Category: Getting Rid Of Fat

This category covers things that relate to metabolizing stored body fat. Generally speaking, burning this fat will result in a reduction of body fat levels, which has been linked to improved health outcomes. Lowering body fat is also one of the two main objectives when tackling body composition or aesthetic goals; the other being the creation of lean muscle mass.

4 Ways To Get More Out Of Your Workouts

Four things that will improve your workouts:

Focus on being present during the workout – when you are working out, work out. Focus all of your attention on the task at hand and be mindful of what you are doing. You will not achieve your potential if you do not put 100% of your awareness into your movements.

Increase the intensity – when you are completely present, the intensity of your actions will increase. The more intensely you move, the greater the amount of work you will completely in a given period of time. More work equates to faster results.

Increase the frequency – if you increase the frequency of your workouts, you are going to see an increase in your results even if you keep the volume the same. For example, people experience better results doing 2 25-minute carido sessions a week than doing 1 50-minute session. The same is true for resistance training, you can increase results by doing half the work in 2 workouts instead of all the work in one one workout. This has to do with intensity – you can work out harder for 25 minutes than you can for 50 minutes, and you can lift with more intensity in the early sets than you can in the later sets.

Increase the amount of overall work you are doing – this is a general statement (use the stairs, walk more, etc…) but as it applies to working out, use equipment that forces you to do more work. For example, use a plate machine instead of a pin machine (loading and unloading plates requires a lot more energy than pulling a pin), use dumbbell movements instead of barbell movements because you need to pick the dumbbells up from the rack and return them when you complete the set and place weights on the ground instead of dropping them.

4 Exercises I’ve Recently Added

Wide grip dead lifts on step – I have never done dead lifting before and needed to work on my technique before I could do them without scraping my shine bone. I found that by taking a wide grip and standing on a step I could get some distance between the bar and my shines. They really work my entire back and I feel them on my hamstrings immediately and my quads the next day. Doing them a couple of times a week over the last two months improved my form enough that I was able to lift 225 on Sunday with a shoulder width grip.

The Corner Barbell Press and Push Press. I love these for two reasons. First, my right side is a little stronger than my left so working each in isolation is helping to close the strength gap between them. Second, they really work the obliques and lower back. The truth is, I don’t enjoy doing side bends at all so doing these helps me work these muscles without doing any extra sets. I’m really happy with the results.

Single arm dumbbell press for the same reasons as the corner barbell press. With both of these exercises, I find myself spending more time working and less time resting – each set takes about twice as long to do, but I need less time between sets because one half of the body is recovering while you work the other side. Overall, I think I’m getting a lot more out of my time at the gym and time passes a lot faster when I’m lifting vs. waiting between sets.

ISO legs press shrugs. I LOVE this exercise! One of my favorites right now. The movement of the machine allows me to use really heavy weights while isolating each side of my body. It is ideal for doing drop sets, cheat reps and pause reps. My traps have seen great improvement over the last 3 months since I started doing these.

Some Interesting Nutrition Findings

Experimental Biology 2007 by Mike Roussell of T-nation.com talks about some of the findings presented at this years Experimental Biology conference in Washington, DC.

Of particular interest was the review of Dr. Barbara Rolls talk:

1) People given either 500 grams or 1000 grams of macaroni and cheese. The ones who received the larger portion ate 33% more calories and reported the same levels of satiety and hunger compared to the people given the smaller portion. These findings did not differ between lean and obese people.

2) 69% of chefs are responsible for the portion sizes served at their restaurant. How they determine the portion size is dictated by the following (in order of importance) — presentation, cost of food, customer expectation, calorie content.

3) Restaurants serve 3 times the recommended amount of all types of food except fruits and vegetables.

4) When people were provided all their food (in caloric excess) for 11 days, they ate 400 calories more per day than needed and consumed more of all types of foods except fruits and vegetables.

5) Drinking water with a meal won’t decrease energy intake, but if you add the water to the meal (i.e. to make a soup or stew), then you’ll consume less calories.

6) Eating a small salad before a meal leads to a decrease in total energy consumption for the entire meal.

