverse the damage of the processed foods you eat, it’s not going to help your body get the nutrition it’s been deprived of, it’s not going to clear your arteries of the garbage that’s caked in them, it’s not going to balance your hormones, it’s not going to heal your damaged organs or lower your risk of cancer, it’s not even going to burn fat! It’s really not going to do anything for you and that’s why you don’t see any of these things promised.

Instead they show you a bunch of fitness models that lead lifestyles that do all of these things and have the body to prove it and tries to convince you that some glorified crunches will give you a body like theirs. These things then sell like hotcakes because people want that body. They care more about the illusion of health (that body) than actual health. The problem is that if a body is not healthy in all regards, it will never look like that.

 

uh huh, yeah, I guess this belt works your biceps too huh? 

 

Diets are exactly the same way. Millions of people have decided that fat and carbs are enemy #1 to a lean body. Some people even avoid life giving fruits and vegetables because they contain carbs. This despite the libraries of studies that say that carbs and fat are essential to the body functioning as it should. Take them away and you cannot be at optimal health. That’s not cared about though because people are more interested in the illusion of health than health.

The illusion of health can be summed up as the characteristics that a healthy body displays: slim, muscular, athletic, shapely, clear skin with healthy glow and elasticity, healthy teeth and gums, etc. All the things the magazines accomplish so well with Photoshop for their covers.

The reason people are failing is simply because they are chasing the illusion instead of the real thing. You can’t eat crap or avoid major nutrients and expect to have a healthy body. It just doesn’t work that way. However, if people would concentrate on health instead of chasing some illusion, I think they would find that the illusion would no longer be an illusion at all. It would instead be the person staring back at them in the mirror day after day.

You may want to ask yourself which one you’re chasing right now. Chances are, if you’re following restrictive diets or doing an 8 minute abs DVD in the morning, you’re probably chasing the illusion. If instead of saying you want to be healthy you’re always concerned with weight loss, you’re probably chasing the illusion.

The illusion is the quick fix and if you chase it, you will end up with nothing. If you decide that becoming healthy is what you really want to do, your body will often take care of the rest.

Until next time,

Kris

 

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The flavor monster-why the foods you think are healthy are actually killing you and how to fix it.

 There are many reasons why people get nutrition so wrong. In the next two installments I want to talk about some common problems that most people never think about. The reason is because many of the things that make a food bad, aren’t made obvious at first glance or through the education we're given about food.

Let me give you a quick example. I went down to FL last week to see some family and friends. I stayed with a friend of mine who, like me is a bachelor so I didn’t expect a lot of cooking to go on. I decided to run by an Applebee’s restaurant where I figured I could find a nice chicken, potato, and vegetable type of meal. How can you screw that up right? Well, leave it to the food scientists to figure out a way.

First, the chicken was like this pressed processed deal that I couldn’t quite figure out but it had so much flavor it couldn’t have been natural. Then their garlic mash potatoes were so creamy that they weren’t even potato consistency. Although they taste good, that was a lot more than garlic. I couldn’t believe when they asked me if I wanted butter and sour cream for these things. Last though was the broccoli. How can you screw up what looked to be steamed broccoli? Most people would eat the broccoli and think that they were doing something good for themselves because its broccoli. Not at Applebee’s though. I quickly noticed that there was something wrong. Sure they were delicious, but broccoli isn’t supposed to be creamy is it? I took the biggest piece and squished it down with the flat end of my fork… Like a Play-Doh factory, this butter jelly came pouring out of every crevice. There was more of this gelatinous mass than there was broccoli when it was all said and done. To their ‘credit’, it was only one big piece that it actually squeezed out of but that was enough for me to see what I was eating and be thoroughly grossed out.

I never looked at the calorie count of the meal but I can assure you that it was much higher than any chicken, potato, and vegetable meal I would have made at home and who the hell knows what kind of nasty chemicals I was putting in my body?

So why is it that I couldn’t just go into a restaurant and order a healthy meal when it was really all I was looking for? I’ll tell you why. It’s about flavor. Let’s face it, we all love flavor. I mean what is the joy of food that is bland or worse? There’s a reason people pick chocolate cake over broccoli even if you know that the broccoli is what you should be eating.

Flavor is the reason we go to one restaurant over another one. It’s what you tell your friends about when you get home. It’s why you drink your tea sweet and your coffee loaded with sweeteners and cream. In the food business, flavor is king.

Unfortunately, the king is killing you and sabotaging your weight loss goals.

See, the magic of that meal was that I was supposed to eat this “healthy” food and be none the wiser. I was supposed to feel good for eating (doing) the right thing and see that at Applebee’s, doing the right thing is actually pleasant. I was supposed to think, man, I’m gonna eat the broccoli here all the time. How do they make this good-for-me broccoli taste so damn good? This is so much better than at my house.

Problem is, most people will do just that because they haven't been taught any better. We've all grown up on the government recommendations which say that grain or rice should be the base of a healthy diet. They fail to tell you that you’re only told this because it’s cheap and abundant. Most people listened to the multibillion dollar ad campaigns designed to make you see the word “light” on a box of processed, genetically modified, chemical filled crap to mean a healthy option. We’ve grown up around the idea that soy is health food instead of the genetically modified Agent Orange…oops (sorry Monsanto)! I meant the patented Round-Up ready estrogen boosting, anti-nutrient filled, chemical covered #2 cash crop in the US that it really is. We’ve grown up thinking calories in natural sugar are far worse than calorie-free chemicals, that essential fat is deadly, and much needed cholesterol is heresy.

