Learning Your Capacity for Change

Few things in life are as stressful as making a big change. This could be changing a job, relationship, where you live, or in our case, changing your body.

Will you be ready when it's time to make a change?

Regardless of what is changing you will find that you have a limited capacity to handle these changes. You can only handle so much change at once until it overwhelms your mind/body/spirit and leads you to a crash. This crash can manifest as a mental, emotional, or physical breakdown, or even all three.

Changing Your Body

The way your body looks right now is a direct result of:

A) Your current dietary habits

B) Your current exercise/activity workout routine

In order to change your body you must make a significant change in both of these areas, but you still have to be aware of your capacity to change, this however requires patience that many of us do not have or do not want to exercise. The tendency for most people will be a desire to make their body change faster that it’s capable of. Instead of accepting the natural limits of your capacity for change the desire is to force the change and make it happen as fast as possible without recognizing the necessity for gradual incremental changes that foster long term adaptation. This is “all or nothing” thinking and it’s certainly not a long term solution. In fact, this type of extreme thinking leads to yo-yo dieting and a lack of control over your body.

You have to be intelligent with the way you divide your energy between diet and exercise in order to get the maximum benefit without leading yourself to a crash, a rebound and ultimately undoing all the work you’ve just done.

Specifically when you have a significant amount of body weight to lose the bigger change will be from your diet and the smaller change will be from your workout. If you imagine that 100% of your capacity for change is being allocated to your body, then you could say at the beginning you will be putting 80% of that effort into diet and 20% into your workout.

As you lose bodyfat and start to get closer to your ideal bodyfat levels you can start shifting your focus from diet to exercise. This is part of the reverse taper protocol we’ve recently discussed and how this method will lead you towards lasting changes in your body.

Towards the end of your body transformation more of your mental and physical energy and capacity for change should be allocated to exercise and less to diet…the proverbial 20%/80% ratio should be reversed in favor of exercise.

This is how you should be viewing your capacity for change and where you should be allocating your energy when you’re changing your body for the long term.

In today’s podcast, we’ll discuss the ‘capacity for change’ and how to manage a body transformation with this concept in mind. We’ll discuss the reverse taper protocol and how this should ensure you do not crash and rebound at the end of your transformation.

John

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So You Want to be a Snowflake…Careful What You Wish For

We are living in the era of evidenced based fitness, and evidenced based medicine…you could even say it’s an era of evidenced based health advice. So what does this really mean?

Health care practitioners use a combination of the best evidence that science has produced so far combined with their clinical experience and expertise to provide you with their best estimation and advice for your  health and well being concerns.

Being unique might not be an advantage

We can’t predict the result of your actions with 100% accuracy but rather we can only give you a probability of what is ‘likely’ to happen to ‘most’ people who are similar to you. Your specific results may vary from this average, and this is where the personal aspect of health and fitness comes into play.

With most human physiological systems we can easily put everyone into predictable categories and pools based on age, height, gender, exercise experience, geographic location, socioeconomic status etc. With an understanding of these variables and a brief medical history it’s not hard for a trained health professional to make some general assumptions and recommendations about your best course of action if you want to ‘get in shape’ and improve your  ‘health’.

After that it’s up to you to follow through on these recommendations and see how they worked. Even if these recommendations have been studied and shown to have a ‘average’ effect of 10lbs of weight loss over 10 weeks and a lowering of blood pressure and an increase in muscle mass and strength we can never know for sure how it will affect you specifically.

Enter the Snowflake Paradox

During any weight loss study, or muscle building study or any research in any health related field the results are usually presented as an average. You will hear claims like “subjects lost an average of 15lbs in 4 months”…or “subjects gained an average of 5lbs of lean mass in 12 weeks”…or “on average cholesterol lowering medication will cause a 10-15% reduction in circulating cholesterol after 3 months” etc.

The key word to notice is AVERAGE. Data collected from a group of people will be presented as an average, but this doesn’t mean that even one single person actually had that exact result. There will be outliers on both the high end and the low end.

If a weight loss study showed an average of 15lbs weight loss in 4 months, there could easily be some people who only lost 2lbs and others who lost 25lbs. And here is the Paradox of wanting to be the snowflake…anyone with a significant amount of weight to lose will want to be the outlier or ‘snowflake’ who displays atypical results that benefit them…in other words, you will only want to be the snowflake if it means you get to lose 25lbs and not the poor sucker who only lost 2lbs in this study.

