By Tom Venuto, NSCA-CPT, CSCS
www.BurnTheFat.com
I receive a lot of e-mail from people with loose skin or from overweight people who are concerned about having loose skin after they lose the weight. In fact, this is one of the biggest concerns and most frequently asked questions I receive from men and women who have a lot of weight to lose.
Just recently, I received this email from a reader of my syndicated "Ask Tom" fat loss column:
"Tom, I began a fat loss program using your Burn The Fat system and it worked so well I got down to 15 1/2 stones (from 19). However, this has caused me a problem: Excess abdominal skin. I didn't crash lose this weight, it came off at the rate of about 2 lbs. per week just like you recommended. Now I'm unsure of whether to carry on, as my abdomen has quite a lot of excess skin - I feel like I've turned into a bloody Shar-Pei! Does everyone go through this? Will the skin tighten up? I was overweight for more than 12 years. Am I going to end up needing surgical skin removal? Can you offer me any advice? I'm a medical student in the UK and my colleagues seem determined to proffer surgery as the only option."
There are 14 things you should know about loose skin after very large weight losses:
1. Skin is incredibly elastic. Your skin can stretch and expand or tighten and retract to a great degree. Look at what women go through during pregnancy. Some women do experience stretch marks after pregnancy, but obviously skin is remarkably elastic.
2. Elasticity of skin depends on both genetics and environment/lifestyle. Wrinkling and loss of elasticity is partly the consequence of aging (genetic factors) and also a result of environmental factors such as oxidative stress, excessive sun exposure, and nutritional deficiency. The environmental parts you can fix, the genetics and age part, you cannot. Advice: Get moving and change the things you have control over... Be realistic and don't worry about those things you don't have control over.
3. How much your skin returns to its former tautness depends partly on age. The older you get, the more an extremely large weight loss can leave loose skin that will not return to normal.
4. How long you carry extra weight may influence how much the skin will become taut after the weight loss: For example, compare a 9 month pregnancy with 9 years carrying 100 excess pounds.
5. How much weight was carried has a lot to do with how much the skin will resume a tight appearance. Your skin can only be stretched so much and be expected to "snap back" one hundred percent. With extreme obesity, the probability of there still being loose skin after weight loss is higher.
6. How fast the weight was gained also has a lot to do with how much the skin will resume a tight appearance. Your skin can only be stretched so quickly and be expected to "snap back."
7. How fast weight is lost also has a lot to do with how much the skin will tighten up. Rapid weight loss doesn't allow the skin time to slowly resume to normal. (This is yet another reason to lose fat slowly; 1-2 pounds per week, 3 pounds at the most if you have a lot of weight to lose, and even then, only if you are measuring body fat and you're certain it's fat you're losing, not lean tissue).
8. There are exceptions to all of the above; For example, people who gained and then lost incredible amounts of weight quickly at age 50 or 60, and their skin returned 100% to normal.
9. Creams probably don't work. There are many creams advertised as having the ability to restore the tightness of your skin. the late bodybuilding guru Dan duchaine used to recommend topical creams made with pycnogenol, which contain the antioxidant bioflavanoids called proanthocyanidins. But to the best of my knowledge, none of the topical creams are scientifically validated. I haven't even heard much anecdotal evidence that they work -- at least not permanently and measurably -- and especially if you have a lot of loose skin. There are definitely some topicals that will pull water from under your skin, but remeber, that is temporary. Buyer should beware with topical products. (as an aside, Ive also heard anectodal reports that skin brushing was helpful, but again, I am not aware of any scientific evidence proving this is effective).
10. Nutrition has a lot to do with the health of your skin. Essential fatty acids in particular are very valuable for many reasons, and one of them is for the health of your skin. It would be worth taking an EFA supplement such as fish oil, flax oil or an oil blend like Udo's choice. Antioxidants are also very important, so be sure to consume copious amounts of a variety of vegetables and fruits. Also pay very close attention to hydration. Drink approximately a gallon of water a day or a minimum of half your body weight in ounces. (By the way, whey protein is high in a powerful antioxidant called glutathione).
11. Exercise has a lot to do with how your skin appears after you lose body fat. If you use very low calorie diets, you are likely to lose lean body mass, and this is going to exacerbate the loose, hanging skin appearance. On the other hand, if you are exercising regularly and increasing lean body mass with weight training, you will be more likely to minimize the appearance of loose skin.
12. Get second opinions if you are considering surgery.If you're considering surgical skin removal, consult a physician for advice because this is not a minor operation, but keep in mind that your plastic surgeon may be making his BMW payments with your abdominoplasty money. (Surgery might be recommended in situations where it's not 100% necessary). Surgery should be left as the absolute final option in extreme cases.
13. Give your skin time. Your skin will definitely get tighter as your body fat gets lower. I've seen and heard of many cases where the skin gradually tightened up, at least partially, after a one or two year period where the weight loss was maintained and exercise continued.
14. Know your body fat percentage before even thinking about surgery. Loose skin is one thing, but still having a lot of body fat is another. Be honest with yourself and do that by taking your body fat measurement. This can be done with skinfold calipers or a variety of other devices (calipers might not be the best method if you have large folds of loose skin. Look into impedance analysis, underwater weighing, DEXA or Bod Pod).
Suppose for example, a man drops from 35% body fat all the way down to 20%. He should be congratulated, but I would tell him, "Don't complain about loose skin yet, your body fat is still high. Press onward and keep getting leaner and be sure to focus on strength training to increase lean body mass as well."
Average body fat for men is in the mid teens (16% or so). Average body fat for women is in the 20-25% range. Good body fat for men is 10-12%, and single digits is extremely lean. Men shouldn't expect to look "ripped" with 100% tight skin on the abs unless they have single digit body fat. Women shouldn't expect to have tight abdominal skin unless they are in the low to mid teens in body fat.
Except in extreme cases, you are actually unlikely to see someone with loose skin who has very low body fat and especially someone who has not just "lost weight" but has altered body composition by adding lean muscle as well. It's quite remarkable how much your skin can tighten up once your body fat goes from "average" to "excellent" and even more so when lean body mass increase. Someone with legitimate single digit body fat and a ton of loose skin is a rare sight.
So the key to getting tighter skin is to improve your body composition (muscle to fat ratio), and lose more body fat, slowly and sensibly, up to the point where your body composition rating is BETTER than average (in the "good" to "great" category, not just "okay"). Only AFTER you reach your long term body fat percentage goal should you give thought to "excess skin removal." At that point, admittedly, there are bound to be a few isolated cases where surgery is necessary if you can't live with the amount of loose skin remaining.
However, unless you are really, really lean, it's difficult to get a clear picture of what is loose skin, what is just remaining body fat and how much further the skin will tighten up when the rest of the fat is lost.
Need help getting rid of that last bit of body body fat? Click here to find out how to do it the natural way: www.BurnTheFat.com
About the Author:
Tom Venuto is a lifetime natural bodybuilder, an NSCA-certified personal trainer (CPT), certified strength & conditioning specialist (CSCS), and author of the #1 best-selling e-book, "Burn the Fat, Feed The Muscle.” Tom has written more than 200 articles and has been featured in print magazines such as IRONMAN, Australian IRONMAN, Natural Bodybuilding, Muscular Development, Exercise for Men and Men’s Exercise, as well as on hundreds of websites worldwide. For information on Tom's Fat Loss program, visit: www.BurnTheFat.com
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
How To Lose 20 Pounds Really, Really Fast
By Tom Venuto, NSCA-CPT, CSCS
www.BurnTheFat.com
Back “in the day” when I was a full time personal trainer and I met with weight loss clients in person at my New Jersey Health Club, the first thing I would always ask during the initial consultation was:
"Tell me what you want... and I'll show you how to get it."
Typical reply from client:
"I want to lose 20 pounds fast."
My reply:
"Are you SURE that's what you want? ...If I can show you how to lose 20 pounds REALLY fast, will that make you happy?"
They nodded their head affirmatively as their eyes lit up in anticipation of the rapid weight loss secrets I was about to reveal...
Their face went white when - with a totally straight face – I pulled out a hacksaw and started walking towards them.... menacingly.
Not sure whether to laugh or run in sheer terror, they said,
"What the heck are you doing?"
"You said you wanted to lose 20 pounds fast. This is the easiest, surest, most effective way I know to take 20 pounds off you FAST! In fact, I figure that right leg of yours might even weigh 25 pounds!"
I kept walking closer and started to get into sawing position, wielding my fast, effective and guaranteed weight loss tool...
"Bear with me because this IS quick, but sometimes it takes a few minutes for me to cut through the bone."
By this time, my client (and I) are either completely cracking up, I have seriously scared the living you know what out of them, or they just think I'm a complete lunatic... (depends on whether I was able to keep a straight face or not)
Finally, the light bulb goes on, and my client would see where I was going with this:
"Okay, smart alec," I get it... I don't want to lose WEIGHT, I want to lose FAT."
Sometimes I would be having so much fun, I would just keep on playin'...
"But why not? This is easy, fast and guaranteed - just what everyone wants these days... it's even better than taking a pill! Come on... let me hack it off! You'll be my next testimonial: 'I lost 20 pounds in 5 minutes!' Imagine what that will do for my business!"
"Very funny. I told you, I get it! I want to lose FAT, not muscles and bones. I need my leg!”
Naturally, of course, I don't always have to pull out my trusty blade. Every once in a while... about as often as a total solar eclipse... a client answers my question like this:
"What do I want? Tom, I want to lose 20 pounds of body fat in the next 12 weeks. I want to do it slowly, safely and healthfully and then keep it off permanently. I want all the fat around my hips and thighs completely gone and I want a firm flat stomach. I want muscle all over my body while still looking feminine. I'd like to see myself at about 16% body fat and maintain all my muscle or gain a few pounds of lean mass if I can, especially in my arms. This is important to me because I want to set a good example for my kids, I want to be healthy and live to at least 90 and I want my husband to look at me and say, "I love your body," and I want to be able to *honestly* say back to him, "me too!"
It is on these rare occasions that I know there is still intelligent life on this planet.
If you could answer the question, "What do you want" with the lucidity, clarity and specificity that this woman did, I don't think you would ever have any difficulty reaching your health and fitness goals... or any other goal in your life, for that matter.
Her answer was what you call a very "well-formed" goal, backed up with lots of emotional motivation-inducing "reasons why."
"I want to lose weight" is a poorly-formed goal.
"Weight" is not the same as "fat." Weight includes muscle, bone, internal organs as well as lots and lots of water.
If you only learn ONE thing from all my newsletters, articles and books, PLEASE learn this:
WHAT YOU REALLY WANT IS TO BURN THE FAT, WHILE KEEPING THE MUSCLE!!!!
FAT LOSS is what you want, not weight loss.
If your body were 100% rock-solid muscle, with absolutely nothing that jiggled (unless it was supposed to), would you care how much you weighed?
I bet you wouldn't! And if that’s true, then…
STOP WORSHIPPING THE SCALE AND START MEASURING YOUR BODY COMPOSITION!
By measuring your body fat, you take the guesswork out of your health and fitness plan and you get an accurate picture of what's really happening in your body as a result of your diet and exercise program.
Instead of worrying about whether you are losing muscle, or wondering if you are losing fat, you can measure it and KNOW for sure. (I always get a good chuckle when someone tells me they're worried about losing muscle when they don't even measure how much muscle they have!)
Instead of being confused by all the "opinions" from weight loss and exercise "experts" who are all telling you something different, you can MEASURE your body composition and based on the results, you can KNOW for sure whether your program is working.
A very wise man once said,
"A single measurement is worth a thousand opinions."
So, how do you measure body fat?
Thanks to technology, there are some methods today that are so accurate, they can tell you whether your left pinky has more fat than your right pinky! Unfortunately, many of them are either too expensive or they are inaccessible, being found only in hospitals or research facilities
If you want to learn a LOT about various body fat testing methods, chapter 3 of my e-book, Burn The Fat, Feed The Muscle (www.burnthefat.com) goes into great detail about the pros and cons of all the various fat testing methods. Instead of re-hashing it all here, let me give you three quick and easy, practical suggestions:
Suggestion 1: Have a trainer or fitness professional measure you if this service is available at your local health club. Sometimes, there's a charge - usually $15 - $25, although some clubs offer the service for free to all their members.
Suggestion 2: Purchase an Accu-measure skinfold caliper. Do a google or yahoo search to find a reseller.
The Accu-measure was designed to allow you to measure your own body fat in the privacy of your own home (you don't need someone else to measure you)
Some people wonder if this is really accurate. Truth is, it's not quite as accurate as a multi site skinfold test from an experienced tester, but what's most important is not the "accuracy" per se, but the reliability and consistency of your measurements so you can track your progress. Skinfold calipers in general are not accurate or inaccurate, it's the person doing the test that is accurate or inaccurate.
Suggestion 3: If you have a spouse, roommate, or friend who can measure your body fat, you can purchase a Slim Guide body fat caliper (or just about any brand of caliper) from Creative Health Products: chponline.com
The Slimguide is the best inexpensive caliper available (about $20), but it wasn't designed for you to measure your own body fat like the Accu Measure. You'll need someone to measure you with this caliper. Other models of body fat calipers (if you want to splurge), range from $150 to $450. (At our health clubs, I use the electronic "SKYNDEX" caliper with the 4-site "Durnin formula.")
The calipers come with instructions, or you can use these formulas, which I have used and found to be very accurate:
4 Site formula for men (abdomen, suprailiac, thigh, tricep)
% fat = .29288(sum of 4 skinfolds) - 0.0005(sum of four skinfolds squared) + 0.15845(age) - 5.76377
4-Site Formula for women (abdomen, suprailiac, thigh, tricep)
% Fat = (.29669)(sum of 4 skinfolds) - (.00043)(Sum of four skinfolds squared) + .02963(age) + 1.4072
[Source: Jackson A S, Pollock, M (1985) Practical assessment of body composition. Physician Sport Med. 13: 76-90.]
Body fat percentages vary based on age and gender, but 20-25% body fat is average for women (15-19% is ideal), while 15-20% is average for men (10-14% is ideal). I have detailed charts for body fat charts in my e-book if you're interested.
Once you know your body fat percentage, then weigh yourself and record your weight and body fat on a progress chart such as the one found in my Burn The Fat Feed The Muscle Program (a fat loss program, not a weight loss program). This chart is how you will track your progress and "keep score."
You can calculate your lean body mass (muscle and other fat free tissue) very easily just by crunching some numbers:
For example, if you weigh 200 pounds and you have 10% body fat then you have 20 pounds of fat (10% of 200 = 20). That means you have a lean body mass (LBM) of 180 pounds.
Now we're talking! With this data, you can get a really clear picture of how your exercise and nutrition program are affecting your physique.
Losing weight is very easy. Losing fat - and keeping it off without losing muscle - is a much bigger challenge. If you simply wanted to lose weight, we could just chop off your leg.
