When you're not getting results through restrictive means

according to conventional wisdom

• you’re still eating too much
• you’re not eating clean enough
• you’re not burning enough calories at exercise

then if you’ve seen too much fitspo you can start to believe a lack of results means something about who you are as a person. Because if you’re dedicated and disciplined you earn results. Therefore if you’re not getting results, it means you’re the opposite of all those things.

BULLSHIT.

In the pursuit of weight and body composition goals I have come to believe that UNDEREATING is actual far more detritmental to your progress than overeating. Obviously you need to be in a calorific deficit, less than would be required to maintain your current weight. But if you “over eat” and exceed your target calories for weight loss… well as long as you’re still below maintenance levels you havent’ really over eaten. Even if you do exceed maintenance levels TODAY but generally you hit an appropriate intake suitable to your goal weight, your progress won’t be effected.

Now if you habitually under eat, on the other hand… your body needs to compensate. It starts to think “well if I run out of fat stores, I’m fucked” and the survival mechanism prioritises the conservation of fat stores over everything else. This is why you often find that you’ve lost weight after what you thought was a “bad” week indulging yourself on holidays or whatever, when you didn’t lose any while dieting and training obsessively.

I’ve had a tremendous amount of success with people who are already very active and performing at training to quite a high level, but aren’t seeing the changes in body composition that they are looking for despite following all the conventional “eat less, cut carbs, eat clean” advice.

Simply put… if your goal is a lean, athletic body type, you need to fuel it properly. Especially with some of the taller, younger, more active women I coach… the prospect of eating “too much” to an extent that their progress would go backwards is so unlikely as to be ridiculous. Often I don’t even set a “maximum” calorie limit.

The issue is with failing to hit a MINIMUM calorie target suitable to fuel their active lifestyle and build the strong, healthy, lean and athletic body that they desire.

The greater issue is with the messages everywhere, that restricting calorie intake or restricting choices of foods is a sign of strong character and makes you a good and valuable person, and that indulging means the opposite. 

That’s bullshit.

It is ok to eat.

More than “ok”, it is entirely necessary. 

You already know this. The problem is we are bombarded with messages to the contrary. This creates cognitive dissonance especially where (as above) we have been conditioned to equate eating habits with being a good or a bad person.

Well… fuck that. 

I'm kicking off my next 12 Week Flexible Dieting For Recovery Challenge next week. You should totally get in on it.

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How to get into shape at home on a budget, part one.

A few people have asked me for an "at home" training program, because they don't want to go to the gym or just aren't able to for some other reason. A good gym routine is always my preferred option but there's no reason you can't get great results through any number off different approaches.

In or out of the gym, you do still need to be training effectively and if your nutrition is appropriate you'll see great results.

Resistance tubes like you can see in my video below are one of... perhaps the best option on a tight budget to use at home. Even for those who do have some weights or a home gym, I often suggest resistance tubes as a nice and inexpensive way to add more options and variety to your training routine. We can replicate a lot of free weight, cable and leverage machine exercises with these... it's not quite the same thing, but for the price it is pretty good.

I'm also using my TRX here which if you shop around you can get at an affordable price too.



This video is just the highlight real, you can see the full thing with extra commentary over on my wordpress site filed under At Home Training Program Video.

I wanted to show you as many different options as I could think of, so here's what I came up with.

• Warm Up: TRX Reverse Fly & Vertical Front Raise
• TRX Hanging Row
• TRX Face Pulls
• Resistance Band One Arm Reverse Fly
• Resistance Band Upright Row
• Pull Ups
• Resistance Band Reverse Fly (again)
• Resistance Band Bicep Curls

This makes for one day in an effective home training split routine. We'll also need a pushing routine, and of course we need to train our legs as well.

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Weight Loss Before and After Videos

I thought I'd do a little before and after... well, really more like an "a while back and more recently" comparison of my own weight loss journey. I won't bullshit you like everyone else with some sob story about how I got too busy and started to neglect my own health or whatever nonsense people usually come out with. I was trying to gain weight, because my long term goal is to be bigger than I am now.

So in winter... well, you mostly want to just gain muscle but I often get to a point where I just think "I'm not gaining fast enough" and don't care too much if I put on a heap of fat so long as there's a bit of muscle in there somewhere.

Here's a video of me from March... I happened to look at it the other day and I thought "bloody hell, I was big!" March actually being quite early in the season, so I definitely would have been bigger (and fatter) by the end of winter.



Actually here's another video from a few months later, a few months bigger.



Now here's a video from this week. 6 or 7kg down from my highest weight in the winter, and stronger than I was in the first video. I had to get a couple new sets of holes in my belt, and it's getting a little loose again already.



So how did I do it?

Some new dieting protocol, or supplement, or a new training system?

