Training Tips

                                    Training Tips

Metabolic resistance training, a system popularized by Alwyn Cosgrove, MS, CSCS, coauthor of The New Rules of Lifting for Life (Avery, 2012), is one of the best forms of exercise to build muscle, rev up your metabolism and burn the most fat in the least amount of time. (See the “Rev Up Your Metabolism” workout.)

Here are the basics:

• Train the whole body on nonconsecutive days, three to four times per week.
• Use compound, multijoint exercises with free weights.
• Choose a weight that allows you to complete no more than three to four sets of 12 to 15 repetitions if you’re a beginner, or six to eight repetitions if you are an experienced lifter.
• Keep your rest time between sets to a minute or less.
• Alternate sets of lower-body and upper-body exercises.
• Continually challenge yourself with heavier weights and new and different exercise variations.

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Fat-Loss Rules to Remember

                             Fat-Loss Rules to Remember

• Most scales can tell you only your body weight. They tell you nothing about body composition: how much is lean tissue, and how much is fat.
• By itself, body weight is a poor measure of fitness. If you gain muscle and lose fat, you’ll be fitter — but the scale might tell you you’re heavier. Lose muscle and gain fat, and you’ll be fatter — but the scale will read lighter.
• Body-fat percentage is a better indicator of your fitness than body weight. Seek out a trained professional with a pair of calipers or an underwater weighing system to find out your body composition.
• Notice how your clothes are fitting. It’s a better gauge of your progress than the scale.
• True fitness is about performance. Regardless of your weight, it’s generally more effective to set goals based on what you can do rather than what you weigh. So find a fun and challenging athletic activity you enjoy and do it regularly. You may settle into an “ideal” weight that’s a few pounds more — or less — than you originally expected. But if you look and feel great, who cares?

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If you want to get leaner, say the latest studies and the smartest trainers, it’s time to start strength training.

If you want to get leaner, say the latest studies and the smartest trainers, it’s time to start strength training.

When Ellen Zwiefel started putting on weight after the birth of her second child, she did what a lot of people do: She tried to run it off. Four or five times a week, she laced up her running shoes and ran five miles, nonstop. But the scale refused to budge. Figuring she wasn’t doing enough, Zwiefel, 44, started attending regular cycling classes and doing additional workouts on cardio machines. Months of heroic effort, however, did little to reshape her body. “Nothing was working,” she says. “I thought my metabolism had just slowed down and that I’d never be able to lose the weight.”

But rather than give up, Zwiefel sought help. Under the guidance of Jason Stella, NASM-PES, CES, head of training atLife Time Fitness in Chanhassen, Minn., Zwiefel took up a strength-building program. Instead of low-intensity, repetitive exercise sessions on treadmills and ellipticals, she began doing shorter, more intense workouts with weights that were never the same from one day to the next.

Four months later, Zwiefel’s shoulders, arms and abs had the sculpted, athletic look she’d always wanted. Better yet, 15 pounds had melted off, and her body fat percentage was 7.5 points lower. Friends started asking her how she’d pulled it off. “Strength training made all the difference in the world,” she says.

Many gym-goers — and even some health and fitness professionals — still believe that strength training is only for people who want to gain weight in the form of shirt-stretching muscles, and that long-duration exercise like running and cycling is the fastest way to lose fat. In-the-know trainers like Stella, however, believe otherwise.

Both their real-life experience and the latest fitness research suggest that low- to moderate-intensity aerobic exercise, while beneficial, is not the fastest route to leanness and overall health that many people believe it is. The real key to fat loss is high-intensity exercise, especially strength training — with real weights, real sweat and real effort.

The results may have little to do with what the scale tells you. Your weight may go down, stay the same, or even go up a bit. Your shape, however, will change dramatically, says Stella. “I always ask my clients, ‘Do you want to hit a number on the scale, or do you want to be leaner, more athletic, and able to fit into your clothes better, even if you weigh a little more?’ For most people, it’s no contest.” 

 

Healthy Hormones

You can’t see all the benefits of strength training in the mirror, but you’ll definitely feel them. One reason: Regular, intense resistance training can have a dramatic effect on your endocrine (or hormonal) system, which manages energy, mood and other components of well-being.