Or, (slightly less painful), I could show you how to drop 10 - 15 pounds over the weekend just by dehydrating yourself and using natural herbal diuretics. Wrestlers do it all the time to make a weight class. But what good would that do if it’s almost all water and you’re just going to gain it all back within days?
You don't have to "throw away your scale" like many "experts" tell you to. By all means, keep using the scale, the tape measure and even photographs and the mirror - the more feedback the better - but body fat is where it's at.
By the way, I recently bought a chain saw and a shiny new axe from Home Depot, and I've been practicing my "American Psycho" and Jack Nicholson, "The Shining" impersonations... so if you want to come to my office any time soon for personal consultation, you'd better have the right answer to my question, "What do you want?"
For more information about a nutrition and training program that focuses exclusively on FAT LOSS, not WEIGHT LOSS, visit: www.BurnTheFat.com
About the Author:
Tom Venuto is a lifetime natural bodybuilder, an NSCA-certified personal trainer (CPT), certified strength & conditioning specialist (CSCS), and author of the #1 best-selling e-book, "Burn the Fat, Feed The Muscle.” Tom has written hundreds of articles and been featured in IRONMAN, Australian IRONMAN, Natural Bodybuilding, Muscular Development, Exercise for Men and Men’s Exercise, as well as on dozens of websites worldwide. For information on Tom's Fat Loss program, visit: www.BurnTheFat.com
www.BurnTheFat.com
Back “in the day” when I was a full time personal trainer and I met with weight loss clients in person at my New Jersey Health Club, the first thing I would always ask during the initial consultation was:
"Tell me what you want... and I'll show you how to get it."
Typical reply from client:
"I want to lose 20 pounds fast."
My reply:
"Are you SURE that's what you want? ...If I can show you how to lose 20 pounds REALLY fast, will that make you happy?"
They nodded their head affirmatively as their eyes lit up in anticipation of the rapid weight loss secrets I was about to reveal...
Their face went white when - with a totally straight face – I pulled out a hacksaw and started walking towards them.... menacingly.
Not sure whether to laugh or run in sheer terror, they said,
"What the heck are you doing?"
"You said you wanted to lose 20 pounds fast. This is the easiest, surest, most effective way I know to take 20 pounds off you FAST! In fact, I figure that right leg of yours might even weigh 25 pounds!"
I kept walking closer and started to get into sawing position, wielding my fast, effective and guaranteed weight loss tool...
"Bear with me because this IS quick, but sometimes it takes a few minutes for me to cut through the bone."
By this time, my client (and I) are either completely cracking up, I have seriously scared the living you know what out of them, or they just think I'm a complete lunatic... (depends on whether I was able to keep a straight face or not)
Finally, the light bulb goes on, and my client would see where I was going with this:
"Okay, smart alec," I get it... I don't want to lose WEIGHT, I want to lose FAT."
Sometimes I would be having so much fun, I would just keep on playin'...
"But why not? This is easy, fast and guaranteed - just what everyone wants these days... it's even better than taking a pill! Come on... let me hack it off! You'll be my next testimonial: 'I lost 20 pounds in 5 minutes!' Imagine what that will do for my business!"
"Very funny. I told you, I get it! I want to lose FAT, not muscles and bones. I need my leg!”
Naturally, of course, I don't always have to pull out my trusty blade. Every once in a while... about as often as a total solar eclipse... a client answers my question like this:
"What do I want? Tom, I want to lose 20 pounds of body fat in the next 12 weeks. I want to do it slowly, safely and healthfully and then keep it off permanently. I want all the fat around my hips and thighs completely gone and I want a firm flat stomach. I want muscle all over my body while still looking feminine. I'd like to see myself at about 16% body fat and maintain all my muscle or gain a few pounds of lean mass if I can, especially in my arms. This is important to me because I want to set a good example for my kids, I want to be healthy and live to at least 90 and I want my husband to look at me and say, "I love your body," and I want to be able to *honestly* say back to him, "me too!"
It is on these rare occasions that I know there is still intelligent life on this planet.
If you could answer the question, "What do you want" with the lucidity, clarity and specificity that this woman did, I don't think you would ever have any difficulty reaching your health and fitness goals... or any other goal in your life, for that matter.
Her answer was what you call a very "well-formed" goal, backed up with lots of emotional motivation-inducing "reasons why."
"I want to lose weight" is a poorly-formed goal.
"Weight" is not the same as "fat." Weight includes muscle, bone, internal organs as well as lots and lots of water.
If you only learn ONE thing from all my newsletters, articles and books, PLEASE learn this:
WHAT YOU REALLY WANT IS TO BURN THE FAT, WHILE KEEPING THE MUSCLE!!!!
FAT LOSS is what you want, not weight loss.
If your body were 100% rock-solid muscle, with absolutely nothing that jiggled (unless it was supposed to), would you care how much you weighed?
I bet you wouldn't! And if that’s true, then…
STOP WORSHIPPING THE SCALE AND START MEASURING YOUR BODY COMPOSITION!
By measuring your body fat, you take the guesswork out of your health and fitness plan and you get an accurate picture of what's really happening in your body as a result of your diet and exercise program.
Instead of worrying about whether you are losing muscle, or wondering if you are losing fat, you can measure it and KNOW for sure. (I always get a good chuckle when someone tells me they're worried about losing muscle when they don't even measure how much muscle they have!)
Instead of being confused by all the "opinions" from weight loss and exercise "experts" who are all telling you something different, you can MEASURE your body composition and based on the results, you can KNOW for sure whether your program is working.
A very wise man once said,
"A single measurement is worth a thousand opinions."
So, how do you measure body fat?
Thanks to technology, there are some methods today that are so accurate, they can tell you whether your left pinky has more fat than your right pinky! Unfortunately, many of them are either too expensive or they are inaccessible, being found only in hospitals or research facilities
If you want to learn a LOT about various body fat testing methods, chapter 3 of my e-book, Burn The Fat, Feed The Muscle (www.burnthefat.com) goes into great detail about the pros and cons of all the various fat testing methods. Instead of re-hashing it all here, let me give you three quick and easy, practical suggestions:
Suggestion 1: Have a trainer or fitness professional measure you if this service is available at your local health club. Sometimes, there's a charge - usually $15 - $25, although some clubs offer the service for free to all their members.
Suggestion 2: Purchase an Accu-measure skinfold caliper. Do a google or yahoo search to find a reseller.
The Accu-measure was designed to allow you to measure your own body fat in the privacy of your own home (you don't need someone else to measure you)
Some people wonder if this is really accurate. Truth is, it's not quite as accurate as a multi site skinfold test from an experienced tester, but what's most important is not the "accuracy" per se, but the reliability and consistency of your measurements so you can track your progress. Skinfold calipers in general are not accurate or inaccurate, it's the person doing the test that is accurate or inaccurate.
Suggestion 3: If you have a spouse, roommate, or friend who can measure your body fat, you can purchase a Slim Guide body fat caliper (or just about any brand of caliper) from Creative Health Products: chponline.com
The Slimguide is the best inexpensive caliper available (about $20), but it wasn't designed for you to measure your own body fat like the Accu Measure. You'll need someone to measure you with this caliper. Other models of body fat calipers (if you want to splurge), range from $150 to $450. (At our health clubs, I use the electronic "SKYNDEX" caliper with the 4-site "Durnin formula.")
The calipers come with instructions, or you can use these formulas, which I have used and found to be very accurate:
4 Site formula for men (abdomen, suprailiac, thigh, tricep)
% fat = .29288(sum of 4 skinfolds) - 0.0005(sum of four skinfolds squared) + 0.15845(age) - 5.76377
4-Site Formula for women (abdomen, suprailiac, thigh, tricep)
% Fat = (.29669)(sum of 4 skinfolds) - (.00043)(Sum of four skinfolds squared) + .02963(age) + 1.4072
[Source: Jackson A S, Pollock, M (1985) Practical assessment of body composition. Physician Sport Med. 13: 76-90.]
Body fat percentages vary based on age and gender, but 20-25% body fat is average for women (15-19% is ideal), while 15-20% is average for men (10-14% is ideal). I have detailed charts for body fat charts in my e-book if you're interested.
Once you know your body fat percentage, then weigh yourself and record your weight and body fat on a progress chart such as the one found in my Burn The Fat Feed The Muscle Program (a fat loss program, not a weight loss program). This chart is how you will track your progress and "keep score."
You can calculate your lean body mass (muscle and other fat free tissue) very easily just by crunching some numbers:
For example, if you weigh 200 pounds and you have 10% body fat then you have 20 pounds of fat (10% of 200 = 20). That means you have a lean body mass (LBM) of 180 pounds.
Now we're talking! With this data, you can get a really clear picture of how your exercise and nutrition program are affecting your physique.
Losing weight is very easy. Losing fat - and keeping it off without losing muscle - is a much bigger challenge. If you simply wanted to lose weight, we could just chop off your leg.
Or, (slightly less painful), I could show you how to drop 10 - 15 pounds over the weekend just by dehydrating yourself and using natural herbal diuretics. Wrestlers do it all the time to make a weight class. But what good would that do if it’s almost all water and you’re just going to gain it all back within days?
You don't have to "throw away your scale" like many "experts" tell you to. By all means, keep using the scale, the tape measure and even photographs and the mirror - the more feedback the better - but body fat is where it's at.
By the way, I recently bought a chain saw and a shiny new axe from Home Depot, and I've been practicing my "American Psycho" and Jack Nicholson, "The Shining" impersonations... so if you want to come to my office any time soon for personal consultation, you'd better have the right answer to my question, "What do you want?"
For more information about a nutrition and training program that focuses exclusively on FAT LOSS, not WEIGHT LOSS, visit: www.BurnTheFat.com
About the Author:
Tom Venuto is a lifetime natural bodybuilder, an NSCA-certified personal trainer (CPT), certified strength & conditioning specialist (CSCS), and author of the #1 best-selling e-book, "Burn the Fat, Feed The Muscle.” Tom has written hundreds of articles and been featured in IRONMAN, Australian IRONMAN, Natural Bodybuilding, Muscular Development, Exercise for Men and Men’s Exercise, as well as on dozens of websites worldwide. For information on Tom's Fat Loss program, visit: www.BurnTheFat.com
Increase Your Metabolism And Decrease Your Appetite With This Fat-Burning Food Group
By Tom Venuto, NSCA-CPT, CSCS
www.BurnTheFat.com
There have been countless studies performed on the role of protein in the muscle growth process to try and determine exactly how much protein you should consume to build muscle mass. Recently, several studies have looked at the role that dietary protein plays in helping you lose fat, and more importantly, helping you keep it off!
One thing scientists have discovered is that eating lean protein foods is important for regulating body composition because it decreases your appetite.
In a 2003 study reported in the journal, Current Opinion in Clinical Nutrition And Metabolic Care (2003; 6(6): 635-638), protein was shown to be more satiating (made you feel fuller) than both carbohydrate and fat both in the short term and the long term.
Eating more lean protein foods has also been proven as an effective strategy to help you burn fat and keep it off because of something called, “dietary thermogenesis” (also known as the thermic effect of food).
In a study published in the British Journal of Nutrition in 2005 (93(2): 281-289), researchers followed a group of 113 overweight subjects after 4 weeks of a very low calorie diet, through a 6 month period of weight maintenance. The subjects were divided into a protein group or a control group. The protein group was simply given an extra 30 grams of protein per day on top of their usual diet.
The researchers found that during weight maintenance, the group with the higher protein intake was less likely to regain the lost weight, and any weight gain in the protein group was lean tissue and not fat. The results were attributed to higher thermic effect and a decrease in appetite.
Although calories will always be the bottom line when it comes to fat loss, studies such as these are confirming what bodybuilders have known for a long time: That calories are not the only factor that can influence your body composition. Your protein intake and your ratios of protein relative to carbohydrate and fat can clearly play a key role in helping you lose fat and keep the fat off.
None of this is news to bodybuilders or to anyone who is already familiar with bodybuilding-style nutrition programs such as Burn The Fat, Feed The Muscle. But it’s interesting that such positive results were achieved in studies where protein was increased so conservatively - as little as 30 additional grams of protein per day or a 20% increase above traditional protein recommendations.
Many bodybuilding-style diets (such as Burn The Fat and Body For Life) call for as much as 30%-40% of the total daily calories from protein and some competitive bodybuilders crank up the protein (temporarily) to as much as 50% before competitions.
I’m curious to see if any research is ever conducted with these more aggressive protein intakes. If so, my guess is that we will find once again, that the bodybuilders are ahead of the science when it comes to the manipulation of diet for improving body composition.
The take home lesson is simple: If you remove some carbs and put in some protein - nothing too radical; even as little as trading 30 grams per day of carbs for 30 grams of lean protein - this small change in your diet may decrease your appetite, decrease your body fat and help you keep the fat off after you lose it.
About the Author:
Tom Venuto is a natural bodybuilder and author of the #1 best selling e-book, "Burn the Fat, Feed The Muscle,” which teaches you how to burn fat without drugs or supplements using the little-known secrets of the world's best bodybuilders and fitness models. Learn how to get rid of stubborn fat and turbo-charge your metabolism by visiting: www.BurnTheFat.com.
www.BurnTheFat.com
There have been countless studies performed on the role of protein in the muscle growth process to try and determine exactly how much protein you should consume to build muscle mass. Recently, several studies have looked at the role that dietary protein plays in helping you lose fat, and more importantly, helping you keep it off!
One thing scientists have discovered is that eating lean protein foods is important for regulating body composition because it decreases your appetite.
In a 2003 study reported in the journal, Current Opinion in Clinical Nutrition And Metabolic Care (2003; 6(6): 635-638), protein was shown to be more satiating (made you feel fuller) than both carbohydrate and fat both in the short term and the long term.
Eating more lean protein foods has also been proven as an effective strategy to help you burn fat and keep it off because of something called, “dietary thermogenesis” (also known as the thermic effect of food).
In a study published in the British Journal of Nutrition in 2005 (93(2): 281-289), researchers followed a group of 113 overweight subjects after 4 weeks of a very low calorie diet, through a 6 month period of weight maintenance. The subjects were divided into a protein group or a control group. The protein group was simply given an extra 30 grams of protein per day on top of their usual diet.
The researchers found that during weight maintenance, the group with the higher protein intake was less likely to regain the lost weight, and any weight gain in the protein group was lean tissue and not fat. The results were attributed to higher thermic effect and a decrease in appetite.
Although calories will always be the bottom line when it comes to fat loss, studies such as these are confirming what bodybuilders have known for a long time: That calories are not the only factor that can influence your body composition. Your protein intake and your ratios of protein relative to carbohydrate and fat can clearly play a key role in helping you lose fat and keep the fat off.
None of this is news to bodybuilders or to anyone who is already familiar with bodybuilding-style nutrition programs such as Burn The Fat, Feed The Muscle. But it’s interesting that such positive results were achieved in studies where protein was increased so conservatively - as little as 30 additional grams of protein per day or a 20% increase above traditional protein recommendations.
