You can go to this link to find out how to enter: Transformation Contest

Here is a look at some of our previous contestants:

Pierre was one of the first winners

Ron won the overall at the first contest

Rich finished second overall in the second contest

Nate also won cash in our second contest

The result of two contests...amazing

(sorry ladies this one is for guys only…venus index is coming in October, there will be a contest for the women then)

So why bother entering a contest anyway?

1) It gives you a clear time frame to set your sights on

2) Gives you motivation to make a serious change in your body in a short period of time

3) Teaches you to challenge yourself and support others who are competing to challenge themselves too

4) Introduces you to a community of rare people who have entered and completed a contest (most people will never try this sort of thing and will never know how much their body can really change)

5) Teaches you what is truly possible when it comes to changing your body when you put your mind to it

6) You can win MONEY!

I’m sure there are dozen’s of other personal benefits you can get from competing in a transformation contest and they’re all good.

This is why we hold frequent transformation contests and they’re getting bigger every time.

Look, I can build you a workout, I can show you how to do it, I can write as many motivational blog posts as possible, and I can give you the best nutrition and fat loss program and information around…BUT I can’t make you follow any of it.

That part is up to you.

The best I can do is give you money of you follow what we say…and that is what the contest is for. I’m simply asking you to follow our recommendations take a couple pics and collect your winnings!

If you’re serious about changing your body don’t wait another day, make today the day it all changes. (and for the girls make mid october the day when the Venus Index workout comes out!)

John

Muscle Building Happens In The Gym

I think many people run into a problem trying to make their workouts do more than they really can. For example the other day I was at the gym and saw a personal trainer making her client push a sled (loaded with 150lbs of weight) back and forth across the entire length of our gym (about 30 yards).

The poor guy pushing the sled must have been at least 70lbs overweight and I’ll bet he is hoping that these workouts are going to somehow make him lose weight.

This is a perfect example of having the wrong expectations. If that guy doesn’t start revamping how much he eats (aka eat less) then all the sled pushing in the world isn’t going to cause him to lose any weight.

It just seems like a lot of wasted effort because pushing that sled around isn’t even building his muscles in a way that will look good when he finally does (if ever) lose the weight.

The point is not to mix up what your diet and your exercise can do.

Use the gym primarily for building muscles and use your diet for weight loss.

IF you don’t have much bodyfat to lose (ie: you’re in that last 10lbs range) then you can certainly accelerate the process in the gym…but it’s still dependent on keep your calories in check.

The bottom line is to stick with a consistent workout for building muscle and use your diet to lose bodyfat.

John

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

Forget the "Rules" You've heard, make up your own.

The diet and fitness industry is hardly at a loss for words. Browsing the interwebs (or is it the world wide net…) will bring up thousands of pages of information, tips, and endless ‘must do’ and ‘never do’ lists.

Within 5 minutes of searching you could easily come up with dozens of ‘rules‘ of fitness and ways to live a ‘healthy’ lifestyle.

Almost all of them revolve around some sort of dietary intervention like changing the timing of a meal, or the composition of that meal.

After that you’ll get extensive lists of good and bad foods, supplements you should be taking, specific ways to workout, and specific times of day to workout etc…

At no point is the practicality of these recommendations considered, the story you hear is preached like a gospel and you may start feeling lousy about yourself if you can’t follow every recommendation you’ve heard.

The stress and guilt you might start feeling for not following these ‘rules’ could easily erase any health benefits you’re getting from doing what you can.

This is hardly a way to approach health and fitness.

Every little bit counts, and whatever you can do and whatever fits with your current lifestyle is just fine.

If you’ve heard that ‘cardio’ in the morning is best, but you can only do it in the evening, that’s just fine. Don’t let some magazine or website steal the positive emotional boost you get from exercising by telling you that you’re doing it at the wrong time of day.

If you lift weights but you don’t have the money or time for a post workout protein shake then don’t worry about it, you’re still going to build muscle and strength no matter what the web-o-sphere of self proclaimed experts say.

Protect what gets into your brain, because it's going to be hard to get it out.

The moral of today’s post is to be careful what you read and what you let get into your brain.

If you’re reading this blog you probably already do lots of healthy and positive things for your body on a daily basis, but if you read too much ‘info’ out there you might just end up forgetting what you’ve done that was good and stress about all the ‘rules’ of fitness you’re still not following.

Instead of following everyone else’s rules try making up a few things for yourself.

Try  to do one exercise ‘thing’ per day for your fitness, and one ‘nutrition/food’ thing per day.

Make it up just for you and it’s gotta fit your life.

I’d like to hear what you’re planning on doing if you don’t mind putting it in the comments section.

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