When you’re facing the challenge of changing your body, developing muscle and losing bodyfat you have likely accepted the idea that you must exert your will over your body. For example you have to lift weights to force your muscles to grow, and you have to consciously lower the number of calories you are eating in order to stimulate a fat loss.

We All need Social Support to get where we want to go

But there is another level to this and that is exerting your will over your environment. You may have tried to get in shape in the past but certain environmental cues are not helping you such as cookies that are always  in the cupboard, or places you frequently eat that are become difficult to navigate without overeating (such as coffee shops and restaurants).

An even bigger environmental factor is other people. They will invite you to eat with them, they might tease you and tell you you’re obsessive about weight loss or fitness, they might tell you their opinion of the ‘correct’ way to lose weight and point out that ‘you’re doing it all wrong’.

In all of these cases this is your environment pushing back against you and you must exert yourself against it to get where you want to go.

Modern western societies can be defined as “obesogenic environments” that pull you towards a sedentary lifestyle of overeating and minimal activity.

When you decide to take action and get in shape be prepared to exert yourself in the gym, but even more so, be prepared to exert yourself against the environment you’re living in. This is where social support can go a long way to helping you get in shape.

Making a change is hard enough on its own, but doing it alone makes it even tougher. Finding like minded people to support you is a big key to getting to your goal and not second guessing yourself the whole way.

Finding a support network is a way to help stack the deck more in your favor and build some momentum to get the change you want.

John

It has become apparent to me that many of the problems people are faced with in diet and fitness are due to a lack of understanding of the definitions of some of the most basic concepts.

This is me at my ideal Adonis Index, around 180lbs. I have no idea what my bodyfat % is and I don't care.

It may be that much of the anxiety and the roadblocks people face on a day to day basis can be reduced or eliminated by having a better and clearer understanding of what they are trying to do. This starts with having clear definitions of each of the major issues in health and fitness, and today I want to talk about the definitions of ‘overweight’ vs ‘overfat’.

Overweight vs Overfat

“Overweight”

Overweight is a designation that comes from the Body Mass Index rating scale that indicates how heavy a person is compared to their body size. It’s a tool clinicians can use for recommending lifestyle changes or interventions to a patient. Researchers can also use it as a way to assess population data when determining relative risks of disease in large groups of people.

For most people who are dieting and going to the gym they don’t care about being overweight per se, it’s more accurate to say that most people want to avoid being “overfat”.

“Overfat”

Overfat refers more specifically to the amount of fat compared to lean mass a person is carrying. You can be overweight and not necessarily overfat, and you can be overfat without necessarily being overweight.

Most people are more concerned about being over fat than overweight. There are general cutoffs for each designation that are used to indicate relative risk of various diseases, but overall most people don’t care about these cutoffs, they just want to look better.

For most people, the goal or target look that they’re after can’t be defined in terms of overweight or overfat, and until now there was no words for it besides ‘being in shape’.

I think this is a lousy way to describe a health or fitness goal and instead would rather use a goal that specifies exactly what the actual shape is you’re trying to get into.

And my research has obviously lead me to an answer that ends up being the Adonis Index for men and the Venus Index for women.

Both of these designations account for weight, fat mass, muscle mass, and most importantly the overall shape (which is what everyone wants anyway).

Nobody cares if they are in the healthy bodyweight or bodyfat range if their shape isn’t what they want. There are many people I have worked with that weren’t overweight or overfat but were still entirely unsatisfied with their body SHAPE, and that is because they never knew what shape to work towards.

To start off the discussion on definitions I suggest throwing overweight and overfat out the window and replacing them with body shape goals.

Having a body shape goal provides a much more specific target that automatically accounts for weight, fat, and muscle mass. Working towards any of the other targets by themselves will never ensure that you’re also getting to the shape and look you really want.

Let the shape be your soul focus and the other metrics will fall into place along the way.

John

When someones sets out to lose weight they have a number of resources they can turn to for information. But most of these resources make a critical error that can stall your weight loss before it ever gets started. And that error is assuming there is a right and wrong way to lose weight.

Eating for weight loss is already tough enough, and being told there are right and wrong ways to do it makes it feel even harder. This is where the fallacy of fitness and health come into play.

The local gym personal trainer or fitness magazine will suggest there is a correct and healthy way to eat for weight loss. They’ll go on to also explain how to exercise to become fit and lose weight.

In both cases the emphasis is turned away from the fundamental principles of weight loss and turned towards the nebulous and entirely undefinable conceptions of ‘health’ and ‘fitness’…but this was never the point…the point was ‘weight loss’…that’s it.

The truth of the matter is that there is no correct way to lose weight. However you can get it done is the right way…The weight loss itself is what will produce most of the health benefit.

This is evident from people who use laproscopic band and gastric bypass surgery to lose weight. They obviously didn’t adopt the typical fitness marketing strategy of ‘eating clean and working out’.

