Just eat healthy. What does that mean though?

It's pretty good advice, although somewhat generic. I see variations on the theme all the time in "motivational" type images on blogs and facebook and so forth; "skip the diet, just eat healthy".

Hard to argue with. Exactly what constitutes a healthy diet, though? It's worth asking, surely?

The problem with such a question is that once you've answered it, you've also defined what makes an "unhealthy" diet. That is... "here's what makes for a healthy diet, therefore anything else is unhealthy". That's how most people seem to think, from my observation. It is problematic.

The tendency I've noticed is to think of a list of all the things that are probably a good idea, and then if you're not doing all of them you have an unhealthy diet. And the logic continues that if you have an unhealthy diet, you'll not be successful in your weight loss or body condition goals. This is highly problematic.

So let's start at the opposite end of the issue, and discuss what would make for an unhealthy diet. It stands to reason that if we can define "unhealthy", anything else is quite suitable for good health and good results from training.

An unhealthy diet would be deficient in important vitamins and minerals.

This is important for good health in general, more than for weight management or performance and results at training. I had to double check this point with a client of mine who happens to be qualified as a Diet Tech (yeah that's right) to be sure, but generally speaking as long as you get your five (or more) serves of fruit and vegetables per day, you're not likely to be deficient in any micronutrients.

Especially if you eat a variety of different types, different colours ("eat the rainbow", as the saying goes) you're going to get a pretty good spread of vitamins and minerals. More's better, but 5 serves a day will do.

So that part is pretty simple.

An unhealthy diet would be excessive in calorific intake.

This is the obvious one. Now... depending on who you listen to and which blogs you read you'll be told that only carbohydrates are the problem, or only fats are the problem, or only certain types of one or the other from certain sources are a problem. That's all horse shit. Excess calories are excess calories, regardless of where they come from. If you consume more than your body has a use for, it will be stored as fat.

Now... it's normal and perfectly healthy to be carrying a certain percentage of body fat within a certain range depending on if you're a man or woman. Excessive body fat though... we all know it's not healthy whether we want to face up to that or not. There are host of other symptoms that are associated with excessive intake, clogged arteries, heart disease, inflammation and so on... people like to argue about which source of calories is responsible, but this is missing the point entirely. The issue is that we are in excess of our requirements, not the source of the excess calories. Regardless of the source, if we were not in excess there would be no issue as the body would find something productive to do with these energy resources.

So, rather than worrying about which food choices are healthy or unhealthy, simply focus on not being in excess of your requirements. However...

A diet that is of an insufficient total calorific intake would also be unhealthy.

As explained above, we don't want to be in the habit of regularly consuming in excess of our energy requirements. But with that being said, energy is still an important resource that we require for good health. Especially in active people who are trying to create a lean and athletic body condition through hard and strategic training, to be insufficient in energy intake can mean that all of that training is actually to the detriment of your physical health.

It is somewhat baffling to me that so many people in the industry or just fitness enthusiasts believe that the way to achieve great results from training is by depriving the body of an important resource, usually carbohydrates but quite often just "all" forms of intake. It is not enough simply to meet your micronutrient requirements, or even your protein requirements. A diet that does not provide sufficient energy to maintain a healthy body weight while accounting for the type and amount of activity your participate in is unhealthy.

An unhealthy diet would be rigid and inflexible, with no regard for your psychological needs.

We're designed to enjoy food. Even within a fine tuned nutritional plan designed to produce elite level performance and results from training, there should be a focus on meeting those requirements from choices of foods that you enjoy and will look forward to eating, rather than on choices that don't enjoy but are "good for you". There should even be room for some choices purely for indulgence.

Rigid diet plans that ban any indulgent choices, that are based on will power and discipline, that imagine that your body treats calories from more enjoyable sources differently to ones from more "virtuous" sources, and leads to feelings of guilt or failure associated with the perfectly natural human behaviour of enjoying food, is clearly unhealthy and an entirely irresponsible thing to promote.

So, what then would a healthy diet mean?

Get your five or more serves of fruit and vegetables, get enough protein, enough dietary fats, enough carbohydrates and fiber, enough total energy intake, but not too much. Boom you have a healthy diet.

Oh and all this talk about it being too expensive to eat healthy? It’s as expensive as your tastes dictate. That’s all.