7) How much people eat is determined by how much the food weighs not how many calories are in the food.

I found it very interesting that people will eat more if more food is made available to them but will tend to report feeling just as full as they would if they ate less. It is also unusual that soup or salad before a meal lowers over all calorie consumption but water alone does not – I wonder if it has something to do with flavor?

I didn’t find it surprising that people will tend to NOT over eat fruits and vegetables. I don’t believe that these foods serve a survival function, at least not from an evolutionary point of view. They do improve the quality of life but animal flesh and sugar rule the day when dealing with energy storage. The antioxidant qualities of green leafy vegetables are of no significance to a creature that is about to enter the food scarcity phase that winter tends to facilitate.

Top 3 Nutritional Mistakes – Why You Need A Food Journal

Top 3 Nutritional Mistakes (and how to fix them) by Michael Roussell of T-nation outlines 3 mistakes bodybuilders make when trying to build mass while keeping body fat levels down. I mention it because body builders are just extreme versions of the rest of us who are interested in getting or staying lean – their goals are the same, their practices are just a little more intense.

1) Focusing too much on Macronutrient Breakdowns

I’m a big believer that the type of calories (protein, carbohydrates, and fats) you eat does matter, but people can overlook the importance of total calories. Yes, it’s possible to manipulate macronutrients percentages so that you can eat more or less food with favorable advances toward your body composition goals, BUT total calories matter. I liken the total vs. type of calorie debate to the diet vs. exercise debate. They’re not exclusive and both matter!

2) Skipping Meals & Eating Unplanned Meals

Not getting the results you want is one thing, but to not know how well you’re following your plan means you’re blindly stumbling around the land of mediocrity with no chance of success.

Lack of proper compliance … is the number 1 reason people don’t reach their physique goals. If you aren’t reaching your goals, yet haven’t filled out a compliance sheet like the one below, I don’t want to hear about how the diet you’re on doesn’t work or that you need a personalized nutrition plan.

3) Not Giving Your Plan a Change – “The best diet is the one you’re not on.”

… today and there’s an overabundance of training programs accessible at your finger tips. In fact, there are so many programs there is a growing population of people who have become training whores, switching to whatever new program has been published that week.

Unfortunately, the same trend has been emerging with diets and nutrition. Internet forums are overwhelmed with people who are “cutting” one week, “bulking” the next, and “cutting” again the following week. If you’ve done the Velocity Diet, Massive Eating, Get Shredded Diet, and the Anabolic Diet in the span of 8 weeks then I’m talking to YOU.

I have gotten my best result when I write everything out to get a calorie estimate and stick to it for a couple of months. I think this is because it’s very easy to forget eating, not eating and what you eat. I’ll admit, it was a pain in the arm the first couple of days but then it got easier because you get better at it. A food journal is a skill, as is a different eating plan and remaining compliant to it, that gets easier the longer you do it.

Finding Control With Food – Eating Disorders

For a very long time I had an unhealthy relationship with food. Since I’m feeling much better about it now I’m going to be honest with myself and explain how and why it was messed up.

My relationship with disordered eating stems from a control issue that I didn’t realize I had. I’m not sure where it came from but I think it has something to do with me moving from Ireland when I was 9 and it was aggravated to problem status when a really close friend was killed by a drunk driver when I was 22.

The death of loved one is pretty hard and particularly so when they are only 21. The seemingly normal and predictable world came undone when I was 22, calling many of my world view rules into question. Natalie was a really nice girl. Liking everyone, she engaged everything with a passion for fun and happiness. I don’t think anyone deserves to die that young and least of all someone who just seemed to light up the world with their presence. It was really sad. Apart from all the grief that her death brought to her friends and family, the world continues to suffers because it goes without her joy forever. It’s really hard not to cry when I think this deeply about it because she had that old soul wisdom that seemed to cut through the unimportant stuff and leave you seeing only the silver lining. I’ve not met anyone who could do this before or since. She had a gift and I wish the world still had her in it.

But it doesn’t and the day she died was the beginning of the end to my control issue. Unfortunately, like most issues, I was years away from seeing it. I needed to hit a bottom before it became visible and I was able to make enough sense of things to move past it.