Many bodybuilding-style diets (such as Burn The Fat and Body For Life) call for as much as 30%-40% of the total daily calories from protein and some competitive bodybuilders crank up the protein (temporarily) to as much as 50% before competitions.
I’m curious to see if any research is ever conducted with these more aggressive protein intakes. If so, my guess is that we will find once again, that the bodybuilders are ahead of the science when it comes to the manipulation of diet for improving body composition.
The take home lesson is simple: If you remove some carbs and put in some protein - nothing too radical; even as little as trading 30 grams per day of carbs for 30 grams of lean protein - this small change in your diet may decrease your appetite, decrease your body fat and help you keep the fat off after you lose it.
About the Author:
Tom Venuto is a natural bodybuilder and author of the #1 best selling e-book, "Burn the Fat, Feed The Muscle,” which teaches you how to burn fat without drugs or supplements using the little-known secrets of the world's best bodybuilders and fitness models. Learn how to get rid of stubborn fat and turbo-charge your metabolism by visiting: www.BurnTheFat.com.
Protein Supplements Vs. Protein Foods?
By Tom Venuto, NSCA-CPT, CSCS
www.BurnTheFat.com
Are protein supplements really better than protein foods? Before attempting to answer this question, I should first preface it by mentioning that I do not sell supplements, nor am I associated with any supplement company, so you’re getting an honest and unbiased opinion. Don't get me wrong; I am not anti-supplement by any means. It would simply be more accurate to say that I am "pro-food." There are a lot of good supplements on the market, and I've used many of them, including a multi vitamin, creatine and essential fatty acid (EFA) supplements such as Flaxseed oil. Protein powders and meal replacements can also be indispensable if you don't have time to eat every three hours. However, protein supplements are not the master key to your success, real food is!
Did you ever notice how articles about protein in certain bodybuilding magazines are seldom objective? Instead, they all seem to be slanted towards hyping some "revolutionary" new product. Did you ever wonder why? In my opinion, most articles on protein supplements are nothing more than thinly disguised advertisements (some very thinly). Sometimes they give you a very persuasive-sounding argument, replete with dozens of references from scientific studies (mostly done on rodents, of course). They even give you an 800 number at the end of the article to order. (How convenient!)
When protein manufacturers throw around fancy words like cross flow microfiltration, oligopeptides, ion-exchange, protein efficiency ratio, biological value, nitrogen retention and glycomacropeptides, it sure sounds convincing, especially when scores of scientific references are cited. But don't forget that the supplement industry is big business and most magazines are the supplement industry. Lyle McDonald, author of "The Ketogenic Diet," hit the nail on the head when he wrote "Unfortunately, the obsession that bodybuilders have with protein has made them susceptible to all kinds of marketing hype. Like most aspects of bodybuilding (and the supplement industry in general), the issue of protein is driven more by marketing hype than physiological reality and marketing types know how to push a bodybuilder’s button when it comes to protein "
Many nutrition "experts" (read: people who sell supplements), state that there are distinct advantages of protein supplements (powders and amino acid tablets) over whole foods. For example, they argue that whey, a by-product of the cheese-making process, is a higher quality protein than most whole food sources. There are many different methods of determining protein quality, including biological value (BV), protein efficiency ratio (PER), Net Protein Utilization (NPU), chemical score, and protein digestibility corrected amino acid score (PDCAAS). If you have ever seen advertisements for protein powders and supplements, you have undoubtedly heard of one or more of these measures of protein quality.
BV is one of the most commonly used and is arguably, the best measure of a protein's quality. BV is based on how much of the protein consumed is actually absorbed and utilized by the body. The higher the amount of protein (nitrogen) that is actually retained, the greater the BV. If a protein has a BV of 100, it means that all of the protein absorbed has been utilized with none lost. Whole eggs score the highest of all foods with a BV of 100, while beans have a BV of only 49.
Protein quality is certainly an important issue, but it is one that has been enormously overstated and even distorted for marketing purposes. Whey protein is truly an excellent protein with a biological value at or near 100. Many advertisements list whey as having a BV between 104 and 157, but if you look in any nutrition textbook it will tell you that it is impossible to have a BV over 100. In "Advanced Nutrition and Human Metabolism," BV is defined as "a measure of nitrogen retained for growth and/or maintenance that is expressed as a percentage of nitrogen absorbed."
When a protein supplement is listed as having a BV over 100, the company has intentionally manipulated the number for marketing purposes or unintentionally confused BV with another method of rating protein quality. Certain whey proponents claim that whey is "superior to whole egg" so the percentage sign on BV had to be dropped and the scale extended beyond 100. It was noted by bodybuilding writer Jerry Branium in IRONMAN magazine that in a study where the BV of whey was reported to be 157, the author confused BV with chemical score. Chemical score is a comparison of the amino acid pattern in an ideal reference protein to a test protein and therefore the number can exceed 100. 157 was actually the chemical score and not the BV.
Most bodybuilders and strength athletes already consume more than enough protein (an understatement if there ever was one), so the importance of BV to these athletes who are already consuming copious amounts of protein has been overplayed. Even though whey has a higher BV than chicken breast, fish or milk protein, if the total quantity of protein you consume is sufficient, then it is not likely that substituting whey for food proteins will result in any additional muscle growth.
Whether you choose a whole protein food or a protein supplement isn’t as important as some would like you to believe. For the purposes of developing muscle, the only guidelines for protein that you must follow are: (1) consume a source of complete protein with every meal, (2) eat at frequent intervals approximately three hours apart (about six times per day) and (3) consume a minimum of .8 grams to 1 gram per pound of body weight. There are times when it would be beneficial to consume more than one gram per pound of body weight, but that will have to be the subject of another article.
Because whey protein does have a high BV, it probably offers the most benefits when you are dieting on very low calories. When your energy intake and correspondingly, your protein intake, are reduced, whey protein could help you get greater utilzation of the smaller amount of protein that you are taking in. In other words, choosing proteins of the highest quality is more of an issue when you are dieting than when you are focusing on mass gains when total calories and protein are being consumed in abundant amounts. Whey protein also provides a way to get high quality protein without the fat, which is also important when dieting.
It has been suggested that whey may have other advantages besides high protein quality, although they are frequently overstated. These benefits include enhanced immunity, increased antioxidant activity and quick absorption. Several studies in "Clinical and Investigative Science" by Dr. Gerard Bounous of Montreal have shown that whey protein provides anti carcinogenic properties, protection from infections, and other enhanced immune responses. Whey protein was also been shown to raise levels of Glutathione, an important antioxidant that can offer protection from free radical oxidative damage. While such findings are very promising, all these studies, which are frequently quoted in whey protein advertisements, were performed on mice, so it is unclear how well the results extrapolate to humans.
Another acknowledged benefit of whey protein is its fast absorption rate. Although there isn’t any evidence that protein supplements digest more efficiently than whole foods (as is often claimed), they are definitely digested faster. This is most important after a training session when the rates of protein synthesis and glycogen re-synthesis are increased. This is the reason it is often recommended that a liquid meal containing protein and a high glycemic carbohydrate be consumed immediately post-workout and that whey is the ideal protein for this purpose. Even in considering post-workout nutrition, there is still little proof that a liquid protein-carb complex will actually produce better muscular growth than whole foods, as long as complete whole food protein foods and complex carbohydrates are consumed immediately after the training session and every three waking hours for a period of 24 hours thereafter.
Speaking of protein absorption rates, the discussion of fast acting versus slow acting proteins seems to be the latest hot topic these days in bodybuilding circles. The interest was sparked by studies in 1997 and 1998 that examined the differences between the absorption rates of whey versus casein. The researchers concluded that whey was a fast acting protein and was considered to be more "anabolic" while casein was slower acting and was considered to be more "anti-catabolic. " It was further hypothesized that consuming a combination of these two types of proteins could lead to greater muscle growth. These findings have prompted the supplement companies to market an entirely new category of protein supplements; casein and whey mixes. The problem with drawing such conclusions so quickly is that these studies looked at the speed of whey and casein absorption in subjects who had fasted for 10 hours before being fed the protein. Any suppositions drawn from this information are probably irrelevant if you are eating mixed whole food meals every three hours. Obviously, more research is needed.
This recent fascination with various rates of protein absorption could be compared to the interest in the glycemic index. The glycemic index is a scale that measures the rate at which the body converts various carbohydrate foods into blood glucose. The higher the glycemic index, the faster the food is converted to glucose and the larger the insulin response. Therefore it is said that high glycemic foods should be avoided in favor of low glycemic index foods. The error in relying solely on the glycemic index as your only criteria for choosing carbohydrates is that the index is based on consuming a carbohydrate food by itself in a fasted state.
When carbohydrates are consumed in mixed meals that contain protein and a little fat, the glycemic index loses some of its significance because the protein and fat slow the absorption of the carbohydrate. That’s why the glycemic index is really much ado about nothing and the same could probably be said for the casein and whey argument. It's just the latest in a long string of new angles that supplement companies use to promote their protein: free-form vs peptides, concentrate vs isolate, ion exchange vs microfiltration, soy vs whey, casein and whey mix vs pure whey and so on. Every year, you can count on some new twist on the protein story to appear. Certainly there are going to be advances in nutrition science, but all too often these "new discoveries" amount to nothing more than marketing hype.
What about amino acid pills? Amino acids pills are simply predigested protein. Proponents of amino acid supplementation claim that because the amino's are predigested, the body will absorb them better, leading to greater improvements in strength and muscle mass. It sounds logical, but this is a gross underestimation of the body's capacities and actually the reverse is true: The human digestive system was designed to efficiently process whole foods; it was not designed to digest pills and powders all day long. Amino's are absorbed more rapidly in the intestine when they are in the more complex di and tri-peptide molecules.
Your body gets better use of the aminos as protein foods are broken down and the amino's are absorbed at just the right rate for your body's needs. In "Exercise Physiology; Energy Nutrition and Human Performance," authors Katch and McArdle state that "Amino acid supplementation in any form has not been shown by adequate experimental design and methodology to increase muscle mass or significantly improve muscular strength, power, or endurance."
Furthermore, consuming predigested protein when you are seeking fat loss is not necessarily advantageous because it shortchanges you of the thermic effects of real food. Whole foods have a major advantage over protein supplements; they stimulate the metabolism more. This is known as the "thermic effect of food." Protein has the highest thermic effect of any food. Including a whole protein food with every meal can speed up your metabolic rate as much as 30% because of the energy necessary to digest, process, and absorb it. This means that out of 100 calories of a protein food such as chicken breast, the net amount of calories left over after processing it is 70. In this respect, the fact that protein foods digest slower than amino acid tablets is actually an advantage.
A final argument against amino acid supplements is the cost. Amino's are simply not cost effective. If you don’t believe it, pick up a bottle and do the math yourself. One popular brand of "free form and peptide bonded amino acids" contains 150 1000mg. tablets per bottle and costs $19.95. 1000 mg. of amino acids equals 1 gram of protein, so the entire bottle contains 150 grams of protein. $19.95 divided by 150 grams is 13.3 cents per gram. Let's compare that to chicken breast. I can buy chicken breast from my local supermarket for $2.99 a pound. According to Corinne Netzer’s "Complete Book of Food Counts," there are 8.8 grams of protein in each ounce of chicken, so one pound of chicken (16 oz) has about 140 grams of protein. $2.99 divided by 140 grams equals 2.1 cents per gram. The amino acids cost more than six times what the chicken breast does! I don’t know about you, but I’ll stick with the chicken breast.
The biggest advantage of protein supplements is not that they can build more muscle than chicken or egg whites or any other whole food protein, the biggest advantage is convenience. It is easier to drink a protein shake than it is to buy, prepare, cook and eat poultry, fish or egg whites. Consuming small, frequent meals is the optimal way to eat, regardless of whether your goal is fat loss or muscle gain. To keep your body constantly in positive nitrogen balance, you must consume a complete protein every three hours. For many people, eating this often is nearly impossible. That's when a high quality protein supplement is the most helpful.
Aside from convenience, the truth about protein supplements is that they offer few advantages over protein foods. There is no scientific evidence that you can't meet all of your protein needs for muscle growth through food. As long as you eat every three hours and you eat a complete protein such as eggs, lean meat or lowfat dairy products with every meal, it is not necessary to consume any protein supplements to get outstanding results. Whey protein does have some interesting and useful properties and supplementing with a couple scoops each day is not a bad idea, especially if you are on a low calorie diet for fat loss or when you're using a post workout shake instead of a meal. Aside from that, focus on real food and don’t believe the hype.
References
1) Groff, James, et al, Advanced Nutrition and Human Metabolism, West Publishing company, 1995.
2) Fruhbeck, Gema. Slow and fast dietary proteins. Nature, 391: 843-844
3) Boirie, Y. et al. Slow and fast dietary proteins differently modulate postprandial protein accretion. Proc National Acad Sci, 94: 14930-14935, 1997
4) Lemon, Peter, Protein and Exercise: update, Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, Vol 19, No. 5, S179 - S190, 1987
5) Carraro, F., et at, Effect of exercise and recovery on muscle protein synthesis in human subjects. Amer Journal of physiology, 259: E470, 1990
6) Lemon, Peter, Is increased dietary protein necessary or beneficial for individuals with a physically active lifestyle? Nutrition reviews, 54:S 169-175, 1996
7)Bounous, G., et al, The immunoenhancing property of dietary whey protein concentrate. Clinical and Investigational Medicine, 11: 271-278. 1988.
8) Sadler, R., The benefits of dietary whey protein concentrate on the immune response and health. S Afr. J Dairy Sci, 24: No 24, 1992
9) Bounous, G., Dietary whey protein inhibits the development of dimethylhydrazine-induced malignancy. Clinical and Investigational Medicine, 12: 213-217, 1988
10) Bounous, G., et al, The biological activity of undenatured dietary whey protein; role of glutathione. Clinical and Investigational Medicine, 14: 4, 296-309, 1991
11) Netzer, Corinne. The Complete Book of Food Counts. Dell Publishing, 1997
12) Katch, Katch & McArdle, Exercise Physiology; Energy, Nutrition and Human Performance, Wiliams and Wilkins, 1996.
About the Author:
Tom Venuto is a natural bodybuilder and author of the #1 best selling e-book, "Burn the Fat, Feed The Muscle,” which teaches you how to burn fat without drugs or supplements using the little-known secrets of the world's best bodybuilders and fitness models. Learn how to get rid of stubborn fat and turbo-charge your metabolism by visiting: www.BurnTheFat.com
www.BurnTheFat.com
Are protein supplements really better than protein foods? Before attempting to answer this question, I should first preface it by mentioning that I do not sell supplements, nor am I associated with any supplement company, so you’re getting an honest and unbiased opinion. Don't get me wrong; I am not anti-supplement by any means. It would simply be more accurate to say that I am "pro-food." There are a lot of good supplements on the market, and I've used many of them, including a multi vitamin, creatine and essential fatty acid (EFA) supplements such as Flaxseed oil. Protein powders and meal replacements can also be indispensable if you don't have time to eat every three hours. However, protein supplements are not the master key to your success, real food is!
