In the last post it was established that your body would not burn fat for energy when insulin is present. Since insulin is released every time we eat the trick is to get insulin levels back down as fast as possible after a meal so we can get back into fat burning land. How do we do that though? Well there are a few ways and if you are reading this blog,  you are probably already doing some of them. One of the obvious ways is to eat a low carb diet, but that has many drawbacks and needs to be implemented properly to maintain workout intensity. That is a subject all its own so I will address that in a future blog. What I want to focus on today is minimizing insulin resistance, and maximizing insulin sensitivity.

We already know that insulin delivers glucose to the muscle cells, fat cells and liver. That”s a good thing. When these cells become “resistant” to insulin’s effect, bad thing definitely start happening.  Muscle cells will not “uptake” the glucose to be stored as glycogen, the fat cells release more free fatty acids into the blood steam,  and the liver ignores the signal to stop producing more glucose. Elevated blood fatty acid levels, reduced muscle glucose uptake, and increased liver glucose production all contribute to elevated blood glucose levels. This causes the pancreas  to release more insulin and the vicious circle continues. Next stop, type 2 diabetes.  Hopefully, and quite likely, if you are reading this you are a long way from this condition and are just trying to get leaner. So lets look at how to maximize your insulin sensitivity so you can get those insulin levels down and burn off  some body fat.

Here are the main factors that will help increase insulin sensitivity:

• eating less saturated fat and fewer total calories.
• keep blood sugars stable throughout the day.
• drink little or no alcohol.
• exercise regularly
• not smoking
• reducing  stress.

Obviously doing the opposite of these thing will increase insulin resistance.  If you are doing all of the above CONSISTENTLY, good for you! You are well on your way to that six pack. If you have room for improvement, and most of us do, it could be the reason you fat loss goals have stalled.

Next week I want to talk about the glycemic index, how it relates to controlling insulin levels, and why it can be misleading when planning a diet. Have a good week.

Nearly everybody  wants to know how to lose fat. In this post I want to talk about how insulin and insulin levels affect how your body does or does not burn fat.  Insulin has gotten most of its “bad rap” because it is indeed heavily involved in fat storage. Hey it is a storage hormone, that’s what it does.  For a very long time it was believed that it was the only, or at least the most important, hormone involved in fat storage. This turn out not to be true, even if some people still cling to the belief.  A compound called acylation stimulation protein or ASP has been know to be the most potent stimulator of fat storage in the fat cell for over 30 years. That point aside, insulin is still very involved in the process of fat storage and the inhibition of  fat mobilization from fat cells.  Even small increases in insulin levels essentially stops fat from being mobilized or released from the fat cells.  No fat being released from the cells, no fat available to be burned for energy.  The simple solution to this seems to be keep insulin levels low at all times. Then fat mobilization would not be inhibited and we could burn fat for energy all the time. Sounds grand doesn’t it?  And since eating carbohydrate is responsible for insulin levels rising  all we have to do is eat no carbs and the problem is solved. Ahh, if it were only that simple. As usual there is more to the story.  It is a misconception that eating carbohydrates is the only thing that raises insulin. Eating protein raises insulin too. In fact eating protein and carbs together raise insulin more than either one of the two when eaten alone.  Well now we are really screwed. How are we suppose to burn fat for energy if  the body keeps shutting down fat burning by releasing insulin every time we eat?   The answer lies in not trying to stop the release of insulin (you definitely do not want that) but rather controlling  how long insulin levels are  elevated. The sooner insulin levels drop, the sooner we can get back to tapping into the bodies energy stores. Next time i will talk about how make this happen. Have a good week.

A calorie of protein provides the same amount of energy to the body as a calorie of fat or carbohydrate.  This may in fact be true but lost in this broad statement is the fact that these different nutrients have different effects on metabolism and hormone secretion that are far  more important than just their caloric value. One of the major hormones influenced by nutrient intake is insulin.

