FatGuyThin

Monday Morning Diet Blues

It’s Monday. Time to get your diet head on again. Your holiday is just around the corner and you don’t want to look like a beached-whale in those Speedos you bought last summer.

You’re determined this time. You can do it. Straight to the gym after work, then home to a plateful of tossed salad and wholemeal croutons. This week is detox week. 

By mid-morning you start to hear the siren-call of coffee and chocolate. And the lonely cottage cheese and lettuce sandwich in your lunch box has begun to lose what little appeal it had. 

Next thing you know, you wake up at your desk surrounded by chocolate wrappers and cake crumbs. You’ve done it again; you’ve raided the office sandwich cart. 

What went wrong? 

You became a diet casualty. You put yourself under so much pressure that you had to let off steam before you even got started. 

Somewhere between your high-fibre breakfast and your second cup of de-caf, you became obsessed with “forbidden” foods. After wrestling with your food demons for a couple of hours, your motivation went out the office window and took your resolve with it. By the time the sandwich lady wheeled into town, you were ready to sell your soul for a chocolate muffin and a cookie.

 

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Even though I had a lot of fat to lose when I started – far more than anyone I knew – I took a long-term approach. I’m in this for life, not just for my next vacation. Guess what? I got lean and they are still struggling to lose weight (imagine that!). Most of them have less than 20lb to lose, but after more than 12 months of stop-start deprivation, they have either put more weight on or they stayed the same.

They are trying to torture themselves thin and it doesn’t work. If fat loss is torture, how can you make it a way of life? You can’t.

You don’t need to put yourself under pressure to lose fat. Leave the diet casualties to their quick-loss diets and take a consistent, long-term approach. You’ll lose the fat and the sandwich lady will feel a lot safer when she visits your office.

My Fat Loss Workout - Guidelines

In a previous post, I listed the core workout I used to lose 140lb:

Leg Press

Chest Press

Pulldown

Shoulder Press

Biceps Curl

Abdominal Crunch

With just one set of six exercises, this workout takes a fraction of the time most guys spend in the gym. But make no mistake about it, this is no easy ride. 

Here are some guidelines on how to go about it:

• For the first 4 workouts (weeks 1 & 2), concentrate on learning good form: proper body alignment, controlling the speed of your reps, comfortable stretch, correct hand/foot placement, and correct resistance on each machine. 

• Familiarize yourself with the machine settings. 

• Use a slow rep speed with the emphasis on completing a full range of motion. 

To stimulate growth, you need to overload your muscles along the full range of each exercise. This can only be achieved by moving the resistance slowly to minimize momentum. 

• Use a weight that allows you to perform 5 perfect reps with the last rep being fairly challenging. 

• Don't be too concerned with trying to rush between machines at this point.

• On exercises marked in red hold for a 2-second pause in the top (contracted) position.

• On exercises marked in black avoid locking out. Reverse the movement when you get to one inch before lockout.

• From week 3 onwards, use enough weight so that you reach muscular failure between 3 and 5 reps. 

Failure means that you cannot get another rep without compromising your form. Each successive rep will fatigue the muscles until – between rep 3 and 5 – it becomes impossible to get another rep. Despite your best efforts, all upward movement will cease. At this point, push as hard as you can for 2 seconds. Then lower the weight slowly and the set is done.

• When you can get 5 reps in any exercise, increase the weight by 5lb the next workout. This may reduce your reps to 3, or you might even get 5 reps  - but don't stop just because you get to 5. Keep going until you fail. 

• Take approximately 6 seconds on both the lifting and the lowering of each exercise. 

• Take a full second for the first inch of upward movement. This will ensure that you don't blast out of the stretched position and hurt yourself. It will also make the rest of the rep easier to control.  

• The only thing that matters in the whole wide world is the rep you are on. 

• Every sloppy rep and every abandoned set is an opportunity missed. 

Here’s a couple of videos of Matt Bentley performing reps in the recommended style:

Pulldown and Chest Press

Abdominal Crunch

• Try to move quickly from one machine to the next. As you get fitter, you will be able to reduce the time between each machine. Do not, however, start the next exercise until your breathing has almost returned to normal.

• Keep a record of every workout. Record the number of reps after each exercise. 