Did you ever notice how articles about protein in certain bodybuilding magazines are seldom objective? Instead, they all seem to be slanted towards hyping some "revolutionary" new product. Did you ever wonder why? In my opinion, most articles on protein supplements are nothing more than thinly disguised advertisements (some very thinly). Sometimes they give you a very persuasive-sounding argument, replete with dozens of references from scientific studies (mostly done on rodents, of course). They even give you an 800 number at the end of the article to order. (How convenient!)
When protein manufacturers throw around fancy words like cross flow microfiltration, oligopeptides, ion-exchange, protein efficiency ratio, biological value, nitrogen retention and glycomacropeptides, it sure sounds convincing, especially when scores of scientific references are cited. But don't forget that the supplement industry is big business and most magazines are the supplement industry. Lyle McDonald, author of "The Ketogenic Diet," hit the nail on the head when he wrote "Unfortunately, the obsession that bodybuilders have with protein has made them susceptible to all kinds of marketing hype. Like most aspects of bodybuilding (and the supplement industry in general), the issue of protein is driven more by marketing hype than physiological reality and marketing types know how to push a bodybuilder’s button when it comes to protein "
Many nutrition "experts" (read: people who sell supplements), state that there are distinct advantages of protein supplements (powders and amino acid tablets) over whole foods. For example, they argue that whey, a by-product of the cheese-making process, is a higher quality protein than most whole food sources. There are many different methods of determining protein quality, including biological value (BV), protein efficiency ratio (PER), Net Protein Utilization (NPU), chemical score, and protein digestibility corrected amino acid score (PDCAAS). If you have ever seen advertisements for protein powders and supplements, you have undoubtedly heard of one or more of these measures of protein quality.
BV is one of the most commonly used and is arguably, the best measure of a protein's quality. BV is based on how much of the protein consumed is actually absorbed and utilized by the body. The higher the amount of protein (nitrogen) that is actually retained, the greater the BV. If a protein has a BV of 100, it means that all of the protein absorbed has been utilized with none lost. Whole eggs score the highest of all foods with a BV of 100, while beans have a BV of only 49.
Protein quality is certainly an important issue, but it is one that has been enormously overstated and even distorted for marketing purposes. Whey protein is truly an excellent protein with a biological value at or near 100. Many advertisements list whey as having a BV between 104 and 157, but if you look in any nutrition textbook it will tell you that it is impossible to have a BV over 100. In "Advanced Nutrition and Human Metabolism," BV is defined as "a measure of nitrogen retained for growth and/or maintenance that is expressed as a percentage of nitrogen absorbed."
When a protein supplement is listed as having a BV over 100, the company has intentionally manipulated the number for marketing purposes or unintentionally confused BV with another method of rating protein quality. Certain whey proponents claim that whey is "superior to whole egg" so the percentage sign on BV had to be dropped and the scale extended beyond 100. It was noted by bodybuilding writer Jerry Branium in IRONMAN magazine that in a study where the BV of whey was reported to be 157, the author confused BV with chemical score. Chemical score is a comparison of the amino acid pattern in an ideal reference protein to a test protein and therefore the number can exceed 100. 157 was actually the chemical score and not the BV.
Most bodybuilders and strength athletes already consume more than enough protein (an understatement if there ever was one), so the importance of BV to these athletes who are already consuming copious amounts of protein has been overplayed. Even though whey has a higher BV than chicken breast, fish or milk protein, if the total quantity of protein you consume is sufficient, then it is not likely that substituting whey for food proteins will result in any additional muscle growth.
Whether you choose a whole protein food or a protein supplement isn’t as important as some would like you to believe. For the purposes of developing muscle, the only guidelines for protein that you must follow are: (1) consume a source of complete protein with every meal, (2) eat at frequent intervals approximately three hours apart (about six times per day) and (3) consume a minimum of .8 grams to 1 gram per pound of body weight. There are times when it would be beneficial to consume more than one gram per pound of body weight, but that will have to be the subject of another article.
Because whey protein does have a high BV, it probably offers the most benefits when you are dieting on very low calories. When your energy intake and correspondingly, your protein intake, are reduced, whey protein could help you get greater utilzation of the smaller amount of protein that you are taking in. In other words, choosing proteins of the highest quality is more of an issue when you are dieting than when you are focusing on mass gains when total calories and protein are being consumed in abundant amounts. Whey protein also provides a way to get high quality protein without the fat, which is also important when dieting.
It has been suggested that whey may have other advantages besides high protein quality, although they are frequently overstated. These benefits include enhanced immunity, increased antioxidant activity and quick absorption. Several studies in "Clinical and Investigative Science" by Dr. Gerard Bounous of Montreal have shown that whey protein provides anti carcinogenic properties, protection from infections, and other enhanced immune responses. Whey protein was also been shown to raise levels of Glutathione, an important antioxidant that can offer protection from free radical oxidative damage. While such findings are very promising, all these studies, which are frequently quoted in whey protein advertisements, were performed on mice, so it is unclear how well the results extrapolate to humans.
Another acknowledged benefit of whey protein is its fast absorption rate. Although there isn’t any evidence that protein supplements digest more efficiently than whole foods (as is often claimed), they are definitely digested faster. This is most important after a training session when the rates of protein synthesis and glycogen re-synthesis are increased. This is the reason it is often recommended that a liquid meal containing protein and a high glycemic carbohydrate be consumed immediately post-workout and that whey is the ideal protein for this purpose. Even in considering post-workout nutrition, there is still little proof that a liquid protein-carb complex will actually produce better muscular growth than whole foods, as long as complete whole food protein foods and complex carbohydrates are consumed immediately after the training session and every three waking hours for a period of 24 hours thereafter.
Speaking of protein absorption rates, the discussion of fast acting versus slow acting proteins seems to be the latest hot topic these days in bodybuilding circles. The interest was sparked by studies in 1997 and 1998 that examined the differences between the absorption rates of whey versus casein. The researchers concluded that whey was a fast acting protein and was considered to be more "anabolic" while casein was slower acting and was considered to be more "anti-catabolic. " It was further hypothesized that consuming a combination of these two types of proteins could lead to greater muscle growth. These findings have prompted the supplement companies to market an entirely new category of protein supplements; casein and whey mixes. The problem with drawing such conclusions so quickly is that these studies looked at the speed of whey and casein absorption in subjects who had fasted for 10 hours before being fed the protein. Any suppositions drawn from this information are probably irrelevant if you are eating mixed whole food meals every three hours. Obviously, more research is needed.
This recent fascination with various rates of protein absorption could be compared to the interest in the glycemic index. The glycemic index is a scale that measures the rate at which the body converts various carbohydrate foods into blood glucose. The higher the glycemic index, the faster the food is converted to glucose and the larger the insulin response. Therefore it is said that high glycemic foods should be avoided in favor of low glycemic index foods. The error in relying solely on the glycemic index as your only criteria for choosing carbohydrates is that the index is based on consuming a carbohydrate food by itself in a fasted state.
When carbohydrates are consumed in mixed meals that contain protein and a little fat, the glycemic index loses some of its significance because the protein and fat slow the absorption of the carbohydrate. That’s why the glycemic index is really much ado about nothing and the same could probably be said for the casein and whey argument. It's just the latest in a long string of new angles that supplement companies use to promote their protein: free-form vs peptides, concentrate vs isolate, ion exchange vs microfiltration, soy vs whey, casein and whey mix vs pure whey and so on. Every year, you can count on some new twist on the protein story to appear. Certainly there are going to be advances in nutrition science, but all too often these "new discoveries" amount to nothing more than marketing hype.
What about amino acid pills? Amino acids pills are simply predigested protein. Proponents of amino acid supplementation claim that because the amino's are predigested, the body will absorb them better, leading to greater improvements in strength and muscle mass. It sounds logical, but this is a gross underestimation of the body's capacities and actually the reverse is true: The human digestive system was designed to efficiently process whole foods; it was not designed to digest pills and powders all day long. Amino's are absorbed more rapidly in the intestine when they are in the more complex di and tri-peptide molecules.
Your body gets better use of the aminos as protein foods are broken down and the amino's are absorbed at just the right rate for your body's needs. In "Exercise Physiology; Energy Nutrition and Human Performance," authors Katch and McArdle state that "Amino acid supplementation in any form has not been shown by adequate experimental design and methodology to increase muscle mass or significantly improve muscular strength, power, or endurance."
Furthermore, consuming predigested protein when you are seeking fat loss is not necessarily advantageous because it shortchanges you of the thermic effects of real food. Whole foods have a major advantage over protein supplements; they stimulate the metabolism more. This is known as the "thermic effect of food." Protein has the highest thermic effect of any food. Including a whole protein food with every meal can speed up your metabolic rate as much as 30% because of the energy necessary to digest, process, and absorb it. This means that out of 100 calories of a protein food such as chicken breast, the net amount of calories left over after processing it is 70. In this respect, the fact that protein foods digest slower than amino acid tablets is actually an advantage.
A final argument against amino acid supplements is the cost. Amino's are simply not cost effective. If you don’t believe it, pick up a bottle and do the math yourself. One popular brand of "free form and peptide bonded amino acids" contains 150 1000mg. tablets per bottle and costs $19.95. 1000 mg. of amino acids equals 1 gram of protein, so the entire bottle contains 150 grams of protein. $19.95 divided by 150 grams is 13.3 cents per gram. Let's compare that to chicken breast. I can buy chicken breast from my local supermarket for $2.99 a pound. According to Corinne Netzer’s "Complete Book of Food Counts," there are 8.8 grams of protein in each ounce of chicken, so one pound of chicken (16 oz) has about 140 grams of protein. $2.99 divided by 140 grams equals 2.1 cents per gram. The amino acids cost more than six times what the chicken breast does! I don’t know about you, but I’ll stick with the chicken breast.
The biggest advantage of protein supplements is not that they can build more muscle than chicken or egg whites or any other whole food protein, the biggest advantage is convenience. It is easier to drink a protein shake than it is to buy, prepare, cook and eat poultry, fish or egg whites. Consuming small, frequent meals is the optimal way to eat, regardless of whether your goal is fat loss or muscle gain. To keep your body constantly in positive nitrogen balance, you must consume a complete protein every three hours. For many people, eating this often is nearly impossible. That's when a high quality protein supplement is the most helpful.
Aside from convenience, the truth about protein supplements is that they offer few advantages over protein foods. There is no scientific evidence that you can't meet all of your protein needs for muscle growth through food. As long as you eat every three hours and you eat a complete protein such as eggs, lean meat or lowfat dairy products with every meal, it is not necessary to consume any protein supplements to get outstanding results. Whey protein does have some interesting and useful properties and supplementing with a couple scoops each day is not a bad idea, especially if you are on a low calorie diet for fat loss or when you're using a post workout shake instead of a meal. Aside from that, focus on real food and don’t believe the hype.
References
1) Groff, James, et al, Advanced Nutrition and Human Metabolism, West Publishing company, 1995.
2) Fruhbeck, Gema. Slow and fast dietary proteins. Nature, 391: 843-844
3) Boirie, Y. et al. Slow and fast dietary proteins differently modulate postprandial protein accretion. Proc National Acad Sci, 94: 14930-14935, 1997
4) Lemon, Peter, Protein and Exercise: update, Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, Vol 19, No. 5, S179 - S190, 1987
5) Carraro, F., et at, Effect of exercise and recovery on muscle protein synthesis in human subjects. Amer Journal of physiology, 259: E470, 1990
6) Lemon, Peter, Is increased dietary protein necessary or beneficial for individuals with a physically active lifestyle? Nutrition reviews, 54:S 169-175, 1996
7)Bounous, G., et al, The immunoenhancing property of dietary whey protein concentrate. Clinical and Investigational Medicine, 11: 271-278. 1988.
8) Sadler, R., The benefits of dietary whey protein concentrate on the immune response and health. S Afr. J Dairy Sci, 24: No 24, 1992
9) Bounous, G., Dietary whey protein inhibits the development of dimethylhydrazine-induced malignancy. Clinical and Investigational Medicine, 12: 213-217, 1988
10) Bounous, G., et al, The biological activity of undenatured dietary whey protein; role of glutathione. Clinical and Investigational Medicine, 14: 4, 296-309, 1991
11) Netzer, Corinne. The Complete Book of Food Counts. Dell Publishing, 1997
12) Katch, Katch & McArdle, Exercise Physiology; Energy, Nutrition and Human Performance, Wiliams and Wilkins, 1996.
About the Author:
Tom Venuto is a natural bodybuilder and author of the #1 best selling e-book, "Burn the Fat, Feed The Muscle,” which teaches you how to burn fat without drugs or supplements using the little-known secrets of the world's best bodybuilders and fitness models. Learn how to get rid of stubborn fat and turbo-charge your metabolism by visiting: www.BurnTheFat.com
Body Wraps and Waist Wraps: The Difference Between Losing Fat And Losing Inches
By Tom Venuto, NSCA-CPT, CSCS
www.BurnTheFat.com
"Body wraps" have been around for ages in the weight loss and spa industry. Claims include loss of body weight, loss of body fat, and loss of inches. Infomercials for rubber “waist belts" are also back on TV and similar claims are made for these types of wraps as well. What few people realize is that there is a huge difference between losing fat and losing inches. When your body fat decreases, your circumference measurements will usually also decrease, but “fat” loss and “inch” loss are not one in the same. If you don’t know how to tell the difference, you could be falling for one of the oldest, most notorious fitness and weight loss scams in the book.
The truth is, body wraps and waist belts do not shrink fat cells or burn body fat - no matter what type of wrap is used: bandages, plastic, foil, vinyl, or rubber and regardless of what you are wrapped in: herbs, minerals, enzymes, seaweed, clay, or mud - it doesn't matter. Fat can only be lost with a caloric deficit from a reduction in food intake, an increase in activity or ideally, a combination of both.
Whenever you see fat loss claims for wraps or any other product which doesn't involve a caloric deficit created though nutrition or exercise, the “scam alarm” should go off in your head, and you should always stay away, no matter how compelling the sales pitch.
Furthermore, the companies making fat loss claims would be in hot water with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) if they were investigated and caught because claims for body fat reduction from wraps cannot be supported with scientific evidence.
The FTC as well as numerous state attorney general's offices have already taken action against body wrap companies in the past for false advertising and unsupported claims. Some companies simply had to stop making false claims, others had to pay stiff fines as well. The problem, from a legal and ethical standpoint, is the claim being made. Remember, "inches" and "fat" are not the same thing.
Some types of wraps can definitely take off inches (for example, they might reduce the circumference measurement of your waist, hips, arms and legs), but it's not fat, its water weight and fluid, and the results are temporary.