So what is Insulin? In simple terms insulin is defined as a polypeptide hormone  that regulates carbohydrate metabolism.In simpler terms this means that after a meal, insulin deals with the rise in blood sugar by delivering it to the cells where it can be used for energy.  While this function is very important, insulin does much more. A study in 1999 showed that insulin is involved in many critical metabolic functions including, the breakdown and utilization (burning) of both dietary and body fat. Insulin was shown to inhibits fat breakdown, so when insulin levels are elevated your body cannot break down stored fat to be used for energy.  If you cannot burn bodyfat for energy it does not seem likely you will reduce your fat stores. Insulin must be the worst thing in the world! Anything that stops us from burning bodyfat and achieving that highly coveted six pack must be completely done away with! Not so fast.  That type of thinking gets babies thrown out with the bath water.  Over the next several posts I will discuss, 

1)Why and when insulin is bad.

2)Why and when insulin is good.

3)How to eat to minimize the bad and maximize the good.

Not sure how many posts this will be broken into as it is a massive subject but I hope you stay tuned.

I have been competing in natural bodybuilding for over 20 years. I have eaten a few meals cold out of a tupperware container. Probably a few thousand. Thats just what you do. You make a plan, and you stick to the plan.

I am now 10 weeks out from my next competition and I have been “sticking to my plan” for quite some time now. As a matter of fact yesterday I had lunch after my workout at a well know pizza joint in town, just as planned. I know what your thinking. “oh that must be your cheat meal” or something to that effect. Well it wasn’t. It was just a regular day that we had just happened to plan to go out for lunch. The key word there is plan.On Friday we decided we would go for lunch after working out on Saturday. I took a few minutes Friday night to pull the nutritional information for some restaurants off the internet. That is the nice thing about large chain restaurants. They all post their menu info online. Because I know how many calories and what breakdown my average meals are, I was able to skim through this information and in a very short time knew exactly what I could order. I did not even have to look at the menu when I got there.

When I am discussing fat loss plans with clients the issue of planning ahead always comes up. It has to. It is the single biggest thing that will determine if you will succeed or not. Planning ahead does not mean you are sentenced to a life of solitary eating, shunned by the rest of society. You just have to take those extra few minutes and plan your restaurant meals the same way you plan your home meals. The only difference is someone else does the cooking! What could be better than that? And before I sign off I just want to say to those of you that are going to claim you don’t have time or the technical savvy to find the food information, bullshit! If you can figure out how to find this blog (and I am glad you did) you can find the restaurant info. Happy dining.

Whether they want to admit it or not the vast majority of people exercise because they want to look better, period. Although the health benefits are undeniable, people  want the rippling six pack and the tight butts they see on the fitness magazine covers. In fact a recent survey found 60 percent of people would rather look good than feel good. I am not sure how “official” any of these findings are but my point is most peoples goals are based more on how they want to look than how they feel or perform. Right or wrong this is the way it is.

Keeping this in mind I am puzzled by the amount of people who desire one outcome but do training that is counterproductive to that goal. One example of this that I see everyday is people who desire the bodies of fitness models and physique athletes but train like endurance athletes. Any successful natural bodybuilder or fitness model I have ever trained has no idea what their best time for a 10k is. The reason for this is the training involved in achieving an elite time in a 10k or more will do nothing to help achieve a cover models physique. It will in fact hinder the process.  

The tight muscles possessed by cover models and natural physique athletes, are a result of  2 things

1)intense weight training

2)strict diets

The  weight training builds and maintains the muscles that give those bodies their shape and form and the diets strip bodyfat to low levels so these muscles show. Cardio training does have a place in their training but I would put it third in priority.  If the other two factors are in check the amount of cardio that is required is relatively low. 

To turn everything upside down and put the training priority on cardio does 2 things

1) drains the bodies recovery reserves

2) strips away muscle tissue, especially in the upper body.

It is easy to see why these two things are exactly what you don’t want when trying to get as lean and ripped as possible.

This is not an attack on endurance athletes either. far from it. In fact for them to train as physique athletes or natural bodybuilders do would be  equally ridiculous.  It is  a sure way to be the best looking loser of any race.

The overall point is you first have to decide what you are trying to accomplish, and then train specifically for that purpose. unfortunately you cannot have the best of both worlds. If you try to train for two apposing goals at one time, your end result will be mediocrity in both.

