I was talking to a buddy of mine who competes in bodybuilding the other day. We were discussing contest preparation and how he uses diet and exercise for weight loss.

He said he takes about 14-16 weeks to get ready for a show. He starts at around 2200 calories per day and finishes around 1600 calories per day in the final weeks (and just to let you know, this guy is well over 300lbs and 6’5)

By the end of his contest prep he cuts down to about 240lbs including a water depletion.

It takes dieting AND exercise to get this lean

Now this is where the interesting part comes in.

He cuts his calories down to about 1600 per day and does 1 weight training session and two ‘cardio’ sessions per day at the end of his preparation.

I did a bit of quick math and figured out that he likely burns all 1600 calories off during his 3 workouts each day. In other words, he is effectively burning off all his daily calories.

This is an example of the extreme measures bodybuilders (and fitness competitors) will go to in order to burn off every last ounce of visible bodyfat from their frame (including using some powerful stimulants to keep their appetite at bay)

3 workouts per day might sound like alot to you but it really isn’t. He will typically break it up into an hour morning walk (perhaps inclined on a treadmill for some added work) then an afternoon workout with weights, and finally another walk later in the evening.

That’s about 3 hours of working out (two of them for weight loss one of them for muscle building)

This extra exercise for weight loss can only provide a significant benefit if he keeps his calories in control.

In other words, if he wasn’t monitoring his calories he could easily replace all the energy he burned during each ‘cardio’ session by eating a bit more food at each meal.

The more you exercise the more likely you will get hungry and the more tempted you will be to overeat (or at least eat more than you were planning)

The treadmill can help if you're careful with your calorie intake

This is the catch 22 with exercise for weight loss. You’ll burn more calories and lost more weight faster if you add in extra exercise, BUT you’ll also be tempted to eat more food as you increase the amount of exercise you do.

So you’ve got to keep the calories you  eat in control if you want to see the full benefit from adding in extra ‘cardio’ sessions.

The point is exercise for weight loss can be effective IF and only IF you’ve got a handle on your calories.

John

Note: I’m getting graphics done for the venus index website and workout and I need your feedback on some designs. If you’re interested in seeing and voting on the current designs go to this link: VOTE FOR THE VENUS INDEX DESIGN

You can give each design a star rating and leave a comment about what you like and what you would change (if anything).

…Now onto the post that goes with todays title.

It’s pretty obvious that some sort of purposeful dieting is required for weight loss (as most of us don’t just accidentally lose weight)

But it sure seems like we can accidentally gain weight.  So what gives?

I have a theory that for most people in north america (and most other industrialized countries) weight gain is a direct result of frequent social event based eating and the social pressure and acceptance to over consume food and booze. I call this “Weight Loss Sabotage“.

Everyone overdoes it at thanksgiving

This is my short list of the times of year when it’s totally normal and socially acceptable to completely gorge yourself with food and/or overdo it with booze.

Christmas

Thanksgiving

Halloween

Easter

Your Birthday

Your family and friends birthdays

Weddings

National holiday (4th of July for USA, 1st of July for Canada etc)

Anniversaries

New Years

Superbowl

Any summer cookout or BBQ

And this list doesn’t include the occasional random dinner out with friends or eating while watching your favorite sporting event.

The "Snackadium" Pure enjoyment, pure weight gain!

You could easily gain 5-10lbs per year just by overeating on these 20-30 days each year.

That means the other 330 days per year you’re likely eating just enough food to maintain your weight.

I believe it is this kind of ‘special occasion’ eating that causes people to slowly gain weight…then 5 years later they wonder how the hell they gained 50lbs!

The key to avoiding the weight gain is to have low calorie days that offsets each high calorie occasion.

The problem with this situation is that it’s easy to overeat 2000-3000 calories at each of these occasions but it probably takes 2-3 days of dieting to reduce your calorie intake by this same amount.

In other words 20-30 days of overeating likely require 60-90 days of dieting to take that weight back off (and that’s just to get you back to where you started) if you want to lose even more you gotta diet for even longer. As you can see this starts adding up to a good portion of the year spent dieting.

It’s all just simple math.

Every calorie you eat above your maintenance level is going to get stored on you as bodyfat. If you don’t have a few low calorie days to compensate you’ll never burn that body fat off.

This is why you never hear of people who just accidentally lost weight.

Pick and choose your overeating days wisely and remind yourself that it’s probably going to take 3 days of dieting to erase the weight gain of one big eating day.

There are other things you can do to avoid overeating at some of these events. One of them is simply sharing food when you go out for dinner so you can still eat what you want and lose weight.

