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

When It Comes To Weight Loss You Don't Want to be an Outlier

I get a lot of questions about weight loss. Most of the questions don’t make much sense because the people who are asking are making a fundamental error in their thinking and that is:

They all think they’re different from everyone else.

They think weight loss in their specific case is much harder and that they are somehow an outlier thinking they are the one person who can’t lose weight with the traditional means of a caloric deficit.

9 times of out ten (and probably even more than that) these people are simply eating too much to lose weight.

By definition you would have to lose some amount of fat and weight if you were eating in a caloric deficit for more than a day or two. If you’re putting less matter in than is going out how could you possibly be at the same weight all the time?

Dieting for weight loss isn’t easy, and many people aren’t ready to take the necessary steps to make it happen. So instead of facing the fact that they’ve got more work to do they romanticize about being the one and only person who can’t lose weight because of some 1 in a million genetic anomaly that they’ve cooked up in their minds about themselves. This is both arrogant and disrespectful to those unfortunate people who DO have a legitimate genetic problem (as rare as it may be).

I’m sure there are the few unfortunate people who really do have some sort of genetic abnormality that makes them prone to weight gain, but for the vast majority of us it’s not a genetic issue. And if you did have such a problem you likely would already be diagnosed and be under medical supervision or on some sort of pharmaceutical therapy.

In other words, if you’re reading this you’re likely similar to everyone else and you just need to eat less. And that’s a good thing, it means the path to weight loss is simple, predictable and 100% achievable.

John

You can't hold your breath to death, but you sure can starve to death.

Well this one takes the cake. I received an email about a man who claims that he has not eaten food or consumed water in 70 years. His claim is that he survives from some sort of supernatural life force and simply breathing is enough.

Believe it or not some people actually believe it’s possible to survive on nothing more than oxygen, it’s called ‘breatharianism’ and it’s about as wacko as it gets. Of course nobody will ever try this because they’d be dead within a few weeks. The specific article that was sent to me was pointing out how this particular man had gone 6 days without food without any adverse effects…this shouldn’t be a surprise as there is well documented cases of morbidly obese people fasting for weeks on end in order to drop weight.

I even did a 5 day fast a few months ago…it’s just not that big of a deal.

Breatharianism is the final stop on the continuum of craziness that starts with the good and bad food dichotomy.

It starts with a list of foods that are good and ones that are bad, then the bad foods list grows due to contamination of toxins (whatever the hell that means), genetic modification, veganism, raw foodism, fruitism, and so-on until there is nothing left to eat.

I’m not suggesting that all people who believe in a good and bad food paradigm will end up with the breatharian belief, but a case can be made for showing a common origin of the thought process behind both ideas.

It’s easy to find fault in almost any food if you examine it enough. No matter what food you choose there is a criteria that could end up labeling it as ‘bad’ and not worth eating. Taken to the absurd extreme this would leave you with nothing left to eat (as a breatharian would believe is a perfectly fine conclusion)

Reason and common sense just isn’t with some people.

John

What Do You Do When You're As Health And Fit As You Can Be?

Why do you suppose anyone reads about health and fitness? My guess is that they want to improve both their health and fitness (kind of obvious I know)

But there has to be a point where you simply cannot continue to make measurable improvements…or at least there will be a point where more information, more effort, more planning will have diminishing returns.

So how do you know when you’ve read enough and done enough?

Is it a life long thing that can only be measured when you’ve reached some longevity goal (living to over 100 perhaps)

Is it a strength goal or endurance goal? (this wouldn’t make much sense unless you also included age as a dependent variable…in other words, your strength at age 65 will be less than your strength at age 25)

Is it just to know more than other people?

Is it to have good markers of health as defined by various governing medical organizations? If so what do you do when all of this looks good and you are in so called ‘optimal health’. Do you actually try to be better than this? (I think some people in fact do try to be better than optimal by striving to be more and more ‘fit’)

In my opinion people read about this stuff because they want to believe that they can take an active role in their own health and fitness (which of course you can considering you will also define your own health and fitness)

But I think problems arise when people do to much reading and theorizing and not enough ‘doing’. Information gathering can easily become more stressful and lead to a deterioration of health and fitness rather than helping you improve it.

