The 3rd Adonis Index transformation contest started yesterday and it’s not too late to enter today.

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

As far as I’m concerned the gym is mostly (if not entirely) meant for building muscle. Sure you can do some ‘cardio’ there and try to burn a few extra calories, but I think the bulk of your time in the gym should be spent building muscle (that includes women too)

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 Sumo Wrestler EVER!

Body fat is distributed all over your body but it’s not an even distribution. For example there is a at least a little bit of fat stored in places like your forehead and the back of your hands, but obviously this isn’t a major fat storage site.

For men the main site of fat storage is the gut/belly, and for women it is a mix of hips/thigh/butt and belly.

Each person will have a slightly different specific pattern but the general trend for men and women are more or less the same.

There are different specific locations of the fat.

Visceral fat is the fat that is stored underneath your abs and is all around your organs. This is basically what makes up a ‘gut’. Researchers are finding out that this fat is what contributes to a higher risk of heart disease and diabetes)

Subcutaneous fat is the stuff just under your skin that you can pinch. This fat also accumulates in the belly area for a double whammy on top of visceral fat. Lower body fat is also subcutaneous.

Intra-muscular fat is within the muscles themselves.

We store fat close to the middle of our bodies simply because from an evolutionary and functional perspective it allows us to still move around and use our arms and legs.

Think of it the other way around. If we stored all of our fat in our arms hands feet and legs it would be a functional disaster. We wouldn’t be able to walk or move our arms.

So as people get heavier they start to look like a sphere, with the additional fat all accumulating in the gut and butt area.

The reason it seems to take so long to burn fat from these areas is simply because more fat accumulates in there.

It takes longer to remove enough fat from these areas to see a difference. So when you’re losing weight it shows up in places with minimal fat first, such as your face, hands and arms. This doesn’t mean you’re not also losing fat from your belly or hips/butt, it just means there is more to lose from those spots and it doesn’t show as quickly.

We don’t like to admit it, but many of us have or had enough fat stored in our bellys/hips/butt that a 10-20lbs loss still doesn’t look like much…that just means you have another 20 to go before these area’s really start to look lean.

Every fitness competitor and bodybuilder I’ve known or worked with is always shocked the first time they diet down and realize how much fat they really had to lose.

It’s always more than they think, and they always end up lighter than they guessed they would be by contest time.

John

He could stand to lose some weight regardless if its fat or water.

“Weight Loss” is the term most people use to describe their dieting efforts. It’s not uncommon to hear people refer to ‘wanting to lose weight’ or needing to ‘drop a few pounds’. Regardless of what the exact words are, the point is always some sort of reduction in ‘weight’.

Fitness competitors and bodybuilders tend to speak more of ‘fat loss’ or reducing ‘bodyfat’ levels.

Reducing body fat levels will also result in weight loss, but to a bodybuilder there is a distinct difference, and that is the understanding that there is also a certain amount of ‘water weight’ that also must be dropped to get ready for a show.

In both cases overall body weight will be reduced (either from a reduction in body fat or body water).

When you embark on a weight loss program you will likely lose both body water and body fat. There is no need to make a distinction between the two as it is advantageous to both your health and your overall look to reduce both.

It’s not possible or practical to try and divide fat loss from weight loss, and it’s not worth your effort or attention.

Focusing on a reduced calorie diet will take care of both and get you to where you want to go.

John

In this episode Meatwad is trying to ‘exercise the fat away’ by power walking. What you don’t see in this clip is the pile of gummy bears he sets out for himself as his target to walk to. Once he arrives at the pile of gummy bears he eats them as a reward for his exercise. (Once again Carl is right on the money with his criticism of meatwads strategy)

As ridiculous as this sounds, this is exactly what many people do who start working out…they reward themselves with food after they complete a workout. This totally defeats the purpose of working out in the first place. (the other day I saw a large woman with a personal trainer, and she was eating a granola bar between her sets in the gym…I can only imagine how absurd the conversation between her and the trainer must have been that allowed a granola bar to become part of the workout)

Back to reality:

The so called ‘health benefits’ of physical activity and exercise are very similar to the health benefits of caloric restriction and the subsequent weight loss that follows.

If you think you can be ‘healthy’ without losing weight you’re missing half or most of the picture. The extra fat mass and added weight itself is a risk factor for many lifestyle diseases and therefore simply being active while eating more food (such that you don’t lose any weight) still does not address the issue of losing body fat (if you have excess bodyfat to lose).

There are many ‘meatwads’ out there who would rather tell themselves the lie that they can eat as much as they want and overcome any ill effects simply by exercising more, but those people will never get the body changing results they really want and likely wont be much ‘healthier’ either.

John

He's not going to lose too much weight this way!

Fat loss is just a matter of having a caloric deficit, this isn’t news (or at least it shouldn’t be news to you). You can create the caloric deficit 3 ways.

1. Caloric restriction

2. Increasing activity/exercise (without conscious attention to calories)

3. A combination of the previous points

Regardless how you create the deficit the fat loss with be the same. It’s probably easiest to focus primarily on restricting food intake and consider any extra exercise induced fat loss as a bonus.