Another thing you can do is use some tricks called “dieting hacking” to get through some of these big eating events without consuming as many calories as everyone else (without looking like an outcast) the way Brad Pilon describes here: Diet Hack

Every little trick helps.

John

I was sitting with my buddy working on the new weight loss program and this is a picture of a van that drove by

Best Van Ever!

How ironic!

Well this is about as blatant and in your face as food marketing can get, this might actually be the best van I’ve ever seen.

The moral to this short post is to remind you that you’re likely exposed to hundreds of marketing message that tell you to ‘Eat More’.

You’ll never, ever see a van drive by that says ‘eat less’.

It’s unfortunate but the simplest answer for weight loss is also the one that nobody (besides me!) will ever tell you.

John

Every bit counts no Matter how Small.

So how do you  lose weight?

Simple, you need to create an energy deficit. In other words, consume less energy than you spend and you’re body has no choice but to burn some bodyfat (after all that’s what it’s there for in the first place).

So how do you create an energy deficit?

1) The easiest is to eat less calories than you burn. This means less calories than your BMR or your daily energy expenditure. Sadly for most people their BMR accounts for all the daily calories burned. (the other things that can burn calories are purposeful exercise and lifestyle activity)

2) Increase your lifestyle activity level. But this only works if you don’t compensate by eating more calories. This is actually tougher than it seems. Most people who have a busier or more active day just end up eating more and erase any weight loss benefit from being more active.

3) Do more exercise (or start exercising). This is different from lifestyle activity because exercise is usually for shorter periods of time and at higher intensity. Again this only works if you don’t compensate by eating more calories.

4) Take a supplement, or coffee, or green tea, or anything that you think will help you stick to your weight loss program. This is likely more of a placebo effect than anything, but going through the ritual of taking a vitamin supplement or a workout supplement might just make it all seem more real and keep you focused.

I have a friend who is successfully losing weight and he takes a different mix of supplements and vitamins every day.

The Ritual of Taking Supplements Might Be More Important than what's in Them.

He doesn’t really care what they’re supposed to do, but the ritual of taking them reminds him to stay on track with his eating and so far he’s doing great dropping 3-5 pounds per week for the past 9 weeks. (can’t say anything he’s doing isn’t working!)

The point is anything that can help you stay on track and focused on your weight loss goal is worth doing. If it means having a special coffee or tea twice a day then go for it. If you think you’d rather have a post workout shake and it helps you avoid overeating in the evening then the post workout shake might be critical to your success.

You’re the only person who knows your weaknesses and barriers when it comes to exercise, weight loss and eating. So once you find a system and ritual that works for you stick with it.

Real weight loss success comes from consistency, and consistency is usually rooted in rituals that make you feel good about the process and that remind you to stay on course.

John

Once the Train is Rolling it's Hard to Stop

I’m in New York for a conference and I’ve been eating more food than I would normally have if I weren’t away at an event. There are open bar dinner and cocktail parties with free food. Free chocolates all over the trade show floor. And a constant invite to go out and have breakfast, brunch, lunch, dinner, late night snack etc with so many different people.

It’s very easy to end up overeating at events like these.

No matter what starts the overeating train going it seems that a few days of overeating are enough to keep the overeating train chugging along.

In other words, it seems that overeating itself is enough to keep you overeating.

It might be a psychological thing, it probably has to do with eating too many high sugar, fat, and salt foods (like pizza). But overeating can become a habit if you don’t stop it before it gets rolling.

I’ll be taking it light today to put the breaks on this patter because the past couple days were a bit too much. But if I don’t consciously do this today it could easily turn into a week of overdoing it.

This is the sort of thing that can easily get away on you if you’re not paying attention to it.

If you know you’ve overdoing it a bit with your eating, stop and take a moment to re-evaluate what your goals are and decide if you need to purposely take a day to go light and put the breaks on the overeating train.

John

Your Best Size and Shape has a Specific Weight

When someone says they want to lose weight what they’re really saying is that they want to change the look and shape of their body.

Weight loss itself isn’t much of a goal without a specific look that you think it’s going to produce.

In reality everyone that wants to lose weight is really after a specific look.

This simple thought experiment will prove my point.

Imagine an alternate world where weight didn’t add up to size…

In this world imagine someone who is 100lbs overweight, pretty big gut, big butt and big legs, flabby arms and just big all over.

Now imagine they lost 100lbs but their body stayed the same size but simply weighed less. In this imaginary world somehow dieting made you lighter without making you smaller. So your body could weigh 100lbs less but stay the same shape and size?

In this world do you think anyone would be concerned with weight loss? Ever? Not likely.