Hormones also regulate your body’s immediate and long-term responses to strength training, so they not only help you burn fat and build muscle directly after a workout, but they also make you a more efficient fat-burning, muscle-building machine, 24/7.

Strength training affects dozens of hormones directly or indirectly, but here are a few of the key players:

• Before you even begin your strength-training session, your adrenal glands secrete epinephrine and norepinephrine, which aid in producing more force, blood flow, and the metabolism of sugar and fat. This helps explain why you might start to feel charged up as soon as you lace up your lifting shoes or stroll up to the front desk at the gym: Your adrenals are revving up.
• Heavy strength training stimulates your anabolic (tissue-building) growth hormone and testosterone. Growth hormone boosts your immune system, increases fat metabolism, and promotes growth in your muscles, tendons and ligaments. Testosterone — abundant in men but present in small amounts in women as well — supports muscle growth while boosting mood and energy. Strength training may thus be an effective, natural way to counteract the drop in testosterone (and resulting loss of muscle mass and energy) that tends to occur in men as they age.
• Peptide YY, a digestive hormone stimulated by anaerobic training, can also aid in fat loss by counteracting the effects of ghrelin, a “diet-sabotaging” hormone that can make you hungrier and more likely to store fat when you cut calories.
• Over time, strength training has been shown to lower insulin resistance, a condition associated with type 2 diabetes that limits your ability to access and burn fat cells. The upshot? Your newly insulin-sensitive metabolism burns fat more efficiently.

Different approaches to strength training, from high reps to low reps, heavy weights to light weights, and everything in between, all elicit slightly different responses from your endocrine system. This has led some zealous exercisers to “chase” different hormones with overly rigid workout programs or to seek out sketchy “hormone-boosting” supplements.

But Jonathan Mike, PhD(c), USAW, CSCS, NSCA-CPT, an expert on the hormonal effects of exercise at the University of New Mexico, advises against such strategies. “The actions of the various hormones are interrelated,” he explains. “You can’t raise one without affecting the others, negatively or positively.”

Mike advises clients to stick with a general resistance-training program. (For more on an especially effective fat-burning method, see “Training Tips,” below and the “Rev Up Your Metabolism!” workout.)

The Power of Inefficiency

In addition to biochemical benefits, a progressive strength-training program also keeps you operating at maximalinefficiency. And that’s better than it sounds.

The problem with many repetitive exercise programs is that they require progressively less energy the more you do them. That’s partly because repetition of any activity makes you more efficient: Your body gets better at performing that task. This is especially true if you’ve lost a significant amount of weight. Your body will naturally use less energy to move your new, lower weight. You’ll also expend less energy during low- to moderate-intensity exercise. This enhanced efficiency can be a major impediment if you’re trying to lose weight.

Your best bet, then, is to find ways to make your exercise program more inefficient. With aerobic exercise, you can mix it up: Alternate longer runs, rides or swims with some intermittent training — intervals in which you go hard for a short burst (30 to 60 seconds), then slow down to an easy pace for a minute or two. But it’s even simpler with strength training: Slap some extra weight on the bar, or take some off. Do sets for time instead of stopping at a predetermined number of reps. Adjust your rest time between sets, do your exercises in a different order, or do different exercises altogether, and you have a new set of challenges to which your body has to adapt. Tweak your program regularly, and you can continue improving for as long as you keep up your strength-training efforts.

“Changing things up guarantees inefficiency,” says Lou Schuler, CSCS, coauthor of The New Rules of Lifting for Life(Avery, 2012). “And that’s what you want when you’re trying to create a metabolic stimulus for fat loss.”

Many people find that the variety and progression inherent in strength training keeps the activity engaging, which is an advantage in itself. But Cosgrove believes that higher-intensity activities may actually burn large amounts of fat in part because they require so much focus and attention, and don’t allow you to simply go through the motions. After all, it’s pretty tough to zone out when you’re holding a loaded barbell over your head. “There may be a cognitive element to effective fat-loss programming that we don’t yet fully understand,” he says.

