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“LESS” is the dirtiest 4 letter word the food industry has ever heard. When it comes to weight loss “LESS” is the only word worth hearing.

You'll never see a message of eating LESS

Apparently Michelle Obama is waging a war on childhood obesity (it still fascinates me how the white house must declare war on everything)

Of course this war will go nowhere and nothing will come of it besides a few watered down recommendations to “eat more healthy foods”

The key point here is the words “LESS” and “MORE”

Psychologically they are the big words in the statements of “eat LESS calories to lose weight” and “eat MORE healthy food choices to lose weight”

The only words that are of any real consequence in the above statements are “LESS” and “MORE”

The actual foods you choose are irrelevant to weight loss.

If Mrs Obama’s campaign is to have any real legs it must include the word “LESS” but if history is any indication there will be massive pushback from every arm of the food industry to block any government mandated message of consuming LESS of any food item.

How would you feel if you made or living selling beef products and her campaign explicitly stated to eat LESS beef…it wouldn’t be long until you were scaling back, getting laid off or closing up shop.

Same goes for everyone other type of food.

The point is that we’re already at a status quo of too much food and the food industry is entrenched with strong lobbies and ties within the FDA and USDA to squash any message of eating LESS of any food.

This is why Mrs Obama will fail in her attempt to do anything whatsoever about obesity in children or adults.

Until the message of eating LESS is allowed to be freely communicated, most people will be hopelessly looking for what special food they can eat MORE of it lose weight…how ironic!

This message of more vs less is the topic of todays philife podcast. Check it out here: Eating More vs Eating Less

John

Yesterday we talked about the reaction other people will have when you successfully lose weight. In many cases the reaction is negative!  Here are some pics of me at my lightest weight in the past 15 years, I”m about 176lbs in these pics and my buddies rip on me for being “Skinny” or “tiny” now…Do I really look “skinny”?

A quick browse of yesterdays comments make’s it apparent that the reaction other people have to seeing someone lose weight is rather bizarre. I believe that it is rooted in the insecurities of the person who is seeing you lose weight (in many cases they would also like to lose weight but haven’t managed to so far).

This can become and sinister situation when friends, nurses, doctors, health care providers and even family members can ex-communicate you or lecture you about the dangers of weight loss. This is an unfortunate side effect of their own cognitive dissonance, lack of understanding and in many cases disappointment/shame in themselves for not achieving the same results you have.

It’s a tricky road to go down when you start making real positive changes in your life while others around you do not. They may feel as though you are surpassing them and leaving them behind. Of course this is not your intention at all, you are simply doing something for you. And if you’re anything like me you want to bring them along with you.

Heck I want to bring EVERYONE with me (hence the blog, the Adonis Index, Venus index and what I do for a living)

Unfortunately it’s not possible to bring everyone. In fact it’s hard to reach even some of the them (even if it’s those people you know who desperately want to change)

As someone whose made a real change your best effort can only be to lead/guide others who are willing to follow, and then gracefully accept that the majority are not yet ready and are simply scared.

Once you accept this fact, it’s much easier to deal with their criticism as you will realize it’s not about you at all and only a projection of their own fears.

John

P.S. Ladies, I’ll be doing a teleseminar in the near future about the Venus Index to explain what we’re up to. I’ll post about it when we’re getting ready, prolly in the next 3-4 weeks.

A friend of mine just had her annual check up and everything came back A-ok. She is actually about 1 inch away from having a perfect Venus Index score as well! In other words, girl is in great shape with a great body.

With that said she wants to lose about 3-4 pounds for her ideal Venus Index shape. She can run 10 kms in less than 50 minutes, she’s got great muscle development and is stronger than almost any girl I’ve ever seen in the gym.

Her check up numbers were great across the board and her cardiovascular fitness is at the elite athlete level.