What they would really want is a way to change the size and shape of their body.

This thought experiment is to show you that ‘weight loss’ isn’t the goal, but rather changing the shape and size of the body is.

It just so happens that in the real world weight and size and shape are all connected, and we all have a specific weight range where we will look our best.

John

The only way to gain weight is to EAT BIG!

If you go to the diet book section of your local book store you’ll find dozens of books with their specific theory on how to lose weight. You’ll find explanation about blood type, parasites, ‘toxins’ (this one drives me nuts…well they all do, but especially this one), glycemic index, hormones, broken metabolism, and all kinds of genetic issues and bad food choices.

So here is an experiment you can do to prove to yourself that weight gain and weight loss is simply calories in vs calories out, and all of this other stuff is meaningless.

If I want you to gain 5 pounds over the next 10 days how would you do it?

Would you?

1) Carefully read through the blood type diet book and eat any of the three blood type diets that weren’t outlined for your type?

2) Read through the book about toxins and parasites and try to get as many parasite infections as possible and fill your body with ‘toxins’ (which by they way they never explain what the eff a toxin is)

3) Try to eat in a specific pattern that wasn’t ‘favorable’ for your fat burning hormones?

4) Try to actually ‘damage’ your metabolism so you were stuck in a mode of storing fat (I can’t even imagine what this would be or how it would be possible)

ORRRRR

5) Would you just eat as much food as possible every day until you gained the requisite 5lbs?

If you answered anything besides 5 please leave this blog and never return, because it’s clear you’ve lost your mind and long since lost your grip on reality.

John

Do Whatever it takes to remember what you've eaten.

So I’m in the middle of a short weight loss run (looking to lose about 10lbs) by mid sept…I’ll put pictures up when I’m at my goal size/weight.

I’m shooting for around 1200-1500 calories per day. As I eat throughout the day I keep a running total in my head (rough numbers) of how many calories I’ve consumed and when the number gets into the 1200-1500 range I just stop eating.

This is a pretty simple system and it’s working well (I actually have no idea how you could possibly lose weight any other way without knowing how much you’re eating, but I digress)

The crazy thing is how easy it is to forget an entire meal you’ve eaten. The other day I was thinking of having a snack or something to eat before going to the gym and as I was thinking of all the things I ate that I day I concluded that I was only at 1000 calories so far…so I thought to myself I’m good to go for a pre gym snack.

Then on my way to get my snack I remembered an entire meal that I had forgotten to count into my total daily calories! And I had only eaten that meal a few hours ago.

I was shocked how easy it was for me to forget what I had eaten so easily and so soon after eating it.

Well thanks to my memory kicking in (albeit a bit late) I realized it wasn’t the best idea to have the preworkout snack.

So I just headed to the gym without and that kept me right on track for my weight loss calorie total for the day.

The point is that calorie counting does work IF you can remember all the food you’ve eaten! That is the biggest trick of all.

If you don’t believe me try it right now. Try to think of all the food you’ve eaten in the past 24-48 hours, it’s not that easy, and I’ll bet you that you can’t think of it all right now and at some point later today another thing you’ve eaten will pop into your head.

Doing this exercise will show you just how much and how often you eat and how easy it is to forget.

John

Tasty Stuff!

I’m sitting at a local “Panera Bread” location waiting to meet up with a colleague and the picture on the left is what is staring at me! A counter of croissants, breads, bagels, danishes, pastries, tarts, muffins, cakes, squares, pies and other tasty things that I don’t even know how to describe (and that’s just the bakery side, there is also a deli/sandwich shop side).

I knew I’d be having this meeting here and I was fully prepared for the temptations of Panera Bread today, and I’ve adjusted my eating schedule accordingly. Basically I’ll consume most (if not all) of my calories here today before/during/after this meeting. And it won’t be hard, a soup/sandwich combo here with a coffee and one of the pastries will easily put me between 1000-1500 calories for the day. I’ll be very content and still on track for losing weight.

This is an example of situational control for weight loss.

I know full well that I cannot be sitting in a Panera Bread and not eat at least 1000 calories. So I make sure that my day (as far as eating goes) is set up for me to eat most or all of my calories here (if I know I’ll be visiting)

This way I can crush all the awesome food Panera has to offer without feeling guilty and staying on track for staying lean or even losing weight.

Just a little bit of planning can go a long way.

John

I don't care how many calories this burns, there's got to be an easier way.

This is a message I just got from a friend of mine which pretty much sums up the reason exercise can’t do much for weight loss unless you’re really watching your calories:

“30 minutes of very high intensity boxing– dripping sweat, almost puked: probaby burned 400 calories, tops