Nope. I just stopped overeating and dialled in a plan I expected to maintain... actually I dropped a couple of kilos more than I expected. Within that plan I'm still smashing a huge pizza once a week, still including oven fry potato wedges at dinner if I feel like, still eating a heap of fruits, some bread, cereals... basically all the stuff I like, to an amount suitable to maintain a lean goal weight.

Simple innit?

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Nothing special.

This was a little rant I posted on Facebook yesterday, a little similar to my post here about modern weight problems:

so apparently a colleague is shopping around around for a publisher for his book, and the feedback he got from one publishing house was that his work was “sane, levelheaded, with proven advice” and as such they weren't interested as they didn't think it was saleable.

Meanwhile I just found out that "paleo water" is a thing. You can buy some sort of filtration device that makes your tap water more closely resemble water our primal ancestors would have drunk. I dunno man maybe they get a guy 200 metres up stream to take a shit in it or something. Sounds WONDERFUL.

All these stupid fkn gimmicks people make a buck with. The next one (I swear to god I am not making this up) is going to be this DNA test where now thanks to the miracle of science your trainer can get a report back from the lab that let's them build an exercise program that will work.

It blows my mind. All this stuff works on the principle that you can only be in shape and healthy under very specific circumstances. You need this very specific diet, very specific exercise program, if you get the wrong one... it might work for someone else but not for you depending on your DNA. 

It is actually ridiculous. Being OUT of shape is what requires a special and unusual set of circumstances. People have been in shape and healthy for aeons without doing anything special about it. The more complicated you make something, the more can go wrong. Why would we even need a complicated approach to produce a result that is our default condition anyway?

Nothing special or complicated is required. So many of my people will tell you how much better results they got, and how it "felt like it just happened by accident" when they stopped trying to follow all of these complicated and restrictive approaches.

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Stonehenge, Eastern Mysticism, and Modern Weight Problems

Every once in a while I suddenly have some sort of a philosophical epiphany that relates to training or dieting, but once I start organising my thoughts so that I can type it up, I realise it's actually something I've written about extensively in the past.

Whatever though.

Last night I was watching a documentary about Stonehenge, and then after that there was one about The Beatles and I didn't see all of it but the part that I caught was focussing on their spiritual leanings under the guidance of the Maharishi. Seemingly unrelated topics.

Now in the Stonehenge documentary they were discussing how it might have been built, and they had this new theory about how the giant stones might have been moved across the country. As it turned out, they tried this idea out and it worked nicely. It would have been quite possible for ancient peoples to have used this method... however, they decided it probably wasn't how they had done it, as it was quite complicated and probably unnecessary so. The quote that stuck out to me was "the more complex you make something, the more there is that can go wrong". And so they figured a simpler method had probably been used.

This struck me as similar to a lot of what I talk about related to weight loss in particular. People are often impressed by complicated approaches that have a lot of rules about what foods you can eat, what foods you can eat at the same time as other foods, what times of the day and so on. Especially when there is an explanation for why all of this is important with some scientific sounding words thrown in, you get the impression that "wow, this guy (or girl) really knows what s/he's talking about!"

Really though... having such a complicated approach just means it is a lot harder to get right and stick to consistently. If there is a simpler approach available that will be just as effective, and a lot easier to put into action... why wouldn't you take it?

Now... the next show. I feel like I don't want to accidental misquote anyone here but there was a lot of talk about the positive effects of meditation and the Maharishi's teachings on people, and a few references to the Tao Te Ching which is something I often refer to as well... and the part that stuck out to me was something to the effect of "I haven't done anything special to you at all, this is what you are like naturally".

Again this is a lot like how I feel about weight loss programs. I always feel my greatest successes as a Weight Loss Coach are when my clients say things like "I feel like I have just lost the weight by accident" as they have stopped trying to force the weight off with difficult, restrictive programs. Doing "nothing special" is what seems to produce consistent, easy results. Why would anything special be required? Our goal is nothing out of the ordinary.

Naturally, people are not obese. Whether for marketing reasons, through a lack of understanding, or perhaps through trying to be kind, we often act like it is actually being "in shape" which is the unlikely, out of the ordinary condition that is only attainable to a select few people either through sheer good fortune or strict and obsessive adherence to some difficult and unpleasant diet and exercise regime. In the industry, you'll often see diet and exercise programs marketed on this basis; that the program creates the unique set of circumstances that can result in being in healthy shape at a normal size and body weight.

In actuality, nothing could be further from the truth and this is the opposite of how things really work. People can be normal sized and healthy following a variety of diets, or not following a particular diet at all. They can be normal sized and healthy following a variety of exercise programs, not following a particular program at all. It is NOT being normal sized and healthy that requires a specific set of circumstances.

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