Читать книгу The Fighter's Body - Loren W. Christensen - Страница 8
ОглавлениеCo-author Christensen recalls hearing the following conversation in a health club between a pumped, steroid-sopped bodybuilder and an easily swayed 24-year-old just beginning to lift weights.
Pumped bodybuilder: “Hey man. You wanna buy some ‘roids? Guaranteed to get you big.”
Skinny guy: “Oh no, sir. My wife and I are trying to have a child and I don’t want it to be born with problems ‘cause I took steroids.”
Pumped bodybuilder: “That won’t happen, man.”
Skinny guy: “It won’t? Oh, okay. How much are they?”
That is all the convincing it took to get this beginner to change his mind and buy an unknown, toxic substance to put into his body. He didn’t research it or talk to a health professional; he simply made a snap decision about something that would affect his entire body, inside and out, based on what a gym rat told him. Why? Because he wanted it to be true.
Myths exist year after year because so many people want to believe in them. We are not just talking about those people who are convinced there are trolls living under bridges or people who believe they are routinely whisked away to other planets. We are talking about mature, educated and worldly people - teachers, lawyers, nurses, judges, and athletes, including martial artists - who want to believe that there is an easy, sweatless and quick way to get healthy, strong, lean, hairless, and get blindingly white teeth.
Let’s narrow it down and look at some of the many myths surrounding the not-so-exact-science of high-powered nutrition, exercise and weight loss. Few of these go away because so many want so desperately to believe they are true. Remember, if it sounds too good to be true, well, you know the rest. As a hard training martial artist, you put tremendous demand on your body. To have healthy longevity in the fighting arts, knowledge is critical as to which methods are likely to work, which are dangerous and which wastes your time.
Spot Reduction
Just when we think the concept of spot reduction has gone away, it returns to lead folks down the path of wasted effort. The false belief is this: Work a specific muscle or muscle group especially hard and fat just melts away from that very spot.
The most common belief, one based on a whole lot of wishful thinking, is that crunches, hundreds of them, trim fat from the waistline. Convincing you that this is possible puts money in the pockets of swindlers who every six months come out with a new abdominal contraption that promises on their grandmothers’ graves to not only melt away abdominal muck, but do so in - say it with us - only three minutes a day. If that wasn’t enough, the commercials suggest that in the end, an attractive and admiring hot babe or stud will hang off your arm and gaze longingly into your eyes. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. Hey, don’t kill the messengers.
Where you accumulate fat depends on numerous factors: genetic make up (blame your parents), gender (men usually store more around their stomachs, while women store more around their hips), your activities, and many others. Making your life even more miserable is the tendency for your body to burn fat first from where it last packed it on. For example, if you accumulated it first around your midsection, that is going to be the last and toughest place for you to trim. Those places on your body with the least fat will be the first to show the visible effects from calorie reduction and increased calorie burning from exercise. Sometimes this might be exactly what you want, while other times it might lead to a disproportionate esthetic effect (a fancy way of saying you look funny in the nude).
3 Minutes a Day
The claim “in just three minutes a day” is used in many magazine ads and infomercials because it sells products. Technically, you will lose a little fat in three minutes, but the loss is so microscopic that you should be able to fit into your new training pants in, oh, about three years. Here is why.
A 170-pound person jogging for three minutes burns about 35 calories, about what is in half a small chocolate chip cookie. Do the math and you find that this person has to jog 100 three-minute sessions to lose 3,500 calories, the amount in one pound of fat. Since ab crunches don’t burn as many calories as jogging, it’s going to take you a long, long while to reach your goal.
Without a sensible eating plan, doing crunches until you drip blood from your belly button won’t give you that coveted washboard abdominal region as long as there is a layer of fat covering it. Crunches will develop strong abs for the power you need for your martial art techniques, but if you want them to show, you have to reduce your body fat. Now, if you just reduce fat without developing a muscular midsection, you will just look skinny. But when you follow a good ab program and diet that coveted ripped look will be yours. So, before you do your next set of 500-rep crunches to burn off fat, think about this bumper sticker.
Abs are made in the gym and in the kitchen
We aren’t going to tell you that reducing fat and developing a strong midsection is easy, because it’s not. On the other hand, it’s not terribly difficult either. It just takes knowledge and discipline. In subsequent chapters we show you how sound dietary habits and exercises aimed at your entire body stimulate overall weight loss, including ridding the midsection of fat. We even show you how to get maximum benefit out of just a few crunches. Before you get giddy, though, know that these crunches are tough and make the veins in your forehead stick out. But you can do it.