Suppose this claim is made in an advertisement:
* Lose Up To 15 inches in 1 Hour! *
This is legal advertising because the claim "lose inches" might be supportable (if enough circumference measurements are taken with a tape measure at enough sites, that might add up to a total of 15 inches in circumference loss)
However I believe that these types of claims are misleading (and probably intentionally so), because "inches" is not the same as body fat but the product vendors know that you might easily confuse "inches" with "fat."
Contrast that claim with this one:
* Lose Body Fat without diet or exercise in 1 Hour!*
That claim is totally false and scientifically unsupportable.
Again, body wraps cannot burn fat or "shrink fat cells."
If fat loss could be achieved with body wraps, it would be very easy to test and prove.
Body composition (body fat) testing (rather than measurements of inches) could be performed before and after the wrap, and the answer ("does it work") would become easily exposed.
Since it doesn't work, you won't find any wrap people accepting your challenge to allow you to do independent body composition testing, nor will you find a shred of scientific evidence showing reduction of bodyfat from wraps.
Unfortunately, bogus fat loss claims are still quite widespread, as a simple Internet search for "body wrap" will demonstrate. The most frequently used claims however, are for loss of "inches."
The inches lost simply come from loss of fluid. And guess what - those inches (and or water weight) will come right back in days if not hours, as soon as you completely re-hydrate yourself.
Other claims made for body wraps include detoxification, improved circulation and tighter, smoother and clearer skin. Most health and fitness researchers, as well as government agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will tell you that these claims are "debatable" and mostly anecdotal.
Some experts even warn that certain types of wraps can be dangerous, mainly due to the rapid and excessive fluid loss/dehydration.
If you want to get wrapped because you find it relaxing or you consider it a "spa-like" treatment, that's one thing. Just remember, wraps have absolutely nothing to do with fat loss.
I'd suggest completely avoiding any companies that advertise fat loss when it's only water and inches you're losing, because a dishonest company is one you don't want to patronize at all.
One last thing – this is a timely subject because although "body wraps" have been around for ages and it's old news, I noticed that infomercials for "waist belts" or “sauna wraps” are back on TV in force and I see that they are replaying the ads over and over again, which means people are buying it.
Everything I just said about body wraps also applies to those rubber waist belts too.
On a web search I just did for those rubber belt waist wraps, I noticed some of the websites are STILL making claims like "Melt fat" (totally bogus, unsupported and illegal claim).
Other sites seem to be wary of the FTC paying them a visit, so they do a whole song and dance around the legal issues by saying stuff like, "sweat away inches," "therapeutic heat", "target your problem areas" and so on. Even if these claims are not illegal, the promotions are still deceptive…
The professional fitness model is pictured taking off the rubber belt, revealing ripped six pack abs below... as if those abs are a result of wearing the belt! Wishful thinking! These are professional models, folks. They got the abs the same way everyone else with abs got them - with a calorie deficit from a combination of strict diet and hard training!
Wraps and waist belt products might take off some inches or water weight, but they can’t take off a single ounce of fat. Buyer beware.
Programs like Burn The Fat, Feed The Muscle are focused on FAT LOSS, not water loss or loss of inches. When body fat decreases, circumferences in inches will also decrease, but "fat" lost and "inches" lost are not one in the same.
About the Author:
Tom Venuto is a lifetime natural bodybuilder, an NSCA-certified personal trainer (CPT), certified strength & conditioning specialist (CSCS), and author of the #1 best-selling e-book, "Burn the Fat, Feed The Muscle.” Tom has written hundreds of articles and has been featured in print magazines such as IRONMAN, Australian IRONMAN, Natural Bodybuilding, Muscular Development, Exercise for Men and Men’s Exercise, as well as on hundreds of websites worldwide. For information on Tom's Fat Loss program, visit: www.BurnTheFat.com. To learn more about Tom's Fat Loss Support Community, visit: www.burnthefatinnercircle.com
www.BurnTheFat.com
"Body wraps" have been around for ages in the weight loss and spa industry. Claims include loss of body weight, loss of body fat, and loss of inches. Infomercials for rubber “waist belts" are also back on TV and similar claims are made for these types of wraps as well. What few people realize is that there is a huge difference between losing fat and losing inches. When your body fat decreases, your circumference measurements will usually also decrease, but “fat” loss and “inch” loss are not one in the same. If you don’t know how to tell the difference, you could be falling for one of the oldest, most notorious fitness and weight loss scams in the book.
The truth is, body wraps and waist belts do not shrink fat cells or burn body fat - no matter what type of wrap is used: bandages, plastic, foil, vinyl, or rubber and regardless of what you are wrapped in: herbs, minerals, enzymes, seaweed, clay, or mud - it doesn't matter. Fat can only be lost with a caloric deficit from a reduction in food intake, an increase in activity or ideally, a combination of both.
Whenever you see fat loss claims for wraps or any other product which doesn't involve a caloric deficit created though nutrition or exercise, the “scam alarm” should go off in your head, and you should always stay away, no matter how compelling the sales pitch.
Furthermore, the companies making fat loss claims would be in hot water with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) if they were investigated and caught because claims for body fat reduction from wraps cannot be supported with scientific evidence.
The FTC as well as numerous state attorney general's offices have already taken action against body wrap companies in the past for false advertising and unsupported claims. Some companies simply had to stop making false claims, others had to pay stiff fines as well. The problem, from a legal and ethical standpoint, is the claim being made. Remember, "inches" and "fat" are not the same thing.
Some types of wraps can definitely take off inches (for example, they might reduce the circumference measurement of your waist, hips, arms and legs), but it's not fat, its water weight and fluid, and the results are temporary.
Suppose this claim is made in an advertisement:
* Lose Up To 15 inches in 1 Hour! *
This is legal advertising because the claim "lose inches" might be supportable (if enough circumference measurements are taken with a tape measure at enough sites, that might add up to a total of 15 inches in circumference loss)
However I believe that these types of claims are misleading (and probably intentionally so), because "inches" is not the same as body fat but the product vendors know that you might easily confuse "inches" with "fat."
Contrast that claim with this one:
* Lose Body Fat without diet or exercise in 1 Hour!*
That claim is totally false and scientifically unsupportable.
Again, body wraps cannot burn fat or "shrink fat cells."
If fat loss could be achieved with body wraps, it would be very easy to test and prove.
Body composition (body fat) testing (rather than measurements of inches) could be performed before and after the wrap, and the answer ("does it work") would become easily exposed.
Since it doesn't work, you won't find any wrap people accepting your challenge to allow you to do independent body composition testing, nor will you find a shred of scientific evidence showing reduction of bodyfat from wraps.
Unfortunately, bogus fat loss claims are still quite widespread, as a simple Internet search for "body wrap" will demonstrate. The most frequently used claims however, are for loss of "inches."
The inches lost simply come from loss of fluid. And guess what - those inches (and or water weight) will come right back in days if not hours, as soon as you completely re-hydrate yourself.
Other claims made for body wraps include detoxification, improved circulation and tighter, smoother and clearer skin. Most health and fitness researchers, as well as government agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will tell you that these claims are "debatable" and mostly anecdotal.
Some experts even warn that certain types of wraps can be dangerous, mainly due to the rapid and excessive fluid loss/dehydration.
If you want to get wrapped because you find it relaxing or you consider it a "spa-like" treatment, that's one thing. Just remember, wraps have absolutely nothing to do with fat loss.
I'd suggest completely avoiding any companies that advertise fat loss when it's only water and inches you're losing, because a dishonest company is one you don't want to patronize at all.
One last thing – this is a timely subject because although "body wraps" have been around for ages and it's old news, I noticed that infomercials for "waist belts" or “sauna wraps” are back on TV in force and I see that they are replaying the ads over and over again, which means people are buying it.
Everything I just said about body wraps also applies to those rubber waist belts too.
On a web search I just did for those rubber belt waist wraps, I noticed some of the websites are STILL making claims like "Melt fat" (totally bogus, unsupported and illegal claim).
Other sites seem to be wary of the FTC paying them a visit, so they do a whole song and dance around the legal issues by saying stuff like, "sweat away inches," "therapeutic heat", "target your problem areas" and so on. Even if these claims are not illegal, the promotions are still deceptive…
The professional fitness model is pictured taking off the rubber belt, revealing ripped six pack abs below... as if those abs are a result of wearing the belt! Wishful thinking! These are professional models, folks. They got the abs the same way everyone else with abs got them - with a calorie deficit from a combination of strict diet and hard training!
Wraps and waist belt products might take off some inches or water weight, but they can’t take off a single ounce of fat. Buyer beware.
Programs like Burn The Fat, Feed The Muscle are focused on FAT LOSS, not water loss or loss of inches. When body fat decreases, circumferences in inches will also decrease, but "fat" lost and "inches" lost are not one in the same.
About the Author:
Tom Venuto is a lifetime natural bodybuilder, an NSCA-certified personal trainer (CPT), certified strength & conditioning specialist (CSCS), and author of the #1 best-selling e-book, "Burn the Fat, Feed The Muscle.” Tom has written hundreds of articles and has been featured in print magazines such as IRONMAN, Australian IRONMAN, Natural Bodybuilding, Muscular Development, Exercise for Men and Men’s Exercise, as well as on hundreds of websites worldwide. For information on Tom's Fat Loss program, visit: www.BurnTheFat.com. To learn more about Tom's Fat Loss Support Community, visit: www.burnthefatinnercircle.com
The Low Body Fat Secret Of Bodybuilders And Fitness Models
By Tom Venuto, NSCA-CPT, CSCS
www.BurnTheFat.com
The secret to getting super lean – I’m talking about being RIPPED, not just “average body fat” – is all about mastering the art of "peaking." Most people do not have a clue about what it takes to reach the type of low body fat levels that reveal ripped six-pack abs, muscle striations, vascularity and extreme muscular definition, so they go about it completely the wrong way.
Here’s a case in point: One of my newsletter subscribers recently sent me this question:
Tom, on your www.burnthefat.com website, you wrote:
‘Who better to model than bodybuilders and fitness competitors? No athletes in the world get as lean as quickly as bodybuilders and fitness competitors. The transformations they undergo in 12 weeks prior to competition would boggle your mind! Only ultra-endurance athletes come close in terms of low body fat levels, but endurance athletes like triathaletes and marathoners often get lean at the expense of chewing up all their muscle. Some of them are nothing but skin and bone.’
"There seems to be a contradiction unless I'm missing something. Why do bodybuilders and fitness competitors have to go through a 12 week 'transformation' prior to every event instead of staying 'lean and mean' all the time? If they practice the secrets exposed in your book, they should be staying in shape all the time instead of having to work at losing fat prior to every competitive event, correct?"
There is a logical explanation for why bodybuilders and other physique athletes (fitness and figure competitors), don’t remain completely ripped all year round, and it’s the very reason they are able to get so ripped on the day of a contest…
You can’t hold a peak forever or it’s not a "peak", right? What is the definition of a peak? It’s a high point surrounded by two lower points isn’t it?
Therefore, any shape you can stay in all year round is NOT your “peak” condition.
The intelligent approach to nutrition and training (which almost all bodybuilders and fitness/figure competitors use), is to train and diet in a seasonal or cyclical fashion and build up to a peak, then ease off to a maintenance or growth phase.
I am NOT talking about bulking up and getting fat and out of shape every year, then dieting it all off every year. What I’m talking about is going from good shape to great (peak) shape, then easing back off to good shape.... but never getting "out of shape." Makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it?
Here’s an example: I have no intentions whatsoever of walking around 365 days a year at 4% body fat like I appear in the photo on my website. Off-season, when I'm not competing, my body fat is usually between 8 – 10%. Mind you, that’s very lean and still single digit body fat.
I don't stray too far from competition shape, but I don't maintain contest shape all the time. It takes me 12-14 weeks or so to gradually drop from 9.5% to 3.5%-4.0% body fat to "peak" for competition with NO loss of lean body mass...using the same techniques I reveal in my e-book.
It would be almost impossible to maintain 4% body fat, and even if I could, why would I want to? For the few weeks prior to competition I’m so depleted, ripped, and even “drawn” in the face, that complete strangers walk up and offer to feed me.
Okay, so I’m just kidding about that, but let’s just say being “being ripped to shreds” isn’t a desirable condition to maintain because it takes such a monumental effort to stay there. It’s probably not even healthy to try forcing yourself to hold extreme low body fat. Unless you’re a natural “ectomorph” (skinny, fast metabolism body type), your body will fight you. Not only that, anabolic hormones may drop and sometimes your immune system is affected as well. It’s just not “normal” to walk around all the time with literally no subcutaneous body fat.
Instead of attempting to hold the peak, I cycle back into a less demanding off-season program and avoid creeping beyond 9.9% body fat. Some years I’ve stayed leaner - like 6-7%, (which takes effort), especially when I knew I would be photographed, but I don’t let my body fat go over 10%.
This practice isn’t just restricted to bodybuilders. Athletes in all sports use periodization to build themselves up to their best shape for competition. Is a pro football player in the same condition in March-April as he is in August-September? Not a chance. Many show up fat and out of shape (relatively speaking) for training camp, others just need fine tuning, but none are in peak form... that’s why they have training camp!!!
There’s another reason you wouldn’t want to maintain a “ripped to shreds” physique all year round – you’d have to be dieting (calorie restricted) all the time. And this is one of the reasons that 95% of people can’t lose weight and keep it off --they are CHRONIC dieters... always on some type of diet. Know anyone like that?
You can’t stay on restricted low calories indefinitely. Sooner or later your metabolism slows down and you plateau as your body adapts to the chronically lowered food intake. But if you diet for fat loss and push incredibly hard for 3 months, then ease off for a while and eat a little more (healthy food, not "pigging out"), your metabolic rate is re-stimulated. In a few weeks or months, you can return to another fat loss phase and reach an even lower body fat level, until you finally reach the point that’s your happy maintenance level for life – a level that is healthy and realistic – as well as visually appealing.
Bodybuilders have discovered a methodology for losing fat that’s so effective, it puts them in complete control of their body composition. They’ve mastered this area of their lives and will never have to worry about it again. If they ever “slip” and fall off the wagon like all humans do at times … no problem! They know how to get back into shape fast.
Bodybuilders have the tools and knowledge to hold a low body fat all year round (such as 9% for men, or about 15% for women), and then at a whim, to reach a temporary “peak” of extremely low body fat for the purpose of competition. Maybe most important of all, they have the power and control to slowly ease back from peak shape into maintenance, and not balloon up and yo-yo like most conventional dieters!
What if you had the power to stay lean all year round, and then get super lean when summer rolled around, or when you took your vacation to the Caribbean, or when your wedding date was coming up? Wouldn’t you like to be in control of your body like that? Isn’t that the same thing that bodybuilders and fitness/figure competitors do, only on a more practical, real-world level?