At some point, says Cosgrove, health and fitness professionals may find out exactly what’s going on cognitively and metabolically, allowing them to devise programs that burn fat even faster. But for now, they aren’t sweating the details — and neither should you. “We’ve been wrong in the past about the mechanism behind it,” he admits. “For all I know, strength training simply summons the gods of fat loss. But we’re not wrong about the fact that it works

Healthy Hormones

You can’t see all the benefits of strength training in the mirror, but you’ll definitely feel them. One reason: Regular, intense resistance training can have a dramatic effect on your endocrine (or hormonal) system, which manages energy, mood and other components of well-being.

Hormones also regulate your body’s immediate and long-term responses to strength training, so they not only help you burn fat and build muscle directly after a workout, but they also make you a more efficient fat-burning, muscle-building machine, 24/7.

Strength training affects dozens of hormones directly or indirectly, but here are a few of the key players:

• Before you even begin your strength-training session, your adrenal glands secrete epinephrine and norepinephrine, which aid in producing more force, blood flow, and the metabolism of sugar and fat. This helps explain why you might start to feel charged up as soon as you lace up your lifting shoes or stroll up to the front desk at the gym: Your adrenals are revving up.
• Heavy strength training stimulates your anabolic (tissue-building) growth hormone and testosterone. Growth hormone boosts your immune system, increases fat metabolism, and promotes growth in your muscles, tendons and ligaments. Testosterone — abundant in men but present in small amounts in women as well — supports muscle growth while boosting mood and energy. Strength training may thus be an effective, natural way to counteract the drop in testosterone (and resulting loss of muscle mass and energy) that tends to occur in men as they age.
• Peptide YY, a digestive hormone stimulated by anaerobic training, can also aid in fat loss by counteracting the effects of ghrelin, a “diet-sabotaging” hormone that can make you hungrier and more likely to store fat when you cut calories.
• Over time, strength training has been shown to lower insulin resistance, a condition associated with type 2 diabetes that limits your ability to access and burn fat cells. The upshot? Your newly insulin-sensitive metabolism burns fat more efficiently.

Different approaches to strength training, from high reps to low reps, heavy weights to light weights, and everything in between, all elicit slightly different responses from your endocrine system. This has led some zealous exercisers to “chase” different hormones with overly rigid workout programs or to seek out sketchy “hormone-boosting” supplements.

But Jonathan Mike, PhD(c), USAW, CSCS, NSCA-CPT, an expert on the hormonal effects of exercise at the University of New Mexico, advises against such strategies. “The actions of the various hormones are interrelated,” he explains. “You can’t raise one without affecting the others, negatively or positively.”

Mike advises clients to stick with a general resistance-training program. (For more on an especially effective fat-burning method, see “Training Tips,” below and the “Rev Up Your Metabolism!” workout.)

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Weight Lifting For Women To Get Toned & Feminine

Weight Lifting For Women To Get Toned & Feminine – Not Ripped Or Buff

Some women who go to the gym to workout want to get ripped or buff — just like the guys. This is not the type of advice you’ll find here.

Usually, the goal of weight lifting for women is to get a nice “womanly” figure while slimming down and firming up. This is the look I’ll show you how to get.

For women to get this look instead of a more masculine look, it takes a different approach to lifting weights. In fact, chances are that even most personal trainers are not teaching the proper techniques for women to get this look because they just don’t know how.

In my opinion, women should look like women and men should look like … men. Many women go to the gym and pay an instructor to train them to get “in shape.” My guess is that the majority of these professional trainers are giving the wrong advice on weight lifting for women.

Weight Lifting For Women

When approaching a workout, men and women have much different goals in mind. Many times, a man is going to workout to get buff, ripped or strong — generally speaking.

Women, on the other hand, usually workout to get slim, firm and fit … not manly — the Bond Girl look.

Because of these differences in goals there are some key items that you should keep in mind:

• Do not do any “forced” reps
• Do not lift to “feel the burn”
• Do take longer rests

These three items all produce an effect that weight lifting should not produce for women who want to tone up — fatigue in the muscle and muscle growth.

Bad Advice For Women Lifting Weights

The #1 piece of bad advice for women has to do with the amount of sets, reps and weight.

I would be surprised if you have not been told to lift light weights and to do a lot of reps. And forget lifting a little heavier weight with less reps because that builds muscle mass. Right? Wrong.