The kick in the butt is that you don’t get to choose which snowflake you are. Your genetic predisposition and a myriad of other and likely unknown factors will determine if you are average, or above average or below average. The only way for you to know where you will be is to go through the program and find out for yourself.

In today’s podcast, I talk to Bryan Chung about evidenced based medicine and fitness and how to understand what fitness claims really mean.

John

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Get Back to Basics to Get in Shape

It’s the first week after new years and the gyms will be overflowing with new years resolutioners. The resolutions are usually some vague goal such as ‘lose some weight’ or ‘get in shape’ etc. These people are well intentioned no doubt, but one of the problems I see with this sort of action is a lack of a defined goal and a lack of a structured plan to get there.

Watch TV at the gym instead of at home with snacks…it’s a basic change that can go a long way

This is the time of year that reminds me how confusing and complicated the diet and fitness media has made things. It’s becoming apparent that people think getting in shape must be significantly more complicated than it has to be.

In reality there are just a few basic items that need to be taken care of to reach any diet and fitness goal. Unfortunately most people look right past these fundamental basics and instead clutter their minds and lives with the minutiae and trivial things written in the pages of fitness magazines and blogs.

If you don’t have the basics under control, none of the fancy techniques you read about will be of any value.

First and foremost you have to get back to basics, and get a base of effective principles and habits in place before you even think of messing around with fancy diet or advanced training techniques.

For example, do you even get an hour of movement in per day? If not, then that is your first order of business…forget about ‘functional training’ or a periodized workout routine, just get out of your house and get moving for a start.

After that you need to get calories in control, if you don’t know how many calories you consume on a daily basis then you must get this under control before you start reading about vegetarianism, or paleo this, and low carb that, and the latest diet fads. No matter what a marketing claim has told you…calories matter, and you have to get a handle on them if you’re serious about making a change in your body.

These are the most basic items that you must get a handle on if you want to change your body. If you’re struggling to make a change in your body and you don’t know where to start, then make your resolution to get back to basics and build effective habits for the new year.

In today’s podcast, we’ll discuss the basic principles that are essential for getting in shape, it’s simpler than you think.

John

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A Picture is Worth 1000 Words: Interview with Lauren Jacobsen

When you’re browsing a fitness magazine or the interwebs for diet and fitness information you will no doubt be exposed to pictures of fitness models.

In some cases the models are in an ad openly endorsing a given product like a supplement or workout system or device, but in many other cases the models are simply displayed within articles about training or nutrition. In both cases we learn to associate the look of the model to have something to do with the information we’re reading.

A Picture Chronology from Rookie Model In 2006 to Seasoned Pro in 2011

2006 - Laurens First Photoshoot ever!

2009 - 3 months out from her next figure show

 

2010 - On stage at the Arnold Classic Figure Competition

2010 - Day after the north american national figure competiton

 

2011 - 8 weeks out from Arnold Classic

In each of these pictures Lauren is in a different condition based on where she is compared to a figure competition

———————————————————————————————————————————-

This can be very misleading if you don’t know the story behind the picture and the model in that picture. In todays podcast you’ll get to know the model in the above pictures and the story that goes with them.

Lauren Jacobsen is a national level figure competitor and has been working in the supplement industry for the better part of the last 10 years. She’s knows what goes into making a professional ad and photoshoot both from the marketing side and the model side. She has been a model in multiple photoshoots and today she will reveal some of the ‘secrets’ behind them.

When it comes to fitness photoshoots a picture is truly worth 1000 words, and today those words are going to be Lauren explaining to you what really goes into a photoshoot and the look of a fitness/figure model.

Pursuing the goal of a better shape and a better feeling body is always a good thing, it will give you a sense of self confidence, and a feeling of empowerment but you have to do it for yourself and on your terms. You can do a competition if you like, or you can simply book a photoshoot and do your best to get in your best shape. With a little insight and effort you can have a professional looking photoshoot just like Lauren.

Going through the process of preparing for a photoshoot may show you once and for all that you can get your body to look every bit as good as a figure model if you want to. But the key is that it’s got to be your choice and on your terms.

Listen up ladies, because this is going to be very revealing about what really happens in the competitive realm of figure and fitness competitions as well as the behind the scenes look at photoshoots and what you’re really looking at in magazines and online.

