Men's Workout World » Diet and Exercise

Low-Calorie Diets And Fat Loss

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 06:01:59 +0000

BY Craig Ballantyne

We’re moving right along to part 4 of my interview with abs expert, Scott Colby. If you’ve been following along with us, then you’ve most likely noticed a heavy emphasis on nutrition. But the reason for this is simple; no matter how hard you workout, you will never be able to out-train a bad diet.

With that being said, if you incorporate small, daily dietary changes into your lifestyle, such as what I suggested in part 3, you will notice significant results.

So, let’s not waste a minute more and jump into today’s question regarding low-cal diets…

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Scott Colby: Let’s move on to Donna out in Sacramento says, “I want to lose at least 40 pounds. I’m currently allowing myself 1,355 calories per day based on the Harris Benedict equation. My starting weight was 195 pounds, and I’ve lost about 5 pounds, although those 5 pounds seem to fluctuate from day to day. I think I need a new scale. I’m thinking of cutting my calories back even more.

“Is it safe for a woman at my age – 58 – to go as low as 1,000 calories per day? And will I have to stay at that low calorie level or lower the rest of my life to maintain? I’m also doing cardio in the form of StairClimber and weight training in the form of BowFlex and free weights three to five days a week.” She wants to know if she needs to go on a really low calorie diet.

Craig Ballantyne: Well, I think what we’ve covered so far in so many of the questions is really gonna help her out.

I think the BEST APPROACH for her would be to write down everything that she’s eating. Figure out how many calories she really is consuming, just to make sure that she’s not consuming more than she thinks. And then to go through all those diet improvements, quality improvements. Can we eat fruits or vegetables instead of anything from a bag or a box? When can we do that? When can we make those substitutions?

And if we can improve the quality of the diet a lot, then spend a couple days on that – see if we aren’t getting more results.

Then take a look at the calories again and see if we really need to go as low as 1,355 calories per day. I certainly think that’s pretty LOW, and I am certainly NOT going to tell her to go down to 1,000.

But I think that improving the quality of the diet will NATURALLY DECREASE THE CALORIE INTAKE, but at the same time NOT DECREASE THE ENERGY of the person who’s consuming that diet.

You just feel better when you’re eating those types of foods, and that’s where I would start. So I think if she used that equation that we mentioned with the ideal body weight, it would probably give her a relatively high calorie intake compared to what she’s consuming now, so it would really confuse her to do that.

Because you probably get 16-1,700 calories on that equation, and she’s down to 1,355 right now, so it’s a really big discrepancy. And people, I will admit that you’re gonna see that discrepancy. It’s gonna be up to you to use your best judgment, and your best judgment is gonna be based on well, really what are you doing right now and what results are you getting?

And that’s why I said use that simple three-step system:

Figure out what you’re eating now.

Improve the quality of the diet.
And recalculate what you’re eating and the results that you’re getting.

So that’s what I would do, and generally it sounds like her workouts are on track.

With my system, with my beliefs, similar to yours as well, three total body workouts, maybe four – I prefer four slightly shorter workouts than three slightly longer workouts, so I do 4 30-minute workouts per week rather than 3 45-minute workouts per week. I just like to split it up like that, but there’s certainly NO REASON to be training hard five, six, seven days a week.

Staying active on the off-days, as mentioned in our previous question – I mean you always have to be doing something. It just doesn’t have to be hard, intense exercise. You wanna recover on those days, but you NEED TO STAY ACTIVE and stay mobile, and that sounds like she’s getting a pretty good workout plan.

Again, we’d have to see a lot more details to double-check on that, but I think hopefully we’ve helped solve her nutrition problem there.

Scott Colby: Awesome. And Craig, that FORMULA that you gave earlier, is that the same for men and women?

Craig Ballantyne: It is, actually, yeah.

And the weird thing is some people took a look at it and were not very happy by it; they thought it was way too much. And then we had both men and women, and both men and women also said, “Hey, this works out perfectly for me,” and so we got very mixed feedback on that. And I’m gonna email you the link right now and you can share with everybody. It’s on my blog, and I’ve included a men’s and women’s example.

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Is Your Nutrition As Good As You Think?

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 06:00:21 +0000

BY Craig Ballantyne

Last day in part 2 of my interview with Scott Colby, I talked about what to do if you’re trying to lose fat, but love carbs. If that sounds like you, then you’ll definitely want to go back and read up on that.

