

### Don't Believe in the Calorie for Weight Loss

By Matt Heath BSc

Copyright 2013 Matt Heath

Smashwords Edition

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Table of Contents

Chapter 1 - Who the heck wrote this book?

Chapter 2 - Fit for Purpose

Chapter 3 - Our ancestry and what got us to this point

Chapter 4 - Don't believe in the Calorie

Chapter 5 - What you need to know (what is a Calorie?)

Chapter 6 \- What does this mean to us?

Chapter 7 - Expanding this point of view

Chapter 8 - The Scenario

Chapter 9 - A diet of confusion

Chapter 10 - A replacement system to the Calorie

Chapter 11 - The difference between losing weight and losing fat

Chapter 12 - Illustrating the point

Chapter 13 \- How to make that change

Chapter 14 - The good personal trainer part

Chapter 15 \- Habits and all that jazz

Chapter 16 - The gym part

Chapter 17 \- Expectations and reality

Chapter 18 - Resistance training benefits for fat loss

Chapter 19 - Stop wasting your time with core stability

Chapter 20 - Stop wasting your time only doing cardio

Chapter 21 - Stop wasting your time only lifting light weights

Chapter 22 - Stop wasting your time consuming sports drinks

Chapter 23 - Stop wasting your time trying to get a 6 pack

Chapter 24 \- Change your methods now

Chapter 25 - Thoughts and interventions on looking good

Chapter 26 - Future technology (here today) and posture

Conclusion

Connect with me online

Testimonials
Chapter 1

WHO THE HECK WROTE THIS BOOK?

Matt Heath is a lazy forty something exercise physiologist, who studied at Roehampton Institute part of Surrey University. With a BSc (Hons) gained in Sport Science, he left these shores to return to the land of his birth, New Zealand. He managed a group of Personal Trainers on behalf of Les Mills World of Fitness, until he helped them make the move from being employees of Les Mills to becoming self-employed contractors to Les Mills, where upon he joined their ranks. During his 8 years as a Personal Trainer he learnt through trial and error (many thanks to those clients that put up with this!) to prove that much of the established foundations about health and fitness, and in particular weight loss (he prefers the factual term "body fat reduction") are in fact wrong and misleading. He had to unlearn much from his university days and find new methods in order to achieve real long term weight loss (body fat reduction) for his clients.

It is no secret that despite his success as a personal trainer and sport psychologist he ended up playing too hard too fast and spending more than he was earning. Despite being sought after by members of the public and elite athletes alike his debts were mounting, so having qualified as an Ocean Yachtmaster, he left New Zealand and entered the world of private super yachts as a professional crew. Even during this time he still trained others, in America - his boss, in Italy the body-builders at the local Savona (spit and sawdust) gym, despite neither party understanding the others language. After one storm too many crossing the Atlantic and having paid off his New Zealand debts Matt finally returned to the UK after an absence of 10 years, and countless experiences.

Deciding that he did not want to fall back into the easy world of the Personal Trainer Matt turned his varied and adaptable skills first to managing a successful wedding venue, and then to property lettings and management. Once again despite the professional vocations, he still found time to train for the UK Half Iron Man, and train others at the gym he used. Even managing a "client" at the gym from reliance on a walking stick, seemingly permanently, to never requiring it again. An amazing outcome for both parties.

Despite not using his personal training skills to directly earn funds, he nevertheless kept writing and refining his thoughts and methodology. He was invited to Manchester to become involved in a management consultancy which hoped to use his sport psychology skills as an extra facet in opening up new methods for management training. With the recession hitting just as this was starting up there was little call for this new innovative approach, and so finally Matt, by various means, has seized his chance to set pen to paper to bring you 20 years of experience as a Personal Trainer and Sport Psychologist to illustrate all that is wrong in the fitness world, and most importantly to give you everything you need to know in order to finally put everything together to get real long term permanent results, particularly for those chasing the elusive body fat reduction.

Chapter 2

FIT FOR PURPOSE

The background to this book, and why I would propose that it is fit for purpose for anyone.

This book is focused on improving the body shape and therefore usually the esteem of individuals.

In doing so their health and fitness will also improve.

It will...

But health and fitness are not necessarily the focus of this manual, and surprisingly nor are they often the focus for the individual concerned.

There is a huge difference between being fit and looking fit.

Do not confuse the two.

There are those who are fit, but do not look fit.

There are those who are not fit, but do look fit.

Many professionals in this field still confuse the two, gaining great fitness for individuals without gaining the desired physical change.

Therefore:

Do not attempt to lose weight.