So far this isn’t much of a story, now here is where it gets interesting. She told the nurse that she was interested in losing a bit more weight…at which point the nurse proceeded to tell her: you don’t look like you need to lose any more weight”…and “you’re in a healthy weight range for your height”…and then pointed out that “exercise can be addictive” and handed her body image pamphlets assuming she had some sort of psychological problem.

Of course all of this information is coming from a middle aged female nurse with about 40-50 extra pounds of fat to lose.

My friend just responded with a polite smile with no intention of heeding any of the nurses advice and warnings.

This is good example of how the established medical profession misses the point on issues of exercise and fitness.

First of all its difficult to take weight loss advice from someone who is overweight.

Second, doctors and nurses understand the relative range of what is generally considered a healthy body weight. But this is just a range and estimate for the mass population. Each individual will have a specific body weight that he or she will look their best at, and no doctors chart will necessarily show this. (incidentally that is what the Adonis Index and Venus Index are for…an indication of what we think is your best look for your height)

It’s unfortunate that even a nurse and doctor would discourage someone from trying to lose a couple pounds in an effort to look better and be happier with their body.

It’s as if the nurse had been trained to tell everyone to be happy looking painfully average and that it’s somehow pathological to want to look better than average.

Interestingly, the overweight nurse was much more worried about my friends intention to lose a bit more weight…whereas the physician who was in good shape himself thought nothing of it.

Perhaps a little personal envy and bias even crept into the nurses cautions and warnings to her.

Regardless of the source of the warning, this is still a good example of how mainstream medical professions are not a place to go looking for advice on achieving your best looking shape. It’s just not what they’re trained in.

Don’t let other people talk you out of shooting for your best look, because your best look is going to be a healthy look.

John

I hinted at this a little bit yesterday. I’m in the middle of a 5 day weight loss experiment. As I”m writing this I’m in hour 88 of 120.

Here are the coles notes so far.

Lost 9 lbs: started at 186lbs – currently at 177lbs

Waist measurement has decreased almost half an inch.

Shoulder measurement is steady.

Strength is consistent (going to they gym in a few mins and I’ll report in on how it went)

So I’ve got about 32 hours left on this experiment.

I’m not using any supplements or drugs, not eating any special foods, not doing any cardio or any extra exercise at all.

My guess is that I can get to 175 within the next 32 hours.

Either way I’ll post my progress and where I end up tomorrow.

I’ll be doing a live teleseminar in a couple weeks to discuss the whole thing and you can ask questions about it too, so I’ll post that link when we’ve got the event set up.

John

I haven’t told any of you yet, but as of the moment I am writing this I’m in the middle of a 120 hour (5 day) weight loss experiment.

Arnold and the boys were constantly experimenting

I’m documenting it on video and you’ll all get to see it when I’m finished.

I’m just testing a few theories out to see what kind of results I’ll get. The actual methods I’m using aren’t exactly ground breaking…they’re pretty simple…but weight loss itself is pretty simple anyway.

Having a theory is one thing, putting it into practice is another. You and I could read every weight loss book ever written and debate the merits of each for the rest of our lives…but until we try them we’ll never really understand what they’re like.

There is a difference between the knowledge you get from reading about something, and doing something. It’s this second kind of knowledge that I’m interested in. –> Experiential knowledge.

I’ve tried just about every ridiculous diet there is. I’ve tried all kinds of muscle building diets, supplements and drugs.

Sure I read about each things before I tried it…but the key point is that I tried it, I tried them all.

The sum total of my experiences have led me to my conclusions thus far..and that is as follows:

1. To lose weight you must find a way to eat less calories than you burn (and enjoy the process)

2. To gain muscle you must continuously lift more weight (and enjoy the process)

Everything else beyond these rules is minutia.

Your body is your experiment. No matter what diet or workout philosophy you read about you still have to give it an honest try before you know if it will work for you (and work over the long term).

For me, weight loss and weight maintenance is easiest with Eat Stop Eat.