If you’re not paying attention, your food is killing you and you’re none-the-wiser. You're eating the broccoli and can’t figure out why your doctor keeps putting you on more medications. Your buying the fat free box of Hot Pockets and wondering why you keep gaining weight and your chest hurts. You’re eating foods that are iron rich and being told you have an iron deficiency and you can’t figure out why!

Well here’s why. Flavor. See, natural food has flavor. Its subtle but its there. Once upon a time, this flavor was enough for us but then someone discovered spices. These were healthy spices that could be used to add zest to our already delicious food. After a while though, competition started to spring up. Huge corporations got in the mix, populations boomed, farming practices got worse and began developing food that had less nutrition and less flavor, soil was depleted of nutrients, farm animals were taken off their natural diets and got sick, nutrient damaging pasteurization processes became necessary to ensure their sickness wasn’t passed to you, they found a way to process everything for better shelf life, and all the while the flavor of these foods was all but destroyed. That’s not all though, your health went right along with it.

The food companies now had a problem on their hands but with a little ingenuity they would turn it all around and create a monster of death and profit in their wake. People everywhere began getting fat and getting diseases that just a few years earlier weren’t very common at all. It wasn’t hard to see that changes needed to be made. What changes though? People don’t want to eat bland health food, plus it’s so expensive. In fact, with the population boom, it would be hard to even feed everyone on real healthy food. They needed a villain and they had it. Fat…

The new campaign would be that fat was bad, calories, are bad, cholesterol is bad. Problem is, fat free food sucks. It has no flavor and the texture is awful. The answer was to increase the sodium and sugar and to hire some lab guys known as “food scientists” to come in and fill the void. These scientists were able to develop artificial flavors and colors and emulsifiers that blew past anything found in nature and they put them in everything from our cereal to our juice. They fed chickens dye to put the yellow back in egg yolks and made new extremely flavorful candy such as Jolly Ranchers. After a while we caught on to the sugar so they started making artificial sweeteners proven from day one to give you cancer but they have no calories and they’re even sweeter than sugar. Now you can drink zero calorie Coca-Cola and because there’s no fat, sugar, or calories feel like it’s a great alternative to water. Forget about the cancer causing chemicals you’re loading your body up with.

Its gotten to the point now though that we are no longer entertained by our normal human diets. Our taste buds have been so assaulted with the artificial flavorings that we find real food to be bland and boring. We see that food as (yuck), health food. This stuff isn’t health food. It’s real food. Organic is synonymous with health food but it’s not. Organic just means no one fucked with it or injected it with anything that shouldn’t have been there or sprayed poison on it. Organic chicken and some organic vegetables without a bunch of sauce all over it is not health food, it’s just food. It’s what you would be eating if the big corporation’s scientists never came along.

The reason why Applebee’s can’t serve healthy broccoli is because you won’t eat it. It’s time to change all of this. If you’re sick of being sick, fat, medicated, and depressed then its time for you to make a few changes. First change you need to make is to begin eliminating artificial flavorings from your diet.

Some simple ways to do this are changing your artificial sweeteners to real sugar. If you go to Starbucks, stop using Splenda (sugar with chlorine injected into it) and start using Sugar in the Raw. The gradually take that down until you aren’t using sugar either. Trust me, once you get used to it, you prefer it that way.

Stop drinking soda. If you can’t stand water, try vitamin water or sports drinks. I’m not saying that these are healthy, just that it will notch you down on the flavor side until you can drink water again.

If you like milk chocolate, try to move to 70% dark chocolate. Its much healthier and has far less sugar.

If you salt your food at the table, stop it. If you’re cooking your own food and need more flavor, forget about salt. Go to your local grocery store and pick up some fresh herbs. Play with a few of them and then just add a pinch of salt. Its amazing how it will bring out the flavors in the food if done right.

As much as possible, stop eating fast food and boxed food. Do your grocery shopping at the perimeter of the store and go into the isles as little as possible. You’ll find that you’re shopping cart looks a lot better when you get to the end of the store.

Buy organic whenever possible. Organic food is often filled with minerals in balances that we need for our health. These mineral balances also effect the flavor of the food in some ways though.

There you have it. A lot of rant and some tips to help you get through the deadly food jungle that haunts our modern world. Once you break out of the land of artificial flavors, something interesting happens. You actually begin to notice new pleasant flavors in your food. Your pallet becomes more sophisticated and biting into the food you once couldn’t get enough of but you knew was killing you, will be a terrible experience that will not have you coming back for more.

Train hard,

Kris

My New favorite Smoothie Recipe-PB&J

So a few months ago my roommate pulled out my old blender and started playing around with some smoothie ideas. I gotta say too that he's quite good with some of the recipes. For instance, he's been playing around a lot with green and black tea bases for his smoothies that give them a really interesting taste. If you've never tried anything like that before I definitely suggest giving it a shot. I'd take out the yogurt though.

A couple days ago I was at the farmers market and the had blackberries very cheap so I got a few containers. Normally I'm not a big fan of blackberries but they were like $1.50 per 6 ounce container and I knew I could find something to do with them.

The first container was used over a couple bowls of my famous cereal concoctions. For those who haven't seen my cereal recipes, it usually has two types of cereal, kefir as opposed to milk, and about 5 other ingredients like nuts, seeds, and random fruit. Its always a production. Lately I've been on an amaranth flake and granola base, almonds, pumpkin seed, flax seed, sliced apples, and blueberries kick. Oh and don't forget the organic plain kefir or yogurt instead of milk. It makes all the difference.

