This page from kidshealth.org goes over some recent numbers about childhood obesity and the finding that 1 in 3 children is now considered overweight or obese. That’s a lot of young people who are suffering now and will be suffering for most of their lives. Carrying extra body fat makes all activity in life more difficult and there is an innate tendency for people to judge obese people more harshly as a result of their weight. I think some harsh judgement is fitting for someone who has control over the food they buy and eat, it is unfortunate for the younger obese person because up until a certain age, they have almost no control over what they eat.

I have little doubt that there are psychological reasons for many eating behaviours but when it applies to the escalating obesity rate with young people, I believe the obesity preceeds any psychological problems. If the young person’s brain is void of issues then the cause of the obesity is environmental in the form of poor eating behaviors taught by their parents or caregivers. Simply put, fat people breed lean people and then proceed to make them fat.

Fattening up a child is one of the worst things a parent can do because it harms their child but there is something even more insidious about it. Fattening up their children serves to make the obese parent feel more normal because it creates another fat person. Think about it this way, if 2 fat parents have 2 lean children, the ratio of fat to lean people in the family is 1:1. But if 2 fat parents have 1 lean child and 1 fat child, the ration of fat to lean is 3:1. If 75% of the people are obese, obesity can be regarded as the norm. If both children are fat then they have a 100% obesity rate making obesity completely acceptable. Obese parents, by making their children fat, create a life preserving fiction that being fat is normal and nothing to be concerned with or treated.

Fat parents rarely teach their children how they should be eating, what foods to buy and how to prepare these foods to maintain a lean body. They also never model lean as a way to live life. Their food choices are taught to their children, along with the obese lifestyle, as things that are normal. Lacking evidence that says anything different, the children learn that these things are how it is. They do not see a choice until much later in life when the habits are formed and their is a solid foundation of adipose tissue ready to soak-up the extra calories and store fat. By the time they realize that they do have a choice the odds are stacked against them that they will ever be a healthy weight because their body’s have become so good at storing fat.

For the obese parent it is not too late to stop abusing your child but you need to start now. You need to make a big effort to eliminate the behaviors that made you fat in the first place and begin to model the behaviors that will help to maintain leanness. You need to do this even if you will never enjoy a long lean life; just because you were victim to the consequences of poor eating behaviors doesn’t mean that your children need to be. There is more than enough information available that will help you make the right choices that to continue to make the wrong ones amounts to deliberate ignorance. The clock is ticking because your children are watching you and making your behavior the reality. How you act now is how they will act in the very near future. Give them a solid foundation to make their life easier than yours has been.

Over 6 months a man named Chris Coleson lost 80 pounds eating food from McDonald’s. It’s great when someone is that successful in changing their body composition. I think the story is LESS remarkable when the McDonald’s thing is added in but I have little doubt that we would have heard anything about Chris Coleson’s weight loss had it not been for him eating only McDonald’s because Chris wouldn’t have lost the weight.

The McDiet itself amounts to an almost starvation diet - Chris was eating about 1400 calories per day down from close to 5000 per day. He was weighing in around 275 lbs and would have needed around 2400 calories per day to maintain his weight. A 1000 calorie per day deficit is huge and isn’t anything that I could recommend that someone do for very long. It would have been unpleasant and very difficult to do.

It is pretty unlikely that you have ever eaten 5000 calories in a day more than a few times in your life. It’s pretty tough to do. When I am bulking, I’ll increase my food intake to around 2500-3000 calories per day and I’m basically force feeding myself. I have no concept of what it would be like to double my food intake and make it a daily habit to eat that much. But I can guarantee this: IF I was able to make it a habit to eat 5000 calories per day it would be one tough habit to break and I doubt that I would have the will-power to reduce my food intake by 75%. Chris did exactly this.

“I would literally sit at the refrigerator and just eat out of the refrigerator,” he said. “I would attack the kids’ school lunches that [my wife] had prepared the night before.”

I think it would be safe to say that Chris had some compulsive eating behaviours before he made the decision to drop the weight. Another factor that makes his accomplishment so interesting. For some reason, his belief that he would lose weight eating only McDonald’s was enough for him to stop his compulsive eating and enter into an almost starvation diet for 6 months. Why would this thought be the catalyst for Chris’ success?