A Word About “Ripped”
A ripped midsection isn’t mandatory for optimum martial arts performance. Case in point: Movie star/martial artist Samo Hung, star of Martial Law and numerous kung fu movies, moves extremely well for an overweight fighter. But he is a rare exception, as few martial artists carrying extra pounds move with such grace and speed. We use the term ripped and its visual image as a way of describing an ideal, one that affords you strength for your techniques and one that offers visual proof of your conditioning.
If you are currently soft around the middle, but four months from now you have developed a six-pack of ab muscles as a result of discipline at the dinner table and in your training, feel proud of your accomplishment. However, if you choose not to reduce your body fat to the extent that your developed abs show (some people naturally have a thin layer of fat over their abdomen), it’s okay as long as they are strong.
I’ll Just Eat Less to Lose Weight
The assumption with this myth is this: Eating makes me fat. Therefore, I’ll eat less and I won’t get fat. People who cut calories radically or skip meals “to drop a couple of pounds” are following the assumption to its seemingly logical conclusion.
Sorry, it doesn’t work that way. In actuality, cutting calories drastically affects your metabolism; specifically, it slows it down, and the slower it goes the more likely you are to store fat. Yes, store it. It’s a cruel joke: eat a whole lot less, and get fat. Real funny!
Stress Reactions to Excessive Calorie Reduction
The human body knows two powerful stress reactions: Acute and prolonged. Think of acute stress as how you react physiologically when a mugger jumps out from the dark and points a knife at your face: Your body dumps adrenaline instantly into your system for fight or flight. Think of prolonged stress as the physiological reaction of being trapped in a collapsed house for several days after an earthquake without food and water: To survive, your metabolism slows down and energy drains from your muscles, digestive system and sexual system, using it mostly for primary functions, such as thinking, breathing and keeping your heart beating. Your system becomes highly efficient with its resources when it figures out that it’s not getting the usual amount of nourishment it needs.
This is a survival mechanism (probably left over from our caveman days) that keeps you alive when food is at a minimum. So when you skip meals and drastically cut calories, your body can’t differentiate between a real famine and you just deciding not to eat. It just knows it’s starving, and slows down your metabolism to desperately hold on to every critical calorie it gets. It’s a fight your body wins, which means those love handles are going to cling fast to your sides.
Here is more bad news: The fact that you are always hungry ultimately leads to binging and overeating, and when that happens, your body thinks, “Finally, some food! I’d better store it for later,” and retains as many calories as possible as — you guessed it — icky fat. Dr. Catherine Steiner-Adair, director of education, prevention, and outreach at the Harvard Eating Disorders Center (a division of Harvard Medical School) who treats eating disorders says, “If you begin to restrict or think obesssively about food, you are very likely to binge.”1
You can gain weight due to the famine stress reaction, even when eating only twice a day and with limited portions. Consider this incredible story. A woman complained to her doctor about being depressed and having low energy. When asked what she ate, she told him she had one bowl of soup at lunch and one yogurt at dinner. That was it. Nothing else. Not even a raisin. Since she wasn’t consuming enough calories in those two “meals” to sustain her basic dietary needs, she was constantly fatigued and depressed. On weekends, she rewarded herself for all her suffering by binging on junk food, which accounted for her overweight condition. This is because her body frantically accumulated all the calories in her fat cells to use as energy during the long week of starvation. She had been following the I’ll-just-eat-less-and-lose-weight logic for five years, never once questioning that it just might be the root of her problems. Her doctor immediately saw what was happening and put her on a healthy diet with fixed times to eat throughout the day. Within one week, she dropped three pounds and immediately began to enjoy greater energy and a happier outlook.
Lack of Energy
This will be discussed in detail later, but for now know that you cannot get a productive workout when skipping meals and cutting calories drastically. Calories are not bad guys; you need them desperately to train, compete, strategize, and recuperate. Later we provide you with several plans to cut calories intelligently so you can still slam and bam with energy to spare.
Something to Get You Started
Later, we give you several ways to reduce calories, but here is a trick you can start using right now since it’s used in all of our eating plans: Eat frequent, small meals throughout the day. This prevents your body from declaring a famine and defensively retaining all the calories and nutrients it can get. By eating five or six small meals throughout your waking hours, you speed up your metabolism, which sends your body the opposite signal: It has enough calories and nutrients for what lies ahead.