And of course the muscle building program I wrote is what I follow (I would never follow another persons workouts)

So that’s what I do.

What do you do? (and I don’t care about what you READ about, I want to know what you DO)

John

In order to lose weight you will have to be in a caloric deficit, this shouldn’t be news to you.

Eating at BMR will maintain your weight

Once you’ve lost the weight you wanted, you can start eating at your daily caloric maintenance level. This is a big difference from going back to eating the way you used to eat that caused you to gain the weight that you just try to lose.

In other words, if you’ve just gone through a dramatic weight loss you have learned two things:

1) You’ve learned how little food you need to eat to lose weight

2) You know how much food you used to eat that caused you to gain weight

BUT you have one more step to go and that is:

Learning how much food you can eat to MAINTAIN your new weight

This last point is the final step for lasting weight loss. Obviously you can’t go back to eating the way you used to, otherwise you’ll just gain weight again.

On the other hand you don’t want to be on your weight loss diet either otherwise you’ll continue to lose weight. What you need to do is increase your calories to your estimated BMR. From there any extra exercise you do might allow you to eat a bit more food.

Pretty simple stuff. If you stick with a good BMR estimate as your maintenance calorie level you should be fine with maintaining your new lower bodyweight.

John

A weird thing keeps happening to me and my friend (who also happens to pay attention to calories in vs out) at some of the local coffee shops that we frequent. I routinely get served MORE food than I order.

Love these things, about 60-80 calories each! Effin' awesome

As many of you know my only rule for weight loss is calories in vs calories out, and the way I lost all of my weight was to stick to this one rule (37 pounds lost so far).

Half of this rule requires me to have at least an educated guess at my calories in. So when I order a coffee with a milk and sugar I have a pretty good idea how many calories are in that coffee. And I like to have something sweet with coffee so I order 3-4 timbits to go with it (which are about 60-80 calories each). And this is where it gets weird.

Even though I’ll only order 3-4 timbits, the person at the counter will give me 4-5 and sometimes even 6. This doesn’t sound like a big deal and they probably think they’re doing me a favor, but in reality their effing up my weight loss progress (because I can’t resist eating them all…which is why I only order 3-4 in the first place)

Each one of these little balls of heaven are between 60-80 calories so I pay close attention to how many I have with a morning coffee so I know how many more calories I can consume at lunch/dinner or whenever I eat again.

Every time the server gives me an extra 2-3 timbits I end up eating an extra 100-150 calories I wasn’t planning on.

This brings up an interesting thought experiment about what is socially acceptable when it comes to eating and food.

So far you and I and most people would agree that it’s perfectly fine to serve someone MORE food than they’ve ordered or paid for (getting stuff for free is almost never a bad thing)…But imagine if someone did the reverse.

Picture this:

You walk up to the counter and place the following order: “I’ll have a large coffee with 2 creams and 2 sugars, and 5 timbits”

and the server looks at you and says: “how bout I give you a small coffee with no cream and a sweetener and 1 timbit”

This obviously would be completely unacceptable (even tho it might actually help you lose weight)

Ironically we live in a society where it is perfectly acceptable to help overfeed people who are overweight or trying to lose weight (and thus make their weight gain worse and crippling their chance to ever lose weight), but it would be completely unacceptable to deny serving food to people who clearly could afford to drop a few pounds.

Messed up.

John

The Claim: The only scientifically repeatable and proven way to lose body fat is to eat less calories than you burn

Answer: FACT

Eating less calories than you burn is the only proven way to lose bodyfat. It does not matter when you eat those calories, or what kind of calories they are, as long as you’re in a deficit you will lose body fat and bodyweight.

This is consistent with all of the known scientific literature in this field and with the laws of physics and thermodynamics.

There is absolutely no other way this can work. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either lying to you on purpose, or clueless enough that they don’t realize they are lying to you. In either case you should avoid listening to them because they’re out to lunch.

