Calculate You Basal and Actual Metabolic Rates

Here is a small program I created to calculate both your basal and actual metabolic rates. All units are standard American and it requires Silverlight.

Pure Physique 4/5 Stars

 Pure Physique (Amazon - Paper - Kindle)

“Unlike other books that provide you with a fad diet or canned workout routines, which fail to maximize your potential and reach your ultimate goal g a leaner, more muscular body. This book provides you with a thorough and comprehensive understanding of the physical and psychological components of exercise and nutrition and how they affect your success or failure.”

The basic premise of this book, described in the quote above, has been espoused in countless articles but not in this level of detail and not in one place. The great thing about it is that you are given an outline of how to craft your exercise routine and your nutritional regime from scratch. The author provides you with the required scientific evidence to guide you but does not dogmatically force you down a rigid path. One of the things that I hate the most is authors who claim to offer the greatest routine/diet/supplementation that exists and all you have to do is follow it. If you make any adaptation of their methods and do not achieve the desired results it’s your fault for making the changes – not matter how slight. The system you follow needs to be adaptable to your needs, your schedule, and your physiology in order to be optimal. Your workout/nutritional system is not a religion and no Personal Trainer is Moses.

There were a few points that I feel this book could improve on. I would have liked it if the author had used some of the copious amounts of whitespace left in this book to show how an individual (perhaps an example trainee or two - one male, one female) would go through the process of creating their own system using his suggestions. The guidance in this respect was minimal. I think a chapter dedicated to this might be nice. Also, my time and money is important to me. I really don’t want a book like this to straddle the line with self-help. I know the psychological aspect of bodybuilding is important, perhaps more important to others than to me, but I felt that aspect of the book could have been removed and room for more practical material could actually have been made. Focusing on this practicality might also make the book better organized.  The index in this book is awesome. Very well composed and needed because at times is seemed the author was writing based on the flow of his thoughts rather than in a structured way. But these are minor complaints compared to the book’s content as a whole.

Over all the book is well written and the author explains his point of view and theories intelligently and I highly recommend the book for the advanced beginner/intermediate trainee looking to go to the next step. We’ve probably seen much of the advice before. But finding it clearly and intelligently described in one place that can be used as a continuous reference is golden.

Muscle and Fitness Rock Hard Challenge Week 3

Week 3 was interesting. I did not have a dramatic change in weight like I did last week, but things are still headed I the proper direction. I’m annoyed that my thighs are not shrinking any, but I am finding it difficult to measure there, so it could simply be that.  I don’t want to lose much lean mass, so slow and steady does the trick. My diet remains clean for most of the week, and I am sticking with the carb cycling strategy suggested in the RHC page.

	Week 1	Week 2	Week 3
Waist	35”	34”	33.8”
Thigh	26”	25.6”	25.6”
Upper Arm	15”	15”	14.9”
Chest	44.5”	44.5”	44.3”
Weight	185	180.3	179.5

The Dietary Optimal Range

How well do you understand the concepts behind Paleo Diet? Do you follow it out of a quasi religious conviction, looking down on Vegans and Pollanesq type locovores as if they were infidels? I believe there are some very good reasons why the Paleo Diet is the optimal diet for human beings, but I don’t believe that in real life anything is perfect and nearly everything operates in a range. If Paleo is so optimal why do other people who become Vegans and who follow other dietary systems report that they have similar benefits to those reported by Paleo Dieters? I think we can isolate a few core rules that describe the optimal range for humans, and they don’t include dietary dogmatisms like “grains are evil.”

