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Do You Want to Be 200 Pounds?

January 30, 2012 by

Today we have an interview with Shan Hefley, who placed second in the Open category in the latest Adonis Index Contest.

Check out his photos:

Adonis Index - Shan

Shan might be just 5'7'', but he is very muscular.

Adonis Index - Shan

Most guys that are in their twenties would kill to look like Shan.

Adonis Index - Shan

If you want to show your abs on a picture, you need to get a dark tan like Shan.

“…I Just Wanted to Get Bigger, Then I Read Adonis Index.”

Shan started working out at an early age and since he gained some weight in college he dieted down and eventually got skinny. His weight fluctuated as the years passed. Being 5’7” lead to the conventional “wanna get big” guy mentality.

Shan never wanted to look like a bodybuilder, but since he didn’t have any specific goal, was skinny and had average height, he thought that getting bigger, and specifically ‘heavier’ would help him get a killer looking body.

He started working out, subscribed to several fitness magazines and read every issue.

He believed in everything they said. And he aimed for the look of the cover models.

After years and years of working out and following the advice from the fitness magazines, he stumbled upon the Adonis Index.

After countless visits and calculating his ideal proportions over and over again, he finally got on board and decided to get the program.

And it proved to be a pretty interesting concept. Shan like most of the guys never really thought about proportions or specific shape, it was always just about getting bigger.

Shan was fascinated by the idea of proportions. He also started understanding that a 5’7” guy can’t and even shouldn’t try to get to 200 pounds. He realized his genetic limits at his height wouldn’t let him reach a body weight of 200lbs unless it was due to an excess amount of fat or drug induced muscle growth.

This was quite a different concept compared to the articles in all the fitness magazines he was following till now. Which if you’ve ever read in the past, you know that there is not a word about proportions. Usually it’s headlines such as ‘100 new tips how to grow your bicep’ or a pitch for a new magical supplement that is supposed to help you pack on 30 pounds of muscle.

Since Shan has taken some art classes, it made sense to him that there is something more to it than just getting bigger at all costs and that it may not be about being big, but rather it’s about looking big, which if you don’t know are not the same things.

If you build a broad back, wide shoulder and a shredded waist then you will create an illusion of being bigger than you actually are.

Usually he is pretty skeptical, but the Adonis Index was so thoughtful and truthful he went right into it, after that he read Eat Stop Eat and everything just clicked.

Now he had tools both for building a specific shape and how to diet down to a low bodyfat.

He wasn’t fat nor did he feel like it, but it was remarkable that after skipping a few meals he could see big changes in muscle definition. Like he said, the bodyfat fell off pretty quickly. And in his own words:

“I discovered muscles I never knew were there and they were under a layer of fat I never knew I had”

There are lots of guys like Shan who are only 10 pounds from ripped, but they screw it up by trying to put on another 20 pounds of muscle. They fall for all the conventional fitness crap and pursue goals they can never achieve, which just results in spending money and effort to remain in the average, ‘ok shape’ looking zone. They just don’t know how close they really are…

Wearing a Big Shirt Doesn’t Mean You Are More of a Man

For Shan this wasn’t just a physical transformation, but also a mental one. A big part was that he went from wearing large to small shirts.

Smaller clothes now really fit him, just take a look:

Adonis Index - Shan

Don't you agree that this smaller size T-shirt really fits him? Can you say the same about your wardrobe?

What about you, do you have an issue with wearing a small T-shirt? Does it make you feel anxious?

Most guys can’t get over the fact that they look better in a small and fitted shirt. They almost think that just because they wear smaller size clothes it means they are not that manly and feel “emasculated”. This seems to correlate with the never ending pursuit of getting big at all costs.

Advice from Shan?

Dump that belief.

Wear what really fits your physique and shows it off!

It’s hard to accept it, but it’s really just a number on an article of clothing manufactured by someone who has never seen your body type…in reality that number doesn’t mean anything. If you are under six foot, then there is no reason for you to wear and extra large shirt. If medium seems to fit the best, then buy mediums only. And if you want to feel good about some number that would tell other people how you look, just focus on your AI number instead of your shirt size.