• High reps create the pump in the muscle
• High reps increase the sarcoplasm in the muscle (fast muscle growth)
• High reps increase the size and numbers of the capillaries in the muscle

By focusing on the volume (pushing to get in those 10 reps) you are actually increasing the “pump” in the muscle. This is known as sarcoplasmic hypertrophy.

The pump feels good. You feel like you are getting toned. But you aren’t. You are forcing fluid into the muscle … growing the size of the muscle.

The best way way to build muscle mass (for women or men) is to lift a high volume of sets and reps. So if you do 3-4 sets at 10-15 reps that’s great. Great for building muscle. Not great for toning up.

When doing sets of 10-15 reps you may have to really push yourself (or your personal trainer may be pushing you) to get in those last 2-3 reps. This is the opposite of what you should do.

Stop doing 3 sets of 10-15 reps.

Weight Lifting For Women To Get A Feminine Look

Now that you know what not to do, here’s how weight lifting for women should be done.

Do fewer reps and focus on strength training workouts. I know, it sounds odd because women don’t necessarily want to get stronger. It seems that your muscles need to grow in size to get stronger but they don’t. Not really.

Now that you know you should not do high reps, here’s why you should do low reps.

• Lower reps create less of a “pump”
• Lower reps are less likely to fatigue and increase muscle size
• Lower reps increase tension in a muscle which further increases tone.

When I am training to get toned I will increase the weight and lift fewer reps — strength training.

Doing this makes your muscles more dense. It does not make them any larger — which I think is a good thing for a woman.

The reason you don’t get much size from lifting heavier weights for less reps (if you stop short of failure) is because this is known as myobibrillar hypertophy. This basically means that you are increasing the thickness of the actual muscle fibers. You are not increasing the amount of fluid that is in them.

An Example Strength Training Workout For Women

The overall amount of reps that you will do is going to be a bit less than you’re probably used to. The common (bad) set and rep scheme given to women lifting weights is 3 sets of 10 reps to tone up. Okay, you know that now. Sorry.

Usually this is done fairly quickly too — all bad.

Instead of doing a total of 30 reps per exercise, you’ll be doing a total of 20 reps. Also, you’ll be spacing out the reps so that your muscle can recover from one exercise to the next. This prevents muscle fatigue and therefore growth in the muscle size.

• Day 1 – Chest & Back
• Day 2 – Shoulders & Arms
• Day 3 – Abs & Legs (optional)
• Day 4 – Chest & Back
• Day 5 – Shoulders & Arms
• Day 6 – Abs
• Day 7 – Rest

You should pick two exercises that you like for each muscle group and you should do 4 sets of 5 reps for each exercise and rest a full 1-2 minutes between each set.

It’s important to stop a few reps short of failure. If you do 3 reps and then barely get the 4th one up stop there. Lighten the weight a bit for your next set. You should be able to do 1 or 2 more than 5 reps … but you aren’t going to.

Another great addition to the program is cardio. If you want to slim down then I strongly suggest adding in cardio after each workout on days 1, 2, 4 and 5. I put day 3 in as an optional day to work abs and legs. If you do decide to work your legs then you should not do cardio after that workout.

In my opinion, if you do HIIT followed by steady state cardio after each workout then you probably don’t need to work your legs at all. The will get more slim if you don’t.

Really, I am just scratching the surface here.

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The Paleo Diet

The Paleo Diet

If counting calories and not changing what you eat is at one end of the spectrum, then the Paleo Diet is at the complete opposite end of that spectrum: no calorie counting, but extreme restriction on what you can consume.

This is one of those diet that people either love or love to hate: it seems far too restrictive for some, while for others it’s the only way that they can find success. 

In a nutshell, eat as if you were Fred Flinstone, consuming only foods that existed way back in the day:

Eat this: meat, fowl, fish, eggs, vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, healthy oils.

Don’t eat: anything else.

Boom.  No calorie counting.  No perfectly timed meals. Only eat the stuff above, and eat as much of it as you want whenever you’re hungry.