Cutting 500-700 calories in a day is much easier than trying to do 500-700 calories worth of exercise.

So even though theoretically you could try to create a deficit with exercise alone, it is only as effective as your ability to maintain a consistent calorie intake close to BMR.

In other words, you can easily out eat a workout session, but you can never out workout an big eating session (but I think this is what so many people in the gym are trying to do)

The actual pattern of fat loss will be the same no matter what you do to get there, so it’s just up to you to find the best solution that fits with your life. I suggest Eat Stop eat and my soon to be coming out book (shameless plug!

John

I only believe what the read button says

We ended up with a pretty good list of weight loss diets yesterday, thanks for your contribution. So can all of the diets listed work? (of course as long as they get you to eat less calories than you burn). Are all of these complex strategies necessary?…of course not.

But what about the specific mechanism of how they work? Isn’t there an advantage to one style over the other?…nope.

The one that is easiest for you to follow is the one that will work the best for you. For me it comes down to simplicity, the simpler the diet the more effective it is likely to be. (by the way this is also shown in the research to be true)

Most of the diet books you ever come across will be based on a marketing gimmick to sell a new concept, but in the end the only way any diet can actually work is by getting you to consume less total calories.

Think about how impossible it would be to combine some of the diets listed on yesterdays post.

How could you eat for your blood type, as well as eat low carb, and then cycle your carbs (which contradicts the theory of low carb), and then eat low fat (which contradicts low carb and carb cycling and blood type dieting),  and then try to eat ‘zone’ style with a 30/30/40 nutrient ratio split (which contradicts low carb low fat carb cycling and blood type diets), then fast (contradicts all diets), then try to avoid cooking your food, then try Mediterranean dieting (whatever the hell that means), point counting systems like weight watchers (contradict all of these diets) etc…

How could the rules of any of these diets fit together?…They can’t.

The truth is that you can eat whatever you like and lose weight, as long as you eat less than you burn.

And if you’re getting ready to drop me a comment and say (but what about_______ diet)…stop for a moment and look at the diets listed above and how they all contradict each other and yet each one has a list of people who will swear by them as the best way to lose weight. The only way this can be possible is if all of these diets share a common theme, and that is less total calories.

Calories in vs out is not a sexy marketing angle so it has to be hidden behind crazy stories about blood types, specific times of day to eat, evil nutrients and bad foods to avoid, fat burning foods to consume, romanticism about other countries and ways of eating from the distant past etc.

It’s all nonsense. When they’re put to the scientific test the only way any diet produces weight loss is a caloric deficit, the food choices and eating patterns are up to you.

John

P.S. my new diet book is actually going to be about calories in vs calories out. I know that doesn’t sound very interesting but I think you’ll be surprised to see how much more there is to the calorie story…It’s not as simple to count calories as you think.

Muscle improves your proportions, but fat ruins them.

The shape of your body is largely determined by your muscle mass, however that is assuming that you don’t have an excess of body fat distorting you true shape. The point of working out with weights is to manipulate your muscle mass to augment your look. Having fat covering all of those muscles makes your effort in the gym seem pointless.

Part of the reason fat distorts your shape is because it is not evenly distributed over you body. For example men typically build up significantly more fat around their abdomen and women typically store more fat around their hips and thighs.

If we gained fat evenly over our whole body then fat gain would look exactly like gaining muscle (the only difference would be less definition, but proportions would always be good)…this however isn’t the case. As we gain more and more fat both men and women start to look more like blobs with most of the fat stored closer to the middle of our bodies (abdomen and hips thighs) and thus proportions look worse and worse the more fat we gain.

The point of both gaining muscle and losing fat (besides any health benefit) is to improve our proportions for the aesthetic appeal. This of course is also measurable with the Adoins Index for men and Venus Index for women. (waist to shoulder ratios and waist to shoulder to hip ratios respectively)

John

What are the Weight Loss Rules?

I’m in the middle of writing my new diet book and I need your help with one of the sections. I want to review the validity and research of the most common diet ‘rules’ that you hear about it in the popular diet and weight loss media including magazines, television and online.

I’ve got a short list of rules I want to tackle but I need your input to round out the list and make sure I hit all of the big ones that you’ve heard but aren’t sure about and want the truth about (ex: these are rules like “you must eat breakfast every day to get your metabolism going”)

So please give me your list of the ‘rules’ you’ve heard or read about that you’d like to know the truth about and I’ll include them in the top 10 list in the new book

John

I'll Bet Even Simple Jack Understands Calories In vs Calories Out for Weight Loss.

Weight loss is simple…but that doesn’t mean it’s easy.

A caloric deficit (no matter how you arrive at it) is all you need to lose weight. Achieving a caloric deficit seems to be difficult for many people for a host of reasons including emotional control, social eating, the routine of eating at a specific time of day, social pressure, and just marketing campaigns convincing you otherwise.

All of these external pressures can lead you to believe that weight loss is more complicated than just calories in vs out…but it’s not.

Just because something is simple doesn’t mean it’s easy. For example:  When bench pressing 400 pounds, the movement is simple, but the amount of weight is tough.

Lets not make weight loss more complicated than it needs to be.

John