Thx for the response, maybe ill give it a try since it seems to fit my lifestyle more anyways. Ive always been the kind of guy who wakes up in the morning and goes all day without eating then when the closing bell hits i pig out on one massive meal. It seems like every other day we are learning that the old style of doing things is either harmful, or doesnt work, or that something we thought was harmful really isnt that bad, like fats, and salts. Seems like just as it is in trading, your success is directly proportional to the amount of time you spend studying and keeping up to all this. Ive always had to battle super hard with my weight but people, and diet books were always telling me that this was the problem, i dont eat enough different meals per day. I always lost weight when i went to the 6 meals per day, but then again I was always hyper focused, so its hard to discern whether 6 meals worked, or it was just cause i was paying close attention at those times, when i had to go into that mode to shed 40 pounds in a few months, As much as anything i would limit my calories severely during these periods, as well as trying to excercise. Winter is a big problem for me when im living in Canada cause i dont spend enough time here to justify being in a hockey league or doing any winter sports, and it just sucks going outside to try to go for a walk or jog when its - 20 degrees celsius, so i find it hard finding fun things to do in the winter that burn calories. In the summer time i do all kinds of out door activities but specifically walk the golf course for 18 holes three to 4 times per week. Im curious about the line of thought you have where you said "Cavemen didnt eat this way" I often times see people comparing our diets to cavemen, but its really hard to overcome the one glaring difference between cavemen and what we do today...... Cavemen also had to go out and hunt, and do all this physical labour we no longer need to do, I mean even in more recent times, you look at all these farmers in the 1900's and none of them were fat, because they had to work their ass off on the farm, so alot of them could eat whatever they want. Look at Michael Phelps i read an article on him, he used to eat 12000 calories a day when he was training, its hard to even fathom putting that much food in your system in a day. So its hard for a guy like me to know whether your spectacular results (congrats btw) come from your spectacular process, (i.e. working out all the time, plus you were skinny before,) or if any of these things actually make a difference, for me as a guy who doesnt spend any time in the gym, ive beat my head against the wall trying everything, and found the only thing that works is going hungry alot of the time, and avoiding breads, and in the end it just comes down to calories in/calories out, the old school weight loss method. I wish we had more conclusive evidence on all these things.
1500 calories a day that are high in protein and low in fat split up over 6 meals Tuna fish Chicken breast Beef jerky Quality protein shake such as Carnivor Shoot for ~30 grams of protein per meal
The Power of Placebo: This Is What Happens When You Believe You’re Taking Steroids By JAMES CLEAR "Fifteen athletes were scattered around the room. Everyone was looking at Gideon Ariel. “We’re going to give you steroids,” he lied. It was 1972 and Ariel was conducting a study on athletic performance with his research partner William Saville. On this particular day, the two men were offering the athletes an interesting proposition. Ariel explained that the study would last for 11 weeks. The athletes would lift weights for the first 7 weeks and those who made the most improvement during that period would be rewarded with Dianabol, an anabolic steroid, for the final 4 weeks of training. What the athletes didn’t know was that the researchers were lying to them. After the initial 7-week training period, the scientists randomly selected six athletes as the winners. However, despite being told they were getting real steroids, the athletes actually received placebo pills. What happened next surprised everyone. Four weeks later, when the researchers conducted the final test, the athletes set all-time personal records in every exercise tested. Before the placebo pills, the lifters added an average of 5.8 lbs (2.6 kg) to their squat during the first 7 weeks of training. After they believed they were taking steroids, they added an average of 41.8 lbs (18.9 kg) in just 4 more weeks of training. That’s a 7x increase in nearly half the time. Every athlete in the study had been lifting weights for at least two years and they were fairly strong already. Before the experiment, each athlete could bench press around 295 lbs (133 kg), squat about 300 lbs (135 kg), and military press almost 195 lbs (88 kg). In other words, they weren’t beginners. The same scene played out in nearly every exercise. During the first 7 weeks of training, the lifters increased their bench press by about 10 lbs (4.5 kg) on average. After 4 weeks of receiving placebo pills that they believed to be steroids, the athletes added an average of 29.3 lbs (13.3 kg) to their bench press numbers. On military press, they increased by an average of 1.6 lbs (0.7 kg) during the initial 7-week period, but added an average of 16.7 lbs (7.6 kg) during the 4 weeks on placebo pills. “Anabolic Steroids: The Physiological Effects of Placebos” by G. Ariel and W. Saville. Medicine and Science in Sports (1972). p.124-126 " style="margin-right: 0.1em; margin-left: 0.2em; border: none; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 0; vertical-align: middle; outline: none; color: rgb(39, 96, 188); text-shadow: rgb(221, 221, 221) 0px 0px 0px; position: relative; z-index: 5; top: -0.2em; box-sizing: border-box; display: inline-block; height: 0.9em; width: 1em; cursor: pointer; opacity: 0.3; -webkit-backface-visibility: hidden; text-decoration: underline; -webkit-transition: opacity 0.25s; transition: opacity 0.25s; padding: 9px 0px !important; font-family: 'Open Sans', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif !important; border-radius: 3px !important; background-color: rgb(117, 115, 113) !important;"> The evidence was clear. Every athlete got stronger simply because they believed they were on steroids. They expected to improve and so they did. " more at: http://jamesclear.com/power-of-placebo