If you find that you read more about fitness than you do about fitness you need to get your priorities in line.

30 mins of reading about what might be healthy will NEVER be as good for your health as a 30 min walk.

You’ve only got so many minutes in your life, so you might as well get the most bang for your buck out of each one.

John

What Would You Eat?

Simple mental exercise for you today.

What would you eat if you knew the food choices you made wouldn’t adversely affect your weight or your health?

I’ll start: I would eat just about everything I am currently eating.

John

Manny and Anthony got this discussion going yesterday and I think it needs further exploration…and that is how much exercise should we be doing per week?

Exercise shouldn't be a sentence to pain and suffering

There are a few ways to approach the answer to this question.

The first thing to do is identify your goal.

Is it to do the least amount of exercise possible while getting into the best looking shape possible?

Is it the above mentioned goal as well as minimizing as many risks factors of disease as possible?

Is it some performance goal (like running a certain distance in a given time, or a strength goal etc?)

Is it some combination of the above?

In any case it seems that many people have come to believe that you can do far less work than you have to in order to get into your goal shape.

I think this is a symptom of the modern industrialized sedentary society. For many of us our daily routine barely requires us to even stand up let alone walk around.

If you spend the better part of your day sitting then there is a good case to be made for you to workout or at least go for a walk every day. At least move around a bit.

I think we’ve all become a bit too accustomed to a really sedentary lifestyle. And as Manny and Anthony pointed out even as little as 7-8 hours per WEEK sounds like alot of exercise…this seems a bit ridiculous…out of 168 available hours in a week does dedicating 8 of them to exercise and improving the look and health of your body sound like too much?

If it does sound like too much that is an artifact of the general busyness and sedentary nature of our societies and nothing to do with fundamental physiological principles.

We could all easily exercise for multiple hours per day if we had enough time. I totally understand that a 2 hour workout every day might not make much sense for everyone. But at least an hour of movement per day should be a bare minimum.

And then mixed within that could be 3-4 more intense and targeted training sessions to force muscle growth and adaptation.

The reality is that Anthony and Manny pointed out how far off our perception of what a realistic amount of exercise per week should be.

I think we’ve all become far too used to doing far too little.

If we learn to prioritize a mix of both targeted vigorous exercise (weight training/running etc) and general lifestyle movement (walking) as something that must be done every day then we’d be close to what our bodies were built for in the first place and many of our lifestyle disorders, issues with eating and dealing with stress would be much less of a problem.

John

I was having a discussion with a friend of mine who has recently lost about 20 pounds and looks really good (almost a perfect venus index)

She goes to the gym 4-5 times per week, mostly running and a bit of weights. Her diet is nothing special, she is a great cook and eats whatever foods she likes, no rules about carbs, fats, protein, wheat dairy yadda yadda. She just eats whatever she feels like for the day…BUT she just doesn’t overdo it with the total amount of food.

She often gets invited out for dinner with friends and on such occasions she will throw in a low calorie day or a fast just before the night out so she can afford to ‘eat big’ on the night out without it affecting her weight loss/maintenance goals.

Now here is where it gets messed up and where most people miss the point about the lifestyle of living lean and exercising.

Her friends actually criticize her for eating pizza or burgers or whatever happens to be the food of indulgence on said night out. In their minds she is the ‘fit’ and ‘healthy’ one and therefore they think and actually accuse her of being a hypocrite for eating pizza and burgers! (they can’t comprehend someone who is in good shape that can actually eat a burger and remain in good shape)

To them being fit and healthy means having a restrictive diet and never enjoying food and not partaking in social eating events that involve things like pizza burgers, chicken wings, etc, and being obsessive about exercise.

This of course is completely backwards and missing the entire point of being in shape in the first place.

The goal isn’t to be in shape in spite of your lifestyle, the point is to find a way to be in shape and enjoy the processes as it fits into your lifestyle.