Today we discuss another familiar question – you eat well, workout regularly, but can’t seem to lose the belly fat. So what should you do? Let’s find out…

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Scott Colby: Let’s see – our next question, Richard Steele out in Hollister, California. He says, “I work out three times a week and am active the rest of the week. I eat as clean as possible, but cannot get rid of the last of my belly pouch. I’m 62 and hover around 8 percent body fat” – that’s awesome, congratulations! “8 percent body fat at 185 pounds. I used to weight 250 pounds.

“Maybe I don’t eat enough to free the need to hoard fat for energy.” So basically, he’s 62, he’s lost a lot of weight, 8 percent body fat, and trying to get rid of the last of his fat in his stomach.

Craig Ballantyne: Well, 8 percent’s kind of hard to believe if you do have remaining body fat, because in pictures of me where I’m kind of – you know on my blog at ttfatloss.com or on my website, my famous kind of ab shot, I don’t even think I’m 8 percent body fat in that shot.

So there may be some error in the measurement, which I’m not making any friends here with this answer. But I just don’t believe that you can be 8 percent body fat and have belly fat that is visible, because 8 percent body fat, that’s what the guys on the cover of Men’s Health magazine are.

So there may be some error in measurement, but then we take into account the fact that you have lost body fat in the past, it may be excess skin. And that excess skin is going to be difficult to remove at age 62, because that’s when our skin elasticity starts to lose its ability to just kind of rebound.

So really we go back to the same thing that I said to our first guy, George. We take a look at the NUTRITION. Is it really as good as we say it is? Do all those things that we talked about. And then increase the intensity of the exercise. And that’s really the only two things that are really gonna work here.

Without knowing how many calories he’s consuming, without knowing the exact foods, we can’t talk about that last question that he asked. But I know we’re gonna get into the how many calories and that type of stuff, so I may as well cover that right now.

How much protein should I consume?

And the answer to how much protein that you should consume per day is gonna be one gram per pound of your ideal body weight. So I’m just answering this because I know we’re gonna cover it. But one gram per pound of your ideal body weight.

EXAMPLE:

So if you’re 150 pounds and you wanna be 140 pounds, then that’s how many grams of protein you should have is 140 grams.

And then your DAILY CALORIE INTAKE should be this:

It’s going to be – your daily calories are going to be your ideal body weight multiplied by the number of hours you exercise plus 9.5.

EXAMPLE:

So let’s say we’re using 180 pounds as our goal body weight, and our daily calories are gonna be 180, and he’s exercising 3 hours per week, so it’ll be 3 plus 9.5, which will give us 12.5, multiplied by 180. I had this on my blog at ttfatloss.com. Now using 180 times 12.5, we get 2250 as a daily calorie intake.

And then from there, we get 180 grams of protein, and then the number of FAT GRAMS we’re gonna want is half of our ideal body weight in grams.

So our ideal body weight is 180 pounds, so fat intake per day is gonna be 90 grams. Then CARBOHYDRATES is simply gonna be the same as protein, so it’s gonna be 180 grams as well.

So that would be – and I’m getting this equation from Men’s Health magazine, from a guy named Alan Aragon, who I think is a really, really smart nutritionist. Common sense – lots of common sense there. And so if you’re exercising 3 hours per week and you wanna be 180 pounds, which would help our gentleman here lose some body fat and belly fat, then 2250 calories per day is maybe what he wants.

Now another thing to do, if that seems high to him – and it may well be – then here’s another thing to do….

Write down everything that you’re eating. Figure out how many calories that is.

If you’re NOT losing belly fat on that, then chances are you have to decrease that amount and increase the quality of your food. So the very first thing that you do is:

Make sure that you’re eating ten servings of fruits and vegetables.
Increase the quality of the food.
Eliminate anything from a bag or a box.
Then maybe even recalculating your calorie intake now that you’ve improved the quality of your diet.
If you’re still not losing weight, then talk about decreasing your calories 10 or 20 percent.

However, if he writes and is concerned that he’s not eating enough, it’s tough to say without knowing the actual numbers here. And then there’s two actual numbers.

There’s the number of calories he BELIEVES he’s eating, and then the number of calories that we’re ACTUALLY eating after we go through that equation and do the seven day food journal and really find out is there anywhere where we’re doing what’s called mindless eating, which is when you go home from work and it’s between work and dinner.

And you’re just kind of putting your hands in all types of things – a cookie here, a handful of chips there, whatever. That’s MINDLESS EATING. It can add up to a lot of calories in a lot of people, and that’s the type of thing that we have to put routines into our life.