In the days immediately following her death, I spend a lot of time in my own head. In between bouts of intense pain, I ran through many of my understandings about the world trying to pull something together that allowed me to make sense of what I was feeling and what had happened. First off, I realized that no one was answering my prayers. Secondly, I realized that all the compulsive behavioural patterns that I had developed to safe guard my life from suffering were ineffective. Third, my belief that the world looked after the good and punished the bad was eliminated completely. I was alone and powerless to prevent my death. The understanding of the world that I had been nurturing was wrong. I had no control over anything.

Over the next few years, life recreated itself around me. I had been burned but I went on living because that’s what human beings do. However, things were different. Having lost the sense of control that I had about the world, the rules I created were based on the assumption that I could be killed at any instant. While that is true, it isn’t very likely. It’s so improbable as to be wrong from any practical perspective; logically I knew this but my life experience had shown me something very different. This single cognitive distortion manifest itself all over the new world view rules that I created. I started to do a lot of things that were hurting my chance of living a long time because I believed that there was a great chance that I would be dead well before the consequence came back to haunt me. I took up smoking, skipping a lot of classes, stopped working out and started going to raves. I didn’t want to die, I just didn’t think I was going to live that long regardless of what I did.

I became addicted to nicotine during this period of time. This was my first experience with addiction and my first conscious experiences with changing my physiological / emotional state with chemicals. Before the smoking, I got drunk when I drank alcohol, I got full when I ate food and I got tired when I worked out. I hadn’t noticed any emotional change in response to doing these things but with nicotine there was a big difference, the dose frequency. I was smoking about 15 cigarettes a day which loosely equates to about 450 dose per day (I’m basing this on the assumption that I took 30 pulls per cigarette). While I am not sure exactly how nicotine impacts the body, it, like most drugs, stimulates neural activity in the body and brain. Over time and repeated exposure to the drug, the body will adapt to the new internal environment that you are creating. As a consequence, normal function will come to depend upon the presence of the drug. When your body makes this adjustment, you learn very quickly just how chemicals can change your emotional state. The negative emotional state that nicotine withdrawal creates disappears INSTANTLY when you inhale the smoke. It happens so quickly that it’s almost impossible NOT to make the connection that smoking makes you feel better (of course it does, it make you feel normal).

This lesson stuck. I realized that I could bring stuff into my body that would not just make me feel good, but which would change the way I felt emotionally. Hmmmm, that was good because this was the first time since Natalie had died that I felt I had some control over something. What else did I have easy access to that I could use to change my emotional state? Well, food. I could buy a chocolate bar for 50 cents, eat it in 20 seconds and change my blood chemistry in such a way as to experience a physiological reward. That was fun so I did it, a lot.

If you’ve eaten a pound of chocolate, or even just a half pound (about 3 chocolate bars), you may have noticed that logical thinking about what you’re doing begins to disappear. The more you do it, the less you need to eat before your thinking is impaired. You find yourself in the zone and the chocolate stops being chocolate and starts being just something you are consuming because it makes you feel a particular way. I’ve spoken to some gamblers about the sensation of betting chips on poker and they describe it in very much the same way, over time, the chips stop being money and start being the fuel that drives the positive sensations of gambling. The more you do it, the better you get at finding the reward. Once you acquire that level of skill you can are free to use the food to evoke that emotional state for the reward or escape. I was about 25 now and this is about 3 years after Natalie died.

Things get foggy here and I’m a little disappointed about that because I don’t have a lot of memories from this period of my life but I didn’t do anything worth remembering. I was basically spinning my wheels until I learned some computer skills and got a job working for an IT company. I was living with my folks at the time to save money to pay off some student loans, so my eating habits had returned to normal. There were still times when I would over eat but they were on special occasions or when I would stay at my girl friends, so it didn’t impact my life at all. My body was changing though and my once iron stomach was starting to have difficulty digesting some of the meals I was eating. In hindsight, I think it was the quantity of food that I was eating in these meals because I am still able to eat smaller amounts of these food now without any difficulty. The IT boom was in full swing and when I got a promotion to manager I moved out. This was a few months after I got my first mountain bike and started riding.