One other benefit, which sounds almost too good to be true, is that since it takes a lot of calories to digest your food, eating several meals a day turns your body into an efficient calorie-burning machine. In other words, the more often you eat the more calories you burn. Life doesn’t get much better than that. Additionally, you enjoy ample and consistent energy from the moment you get up until you crash into your bed 16 hours later. More on frequent meals in subsequent chapters.
I’ll Stop Eating Fat to Lose Weight
We don’t state many absolutes in this book because it’s difficult to do so when discussing how the human body reacts to various programs. That said, here is one absolute about dieting, or more specifically, about calories. As you know, there are gazillions (read: a lot) of diets in books, magazines, on the internet and on photocopies passed around the office. Some are good, some are absurd (the beer and steak diet comes to mind. Darn it!), and others are seriously dangerous to your health. There are diets designed around eating only vegetables, eating only meat and a popular one at this writing that touts the wonders of eating lots of fat.
If any of these diets work, whether they are the healthy ones or the crazy ones, it’s because of one reason and one reason only: Your body uses more calories in its daily activities than it takes in. It doesn’t care if the calories are from fat, carbohydrates (carbs) or protein. If you eat fewer than what your body needs to train, work, play, sleep or zone out in front of the tube, you lose weight. It’s a simple concept. There is no argument.
Since fat holds more calories than carbs and protein, it would seem that fat is the bad guy in your diet. Much of this myth comes from the negative connotation conveyed by the word. We want to trim fat from our waistlines; our butt is too fat, our thighs are too fat. Therefore, fat is bad. While that seems logical, it’s dangerously incorrect.
The truth is that there are vital biochemical functions in your body that need fat. For example, fat is required to maintain a correct hormonal balance, maintain healthy skin, maintain a healthy testosterone level, and absorb certain vitamins. Totally eliminating it would lead to illness. Even if it were possible for you to avoid dietary fat altogether, you wouldn’t lose weight if you consumed more protein and carb calories than you use in your daily activities.
Make fat a part of your diet, just make sure it’s not the biggest part. More on fat in Chapters 3 and 4.
Why You Crave Fat
Fat cells supply you with energy and protect you from hunger and cold. Eating it is a primal survival mechanism you inherited from your prehistoric ancestors. In their era, fat was a valuable commodity, but in your world, it’s ever-present. Unfortunately, the survival mechanism still works to make you crave the stuff. Eliminate or drastically reduce it, and you soon hunger for it, and hunger desperately as it gives texture, flavor and taste to food. You become obsessed, especially for burgers, chips, milkshakes, cupcakes, and other high-fat goodies. When you do give in, usually after rationalizing that you need it, you overindulge.
It’s More Expensive to Eat Healthily
This is patently untrue. Basic, nutrition-rich foods, such as vegetables, fruit and lean cuts of meat, are almost always cheaper than ready-made meals and dining out. Take advantage of the time of year and buy whatever fruit and vegetables are in season and at their lowest price. Get to know the stores in your community, since one might offer the best buy for fresh foods and another the best buy for lean cuts of meat.
Want a snack? A medium-sized, 100-calorie apple with no fat costs you about 50 cents, while a chocolate bar, a 300 calorie, fat laden chocolate bar, costs about a dollar. If you don’t know which of those are the best for your kicking and punching body, you soon will as you delve deeper into these pages.
Eating After 8 PM Makes You Fat
This myth is based on the fact that since you don’t use many calories after 8 PM, any you take in are stored as body fat. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t. Once again, it’s all about calories; in this case, it’s about how many you consume before 8 PM. Let’s say you need 2000 calories a day to maintain your weight, and today at breakfast, at your midmorning snack and at lunch, you took in a total of 1,300. This means at your afternoon snack and at dinner, you can have no more than 700 calories. That’s it. You are done eating for the day. If you do have a little something beyond your 2000, say, 300 calories worth of something, there is a good chance it will accumulate as fat. The solution, therefore, is to take in 1,800 in your fist five meals, so that you can have 200 calories for an evening snack.
How It Typically Happens
You just had a grueling, seemingly endless day at school or work, and then you raced across town to your martial arts school, trained to exhaustion, and then raced back across town to your home, where you collapsed onto your sofa in a heap of fatigue and stress. It’s 8:30. After you catch your breath, you have one simple thought: chips and a comfort drink, pop or beer. Since you haven’t had your evening meal, you rationalize that your fatigue and stress entitles you to pork out and, what the heck, enjoy a second comfort drink.