In my opinion, due to the nature of the diet and how counter-intuitive it is to what’s considered a “healthy diet” (and I use that term loosely) these days, it can be quite difficult to stick with a Paleo diet.  This is especially true if you have to eat out, your family/friends don’t eat the same way, or you travel a lot.  However, if you can manage to stick with the diet and build healthy habits, you’ll have the best possibility to see the best results.

For example, my friend Saint spent two years restricting his calorie intake and running more without getting the results he wanted.  It wasn’t until he went 100% Paleo and started lifting weights that his body fat percentage dropped down into the single digits.  Staci, our resident powerlifting superhero, also credits her crazy success with the Paleo Diet and heavy lifting.

So, this is the most “difficulty increased” diet out there, but it can also produce the most drastic results and healthiest benefits.  If you need to lose a LOT of weight quickly, or if you are interested in getting down into extremely low body fat percentages, the Paleo Diet is your play – just make sure you have the ability to say NO to a lot of foods throughout the day.

So what’s the best one?

I’ll give you the same answer that I give people when they ask me “what’s the best workout plan?”  The one that you’ll actually stick with!  Us members of the Nerd Fitness Rebellion are in this for the long haul, so we pick diets that work for our particular body type and situation because we know that they’re diets that we can stick with.

Tony lost a BUNCH of weight following the Fitness Guide – not because it has some super secret workout or magic bullet diet plan, but because it was a solid plan that made sense to him – He stuck with it, followed the blueprint consistently for months, and not surprisingly saw awesome results.

No matter what type of healthy eating diet you choose, be it counting calories, vegetarian, vegan, glycemic load, or paleo diet, you are going to have the most success with the one that you can actually stick with.  For that reason, I recommend that people start slow at the easy level until they have a good level of knowledge about how their body adjusts and what portion sizes are.  At that point, they can determine how invested they are in making changes:

• If you want to be healthy and get down to a healthy weight – I’d push you towards the glycemic load type of eating.  Avoid foods that cause insulin spikes in your system, cut out as much junk as you can, and focus on the good stuff.
• If you want to look like my buddy Saint - then I’d push you towards the Paleo Diet with a few warnings: to get to that low of a body fat percentage, you need good genetics, a strict workout routine, patience, and the iron will to say NO to foods that aren’t on your list of approved foods.

Determine what level of commitment you are comfortable with, and then make adjustments based on that.  Before you discredit or dismiss any of the advice above, I recommend you spend 30 days trying it out for yourself before passing judgment – question everything, and come to your own conclusions.

Making it All Work

“Do the best you can, with what you have, where you are.” – Teddy Roosevelt

“You gotta have fun.” – My Dad

If I had to break down my personal diet philosophy, it would be a combination of the previously mentioned Paleo Diet along with these two quotes.  I tend to eat Paleo for around 80% of my meals, I eat the best I can when traveling which is frequently, and then I eat whatever the Hell I want 10% of the time.  I might eat pure Paleo for three straight days, and then for two nights in a row I’ll eat pizza and chicken wings while drinking beer while watching football.

I have absolutely NO problem with this, because I found a method of healthy eating that works for me.  I know that one meal doesn’t define me.  I know that a weekend of poor eating doesn’t throw me off track.  I know that a vacation where I’m going to enjoy myself for a few days (which I’m going on next week) is NOT the end of the world.

I do the best I can, with what I have, where I am.

I also know that I only get one chance on this planet, so I’m going to have some fun too. I eat what makes me happy occasionally and then go right back to healthy eating because I want to become the best version of ME that’s possible.

I encourage you to do the same – do the best you can and have fun!  Make small, permanent changes that you can live with until they can become habit, and then pick another small change to tackle.  Don’t feel guilty about a bad meal or an unhealthy weekend.  Pick right back up where you  left off as soon as you can, and continue living your life.

How can I help?

Why not start today?  Clear the junk food out of your cabinets.  Take the candy jar off your desk.  Remove the temptation, and pick one habit or two to remove from your diet.  Start making changes.  The more drastic the change, the higher the possibility for drastic results, but the higher likelihood that you’ll fail as soon as you hit a bump in the road…so balance these changes with your personality.  You might stumble a few times before you find your stride or you find a method that works for you.

Failing or stumbling is okay, as long as you get back up and try something new.

So what other questions do you have about healthy eating?  How else can I help you level up your life?