Such as instead of going home and doing that, the first thing I do when I go home while I’m preparing dinner is I cut up lots of broccoli, peppers, mini-carrots, and prepare hummus, and that’s what I snack on. So even if I filled myself up on that, I’d probably only eat 200-250 calories, versus if I had one cookie and a handful of chips, I might have 250 calories and no dent in my hunger was even made.

So that’s the kind of stuff we have to watch out for is the mindless eating.

And then we put those routines in there to make sure that we are not doing that type of stuff. And then we also figure out from that calorie and food journal are the portion sizes that we’re eating, were they twice as much than what we thought? And therefore we’re eating an extra 300 calories at breakfast, an extra 150 calories at lunch, an extra 250 calories at dinner. And if we cut those portions back, then we start getting results.

So there’s a lot of factors. I mean really every single one of these questions needs to be answered in an entire one-hour sit-down consultation.

Scott Colby: You got that much time, Craig?

Craig Ballantyne: Well, you know there’s so many factors in here. I’m trying to be pretty straightforward about it and trying to cover every single angle from which we can attack this. But I think that he’s certainly living a great lifestyle, and he deserves better results than what he’s getting if he’s struggling with that. So hopefully those are some alternatives that will come through for him.

Scott Colby: Yeah. All good advice, Craig. And I’ll send out a link to your blog where people can get that equation that you were determining the calories and the fat grams.

Craig Ballantyne: Sure.

Scott Colby: And we’ve covered weight training and such, and I’ll just recommend maybe he could take a look at his workouts just to make sure he’s changing it up.

A lot of people do the same routine for months, and that may be one thing he needs to do is increase the weight or change the routine of the workout. And then just something simple, like when I went through a pretty good transformation, one of the big things – and we’ve talked about it – I just cut out cereals and most breads and that made a big difference in my belly fat.

Again, it was stuff I thought was healthy for me that it turned out had too many ingredients that were holding me back in my results. So just maybe some simple tweaks, but you gave some great suggestions.

Let’s jump to the next question regarding low calorie diets for fat loss.

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How to Lose Fat if You Love Carbs

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 23:30:32 +0000

Low-carb diets – do they work and should you follow one if you love carbs? Read on as I tackle this question and more in part 2 of my interview with abs expert, Scott Colby.

Did you miss part 1? Find out what advice I gave Scott when it comes to eliminating fat from the body.

Scott Colby: Let’s get to our next question. It’s from Menar from Jordan – I hope I pronounced it right. It says, “Hello, how are you? Hope you had a merry Christmas. I LOVE carbs, and this is my problem. Is being on a low-carb diet the SOLUTION for me? Thanks a lot.”

Craig Ballantyne: Absolutely not.

I mean that’s just not gonna work, if you like carbohydrates and you think you’re gonna go on a low-carbohydrate diet. I mean really what you should do is try and eat ten servings of fruits and vegetables per day. That’s gonna fill you up. That’s also gonna give you some of that sweetness from the fruits. So I would say probably five fruits, five vegetables, so it’s a total of ten servings. I mean everybody that’s listening to this call should be getting ten servings of fruits and vegetables per day.

And large apples can be two servings, so don’t be overwhelmed by when I say ten servings, because it’s really not as much as most people think. But we need to be getting more, and then really you just need to look for foods. Read the ingredient list.

There’s even HIGH PROTEIN PASTAS.

I’ve been consuming a lot of those. Beans, legumes, lentils, that type of stuff. Other carbohydrate sources. But I really don’t think that personality-wise you are suited for a low-carbohydrate diet if you like carbohydrates. And I think maybe the truth is you like eating sugar and stuff, and that has to be eliminated from every diet down to that 10 percent category if you wanna lose body fat.

So get the sweetness from fruits, and that’s fine. But added sugar, you should not have any processed foods. So I think talmond butter How to Lose Fat if You Love Carbshat’s really important to understand is that what are you really saying when you say you like carbohydrates? Is it that you like sugar, or that you like bread? Bread is fine in some cases. I mean I wouldn’t eat a whole loaf of bread in a day, but if you wanna have a sandwich with almond butter that’s certainly okay.

CALORIES IN, CALORIES OUT – I know that’s another one of the questions we’re gonna talk about in a bit – is still a fairly large component of weight loss, no matter what people are saying, and trying to minimize the calories in, calories out.