OK back to my story. So its been about 4 days now since I bought these blackberries and I have the second pack sitting in their completely untouched. I knew they had to be used quickly but I wasn't sure how. It seemed the obvious answer would be the blender. Problem was that I had almost no other fruit other than bananas and apples and I'm not a huge fan of apple peel in my smoothies, Yes I know I could peel it but I hate throwing away nutrients.

Anyway, I thought about it last night and wasn't sure about a banana blackberry smoothie but when I woke up this morning, it seemed like a great idea for some reason. Seemed to me that the banana would serve to mellow out the tart blackberries so I tried it. At first I put in the banana and then I dumped in the whole package of blackberries. Next for a liquid base I put in some kefir (if you don't know, kefir is like a liquid yogurt beverage which is extremely healthy and is a better pro-biotic source than yogurt. You can find it in specialty shops and health food stores).

Now if you've every used blackberries in a smoothie you know the amazing deep purple that comes from it. An entire package of blackberries was fun to watch. Once that was done I tried it and it was great but since it was breakfast, I knew I needed some fat and protein. Next I added 3 tbl sp natural peanut butter, 1 tbl sp of olive oil, and one scoop of whey protein.  

It was thick, but it taste kind of ;ie a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in a glass! I gotta say I really loved it. Tastes great, high calories, high protein, and very dense in vitamins and minerals.

 
Recipe

1 med banana

6 oz fresh blackberries

3 tbl sp natural peanut butter

1 tbl sp olive oil (optional with pb)

3 oz yogurt of kefir (I like kefir)

1 scoop (28g) whey protein.

Appx 725 calories, 40g healthy fat, 60 g carbs (15g of the fiber), 45g protein, super high vitamin and mineral content.

If you're trying to keep a lower calorie diet of you're concerned about the fat, you could by all means drop the olive oil and lower the amount of peanut butter to 2tbl sp. Personally I love peanut butter so I add more but its up to you. Feel free to play with the recipe anyway you'd like. If you have a better one or just a favorite of your own, please post it in the comments below. Oh and play with the tea thing. It really has some interesting potential.

For those of you that are into the smoothie game and looking for some new killer recipes, Craig Ballantyne (writes for fitness mags and authored the Turbulence Training series) just brought out a smoothie recipe book of his favorite ULTRA-HEALTHY mixes and I gotta tell you, of the five I've tried so far, they are freakin delicious. Before I say anymore, its not free. Its like $20 but the recipes are worth it.

I know you can get them for free online all over the place but honestly, I've seen people say that Dunkin' Donuts Coolatte or whatever it's called is healthy based on the nutrition facts on the website only to go look at it myself and be horrified by its over 100g of sugar and other ridiculousness. Therefore, I really don't trust what random internet people say is healthy. On the other hand, I know Craig actually knows what healthy is so I don't have to take ten minutes to verify each recipe.

Anyway, I picked it up for the recipes, but the rest of the book is pretty awesome also. Actually I was pretty surprised because here's this fitness and health guru that writes for the magazines that is handing you his exact weekly grocery list and telling you EXACTLY what he eats each day and why.

I mean honestly, seeing exactly what one of the top fitness guys on the planet does for himself each day to keep his year around six pack is really the Holy Grail of nutrition information. So I was pretty shocked to see it just be thrown in with a $20 ebook. There's some other stuff as well like information on staying naturally detoxed without crazy 11 day liquid diets, how to schedule in pizza and ice cream days so they don't sabotage you, how you can actually eat enough carbs to keep you more than satisfied and still actually keep your weight loss on track and some other stuff.

Anyway, I highly recommend you grab a copy. The information in there is well worth the $20 even if you're not trying to lose weight and the smoothie recipes are awesome. Oh and let me know if you make my PB&J smoothie or if you perfect it. I only did it this once so its certainly not perfect yet but it was good and I think I'm on to something.

 

Until next time,

Kris

 

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The energy balance-Muscle Vs. Fat

In our quest to lose or gain weight there are a lot of different things we hear that on the surface seem to make sense. These things seem to draw a line in the sand for us in what should work and what doesn't. The one of these I'd like to discuss today is the ~3500 calorie per pound myth.

If you haven't heard it it goes like this, roughly 3500 calories is the equivalent of one pound of body weight. Therefore if you want to lose one pound per week you's need to cut your diet by 500 calories per day or burn an additional 500 calories per day through exercise.

This makes sense right? Of course it does. But like all on paper diet science, it basically never works. The question is why not?

FIrst lets go into a few of the obvious reasons. The first is that we don't actually digest all of our food. This means there is unused energy that comes out in our feces. That means if you eat 500 calories less, you weren't absorbing all of those 500 calories anyway so its not really a full 500 calories deficit.

Next, digestion takes energy. Depending on the type of nutrient it can be more or less but its on average about 10% of our energy intake is used trying to digest the food. So once again, eliminating 500 calories would only really be like eliminating 450.

Next, different macro-nutrients (protein, fat, carbs, fiber, alcohol) absorb at different rates so depending on what you're eating, you may absorb more or less nutrients.

Water weight is another big one. The average body can shift weight easily by 10-15 pounds of just water weight and many times, changes in our diets will actually trigger water retention or gain. So even though we may have lost tissue, it will never show on the scale because its replaced by water. This is why some people can workout for weeks and lose no weight, then all at once they seem to lose 8 pounds. Its not magic, its water.

Changes In Output

Ok so many of you are now asking what happens if you were to burn an additional 500 calories instead of just changing the intake. Well, there's more to the energy equation than just intake and output. There are actually four different types of output.