It’s just like body weight. What shows on the scale is just a number, it doesn’t indicate if you are healthy, or the proportion of your body. The truth is nobody knows how much you weigh either and  nobody really even cares. The only one that is obsessed with it is you.

This comes to a central theme of the Adonis Index and that is the permission to be light and really accept that a great looking 5’7” body is not going to be 200 pounds.

If it’s kind of hard to grasp right now, then don’t worry even Shan had big issues accepting this. On some days he was on a scale thinking that he should weight more, and was skeptical of losing weight, but he couldn’t argue with the numbers AI gave him. If the AI that is based on precise math is telling you that you are exactly where you are supposed to be, then you shouldn’t want to weigh any more and you shouldn’t try to weigh more.

Just like women think they need to be as light as possible and that men are only interested in a muscle-less tiny woman, men think of exactly the opposite. Just imagine a skinny woman without any shape, would you be attracted to her?

Probably not.

This is exactly the same and big guys without any proportion or shape.

That’s why the Adonis Index is so powerful. It gives you the proportions and goal to shoot for.

And like Shan said, you just can’t argue with the numbers. What looks visually appealing  doesn’t necessarily translate to a specific and heavy weight.

Take home message from Shan

  • Don’t be afraid to go light, give yourself the permission to be light
  • It’s about the shape you will build and the measurements you will have, not the weight
  • Aim for your ideal Adonis Index
  • It’s not about building lots of muscle, but rather making specific muscles bigger, changing clothes and presenting yourself in the best way possible
  • In pictures you look differently than you do in reality, that is why you need to play with tanning, lighting and posing a bit
  • It’s possible to do Adonis Index workouts at home
  • When you undergo a body re-composition, it doesn’t necessarily have to show up on the scale
  • Remember that just a few pounds of muscle will make a big difference on a lean body
  • It is about how you look, not how much you weigh or how much you can lift
  • As you age, the changes take longer

Programs that Shan used to get in contest shape:

Adonis Index Workouts – Here are the original workout plans that have been responsible for some of the most amazing transformations online.

Eat Stop Eat – Pilon’s revolutionary lifestyle and diet protocol.

Adonis Index Community – You will never find a more supportive, outgoing, and RESULTS based community like you’ll find with the AI “Insider’s Club”.

Listen to the interview here:

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Android | RSS

Filed Under: Contest, Podcasts, Transformation Tagged With: ,

Personal Trainer Confirms that Fitness Industry Leaves You with More Questions than Answers

January 23, 2012 by

Today with have an interview with Blair Baxter and he placed 5th in the latest Adonis Index Transformation Contest.

Check out his before and after pictures:

Adonis Index - Blair

Blair is very muscular, but before he dieted down, the muscles just weren't visible.

Adonis Index - Blair

If you have been training for a while, the muscles are there, but you need to get rid of the fat for them to become visible.

Blair is a personal trainer and in the interview he says that he’s probably let a few people down, because he has given advice that he now understands was useless. He openly admits the fitness industry is pretty pathetic and leaves us with more questions than answers.

He always thought that he needed to eat every three hours or his body will go into a starvation mode.

It’s an irony that at college he pretty much understood how the body works, when he wanted to lose fat, he just cut out the calories and instinctively ate less. Without any nutritional courses he knew that it’s just about calories in and calories out. Later on when he started following the fitness magazines he got mislead and bought into the whole bodybuilding lifestyle.

Blair’s Experience with the Adonis Index

Being a personal trainer made the decision to start following the Adonis Index workout a bit tough. Blair just wouldn’t want to follow a different training routine, after all he was fully capable of designing his own effective workout. He would follow the Eat Stop Eat and Anything Goes Diet principles, but not the workout, he felt like it wouldn’t work and he knows better. He was predicting that his shoulders would hurt, that it would not help him build any more muscle mass and it seemed too complicated to him. He was just sitting at his gym and finding excuses why he didn’t want to follow this training program.

It took him a while to get his mind over the fact that he is going to do somebody else’s program and not change anything. But Blair saw the pictures of the previous contestants and he knew that if this worked for so many guys before him, it would work for him too. So he decided to put his ego away and just try it for three months.

Blair said that he works out not because he likes working out, but because he likes the results. However, in the past he was usually jumping from program to program every month. For the first time he was able to stick to one program alone and finish it.