Leave your questions in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer them.

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The Glycemic Load

The Glycemic Load

At this point, you’ve learned that you need to be eating a healthy portion of protein and fat with each meal.  As far as your carbohydrate sources go, we’re going to get a little help from our friends, the Glycemic Index (GI) and Glycemic Load (GL)…who I feel needs a WWE theme song because they sound like some crappy tag team.

No clue what those things are?  Don’t worry:

“Not all carbohydrate foods are created equal; in fact, they behave quite differently in our bodies. The Glycemic Index describes this difference by ranking carbohydrates according to their effect on our blood glucose levels. Choosing low GI carbs—the ones that produce only small fluctuations in our blood glucose and insulin levels—is the secret to long-term health reducing your risk of heart disease and diabetes and is the key to sustainable weight loss.”

The GI is a scale of 1-100, with 100 being the fastest and quickest impact on your blood sugar level, and 1 being the slowest impact on your blood sugar level.  By choosing foods that are lower on the glycemic index, your nutrients are delivered more slowly to your blood stream, which means they’ll provide a slower/longer source of energy, produce less of an insulin response (you did watch the video above, right?), and create less of a crash that causes your body to crave more carbohydrates!

Now, the GI DOES NOT factor in serving size.  For example, watermelon has a GI number of 73, and milk chocolate has a GI number of 43. So should we be eating chocolate all day long and avoiding fruit? Nope, it’s because the GI number is based off of 50g of total carbs of each type of food. You only have to eat 3 oz of chocolate to get to 50 grams of carbs, while you need to eat 1.5 pounds of watermelon to get 50g of carbs.

Luckily, the Glycemic Load factors in serving size along with the glycemic index. Processed foods, refined carbs, and sugar all have high glycemic loads, while fruits and vegetables generally have low glycemic loads. This is the info that we’ll be using to our advantage.

Rather than print out every single piece of food and it GI and GL, I’d rather keep things simple. Focus on eating foods with LOW glycemic loads during the day, and only eat carbs with HIGH glycemic loads immediately before a workout – they’ll be burned immediately as fuel – or directly AFTER a workout along with protein – they’ll get used to refill your muscle’s fuel stores rather than stored as fat.

Search for whatever carb you’re eating here to see it’s glycemic load.

Foods above 55 are considered to have a high Glycemic Index, and foods above 20 are considered to have a high Glycemic Load.

If you are familiar with Tim Ferriss’s “The Four Hour Body” – his Slow Carb diet is based around this concept.

***If you’re a vegetarian or vegan, then this is the path that I’d recommend for you – cut back on grains and crappy carbs, load up on vegetables, nuts, beans, fruits, and some low-glycemic grains if you’re running low on calories, and make sure you’re getting enough protein!

Now, this method of eating requires a little bit more effort, as you’ll be restricting yourself from eating certain foods and you have to spend time researching which carbs produce what type of response in your body.  However, it’s a huge step in the right direction towards healthy eating, and you’ll generally have more success with losing the right kind of weight when combined with strength training – burning fat and keeping the muscle you have.

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A Beginner’s Guide to Healthy Eating

Do you suck at eating?

Maybe your doctor told you that you need to lose weight.  Maybe you’re sick and tired of being the self-deprecating big guy/girl in your group of friends.  Maybe you just had your first kid and realized you need to be there for him growing up.  Maybe you woke up this morning, looked in the mirror, and finally came to the realization that it’s time to start taking care of yourself.

Whatever your reason is for wanting to make a change, you’re not alone! Every day, thousands of people make the decision to start eating better and losing weight…and every day those thousands of people don’t really have any plan or idea what they’re doing.

After all, there are so many freaking decisions to be made:

• Should I follow the food pyramid?
• Should I be counting all of my calories?
• What about “heart healthy” whole grains?
• Should I do this juice diet all of my coworkers are on?
• How many Twinkies can I fit in my mouth?

Fear not, for perfect Fitness is here!  (This is where the perfect Fitness theme song would play…if we had one).

Today you’re going to learn the basics of a healthy diet so you can stop sucking and start living better.  This is a relatively long article (3500+ words), so feel free to wait until you’re on you’re lunch break to really dig in…or just shun your work for the next 30 minutes and enjoy.  Tell your boss you’re leveling up your life…he’ll understand.