• Write the weight against each exercise before your next workout.

• Train twice a week and space the workouts at least two days apart. For example, Monday and Friday, or Tuesday and Saturday.

• Do not perform any other exercise between workouts. No aerobics, no weights, no running, no calisthenics - just your normal daily activities. You will not get the best out of this program if you exercise more than recommended.

• Take no notice of what you see other people doing in any gym - most people are there for social reasons!  

The Finer Points

The most important thing about exercise is QUALITY not quantity. Quality reps, quality exercises, quality time in the gym.

Each rep will take you closer to your goal, but to get there you will have to fight. This is where you will find out just how badly you want to change or not. 

As lactic acid builds up, a few things are going to happen. 

• Your mind will be screaming for you to stop. This is normal. Suck it up and carry on. 

• The impulse to shift around in the seat and speed up the reps will grow stronger - don’t! Suck it up and carry on.

• You will want to hold your breath – don’t! Breath freely. Pant and get plenty of oxygen.

• Your mind is going to want to drift off somewhere pleasant (which, at this point in the set, will be anywhere but the gym). Steel yourself and concentrate hard.

This style of training takes discipline, concentration, and effort. The good news is, if you give it your all you will be rewarded with the best possible results.

“Never give in! Never give in! Never, never, never, never…. In nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions or honour and good sense!”

-Sir Winston Churchill

The Best Exercise For Fat Loss

When it comes to exercise, we have been asking the wrong question. Instead of asking, "Which exercise burns the most calories?" we should be asking, "Which exercise increases calorie-burning power?" 

"The reason 95 percent of today’s diets fail to keep your weight off", say Vash, Zak, and Carlin, in their book ‘The Fat to Muscle Diet’, "is that they cause you to lose muscle tissue along with your fat. These muscle losses are critical. They slow down your metabolism and reduce your calorie-burning power."

The solution to this problem is to prevent muscle loss so your metabolism doesn’t have a chance to slow down. Strength training is the only exercise that can do this. 

Strength Training Increases Metabolism

Strength training not only prevents muscle loss, it can also promote muscle gain. When you gain muscle, you increase your calorie-burning power. 

What about combining strength training with aerobics to increase the calorie-burning benefits? Unfortunately, this causes overtraining and leads to muscle loss. 

A more effective way of building muscle and cardiovascular fitness is high-intensity strength training with short rest periods between sets.

My Fat Loss Workout

Here’s the high-intensity strength training workout I used to shed over 140lb of fat:

Leg Press

Chest Press

Pulldown

Shoulder Press

Biceps Curl

Abdominal Crunch

On Mondays and Fridays, I performed one set of 3 to 5 slow repetitions on each exercise. Anytime I got 5 repetitions on an exercise, I increased the resistance. 

At first, this workout took 30-minutes to complete. I can now complete the same workout in 15-minutes using more resistance on each exercise.

This workout, along with a reduction in food, led to consistent weekly fat losses. My weight didn’t plateau, and I didn’t need to reduce my food further. I was able to do this because I increased my calorie-burning power by getting stronger.

My Weekly Weight Loss 

An Elegant Solution

If you ask the wrong question you might get the wrong solution. To be able to ask the right question, you need to understand the problem. The problem is not a lack of aerobics; the problem is diet-induced muscle loss. The solution is strength training. 

Do You Make This Weight Loss Mistake?

My friend asked a doctor who was running on a treadmill why he never saw him in the weight room. The doctor said it was because he wanted to lose weight.

“Weight” being the operative word because when my friend told him that dieting and running would cause him to lose muscle, the doctor said he didn’t care as long as the weight came off.

The doctor was more concerned with his body mass index (BMI) than losing fat. 

This is a sentiment shared by many dieters. They don’t care what their weight loss is comprised of – fat, muscle, bone, brain tissue – as long as the number on the scale goes down. 

Muscle Loss Slows Down Your Metabolism

Muscle losses slow down your metabolism and reduce your calorie-burning power. This makes fat gain much easier. As the number on the scale falls, the chance of you regaining the weight increases. 

The only way to prevent these muscle losses is strength training.

The number on the scale tells you nothing about muscle mass, or how you look, and it won’t tell you when your tendency to get fat is increasing.