The basic Adonis Index program changes so often with so much variety because more variety and change keeps the program interesting and helps you to stick to it for longer periods of time. Make no mistake, this is completely by design. We know that most people have a very short attention span with their workouts and half the battle with designing a good workout is keeping you interested in it long enough to see the results.

If You Want to Show the Work You’ve Done in the Gym You Have to Eat Less

Blair was amazed by the results of just eating less, his muscles were actually starting to show up. He always thought he is supposed to just bulk up otherwise he would lose muscle. Now he was doing exactly the opposite and surprisingly enough, it worked.

In reality the muscles were always there, but covered by fat.

In the past there were a few attempts to lean out, but after a while he would always think that he is getting too small, so he would start bulking again.

Now he has quite a different perspective. Here is how he put it: “When you feel like you are getting too small and you are almost there you have to keep going”. And that comes from somebody who spent a good chunk of his life bulking up.

The permission to be light seems to be a big challenge for most guys, especially for those not used to being lean and light. But truth to be told, no matter how it feels or what you now think, being big and heavy doesn’t equal being a bigger man, that is not how it works.

And while Blair was afraid that he will disappear if he drops a few more pounds, he persisted thanks to support of his friend that got him to Adonis Index in the first place and got himself a fine placing in the transformation contest.

It may not make any sense to you now, especially if you are in your early twenties with the ‘skinny-guy complex” and you want to just get bigger, but eventually you will learn that it’s about looking bigger, not necessarily being bigger.

Once your body fat is lower, then your muscles will show up and create an illusion of you being bigger than you actually are.

Dieting Doesn’t Equal “No Fun”!

Sometimes when people hear the term calorie restriction they get scared off and think that they will suddenly lose all the fun in their lives. Well, that’s not how Blair felt during the transformation.

He had a barbecue every week at least once, went to several weddings and a few all you can eat events. That doesn’t sound like restriction or a “no fun” lifestyle, does it?

And that’s the key, if you understand that you have something like a calorie budget, then it’s no different than balancing your bank account. If you have 200 bucks a week for purchases, then you can buy smaller items each week for four weeks in a row or just save it up and buy something bigger at the end of the month, it’s up to you. Same with calories. If you fast during the day, then you can have some chicken wings and a muffin at dinner, it’s all about choosing what you want to eat when you want to eat it within your calorie budget.

Ever had a lean friend that would “eat for three” every time you went out for dinner? Many people would assume he was just born lucky with a high metabolism…

…or could it be that he was just using his calorie budget more wisely than you and didn’t each much (if anything at all) earlier that day and not telling anyone about it?

Let’s take a look.

Here is the thing, you don’t know how other people eat when they are alone and usually those who restrict themselves at social events are those who are out of shape, trying to put on a show to get praise on their hard work and blame the weight on their genetics.

Remember this, it’s never what you do socially, but what you do when you are by yourself and nobody is watching that will win the battle.

If you can manage yourself, you are halfway there.

Yes, you may not get all the comments about how you can stick to your diet, but it really comes down to whether you want to impress other people with your effort or your results. So, what will it be?

This is why the concept of “Never Let Them See You Sweat” is so great.

Blair’s friends would see him losing weight, but he was always eating more than anybody else around him at social events. To his friends it may have seemed like magic, but now you probably understand that he was just restricting, no lets say “managing” himself when he was alone. Blair didn’t want to impress everyone else with his dieting effort, he wanted to impress them with is dieting results.

If you have a big eating event coming up tomorrow, then just take a break from eating today and you will be able to eat pretty much whatever you want. Like Blair found out, you can live a day without food.

Does fasting scare you?

Well, do you think that your metabolism will suddenly break down if you don’t eat for few hours?

Doesn’t that sound a bit ridiculous?

Do you think that people in the past were timing their meals like they do now? What about regular people that are lean, but never cared about fitness? What about monks and other religious groups that regularly fast? Do you think all those people have “broken metabolism”?

If you look more closely you will find that there is no proof that your body will go to ‘starvation mode’ if you stop eating for 24 hours. It’s quite the opposite actually. It is quite healthy to provide your body a break from constantly processing food.