Combine these diet tips with a fun strength-building routine and you’ll be shouting “THIS IS SPARTAAAAAAA!!!” in no time…or whatever else you prefer to yell while kicking people down bottomless wells.

Note: the diet advice here is an abridged version of the diet philosophies that I present in the different Rebel Guides for sale from 'NF'- diets and what to eat can be some of the most controversial topics out there, so this information is based on my personal research, philosophy, and results along with the results of the members of the Perfect Fitness community who have followed similar guidelines.

If I had to break down the Perfect Fitness Diet into a single sentence, it would go something like this:

“You’re smart and you know what real food is, so stop eating crap.”

You know what real food is: things that grew in the ground, on a tree, came out of the sea, ran on the land, or flew through the air.  Meat, fish, eggs, vegetables, fruits, nuts are all great examples of REAL food.

On top of that, you know what crap food is: food that comes from a drive-thru window, a vending machine, box, bag, or wrapper.  If it has an ingredient list longer than A Game of Thrones, it’s probably not good for you.  If it started out as real food and then went through fourteen steps to get to the point where you’re about to eat it, it’s probably not good for you.

Use this information and combine it with this mantra: “you can’t outrun your fork“.  When trying to lose weight, feel healthy, and get in shape, 80% (not an exaggeration) of your success or failure will come from how well you eat – which is why this point is one of the cornerstones of the Rebellion.

Eat more real food, you must.  Eat less junk food, you will.

I realize this concept is nothing new or revolutionary, but up until now the ability to actually DO IT has eluded you for some reason – your heart wasn’t in it, you got sick, went on vacation, got bored, or just decided that you couldn’t live without certain foods (SPOILER ALERT: you can).

I am NOT a fan of “diets”, detoxes, juice cleanses, or crash-fads that result in vast fluctuations in your body weight and health.  These are the useless solutions that are sold to you in pill form, in MIRACLE DIET INFORMATION ads online, and in super expensive health food stores.

You are smarter than that.

Want to know what I am a fan of?  Small changes that produce big results, like my boy Optimus Prime.  You need to determine for yourself how likely you are to succeed depending on how many changes at once you can deal with:  Some people can radically adjust everything they eat overnight and have no adverse effects.  Other people wouldn’t dream of giving up certain foods and the second they go more than a few days without it they become Crankenstein.

That choice is yours.  You need to determine:

• How averse are you to change?
• How much weight you think you need to lose?
• How quickly you need to lose that weight? (wedding? honeymoon? vacation?)
• How likely are you to stick with your changes?

Like playing a video game, you need to determine what level of difficulty you’re up for.  Sure playing on Difficult gives you less room for error, but it also hones your skills far more quickly and produces more impressive results.  Or maybe you’re cool with playing on easy, because you don’t have to be as neurotic and can have more fun with it.

Decide what method works best for you based on how radical of a change you’re chasing.  Just don’t overdo it – small permanent successes will beat out massively ambitious failures 100 times out of 100.

If you are just eating better because somebody told you to or because you think you should (but don’t really have a real reason)…every day that you deprive yourself of your favorite foods will seem like torture – you’re going to fail miserably.

Instead, look at the changes you’re making to your diet as small steps on the path to a leveled up live.  You’re not depriving yourself of junk food because you want to suffer, but rather because you want a better life, a happier existence, and/or because you want to set a good example for your children.

nothing tastes as good as looking good feels.” 

It’s time to give up that instant gratification you get from eating a donut, a bag of chips, or six slices of pizza.

You are not a slave to your taste buds.

As we’ve learned from the Matrix, you DO have a choice – stop letting the food companies, who have all designed these crappy foods for maximum addictiveness, hold you hostage.

Free your mind, free your taste buds.

[I can't believe I just typed that.  Wait, yes I can.]

We’re not looking for instant gratification.  We’re looking for a long life full of epic winning.

Eating for dummies

Okay! You’re finally ready to start making some changes, but you’re not quite sure what you’re going to change or how you’re going to change it.  Hopefully you passed basic math back in the day; if you didn’t and you made it this far in life…I’m not even mad, I’m impressed.  Anyhoo, remember this basic equation:

• One pound of fat = 3500 calories

If we do some complex synergistic rocket geometric algebra here, we can determine that 3500/7 = 500.