In this case they have a surgical intervention to get to the root of what causes people to be overweight…eating too much. And the best thing for them isn’t to adopt some workout routine or start eating spelt and quinoa…no the thing they need is to eat less…even if it means a surgical intervention to allow less food to enter their stomach.

If weight loss is your goal then you have to keep your eye on the prize and don’t allow yourself to get side tracked with popular fitness media dogma about the right or healthy way to lose weight.

There is no correct way to lose weight, there is only weight loss, or no weight loss.

John

One of the popular diet and fitness myths is the concept of meal timing, specifically the idea that you should eat more frequently than the standard breakfast/lunch/dinner that north american society has become accustomed to.

Pro Bodybuilder Lee Priest "Bulking" in the offseason

This is a concept borrowed from bodybuilders who followed a ‘bulk and cut’ cycle routine where they would eat massive amounts of calories during their ‘bulking’ phase and then gradually drop their calories for their ‘cut’ phase.

In some cases it could have been necessary to eat 5-6 meals if these guys were trying to eat 5000-6000 calories each day…that would be 1000 calories at each meal…that is quite a bit of food, and it wouldn’t feel too good to try and each that much food in only 3 meals…think about how gross that would be, 2000 calories at breakfast lunch and dinner!

The pseudo scientific claims of ‘insulin control’ and ‘revving up your metabolism’ followed as a reason for eating in this pattern in order to lose weight…but the reality is that the frequency of your meals cannot change your metabolic rate, and it won’t make any difference on your hormone or insulin levels (beyond the effect that changing the total amount of calories would have).

This concept of ‘meal timing’ has been thoroughly investigated in the scientific literature and shown to be completely irrelevant to metabolic rate, weight loss, energy levels, hormonal balance (and just about any other claim that the fitness media drum is still beating)

I go into a much more in depth investigation into this concept in my new weight loss program called “The Anything Goes Diet” that will be coming out tomorrow! AWESOME!

But what about the snacks?

Anyway I’ll be posting some updates this week and more info if you’re interested in picking it up (on sale this week).

This is the diet program I’ve been working on for the past year, and if you been reading my blog for any length of time you might have already heard about this (or at least had an idea that I was writing this thing)

The take home message on meal timing is this:

Eat as many or as few meals as you like as long as your total calories are where you need them to be for your goals (weight maintenance or weight loss).

John

When you’re trying to lose weight you’ve got to eat less calories than you burn, that is the easy part, the hard part is deciding how and when you’ll eliminate some calories.

This was my breakfast every morning when I lost 40lbs

In general the way you eat less calories is to either cut out some eating events, or to modify the amount of calories you consume at each event.

I’m calling them ‘eating events’ because the word ‘meal’ seems too formal and people don’t categorize everything as a meal. But ever ‘eating event’ matters when you’re trying to lose weight.

For example, lets say you have a coffee and a cookie in the morning. This would be considered an ‘eating event’. For many people their morning coffee and ‘treat’ is an important creature comfort they’re not going to give up even during a weight loss program (I didn’t).

The problem with the terminology ‘meal’ is that most people wouldn’t consider a coffee and a cookie as a ‘meal’ even though it could easily has 300-500 calories (which is definitely a meal worth of calories).

A successful weight loss program has to allow you to have the ‘eating events’ that you enjoy without producing feelings of deprivation.

In some cases cutting entire eating events out can help, this could include things like snacking on cheese and crackers while watching tv, eating while driving, the second or third coffee and cookie break of the day etc.

If you can’t find any eating events you’re willing to do without then you’ve got to try and eat less during each of those events. For example you might not want to give up your second coffee break of the day but you could put less cream and sugar in your coffee or have a smaller cookie (or half a cookie) with your coffee.

This way you haven’t lost the satisfaction and the experience of having your second coffee and cookie but you’ve still managed to reduce your calories.

The point is to be flexible and use all the tools you can to achieve a calorie deficit.

You may even have to do an extra workout in order to allow yourself an extra eating event. Maybe you want to eat a bigger dinner tonight and don’t want to skip any other eating events of the day. The way to do this is to add in an extra workout (even just an hour of walking) and burn off some calories to allow you the room to have the bigger dinner without having to sacrifice any of your other eating events.

Each day you’ve got roughly your BMR to play with as far as food eaten. The more exercise you do the more calories you burn past BMR (but there is obviously a limit to the amount of exercise you can do in a single day).

You can mix and match higher and lower deficit days, by doing more or less exercise and eating more or less calories. It’s likely that your drive to have a set number of eating events is going to be a strong influence and tend to mold the pattern that fits best for you.

If you really want to have a morning coffee and muffin, as well as lunch, dinner and a snack then you’ve got to find a way to make those for events work in a deficit. In some cases you might need to do an extra workout, in other cases you might need to cut back on how many calories you consume at each event.

The only other option is to cut one of those events out completely and just do as you would normally do during the others.

Any of these combination’s are a perfectly viable option for effective weight loss and you can change them every day.

Flexibility is the key to lasting weight loss.

John