So even if you have no competitive aspirations whatsoever, don’t you agree that there’s something of value everyone could learn from physique athletes? Don’t model yourself after the huge crowd of losers who gobble diet pills, buy exercise gimmicks and suffer through starvation diets like automatons, only to gain back everything they lost! Instead, learn from the leanest athletes on Earth - natural bodybuilders and fitness competitors…
These physique athletes get as ripped as they want to be, exactly when they want to, simply by manipulating their diets in a cyclical fashion between pre-contest "cutting" programs and off season "maintenance" or "muscle growth" programs. Even if you have no desire to ever compete, try this seasonal “peaking” approach yourself and you’ll see that it can work as well for you as it does for elite bodybuilders.
If you’re interested in learning even more secrets of bodybuilders and fitness models, visit the Burn The Fat website at: www.burnthefat.com
About the Author:
Tom Venuto is a lifetime natural bodybuilder, an NSCA-certified personal trainer (CPT) and a certified strength & conditioning specialist (CSCS). Tom is the author of the #1 best-selling e-book, "Burn the Fat, Feed The Muscle,” which teaches you how to get lean without drugs or supplements using the secrets of the world's best bodybuilders and fitness models. Learn how to get rid of stubborn body fat and increase your metabolism by visiting: www.burnthefat.com .
www.BurnTheFat.com
The secret to getting super lean – I’m talking about being RIPPED, not just “average body fat” – is all about mastering the art of "peaking." Most people do not have a clue about what it takes to reach the type of low body fat levels that reveal ripped six-pack abs, muscle striations, vascularity and extreme muscular definition, so they go about it completely the wrong way.
Here’s a case in point: One of my newsletter subscribers recently sent me this question:
Tom, on your www.burnthefat.com website, you wrote:
‘Who better to model than bodybuilders and fitness competitors? No athletes in the world get as lean as quickly as bodybuilders and fitness competitors. The transformations they undergo in 12 weeks prior to competition would boggle your mind! Only ultra-endurance athletes come close in terms of low body fat levels, but endurance athletes like triathaletes and marathoners often get lean at the expense of chewing up all their muscle. Some of them are nothing but skin and bone.’
"There seems to be a contradiction unless I'm missing something. Why do bodybuilders and fitness competitors have to go through a 12 week 'transformation' prior to every event instead of staying 'lean and mean' all the time? If they practice the secrets exposed in your book, they should be staying in shape all the time instead of having to work at losing fat prior to every competitive event, correct?"
There is a logical explanation for why bodybuilders and other physique athletes (fitness and figure competitors), don’t remain completely ripped all year round, and it’s the very reason they are able to get so ripped on the day of a contest…
You can’t hold a peak forever or it’s not a "peak", right? What is the definition of a peak? It’s a high point surrounded by two lower points isn’t it?
Therefore, any shape you can stay in all year round is NOT your “peak” condition.
The intelligent approach to nutrition and training (which almost all bodybuilders and fitness/figure competitors use), is to train and diet in a seasonal or cyclical fashion and build up to a peak, then ease off to a maintenance or growth phase.
I am NOT talking about bulking up and getting fat and out of shape every year, then dieting it all off every year. What I’m talking about is going from good shape to great (peak) shape, then easing back off to good shape.... but never getting "out of shape." Makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it?
Here’s an example: I have no intentions whatsoever of walking around 365 days a year at 4% body fat like I appear in the photo on my website. Off-season, when I'm not competing, my body fat is usually between 8 – 10%. Mind you, that’s very lean and still single digit body fat.
I don't stray too far from competition shape, but I don't maintain contest shape all the time. It takes me 12-14 weeks or so to gradually drop from 9.5% to 3.5%-4.0% body fat to "peak" for competition with NO loss of lean body mass...using the same techniques I reveal in my e-book.
It would be almost impossible to maintain 4% body fat, and even if I could, why would I want to? For the few weeks prior to competition I’m so depleted, ripped, and even “drawn” in the face, that complete strangers walk up and offer to feed me.
Okay, so I’m just kidding about that, but let’s just say being “being ripped to shreds” isn’t a desirable condition to maintain because it takes such a monumental effort to stay there. It’s probably not even healthy to try forcing yourself to hold extreme low body fat. Unless you’re a natural “ectomorph” (skinny, fast metabolism body type), your body will fight you. Not only that, anabolic hormones may drop and sometimes your immune system is affected as well. It’s just not “normal” to walk around all the time with literally no subcutaneous body fat.
Instead of attempting to hold the peak, I cycle back into a less demanding off-season program and avoid creeping beyond 9.9% body fat. Some years I’ve stayed leaner - like 6-7%, (which takes effort), especially when I knew I would be photographed, but I don’t let my body fat go over 10%.
This practice isn’t just restricted to bodybuilders. Athletes in all sports use periodization to build themselves up to their best shape for competition. Is a pro football player in the same condition in March-April as he is in August-September? Not a chance. Many show up fat and out of shape (relatively speaking) for training camp, others just need fine tuning, but none are in peak form... that’s why they have training camp!!!
There’s another reason you wouldn’t want to maintain a “ripped to shreds” physique all year round – you’d have to be dieting (calorie restricted) all the time. And this is one of the reasons that 95% of people can’t lose weight and keep it off --they are CHRONIC dieters... always on some type of diet. Know anyone like that?
You can’t stay on restricted low calories indefinitely. Sooner or later your metabolism slows down and you plateau as your body adapts to the chronically lowered food intake. But if you diet for fat loss and push incredibly hard for 3 months, then ease off for a while and eat a little more (healthy food, not "pigging out"), your metabolic rate is re-stimulated. In a few weeks or months, you can return to another fat loss phase and reach an even lower body fat level, until you finally reach the point that’s your happy maintenance level for life – a level that is healthy and realistic – as well as visually appealing.
Bodybuilders have discovered a methodology for losing fat that’s so effective, it puts them in complete control of their body composition. They’ve mastered this area of their lives and will never have to worry about it again. If they ever “slip” and fall off the wagon like all humans do at times … no problem! They know how to get back into shape fast.
Bodybuilders have the tools and knowledge to hold a low body fat all year round (such as 9% for men, or about 15% for women), and then at a whim, to reach a temporary “peak” of extremely low body fat for the purpose of competition. Maybe most important of all, they have the power and control to slowly ease back from peak shape into maintenance, and not balloon up and yo-yo like most conventional dieters!
What if you had the power to stay lean all year round, and then get super lean when summer rolled around, or when you took your vacation to the Caribbean, or when your wedding date was coming up? Wouldn’t you like to be in control of your body like that? Isn’t that the same thing that bodybuilders and fitness/figure competitors do, only on a more practical, real-world level?
So even if you have no competitive aspirations whatsoever, don’t you agree that there’s something of value everyone could learn from physique athletes? Don’t model yourself after the huge crowd of losers who gobble diet pills, buy exercise gimmicks and suffer through starvation diets like automatons, only to gain back everything they lost! Instead, learn from the leanest athletes on Earth - natural bodybuilders and fitness competitors…
These physique athletes get as ripped as they want to be, exactly when they want to, simply by manipulating their diets in a cyclical fashion between pre-contest "cutting" programs and off season "maintenance" or "muscle growth" programs. Even if you have no desire to ever compete, try this seasonal “peaking” approach yourself and you’ll see that it can work as well for you as it does for elite bodybuilders.
If you’re interested in learning even more secrets of bodybuilders and fitness models, visit the Burn The Fat website at: www.burnthefat.com
About the Author:
Tom Venuto is a lifetime natural bodybuilder, an NSCA-certified personal trainer (CPT) and a certified strength & conditioning specialist (CSCS). Tom is the author of the #1 best-selling e-book, "Burn the Fat, Feed The Muscle,” which teaches you how to get lean without drugs or supplements using the secrets of the world's best bodybuilders and fitness models. Learn how to get rid of stubborn body fat and increase your metabolism by visiting: www.burnthefat.com .
Who Else Wants To Burn Off Body Fat And Turbo-Charge Their Metabolism?
Tens of thousands of men and women in more than 130 countries are now enjoying the lean and muscular bodies they never believed they could have. The best part is, they did it without drugs, supplements or starvation diets, and without messing up their metabolisms…
How did they do it? They used a scientifically-proven and real-world tested program that’s been sweeping the Internet called, Burn The Fat, Feed The Muscle ("Burn The Fat" For short
What Makes This Fat Burning Breakthrough So Exciting is That it Gives You The Power To...
* Lose fat permanently. It's a fact - 95% of the people who go on conventional diets gain all the weight back and sometimes they end up fatter than when they started. Burn The Fat teaches you how to be in the successful 5% group that keeps fat off forever.
* Lose body fat without wrecking your metabolism. If you've ever started a diet, then smashed into the dreaded "fat loss plateau," it's probably because you cannibalized your own muscle and slowed down your metabolism. The Burn The Fat system teaches you the only way to prevent your metabolism from crashing when you diet and what to do if you think you’ve already damaged your metabolism
* Lose fat without drugs. Steroids or fat burning drugs can work, but the results are temporary and the side effects are nasty. The tiny handful of natural bodybuilders who have learned how to use training and nutrition science to alter body composition without drugs are the only people in the world who keep their fat loss and muscle gains permanently. You will learn these fat burning secrets from a natural bodybuilding champion who knows from real-world experience exactly how it's done and has been teaching “regular people” how to do it for more than 17 years.
* Lose fat without supplements. 97% of all supplements are a total waste of money! You are being lied to and ripped off by profit-hungry companies that don't give a rat's turd about your health and well-being. If you want to learn the ugly truth about the $13 billion per year supplement industry, and the $40 billion per year weight loss industry, then read every word of this report because it could save you thousands of your hard-earned dollars!
Introducing The World’s First Complete Fat Burning System Based on The Secret Techniques of The World's Best Bodybuilders and Fitness Models
"Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle" (BFFM) is a 340 page fat burning success manual in e-book format, jam-packed cover to cover with all the fat loss methods previously known by only by an elite group of top fitness models and bodybuilders.
All around the world, thousands of people are calling Burn The Fat their “Fat Loss Bible” because in one place, you now have all the information you'll ever need to help you melt away body fat permanently without losing muscle and without using risky and dangerous drugs or expensive and unnecessary supplements.
Here's just a small sample of what you'll learn when you Get your copy of Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle today:
* Fat burning nutrition secrets to break through any fat loss plateau - even if you have bad genetics, a slow metabolism or you’ve been stuck at the same weight for years! 10 fool-proof methods that work like magic every time.
* The top twelve worst foods you should never eat
* The top twelve best foods you should eat all the time
* How to crank up your metabolism and turn your body into a food-incinerating, fat-melting human blast furnace! Easy metabolism-boosting techniques revealed!
* The #1 reason why most people can't drop the last 10 -20 lbs of ab flab and how you can lose it with ease...and (if you want to), go even further and get hyper-ripped and rock-hard like a bodybuilder or fitness model
* Which body type classification you are and how to eat right for your body type (if you're eating wrong for your body type you can forget about losing any body fat no matter how hard you train or how strictly you diet)
* How to boost your energy levels higher than you ever thought possible - almost instantly! (you'll notice the difference the very first day)
* The #1 most effective way to burn body fat ever (If you could only make one change to your current diet program, this would be it!)
* Dozens of the best-kept fat loss secrets of bodybuilders and fitness models that almost NOBODY knows about...compiled by a 14-year, rare study of the most "ripped"athletes on earth
* The three critical factors that determine whether you'll lose muscle while dieting...and how the slightest nutritional "tweak" can guarantee you keep every ounce of precious lean body mass while you're dieting
* 7 strategies to make sure your body never goes into "starvation mode" and the one thing you must do immediately if you suspect it's already happened to you
* What to do when you've tried everything and the stubborn fat still won't come off (this is one of the little-known tactics bodybuilders and fitness models use in the final weeks before competitions)
* Why you don’t need supplements (they’re totally optional), and why you'll never get the whole truth about “fat burner” supplements from any magazine (Even if they wanted to tell you, there’s a reason why they CAN'T!)
* Why you will almost ALWAYS fail to keep the fat off permanently if you use a conventional low carbohydrate diet - If you've failed on low carb diets before (especially diets that put you in ketosis), this is the reason why!
* How a "unique new spin" on the old low carb diet can increase your rate of fat loss to the maximum possible without muscle loss or metabolic downgrade
* Fat-slashing cardio routines and the truth about how much cardio you REALLY need to lose body fat and when you should do it for maximum impact
* Not one, but FOUR weight training programs designed to fit your schedule and experience level - plus a "conservative" routine for "time-crunched" people who can't train as often as they'd like to - YOU pick the routine you want; its all mapped out for you day by day
* The psychology of permanent fat loss...Goal setting and motivation tactics that program your subconscious mind for massive success...Follow this "secret mental training formula" and you'll be practically "hypnotized" into eating properly and working out consistently!
And that is just the beginning! Burn the Fat Feed the Muscle is so much more than just an "e-book" - it's a complete fat burning SYSTEM for sure-fire success.
In fact, this is quite possibly the most comprehensive program for fat loss ever developed because it covers fat burning nutrition, fat burning cardio training, fat burning weight training, as well as the fat burning psychology and motivation techniques that none of the other trainers or nutritionists teach ever you!
This is Not A “Diet” – It’s A Lifestyle Change
There are NO gimmicks in this program - there are no supplements or pills to buy and no hidden agendas - just the FACTS you need to know to get a lean body now. It’s great news that someone has finally released an effective fat burning program based on the truth, but this also means that you have to ask if this is the right program for you:
Anyone who is not willing to exercise and work hard, anyone who is not willing to be disciplined about what they eat, anyone looking for a quick fix solution to fat loss, anyone who wants “overnight results,” anyone looking for a "magic bullet" offered by the likes of fat burning pills, diet shakes, or "fat-burning" creams and gels is just not ready for a program like Burn The Fat yet.
On the other hand, if you’re sick of the B.S. and gimmicks in the weight loss industry, if you’re willing to work at it and make a lifestyle change and you know you could be doing a whole lot better with your fat loss results, then you have definitely found the honest and effective fat loss solution you’ve been searching for.
To learn more about the Burn The Fat system and to find out how YOU can start turning your body into a “fat burning machine” today, visit the Burn The Fat Website HERE
Sincerely,
Matt Farron
PS Wait until you see the testimonials and success stories! Last time we checked, there were 42 pages of success stories – hundreds of them - which proves this method works – and it works for almost anyone! It works for men as well as women. It works if you’re 21 or 61… whether you have 10 lbs to lose or 100 lbs. Whatever your goals, it doesn’t matter. Other people have done it and so can you. See for yourself and learn more by visiting the burn the fat site today:
How did they do it? They used a scientifically-proven and real-world tested program that’s been sweeping the Internet called, Burn The Fat, Feed The Muscle ("Burn The Fat" For short
What Makes This Fat Burning Breakthrough So Exciting is That it Gives You The Power To...