I moved in with Tony and Beth again (2nd time) and we shared a 3 bedroom townhouse in Burlington. This was a fun time because I was making a lot of money and I was very good at my job. I felt like I was on my way again, that life had returned to normal after the death curve ball from 6 years ago.

But things weren’t back to normal. My relationship with food was deteriorating as I was starting to over eat more frequently and suffering indigestion more often. There were a couple of meals a week that didn’t get processed. To me it was normal to get sick when you are feeling sick. It never occurred to me that it wasn’t normal to feel sick so often. I figured it would pass on its own and I didn’t alter my eating habits.

It wasn’t the stereotypical binging and purging that you see on “The Intervention”. The purging wasn’t a conscious “hey, I need to get rid of this meal” thought, it was a “I will feel better if I throw this up” thought. And it was true, I always did feel better. I viewed the over eating as me just having a big appetite. Since I wasn’t gaining any weight, I was healthy. No one said anything to me for a long time, they didn’t have any reason to. It wasn’t as if I was sick or had a problem. 8 chocolate bars here, an extra large pizza there, 65 doughnut bites on the couch while playing Madden on the PS2, whatever. It was just food and I was hungry, and sometimes I ate too much.

Tony was the first to ask me about it. I remember him saying “do you think it’s normal to get sick as much as you do?” I said “yeah, I guess. It must be because causes it’s happening.” Then it was my girl friend’s roommate. Her comment about “getting that checked out because it ISN’T normal for someone who is healthy to get sick very often” didn’t immediately change anything and of course, I didn’t bother getting it checked out.

It began to change though, I started being more aware of what and how I was eating. I started to notice that once I began eating sugary high fat foods, a sensation gripped me that wasn’t there before. It was a drive or compulsion to keep eating. The only things I can compare it to are the drive to have sex or the drive to have a cigarette. Eating was the only thing I could do to make the thoughts go away so I kept eating. Maybe Tony was right, maybe there was something wrong with what I was doing.

Tony and Beth bought there first house and I moved out. I lived between my folks and my girl friends place. This meant that I wasn’t feeding myself anymore, so my diet improved. I was back to the gorging occasionally and didn’t get sick nearly as often. I also worked a lot and didn’t have the chance to lose myself in food.

A few months later I moved in with my friend Deb to be closer to work. My eating habits remained fairly good, but I was starting to gain some weight because I had been spending more time working and less time riding my bike. I decided to try the Atkins low carb diet because I had friends who had lost a lot of weight with it. It was fairly successful with a drop of about 12 pounds in 3 weeks. But the biggest thing I noticed was that my desire to eat sugar disappeared after about a week – I knew I was going without something, the diet wasn’t completely effortless but I wasn’t hungry. Again, the feeling was something like day 7 of quitting smoking – you physically don’t need anything but you are going without something that you find rewarding. The switch had been thrown and the light had gone on, I had drawn a connection between eating sugar and my drive to keep eating sugar. I did what most people do in a situation like this, I went over board. I developed a fear of carbohydrates and took deliberate steps to eat less of them.

Another stint living with Tony and Beth and then back to my folks place to regroup and figure out what I was going to do next. My IT management job had come to an end so I got a job with GoodLife Fitness Clubs and my issues with eating just seemed to disappear. Well, that isn’t exactly true. I still like to over eat occasionally but I work out a lot so I have a lot of opportunity to burn off the excess. I consider the whole thing history because I don’t get sick very often anymore.
Looking back, my disordered relationship with food was a behaviour learned in the time following Natalie’s death. It seems almost too simple to say it, but I was trying to find something to control. The predictable satisfaction of binging and my ability to prevent weight gain gave me these things. Over time, experience provided me with more information and I’ve modified my understanding. As I’ve grown past it I now try to control my eating habits and my fitness, not my mood and my weight.

And I’m really happy that it is behind me now.

Five Factors for Fat Loss Training

The Hierarchy of Fat Loss by Alwyn Cosgrove from T-Nation outlines the steps you need to follow to maximize your time when trying to get ride of fat. Visit the link for the complete article. It lists the exercise intensities that you should be working out at along with the amount of time you should be spending on each.