If all this comfort eating takes place after you have eaten your 2000 calories, you are on your way to Fatville City, but only because you ate more than 2000, not because you gorged it down after 8 PM. Later we discuss the harm such junk food does to your body after a hard workout.
Don’t allow stress, fatigue, and need for comfort to be an excuse to overeat, whether it’s healthy food or high-fat junk. Don’t listen to that syrupy, evil voice of rationalization: “Come on. You trained like a crazy person. You earned a triple burger and milkshake. And some fudge. ‘Cause you’re a killer.” You must resist, and resist hard because fatigue and stress can weaken your willpower. Use your discipline, the same discipline you use to go to your martial arts school on hot summer days and do 200 punches and 200 kicks when your friends are sitting in the shade at the park. If you do weaken and yield to The Evil Voice, your evening will end with hundreds of excess calories hanging off your gut. Think of them as designer calories, designed to make your belly larger.
Bottom line: If by bedtime you have taken in more calories than you used during the day, you get a glob of fat somewhere on your body. To phrase this more positively: It doesn’t matter when you eat during a 24-hour period, as long as you eat only the calories you need. Do that and you will be a lean, mean fighting machine.
Free tip 1: Dinner is often the only hot meal eaten by people with fast-paced lives, food that frequently contains calorie monsters like gravy, casseroles and so on. Know that cold foods often contain fewer calories.
Free tip 2: Here is an idea that works for some fighters. Plan your daily meals in such a way that your martial arts workout follows the meal with the most calories. You have to have enough energy to train anyway, so combine a big meal (not too big) with a hard training session that burns lots of calories.
Natural or Herbal Weight-loss Products Are Safe and Effective
Over the last decade there has been a veritable boon of interest in so-called “natural” products, a movement that is hardly surprising considering the industrialization of the food industry. What we get today on our plate has never been more altered, enriched, colored, processed, tweaked, massaged (in Japan they actually massage cows to improve the meat), and who knows what else. Check out the labels and you find conserving agents, taste enhancers, color additives and all kinds of unpronounceable chemicals.
Scary fact: Many of the same chemicals added to your food are also found in cleaning agents, dyes and a host of other products found under your sink.
As interest in health, nutrition and exercise has increased over the years, enlightened consumers are more aware now of the low nutritional value and health risks in many ingredients added to packaged foods. Due to the growing interest in natural foods, virtually every major supermarket today has a “health” section where you can find food products that have not been sprayed, colored or supplemented with chemicals. In the same aisle are rows of herbal products that fall under the same “all natural” label.
So do such labels as ”health food,” “natural” and “all natural” mean they are safe to use? Not necessarily. Always keep in mind that many companies selling these products are just as motivated to relieve you of your money as are the infomercial people (discussed in a moment), and are often just as quick with half-truths, unsubstantiated claims and just plain verbal rubbish. Yes, some of these products are good for you, but others have no value whatsoever, and those remaining might be downright dangerous. Due to the litigious society we now live in, many companies have started to cover themselves by adding large disclaimers on their products.
We found one product that has the following script on its label: “The dietary supplement [X] consists of only the finest natural herbs gathered from over 12 countries of the world. All our products are manufactured in the United States at our government-inspected facilities. We are a leader in quality with every product meeting the highest standards of the industry.” Written by the product’s marketing people, these sentences are designed to put your mind at ease as to the product’s safety and effectiveness. You read it and conclude that the product is natural and safe. Maybe it is, but just below the script are these bold-capped words: “READ ENTIRE LABEL WARNING IMMEDIATELY BELOW.” The text that follows, also in caps, warns you against using the product if pregnant, if you have a history or a family history of heart or thyroid disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, recurrent headaches, depression, any psychiatric condition, glaucoma, difficulty urinating, enlarged prostate, and many other medical conditions. Buried deeply in the warning is a further warning that you might experience “serious adverse health effects” if you take the product with caffeine. Surprisingly, people are still buying this, though there has to be a significant percentage who fall into one or more of the at-risk categories.
The question that needs to be asked is this: If an all-natural product is completely safe, why are there so many conditions that prohibit its use? Should all products labeled “natural” be considered unsafe? Well, we wouldn’t go that far. But since it’s not always easy to tell, it’s best to never use them indiscriminately. Read the labels, adhere to the warnings, and when in doubt, contact your physician.