In the past 25 years I have heard it all when it came to cardio and fat loss or a least it seems like it.” Cardio must be done on a empty stomach first thing in the morning”. “steady state cardio will not make you ripped, you must do intervals” and of course the ever popular “cardio must be done in the target “fat burning zone” to be effective for fat loss. All  of these statements are backed up by reams of scientific studies, sometimes the same study is even used to prove two opposite opinions.

There is nothing wrong with scientific studies. Many amazing life changing things have been discovered,either on purpose or by accident, by such studies. It actually amazes me that so much time and money has been spent on the subject of exercise and fat loss. It seems like such a waste of time for the rats and untrained college students that are usually the subjects in the studies. Isn’t there cheese to be eaten and beer to be drunk? This would seem like a much better use of this resource.

Why not look at more relevant examples for the answers. People that actually get lean for a “hobby” Subjects that get themselves into single digit bodyfat land just for shits and giggles. Yes if you have not guessed it I am talking about the lowly bodybuilder. More specifically the natural bodybuilder because you can not attribute his extreme leanness to some pharmaceutical concoction. He or she has had to achieve this leanness through their training protocol. Surely the answer must lie with these speedo wearing hairless creatures. Funny thing though, when you examine the cardio stategies employed by this group.  Some swear by early morning cardio, some by slow long steadystate and others worshiped at the interval alter. There isno more agreement among this group than the lab coat wearing pencilnecks.

The simple fact is all of these methods have been used with success to achieve extreme leanness. But how can this be?  Surely there must be a best way! Well sorry, there is no best way to do your cardio to promote fat loss and here is why. cardio is not the biggest factor in getting your body to lose fat. In My opinion there are two factors that are much more important.

1) calorie deficit

 2) efficient metabolism

The single biggest fact that effects these two thing is, drumroll please, DIET. A properly designed diet can effectively put you into a calorie deficit while still maintaining a efficient fat burning metabolism. No matter what type of cardio you do if your diet is not on track you will not achieve extreme leanness, not even close. And the beauty is the better your diet the less cardio you will have to do before the six pack makes its grand entrance.

So lets end the debate about the hows, and whens, of cardio. Put some of that time into tightening up your diet and then do whatever type of cardio you chose. Just be careful not to step on any  rats doing wind sprints along the way.

I came across this article from Dr Doug Cook Rd commenting on a popular “fat loss/cleanse system. I found it interesting, maybe you will to.

Isagenix is not new but it seems to have taken on new life. I have been approach by representatives of Isagenix on several occasions to be a distributor - that’s right, it’s a multi-level marketing scheme. While some product lines like Avon are a little more straight forward, Isagenix is a line of nutritional products making unsubstantiated claims and promises.

Keeping with the fad of detoxing, these products claim to help rid the body of excess ‘toxins’, which they say, are the reason why so many people struggle with weight. One of their main arguments is that people are unable to digest and use the food they eat making them malnourished at a cellular level. When people are starved of nutrients and when they are loaded with toxins, their bodies can not use stored fat for fuel and so it just accumulates and people gain weight, according to pitch I’ve been presented with.

Upon closer examination of their weight loss plan, you replace two meals with Isalean shakes (about 250 calories each), and eat a ’sensible’ dinner - this would provide about 1000 to 1200 calories per day! You don’t need to be an expert in nutrition to know that this will result in weight loss, and the weight loss is not due to the herbal supplements etc that they claim help to ‘flush’ the body of toxins or the cayenne pepper/green tea ‘accelerator’ used to ‘boost’ metabolism.

When pressed for supporting research to substantiate these claims, I’ve always been given the run around. This system does nothing more than line the pockets of the distributors while leaving the buyer with products that just don’t measure up! What’s amazing to me is how people take the sales pitch of the distributors, who tend not to know the first thing about nutrition or human physiology, as proof positive. Reiterating the information that comes with the product does not make someone knowledgeable! Please save your money for real wholesome foods, a good multivitamin and of course vitamin D to start!