KEEPING A PROMISE ON GETTING LEAN AND FIT

Time to keep the rest of the promise on how to get fit and energetic I made last month in Joel Wade's Self Control and Lack of Energy, and half-filled with Good Morning! two weeks ago.

First let's talk about why weight doesn't matter and why dieting causes obesity.

The world record for the most idiotic health measurement ever foisted on the public by scientists is something called the BMI:  the Body Mass Index.

It's a number derived by dividing your body weight by the square of your height.  The National Institutes of Health – our government at work – provides a BMI calculator for your convenience.

About 20 seconds of consecutive thought should enable most anyone to see how impossibly stupid this is.  Let's take two guys, both 35 years old, who are six-foot-two and weigh 240 pounds.  That means, using the calculator, they have a BMI of 30.8. 

Above 30 means being obese.  Not just fat or overweight but obese.

The first guy is Joe Bltxpix, a total couch potato with a giant beer belly that makes his feet disappear when he stands up and looks down.

The second guy is Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime.

The BMI does not distinguish between them.  Both have the same BMI number, so both are obese.

Or take the reverse.  Take a 45 year-old string-bean guy with no muscle and a volleyball pot, and a 25 year-old of the same height and weight with steel-wiry muscles and rock-hard abs:  same BMI.

Only government health scientists could come up with something this stupid.  Yet it is the standard measure of determining obesity by the National Institutes of Health and the World Health Organization.

Because so many people accept this nonsense – that how much they weigh, pure and simple, determines if they're fat – we have this weird paradox in America today:  the main cause of obesity is not overeating but dieting.

Now – how can going on a diet make you fat?  Simple.  Diets are designed to lose weight.  But the weight your body sheds first is not fat but muscle.  The weight loss resulting from most commercial weight loss diets without a rigorous exercise program averages at least 10 pounds of muscle for every 1 pound of fat.

Losing 20 pounds on most diets means you lost 18 pounds of lean muscle tissue and 2 pounds of fat.  Then when you go off the diet – for no one sticks to them – and you gain weight back, those added pounds are more fat.  Do that cycle a few times and you are obese.

So – if you want avoid the dieting-obesity cycle, if you want to be leaner and trimmer, forget about weight.  Focus instead on fat.  You want to lose fat, not weight. 

Of course, the way to do this is with the old cliché, diet & exercise.  We, however, are going be clever about it, for there are a number of sophisticated tricks that are amazingly efficient at getting you fit.  But first, there's one reality to face up to:

You gotta pump iron.

Or something equivalent:  weight-bearing exercise to maintain, or ideally increase your muscle mass.  Muscle burns up thirty times more calories than fat, not just when you're working out, but 24/7, even when you're asleep.

You don't need to be a fanatic, you don't need to join a gym (you're welcome to but you sure don't have to).  Get an inexpensive set of dumbbells 10-15-20-25-30 pounds.  Or get a pair of Push-Up Pro rotating grips for $20.  Or a power stand for chin/pull ups, dips, ab/leg raises, and bent-knee situps.

If you just spend 10 to 15 minutes first thing in the morning doing Push-Up Pro push ups, power stand exercises, and deep-knee bends holding 20 or 30lb dumbbells, you'll be maintaining and increasing your muscle mass while you're losing fat.

Now for the second exercise reality:  You gotta pump your heart. 

There's a fun way to do this:  watch a movie.

Here's how:  Get a treadmill and put a TV with a DVD player in front of it.  Subscribe to Netflix.  Watch a movie while walking on the treadmill.

You don't have to jog, just walk fast, like 3 or 4 miles an hour (ideally elevated a few degrees).  You'll be amazed how quickly a half-hour or full hour goes by.  Don't watch TV news or programs as the commercial breaks will distract and demoralize you.  Watch a movie. 

If you do these two things, 15 minutes of weight-bearing exercise in the morning, and at least 30 minutes watching a movie on a treadmill (best time for me is before dinner), you'll soon be halfway to being strong and fit.

The second half is diet. 

I don't want you to go on one.  Forget about diets.  I want you to buy a book, eat starch, and drink a cup of tea.

The book to buy is The New Glucose Revolution.  You can read it if you want to, but it's what you physically do with it that counts – namely, take it with you when you go to the market, turn to the GI Tables at the back (pgs. 292-313), and buy only foods with a GI value of under 50.