People will tell you that this kind of lifestyle is unhealthy, but what they are doing is just making excuses why they are not in great shape like you and justifying why they are not trying to improve themselves. And don’t kid yourself, this happens constantly…when you get in shape, be prepared for the negative comments and naysayers to try and diminish your effort and results. You have to grow a bit of thick skin and learn to shrug off these comments. Instead view them with sympathy because they desperately want what you have, but since they cannot fathom how you’ve done it they turn to criticism instead of asking for advice. Unfortunate as this is, it’s more common that you would think, and all of contest winners can attest to this.

Take home message from Blair:

  • Follow the workouts as they are laid out, don’t try to ‘improve’ anything
  • Most people have never committed to something for three months, be different, commit to sticking to the workout and really improve your shape
  • Don’t spend your best years of life trapped in a bulking phase while you can be lean and ripped
  • Listen to your body, if it needs a break, take it
  • Don’t label food. There is no healthy vs bad foods, it’s just a source of energy and nutrients, nothing more
  • If you save calories during the week, then you can enjoy your social eating events on the weekends
  • Keep a food log, Blair writes down everything he eats, so his clients can take a look at his food choices
  • It’s not about eating less than you are currently eating, it’s about eating less than you are BURNING
  • Take action without hesitation, don’t predict what will happen before it actually happens
  • There is a difference between working out hard intelligently and working out stupidly
  • If you want to lose fat, find a way to eat less
  • Keep going until you get where you are headed, don’t quit like most people
  • Eating more doesn’t make sense, you can’t boost your metabolism by eating more food
  • Understand that when you’re losing fat you will begin to feel small, but push through that feeling nonetheless. It’s just in your head and once you get lean, it will actually reverse and you will create the illusion of having bigger muscles.
  • The hard work you’ve been doing in the gym will show only after you diet down
  • Don’t listen to the conventional fitness industry advice. Everybody keeps repeating that you should eat six meals a day, bulk up, but nobody knows where they heard it, they just heard it so many times they think it must be true, so they keep repeating it

Words & phases mentioned in the podcast:

  • Eat Stop Eat aka ESE – Lifestyle and diet protocol by Brad Pilon focusing on balancing social eating events with fat loss.
  • Anything Goes Diet aka AGD – “Diet without rules”, forget about carb cycling, macro-nutrients or unhealthy foods. Eat what you like and lose weight.

Listen to the interview here:

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Android | RSS

Filed Under: Contest, Podcasts, Transformation Tagged With: , ,

BCAA’s, Fasting and Autophagy

January 19, 2012 by

Intermittent fasting has become a popular method for reducing bodyfat. Brad Pilon’s popular book Eat Stop Eat is the go to resource for all things intermittent fasting.

Fasting itself is quite simple, just stop eating for a predetermined length of time. But it seems that people cannot leave well enough alone and always want to add something to make their fasts better, or tweak it in hopes to improve the outcome.

You could say Oscar is in charge of Autophagy on Sesame Street...ok not exactly, but I like the picture of Oscar.

This has lead to a recommendation for taking BCAA (Branched Chain Amino Acids) during a fast. There is a belief that by taking BCAA’s during a fast, you can promote a greater degree of muscle growth than if you fasted without taking them.

This assumption comes from the role BCAA’s play in affecting something called the mTOR pathway in your muscle cells and a mechanism known as ‘Autophagy’.

Autophagy is defined as “the consumption of ones own body”

In typical fitness/bodybuilding media bro-science, this process is mistaken for the loss of muscle mass. Words like ‘catabolism’, ‘muscle break down’, “protein loss’ etc are used to explain this cellular process. These phrases sound like it would be detrimental effect to the process of building/maintaining muscle, however that is not the case.

Autophagy may be more accurately described as ‘cellular cleansing’ (or even just taking out the garbage) which is a normal process that happens constantly in all of your cells. It may even be that if this process is impaired it can lead to accelerated cellular aging and other metabolic problems.

In other words, it’s not correct to view autophagy as a negative event that must be stopped by taking BCAA’s, but rather it is a necessary step in the proper functioning of a healthy cell.