It’s also about enjoying food and social gatherings without worrying about gaining weight or negatively affecting your health. (I think her system does this perfectly)

In total she probably only spends 7-8 hours per week working out (this isn’t much, I’ll bet most people spend more than this watching tv)…she spends zero time obsessing about food and eats freely (just not too much).

If you’re revamping your entire life in order to lose weight and ‘get healthy’ and in the process you end up losing out on social events, or eating foods you enjoy, or spend more time preparing and worrying about food and good foods vs bad foods, and going to the gym than socializing with friends and family…then you’re missing the whole point of being fit and in shape in the first place.

Unfortunately as this example demonstrates many people think that you can’t have both and might just forgo even trying because of what they erroneously think must be a difficult life.

But it’s actually really simple, and they’d find that out if only they would try.

I guess it’ll be our little secret for now.

John

I just finished doing a podcast about the definition of health and how this word doesn’t mean anything until you give it some meaning and values. You can listen here –> Your Definition of Healthy

Today we’re going to do a word association game. I’m going to write some of the more popular and relatively ambiguous terms in the health and fitness industry and I want you to answer with ONE word that comes to mind for each word in the list below.

But only ONE word each, so be honest and pick the one word that really comes to mind for you. If you write two words for any of them I’m going to delete your comment entirely.

List your answers in numerical order in the comments section. Write your words down before you look through the comments to avoid having other people’s answers influence yours.

Here’s the list:

1 – Health

2 – Fitness

3 – Fat

4 – Food

5 – Diet

6 – Sugar

7 – Obese

8 – Skinny

9 – Eating

10 – Muscle

John

So I’m going to start writing a new book about health/fitness/diet but I don’t really know where to start and what issues to tackle or what questions to answer or what problems need solving.

What do You Want to Learn?

In the past few months we’ve had some good discussions on this blog and it’s becoming apparent to me that I don’t really know what you want to learn about when it comes to health and fitness. Some topics that I thought were really important seemed to get glossed over…and then other topics that I thought were old news and obvious seemed to get the most interest and discussion.

So I need your help.I need to know what this book has to say to be the most useful diet/fitness/health book for you.

Here are the things we got covered so far:

1) Eating for weight loss – We’ve got this covered with Eat Stop Eat and all of the Eat Stop Eat family of materials that really explain how fat loss really works.

2) How Much Protein for Muscle Building – We’ve already got this covered with Brad’s book “How Much Protein”

3) Working out for your best proportioned look – We’ve got this covered with Adonis Index and soon to be available the Venus Index

My thought at this point is a book about the diet/health/fitness industry and how to tell what is truth from what is nonsense. I guess you could say it would be a diet/fitness/health myth busting manifesto…a proverbial handbook or user’s guide to the health and fitness industry.

I’ve been so far into this industry for so long that it’s easy for me to forget that you probably don’t have a graduate degree in nutrition and human physiology, or a career formulating and developing sports supplements, and haven’t been a strength and conditioning coach, or done clinical trial research, or trained with a powerlifting team or any of the stuff that I’ve been doing for the past 15 years.

So I need your help. I need you to let me know what you want to know. Your answer will be what I use to formulate the basis and topics of this new book.

For now the project name is called “The Health and Fitness Survival Guide” …I think this is an ironic sounding name because the words health and fitness seem to already be synonymous with ‘survival’!

Please put your suggestions in the comments section.

John

I was reading a blog about the BMI (Body Mass Index) chart the other day and noticed that many people were saying that it’s not accurate and is an outdated measurement and needs to be replaced/revised.

Most 'athletes' can't build enough muscle to be outside of the 'normal' BMI range without steroids

So I started to think about why anyone would say this. The BMI chart was created over 100 years ago as a way of charting body ‘fatness’ or ‘thinness’. With the influence of Ancel Keys (visionary scientist way ahead of his time) BMI became a prominent tool in the 1970′s for assessing population health risks.

There is a criticism that the BMI doesn’t account for different ‘frame’ sizes of people (endomorphs and ectomorphs) or athletes who have built up their muscles to a much larger degree than the regular population. Both of these criticism’s seem to be weak as true ecotmorphic or endomorphic people are very rare…in other words, for MOST of the population the BMI works just fine, and that was the point in the first place.