Chris knew all along that his behaviour was what was making him obese but like many people who have consumption disorders he had likely given up on his ability to do anything about it. He also knew that his obesity was shortening his life given the family history of heart disease but again, he had likely given up hope of doing anything about it. He had lost control and needed something external to help him find the motivation to make things right. Setting the goal of losing weight by eating only McDonald’s was the external factor he needed.

I think that is the lesson that we should take out of this: you may need to set an unreasonable goal in order for you to achieve the really tough things in life. Good for you Chris!

Cosgrove’s Five Ah-Ha! Moments: The Education of a Misguided Trainer by Alwyn Cosgrove is a T-nation article outlining 5 important moments of enlightenment. The ones dealing with body composition are the ones that I found the most interesting:

Ah-ha! #2: For fat loss, the post-workout period is where the most important “something” happens. 

…When comparing total calories burned from exercise, the researchers found the endurance training burned 28,661 calories, while the interval training group burned 13,614 calories. In other words, the interval-training group burned less than half the calories of the endurance-training group. However, when the researchers adjusted the results to correct for the difference in energy cost, the interval-training group showed a 900% greater loss in subcutaneous fat than the endurance group. In other words, calorie for calorie, interval training was nine times more effective than steady state exercise.

What we can conclude from the study is that interval training is much better at eliminating fat than steady state cardio REGARDLESS of the number of calories burned during the training session.

Why would this be?

I’ll speculate a few reasons:

1) The cost of recovery is greater for interval training than it is for steady state training in terms of absolute calories and duration.

2) The body is less efficient at adapting to interval based training so the cost of recover never really decreases. The body adapts very quickly to steady state training so after the first couple of workouts, the recover cost is already a lot lower. There is a diminishing marginal cost associate with steady state that doesn’t appear to be there with interval training.

3) Interval training relies on a variety of energy systems to get the work done and there is a great recovery cost when replenishing stores to multiple energy systems as opposed to just one.

Ah-ha! #5: Hypertrophy is a systemic response and effect, not a localized one.

All the talk about bodypart training versus full body routines, isolation exercise versus compound exercise, etc. is based upon a fundamentally flawed concept: that hypertrophy is somehow completely regional-specific.

The researchers compared the effects of a weight training program on 5RM strength and arm circumference and divided the subjects into two groups. Group 1 performed four compound upper body exercises, while Group 2 used the same program but included biceps curls and triceps extensions.

The results showed that both groups significantly increased strength and arm size

However, the addition of direct arm training to group two produced no additional effect on strength or arm circumference after 10 weeks of training.

The additional localized training did not result in anything that the bigger compound exercises didn’t provide.

This one blew my mind because I finially had scientific confirmation of something I’ve been saying to people for a long time. People often ask me how do they get their arms to grow or how do they bench press more. My answer is always to say “squat more” or “start to deadlift.” Those who follow the advice grow and get stronger upper bodies while those who take the time to point out the flawed logic remain exactly the same.

Two important things here: don’t ask for advice if you don’t want to follow it and more importantly, the body is only going to get as big and as strong as it needs to. If it isn’t as big or as strong as you would like it to be, do things that increase the demand for size and strength even if it isn’t in the areas that you want to improve and you will grow.

I think this happens for a few reasons:

1) The hormones that make the body grow impact the entire body and not just the area that is trained.

2) The body will conserve energy at every opportunity. If it isn’t being taxed in a particular way, it is going to do only what it needs to do.

3) The body strives for balance because muscle imbalances lead to injury and an increase in effort (wasted energy).

It’s a great article that may change the way you view things.

From the CrossFit website we learn that “CrossFit is the principal strength and conditioning program for many police academies and tactical operations teams, military special operations units, champion martial artists, and hundreds of other elite and professional athletes worldwide.”

They have a lot of videos on youtube if you would like to see what it is all about. ‘DL, J RingDip, RopeClimb‘ is one that tells the story. It is a little messy but it is a great example of determination and how the body responds to high levels of lactate.