In today’s podcast, we’ll explain what autophagy is and how it relates to muscle growth, aging and the overall health of a given cell.

You’ll get a different perspective on what anabolism and catabolism mean, and another way of viewing fast with or without BCAA’s.

John

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Tips on How to Place in 2 Contests, Lose 100 pounds and Get Ripped

January 16, 2012 by

Today we bring you an interview with Dan Richardson who placed 4th in the Open Division in the last Adonis Index Contest.

Check out his pictures:

Adonis Index - Dan (After photo)

Dan is incredibly lean.

Adonis Index - Dan (After photo)

Dan's back shot.

This is not the first competition Dan placed in. Right now he has three contest under his belt.

Here are the pictures from one of his previous contests:

Adonis Index - Dan's first before pics

Here is a compilation of Dan's before pictures from his second contest.

Adonis Index - Dan's first after pics

These are the after pictures from Dan's second contest.

This is basically how you do this. You lose fat and tighten up and place in the transformation contest and then you more muscles, reshape your body and compete in the Open category.

In the last contest he went from 172 pounds to 141 pounds. He cut as hard has as he could.

And over the range of 16 months he has lost 100 pounds. No, I’m not kidding, he really did lose 100 pounds. It’s pretty hard to imagine how much effort he had to put in to constantly stay in a deficit for more than a year.

Dan told us that the last time he may have overdone it a bit and pushed himself too hard. If you happen to listen to VI from time to time you know that this is somewhat similar to the experience that the Venus Index winner Alisha had.

This is why Dan decided to loosen up a bit and not go too strict to avoid any rebounds after this contest.

Maintenance Still Requires Effort

Dan thought that once he arrived at his desired body weight goal he would be able to stop cutting and go back to eating more, almost like he did before.

There are two things going on you need to understand and they are connected to each other.

First of all, even maintaining your look requires effort. Just like you have to work out to prevent your muscles from atrophying, you also have to do something similar with your diet. If you want to keep the weight off once you lose it, you just can’t go back to overeating. That’s a fundamental basic rule of how this works.

Once you lose fat and start eating more than you burn, well the difference gets stored as fat. However, this doesn’t mean you have to diet all the time, when you are satisfied with your bodyfat percentage, you can just enjoy the maintenance.

There are three eating patterns:

  1. Eating more than your body burns = Weight gain
  2. Eating less than your body burns = Weight loss
  3. Eating at maintenance = Staying at roughly a constant weight
This brings us to a next thing and that is “The Swing of the Pendulum”. A pendulum can be used as an analogy to weight loss and weight gain.
As you can imagine, you can’t really eat exactly at maintenance even if you wanted, because you don’t know the EXACT number of calories your body burns every day.
More accurately you could say that you are always kind of either losing or gaining fat, but it’s in            an almost unnoticeable way. If we use the pendulum analogy, it’s always swinging in some direction, even if it’s just a little. Finding how to eat to keep the pendulum swinging as little as possible is what eating at maintenance really is.

Social eating events like christmas, thanksgiving, weddings, birthday parties or Friday nights out with friends are also part of your diet and you need to learn to balance those days with other less indulgent ones. On those sort of events you will most likely eat more than your calorie expenditure that day and you will have to make up for that either upfront, after or both.

That will also be a part of maintenance. As you can see, even maintenance requires some effort, not as much as a full cut, but it’s still work on your part.

If you are like Dan and have “gorging urges” from time to time, you will have to find out how to manage them to keep your six pack.

Dan’s Second Contest Walk-through

Dan tried a lot of things. For example he wanted to improve his commitment and made a deal with his friend that each week he didn’t drop an inch on his waist, he would give him 100 bucks. And it worked, he really lost all the inches he wanted. However, at the end he rebounded and put on 10 pounds.

This was a big issue for him.

He could gorge himself back to where he were before if he allowed it. Like he said, he can’t eat whatever he wants whenever he wants like some guys recommend, because there is no stopping him. Even 10 000 calories is not a ceiling for him.

This is why he discovered that he needs to count calories and weigh himself regularly, otherwise he will gain pounds of fat and spend the next month cutting back.

He tried to stop weighing himself like some previous contestants advised, but that didn’t work for him, because an inch on his waist doesn’t seem like a big number, but 5 pounds does.