Resting or basal output

Exercise output (thermic effect of action/TEA)

Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis/NEAT

Food output (the calories we burn to eat and digest/thermic effect of food/TEF)

The problem with simply increasing output in one area is that it can effect the output of another. For instance, if you were to go for a run to burn your 500 calories, you may find that you don't move as much as you would have when you get home because you're tired. Therefore you burn less NEAT calories which offset the 500 you burned.

There are many other things as well but my point is that no matter what you do, you'll never be able to get it down perfectly in the equation so you can't expect perfect results.

Fat Vs. Muscle

I would say the biggest flaw however is that its just wrong. Its not bodyweight that equals roughly 3500 calories' it's fat. Muscle and fat are not the same. Fat may be 3500 calories but muscle is only about 600 calories per pound. That means, that same 3500 calories could burn one pound of fat or 5.83 pounds of muscle! Of course no one is going to lose just muscle or just fat but following this logic, if you're losing more than 1 pound of weight per week with a 3500 calorie deficit, you are losing your muscle! The sad thing is that because of water weight issues, you may not even know it until its too late.

The moral of this story is that when you're dealing with the body, nothing is concrete. We are not static beings and not even the equations of life seem to stay the same for us.

 

Until next time,

Kris

PS: If you want more information on this topic, there is a great article called The Energy Balance Equation

 

 

 

  

  

 

 

 

is it possible to lose 20-30 lbs in 2 months?

is it possible to lose 20-30 lbs in 2 months?

I'm 18 years old and weighing 173lbs. I was wondering if is it possible to lose 20-30lbs in 2 months. Can u give me some workout advice on how to lose weight and belly fat.

 

Before I give my answer I just wanted to say a few things...

 

This is a question I get quite often. Change his numbers around a little and you pretty much have the worlds problem. This question actually came from Yahoo! Answers which I visit occasionally to try to help people sort out all the crap. I understand how daunting the situation of weight loss can be and its all due basically to the myriad of crap out there people are trying to tell you so you'll buy their product. Honestly folks, whether you are trying to lose fat, gain muscle, pack on the pounds, play football, learn to fly, or hibernate for the winter, the advice I give below is pretty universal. It is simply based on how the body works and what it needs. After that, the only difference in using this to pack on the muscle or lose a bunch of weight is your calorie intake. That's it. Comment below if you have any questions. Thanks.

Your Answer:

Its possible but its past what is considered healthy. This means you'll probably lose some muscle as well. To minimize that make sure you're strength training and taking in high protein. There aren't going to be any specific exercises that are proven to burn belly fat. If you have skinny-fat guy syndrome (skinny arms and legs with a gut) you're probably insulin resistant. There are things like lactic acid training with weights that can help with insulin resistance problems but its not completely proven. I don't want to go into what it entails here because in the space allotted I could really only give you enough information to get you hurt.

Bottom line though. Here's your game plan.

Eat as close to 6 meals per day as possible. try to keep it around 300 calories per meal. Try to do this with regular cadence. Your first meal should be within 20 minutes of waking up. You may have to cut this calorie intake if you aren't getting results but I wouldn't cut it much.

Eat a lot of RAW vegetables. This should be your main source of carbs.

Stay away from simple carbs outside of the occasional sugar in fruit.Fruit won't make you fat but for now, vegetables are just better options. This means don't eat most bread, pasta, white rice, etc.

Eat a source of protein with each meal. Might be tuna, chicken, nuts, cottage cheese, a glass of milk, etc.

No soda (including diet), no fruit juice, sports drinks, drink lots of water.

 

No fried food

Try not to eat anything packaged. More than one ingredient is bad. More than five is highly destructive to your goals. Can't pronounce it, it'll kill you.

Try to keep your diet organic (beef should be grass fed, chickens should be real free range.) A quick tip. You see out there a lot of chicken and eggs advertised as both free range and 100% vegetarian. When you see this, it means the "free range" part is BS. Chickens aren't vegetarians they have a wide ranging diet that consists of a lot more than the corn meal garbage they are fed.

 

Do a mix of weight training and cardio 4 days per week. You can throw in extra cardio days but I wouldn't increase the weight lifting days. On days you're doing both, do your cardio AFTER your resistance training.

Any simple sugars you eat, in other words, if you're dying for some pasta or something sweet, try to consume this around your workout time.

No carbs other than raw vegetables within four hours of sleeping.

If you aren't eating a lot of fish, take a fish oil supplement.

No alcohol

If you can follow this and adjust your calorie intake to your progress, You'll lose the weight. However, I know its a lot so take it all in and fit in what you can. Oh yeah, if you ever want to bulk up and get muscular, same formula but with more calories and more emphasis on protein intake.

Is it possible to spot reduce your body fat?

Lately there seems to be a lot of talk about whether or not its possible to spot reduce body fat. Spot reduction would be like doing crunches in an effort to lose your gut. The concensus has long been that its not possible to spot reduce but tjis hasn't stopped the As Seen On TV Scam team and the other magic potion pedalers from trying their best to get you to ignore that fact.

To keep it simple, up until now the only thought on the matter has been that the only way to lose weight body fat is an overall caloric deficit and this would remove fat from the entire body and not just the part you want it to be removed from. Also, because exercises like crunches don't burn many calories, you can do them all day and you will probably never end up losing any weight.

To me, and to many other people for years this has made perfect sense. However there are a few arguments coming out now that say that we may have been wrong. Hey, it wouldn't be the first time the health and scientific communities were wrong now would it?