Don’t be fooled by the flashy labeling on the products or the finely honed sales pitch from the slick-looking dude in the infomercial. Natural or herbal products aren’t a sure bet. While some produce good results, many others aren’t worth your hard-earned cash. Educate yourself about any product you put into your body. Research it and talk with your physician or dietitian. Then listen to that little voice of common sense in your head when strolling through the health section of your supermarket.
Low-fat Food is Healthier but Tastes Terrible
There is some truth to this, though “terrible” is in the taste buds of the, uh, chewer. A friend of Christensen’s once shared a no-fat muffin with him as they drank coffee together. Christensen says it not only tasted horrible, but it had a consistency of chewing gum, and at one point it got caught half way down his throat. At first he tried to massage the outside of his neck to get it unstuck, then he went into a retching fit, looking a little like a cat with a fir ball in its throat.
As mentioned earlier, fat adds flavor to food and gives us a sense of feeling full. This doesn’t necessarily mean that all low-fat food is devoid of flavor. Again, that is up to each person to decide. Christensen’s friend chomped on the muffin with obvious pleasure, while Christensen prayed the man was adept at the Heimlich maneuver. The good news is that people in the food industry are working to develop more flavorful low-fat foods that taste closer to those that contain more fat.
Maintaining your weight or dropping a few pounds needs to be approached from all angles; eating low-fat foods is just one. If you try to survive solely on low- and no-fat foods, you soon will go mad and fling yourself from the roof of a high-rise building. To ensure this doesn’t happen, eat only those low- and no-fat foods you like, while keeping an open mind to try others. Don’t overindulge. They still contain calories, sometimes lots of them. For example, two of those Volkswagen-sized muffins contain enough calories to keep a room of kindergartners looting and pilfering for hours. Eat low- and no-fat foods as part of your overall plan, but you still need to count the calories.
Low-fat Foods Can be Delicious
If you happen to be a kitchen warrior, know that with some creativity you can whip up a delicious low-fat meal that just might be tastier than those artery-choking, high-fat ones. There are zillions of low-fat cookbooks on the market and gazillions of low-fat recipes on the internet. Test it out on the net: Keyword “low-fat chicken and Spanish rice” into the search box of your favorite search engine. You get mucho recipes.
When one flavor dominates, it’s often less enjoyable than meals that offer a variety of tastes. The flavors in many packaged foods, for example, are poorly balanced so that the dominant flavors - salt, barbeque sauce, cheese, hot sauce — prevent you from distinguishing subtle nuances. This can lead to overeating as you unconsciously search for a greater variety of tastes.
Make your meals flavor intense. The best recipes are those that give you balance in flavor and nutrition. Do a little research on cooking low-fat meals to see how you can combine different flavors to create a delicious meal without consuming volumes of calories.
Low-fat Foods are Best for Losing Weight
Along with herbal and natural products, low-fat foods have — as a result of clever marketing — taken the world by storm. Today, virtually every type of food on the market has a low-fat version. The smart marketers slap on appealing labels, such as “low-fat,” “light,” “fat-free” and “reduced-fat” and then charge more than their fat counterparts. However, all this creative verbiage about the product’s fat content ignores or deliberately hides one important question: Exactly how low, how light, how free and how reduced is the fat in the product? Five percent? Ten? More? Less?
These are vague labels (deliberately so?) and their meaning varies from one product to the next. The food industry might have a mandate as to how foods are labeled, but it’s still incredibly confusing to consumers. You might find a good tasting low-fat candy bar that contains only two-percent fat, while another brand, also displaying a low-fat label, contains a higher percentage. Not only might there be a difference between two low-fat candy bars, it could be a significant difference. This is why it’s important that you always check the nutrition value table on all products. While the terms low, reduced and light are not consistent from product to product, the labeling laws are strict as to the quantity of carbs, fats, protein, calories, and micronutrients in the products.
Make special note of the calories in the low-fat products. Remember, your body doesn’t care whether the excess calories came from carbs, protein or fat. Any unused calories get stored somewhere on your body. Know that low-fat, reduced-fat, and no-fat, doesn’t necessarily mean low calories. Co-author Christensen learned this about three months after he discovered no-fat, frozen yogurt, sold in a quaint little shop a few blocks from his home. Since it had no fat, he naively assumed he could have an industrial-sized cone once a day, sometimes twice, sometimes dipped in chocolate. By the end of summer, his training uniform fit snugly and his martial arts moves had become sluggish, a result of about 15 pounds of unused calories — no-fat calories — surrounding his waistline.