1.       Eat fewer calories than most Americans do today.

2.       Avoid highly processed foods.

3.       Eat mostly plants - including some raw veggies and fruit.

4.       Include good fats.

If you consider a Raw Food dieter they certainly are going to be in this optimal range and so is a Vegan. The people who are not in this range are, for example, supposed Vegans/Lacto-Ovo Vegetarians who eat a ton of junk food and as such consume far too many simple carbs and bad fats. So when I hear a Vegetarian complain that he or she is fat because of genetics implying that Vegetarians should all be skinny because they don’t eat meat, I want to scream. Every single human being on this planet is a genetically charged fat storage device. Some of us are better at it than others but in the Evolutionary Environment of our Ancestors, humans who did not store fat well would have died out. More important than your genes is the environment in which they express themselves. If you are inactive and eat too many calories, your genes will do what they were fine tuned to do: store fat. And it becomes a metabolic snowball effect. Once you hit a certain point your metabolism begins to slow to where storing more and more fat gets easier and easier. Interestingly the opposite is also true. Individuals who are between 7% and 10% body fat are more easily able to store calories as lean muscle than people with higher percentages. But ask anyone who regularly maintains a percentage of body fat at that level and they will tell you it is hard work. In 2008 I was fat because of a combination of my behaviors - plural. Not just because I ate brown rice, not just because I ate animal protein, not just because I had stopped working out, not just because I did not eat a lot of raw veggies and not just because I was genetically predisposed to obesity. If the point of diet, not a weight loss regime, is to eat in the range that is optimal for your body and psychological makeup then there must to be a number of choices and we need to think within that range, not within a narrow, quasi religious subset of it that focuses on the mostly politicized aspects of what we eat.

Week 2 of the Muscle and Fitness Rock Hard Challenge.

I honestly forgot to take my measurements on Saturday, so they will have to wait until another post. I have hit a milestone, though. I finally had a weigh in at 180 lbs! It was actually 180.3, but who is counting the .3? I have been struggling to get there for the past 6 months and you might ask “What did it?” Would you believe it was adding between 300 and 800 calories per day, including the addition of carbs? It’s the truth. I’m adding a progress pic as well.

That's nearly 5 lbs in a week and I am eating more! I'm very excited. Carb/calorie cycling has really been paying off for me.

Update - Weekly Stats

	Week 1	Week 2
Waist	35	34
Thigh	26	25.6
Upper Arm	15	15
Chest	44.5	44.5

Week 1 of the Muscle and Fitness Rock Hard Challenge

Here is my weeekly check in:
Height: 66" (5' 6")
Weight: 185 lbs
Thigh: 26"
Waist: 35" (at widest part around bellybutton)
Arms 15"
Chest: 44.5"

I have given up on any hope of accurately measuring my bodyfat at the local Y. In the past 2 months I have gotten readings ranging from 7% to 17%. Clearly their machine is defective.

Entering the Muscle and Fitness Rock Hard Challenge 2011

I’ve decided to enter the Muscle and Fitness 2011 Rock Hard Challenge. I’ve made some progress over the past few months having raised my calories but I’m not sure about the degree of the success. The issue I am seeing is that I have raised my calories out of fear I was consuming too few and I’ve gotten more muscular and my pants fit me better. I’ve probably gone down a half of a pant size. But my weight has stayed the same and while I am certain I have lost fat, I feel I should be making faster progress. What I feel I am lacking is real focus. So for the next 3 months I am going to use the RHC 2011 as a goal to focus my efforts.

My goal is based on percentage of body fat, not on weight.

Goal: 7% body fat by the end of the contest in April, 2011.

Diet Strategy: I will continue eating Paleo, of course, but I will also be using Carb Cycling to help me achieve my goals. Daily calorie intake will vary as will daily carbohydrate intake. This will be based on the type of exercises performed on any given day.

Workout Strategy: For the first month and a half I am going to continue on the current system I am using, which is FST7 on Sat, Sun, Mon, and Wed with HIIT cardio being done on Tue and Wed. I will re evaluate this based on my results after the initial month and a half.

Progress Tracking: I will document the following measurements on a weekly basis.

·         Weight

·         Waste, thighs, arms, and chest. Each day I perform the measure I will take the measure 3 times in the same area and document the average.

On a tri-weekly basis I will track my body fat measurement. I will do my best to ensure the measurements are accurate but the machine used at my local YMCA seems to have occasional issues. I will also post photos roughly every 3 weeks.