Be wary when you read the book itself, for the authors are too pro-sugar.  Maybe that's a device to get people from eating stuff worse than sugar.  The GI (glycemic index) of white table sugar is 60, while the GI of the average meal eaten by millions of Americans is 78. 

If you stick to eating whatever you want – and how much you want (being reasonable and not pigging out) – from the hundreds of foods listed with a GI under 50, you'll lose weight.  Period. 

The gold standard for judging the quality of scientific research is the meta-analyses conducted by The Cochrane Collaboration.  Their definitive study on diets (completed last May) concluded:

Overweight or obese people on LGI [low glycemic index diets] lost more weight and had more improvement in lipid profiles than those receiving C [conventional] diets. Body mass, total fat mass, body mass index, total cholesterol and LDL-cholesterol all decreased significantly more in the LGI group. In studies comparing ad libitum LGI diets to conventional restricted energy low-fat diets, participants fared as well or better on the LGI diet, even though they could eat as much as desired. Lowering the glycemic load of the diet appears to be an effective method of promoting weight loss and improving lipid profiles and can be simply incorporated into a person's lifestyle.

The bottom line:  eat whatever and however much you want of food that is a combination of high protein, high fiber, under-50 GI carbohydrate, and the benefits above will accrue to your body.  Which brings us to eating starch.

There is a certain kind of starch called resistant starch, meaning it resists digestion in the small intestine and goes unchanged to the large intestine where it acts like dietary fiber.  My scientist friends Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw have developed a purified form called Glycemic Control resistant starch.

If you combine this (they suggest one level tablespoon) with a beta-glucan-rich soluble fiber like their Glycemic Control barley flour ( they suggest two level tablespoons) in a meal, it will slow down the food absorption (thus the insulin peaks), give you a "time-released" energy, and speed up weight/fat loss.

Now about that cup of tea.  You make it by brewing one tablespoon of a very particular combination of Chinese Pu-erh and Darjeeling Green loose-leaf teas which Durk & Sandy call Shape Shifter Tea.  What SST does is truly astounding.

There is an enzyme called fatty acid synthase (FAS), which is your body's final step in producing fat.  SST is a FAS-inhibitor.  Blocking FAS blocks the production of fat – and causes a build-up of the stuff that makes FAS, a co-enzyme called malonyl-CoA. 

A sufficient build-up of malonyl-CoA signals your brain to turn on a gene called PGC-1alpha (peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor gamma coactivator-1alpha).  This is the gene that codes for a Holy Grail of Increased Energy and Age Reversal:  mitochondrial biogenesis.

Mitochondria are organelles in the nucleus of our cells that produce energy (specifically, the molecule that carries chemical energy, ATP, adenosine tri-phosphate.)  As we get old, our cells contain fewer and fewer of them and what ones are left become less and less efficient at making ATP. 

As a strong FAS-inhibitor, SST creates such a pile up of malonyl Co-A that the PGC-1alpha gene creates more and revitalized mitochondria, a process called mitochondrial biogenesis.  You have more energy and feel younger.

Have a cup of tea?

For the holy grail effect, you should drink three cups a day – and there's a catch.  SST doesn't work without a LGI diet.  If you eat high glycemic index foods so that your bloodstream is swimming with glucose and insulin, all the tea in China isn't going to block FAS and fat-creation. 

For mitochondria-creation instead of fat-creation, it's high protein, high fiber, under-50 GI carbohydrate meals/snacks, so that 3 cups daily of SST will shift your shape and your energy.

Do that, plus 10-15 minutes of pushups, chinups, dips, situps, and knee bends along with 30 minutes of watching a movie on a treadmill 3-4 times each a week, and I guarantee you'll be lean and muscular and fireball energetic.

If you give this appropriate time.  You'll start to feel a difference within days, but take the exercise slowly, baby-step your way into it.  Even so, within a month or so, the difference will be quite dramatic.

Two more items.  More important than your scale is a skinfold caliper to measure your fat-to-muscle ratio.  It's not how much you weigh, it's how much of what you weigh is fat.  You want more muscle, less fat. 

And to accelerate the effectiveness of your exercise, take a tablespoon of Durk & Sandy's Inner Power formula a half-hour or so beforehand on any empty stomach.

So – I've kept my promise.  Haven't you made a promise to yourself to get lean and fit?  I hope this helps you keep it.  A number of TTPers, like Marco, have told me that Good Morning! has gotten them on the way.  Keep going all the way now.  Being lean and fit will better enable you to battle liberal moonbats and other enemies of America.