* Lose fat permanently. It's a fact - 95% of the people who go on conventional diets gain all the weight back and sometimes they end up fatter than when they started. Burn The Fat teaches you how to be in the successful 5% group that keeps fat off forever.
* Lose body fat without wrecking your metabolism. If you've ever started a diet, then smashed into the dreaded "fat loss plateau," it's probably because you cannibalized your own muscle and slowed down your metabolism. The Burn The Fat system teaches you the only way to prevent your metabolism from crashing when you diet and what to do if you think you’ve already damaged your metabolism
* Lose fat without drugs. Steroids or fat burning drugs can work, but the results are temporary and the side effects are nasty. The tiny handful of natural bodybuilders who have learned how to use training and nutrition science to alter body composition without drugs are the only people in the world who keep their fat loss and muscle gains permanently. You will learn these fat burning secrets from a natural bodybuilding champion who knows from real-world experience exactly how it's done and has been teaching “regular people” how to do it for more than 17 years.
* Lose fat without supplements. 97% of all supplements are a total waste of money! You are being lied to and ripped off by profit-hungry companies that don't give a rat's turd about your health and well-being. If you want to learn the ugly truth about the $13 billion per year supplement industry, and the $40 billion per year weight loss industry, then read every word of this report because it could save you thousands of your hard-earned dollars!
Introducing The World’s First Complete Fat Burning System Based on The Secret Techniques of The World's Best Bodybuilders and Fitness Models
"Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle" (BFFM) is a 340 page fat burning success manual in e-book format, jam-packed cover to cover with all the fat loss methods previously known by only by an elite group of top fitness models and bodybuilders.
All around the world, thousands of people are calling Burn The Fat their “Fat Loss Bible” because in one place, you now have all the information you'll ever need to help you melt away body fat permanently without losing muscle and without using risky and dangerous drugs or expensive and unnecessary supplements.
Here's just a small sample of what you'll learn when you Get your copy of Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle today:
* Fat burning nutrition secrets to break through any fat loss plateau - even if you have bad genetics, a slow metabolism or you’ve been stuck at the same weight for years! 10 fool-proof methods that work like magic every time.
* The top twelve worst foods you should never eat
* The top twelve best foods you should eat all the time
* How to crank up your metabolism and turn your body into a food-incinerating, fat-melting human blast furnace! Easy metabolism-boosting techniques revealed!
* The #1 reason why most people can't drop the last 10 -20 lbs of ab flab and how you can lose it with ease...and (if you want to), go even further and get hyper-ripped and rock-hard like a bodybuilder or fitness model
* Which body type classification you are and how to eat right for your body type (if you're eating wrong for your body type you can forget about losing any body fat no matter how hard you train or how strictly you diet)
* How to boost your energy levels higher than you ever thought possible - almost instantly! (you'll notice the difference the very first day)
* The #1 most effective way to burn body fat ever (If you could only make one change to your current diet program, this would be it!)
* Dozens of the best-kept fat loss secrets of bodybuilders and fitness models that almost NOBODY knows about...compiled by a 14-year, rare study of the most "ripped"athletes on earth
* The three critical factors that determine whether you'll lose muscle while dieting...and how the slightest nutritional "tweak" can guarantee you keep every ounce of precious lean body mass while you're dieting
* 7 strategies to make sure your body never goes into "starvation mode" and the one thing you must do immediately if you suspect it's already happened to you
* What to do when you've tried everything and the stubborn fat still won't come off (this is one of the little-known tactics bodybuilders and fitness models use in the final weeks before competitions)
* Why you don’t need supplements (they’re totally optional), and why you'll never get the whole truth about “fat burner” supplements from any magazine (Even if they wanted to tell you, there’s a reason why they CAN'T!)
* Why you will almost ALWAYS fail to keep the fat off permanently if you use a conventional low carbohydrate diet - If you've failed on low carb diets before (especially diets that put you in ketosis), this is the reason why!
* How a "unique new spin" on the old low carb diet can increase your rate of fat loss to the maximum possible without muscle loss or metabolic downgrade
* Fat-slashing cardio routines and the truth about how much cardio you REALLY need to lose body fat and when you should do it for maximum impact
* Not one, but FOUR weight training programs designed to fit your schedule and experience level - plus a "conservative" routine for "time-crunched" people who can't train as often as they'd like to - YOU pick the routine you want; its all mapped out for you day by day
* The psychology of permanent fat loss...Goal setting and motivation tactics that program your subconscious mind for massive success...Follow this "secret mental training formula" and you'll be practically "hypnotized" into eating properly and working out consistently!
And that is just the beginning! Burn the Fat Feed the Muscle is so much more than just an "e-book" - it's a complete fat burning SYSTEM for sure-fire success.
In fact, this is quite possibly the most comprehensive program for fat loss ever developed because it covers fat burning nutrition, fat burning cardio training, fat burning weight training, as well as the fat burning psychology and motivation techniques that none of the other trainers or nutritionists teach ever you!
This is Not A “Diet” – It’s A Lifestyle Change
There are NO gimmicks in this program - there are no supplements or pills to buy and no hidden agendas - just the FACTS you need to know to get a lean body now. It’s great news that someone has finally released an effective fat burning program based on the truth, but this also means that you have to ask if this is the right program for you:
Anyone who is not willing to exercise and work hard, anyone who is not willing to be disciplined about what they eat, anyone looking for a quick fix solution to fat loss, anyone who wants “overnight results,” anyone looking for a "magic bullet" offered by the likes of fat burning pills, diet shakes, or "fat-burning" creams and gels is just not ready for a program like Burn The Fat yet.
On the other hand, if you’re sick of the B.S. and gimmicks in the weight loss industry, if you’re willing to work at it and make a lifestyle change and you know you could be doing a whole lot better with your fat loss results, then you have definitely found the honest and effective fat loss solution you’ve been searching for.
To learn more about the Burn The Fat system and to find out how YOU can start turning your body into a “fat burning machine” today, visit the Burn The Fat Website HERE
Sincerely,
Matt Farron
PS Wait until you see the testimonials and success stories! Last time we checked, there were 42 pages of success stories – hundreds of them - which proves this method works – and it works for almost anyone! It works for men as well as women. It works if you’re 21 or 61… whether you have 10 lbs to lose or 100 lbs. Whatever your goals, it doesn’t matter. Other people have done it and so can you. See for yourself and learn more by visiting the burn the fat site today:
Online Weight Loss Programs
By Jimmy Sturo
Weight loss programs are increasingly being promoted over the Internet. Jenny Craig, E-diets and Weight Watchers offer some of the popular online programs. Websites provide dieters with resources to develop their own nutritional and exercise plans to facilitate weight loss. Ease of access enables more participation in these programs. These sites also offer personal trainers that offer customized plans for the dieters. They also keep a track of their weights as their plan progresses. They mostly offer balanced diet-non-fad plans, low GI diets, vegetarian diets, low cholesterol diets and others as advised by the trainer. Such sites include exhaustive diet plans and information on different exercises that can be undertaken to attain weight loss.
It is advisable to consider only those online programs that have a track record of proven and guaranteed results. A majority of these online weight loss programs are to be paid for and hence the user must ensure quality before spending money on them. Ideally online weight loss programs should have personal guidance as one of their aspects of support. Lack of proper guidance often results in blocks or impediments in the process of weight loss.
Some sites also conduct regular offline meetings for the purpose of assessment, guidance and support. These can be once a month or once a week as per the schedule given by the counselor. Such meetings lend a social touch to the otherwise personal issue of weight loss. The meetings are very useful for behavior counseling and procurement of further guidance to fine-tune programs to suit dieters in the best possible manner. Some sites also allow contacting counselors to discuss a problem, which is a definite advantage. Another feature may be the provision of an online store for purchasing carefully balanced food items.
Weight Loss Programs provides detailed information on Weight Loss Programs, Best Weight Loss Programs, Free Weight Loss Programs, Online Weight Loss Programs and more. Weight Loss Programs is affiliated with Weight Loss Diet Pills.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Jimmy_Sturo
Sky Rocket Your Fat Loss Success Today!
Weight loss programs are increasingly being promoted over the Internet. Jenny Craig, E-diets and Weight Watchers offer some of the popular online programs. Websites provide dieters with resources to develop their own nutritional and exercise plans to facilitate weight loss. Ease of access enables more participation in these programs. These sites also offer personal trainers that offer customized plans for the dieters. They also keep a track of their weights as their plan progresses. They mostly offer balanced diet-non-fad plans, low GI diets, vegetarian diets, low cholesterol diets and others as advised by the trainer. Such sites include exhaustive diet plans and information on different exercises that can be undertaken to attain weight loss.
It is advisable to consider only those online programs that have a track record of proven and guaranteed results. A majority of these online weight loss programs are to be paid for and hence the user must ensure quality before spending money on them. Ideally online weight loss programs should have personal guidance as one of their aspects of support. Lack of proper guidance often results in blocks or impediments in the process of weight loss.
Some sites also conduct regular offline meetings for the purpose of assessment, guidance and support. These can be once a month or once a week as per the schedule given by the counselor. Such meetings lend a social touch to the otherwise personal issue of weight loss. The meetings are very useful for behavior counseling and procurement of further guidance to fine-tune programs to suit dieters in the best possible manner. Some sites also allow contacting counselors to discuss a problem, which is a definite advantage. Another feature may be the provision of an online store for purchasing carefully balanced food items.
Weight Loss Programs provides detailed information on Weight Loss Programs, Best Weight Loss Programs, Free Weight Loss Programs, Online Weight Loss Programs and more. Weight Loss Programs is affiliated with Weight Loss Diet Pills.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Jimmy_Sturo
Sky Rocket Your Fat Loss Success Today!
5 of the Best Weight Loss Tips for Long-Term Success
By Linda J Bruton
If you've decided that you need to lose weight, it is important to devise a plan that you will follow long-term. Long-term weight loss should not be a plan that you follow a few months, then you go back to eating the same way that got you overweight in the first place! It is important to your long-term success that you make permanent lifestyle changes in both your diet and daily exercise. Here are 5 of the best weight loss tips to help you achieve your goals:
1. Always eat breakfast.
How many times did your hear your mother say this is the most important meal of the day? She was right! By ensuring that you have a balanced and nutritious breakfast each morning you are helping to give your metabolism a kick start. Not only will you no longer be tempted by sugary snacks half way through the morning but the calories you consume will burn off a lot faster.
2. Don't skip meals.
As long as you eat your meals at regular intervals then your metabolism will improve even more. On top of that, you won't be as tempted to eat unhealthy snacks because you are hungry. Many health professionals now recommend eating 5-6 smaller meals a day. Eating every couple of hours will keep you from ever feeling hungry, will aid your digestion, and will keep your metabolism working at top speed.
3. Take your time.
Actually sit down for your meals, take your time, and savor each mouthful. Unlike our ancestors, most people in the Western world are eating far too much and eating it far too quickly. By slowing down the rate at which you eat your food you will give your body time to signal you that it is full. You will find that this often happens with smaller portions if you take the time to eat slowly and chew thoroughly.
4. Take control of your portion sizes.
It is important that with any meal the amount of food on your plate should be no larger than your two fists. So if you go out to a restaurant for a meal either order smaller portions, if possible, or take half your food home for another meal. Restaurants are notorious for serving portion sizes that are much too large for the average adult!
5. Get Active.
A great way of getting active without having to go to the gym each day is just by changing your daily routine. For example, if you go to work on the bus then get off a couple of stops earlier and walk the rest of the way. If you work in an office that has elevators, then why not use the stairs a few times a day? It is fairly simple to add more walking to your life, and the benefits are many.
These ideas are very simple, but they are some of the best weight loss tips you'll find. And you'll find them even easier to implement!
An effective weight loss program does not have to mean deprivation or back-breaking exercise routines. To discover simple strategies for lasting weight loss and a free book of delicious recipes, be sure to check out my Painless Weight Loss Tips blog at: http://www.painless-weight-loss.com/
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Linda_J_Bruton
Download Your Free Report to 'Sky Rocket Your Fat Loss Success' Here!
If you've decided that you need to lose weight, it is important to devise a plan that you will follow long-term. Long-term weight loss should not be a plan that you follow a few months, then you go back to eating the same way that got you overweight in the first place! It is important to your long-term success that you make permanent lifestyle changes in both your diet and daily exercise. Here are 5 of the best weight loss tips to help you achieve your goals:
1. Always eat breakfast.
How many times did your hear your mother say this is the most important meal of the day? She was right! By ensuring that you have a balanced and nutritious breakfast each morning you are helping to give your metabolism a kick start. Not only will you no longer be tempted by sugary snacks half way through the morning but the calories you consume will burn off a lot faster.
2. Don't skip meals.
As long as you eat your meals at regular intervals then your metabolism will improve even more. On top of that, you won't be as tempted to eat unhealthy snacks because you are hungry. Many health professionals now recommend eating 5-6 smaller meals a day. Eating every couple of hours will keep you from ever feeling hungry, will aid your digestion, and will keep your metabolism working at top speed.
3. Take your time.
Actually sit down for your meals, take your time, and savor each mouthful. Unlike our ancestors, most people in the Western world are eating far too much and eating it far too quickly. By slowing down the rate at which you eat your food you will give your body time to signal you that it is full. You will find that this often happens with smaller portions if you take the time to eat slowly and chew thoroughly.
4. Take control of your portion sizes.
It is important that with any meal the amount of food on your plate should be no larger than your two fists. So if you go out to a restaurant for a meal either order smaller portions, if possible, or take half your food home for another meal. Restaurants are notorious for serving portion sizes that are much too large for the average adult!
5. Get Active.
A great way of getting active without having to go to the gym each day is just by changing your daily routine. For example, if you go to work on the bus then get off a couple of stops earlier and walk the rest of the way. If you work in an office that has elevators, then why not use the stairs a few times a day? It is fairly simple to add more walking to your life, and the benefits are many.
These ideas are very simple, but they are some of the best weight loss tips you'll find. And you'll find them even easier to implement!
An effective weight loss program does not have to mean deprivation or back-breaking exercise routines. To discover simple strategies for lasting weight loss and a free book of delicious recipes, be sure to check out my Painless Weight Loss Tips blog at: http://www.painless-weight-loss.com/
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Linda_J_Bruton
Download Your Free Report to 'Sky Rocket Your Fat Loss Success' Here!
The Best Weight Loss Program
By Donovan Baldwin
WHAT THE BEST WEIGHT LOSS PROGRAM IS NOT.
The best weight loss program is NOT about diets, diet pills, fad diets, or even dieting. While it involves physical activity...we're all adults here, I'll use the word..exercise...it is NOT about pushing your physical limits, embarrassing yourself in front of the neighbors, joining an expensive gym, or hiring a personal trainer. It is NOT about joining a cult, avoiding friends, alienating your family, eating only disgusting, unappealing and unappetizing foods or feeling guilty and depressed. Most of all, it should NEVER be about BEING ALONE in your struggle.
WHAT THE BEST WEIGHT LOSS PROGRAM IS!