It’s a big reminder to never compare yourself to anyone else besides yourself…and especially not to a picture of a fitness model that you’ve never met in person.

John

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Never Let Them See You Sweat

I was recently speaking with a fitness competitor who had just won a show and she said something that was very revealing about the process of getting in shape. She said that she was shocked at how much ‘her body’ rebounded from the diet and getting in shape.

She said it almost as if she had nothing to do with the overeating that took place after the show. And this is partly true. If you diet incorrectly and push it too hard to get into extreme condition you can set yourself up for a big rebound characterized by an uncontrollable urge to overeat.

Is the point to show them how hard you work, or the body you built?

 

It doesn’t have to be this way. Unfortunately many people get coached to cut calories harder and harder as they get leaner and leaner and this is the exact opposite of what we propose you should do. Instead of cutting calories lower as you get leaner, we suggest you cut calories hard when you have the most bodyfat to lose, and as you get leaner bring your calories up closer to maintenance until you finish with your leanest look and eating all the way up to energy expenditure.

This pattern should teach you how to not only diet without a crash, but also maintain the body once you get there. This pattern of ‘reverse tapering’ will take care of the physiological rebound that accompanies most hard diets, and that is a good thing because there are multiple other factors that can also sabotage your body transformation success.

Enter the “Imposter phenomenon”

Many people who go through a transformation report that they still cannot believe they did it and that they cannot believe what they’re seeing in the mirror. They’ve been living so long with their old body image that they have a hard time accepting that they’ve now changed and look different and well, look better. The point is that your body can and will change much faster than your mind. The time immediately after your transformation is when you have to re-train your mind to accept and believe that you deserve the new body and that it’s here to stay. This is partly why diets fail, and another reason why avoiding any rebound eating is so critical. This is why reverse taper dieting works so well, it helps you  avoid big time hunger cravings during this fragile psychological state when your mind is still getting used to seeing and accepting your new body. The next big challenge is the social effect of being in shape.

Once you’re in great shape you can no longer identify with the process of ‘getting in shape’ because at some point you will finally be in shape. At this point the goal is to maintain that shape with the least amount of work possible. This is the concept of never letting them see you sweat.

Being the guy or girl in the gym who is sweating buckets, and grunting and screaming, and ‘working harder’ than everyone else isn’t the goal. Instead, being the person who works just as hard as everyone else BUT looks better than everyone else should be the goal.

This isn’t to say that you don’t take your workouts seriously, but rather to do what is necessary to maintain your look without overdoing it.

The workout and the effort isn’t the goal, the body is the goal. This is achieved with just the right amount of targeted effort, and not a buckshot approach of doing as much as possible.

Once you’ve achieved a new body, the challenge is to keep it while making the least amount of sacrifices as possible…in other words: Never Let Them See You Sweat.

John

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When Does Bodyweight Matter?

There are many different metrics you can use to measure a change in your body shape and composition. The short list includes, bodyweight, bodyfat %, and the circumference of your waist, hips, and shoulders. All of these measurements can be made at home relatively easily with a decent degree of accuracy.

At what point does the scale become useless?

All you need is a scale, a cheap set of bodyfat calipers, and a measuring tape and you can keep a pretty good eye on the shape and composition of your body.

These metrics can give you a snap shot of where you’re at during any given point in time, but how much information will they give you about how much you are changing over time?

The answer to this question is dependent upon where you currently are.

If you’re BMI (Body Mass Index) is in the overweight or obese category it’s likely that the only metric that is even worth measuring is bodyweight. Indeed if one is large enough calipers are problematic to use, and it may not even be obvious where to put the measuring tape to get a true ‘waist’ measurement etc.

The point is when an individual has between 50-100lbs to lose, bodyweight itself is likely your most useful measurement tool. The goal is simply weight loss, regardless of what the weight itself even is…it will likely be a mix of bodyfat, excess body water, and even some pathological forms of lean mass (remember not all lean mass is muscle mass).

Reducing total bodyweight is the key for people who are in upper range of the overweight BMI and all those in the obese range.

Once your bodyweight enters the ‘normal’ weight range of the BMI things like bodyfat % and the tape measure on the waist, hips and shoulders (as well as arms, legs, chest etc) start to tell more of the story.

Bodyweight becomes less useful as you approach the 10% bodyfat range, and becomes almost totally useless below this level. As a woman approaches the mid to low teens in bodyfat % the only thing left to track changes is the mirror.