Do attempt to lose body fat.

There is a difference.

Diet alone will not work.

Nor will cardio work alone.

Nor will resistance training alone.

Good use of nutrition with cardio work and resistance training will work; putting these 3 together is the only way to truly lose body fat permanently.

Together these will take a positive effect.

People, particularly those in the "industry", frown at my claim that most attending the gym are not there to get fit, but simply to look fit. Certainly the weight loss companies (or many now terming themselves "shape management" companies) have no interest in the health of their clients, their one motivation (apart from running a business and making money out of others misery) is simply to lose weight for their client, and as I have stated before there is nothing essentially healthy about this, plenty of ill health can occur due to weight loss.

Talk to people about being fit and generally they get very confused as to what that means, talk to them about being healthy and the confusion really starts. They might talk about what they have been told to talk about by those pervasive adverts, and food companies, but in reality this bares little or no relationship to fitness, health or what people actually want to achieve.

We are all so very confused, mainly because this whole scene has been hijacked by the biggest companies jumping on the band wagon and bending our understanding as to what it is to be healthy, and fit.

Chapter 3

OUR ANCESTRY, AND WHAT GOT US TO THIS POINT

Our ancestry should inform us as to what we really should be looking to in the future...

Our ancestry shows that we are evolved from apes, and this should in many ways enlighten us to the fact that male and female are not so very different from one another.

This should highlight the very alarming fact that we are hell bent on differentiating ourselves most severely from the marketed ultra-female waif model to the ultra-male macho triangular shaped torso currently on view in any magazine.

These two extremes do not represent us, Homo sapiens, who apart from an x chromosome are identical in almost every form, our deviances from a standard are minimal. So why this unhealthy appetite for extreme differentiation which, although obtainable in the short term, is in reality not so healthy over time.

This is not to excuse obesity, but rather to support a more moderate line that our human bodies as males and females are not so clearly defined.

Go to any good safari park, and check out those in our genealogical family, the apes, and you will find it hard to tell female from male at first glance.

Track our evolution and it would be hard to support that only males hunted, and only females waited back at camp for the hunters to return. In all probability all responsibilities we carried out by all members of a community irrespective of their sex. As time has travelled precariously forward so we have divided further and further the perception of what it is to be male or female, and therefore what it is to look male or female.

Certainly I have covered topics in the previous paragraph that are far removed from my speciality, but the reason for this is to rebuff this constant impression forced upon us that only one body type is acceptable for a female and one body type for a male.

In reality we need to understand that if we can all (and juvenile males especially) look past breast tissue and genitalia our very human bodies are identical.

Our bone structure is the same, our muscle tissue the same. Yes we are moulded by our hormones, but essentially we are the same.

So why oh why do we insist on treating males and females so ridiculously differently in the gym, and with so called weight loss regimes.

The whole situation is totally illogical, and invented by people who never fully understood what it was they were dealing with all those years ago at the outset of the "weight loss" industry – such a terrible term!

Our role models should not be the super waifs of the fashion industry, this is simply not obtainable, and even worse this is clearly unhealthy. Most people would be alarmed to be informed that it is also not "lean".

That is to say "yes" they are skinny but they have more body fat than you would guess, ultimately because they possess no muscle mass. Take a cross section of an arm from a typical "waif" model and you will find bone at the centre, then a flimsy wafer of muscle, surrounding this will be a more generous layer of body fat than appears superficially, finally encapsulated by skin.

Role models for females should come from the sporting and athletic world. Hopefully not that beset by drug cheats, but that of the female form honed by physical work, that aids muscle so that it can perform its rightful functions of dynamism and mobility for the body, and most importantly an efficient system that continually demands energy and thus over time body fat as a source of energy.

This body is not too far from those of their male counterparts. They are not huge muscle bound entities that most women will imagine in their minds when trying to make the tricky link between women and muscle.

Gyms and women alike are so scared of producing the muscle bound physique of their imagination that they do nothing for their own muscle, the only part of their body that will ever help them rid themselves of their body fat.

Over 20 years of training women with genuinely heavy loads on resistance machines (when we talk about heavy loads or weights this is relative to the individual) none of them have ever complained that they were in any way muscle bound.

They have always commented on being fitter for life (whatever that might mean (a personal feeling to each individual)) and of being leaner and smaller, but never skinnier.

Surely the issue has to be to move away from this insane separation of the sexes and their physical appearance.