Read More

Precision and Pump, Shoulders Workshop

I'll hopefully redo this with my half decent camera soon, and even talk you through it if there's not too many people around. Here's a little bit of terrible quality video from my phone for now though.

Hitting some anterior (front) and medial ( middle) deltoid muscles, Precision & Pump style at the end of today's training session.



First up, Front Raises targeting the (appropriately enough) front deltoid muscle. Usually I use a barbell for this but I went with a plate today for a little variety. A plate is good because if you do not control it properly on the way down, you'll smash yourself in the genitals and learn an important lesson.

What I'm trying to do here is raise it to about a position where my arms are horizontal / parallel to the floor. Now if you can imagine trying to just hold that heavy ass weight out there for any length of time, it would be quite horrible and difficult, right? So... we want to try to put a little pause in at the top of the movement, and then resist the force of gravity by controlling the weight as we come back towards the starting position.

Note I said "towards" and not "to" the starting position. At the starting position, we're just holding the weight with our hands, we haven't actually activated that anterior deltoid muscle. So, when performing the exercise we want to stop just short of that point. We're gradually releasing the muscle contraction as we lower the weight, and then BOOM we contract hard again to raise the weight, hold it for a moment at the top, and repeat.

Much the same for the side lateral raises to target the lateral deltoid. I like to do these seated, as it doesn't allow you to cheat by using momentum to swing the weights up. Also for my money this is a real "precision" exercise and I'm much more concerned with strict form than with trying to throw heavy weights up in the air. For me, this movement is all about abduction and not about rotation at the shoulder. Maybe other people have a reason for doing it that way that I don't know about... but for me, I feel that this abduction movement better targets the lateral deltoid the way I want it to. Again, note I attempting to pause at the top of the movement, control the rate of descent, and change direction just short of that starting position.

This is all about maximising the time under tension and keeping the targeted muscle activated at all times while performing the desired number of reps.

To be honest... all of these reps felt a lot slower while I was doing them, than what they look in the video!

Read More

Like, not to brag or anything but...

I'm pretty chuffed with the new layout I've set up for my Lose Weight No Bullshit page.

For those of you who just don't know, that's my FREE weight loss education AND exercise program, and also my weight loss scam busting blog where I pick fights with dickheads corrupting the industry. It's just a free theme that I tweaked a little and made my own header for but as previously stated, I'm pretty chuffed with how it looks now.

Also I'm pretty chuffed with this new entry over on my main business website talking about Why Diet And Exercise Doesn't Work. That might seem like a strange thing for me to say, but really it's quite true, isn't it?

People who are always going on and off diets only seem to keep getting further and further away from their goal of simply being a "historically normal" size and condition. And all those machines and exercise programs on the TV that all claim to burn more calories than anything else... how many people do you know who ever got into shape just mindlessly trudging it out on one of those things in the name of "burning calories"?

None I'll bet.

Now like I say over on the main article... a diet is something you go on to make up for being inactive. If you're activity level is less than normal, you only need to eat a normal amount and you'll get fat. Now, most people are both inactive and eating more than would be required for a moderately active person, so their outcome is more dramatic than just getting a little fat and a bit out of shape.

Dieting alone is a poor strategy, as it ignores your psychological need to be able to enjoy plenty of delicious foods every day. Being inactive means you just can't put all that much fuel to use, so you're quite limited in what choices of foods will not put you into excess of your requirements. So, I don't like any of these restrictive diets that are popular nowadays but for an inactive person with such low fueling requirements, you could see how they would be necessary. Necessary, but still impossible to stick to.

When you're inactive, you need to limit to a low level of intake. Now, the way most people exercise with a focus on nothing other than "burning calories" is a way to achieve the same ends. You simply burn off all the fuel, so in effect you end up at the same amount. But that's not good.

Now when people are both restricting their intake AND exercising with a view to burning hundreds of calories, this is really a destructive course of action. Unfortunately, it's also the one that most of this industry as well as a bunch of other dangerous morons on the internet will promote.

Starving and burning calories off like this is no way to achieve your goal body type and condition. You need to train strategically to build your goal body, not just to destroy the body you have now. By training strategically for strength, health and functionality, we require more fuel. This means we will see better results even while eating more, and including some of whatever makes us happy.

Read More