Throwing-up is a natural response by the body to high levels of lactate and high levels of lactate is the natural response to intense exercise without sufficient oxygen. Lactate inducing workouts are fantastic for fat burning because of the massive amount of EPOC (excessive post-exercise oxygen consumption) they create.

I believe that this type of training is going to become very popular because it is effective at leaning a person out, building relative strength and developing mental toughness. It teaches a person how to ride the line between too much exercise and just enough exercise and this will allow them to get the most out of their time at the gym.

I don’t see many people working out like this at commercial gyms but did get people to the threshold a few times when I was a trainer at one - my boss didn’t like it very much because it was “bad for business.” I don’t know what he was talking about because my clients got results and renewed with me; but it could have had something to do with the fear instilled in the new members who see them holding buckets to their faces.

Inspired by T-nation author Eric Cressey’s What I Learned In 2007, I decided to put together my own list of things that I learned in 2007 (note - Eric’s 2006 article was my first ever post so be sure to read this years version).

1) Gifted athletes do not necessarily look remarkable but there is something weird about the way they look when they train. A few weeks ago we did the athlete testing for SST’s 12 week football academy. There were a variety of assessment tests but the one that stood out to me was the penta jump. This is basically a standing long jump with 5 jumps instead of just one, all linked together in a fluid unstopping order. It is a skill, but talent does impact ones performance.

Many of the athletes performed unremarkable, which is what we expect to see at the start of the camp because many of them are untrained and are coming off of a month or two layoff from exercising. But one of the athletes, a 14 year old, look weird doing it. He seemed to float away from me when he jumped - each jump took him so much further down the turf than any of the other athletes. His distance way 6-8 feet longer than any one else in his age group. I wasn’t very surprised to see his sub 5 second result in the 40. He’s 14 years old and pretty small. I’m looking forward to seeing how he’ll continue to improve as he grows pounds of muscle and gains more complete neural control over his muscle firing patterns.

2) Fish oil supplements eliminate most of the shoulder pain I experience when I’m lifting heavy. I’m both shocked and happy to have found this to be the case. There is practically no fire in my shoulders in the days following my chest / back workouts. There used to be pain that prevented me from sleeping and stopped me from training heavy in the summer. This is all but gone now, thanks to 6-10 grams of fish oil per day.

3) Great athletes embrace coaching, lifters tend to ignore it. How someone responds to feedback plays the biggest role in the quality of feedback that they get. The gifted 14 year old listens to all the advice and coaching that he is given and he continues to improve, and people continue to coach him. This isn’t surprising because people do not like to waste their time. IF someone isn’t going to follow the advice that is given to them, people learn very quickly to stop giving it to them. Personally I begin to disengage from a person after the first time they role their eyes and DON’T change their movement pattern - they can role their eyes, call me a prick but so long as they change their movement pattern I’ll keep coaching them.

When it comes to lifters most of them do not want to lift correctly. They lift the weight and not the movement. I look away a lot when I’m at the commercial gym because I don’t want to see someone hurt themselves and feel responsible from helping them. I’ll offer advice to a young lifter on the off-hand chance that they want to become better, but more often than not they don’t want to hear it. This is too bad for them and good news for Rachel because she’s going to be an athletic therapist and will have a lot of people to work on.

4) Energetic coaching is more important than knowledgeable coaching when it comes to working with young or inexperienced athletes. Young people don’t not have the movement inventory or body awareness that older people have because they have spend less time in their bodies interacting with the earth. Most athletic movements are going to be new to them and they are not likely to have the motor control to move their bodies in the way that is required in order to be performed the movement correctly. For this reason, advanced coaches are not going to be able to use their knowledge to facilitate improvements within this population. More importantly, given that it is frustrating to be bad at something, particularly when a coach or another athlete does it with ease, inexperienced athletes may find quitting an easier choice if they do not find any enjoyment in an activity. An energetic coach can help bridge the gap between a lack of experience and learning a new skill and will often help the young person find joy in an otherwise unrewarding experience.