It still is a very important component – mostly the calories in. So high fiber bread with almond butter, that’s gonna fill you up a lot more than the bowl of breakfast cereal that we talked about and a cup of milk. And you’re probably gonna have more calories in that cereal and milk, but not have that long-term suppression of appetite. You’re gonna be hungry by mid-morning.

But high fiber bread plus almond butter plus one piece of fruit, you’re gonna get through the morning a lot BETTER than with the breakfast cereal, and probably on fewer calories.

So overall I think go back to what we said in the first answer, is to use a FOOD JOURNAL.Write down everything that you’re eating for at least seven days. Use FitDay. Continue to use a food journal if possible.

Men’s Health magazine back in their February 2009 issue talked about a study that showed that people who use a food log lost 3 ½ pounds more than people that didn’t use a food log over a 12-week period. So that’s IMPORTANT.

Drinking lots of fluids, lots of water – water, green tea, no-calorie fluids – to minimize any hunger that’s really just thirst. Some people say, “You’re not really hungry, you’re thirsty; have an extra couple of cups of water.”

Having soups, vegetable-based soups before your meals, that’s also research-shown to reduce calorie intake. So vegetable soup, that’s gonna help contribute to your ten servings per day. But if you have a vegetable soup before you have your lunch and before you have your dinner, you’re gonna cut your calories.

As I mentioned, there’s a lot of high protein like what people would traditionally call carbohydrate fookamut pasta How to Lose Fat if You Love Carbsds. There’s pastas that I’ve been using recently – there’s spelt pasta and there’s another one called kamut pasta – K-A-M-U-T. And the kamut one actually is really good for people that have gluten insensitivity, because it does contain gluten, but for some reason a certain kind that doesn’t cause problems in people who are insensitive.

And it’s 15 grams of protein per serving, and so people are always worried about on a non-meat or non-animal-product diet how they’re gonna get protein. I know we’re gonna talk about that as well. But if you have that, you’re gonna have 15 grams in a single serving, plus you’re gonna get some other type of protein in that meal, I’m sure, whether you’re going to have cheese in it or whether you’re going to have meat in it as well. Clearly you’re gonna get plenty of protein from that, but also you’re gonna get protein from your legumes that you may have with it. Or you may have vegetable soup with legumes – that type of stuff, so plenty of options there.

I’m just going through as many of the nutrition things so we cover them kind of in this question.

Another thing I want people to do is they SCHEDULE that reward meal once per week, but then if they really want advanced results they stick to that 90 percent.no sugar How to Lose Fat if You Love Carbs

We remove all the sugar and trans fats from our diet, and you talked about a couple of those foods, which are gonna be the processed packaged foods. The ones that have a lot of ingredients are gonna probably have more sugar and trans fats in them, so remove that.

And then another thing I want people to do is take three or four minutes and just write down every nutrition obstacle that’s in the way of their week.And then in addition to every one of those obstacles, write down two solutions.

So for example, every Wednesday you might have a long meeting, all afternoon from 1:00 till 5:00, and then you immediately have to go and take your child to a sporting activity or some type of after-school activity. And so you really don’t have any chance to eat from 1:00 until 8:00. Or you might just go to a vending machine or something. So that’s an obstacle.

Now the SOLUTIONS of course are to make sure that you PLAN AHEAD and you have an apple and almonds for while you’re commuting between work and the activity.

So you’re planning ahead – that’s just one solution. You may have another solution. You may say, “Okay, I’m gonna take all these vegetables and some hummus, and that’s gonna be my other solution. So if I don’t have the ingredients for one of those solutions I’m gonna have the ingredients for the other.” And just come up with every single obstacle in your way and two solutions – problems are solved.

And make sure you plan shopping. Prepare preferably one day on the weekend where you have lots of time and you can go to the grocery store. Make a list. Get it.

Prepare as much as you can, chopping stuff up, etc., cooking stuff in advance, and that will help you get through thosemeal planning How to Lose Fat if You Love Carbs tough times.

So again, a long answer to a question – went off on a tangent there a bit. But I want to cover a lot of this stuff as soon as possible, so that everyone heard it and can apply it to their questions, which we’re gonna answer in a couple minutes as well.

Scott Colby: Awesome – good stuff, Craig. One suggestion I gave on my blog a few weeks ago – actually kind of a light-hearted suggestion, but it would actually work – is to keep an ingredient journal for like a day or two.