There are now two arguments for spot reduction that seem to really be riling people up and they both seem quite viable. The first is spot reduction through hormone manipulation. Basically, this says that if you have a "problem area" it has to do with your hormone production being off balance. We know some of this is true. For instance, people with high insulin resistance tend to have more belly fat. If a guy has "man boobs", it can be due to his high amount of the female hormone; estrogen.

Since there are diets and routines out there that can make huge differences in your hormone makeup, this would give us the ability to spot reduce. If you want to see more about this, check out John Romaniello's new product, Final Phase Fat Loss. I picked this up at the launch and started reading through it for after I get off my current program. I must say its fascinating stuff and really seems to have merit.

So the first type of spot reduction is hormonal and seems to make a great deal of sense to me. However, it still doesn't allow you to just go to work doing crunches to lose belly fat so its probably more than most people really want to deal with no matter how effective.

 

My secret is 200 crunches per day

 

The second type here is right up the lazy persons alley though. Through a recent study by scientists in Copenhagen which was recently talked about  by renowned fitness author, Jeff Anderson, it seems that when exercising a specific body part with the right combination of resistance and aerobic activity, the muscles will release natural heat and spur hormones that will cause it to reach out to the nearest energy source (fat store) for break it down for energy.

Now this is in fact a heavy finding. Of course I only know of one study now that's found this and I don't really know the details of the study but the finding is still pretty huge none-the-less.

Now I like to be open minded so I won't burn Jeff at the stake for repeating a very interesting study llike some of his readers seem to have done. However, I will have to think about this with some good old fashioned common sense.

First, I have to look at the results around me and say, I have never seen someone go into the gym fat, do a million crunches and come out with a fat arms and legs but a trim waist. I have seen a lot of overweight people do months of crunch-a-thons though. Next, I've seen people that are push up machines that have manboobs. This also doesn't seem to jive with the study.

See, here's the thing. This theory could, and probably is, 100% true. The problem is that its not the only factor. OK, so maybe crunches will cause your body to burn more belly fat than say thigh fat but what does that matter if 100 crunches only burns 50 calories total? So 30 of those calories are burned from your stomach? Big deal, that's less than 1% of a pound of fat. Remember, one pound of fat is about 3500 calories and total body calesthenics only burns about 550 calories for an entire hour.

The second thing I see as a problem is that any exercise that involves both resistance and aerobic work is not for the faint of heart. Even the best of us have a very limited amount of time we can do these movements before we're in the bathroom sorting through our pre workout meal. What this means is, unless its a small amount of work to get you there (which I doubt or we would have discovered this effect long ago), most people will probably never be able to do enough work in a specific area to see any real results. 

Here's a few other questions to keep in mind...

How long into the workout does this take effect?

Does it maintain its effects after the movement is finished and if so for how long?

How effective is it actually?

Do we have to first deplete out glycogen stores for it to be effective? 

Please, check out Jeff Anderson's article here and leave your comments to tell me what you think. Do you think this is worth further exploring? Does the prospect of spot reduction excite you? Do you think its all a hoax? WIll this change anything in the industry? Should Jeff be burned at the stake (sorry Jeff)?

Until next time,

Kris 

But I don't want to be too bulky... and other weight training myths...

Hello Lads and Ladies,

Today I wanted to address the idea that if you lift weights you will become bulky and muscular because I personally think that its one of the biggest misconceptions out there and it is one that seems to stifle the progress of far too many people.

Most of us have read about the weight loss and health benefits of lifting weights. Different camps have their different opinions but I think we can agree that, while maybe not in extremes, the act of weight lifting is a generally healthy thing to do. A lot of people though that hear this and know this to be true, seem to feel as though they can't participate in this activity because it would be counter-productive to their ideal body image.

We've all seen the pictures of the massive body builders and whether its "for you" or it isn't, I think we can agree that its really not everyones taste to blow up like these guys. Hey, I understand. I want to be big and strong and have big bulging muscles but I definitely don't want to be sharing the Mr. Olympia stage. I'd still like to look somewhat natural and approachable. Fitting into normal clothing would also be kind of nice.

That's kind of what brings me to todays topic though. Today when I was at the gym, I was flattered by the approach of two guys that looked like they were really just getting started in the gym. They were young and pretty tall and really very skinny. Not much muscle tone going. I had noticed one of them earlier because of some form issues he was having with his curling. I really wanted to go help the kid out but I make a strict rule during my workouts to not converse with anyone unnecessarily. It KILLS the intensity of the workout.

Anyway, I had just finished up my workout and was filling up my water bottle for the walk home and one of the guys walked up behind me. My headphones were on and the music was pretty loud so I didn't hear him at first but I could tell there was someone behind me so I turned around and removed my headphones in anticipation of his question. I was pretty flattered when his question turned out to be asking how he could get arms like mine. Problem was that the question didn't end there. The actual questions was, "How can I get arms like yours by the end of next week?" Turns out the kid had a modeling gig the next week with a NYC high fashion clothing line and he had really just made the cut. Ideally they wanted him to stay the same weight but get really toned.

I understand his desperate want but the truth is that there wasn't really any helping him. I gave him some water control tips and a couple exercises anddiet tips. It was hard to give him more than that in a five minute window. I thought about having him meet me in the gym the next day but the truth is I could tell that as much as he "wanted it", all he wanted from me was to be able to show him a really easy thing he could do that would require no real work but allow him to have what its taken me years to build, in about two weeks. If I could have said, "Hey, just do some dumbbell curls for five minutes a day and take this Hydroxycut whenever you feel like it and you'll be golden", he would have loved me. I'm starting to understand why there are so many ridiculous diets out there that people just keep buying into. 

