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.

Why Grains Suck When Every Calorie Counts

I do some pretty intense training on a daily basis and I’m on a calories restricted diet. So every calorie counts for me. One of the things that aggravate me most about Paleo naysayers is how they often nearly always have mistake ideas about the nutritional make up of the foods they are urging me to eat.

“If you cut out grains, like rice, how are you going to get enough fiber?”

The fact is the calories to fiber ratio in grains compared to most veggies (leafy green veg, not fruits commonly called vegetables by many people like peppers or zucchini), is terrible. Let’s take a look at how brown rice, commonly considered a good-old whole grain, measures up to the lowly spinach.

	Brown Rice – 1 Cup – Steamed	Spinach – 1 Cup – Boiled
Total Calories:	216	41
Fiber:	3.5g	4.3 g
Calcium	19.5 mg	244 mg
Potassium	83.9 mg	838.8 mg
Carbohydrate:	216 g	41 g

A cup of rice has more than 5 times the calories of the same amount of spinach and nearly a gram less fiber. Another common vegetable I eat, the Brussels sprout, has 6.8 g of fiber and 65 calories. So who’s getting more fiber in their diet and fewer calories? The guy eating from the fast-food Chinese buffet with its sugar laden sauces or the Paleo eater chowing down on 7 to 10 servings of vegetables every day?” But what about bread?” the naysayer might ask. Two slices of whole wheat bread (let’s be honest how most people eat it – sandwiches) is even worse: 148 calories but only 1.9 g of fiber. The breakdown of other nutrients like calcium is just as bad.

I guess my point here is that you need to understand the facts about a position, either side, if you are truely going to espouse said view. If not, you are just repeating things that you have heard and don't really understand. And that's setting yourself up to look foolish.

Paleo Diet: Incorrect Impressions

One thing that annoys me about the average American’s idea of the Paleo Diet is they think I live my life in an orgy of red meat and fat. Let me correct some impressions about what I am doing.

1.       Paleolithic peoples ate only wild game because that was all that existed. Animals that eat natural diets of grasses have a much better breakdown of healthy fats like Omega 3s than farm raised, feedlot, corn stuffed cows that are bread to be fatter than their wild cousins were. If you are following a truly Paleo Diet you will strive to choose the leanest cuts of meat you possibly can. I certainly have a much healthier intake of good vs. bad fat than the average American.

2.       From the available archaeological evidence it seems likely that Paleolithic peoples ate on average a diet of 60/40 vegetable to animal. This means they still got the majority of their calories from proteins and fats but these were much healthier fats than what the typical American consumes today. Additionally the 60% of their food that was vegetable is significant as it was truly high-fiber, high-nutrient vegetable matter – not processed, reconstituted, and deep fried.

At a typical meal I consume less meat than the typical American and two servings of vegetables that are neither salted nor covered in butter or margarine. On a normal day I consume at minimum 7 servings of vegetables, on days when I slack I get about 5. Most importantly I eat a large variety of veggies that are highly nutritious: broccoli, mixed greens, Brussels sprouts, artichoke hearts, spinach, asparagus, and others make several appearances on my plate during the week. This doesn’t even count the fruit (black berries, raspberries, blue berries, apples, and avocados).

So tell me:  what’s so bad about eating tons of fresh veg and fruit and not eating Wonder Bread and white rice?

Ramblings about Paleo Diet, Weight Loss, and Weight Training

     

In addition to my professional blog for SQL Server and other related technologies I've decided to start a blog for my ramblings on diet and specifically to document the loss of my final 20 pounds and getting my percentage of body fat down to 7%.

Background

In November of 2008 I weighed 300 pounds and my percentage of body fat was probably in the high 50s. Initially I followed a typical sort of diet and made some good progress. But it wasn’t until I started eating within the guidelines of the Paleo Diet that I really started to make progress. I’m now floating just above 185 and around 15% body fat. But the last 20 pounds have been nearly impossible for me to drop. My current strategy is this:

1.       Increase both carb and protein intake so that I am eating more than 2000 calories for a two week period.

2.       Stop doing cardio but continue weight training and then…

3.       Drop the additional fruit and protein to get my calories back to less than 1800.

4.       Add back HIIT with sprints and also do occasional stair master.

I will probably have to cycle through like this a few more times before early spring to reach my goal. I hope my documenting this journey will be helpful to others.

Current Status

At the time of writing this I’m starting the second week of higher carbs and calories.

Dec, 2008 - Sept 2010

June, 2008