So instead of just writing down your foods, write down all the ingredients you eat. So if you eat the nice, whole, natural foods that Craig is suggesting, your food list and your ingredient list is gonna be the same. Apple, eggs, nuts, things like that. But if you’re eating all these boxed foods, your arm’s gonna fall off trying to write down those ingredients, but it’s a REAL GOOD EYE-OPENER.

If you do write down an ingredient that you’re eating, it’s an eye-opener to see everything that you’re putting in your body. And hopefully if you just see it down in writing, that’ll make you change some of your habits as well. Very cool.

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Men’s Workout: Diet vs. Exercise Royal Rumble

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 03:37:19 +0000

What happens when you put 3 fitness experts in a room with a pizza, two cheeseburgers, two servings of edible cancer sticks (aka “french fries”), 2 sodas, 2 donuts, 2 giant chocolate chip muffins, 1 huge frappacino, 2 espresso brownies, 1 protein bar, a treadmill, a stairclimber, and a kettlebell?

Well, you have the Ultimate Fat Loss Royal Rumble, of course. The battle of “Diet vs. Exercise”. And while we have it ALL on video, I want to tell you about in gory bite-by-bite “how to ruin your fat loss diet” detail. Click Here to Watch the Entire Video

It all starts with this strange idea I had while walking Bally the Dog. I thought, “Hey, I really need to show folks just how futile cardio is in the fight against a bad diet. But how can I do this…”

Then it hit me. We could show folks just how fast they could consume enormous amounts of calories that ruin fat loss programs. We’ll do a skit called 1000 calories in 1000 seconds. That’ll be perfect. But then I did the math. That’s 1000 calories in almost 17 minutes. Anyone can do that…and no one’s watching a 17 minute video of me eating.

So then I had a better idea. Why not compare how much “diet damage” can be done in a short amount of time PLUS just how FEW calories you can actually burn in hard exercise?”

I was willing to be the exercise subject, and sacrifice some hard work in order to get the message across…but I needed some Guinea Pigs to consume a ridiculous amount of food in a short amount of time. My first thought was Bally the Dog, he likes to eat, but then I’d probably have PETA after me…

So I thought, why not get nutrition expert Brad Pilon? PETA doesn’t care about him, and I know he can eat! Turns out Brad was down with the idea, so we got everything together and met in the gym late at night to film 5 episodes of Diet vs Exercise and test the limits of human (eating) performance!

Diet vs Exercise – Episode 1: Treadmill vs. Pizza & Soda

It doesn’t take a professional gambler to realize this was a mismatch from the start. First of all, it was two foods against one machine! You’ll love the video, but just to give you a quick rundown of the results, Diet scored a whopping 1100 calories to 43 calories victory over the Treadmill in just 3 minutes.

That’s right, Brad was able to consume over 1100 calories in pizza and soda in just 3 minutes, while I was only able to burn 43 calories while running at 10.5 mph for 3 minutes. It was no contest and we proved the point that “you can’t out-cardio a bad diet”.

Diet vs Exercise – Episode 2: The Stairmaster vs “Burger & Fries plus a Soda”

In this battle, we had men’s exercise expert John Barban wolf down as many calories from a beefy burger, fries, and soda meal as possible in just 3 minutes, while I got relegated to 3 minutes on an old-school stairmaster.

Couple of things to point out here…First, according to the stairmaster, climbing a flight of stairs only burns 3 calories! So the next time you read a politically correct article from some lame fitness expert telling you to “take the stairs instead of the elevator”, just realize that doesn’t even cover one french fry’s worth of calories! What a joke.

Second, I found the stairmaster exercise to be easier than running on the treadmill, yet in the same amount of time the stairmaster reported I burned 59 calories (that was 16 calories MORE than running at a harder pace – in my opinion). That just goes to show you that you CAN NOT trust the calorie counters.

So the winner again was DIET, by a score of about 1100 calories to 59 calories – again, delivering the knock out blow in just 3 minutes.

We actually filmed 3 more episodes, but I’ll wait for those to hit video. You should get a good laugh out of fitness and nutrition experts stuffing their faces while I suffer through sprints, kettlebell exercises, and the indignity of using a stairmaster. How embarrassing.

But the point of course is not just to entertain, but to get across this extremely important message and the BOTTOM LINE: You can’t out-train a bad fat loss diet.

Your fat loss diet is the key to burning fat and losing inches,

Craig Ballantyne, CSCS, MS
Turbulence Training

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