There are more, but this is all I can think of off the top of my head:

1) Calories in vs. Calories out for Fat Loss – PERIOD

2) Strength Training is for shaping the muscles, and cardio is for conditioning purposes. Trying to use either for fat loss was not there intended purpose.

3) Leg Press is for calves only!

4) High carb, High fat, high protien diets: whatever you want to use. They all work. My clients use them all at my gym. The only consensus is they all eat less calories than they burn. I’ve lost almost 40lbs in 12 weeks on a mostly Carb/protein diet..

5) Fasting is the easiest way to lose weight and keep weight in check.

6) The three kinds of eating: The kind that gets you fat, the kind that gets you from fat to lean, and THE ART of eating to neither gain nor lose fat.

7) “Training intensely” won’t be as intense sometimes as other times. Always train as hard as you can and don’t kick yourself if you give it your all but it feels like you didn’t do it as intensely as that one time you really did.

8) Consistency is a key between successful transformations and those who never see progress.

9) The more impressive your physique, the easier it is to be seen as a jerk or a bad person. Make an effort to smile and treat others as you would want to be treated if you were in their place. It works well.

10) Old habits may be ingrained into us to the point where we unconsciously do things…but make an effort to act as in #7. You’ll be pleasantly surprised.

11) Fat loss should be a sprint but muscle gaining is a marathon. Skinny-fat people have a combo of these…so training for them is kind of like HIIT.

12) We all have limitations in our lives. Don’t make excuses….make ways around those limitations. This goes for life, family, work and even limitations on training equipment. If you really want to transform your physique, find a way…not excuses.

13) If you don’t feel an exercise, it probably means you don’t have enough muscle there in the first place (assuming you’re doing the exercise correctly). You need some size to feel the work. Just keep going as best as you can and don’t worry about it.

14) We don’t need to know or worry about all that micro-information about training and nutrition. It just confuses people unless they can see the original studies and actually have the time to study them.

15) Find good mentors and learn from them.

16) Be careful of TMI (to much information). Specifically, I’m talking about too many mentors about the same topic/subject. Sometimes putting all your eggs in one basket **IS** a good thing…assuming that basket is knowledgeable and truthful.

17) Become a “whole and complete” person. Don’t get obsessed with just the physical. Develop your brain too…logical, philisophical, artistic.

18) Become more cultured. Don’t neglect Spiritual development. While I do have my thoughts on how you should do this, it is not the topic of this blog, so I’ll leave it as that.

19) Creatine, protein, fish oil, and a multi-vitamin are pretty much the only supplements that are needed. Even then, protein is only needed if you’re not consistently at 490-840g/week.

20)  The only machines in the gym worth using are the cable machines because you can not duplicate those exercises with free-weights.  All other machines keep your body in a fixed axis inevitably sacrificing your joint health long-term.

21) 3DFitness Coaching Studio is always on the cutting edge. You owe it to yourself to check it out – http://3dfitness.net

 

The average person attempting to lose weight tends to get on the scale several times per week and sometimes several times per day.  If you don’t understand the daily fluctuations of your body weight and the errors in food, this is a sure fire way to drive yourself crazy.  While I’m not a fan of this method for most people I figured the least I could do was teach you why you shouldn’t get frustrated if you like to weigh yourself frequently.  So before you toss your scale and run out and buy a new one, a few simple adjustments will get you back on the right track.

The human body is made up of about 60-80% water.  This means that on any given day your body weight can fluctuate depending upon how  much water you are holding on to and how much food you have in your system at that time.  Since the average person eats about 3-5lbs of food a day, I guess it’s safe to say your body weight can fluctuate by at least 3-5lbs a day.  (Personally, I have a much bigger fluctuation.  My weight can fluctuate 3-8lbs in a day.)  Now I’m sure most people would be freaked out by this, but I actually enjoy watching my weight move around on a daily basis.  Maybe I’m just weird like that.

The more carbohydrates you eat, the more water your body holds.  Every gram of carbohydrate you eat your body holds approximately about 2 grams of water.  This is why people get really excited when they first cut carbohydrates out of their diet and the scale goes down.  The only thing that happened was their body began shedding some water.  This loss of water gives people the illusion of actually losing fat when in all actuality you may not have lost any body fat at all.  And let’s face it, no one wants to actually just lose weight – they want to lose fat!

So how do you lose fat?  In order to lose 1 pound of fat, you must burn approximately 3500 calories.  Forget all the exercise gadgets and gimmicks you read about claiming to help you tone up your problem areas - this can ONLY be done 1 of 3 ways.

1.  Eat Less than the number of maintenance calories you need per day

2.  Eat up to maintenance and exercise some calories off

3.  A combination of the two

If you take a closer look at the food we eat, you will notice that it is measured in grams.  When we weigh ourselves, the scale measures us in pounds.  There are approxiamtely 453 grams in 1 pound.  I’m sure you may be wondering “what does that have to do with weighing myself?”  Just hang on a second and it will all make sense soon.

There are a ton of errors to take in to account when it comes to losing weight, and the majority of them happen at the gram level.

1.  Exercise - you will never know how many calories your body burns through exercise.  Studies show we can over estimate how much we exercise by 50% or greater.  If the machine says you burned 300 calories, how do you know that number is really accurate?  And even if that number was accurate, you would still need to deduct the number of calories you would have burned anyway through your resting metabolic rate.