What I found funny though, wasn't really any of this. What I found really funny was that anything I would recommend that involved weights, we would shun off and say, "oh but I can't get big muscles". This is such a common thing. I hear this most with girls of course which is actually extra humorous.

Why is it so funny? How many guys do you see in the gym that are lifting heavy weights day in and day out trying to put on that ever elusive muscle mass? They're reading their magazines, scouring the message boards, taking 25 different types of supplements, and really just about killing themselves and if you look really close, you'll notice that they almost never get any bigger. SOme of these are younger guys that are filled with testosterone. These guys will change some but for all the grunting and groaning and effort, they certainly don't change very much.

So why is it then that when a girlfriend of mine comes up and says, "Hey, I'm looking to tone up and lose some weight, what should I do?" and I suggest a light weight program that they all do the same thing... They freak out as if they're going to turn into Arnold in they touch a dumbbell. There are so many misconceptions out there that its a little scary. I understand where they come from but we really need to do more to get the important messages across.

Let's try this...

  ********************Urgent bulletin********************

If I can spend five days a week in the gym lifting weights that are multiples of myself for while strategically eating to gain as much muscle as possible and I struggle to gain muscle, I promise you that doing a light weight routine is not going to turn you into Hercules. If I happen to be wrong and you wake up and look like Hercules, I promise,losing those results is much easier and quicker than gaining them.

    **********This has been a special announcement**********

No matter what routine you're on, the only real determination in whether you gain muscle or just tone is your diet. If you're not interested in getting bigger, that should e no excuse for you not to be lifting weights. And honestly, in many cases, to be lifting very heavy weights. You just have to make sure you're eating no more than your maintenance calories each day. If you are eating that amount or less, your body won't have anything to use to build those muscles. Can't build a house with no materials. You will get stronger though and more toned though. You will burn fat, boost your metabolism and find many other incredible health benefits. 

Likewise, if you want to build muscle, almost any program will do it also as long as you are eating and resting properly. I mean it, even a garbage program will do SOMETHING for you if you're eating and resting sufficiently. Of course, a great program mixed with proper diet and rest will take things to an entirely new level for you.

Just one note before I end this post that I think is very important. Obviously I truly believe in the benefits of weight training but I don't recommend lifting even light weights if you don't know what you are doing. If you're completely new to this, or if you haven't done it in a while, I recommend getting with a friend that knows what they are doing to be with you for several workouts, or get a trainer. I would go no less than ten workouts with the trainer to really get a feel for it. The more the better.

I talk about some of the programs I use here a lot that are great replacements for trainers but honestly, there is no book or program or even video that can teach you proper technique if you're a complete beginner. You need someone there that can be there to watch and correct you and show you how it is supposed to feel so you train your body. I can't tell you how many times in the gym I'm just cringing waiting for someone to get seriously injured. Watching someone that knows what they are doing can make it seem easy but many of these moves are not what they seem. They aren't very natural for most of our bodies that have spent years sunken into couches and desk chairs and they will find shortcuts for any movement. Unfortunately though, these shortcuts aren't meant to be repeated over and over again and if you do, you will eventually get injured.

Until next time,

Kris

 

Muscle Building and Fat Loss, Beating Your Body At its Own Genetic Game! (pt 2)

So yesterday we talked about the differences between what your body wants and what you want, and why these differences can cause massive amounts of frustration when trying to get results with a diet and exercise routine. If you missed it, please look over it here.

What I want to do today is dive a little deeper into the fascinating processes of the body, and in part 3 we will get into some actual real life examples of how you can use them for your goals of building huge muscles while burning truckloads of fat.

If you want to find a program that takes all this into account and just gives it to you in a manner in which all you have to do is execute, please check out Vince Delmonte’s No Nonsense Muscle Building; or for those looking to cut weight and get that coveted 6 pack, check out Your Six Pack Quest here. There are others out there but these are the best ones I know of that I have personally used to see fast results.

So let’s start out by taking a concept I brought up yesterday: your body’s survival instinct. Because your body really has only one purpose--to survive so it can pass on its genes--and because ANY excess muscle past the necessities of survival are really just seen by your body as a drain on its precious energy supplies, it will decimate that excess muscle as soon as it gets a chance. On the opposite side of the equation, because your fat is your body's built up supply of that precious energy, trying to get rid of it will be met with challenges. Your body will want to hold onto every drop that it can. This is built directly into the blueprint for your body, your DNA. What I’m telling you is that fighting it is futile. You will not win.

“But Kris, lots of people have the body that I want. Lots of people have lost a ton of fat and built lots of muscle. It can’t be futile. You’re not saying that all those people are just blessed with incredible genetics are you?” And the answer to this is of course no. It's very true that it is highly possible to accomplish these goals for you or for anyone else. Not everyone, at least with today’s technology, can be Mr. Olympia but almost everyone has the ability to look pretty damn good, and EVERYONE has the ability to make positive changes to what you already have. So why then would I say it's futile?

Because it is. You can’t fight your body. You can’t fight its design. You can, however, work with it. In your DNA, there are rules to be followed. These have evolved for millions of years into what they are today, and it’s what makes our bodies and brains so amazing. These rules are what allow us to change and adapt and what has allowed both our survival and even dominance in the animal kingdom. Yes, it's true that some very big rules are things like "fat (energy stores)= good" while "muscle (energy wasters)=bad," but that’s not the entire equation.