5) Rotator cuff muscles are primarily fast twitch fibers and should be trained in the 7-10 rep range with fast effort and slower negative tempos. This one could have read - people should train their rotator cuff muscles. I started doing internal and external rotation exercises just after I started working at SST after the cause of my horrific posture was pointed out. While I am still imbalanced in this area, I’m catching up and standing taller than I ever have.

6) Steady state cardio promotes fat storage while high intensity interval training creates more EPOC that will result in greater fat loss over the long haul. I credit RPM with starting my brain thinking about this one. The choreography is interval based with exertion levels growing from comfortable to breathless. One of the things I found once I stopped trying to keep my heart rate at 150 was that I was more tired at the end of the workouts and couldn’t do so much riding. I also noticed that there is only have a finite length of time that I can get my heart rate above 160 and once this time is up I get too fatigued trying to bring it up there again.

As this relates to fat loss: you need to workout very intensely to promote fat loss, but you need to workout at various levels of intensity to get the most fat loss because it requires the most amount of energy to adapt to many different level of effort. Also, if you workout at just one intensity, your body will quickly adapt to make it more and more efficient to work at that level the next time. This means if you are working out at a level that requires fat as fuel, the body will adapt to store more fat to fuel the effort next time. If you keep it at a steady state, your body will become so efficient at working at this level that it will stop losing fat. Given that your activity level will not change, it is unlikely that you will alter your diet to account for this improved efficiency and will begin to eat a calorie surplus thus promoting fat storage.

7) Spell check and proof read your resume a number of times before you submit it. We initially passed on a trainer candidate because of the typos on his resume. I looked over his resume a week later and thought that maybe there was a good reason why the mistakes were there. When we chatted it was obvious that there wasn’t a good reason but that he was a good candidate. He did fantastic in his interviews and we hired him. He is a gifted trainer with a wonderful demeanor that allows him to connect with almost everyone he engages. I’m glad I called him because he is a real asset to the team and a good human being. But I almost didn’t take the chance because of something that is very easy to avoid.

It is January and the busiest month of the year for all commercial gyms. This month alone counts for 15-20% of the years new memberships. The problem is that 5% of the people who sign up will NEVER set foot back in the place except to cancel. In 6 weeks another 25-35% of them will have stopped coming. In three months another 25-30% will have stopped. By this time next year, only about 15-25% will remain.

I appreciate this time of year for a few reasons. There are a lot of new people in my class, so I have a new opportunity to change peoples lives by helping them find that “oh my God” moment when they have pushed harder than they thought they could and realize that they are still in the fight. My classes are full and there are people waiting at the door to get in; this means that those who do make it in are going to work harder and not leave midway through.

But on a more cynical / realistic level, this time of year marks the start of one of the worst periods for 75-85% of the people who join the gym. It represents the moment in time when they made a mistake and actually believed that they had the ability to change their life and become the healthy person they thought they were.

I’ve seen 1000’s of people join and quit the gym. I’ve sold 100’s of people on the dream that they could look like me, the trainers, the regulars and the sexy people on TV, only to have their dream fall apart a few weeks later when they realize that they are not ready to achieve their goals. I used to feel bad about it so I stopped selling at a commercial gym.

When I’m teaching RPM at GoodLife, I try to be encouraging, upbeat, high energy and honest about what the participant are about to go through. I tell them that it is going to hurt, I let them know that it is going to take a few weeks of sustained effort before the class starts to get easier, I mention that I was once brand new at it and that I found it to be one of the toughest gym experiences I had gone through in spite of the fact that I raced mountain bikes and had been active for most of my life. I try not to sell anyone on the “you can do it” dream and instead try to sell them on the “it’s going to suck until the end of class” reality.

I’ve learned that there are 10-15% of the population that are going to burn 80% of the calories. These are the people who are already working out and will remain working out regardless of everything. These people need coaching on form and that is it. They supply the motivation and will find their way to the gym when the roads are closed due to snow, on Christmas day when everyone else is at home, and when they are in their time of need. Working out for these people is similar to prayer for the faithful - it’s what they do when they need to find peace.

How do you become one of the 10-15% if you are not one of them?