The athlete argument doesn’t hold much water either, as they represent a very small percentage of the population and many of them at all levels use steroids and other drugs that artificially elevate their lean body mass. In other words, the BMI was never meant to be applied to people taking steroids and GH.

So what about ‘natural’ athletes and bodybuilders who don’t use drugs but just build lots of muscles? Surely they wouldn’t be in the ‘normal’ BMI range…right? Wrong!

A few days ago I posted pictures of myself after a 5 day fast (I weighed 176lbs in those pics…granted this was mostly a water reduction)…as of the moment I am writing this my bodyweight fluctuates between 180-183lbs. In both cases I am still within the normal BMI range. And this is where the argument about athletes being in the ‘overweight’ BMI range because of increased muscle mass falls apart for me.

In these pictures -> DO I LOOK SKINNY? I’m well within the normal BMI range…and I don’t think I look too small or lacking in muscle development. In fact I’ve spent the past 15 years trying to build as much muscle as I can…and I STILL fall within the ‘normal’ BMI range. If anyone was a candidate for being ‘overweight’ due to muscle mass I thought surely I would be it…but nope I’m still ‘normal’.

So the argument that athletes can build enough muscle to somehow push them out of the normal BMI range seems a bit wonky to me (unless of course they are using steroids or were true endormorphs to begin with…which is an exceedingly small portion of the population). Look at those pictures of me again, do I really look like I could possibly get bigger? Do I look like I NEED to be bigger? AND do I look unhealthy at the size I am?

The problem people have with the BMI is not the chart itself, but what the chart MEANS to them. The chart is meant to show ‘fatness’ and categorize it as normal or abnormal on both the high and low end. The key word here is ‘normal’.

What SHOULD be normal for a human body and what has BECOME normal in modern western societies are two different things.

The BMI chart shows what SHOULD be normal, not what is currently considered normal.

If most of the population is overweight (according to the BMI chart) the error in logic could be that the population is right and the BMI chart is wrong.

I think many people have a sharp emotional reaction to things like the BMI chart because it categorizes you in a way that feels discriminatory and prejudicial. Of course there is no emotion behind the BMI chart, it’s just a mathematical equation…but there is some thought and research into it, it’s not just a random idea, so you know there is some validity to the category you’ve been placed in according to the chart. And this is why it bothers people. If there is some good reason why you are categorized as ‘overweight’ then you’re faced with the following dilemma about your  belief in the normalcy of your current body size:

Either the chart is wrong, or YOU are wrong.

It’s much easier to dismiss the chart as being inaccurate and not useful for your specific body shape and size or whatever excuse you like, than it is to accept the fact that perhaps you’re in fact simply overweight.

The final point on this topic is the view from being in the normal category vs the overweight or obese categories.

I used to be much heavier than I am now and I used all the same excuses explaining away the BMI as antiquated and outdated and didn’t account for the mountains of muscle I had built over the years. In reality, I was just fat.

Once I went through my cut down and got rid of all the excess weight I ended up right where the BMI chart predicted me to be at the high end of the normal range…which makes perfect sense as I’ve built as much muscle as I can without drugs.

If I’m currently in the normal category, and I’ve spent my whole life trying to build muscle, and all of my measurable health markers are in very good shape, and I’m happy with the look and shape of my body, and I have a golden Adonis Index ratio…then how is it possible for me or anyone with roughly my frame (which is average) to actually be in the overweight category without simply having more fat mass on their body and subsequently looking worse than I do right now?

In other words, if some people suggest the BMI cutoff for ‘overweight’ is too low, then what does that make me in these pictures? Underweight?

Or is it that people who don’t like the category the chart puts them in immediately react by dismissing the chart as being wrong instead of heeding the guidance it provides to lose some weight. This of course is cognitive dissonance at its finest.

For anyone who is in the ‘normal’ range the BMI chart seems to make perfect sense, or at least it does to me.

John