Pounds on the scale held him more accountable and gave him a range that he knows he needs to stay in.

Being lean holds a new set of challenges, it’s not like you lose all the fat and all of life’s problems disappear. While a lot of problems get solved, there will be new challenges you need to focus on. For Dan it was finding new eating habits.

He also realized that he needs to count calories, because he would easily eat his way up to 10 000 if left totally unchecked all the time.

He set a new pattern that is somewhat similar to other contestants, restricting during the week and saving the calories for the weekends.

He found out that there is a totally different tension between his diet and himself. Being 100 pounds heavier he would eat whenever he wanted, whatever he wanted and how much he wanted, not restricting himself at all. This tension meant a completely new approach. For example he stopped doing 24-hour fasts twice a week and started doing 16-hour fasts every day.

When you are lean, you have to stay in a smaller deficit for shorter periods of time, because if you don’t you may end up overeating afterwards.

The last thing he changed was cardio. He decided to put most of the energy on the resistance training and added just a few sessions of steady cardio a week 30 minutes each.

If you’re like Dan you may want be careful with the cardio, because if you overdo it, your hunger will kick in and you will end up eating what you just burned.

Take home message from Dan:

  • You need to have a purpose behind what you are doing, a good and convincing ‘why’
  • Establish a new lifestyle that requires you to be in that new shape
  • Don’t worry about skinny comments. After a while people will get used to your knew look. Focus on building muscles.
  • Write down your goals, remind yourself of what you want to achieve and why you want it
  • If you feel like you are burnt out, pull back a bit, find your sweet spot. You need to maintain your look for the rest of your life, so you have to find the balance
  • The minute you stop fighting for this, it’s over and you’ll end up back to where you were before
  • Have realistic expectations and build a lifestyle that is sustainable for more then just three months
  • Don’t do it for other people, because in reality they don’t really care and probably are just jealous of you looking better than them
  • Breakfast opens doors for eating earlier and gives opportunity for overeating, be aware and consider skipping it
  • Some guys don’t weigh at all to avoid obsession with weight numbers, but if the weight holds you accountable then by all means weigh yourself every day.
  • The support in the community is huge, he once tried to unplug, but that was a mistake that set him up for failure for several weeks. In the community you can find guys that are further along the way than you and will hold you accountable.
  • Men always try to get bigger and be more superior, however what really matters is the shape, not the weight.  Just because you wear small or medium shirts doesn’t mean you are less of a man.
  • Don’t obsess yourself with shirt size or what is on the label
  • Buy new clothes that fit you’re new body and ditch the old ones
  • You should really progress to a smaller shirt only when your back and shoulders will tell you, not your waist
  • Don’t aim to get heavier. The metrics you are after are based on your perfect AI – wider shoulders and slimmer waist, bodyweight doesn’t matter

Words & phases mentioned in the podcast:

Listen to the interview here:

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Android | RSS

Filed Under: Contest, Podcasts, Stories, Transformation Tagged With: ,

So You Want to be a Snowflake…Careful What You Wish For

January 11, 2012 by

We are living in the era of evidenced based fitness, and evidenced based medicine…you could even say it’s an era of evidenced based health advice. So what does this really mean?

Health care practitioners use a combination of the best evidence that science has produced so far combined with their clinical experience and expertise to provide you with their best estimation and advice for your  health and well being concerns.

Being unique might not be an advantage

We can’t predict the result of your actions with 100% accuracy but rather we can only give you a probability of what is ‘likely’ to happen to ‘most’ people who are similar to you. Your specific results may vary from this average, and this is where the personal aspect of health and fitness comes into play.

With most human physiological systems we can easily put everyone into predictable categories and pools based on age, height, gender, exercise experience, geographic location, socioeconomic status etc. With an understanding of these variables and a brief medical history it’s not hard for a trained health professional to make some general assumptions and recommendations about your best course of action if you want to ‘get in shape’ and improve your  ‘health’.

After that it’s up to you to follow through on these recommendations and see how they worked. Even if these recommendations have been studied and shown to have a ‘average’ effect of 10lbs of weight loss over 10 weeks and a lowering of blood pressure and an increase in muscle mass and strength we can never know for sure how it will affect you specifically.