The easiest way is to get a personal trainer (PT). Over the years I’ve gone from considering PTs as jocks who count reps to considering most of them to be jocks who hold the unmotivated to their promises. I’m not certain but I have the feeling that most people show up to their appointments because they have public integrity and don’t want to go back on their word to another person; but it could have something to do with the $0 refund for no-show appointments - the notion of losing $60 for not showing up to an hour appointment may serve as more of a motivator than the fear of dying from an obesity related illness.

There is a lot of talk in the business about personal training and how much commercial gyms profit from it - very often the gym pays the trainer only 25-35% of the hourly cost of the session. This means they get 65-75% PLUS the monthly membership cost. But, when you get down to it, most PTs are getting a fair wage based on what they actually know and they also get to be “Personal Trainers”, which carries some prestige in many gyms.

But it is an undeniable observation that those who train with PTs WILL stick with their workouts for a longer period of time. If you are not one of the 10-15% who treat working out like worship, getting a PT will allow you to behave like one of them and it will help you stay diligent with your workouts.

I have nothing to gain directly from encouraging people to train with a PT because I do not work for a commercial gym - SST uses floor coaches to offer guidance to all of the members who are working out. My suggestion that working out with a PT will increase your likelihood of success is based on years of observing the sales cycle in a commercial gym. If you are not already working out there is a 85% chance that you will fail to become one of the ones who work out UNLESS you get professional help. Get an expert and change your life. Otherwise you may just be helping to buy all the new and shinny equipment I love to workout on.

T-nation article by Chris Shugart “It’s Sabotage!” is about toxic people. I love reading this article because it really resonates with me. I used to have a lot of friends who would rip on me for trying to improve myself and I have to admit that their influence was negative and effective. The big issue with toxic people is that you don’t necessarily see their influence until it has had an impact and the greater the impact, the harder it is to undo. If you make a clean break from the toxic influences in your life, you can begin to build more positive support structure but first you need to identify those toxic people so you can banish them forever. (Okay, maybe not forever because many of them don’t even know that they’re behaving like non-friends, but put them out of your life until they make a positive change in how they interact with you and the rest of the world).

I bring up toxic people in reference to body composition because very often there are negative people in your life who keep throwing up reasons why you shouldn’t try to change the way you look and feel. For the most part, their reason have nothing to do with you and are based solely on their own feelings of low self worth. For some reason, many people can only get up by getting others down. They have failed to see that their is almost unlimited success available in the world and instead see the world in binary terms such that any success of another person is an immediate failure in them.

I don’t see the world in these terms. I believe that there is unlimited success available when it comes to fitness and health because these things are measured by ones individual ability and not by comparing performance to another person. For example, there is no reason why most people in the world cannot have a body fat percentage of 15% and be able to run 3 Km. There is no reason for people not to be able to do a pull-up, 10 push-ups, and be able to walk up a flight of stairs without gasping for air. Assuming these things are a measure of fitness and health, my fitness does not improve anytime another person fails to achieve one of these benchmarks.

Translation - I do not get healthier when another person becomes less healthy. I gain nothing when someone else falls deeper towards disease. I actually believe that the world becomes a worse place when someones health and fitness falters. I do not enjoy seeing people fail at the gym, fail to make the right choices when they shop or fail to make the decision to stop smoking, drinking, or being a total layabout. 

I’ve been lucky enough to have a supportive family and close friends who don’t try to rip down my passions. When I started to learn how to play guitar, my friends put up with it. When I started to correct my eating habits, my family supported me and stopped offering me dessert. When I decided to take some time off from working, I was supported in my decision because my friends and family believed that I was working towards something.

What does this mean to those who want to change the way they look? Well, simply put, you need to start to clean out the crap from your life. There is an undeniable correlation between your successes and the successes of your 5 closest friends. If your 5 closest friends smoke, there’s a very good chance that you smoke. If they eat crappy food and blame the government for their place in life, there’s a very good chance you eat crappy food and blame the government for everything. If your closest friends are like this, there is an almost 100% chance that you will fail at everything you set out to do because your friends will help to facilitate your failure through negative comments, derailing behaviours and basically making you feel like crap for ever thinking you deserve better.