One low-fat commercial cupcake, for instance, contains the same number of calories as a regular, high-fat cupcake, but because it’s labeled low-fat it sells like, well, hotcakes. No doubt the naïve even eat two or three extra believing it’s okay to do so. Learn from Christensen’s discovery, the same sad one made by thousands of others, and don’t overeat low-fat foods under the assumption that they contain fewer calories. Check the labels, check the labels, check the labels.
How They Still Get You
One reason why there aren’t fewer calories in some low- or no-fat foods is that the manufacturers have added things to get you to eat them. Fat-free desserts, for example, often contain extra sugar, sometimes a lot of extra sugar, to compensate for the lack of rich taste lost when the fat was removed. What this means is the calories saved by eating a low- or no-fat desert come back to haunt, laugh and mock you in another form.
We aren’t saying that you shouldn’t eat these foods, but we are encouraging you to read the labels and keep your portions in check. Low- and no-fat products are a valuable addition to your diet, but they aren’t a quick fix to losing weight. The manufacturers have spent a lot of money to fool consumers into believing that fat is the bad guy in your diet. While it’s true that too much saturated fat can have detrimental effects on your health (we talk about this later), it’s also true that eating too many calories, no matter where they come from, causes you to gain weight. This is a fact the admen haven’t been able to change and almost always fail to mention.
Keep this fact in mind and hopefully it will help you remember to check the labels: We now have more fat-free foods than ever before in history, but the population is growing ever more dangerously fat with each passing year.
Don’t let the ad men win. You are a warrior. Keep your guard up.
By now you know that it’s all about calories and anything you hear that claims otherwise, you should suspect immediately that they are evil, stinking low-life liars. That might be a little strong, but you get the point. Here are 10 diet cons that slim and trim — your bank account.
The program is effortless Sure, and a kick in the groin is a lot of laughs. Losing weight takes time, effort and discipline. It’s not always easy, but it’s definitely worth the effort.Your weight loss is permanent Not if you resume eating and training the way you were before you began the diet. If after you lose the weight you maintain a sensible, calorie conscious eating plan and a good training regimen, the weight stays off. Eat more calories than you burn, however, and your old self comes back to strain your waistband.Eat all the sausage and bacon you want Even if this worked, do you really want to feed your heart and arteries all that fat? Along with a sensible reduction in calories, eat lots of fruit, veggies and lean meat to slim down healthily.You need a Masters degree in chemistry to figure it out This diet claims that you must eat only protein at one meal, carbs at the next and fat only on Sunday. Nonsense. There is no scientific proof that you can lose weight by not combining certain foods. It’s okay; your body can handle bread and turkey at the same time.Certain food groups are banned Anytime you neglect a food group you risk suffering from a lack of nutrients. Your objective is to drop those unwanted pounds, but do so with lots of energy and with vibrant health.They show before and after pictures of a guy who lost 50 pounds eating a brand name fast food The more sensational the ad, the more you need to scrutinize the fine print. By law, the weight loss claimed from an advertised diet must be representative of all people, not just one person. If it’s not, there must be a disclaimer that says something about the results not being typical.You have to trace your ancestry There are even wacko diets where you tailor your eating according to your blood type or where you eat similarly to your cave dwelling ancestors (this ignores the fact that few cavemen lived to see 30). Avoid these plans like a charging T-rex and spend your efforts on training hard and selecting healthy, low-cal foods.Eat only watermelon and cheesecake Hmm, this one sounds pretty good. But for six meals a day? While you might at first lose weight on a diet that allows you to eat only one or two types of food, such restriction is unhealthy because it lacks a variety of nutrients. Also, few people can remain on a diet that is so boring, and when they go off, it’s — hello pizza.Foods you have always known to be healthy are now bad for you There are diets that claim nutrient-rich foods, such as beets, carrots and apples cause you to store excess sugar as fat. Nonsense. The only thing that causes you to store fat is too many unused calories.You see it advertised at 2 AM on cable Always keep in mind that the spokesperson’s giddiness and dripping enthusiasm are part of an act. The pretty person is getting paid to get you excited over their wacky diet plan. Don’t fall for it. Besides you should be sleeping, anyway.Infomercials
Infomercials that push exercise and nutrition products zap us with, “See results in 10 days!” and “Get a defined midsection in less than three minutes a day!” While this does have a certain appeal, it unfortunately isn’t the way the human body works. Now, some of the advertised products are indeed good, but the claims shouted by the ecstatic spokespersons are often laughable exaggerations of what is the truth. Actually, they aren’t that funny when you think about how many hopeful people send in their hard-earned bucks for the stuff.