1. Metabolic Resistance Training – The first 3 hours of training in a week. Basically we’re using resistance training as the cornerstone of our fat loss programming. Our goal is to work every muscle group hard, frequently, and with an intensity that creates a massive “metabolic disturbance” or “after burn” that leaves the metabolism elevated for several hours post-workout. (Increase EPOC).

2. High Intensity Anaerobic Interval Training – Hours 4 and 5 in training week. The second key “ingredient” in fat loss programming is high intensity interval training (HIIT). I think readers of T-Nation will be well aware of the benefits of interval work. It burns more calories than steady state and elevates metabolism significantly more than other forms of cardio. The downside is that it flat-out sucks to do it!

3. High Intensity Aerobic Interval Training – Hours 5 and 6 in training week. The next tool we’ll pull out is essentially a lower intensity interval method where we use aerobic intervals.

4. Steady State High Intensity Aerobic Training – Hours 6 to 8 in training week. Tool number four is just hard cardio work. This time we’re burning calories — we aren’t working hard enough to increase EPOC significantly or to do anything beyond the session itself. But calories do count. Burning another 300 or so calories per day will add up.

5. Steady State Low Intensity Aerobic Training – Anything above 8 hours
This is just activity, going for a walk in the park, etc. It won’t burn a lot of calories; it won’t increase muscle or EPOC. There isn’t very much research showing that low intensity aerobic training actually results in very much additional fat loss, but you’re going to have to really work to convince me that moving more is going to hurt you when you’re in fat attack mode.

EPOC At Millcreek

Last Wednesday night I taught All Terrain at Millcreek. I really like the cycling room there because it’s enclosed, kind of dark and has such poor circulation that they have two industrial fans to move around the air; it reminds me of a rave environment. On Wednesday, as luck would have it, the mic wasn’t there meaning I had to cue with my hands and using verbal commands only as loud as I can shout. But by track 3 it was evident that I wasn’t loud enough and that my attempts to communicate were leaving me out of breath and not helping anyone. It was a little stressful so I did what I always do when I’m stressed, I worked as hard as I could. I was hoping that if they were able to copy what I was doing on the bike, they were going to get a heck of a workout.

The class went like most classes, really quickly and I was soaked by the end of it. I locked the studio door and changed. As I was leaving, I noticed that I was still pretty hot. My body temperature was still a little high and my breathing hadn’t returned to normal either. This was about 10 minutes after class ended and about 20 since the last working track. I seemed to float to my car and then sat in silence for about 10 minutes before I started it to drive away.

The drive was blissful. It was a sunny spring evening so I had the car windows open. There was a nice breeze and it was still bright out. Everything about it said that the winter was over and that spring was here. It was peaceful because I didn’t care about anything. “Stop at red lights and don’t hit any cars” was my only mandate. No speeding, no weaving, just mindless driving with plenty of time to get to where I was going. A quick stop to get some groceries and then to my brother and sister inlaw’s place to make dinner and go to bed – I had to be up for 5:15 the next morning.

The thing was, I didn’t feel any different from how I did when I floated across the parking lot. In fact, I hadn’t seemed to come down at all from the workout. I still had the narrowed spacey focus I get when I race and I felt nothing. Whatever was coursing through my veins was coating my insides numb and leaving my brain not much better. Shopping took a while and they I went to Des and Sarah’s to watch American Idol. I feel asleep around 10:30 and slept well until the alarm woke me up.

I get that feeling a fair bit. It seems to come on after every lap or race I complete, after a really really intense weight workout or when I get my heart rate up above 170 for longer than a minute 3 or 4 times in a cardio session. It doesn’t come on with steady state cardio or short duration resistance workout, only after very hard work; work that could be viewed as fight or flight because it taxes the body so severely. While not the result of the acute stress response initiated by sympathetic nervous system arousal, the physical symptoms / reactions are exactly the same – increased blood flow to the muscles, increased heart rate, a deadening of your ability to think clearly about abstract things.