2.  RMR - RMR stands for “resting metabolic rate” which is the number of calories you would burn if you didn’t do much all day besides read my blog.  If you think your RMR is 1800 calories day but it’s actually only 1600 calories a day that’s a 200 calorie per day error right there which could account for about 1.5 lbs of fat loss per month.

3.  Food - unless you weigh everything you eat, there is an inherent error between what you ate and what the package says.  For example a Snickers Bar package says 55g and 280 calories, but unless you actually weigh it, how do you know that bar is actually 55g?  You don’t.  You just assume it is which is a very bad assumption.  Food manufacturers are allowed to give you more than the label says, but not less.  The bar you ate could have actually been 65 grams, thus making it about 350 calories instead of 280. If you make a few of these 40-50 calorie errors all day long, that could be the difference between losing a pound of fat or not.

When we add up all these errors you can see they end up compounding on top of each other.  Then when you go and get on the scale and you’re trying to see changes at the pound level but you’ve made errors all week long at the gram level, it’s very easy to see why the average person gets frustrated because they’re not losing weight.  If you have a ton of errors at the gram level, it will be hard to see changes at the pound level.

Marketers know these errors exist and they will continue play on your lack of knowledge if you let them.

At 3DFitness, I teach my clients to over-estimate whatever the label says by 20-30% and under-estimate however many calories they think they burned working out by 20-30%.  These error adjustments are what allow them to continue losing weight without ever getting frustrated about their lack of progress.

In order for this system to work effectively, you must “count calories”.   Other than that, you are at the mercy of the marketers and food manufacturers.

EVERYONE at my gym who follows this system loses weight.

 

Coach Blair

 

 

I was talking to friend recently about weight loss and after listening to her talk, it hit me, people are really confused when it comes to losing weight.  I asked my 6 year old neice how lose weight and she simply said “don’t eat so much”.  If a child who’s never read a book on diet and nutrition instinctively knows this, then why aren’t people losing weight?

People hear me talk a lot about calories in vs calories out and can’t phathon that weight loss can be so simple.  The question I usually get is “what about carbs, protein and fats?”  My answer is generally “don’t worry about them right now until you get leaner.”  Simply meaning that you can’t see any measureable changes in your body in relation to carbs, protein and fat until you get really lean.  Now I know this isn’t the answer most people are use to hearing because it’s not a sexy answer.  So I’m prepared to be met with some resistance.

There is a huge distinction between an “Author” and a “Fitness Coach”.  The easiest people to work with are always the ones with the least fitness knowledge.  I just tell them what to do and they do it.  The hardest people to work with tend to be the ones who’ve read every book ever written on nutrition.  They will fight me tooth and nails about what they read and why they should only eat certain foods at certain times.

Now I know this may sound shocking, but 99% of the books on diet and nutrition are simply just marketing hooks (food cults).

Marketers understand that one of the needs of the human ego is the “need to belong”.   People want to belong to something so in the diet and fitness industry, they began forming food cults for this purpose.  Just think, you have veagans, vegetarians, no carb, low carb, high protein diets, etc all claiming their way is the best way to eat.

I’m a firm believer that most people spend way to much time worrying about the minutia of weight loss that they usually never end up losing any weight.  Sure we’ve all heard the eat 5-6 small meals a day to keep your metabolism elevated so your body doesn’t go into fat storage mode.  Heck, I even said the same thing to people when I first started training.  The problem with that, is no one really knows where that answer came from but we repeat it like it’s the ‘Gospel.’

I remember hearing a story about a guy who wanted to start running but before he could start he felt he needed to get a few things.  First he went and researched running shoes because he wanted to find the best running shoes available.  I mean there’s no way he could start running without those right?

Next he decided he needed to have the right outfit to run in.  So he went to the sporting goods store and purchased an outfit just for runners.  By this time several weeks had gone by and he still wasn’t exercising.

Then he decided to hire a running coach to teach him how to run because he wanted to make sure he was doing it properly.

This is how most people diet.  They spend all their time reading nutrition books and bogus blogs (except this one in hopes of finding the magical solution they’ve been searching for.  All in all, they’ve never gotten out of the starting blocks like our runner in the previous example.

Fat Loss is the simplest concept, but the most misunderstood.  No worries though because my new book will help you.

Currently I’m working on creating my own nutrition food cult and it’s going to be called “Gun To The Head Nutrition”.  If I put a gun to your head and told you I would kill your entire family if you didn’t lose 10lbs in 2 weeks, what would you do?

Would you?

1) Carefully read through the blood type diet book and find the one for you and ony eat the foods that were outlined for your type?

2) Only eat foods that were low on the glycemic index charts?
3) Try to eat in a specific pattern that’s ‘favorable’ for your fat burning hormones?

4) Eat More meals in an effort to try to actually ‘speed’ your metabolism so you you’re not stuck in the mythical mode of storing fat?

5) Would you just eat as little food as possible and possibly not even eat at all every day until you lost the requisite 10lbs?

If you answered anything besides 5 please leave my page and never return, because it’s clear you’ve lost your mind and long since lost your grip on reality.