If you are tired of being overweight and lazy, and all of your friends are overweight and lazy, it’s time to get some new friends, ones who aren’t overweight and lazy. Even if you don’t / can’t get new friends (which is a possibility because healthy people know the potential negative influence that overweight under motivated people possess) you may need to get rid of your old friends and go it alone for a while because your chances of success are much greater if you have no negative influences.

Always keep in mind that true friends want for you what you want for you not what they want for you. They will look to you for inspiration and will try to be inspiring to you. They aren’t going to measure their successes in terms of your failures. Anyone who wants you to fail needs to be taken out of your life forever.

Anyone who asks me how to lose body fat will hear me say the following things:

1. Eat 5-7 smaller meals a day, 1 every 2.5 to 3 hours
2. Eat protein at every meal
3. Eat vegetable at every meal
4. Lower high and moderate GI carb intake
5. Consume your carbs after an intense workout out
6. Eat breakfast everyday
7. Start or keep exercising

There are other things that I will say but these are the standard answers to everyone but the very lean or very active people.

In T-nations The 2008 Fat Loss Roundtable, Part I and Part II, some other suggestions are given:

Dr. Mohr: Here are four such rules:

1. Eat a fruit and/or at least one vegetable with every single meal.
2. Plan ahead. Don’t go to work without any food at all, then wonder why you opted for fast food at noon, hit the vending machine at 3 PM, and are famished on the way home so you decided to order a pizza to pick up for dinner.
3. Define your goals and write them daily. If you don’t know what you’re working toward, you’re going to continue to struggle.
4. Move more! I’m all about complexes, interval training, large body movements like deadlifts, etc. but what about the other 160-plus hours during the week when you’re not at the gym? Walk more. Get on a bike and use that as your transportation. Use the stairs instead of the elevator.

And:

Mike Roussell: Yes, what I call the 6 Pillars of Naked Nutrition: 

1. Eat five to six times a day.
2. Limit your consumption of sugars and processed foods.
3. Eat fruits and vegetables throughout the day.
4. Drink more water and cut out calorie-containing beverages (beer, soda, etc.).
5. Focus on consuming lean proteins throughout the day.
6. Save starch containing foods until after a workout or for breakfast.

I’ll admit that the lists are not exactly the same, so saying that these experts agree completely would be inaccurate. BUT, if you look closely and consider the practical consequence to these suggestions, the behavioural outcome IS the same.

When you read the t-nation articles it will be obvious that these guys draw their conclusions from research and experience, the same places I get mine from. It will also be obvious that they hold out little hope that an individual will change their behaviour until they take a hard look at the way they think about the world, themselves and their relationship with food. In fact, the claim is made that binge eating is the number one eating disorder in America.

If you have some body fat to get rid of and what you are reading here does not come as a surprize, you need to ask yourself WHY you are not doing what you know you need to do. There is too much evidence now about the right way to achieve your goals that you can no longer blame your lack of success on a lack of knowledge.

I remember thinking when I heard about JFK Jr. crashing his plane ”why do people think lawyers can fly?” It was sad, because he was young, and two other people died along with him. But it wasn’t that surprising to me, because he was a lawyer. He was a hobby pilot at best, and frankly, I don’t think it’s a good idea to go flying with hobby pilots. If you want to fly, get an expert pilot to fly the plane.

I hold the same opinion when it comes to changing body composition. When I need to change something about the way my body looks; I ask an expert for their advice. I then follow their advice until I look the way I want to, or I realize that their advice doesn’t apply to me. It’s pretty simple. If I don’t look the way I want to it is because I don’t know how to make myself look that way. If I did know I would be doing what I needed to make it happen.

When I was a trainer at GoodLife it became obvious that almost everyone THINKS they know how to eat in order to change the way they look IN SPITE of the fact that they don’t already look the way they want to. When I asked them why they hadn’t achieved their fitness goals yet, their answers were all basically the same – it was due to a lack of effort and not a lack of knowledge. Hearing these excuses day in and day out was the main reason I made the decision to stop training people, and focus most of my energies on my own fitness and health related goals.