That means that if you are interested in losing ONE pound per week, you need to be eating 500 less calories per day (or burning 500 calories more per day).  Optimally, your 500 calorie deficit per day would come from a combination of increased exercise and decreased calorie intake, but lets just say for today that you’re going to focus on eating 500 less calories per day.

“But Steve, how do I do that?”

Great question, thank you so much for asking!

I HIGHLY recommend you spend the next three to four days tracking your calorie intake.  And when I say track them, I mean track EVERY FREAKING THING YOU EAT.  Yeah, those handful of M&M’s you stole off of Milton’s desk at work count.  So does that half can of coke you found in your back seat cupholder from last June.  So does the handful of french fries you stole from Richard while he was in the bathroom at KFC.

Every.

Single.

Calorie.

If you are wondering how many calories you SHOULD be eating, calculate your Basal Metabolic Rate here, and then adjust for how active you are.

Now, if you are used to eating 4,000 calories a day, switching to 2,000 per day will probably make you want to gnaw your arm off – instead, slowly decrease your calorie intake by a few hundred calories each week.  Think of your stomach like a muscle that needs to be trained – it needs to learn that it can function and operate on way less food than you’ve been giving it.

This is the easiest method of weight loss – you still get to eat all of the same foods, you just have to adjust how much you are eating.  Unfortunately, this method also produces the least optimal healthy results in my opinion, but it’s a great place for a newbie to start taking control of his/her eating.

Quality of Calories

Once you’ve learned how many calories you’re consuming, you might start to see a few pounds disappear, but its just a step in the right direction.  Hopefully this won’t come as a shock to you, but 2000 calories worth of gingerbread cookies doesn’t fuel your body the same way 2,000 calories of meat, vegetables, and fruit would.

Not all calories are created equal!

Your body digests certain types of nutrients differently, using them for all sorts of bodily functions: building muscle, transporting nutrients, fueling various organs or muscles, or storing energy as fat for later use.  Let’s take a look at how to compose a basic meal:

Protein: When you exercise, your muscles are broken down and then use protein to rebuild themselves stronger while recovering. Protein absolutely NEEDS to be a main component of every meal.  Aim for one gram per pound (two grams per KG) of lean body weight, or just do one gram per pound of body weight if you don’t want to do the math – with an upper limit of 200 grams.  Sources of protein include chicken, eggs, beef, pork, fish, nuts, legumes, quinoa, and most dairy products.

Carbohydrates: When you eat carbohydrates, they get converted to glucose (sugar) in your system, which is then used to provide energy for all sorts of body functions to take place.  Vegetables and/or fresh fruit are quality sources of carbohydrates, with grains being less so in my opinion…but we’ll get to more grains later. There are certainly bad carbohydrates (processed carbs, refined grains, and more), and those are the ones we want to avoid.  Unless you’re a marathon runner, you can function with WAY less carbs than you’re probably consuming now.

Fat:  Fat is easily the most misunderstood macro-nutrient in your diet; long story short: fat is absolutely critical to your body and should make up a BIG portion of your daily calories.  Things like avocados, almonds, olive oil, walnuts, and almond butter are great sources of healthy fat (polyunsaturatured and monounsaturated).  If you take this stance on saturated fat (personally, I do), then full fat milk, coconut milk, and fatty cuts of meat will provide you with sources of saturated fat.

The first thing I want to make sure you know is that the fat in your food is not what made you fat.  It wasn’t until the past 40-50 years that poor fat was suddenly vilified (after a few scientific leaps of faith with no real evidence ot back it up), which is why every “healthy” food these days is “low fat” or “fat free!”  Not surprisingly, our country is fatter and more unhealthy than ever, and yet people still avoid fat at all costs and consume more “healthy whole grains!” (ugh).

So what IS making us fat?  Simple, refined, and/or processed carbohydrates!  Rather than spend thirty minutes typing it out, I’d recommend instead that you spend three  minutes to watch this video to show WHY excessive carbohydrate consumption can make you fat:

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