Enter the Snowflake Paradox

During any weight loss study, or muscle building study or any research in any health related field the results are usually presented as an average. You will hear claims like “subjects lost an average of 15lbs in 4 months”…or “subjects gained an average of 5lbs of lean mass in 12 weeks”…or “on average cholesterol lowering medication will cause a 10-15% reduction in circulating cholesterol after 3 months” etc.

The key word to notice is AVERAGE. Data collected from a group of people will be presented as an average, but this doesn’t mean that even one single person actually had that exact result. There will be outliers on both the high end and the low end.

If a weight loss study showed an average of 15lbs weight loss in 4 months, there could easily be some people who only lost 2lbs and others who lost 25lbs. And here is the Paradox of wanting to be the snowflake…anyone with a significant amount of weight to lose will want to be the outlier or ‘snowflake’ who displays atypical results that benefit them…in other words, you will only want to be the snowflake if it means you get to lose 25lbs and not the poor sucker who only lost 2lbs in this study.

The kick in the butt is that you don’t get to choose which snowflake you are. Your genetic predisposition and a myriad of other and likely unknown factors will determine if you are average, or above average or below average. The only way for you to know where you will be is to go through the program and find out for yourself.

In today’s podcast, I talk to Bryan Chung about evidenced based medicine and fitness and how to understand what fitness claims really mean.

John

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The Only Downside Is the Need for New Clothes

January 9, 2012 by

Herman Douglas placed 3rd in the Sixth Adonis Index Contest in the Open category.

Check out his photos:

Adonis Index - Herman Front Pictures

Herman was one of the most muscular guys in the contest.

Herman-Douglas-Back

Herman was pretty surprised when he saw his back shot.

Herman has been working out since 9th grade, so he’s a pretty experienced lifter. While he has a lot of experience in the gym, he was never in a really exceptional shape. And because he was afraid of losing all the muscle he ate a lot of calories that in reality prevented him from losing any fat.

Herman is 5’9” and was always scared of being lighter than 200 pounds. Like he said, it is pretty ridiculous to think that somebody his height should weight that much.

If you are working out that sort of weight can look good in a shirt that perception drastically changes when you take it off.

For Herman it wasn’t until his wife took some pictures of him, especially of his back. Only then he realized how much fat really is on his body. Most guys never really care how they look from the back and focus on the mirror look only. When Herman saw that there is a lot of fat hiding from him or from what he can see in a mirror, he was really surprised. He thought he was in much better shape.

After a friend introduced him to the Adonis Index he started to wonder if this new approach would get him some results. It still took him some time to get over the fact that he needed to drop not just 10 pounds, but really somewhere around 30 pounds of fat to get in decent shape.

Stop Using Weight as a Fitness Indicator

A lot of guys think that they need to get to 200 pounds and while it’s impossible for the vast majority of guys to be that heavy while being lean, there is no need for that either.

If you think you need to get big and hit the 200 mark as soon as possible, you are looking at it from the wrong perspective.

Ask yourself this: “Do I want to look good and enjoy all the benefits of having a killer looking body?”

If so then stop focusing on getting bigger and rather take a look at yourself and concentrate on a specific shape and proportions. Shape and proportion are what matters and what will determine whether you are in good shape or not, not how much you weigh.

There are several issues with using weight as an indicator whether you look good or not.

Weight itself tells you nothing. Weight is directly proportional to your height. A 6’4” NBA player will have genetic potential for building more muscle mass than an average 5’10 gym rat. So setting up a weight goal without considering other factors just points out on a lack of perspective.

Be different from other guys and don’t set your goal for weight gain, focus on the ideal shape and proportions instead.

When Herman first heard from his friend that he should be 30 pounds lighter, he wasn’t ready or in a state to hear such advice. The idea of being over 200 lbs was still in his head and he was afraid of letting it go.

He was happy with the weight and he looked good in clothes. He just didn’t want to admit to himself what was really going on. He, like many other guys was scared that what he believes may not be true and didn’t want to shatter his belief system.

It took him a while, but seeing his friend getting in shape, he decided to give this new idea a shot and at the end he is glad he did.