In it's simplest form, the best weight loss program is the one you will stick with. Let's modify that a little and say that it is a healthy, doable, rational, flexible program you will stick with...that works!
THE BASIC FACTS ABOUT DIETING AND WEIGHT LOSS!
Diets don't work. Yep! That simple. Oh, if you want to drop 5 or 10 lbs to look good at your sister's wedding, a quick diet might be okay. But if you truly have a weight problem, as over 50% of Americans do, it is a lifelong condition and requires lifelong measures. However, don't consider yourself doomed to a life without pleasure or happiness, and don't give up. Go back and read the first paragraph, and realize that there are things that CAN be done, and YOU CAN DO THEM. In the meantime however, let me just cover a few facts. Quick and dirty. You can scan through them and just get the basics. This article is not going to be big enough, nor intimidating enough, to include everything.
WHY DIETS DON'T WORK.
Diets don't work for a lot of reasons, physical and mental, but I don't have enough space here to cover all of them. If you would like to read more on this, I have a web page at http://nodiet4me.net/10reasons.html that gives 10 reasons why diets don't work, and those aren't the only reasons, either. The main reason a diet will not work is that your body has some really effective self-regulating mechanisms. If you deprive it of it's expected calorie intake over a period of time, it will adjust itself to need less calories. Although you will be eating less (and definitely not enjoying it), your body will settle into a new pattern and your weight will level off with only a small weight loss. Even worse, when you stop dieting, as you know you will, the body will keep its new level of calorie need while you return to your old eating habits. This brings us to another point.
THE BASIC LAW OF WEIGHT LOSS AND WEIGHT GAIN.
Everybody's body works to it's own rhythm and needs, but they all follow the same law. If you take in more calories than your body needs, it will store the excess as fat. Bottom line. Fact. End of discussion...almost. Using the information in the paragraph above, you can see that when you quit your diet and go back to eating the old way after your body has adjusted its needs downward, you now have MORE EXCESS CALORIES TO BE STORED AS FAT! This is why people often GAIN WEIGHT after a diet...or series of diets.
SO WHAT IS THE BEST WEIGHT LOSS PROGRAM?
As you can see, you are back at the beginning of this discussion, but with a little more information. We can still say that the best weight loss program is the one you will stick with, and now you know a little more about why. Since we are all different, the obvious fact should be that what you need to find is not THE best weight loss program, but YOUR best weight loss program...the one YOU will stick with. The biq question in your mind is...
HOW DO YOU FIND "YOUR" BEST WEIGHT LOSS PROGRAM?
There are a lot of things you can do to improve your health, your life, and your personal weight situation, such as drink more water, get plenty of sleep, do things that you enjoy, for example. These can all contribute to weight loss, but let's just look at two things for now.
1. Become more active: Notice, I avoided saying, "exercise". Whoops! I said it. Look, exercise equals activity. If you want to do Richard Simmons' tapes and "Sweat to the Oldies", more power to you. If you choose to buy a Bowflex and in a few months look like the grandmother in their TV commercials, that's great! Odds are however, you just need to make some lifestyle adjustments and become more aware of the opportunities that exist to "exercise" in daily life. Oh sure, a planned and scheduled exercise program is great, but so is a walk, or gardening, or swimming, or cleaning house, or...well, you get the idea. The only need is to make it regular,at least 4 or 5 times a week, and to make it challenging.
Only you can assess what is challenging. What is challenging today may simply be walking out to the mailbox and back. One lady started her "exercise program" with that simple step (no pun intended). Another gentleman started his program by walking to the end of his block. That first day, he thought he wouldn't even be able to get back to his house. A few weeks later, he was walking over a mile. At one point in my life, I regularly ran over 6 miles at a time. However, the first time I ever tried to run, I didn't make it half a block. The key is to get started, do it regularly, and challenge yourself.
Becoming more active not only burns calories during the activity (remember, the more calories burned the less fat stored), but continuing the activity over time (you were going to do it regularly) causes your body to shift to a new level where it automatically burns more calories than it used to. The facts behind this are not complicated but require a lot more space than we have here, and I did say I was going to keep to the basics.
People drop out of "exercise programs" for a lot of reasons. For your purposes, do the activity as it fits in your schedule, pick the activity that pleases you, and vary the activity...if you cleaned house yesterday, take a walk today. By the way, if I told you to exercise, to take a walk, you might begin that avoidance process that makes people drop out of formal, planned exercise programs. Why don't you take the grandkids to the zoo instead? If that isn't a workout, I don't know what is. Be creative. It's your "exercise program", make it what you want it to be.
2. Eat sensibly: You know how you SHOULD be eating, right! Back to basics. Lots of vegetables, cut down on portion sizes, have an apple instead of pie or a candy bar. Take the sugar out of your life. There are all kinds of diet tips running around. Not a single one of them is worth a hill of beans...but a bunch of them add up to a lot more than a hill of beans. Changing only one thing is probably not going to make a big difference, but...IT DOES MAKE A DIFFERENCE! changing seventeen things might make quite a difference, but there's a secret...
Don't try to make all seventeen, or twelve, or thirty changes all at once. Start with one change, and once it is part of your life, make the next one. You might want to learn a little bit about Kaizen. Small steps in the nutrition area will help get you where you want to go eventually, just as taking that small walk out to the mailbox may someday lead to walking one or two miles at a time.
HOW LONG DO I HAVE TO STAY ON THIS WEIGHT LOSS PROGRAM?
Well, for the rest of your life. That's why it is important to choose activities you enjoy and learn to make better nutrition choices while still enjoying the pleasure of eating. Also, many people have weight loss problems because they have personal issues with life. Your personal weight loss program, regular activity plus nutritional common sense, equals a sense of control over a situation that produces many negative affects in your life. A sense of control over that situation allows you to remove many of those negative affects and move on to rearrange other parts of your life that may need attention.
One last point. I have kept this as simple as possible, but it is based on a large body of information. If you truly want to create the most effective weight loss program for you, you will have to learn a lot more than you probably know now. The public library is a good place to start, as is the internet. Be aware, however, that many people will try to entice you with diet pills and lose-weight-quick plans. Stay focused on a lifestyle change that will last all your life. Even if diet pills, fad diets, and things like weight loss belts or devices that supposedly exercise for you do work, their affect is short lived (and sometimes dangerous) and, as was pointed out above, once you quit the pill or the program you may gain back even more weight than you lost.
A FINAL TIP:
Find a weight loss buddy. Share your goals, and the information in this article, with them. Make sure they are on the same wave length. You might want to walk with them, you might want to shop with them, but most of all, if there is no one else who understands what you are going through...they will, and that is worth more than gold.
The author is retired from the Army after 21 years of service, has worked as an accountant, optical lab manager, restaurant manager, and instructor. He has been a member of Mensa for several years, and has written and published poetry, essays, and articles on various subjects for the last 40 years. He developed an interest in health and fitness in the '70s after reading numerous books, including Dr. Kenneth Cooper's "Aerobics". This has led him to continue his personal research into health and fitness for over 30 years, and to pursue course work on health and fitness. He now has an online health supplement store at http://eherbsstore.com. Find more weight loss tips at http://nodiet4me.com.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Donovan_Baldwin
Sky Rocket Your Fat Loss Success Today!
WHAT THE BEST WEIGHT LOSS PROGRAM IS NOT.
The best weight loss program is NOT about diets, diet pills, fad diets, or even dieting. While it involves physical activity...we're all adults here, I'll use the word..exercise...it is NOT about pushing your physical limits, embarrassing yourself in front of the neighbors, joining an expensive gym, or hiring a personal trainer. It is NOT about joining a cult, avoiding friends, alienating your family, eating only disgusting, unappealing and unappetizing foods or feeling guilty and depressed. Most of all, it should NEVER be about BEING ALONE in your struggle.
WHAT THE BEST WEIGHT LOSS PROGRAM IS!
In it's simplest form, the best weight loss program is the one you will stick with. Let's modify that a little and say that it is a healthy, doable, rational, flexible program you will stick with...that works!
THE BASIC FACTS ABOUT DIETING AND WEIGHT LOSS!
Diets don't work. Yep! That simple. Oh, if you want to drop 5 or 10 lbs to look good at your sister's wedding, a quick diet might be okay. But if you truly have a weight problem, as over 50% of Americans do, it is a lifelong condition and requires lifelong measures. However, don't consider yourself doomed to a life without pleasure or happiness, and don't give up. Go back and read the first paragraph, and realize that there are things that CAN be done, and YOU CAN DO THEM. In the meantime however, let me just cover a few facts. Quick and dirty. You can scan through them and just get the basics. This article is not going to be big enough, nor intimidating enough, to include everything.
WHY DIETS DON'T WORK.
Diets don't work for a lot of reasons, physical and mental, but I don't have enough space here to cover all of them. If you would like to read more on this, I have a web page at http://nodiet4me.net/10reasons.html that gives 10 reasons why diets don't work, and those aren't the only reasons, either. The main reason a diet will not work is that your body has some really effective self-regulating mechanisms. If you deprive it of it's expected calorie intake over a period of time, it will adjust itself to need less calories. Although you will be eating less (and definitely not enjoying it), your body will settle into a new pattern and your weight will level off with only a small weight loss. Even worse, when you stop dieting, as you know you will, the body will keep its new level of calorie need while you return to your old eating habits. This brings us to another point.
THE BASIC LAW OF WEIGHT LOSS AND WEIGHT GAIN.
Everybody's body works to it's own rhythm and needs, but they all follow the same law. If you take in more calories than your body needs, it will store the excess as fat. Bottom line. Fact. End of discussion...almost. Using the information in the paragraph above, you can see that when you quit your diet and go back to eating the old way after your body has adjusted its needs downward, you now have MORE EXCESS CALORIES TO BE STORED AS FAT! This is why people often GAIN WEIGHT after a diet...or series of diets.
SO WHAT IS THE BEST WEIGHT LOSS PROGRAM?
As you can see, you are back at the beginning of this discussion, but with a little more information. We can still say that the best weight loss program is the one you will stick with, and now you know a little more about why. Since we are all different, the obvious fact should be that what you need to find is not THE best weight loss program, but YOUR best weight loss program...the one YOU will stick with. The biq question in your mind is...
HOW DO YOU FIND "YOUR" BEST WEIGHT LOSS PROGRAM?
There are a lot of things you can do to improve your health, your life, and your personal weight situation, such as drink more water, get plenty of sleep, do things that you enjoy, for example. These can all contribute to weight loss, but let's just look at two things for now.
1. Become more active: Notice, I avoided saying, "exercise". Whoops! I said it. Look, exercise equals activity. If you want to do Richard Simmons' tapes and "Sweat to the Oldies", more power to you. If you choose to buy a Bowflex and in a few months look like the grandmother in their TV commercials, that's great! Odds are however, you just need to make some lifestyle adjustments and become more aware of the opportunities that exist to "exercise" in daily life. Oh sure, a planned and scheduled exercise program is great, but so is a walk, or gardening, or swimming, or cleaning house, or...well, you get the idea. The only need is to make it regular,at least 4 or 5 times a week, and to make it challenging.
Only you can assess what is challenging. What is challenging today may simply be walking out to the mailbox and back. One lady started her "exercise program" with that simple step (no pun intended). Another gentleman started his program by walking to the end of his block. That first day, he thought he wouldn't even be able to get back to his house. A few weeks later, he was walking over a mile. At one point in my life, I regularly ran over 6 miles at a time. However, the first time I ever tried to run, I didn't make it half a block. The key is to get started, do it regularly, and challenge yourself.
Becoming more active not only burns calories during the activity (remember, the more calories burned the less fat stored), but continuing the activity over time (you were going to do it regularly) causes your body to shift to a new level where it automatically burns more calories than it used to. The facts behind this are not complicated but require a lot more space than we have here, and I did say I was going to keep to the basics.
People drop out of "exercise programs" for a lot of reasons. For your purposes, do the activity as it fits in your schedule, pick the activity that pleases you, and vary the activity...if you cleaned house yesterday, take a walk today. By the way, if I told you to exercise, to take a walk, you might begin that avoidance process that makes people drop out of formal, planned exercise programs. Why don't you take the grandkids to the zoo instead? If that isn't a workout, I don't know what is. Be creative. It's your "exercise program", make it what you want it to be.
2. Eat sensibly: You know how you SHOULD be eating, right! Back to basics. Lots of vegetables, cut down on portion sizes, have an apple instead of pie or a candy bar. Take the sugar out of your life. There are all kinds of diet tips running around. Not a single one of them is worth a hill of beans...but a bunch of them add up to a lot more than a hill of beans. Changing only one thing is probably not going to make a big difference, but...IT DOES MAKE A DIFFERENCE! changing seventeen things might make quite a difference, but there's a secret...
Don't try to make all seventeen, or twelve, or thirty changes all at once. Start with one change, and once it is part of your life, make the next one. You might want to learn a little bit about Kaizen. Small steps in the nutrition area will help get you where you want to go eventually, just as taking that small walk out to the mailbox may someday lead to walking one or two miles at a time.
HOW LONG DO I HAVE TO STAY ON THIS WEIGHT LOSS PROGRAM?
Well, for the rest of your life. That's why it is important to choose activities you enjoy and learn to make better nutrition choices while still enjoying the pleasure of eating. Also, many people have weight loss problems because they have personal issues with life. Your personal weight loss program, regular activity plus nutritional common sense, equals a sense of control over a situation that produces many negative affects in your life. A sense of control over that situation allows you to remove many of those negative affects and move on to rearrange other parts of your life that may need attention.
One last point. I have kept this as simple as possible, but it is based on a large body of information. If you truly want to create the most effective weight loss program for you, you will have to learn a lot more than you probably know now. The public library is a good place to start, as is the internet. Be aware, however, that many people will try to entice you with diet pills and lose-weight-quick plans. Stay focused on a lifestyle change that will last all your life. Even if diet pills, fad diets, and things like weight loss belts or devices that supposedly exercise for you do work, their affect is short lived (and sometimes dangerous) and, as was pointed out above, once you quit the pill or the program you may gain back even more weight than you lost.
A FINAL TIP:
Find a weight loss buddy. Share your goals, and the information in this article, with them. Make sure they are on the same wave length. You might want to walk with them, you might want to shop with them, but most of all, if there is no one else who understands what you are going through...they will, and that is worth more than gold.
The author is retired from the Army after 21 years of service, has worked as an accountant, optical lab manager, restaurant manager, and instructor. He has been a member of Mensa for several years, and has written and published poetry, essays, and articles on various subjects for the last 40 years. He developed an interest in health and fitness in the '70s after reading numerous books, including Dr. Kenneth Cooper's "Aerobics". This has led him to continue his personal research into health and fitness for over 30 years, and to pursue course work on health and fitness. He now has an online health supplement store at http://eherbsstore.com. Find more weight loss tips at http://nodiet4me.com.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Donovan_Baldwin
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