Anyone who has participated in physical training for at least a year knows that it takes time and effort to lose weight, to get aerobically fit and to develop the best body that genetics allow. While there are rare people who are genetically blessed and can achieve tremendous success faster than the rest of us (we so hate them), even they can’t do it in 10 days, using three-minute workouts.
So why do people buy these infomercial products? Besides falling prey to the slick salesmanship, infomercials appeal to their desperate hope that there really is a magic bullet out there that gives results for little effort: larger breasts, whiter teeth, $10,000 a week working only two hours a day, rock hard abs, and self-defense skills from aerobic kickboxing. The con artists selling these hopes and dreams drive nice cars and wear flashy suits because people are buying, people who want to believe there is a shortcut to success, fame, health, and a youthful appearance. Even the word “infomercial” is a trap, as it suggests that what you are viewing isn’t just a commercial but information, truthful information. More times than not, though, it’s disinformation.
Over the many years that infomercials have been entertaining insomniacs and Sunday morning early risers, they have offered a host of products (besides spray-on hair and vibrating finger attachments) that promise an easy and fast path to a hard body: diet pills, abdominal exercisers and electrical muscle stimulating devices. While some products do give minimal results, seldom are they sold with information that isn’t distorted, exaggerated or falsified. Let’s take a look at one product seen frequently on infomercials that has appealed to many martial artists.
Why They Can Lie to You
Have you ever torn your gaze from the attractive spokesperson and noticed the tiny print at the bottom of the screen that companies must display to cover themselves legally? The print usually reads like this.
“A sound diet is necessary for permanent weight loss.”
“Individual results may vary.”
With these barely visible phrases, the makers of infomercials are able to get away with twisting facts so that you buy their products. The fine print also prevents you from suing them when you sadly discover that you still have a big tummy though you followed their instructions and spent less than three minutes a day for 10 whole days on their goofy abdominal contraption.
Abdominal Machines
Setting aside the fact that some ab machines are bad for your back (co-author Christensen bought one of those) or that some do a terrible job of targeting the abdominal muscles, let’s take a look at those oh-so-sincere claims made by those oh-so-attractive, bubbly spokespersons as to how they “burn calories” and award you with “a tight tummy and a sexy six-pack.” Right, and cows fly in formation.
Here is a statement you will see many times in this book: To lose fat, you must burn more calories than you consume. Any physical activity you do beyond what is your normal daily activity burns extra calories. For example, should your TV remote suddenly die and you are forced to get up off your sofa 10 times in one evening to change channels (we pray that never happens to you), you will burn extra calories. Now, getting up and manually changing channels won’t give you an awesome six pack of abs, but because it’s an activity beyond what is normal for you, you will burn a few calories, roughly the same number contained in a couple of potato chips.
Likewise, since you normally don’t exercise on that abdominal machine the partially clad spokesperson is pitching, doing so burns a few extra calories. Will that activity alone give you a defined midsection? Sorry, but no way. How about if you do it every day? Nope. You still have more work to do before you can show off your bellybutton ring.
Now, we aren’t against all ab machines, per se; some are safe and some actually help you develop a strong midsection. However, it’s our opinion that you really don’t need an apparatus since there are hundreds of free-hand exercises that can be done without spending a dime. There are even martial art movements that work your abs (see Chapter 8). For now, just know that when you diet consistently and train intelligently, your six-pack will one day show itself in your bathroom mirror.
About 111,000 Reps Should Do It
To burn one lousy pound of body fat - 3,500 calories — on an ab machine, you would have to do thousands of reps, since it’s an easy exercise and the abs are small compared to, say, the leg muscles. You would have to emulate a guy by the name of Edmar Freitas, a Brazilian weight-training instructor who cranked out 111,000 crunches in 24 hours for the Guinness World Records. If you choose to burn fat like ab-man Freitas, know that you are going to have to do it about every day, which means you have to scratch sleep, eating and going to the bathroom off your “Things-to-do-list.”