To review, here is a brief list of all the things that absolutely DON’T matter for weight loss:

1. Meal timing
2. # of meals per day
3. Nutrient ratios in each meal (protein, carb, fat ratios)
4. Blood type (probably the most ridiculous of all, if you believe this one you need to get your head checked to be sure your brain hasn’t fallen out)
5. Raw food, veggie, vegan whatever (cook your food or don’t cook it, eat meat or don’t eat meat, none of it matters for weight loss)
6. Saturated fat, trans fats, omega 6 fats or whatever fat you like to hate
7. Eating for the supposed purpose of manipulating hormone levels

I’m sure there are other strategies that I’ve missed, so please feel free to enlighten me on the magic weight loss bullets that I don’t have loaded in my fat blasting revolver! (if you can’t tell…I’m being sarcastic here and poking fun at typical weight loss marketing speak)

So if you’ve ever lost a significant amount of bodyfat and bodyweight you already know that none of this stuff matters, if you’ve never managed to lose weight you’ve got no grounds for making any argument…because, well you just don’t know.

If you want to lose weight, the only way to do it is to keep it simple. I suggest Eat Stop Eat as the best way to do this, but don’t take my word for it, test it out for yourself.

John

The Claim: Eating late at night causes you to gain fat.

Answer: FACTOID

Gaining weight is simply a matter of eating excess calories. WHEN you eat those calories is irrelevant. But there is a persistent myth that eating late at night somehow causes you to store more fat that eating earlier in the day. There is no scientific evidence to support this idea.

If you just eat the amount of calories you burn off, then it doesn’t matter at all if you eat all of those calories at night, or in the morning or spread throughout the day.

Total calories is all that matters. So if your BMR is 1600 calories, that means you could eat all 1600 of them at midnight and not gain an ounce of fat.

John

The health/fitness and diet industry is based almost completely on factoids and half truths. Today I’m issuing you a test to see if you can tell fact from fiction. But first we have to define what a ‘factoid’ is.

A factoid is a questionable or spurious—unverified, incorrect, or fabricated—statement formed and asserted as a fact, but with no veracity. The word appears in the Oxford English Dictionary as “something which becomes accepted as fact, although it may not be true.” However, the word can sometimes mean, instead, an insignificant but true piece of information. (wikipedia)

Most of the claims you hear or read about in the health/fitness/diet industry are simply factoids.

In many cases they started with a misinterpretation of a scientific theory or fact and quickly turn into something completely untrue and in some cases the opposite of what the science tells us.

Finding out if a claim is a fact or a factoid takes time and effort to research where it came from and how it became popular.

Many claims in the health and fitness industry are difficult to prove in your daily life (if you gain 1 pound this week, was it muscle or fat?!)…so factoids can persist and many people get taken to the cleaners spending money on products based solely on factoids.

So here is the challenge. I want you to guess which of the following claims are facts or factoids…(re-read the definition of factoid above if you have to while you’re doing this exercise)

1. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day and kickstarts your metabolism. If you skip breakfast you’ll overeat at the end of the day and you won’t perform as well at work/school.

2. Eating late at night causes you to gain fat

3. Your metabolic rate is determined by your fat free mass (all the parts of your body that aren’t fat)

4. Adding an extra pound of muscle to your body causes you to burn about 50 more calories per day

5. High Intensity Interval Training causes you to burn more calories than steady state cardio (given the same amount of work)

6. Cardio on an empty stomach in the morning causes you to burn more fat than glycogen

7. Low insulin levels are correlated with a shift to a high percentage of fat burning

8.  Working out your abs will give you a flat stomach

9.  Certain foods cause you to burn more calories digesting them than others

10. The only scientifically repeatable and proven way to lose body fat is to eat less calories than you burn

Put your answers in the comment section. If you think it’s a fact just put “F” and if you think it’s a factoid put “FT”

I’ll be taking up the answers with 10 video posts throughout the rest of this week.

And let the game begin.

John