I give a lot of nutrition presentations to parents of young athletes, and I find it remarkable that so many sceptical people trust their children’s training to us, but don’t believe me when I offer them guidance concerning optimal nutrition for athletes. Sure there are some who agree with everything I say, and there are others who agree, but admit that it’s difficult and expensive to eat that way. But I’m baffled by the people who continue to tell me that fat is bad; that human beings need lots of grain; that too much protein will destroy the kidneys, and that supplements shouldn’t be given to young people. When I ask them how they know these things; they say that they don’t know how they know; they just know that they know. I don’t try to convince them, because my role is to educate, and people can only be educated when they are open to new information.

I try to win them over by saying that what they have been doing is not bad or dangerous because they are still alive. I suggest that it is just not optimal. I inject some science into what has traditionally been taught by parents. Serving size and food choices are perfect examples of this – we tend to eat the same foods and similar amounts of food that our parents feed us. In talking to these people, I try to make them doubt the scientific basis of their knowledge in an attempt to get them to open their minds a little. Over time, some of what I say may get in and make a difference at a later date - an approach that has worked with a number of my peers and clients. Those who are receptive to what I say begin to make the changes they have always wanted while those who remain sceptical tend to remain on the same path they have been on most of their lives.

I do consider myself an expert on nutrition; at least as it applies to body composition, because I have done everything that I recommend. I have also been a heavy guy who needed to learn the right way to eat, because my food choices were making me fat. It took a long time to figure it out, but once I did, I was able to bring about the changes I needed in order to improve the quality of my life, and to make my body look the way I had always wanted it to. But I only gained my knowledge because I remained open to what experts had to say about nutrition, and the results came only because I listened to their advice.

If you want to change the way you look, chances are that you are not an expert. Your first step is to accept that you don’t know how to make it happen. Your second step is to find someone who does know. And your final step is to follow their advice COMPLETELY. It’s very simple, the best people get the best results EVERY TIME.

20 Minutes to a Hard Body Get Full Without Getting Fat, And Other Tips by t-nations Chris Shugart paints an interesting picture of why human beings act the way they do when it comes to food. All in all, we are far from a perfect species that uses advanced and accurate methods for determining when we’ve eaten the right amount of food. In fact, most of us possess the biology that ensures that we over-eat at every possible opportunity.

We don’t have immediate feedback from our bodies telling us we’ve eaten enough. It takes about 20 minutes for food to be digested enough that glucose gets into the bloodstream and the hormones start working.

20 minutes is just long enough for us to eat about twice as much as we need to so it would appear that we’ve evolved to TRY to get fat. This is fine and good when there isn’t a surplus of food and we need to gorge every chance we get. But there’s no shortage of food in our modern world to this system gets in the way of eating appropriately.

Lesson - eat a small to medium sized meal and wait for 20 minutes before eating a second helping. If you are still hungry, eat a little more. If you aren’t, you made the right call stopping.

… secretaries ate more chocolates when they were easily within reach, and they ate more when they were visible instead of covered. And the kicker here is that they usually didn’t realize they were consuming more calories from closely-placed foods. 

This is pretty amazing when you think about it: If a human being sees food within reach, he’ll eat it, even if he’s not hungry. If that same food is a few feet away and/or hidden from view, he’s less likely to eat it.

So seeing food makes us want the food. Great mechanism in a world where there isn’t a lot of food because we’ll eat EVERY chance we get, but this doesn’t make sense now given that we have an abundance of food.

Lesson - make sure you do not have easy access to any food that you don’t want to eat or know you shouldn’t be eating.

Think High Volume, Low Energy. By “energy” I mean calories. Some foods are calorically dense; others aren’t. The idea here is to have low-density foods with every meal so you’ll feel full without adding tons of calories. Basically, you’re taking up space in your stomach so you don’t eat so damn much.

The stomach will send stop eating signals to the brain when it gets physically full. This is a secondary and less accurate method for determining satiation but the outcome is the same, we stop eating.

Lesson - if you want to eat less overall, eat high volume, low calorie yield foods.