There's really only one thing that truly makes a difference. And that's consistency of effort. If you are constantly starting and stopping your diet and/or training, it's virtually impossible to get any lasting results. So in my opinion, the only diet or workout program that's worth a damn is the one you can stay consistent with. The problem with most diets is that they are too restrictive and feel like hard work, and they cause you to feel like a social outcast when you're around friends or coworkers. So finding a diet that doesn't really feel like work all the time is the trick to staying consistent with it. That's why I shared the Intermittent Fasting diet earlier in the thread. I've been able to stay very consistent with it over the last couple of months without it feeling like torture 24/7. The trick to being consistent with training is to associate working out with something pleasurable instead of associating it with negative emotions like "boredom", "pain" or "hard work". CrossFit tried to address this issue with the "team" concept of training, meaning that you are constantly being encouraged by other CrossFitters and coaches. Ask anybody first starting out in CrossFit why they like it, and they'll talk about how much they love the people, coaches, and overall positive environment, not how much they love doing burpees and thrusters. Their brains got rewired after the very first CrossFit workout to associate exercise with the concepts of camaraderie and encouragement. They never had those feelings before CrossFit, which is why so many CrossFit athletes say they can never go back to the boring world of resistance training at a traditional gym. I can't speak for every person who's ever tried CrossFit but I personally know at least 20 people who tried it last year, but only two are still doing it, and even those two haven't been very consistent. So this begs the question: If CrossFit is so awesome then how come the people that loved everything about it last year are either inconsistent or completely out of it nowadays? The answer is simple. It's too difficult. Eventually, the workouts progress to the point that you are ridiculously sore, or you get injured. And by ridiculously sore, I mean you can barely walk for a week because your quads, hamstrings or glutes are completely trashed. That's what happened to my wife, and she had been doing CrossFit for months before that happened. Luckily she didn't suffer a more serious injury like some of her other CrossFit buddies did. Now what do you think happens to a person's brain when they are sitting around the house trying to recover from extreme soreness or more serious injury? They think about how the injury occurred and how bad it sucks to be hurt, which causes them to successfully rewire their brains again, only this time the association with CrossFit is intense pain. It's this negative emotional link that prevents people from ever going back to CrossFit or to any other type of exercise that previously caused some form of intense pain. You've probably experienced this same kind of neural rewiring when you got food poisoning after eating a certain food or that one time you were puking all over the place after drinking way too much of a specific brand of booze. In your brain, you've established very intense pain links with these specific foods or spirits and now you can't even think about the stuff without feeling sick. The positive side of all this is that you can undo any negative links you previously established by associating that activity with something pleasurable. For example, I rewired my own thinking about working out and increased my consistency dramatically by associating exercise with the joy of discovering new music. On most days, I use the music service called SoundCloud to listen to new tracks from a variety of independent artists that I'm following. Every day that I work out, I literally have a playlist of brand new music waiting on me that I've never heard before. I'm almost guaranteed to like what I hear because these are artists that I previously listened to and liked what I heard. Since I'm listening to the music while doing the exercises at the same time, my brain associates lifting weights with the enjoyment of exploring cool new tunes, not with feelings of dread, boredom or pain. And I keep my workouts usually around 30 minutes to prevent myself from ever doing too much and getting overly sore. So for me, there's no real effort is staying consistent with training any more because "working out" to me is just an activity I do while I enjoy listening to new music for a half hour each day. So in summary, it's not hard at all to be consistent at something that brings you pleasure. You can be more consistent at working out, dieting, or anything else if you just link that activity to something pleasurable instead of something painful.