In today’s podcast, we’ll discuss where the break points are for using body weight, body fat % and measurements as an accurate way to track progress. In the end the only measurement that will truly matter is the mirror.

John

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How Much Protein for Weight Loss

Losing weight requires a caloric deficit. You can choose to create that deficit with a combination of caloric restriction below your daily energy requirement as well as raising your daily calorie burn with a combination of cardio and weight training.

Will this help you burn fat?

These are the basics and they don’t change, and it doesn’t really need to get any more complex than this.

However you will find many claims from the diet and fitness media that suggest it is much more complex than this, and one of the most persistent claims is about protein and it’s benefits for weight loss.

Eating a high protein diet is claimed to be a benefit for weight loss for any one of the following reasons (and probably a combination of them):

1. Increased thermic effect of protein foods

2. Higher degree of satiety per gram

3. A change in fat burning and fat storing hormones to favor fat burning

4. Nutrient repartitioning (ie: more of the calories from protein will go to muscle instead of fat)

These claims sound pretty good and some of them do have scientific evidence that suggest there might be some fire under the smoke.

For example, the thermic effect of protein can be measured and has been shown to be higher than protein or carbs. This means that if you eat the same number of calories from protein instead of carbs, it will cause your body to burn a few more calories digesting and assimilating it. This effect is small, and might only make a noticeable difference for bodybuilders and fitness competitors who are dieting down to single digit bodyfat levels.

Another claim we often see relating to protein is the effect on satiety. Many studies and anecdotal reports suggest that protein itself will satisfy hunger better than the same amount of carbohydrate. This could help you stick to a diet and keep you from overeating at other points throughout the day.

It’s also known that dietary protein will increase amino acid pools, increase nitrogen balance, and contribute to intramuscular amino acids. This is all part of the ‘nutrient partitioning’ story. Essentially the protein you eat is much more likely to end up contributing to amino acids in muscle and repairing tissues all around your body before it will ever contribute to fat.

It would appear that there are many benefits of increasing your protein content when trying to diet down and keep your lean muscle mass up.

In the “How Much Protein for Weight Loss” UNCENSORED audio program released today, we’ll review some recent research that looked at the effect of high or low protein on weight loss. We’ll discuss the merits and limitations of this research shed whatever light we can on the results and what they mean to you in your efforts to build muscle and burn fat at the same time.

John

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How Do Muscles Grow?

Working out with weights causes muscles to adapt and grow, this is nothing new. The pattern of muscle growth however is not as obvious as we might have thought.

Most people think you train a muscle and the entire muscle simply gets bigger in a uniform and evenly spread out way…but this is a false assumption.

New research is showing that muscles do not grow in a uniform pattern, in fact research is showing certain areas or ‘chunks’ of the muscle grow to a greater degree than other ‘chunks’.

This non-uniform growth is due to many factors that come into play when we start working out with weights. These factors include:

The Anatomy of a Muscle

1. Volume of training

2. Intensity of training

3. Frequency of training

4. Velocity of reps performed

5. Muscle pennation angle

6. Muscle fiber length

7. Distribution of muscle fiber types within a given muscle group

8. Type of exercise performed

9. Previous training experience

And this is just the short list.

In the UNCENSORED audio program named “Non Uniform Muscle Adaptation – How Do Muscles REALLY Grow?”, released today, we review the latest research on muscle adaptations to strength training and determine how much or how little of a muscle we can really activate while working out and what is necessary for maximum muscle growth.

We also look into the research that the same muscle does not grow at the same rate from top to bottom and we may indeed be able to change the ‘shape’ of a given muscle group if we know how to active the entire muscle.

John

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Can You Lose Weight and Keep it Off? (New Research on Weight Maintanence)

Well all know someone who has lost weight and put it back on…and then some. We hear phrases that 99% of people fail on a diet and put the weight back on. This however isn’t a scientific claim as much as it is an assumption.

Weight loss isn’t a straight line but rather a series of peaks and valleys. People can ‘go on a diet’ to get rid of a chunk of weight and then try to maintain that new lower weight.

When you look at it from this standpoint there are 3 ways to eat.

Are we all doomed to always put weight back on after dieting?

1) The way you can eat that causes you to gain weight

2) The way you can eat that causes you to lose weight

3) The way you can eat that keeps your weight stable

These must be viewed as 3 distinctly separate phases and treated differently. Most weight loss programs and studies focus on getting people out of the first phase and into the second phase, which is pretty easy. The only real action needed to cause weight loss is a reduction in calories eaten until body weight starts to fall.

