The more they tell me I am wrong, the more I know I am right.

Sometimes I get annoyed.

The same way the public gets sold a new diet, exercise program or gadget every few months... it's the same for me in the business. Every few months, all of a sudden "we know better now" and we're supposed to make everyone go low carb, or low GI, or gluten free, or fructose free, or paleo, or fast a few days a week, or whatever.

And I get lectured about "not keeping up with the latest industry trends" because I just keep doing what I know works, without bringing a bunch of unnecessary rules or restrictions into it. Don't get me wrong, I'm continuously refining my approach... but I don't just throw everything out to follow whatever is in the latest fad diet or alarmist food conspiracy book written by some fucking software engineer or other non qualified source.

No.

And six months later no one is doing it any more. They stopped because it was too hard, they realised it wasn't necessary, people weren't signing up for it any more... and in at least one particular case that I know of, because their staff and clients started to develop bulimia as a result of trying to live up to some impossible strict standard of "clean eating". But all the same people are now saying exactly the same things about whatever the "latest evidence" (usually cherry picked pseudoscience and alarmism) suggests is the answer to all of our problems.

Whatever.

The more these people tell me I am wrong, the more certain I am that I am right. Especially when my clients keep reporting in with great results, eating more and with no restrictions.

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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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