I believe that this is the cause of EPOC (excessive post-exercise oxygen consumption). EPOC is the tendency for the body to continue to burn energy at an elevated rate after a workout; we know it exists because there is an increase in O2 consumption above baseline levels following certain types of workouts. Most of the evidence comes from studies addressing resistance training workouts which show a sustained increase in O2 consumption following intense exercise because adaptive change requires energy and intense exercise forces adaptive change.

While the amount of evidence on EPOC with high intensity interval training (HIIT) isn’t nearly as robust, anecdote and interpretation of the results of these type of studies indicate greater fat loss for HIIT vs. steady state cardio exercise. I believe that HIIT does one that that steady state does not, it forces the body to adapt to a variety of different intensities vs. just one, which I believe causes more EPOC than steady state cardio.

All things being equal I’d rather connect with the participants of the classes I’m teaching. But when the mic is broken and I can’t yell as loud as I need to, I’ll take EPOC.

What Would I Make Sure I Said

I was tagged by JoLynn from The Fit Shack to participate is a meme and write a post based on the following premise “the blogosphere has come to an end, and you have one last post to write. What would you say?” She got the idea from Albert of the urbanmonk.net who is going to donate a dollar for every person who trackbacks to him.

The post made by JoLynn is about the addictive power of the sugar, an addiction I have no problem admitting to. My advice is contained in an old article when I posted “eat only enough so that you are hungry in 3 hours and then repeat in the post “If you listen to one thing, listen to his…”. This is the one thing that I have found has made a world of difference in the way I feel and look. It is also the piece of advice that I give out most frequency to anyone who asks me what they can do to improve their energy and the way they look.

But I give out this advice for free so it doesn’t really have any value unless you follow it.

Too Many Lifting And Fitness Tips To Count

4 Days in 15 Minutes A Summary of the 2007 Health & Fitness Summit by Chris Shugart of T-Nation has so many tips in it that you really don’t have a choice but to read it; well, maybe you can attend next years summit.

  • Textbooks are often wrong by the time they’re published. Textbooks are not “evidence.”
  • The body is built to walk 3.5 miles per hour, or about a 17 minute mile.
  • Just 17 minutes of physical activity a day can lead to a pound of fat loss a month.
  • The first step in playing fast is to eliminate excess body fat.
  • Too busy to eat breakfast? Then you’re too busy to be good!
  • Grape juice is just as good as wine when it comes to antioxidants.

This is one of those threads were it pays to read the comments as well. There’s a lot of wisdom there for the taking!

Ride Lighter – Getting To Race Weight Quickly

It’s early April! All the snow has melted and the day-time high is finding itself close to 10 degrees. New life begins again as the dawn of the bike season nears. If you weren’t disciplined this winter and let your weight creep up a little too much, here are my recommendation for you to get to race weight fast by eliminating some of that body fat!

  1. Eat to lose weight. Correct eating patterns that are increasing fat gain. A lack of exercise is only a small part of excessive off season weight gain. Poor eating is the real issue. Consider adopting or returning to a more efficient way of eating and change some of your habitual eating practices to provide your body with the fuel it needs to perform and look its best.
  2. Set a goal. We can safely lose between 1-2 pound of fat per week. That means you have enough time to be 10 to 20 pounds lighter for the first week of June if you neglected your diet over the winter. But you need to start now! Write out your goal.
  3. Set a time frame. Regard your fat loss as a two to three month all out effort that will press your body to adapt and find a more efficient state. The improved cardiovascular and performance benefits are secondary to your goal of burning fat. Beside your fat loss goal, right the end date of your war on fat.
  4. Start to train at a higher intensity TODAY. I recommend this for three very important reasons: 1) you need to change your behavior TODAY to start getting different results TODAY, 2) training at a higher intensity is the best way to burn energy to create a caloric deficit and 3) you ride at a high intensity when you are racing so start training with a high intensity.
  5. Figure out how you’ll maintain your goal weight. Avoid the same thing happening next year by adjusting how you eat. Consider adopting the newstasis.com weight management approach to change some of your habitual eating practices and provide your body with the fuel it needs to perform and look its best.