What Herman Did to Get in Shape

Once he got over the belief that he needed to be heavy, he could start eating less calories and actually lose weight.

At first he needed to lose a lot, so he was eating roughly 1000 calories per day, however this was getting tougher every week and he was forced to raise his caloric intake and he gradually went from 1000 to 1800 over the next couple of weeks. And this is something you can expect to happen, if you have a lot of fat to lose (let’s say 30 pounds) then at the beginning you will be able to eat very low, however as you progress and get leaner, you will have to start eating more and more and slightly optimize to maintenance once you get to a single digit body fat number.

This is of course all very personal, so you have to calculate your own caloric needs based on your BMR, physical activity, current weight and your goals.

For Herman once he lost most of the fat he had on his body, he found his “sweat spot” around 1800 calories. This allowed him to push hard in the gym, while still being able to lose some fat and satisfy his hunger.

Herman is 5’9” and did the Adonis Index workout and some additional cardio, so your number will be different, but the key is to calculate it and act according to it.

Herman did some cardio, but as he got leaner and leaner he had to cut back on it because it just wasn’t sustainable. And this is important, find what works long term and stick to it. Even though extra cardio worked at the beginning when he had a lot of fat to go, as he got closer to his ideal waist, it got tougher and then he was faced with a decision – eat more or cut cardio. He decided that there is no reason to do more work for the same results, so he stopped doing the cardio and focus mostly on his diet.

The result of all this?

Before he was wearing size 36 pants and his knees and back hurt. Now he is wearing 33 and even that feels too big. Plus he is no longer scared of having heart problems like his father. He is healthy and he feels healthy.

The best thing was that other people noticed this transformation and complimented Herman on his work.

This was all possible only because he overcame his belief of being big and heavy. It’s not worth trying to be heavy, it’s a waste of time, unless you are 6’4’’ you are not supposed to be over 200 pounds and there is no reason to spend good years of life being overfat.

Now when Herman gets in front of a mirror the only thing he can say is “wow, what a difference”.

When you wear clothes, they just cover it up. Clothes hide the fat from your eyes and will trick you into believing that it is okay to be that big.

Here are the two goals you can pursue, decide however you like:

a) You can be big

  1. In clothes you look good, it’s obvious that you work out
  2. You feel like a man, because everybody is addressing you as “the big guy”
  3. You can wear extra large T-shirts and feel really dominant
  4. You are covering up your belly fat and love handles
  5. You won’t be confident taking your shirt off
b) You can be ripped
  1. Other people can tell that you work out
  2. Your arms will have incredible muscle definition
  3. If you wear clothes that fit, you will really stand out in almost any group of people
  4. You are very confident taking your shirt off
  5. When you take off your shirt everybody will make a comment about how shredded you are
  6. People will ask you for advice and will want to know what you did to get into such a shape
  7. Girls will make excuses to touch you (I know how it sounds, but it is true, but you probably won’t believe it till you experience it yourself)

Take home message from Herman for guys who have been training for a while, but have been just carrying too much weight:

  • Mirror is different from reality, don’t rely on it, because it sends back a false reflection
  • It sucks being heavy
  • Give yourself permission to be light
  • The leaner you get the harder the fat loss will be. You will have to up your caloric intake a bit to sustain the diet.
  • If people are used to you as the big guy and you suddenly start to lose weight, they won’t be very happy about it and might tell you that you are skinny or that it is unhealthy. Don’t listen to them, they don’t understand what you are doing and why you are doing it. And most importantly they are subcutaneously making excuses for not getting in shape themselves.
  • If you decide to take professional photos, it will take you some time and trial and error until you learn all the proper posing, how to flex and hold the muscle, what lighting works the best, in what time of the day are your muscles most defined, expect it.
  • You won’t notice how the food you eat affects your look until you get lean, only then you will notice that certain food makes you more cut and other more bloated
  • Once you get in shape, you will face a new challenge – Learning how to dress properly to show your brand new body
  • The leaner you are the bigger you look. The fat mass and shirt has to come down for you to look bigger. While this sounds strange, it’s is true, it’s the muscle definition that creates the illusion that you are bigger.

Words & phases mentioned in the podcast:

Listen to the interview here:

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