I do not wish for males and females to look the same (I am not chasing an androgynous look), that is not what this is about; rather it is far healthier for society as a whole to be able to avoid the obesity slope we are now heading down. We cannot do this on our current course of action with diets, fads, and classes, which deliver nothing in real terms. We need to move beyond these current accepted norms for weight loss, and understand that without that imagined fearsome body component "muscle", we will never deliver long term body fat reduction to both male and female, but in particular female, who have been lied to for so long.

We need to understand that we are trying to improve the efficiency of women's muscle, if we can do this they will maintain any body fat loss for as long as they maintain the efficiency of their muscle. It is virtually impossible to increase the size of a woman's muscle through the training required to help produce efficient muscle (which will combat body fat increase) because they produce too much oestrogen.

Attaining this muscle efficiency (which is the crux of this argument) does not remove the sexuality of the sexes.

To help highlight the "normality" of this as opposed to the negative press this sort of proposition gains we need to remember that we are dynamic animals, we are descended from highly mobile and dynamic species, we have always required that our bodies are fast, and adaptable, so we need to maintain some form of that.

We need to move.

Our bodies thrive on movement, pace, and dynamism, on being physical. Our bodies reward us for being active, the chemicals of the body produce positive effects on us, and our intelligence (mind, thought process, call it what you will) are improved and lifted.

We can observe this all too often in our daily lives, we come across those who are less and less active, and with this passivity comes a deterioration of their physical being, along with a slow deterioration of their intellect, mind brain call it what you will.

In a sporting context we know that physical fatigue is a precursor to mental fatigue, and of course mental fatigue leads to mistake, and mistakes lose games, matches, competitions.

Much of my work with athletes has been based around this, to prevent athletes becoming so physically fatigued that they suffer mental fatigue, the longer our athlete can hold out in this stake the greater their opponent will commit mistakes first, so helping to achieve their victory, prize, or win.

To move this principle to us - sedentary individuals - is simple enough. The more you do, the more you can do. If we expose your muscles to "work" then they reward you with greater longevity before fatiguing allowing you to achieve more both mentally and physically, and to a degree this pays into an improved immune system, so helping prevent illness is part and parcel of a thriving musculature.

Put simply we did not evolve to have our lives stolen by 8 hours of television a night; we evolved to be intelligent dynamic beings that can achieve almost anything. With our butts secure to the sofa we can begin that catatonic state that will eventually be our downfall, as the chemicals that keep us thriving both mentally and physically that are precursors to our emotional and immune systems begin reduce in their production so we being to shut down.

One final but increasingly important thought to consider:

You will only ever have ONE body.

You might be able to afford many cars through your life, or a few houses, certainly many bottles of wine, or meals out, but you only get one body. As much as modern medicine is amazing, your one body is never the same after being held together by medicine, stitch or wire.

So eat wisely, not according to the calorie, but according to the chemical make up of a food, keep moving, stay mobile, and keep the muscles active, since they are the only part of your body that will consume energy (or reserves of body fat) at any time.

Do not take your body for granted, it is yours, and will only look after you once.

I have had the opportunity to work with Olympic athletes with disabilities over the years, this always serves as a reminder to me that I have no disabilities and yet do nothing compared to them, I have a "perfect" body yet I do not make the most of it. So I get on my bike and ride, I run and I swim, and occasionally I put it all together in a triathlon. I look to use my body so it will reward me. I have no excuses not to look after my body, it has lasted me 40 years so far, so by our very real lifespan as set out by our predecessors' before medicine I should already be dead.

Without medicine we would not be around much beyond 30, so try to remember that the next time you decide not to look after your body and treat it with some respect.

Our bodies were not designed to store such massive amounts of body fat. They are designed to carry a little, for those days when we might not have any food, but essentially they are designed for speed, and endurance, and physical activity most animals could never achieve.

Try to be wowed by your body again, as opposed to that cheetah you just saw running across the television in high definition, or that amazing squirrel you watched on YouTube the other day, your body is far more amazing, and it is the only one you will ever have.

Chapter 4

DON'T BELIEVE IN THE CALORIE

So straight to it, let's not waste any of your valuable time.

Why do I say don't believe in the calorie?

It is down to the misapplication of the science that forms the backbone of the health, fitness and diet industries, namely the calorie.

In essence the calorie in itself is not at issue, it is the application of this unit of energy to us and our food that is misplaced.

In explanation of this we need to establish what the calorie is and where it comes from. Ask most people and they actually do not know what a calorie is, apart from something they count from the side of a food packet.

Have a go right now, put the book down, go to your email, social network or text, and ask some of your friends: "do you know what a calorie actually is?"

I guarantee you no one will actually know, well perhaps 1 in 10 might.