The real trick is figuring out how phase 3 works and keeping the weight off. And this is where many diet interventions fail. Most people can fight their way through a 10-12 week hard diet, but it’s the months and years following the hard diet that are trickier to navigate.

Once the hard diet part is over, you’re not relying on a strict deadline or an ‘iron will’ to get through the next month, but instead you’re looking at a whole new way of eating from here on out. What happens after the hard diet is rarely studied, but a recent research paper did just that.

In a study published Oct 2011, researchers put people on a hard low calorie diet for 10 weeks then followed up with their subjects a full year later to see how much weight they kept off and test multiple hormones and other markers of health.

This same paper has been reviewed by various fitness commentators who seem to have selectively chosen to spin the information from this study in a negative light vs a positive light. This one sided approach to reporting the science seems to be rooted in an academic and political will to try and prove that obesity is a disease and out of our control to deal with.

In today’s podcast, we review this research paper and show you what the results really say and how the fitness media and even the researchers themselves distort their reporting in order to put a doomsday spin on the findings.

This is a important lesson in diet and fitness science reporting and how information can be twisted and used to tell a very different story from what the facts say.

John

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Diet Records: The Obvious Flaw Of Diet Studies

The diet and fitness industry makes claims on the effects of workouts, diets, supplements and the combination of the three. The better commentators even quote published research, and the best of them actually read the full research papers and make an honest effort to give an accurate account of what they’ve read.

This however is not enough when it comes to interpreting diet information, and specifically when reading research about human dietary habits.

Would you really admit to having this for lunch?

The problem is that people are notoriously bad at admitting what they eat when they’re being studied. In most cases people will under report the total amount of food they’ve eaten. This phenomenon is so systemic in diet research it’s hard to make any conclusions from diet study results because you can never be sure that people really did eat what they say they ate.

This has been a problem since the entire field of studying diet and nutrition started, and we still do not have a solution for it. In the past before modern metabolic measurement techniques were developed researchers had no choice but to simply assume people were telling the truth about what they were eating.

In recent years new and cost effective techniques have been developed that can accurately measure how many calories the human system burns on a daily basis, and therefore we can measure how many calories you can eat without gaining excess fat mass, or losing body mass.

Once these measurements were adopted by nutrition researchers the truth came out, and it’s not pretty. We now have proof that diet records are a highly flawed measurement technique and that in some cases up to 80% of the people in a diet study will lie about the amount of food they eat and under report it.

We also know that people will over report eating foods that a perceived as ‘good foods’ and under report eating foods that are perceived as being ‘bad foods’.

This stems from the growing marketing and dogma about good and bad foods, and the idea that there is the ‘right’ way to eat.

When people are in a nutrition or diet study they do not want to appear as eating ‘bad’ foods or eating too much, so they do not report everything they eat and systemically make their diets seem ‘better’ or ‘healthier’ than they really are.

This deception is rooted in shame, guilt and embarrassment that people are trained to feel when not eating what the fitness industry has labeled the ‘right way to eat’. And this is the failing of diet and fitness marketing on a whole.

It has created a society of people who are ashamed and guilty about their food choices and unsatisfied with their bodies. It truly has done more harm than good. And now even in a scientific experiment most people cannot bring themselves to admit what they really eat or how much they really eat.

The direction things are going is ominous and it’s likely only going to get worse. The more diet and nutrition marketing and fear mongering we are exposed to about good and bad foods, and good and bad ways to eat will only further this embarrassment and guilt in people trying to lose weight or be healthy. This leads to even more dishonest diet recording and even less understanding of what is really going on with the modern diet.

It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that modern nutrition science actually has no idea how people eat, what they eat, and most importantly how much they eat.

The next time you read a book, website, or article that is quoting nutrition research about a particular diet you should view it with a very skeptical eye. It’s most likely reporting on highly inaccurate diet records that tell us almost nothing about what those people truly ate.

The bottom line is people will not tell the truth about what they eat.

In todays podcast we dig into the diet record research and show you how flawed this research is. Considering diet records are the foundation of most diet research it’s not a stretch to assume that most conclusions in diet and nutrition research are highly flawed and likely incorrect. We can’t know what effect a particular way of eating has if people will never tell us what they’re eating.

John

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