If you were to highly simplify it, the true equations look more like this :

Excess muscle=bad (unless)    X    .

Excess fat=good

You’ll notice that there was no (unless) with the fat rule. Your body didn’t evolve having to deal with excess fat, so there is no real rule for it in your DNA--even though we are now seeing that it can kill you. This is why you can be 300 pounds and your body will go into starvation mode. The important rule then when dealing with fat is this…

If fuel is not provided, I will take from excess muscle over fat stores (unless)    X   .

I know it’s not much of an equation, but work with me here.

So what is X? X is the phrase “I need it for survival."  And even more so it’s “if I need it for survival in a more significant way than I need the fat (energy stores)."  There are other complexities such as what whether it needs just energy or whether it needs protein to build new cells but that is past the scope of this article.

The problem is that in today’s modern world you really don’t need all that extra muscle for survival, so why would it keep it over fat stores?  This is where the body's design can trump our conscious wants.

Your body has no concept of what the modern world is. It doesn’t know it's the 21st century and that you’re going to the gym to impress a girl any more than it knew that you might be running from a lion a few thousand years ago. All it knows is that when it is exposed to certain stimuli, it should react in a given way. That reaction is what has given it the evolutionary advantage for you and I to be alive today. Most people think of these actions in very large steps, such as "I will now build a bigger bicep."  The truth however, is that your body is not really trying to build a bigger bicep. That’s really just an after-effect of the processes it's always done, the processes which have allowed humans to be awarded survival.

Instead of "building a bigger bicep," your body will release a chemical or hormone. This hormone will stimulate something else, which will then have another effect, and eventually, you will have muscle. Even if you don’t believe in evolution, you should be able to agree that the body is not actually “thinking” about what it’s going through; it is reacting. It’s these reactions we need to be able to control if we want success. Of course, you can’t just tell your body what reaction to have next. What you can do is set the stage, give it the right tools, and watch it work its “magic.” Give it a hammer when it needs a screw driver though, and depending where you are in the process it will either try to use the hammer and actually cause damage, or its more common response is to just abort the mission leaving you with little to no results.

In part three, I will go more into how you can know what the right tools are for the job you want your body to do, and give you some real life examples of how to use them.

 

Yours in success,

Kris

Muscle building and fat loss, beating your body at its own gentic game! (pt.1)

 This post is being broken down into 3 parts as the topic is long and deserves some space. I hope you find this stuff as fascinating as I do!

It’s only been in the relatively recent past that we homo-sapiens have begun actively trying to lose weight and build more muscle.  To accommodate that, there have been many, many different programs and concepts set forth from both amateurs and professionals alike.  It can be frustrating to realize that while there are so many books, DVDs, and programs out there, people are still having a hard time losing that fat and building that muscle.  The truth is, it’s best to think of your body as an adapting machine that has evolved to hold onto its most basic need:  survival.  Most of us are stuck on the idea that if we just go to a gym and randomly lift some really heavy weights, we’ll get great results; unfortunately, it doesn’t really work that way, and here’s why.

Basically, your body doesn’t really want to put on muscle. One of the things we often forget is that our bodies aren’t designed to do what we now find appealing in our modern lives. For instance, while our modern society praises lots of muscle and a lean build, evolutionarily our bodies fight against this. The body is equipped to adapt to what we need it to do, which for our purposes means building muscle when it needs to have it. When you go to the gym, you are essentially fooling your body into “believing” that you need this muscle for survival. Your body doesn’t realize that you aren’t out there in a fight for your life against a bear for those 45 minutes every other day. It just knows that you’re counting on it to deliver strength, so it accommodates that need the best it can. It’s important to remember though that your body is only doing this for survival purposes, and just like it is designed to adapt to situations for survival, it has certain preferences in its blueprint to help meet those adaptations.

One major preference is to not hold on to muscle—because excess muscle is expensive to our bodies’ survival. We know that muscle burns more calories than fat, and to us in our modern lives, that’s a good thing:  we’re deliberately building that muscle to counteract our sedentary lives and the processed foods in our diet. Your body, however, isn’t designed for your modern life; it’s designed for survival in the wild. It wants to store as much excess energy as possible, and it does so by storing fat.  Therefore anything that burns excess energy (calories), such as too much muscle, simply by being there is a bad thing. When your body needs energy that is not immediately supplied by food, it can take it from two primary places: from fat or muscles. If it feels it needs the muscle for survival it will keep them intact, but if that muscle is causing too big a drain on its resources without providing enough benefit, it will cannibalize the muscle even before it goes for your fat stores.

If most people could have their way, they would have their body easily build and keep as much muscle as they wanted, and have it destroy all fat stored and ingested into your body like a school of hungry piranhas on  the attack. Most of us don’t fully understand why we can work out and eat healthily and still not be an Adonis. So try to think about it from your body’s perspective:  what you’re essentially asking for is your body to fill itself with excessive, virtually worthless-to-your-survival muscle that does nothing but drains the precious energy your body has tried so hard to acquire. It would be like going to the bank and getting a loan, then burning not only the money they gave you but also your life savings. You’d have to work day and night to put in enough money to keep from bankrupting (or dying in your body’s case) and you’d have nothing to show for it—remember, your body doesn’t care that you look good at the beach!  To your body, fat (energy) is a good thing and excess muscle (a drain on your energy) is a bad thing. If you are trying to build muscle and burn fat, you are fighting against nature, and nature is going to do everything in its power to stop you or at least slow you down. It’s important to know this going into any fitness program so that you have a full understanding of the demands you are putting on your own body.