I like the music idea, think im going to give it a try, and i totally understand what your saying about crossfit and team sports, growing up i played almost every team sport, hockey, baseball, basketball, then golf all summer with buddies, so there was definitely that camraderie, and the desire to win that made me want to keep doing it. Ive always found going to the gym, or walking/jogging to be akin to torture cause it just seems like repetition where there is no end, and no winning. So maybe if i trick my mind like you said i can get past that, thx for the tips.
I don't understand why some people find the gym boring. I will be the first to admit that low-to-moderate intensity cardio for any length of time is boredom defined. That is why it is no longer a part of my routine. However, resistance training is all about personal challenge. By definition, if you are challenging yourself then it cannot be boring. Further, resistance training is a series of brief challenges, i.e., sets. It actually feels good going to the limit (using proper form, of course). It makes me feel more alive, both during and especially after. As for the reference to CrossFit, personally I can't see the attraction aside from the social aspect. If people, most of them uninformed, are pushing you beyond your limit that seldom ends well. Plus I saw a segment about it on 60 Minutes. They don't even do a number of exercises properly, notably pull ups, which they kip into oblivion relying on momentum more than anything else and they don't even do full range of motion. WTF.
My best friend got down to sub 8% body fat naturally, at age 38, eating a low carb diet, weight-lifting, and doing ~30 mins of HIIT/sprinting at the end of his work outs. And he's more of an endomorph. Visible eight back. Ripped. Totally natural. Towards the end of his cut, his carbs consisted of three rice cakes a day. That's it. Totally possible at mid-life, and can be quite simple too. Just takes dedication and consistency.
No. I never counted calories consistently. But in the beginning, I did count them for a day or two so I could get a feel of what my macros were like by eating that way. When I say macros I mean total grams of Protein, Carbs, and Fat taken in for that day. No. If you did that, you wouldn't end up with 16 consecutive hours of fasting, which is really the key to the whole diet.
Thanks. I'm trying to decide how to approach this diet, such as the time of day that I will begin, and if I should keep my workouts within that window. My thoughts are to do my workout during the early part of the window if I follow it in the morning, probably within the first hour after my first protein drink, or later in the window if I do it late in the day, probably an hour before the end of the window. I'm thinking it would be better to move my workouts to evening for reasons I'll mention next paragraph. Either way, I will most likely continue to count my macros, mostly as a way to gauge progress (at least for a time). This will take some serious discipline on my part. I have the discipline in the gym, but struggle with the ice box on occasion, especially late in the day when I worked out in the morning and then successfully dieted through the day. That's why this diet would be much easier during my last 8 hours of wake time. Only problem I see is that I would then be consuming a large part of my diet prior to going to bed (which is counter to my old way of thinking), but might be OK if I do most of the carbs and fat early in the window and just drink a post workout protein and just enough carb (glucose maybe for my post workout insulin spike). What do you think? Also, do you add slow digesting proteins like casein into the last, or any part of your window, or do they run counter to the concept?