Now of course I’m generalizing to some extent, and of course too much fat is more detrimental to your health than too much muscle. It would seem to reason that your body would shut off excess fat gain just as it tries to ward off excess muscle gain, but keep in mind where it’s coming from. If you are running around in the wild, fighting animals and procuring your own food, you aren’t going to get huge and fat.  Your body therefore has no reason to have that emergency shut-off switch; your very lifestyle is supposed to be the shut-off switch. What with the primal lifestyle our bodies are still evolutionarily used to (finding and preparing your own food, fighting for territory rights, building your own shelter), the human body’s problem is not supposed to be storing too much energy, it’s supposed to be not having enough—and all that muscle you’re putting on now is simply a drain on its precious energy.

The bottom line is that when you’re trying to build muscle and burn fat, you are fighting against nature, against the amazing system that is your body and brain. Your body has developed systems so complex that we may never completely understand them in order to accomplish what it wants. Literally, weight-lifting and body-building is a science experiment as we continue to figure out the human body.  

 

Continued in part 2 on Saturday

The runner’s quest.

Calling myself a runner is a very new concept, and still a bit of a foreign one.  Getting to even this point has been a long journey, and the path to my goal is still stretching for miles ahead of me—13.1 miles, to be exact.

I’ve never been in great shape.  My family has never really been one for great nutrition, and food was always around when I was growing up—in the form of “after-school snacks,” “goodnight snacks,” and well-stocked cabinets.  I don’t mean to slight my family at all, but responsible eating habits were never really ingrained; I managed to be an average-weight kid by taking tap classes and being relatively active.  I hated organized sports in general though, and would much rather skip gym class and read a book. 

In high school I had finagled my schedule to substitute my gym requirement with a dance class, but everything changed my freshman year when my right knee went out.  My knee would dislocate itself (seemingly on a whim; it could happen any time) and swell to the size of a balloon, and after this happened several times my doctor ordered surgery to prevent it from happening again.  The surgery was followed by several months of physical therapy, along with the knowledge that despite the operation, pressure on my knee or hard activity could still injure it.  For years I was afraid of playing sports or games that could possibly injure my knee, and I got used to babying it. 

Living on my own while in college truly tipped the scales on my weight gain:  my eating habits worsened and I was hardly exercising at all.  I could see myself gaining weight, but somehow thought myself powerless to do anything about it.  I would go to the school gym and exercise for a few days, then get tired and turn to the same patterns of inactivity and poor eating.  One of my friends at the time had been a runner all through high school, and I mentioned how much I admired her for it and how interesting running as a sport seemed.  She was excited for me and lent me a book on running, but I could never seem to get around to reading it. 

I was officially overweight my senior year, when I kept having pains and was sometimes ill to the point of vomiting, but these occasions were several months apart and I always chalked them up to stress, not my lifestyle.  One day though I was in excruciating pain and had to go to the hospital, only to learn that the pain I had been ignoring for months had turned into gallstones and severe pancreatitis.  According to the doctor, if I had ignored the pain for another day or two I would have died from it.  I had my gallbladder removed and was in the hospital for a week, getting out on what would have been my graduation day from college.  I was recovering for a few months, unable to eat fibrous foods and gaining a few more pounds, as losing a gallbladder can make you retain more fat.

You’d think something like this would be a wake-up call, that I would turn my life around and vow to be healthier.  For some reason though, that just didn’t do it.  I continued to eat unhealthily and didn’t truly see my weight as something that was in my power to change.  It wasn’t until a year later, at the age of 24, that a conversation with my best friend (who was losing weight herself and was an inspiration) showed me that my weight and eating habits were things only I was accountable for, and therefore I could change them.  I took things slowly, changing one meal at a time and getting up early to do exercise DVDs, and over the course of a year and a half lost 50 pounds.  I was thrilled that I had tangible results from my efforts, was receiving compliments, and went down 6 pants sizes.  In the middle of all this I decided to take advantage of an opportunity:  I moved in with the same friend who had inspired me to lose the weight when she had a roommate opening in her NYC apartment.  I went from south FL to NYC, and loved the city from the moment I got there.  One thing I learned though is that NYC always has food to offer, and for a while my eating habits went back downhill.  My weight loss hit a plateau (especially after I started dating someone who encouraged me to eat more), and things ground to a halt for a while.  I would always talk about losing more weight, but instead rested on the laurels of losing 50 pounds and not gaining it back.  It seemed I’d reached a point where to continue losing weight, I’d truly have to work hard at it every day, and I just wasn’t doing that yet.

Which brings us to October 2009.  I’d decided to give running a try again; it always stood out to me as a fascinating sport because it is purely self-driven, relying only on yourself to get you across that finish line.  I was flipping through a running magazine and saw an ad for the Disney World Princess Half-Marathon, and was transfixed by it.  Growing up in Florida I’d been to Disney countless times, and it’s full of happy memories for me and my family.  Wouldn’t it be amazing to work my way up to a half marathon, 13.1 whole miles, and celebrate that goal at Disney?  Before I’d even really thought it through, I registered for the race and was officially going to be there on March 7, 2010.

And now, I’m fully engaged in my fitness quest.  I’m halfway through my training program (more on that later), and have started running more than I ever thought I could.  I haven’t lost very much weight yet, but I have found confidence in myself I didn’t know existed—I also plan on incorporating strength training to reach the weight loss goals (more on that later too).  I’ll be sharing with you the ups and downs of running with you; maybe there are other aspiring runners out there who will want to go through it with me.  It’s an exciting, scary journey—my quest to become a lifelong runner!