However is this not odd? Does this not strike you as strange? We all live by the calorie, the government bang on about it, the health services, everyone does really, and yet no one actually knows what it is. It is such an accepted part of weight loss health and fitness. That should really scare us, we know what a pint is, we know what a mile is, or a centimetre, or a kilogram, but not a calorie, and apparently it is really important for our health, or our weight, heck who knows?

Chapter 5

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

The calorie is the name given to the unit of "heat" energy as released from a given amount of food when "burnt" in a bomb calorimeter. For example take a slice of chocolate cake, place it inside a flame proof bag, draw the air out of the bag and replace with oxygen (it burns well) seal it with an ignition unit inside (something that makes a spark). Now place this bag inside an insulated box, which is also filled with a known amount of water at a known temperature, with a thermometer to record temperature change. Finally press the switch that initiates the ignition unit inside the bag, let the cake and oxygen burn until there is nothing left of the cake apart from the inevitable carbon residue. To know how many calories are released in this experiment simply observe the increase in the temperature of the water, this increase in water temperature is the calorific value given to this slice of cake.

Essentially 1 calorie is the increase in 1kg of water by 1 degree Celsius (first defined by Professor Nicolas Clément in 1824 as a kilogram-calorie).

This procedure continues across all food groups, until you have a comprehensive table of the calories contained in all foods.

Stop right there, think about that for a moment before you read on, we are dealing with burning some food to predict what benefit that has for us...think some more...

So the question has to be asked:

When was the last time any of us placed food into our stomachs and then "set fire to that food?"

We consume our food not by fire, but by lengthy chemical processes, initiated first by the mechanics of the teeth, along with the chemicals of saliva, followed by all intervening chemical processes from the stomach through the small and large intestines until the food is finally passed.

Therefore there really is no link between our food, it's so called calorie count, and the manner in which our bodies take up the nutrients from our food necessary for normal life.

The link between a Calorie (a widely used unit of heat energy from physics) to our food and therefore us, is attributed to Carl Von Voit and Max Rubner early twentieth century physicists.

However since then it would appear that no one has really challenged or questioned this link.

It has its merits but cannot be viewed as the be all and end all of the link between us, our food, and our ever increasing waistlines.

It is too simple and ignorant to suggest that calories in versus calories out is all we need to consider when taking on body fat reduction on a permanent basis.

Our terminology within the industry still reflects this centuries old mind-set, we still talk about burning energy, or burning calories, as if we really burn anything at all.

It is a nonsense, we do not burn anything, we certainly do not burn food, or fat, these are broken down by complex chemical reaction to liberate the essential chemicals for mobility and life.

We "heat" up when working out due to the extraordinary chemical reactions occurring in order to allow us to work out. "Heat" is a by-product of these chemical reactions, it is not the focus of the body's effort.

Do not be suckered in by the calorie and frenzied marketing based upon it aimed at you and yours.

You need to look beyond this, and hopefully this book will guide you through the razzmatazz rubbish out there to an easy understanding of what you should be looking for in your food.

We need to look at the chemicals of these foods and how they interact with us, and believe it or not this is far simpler than many would suppose.

Chapter 6

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN TO US

So as much as the calorie might inform us as to the potential or actual "heat energy" of a food in no way does this translate into "energy" that we might be able to assimilate from our lengthy chemical processing of food.

The term energy is very misleading when it comes to discussing the energy content of a food.

There is no problem with the science, there is a huge issue with the incorrect implementation of that science from food to us.

The ramifications of this is the unwitting misinformation of the government, food industry, and of course the diet, health and fitness industries.

The solutions are fairly simple in reality.

We are dealing with a chemical process, so we need to look at the very basic chemical make up of our food groups.

We currently obey the rules according to calories. So that:

1 gram fat contains 9 calories

(chemical make up Carbon, Hydrogen and Oxygen)

1 gram carbohydrate contains 4 calories

(chemical make up Carbon, Hydrogen and Oxygen)

1 gram protein contains 4 calories

(chemical make up Carbon, Hydrogen and Oxygen and Nitrogen)

according to the burning of foods in a bomb calorimeter these are all correct, but they do not apply to us or our food as we consume it.

Bearing in mind the chemical processes that we utilise a better explanation of the foods we consume is to view them in the terms of their likelihood to be stored as fat on us or not.

For example since water only contains Hydrogen and Oxygen it can never be stored on us as body fat. Since we know the make up of fat (whether stored on us or that consumed in our food) is carbon hydrogen and oxygen, then foods containing these components can either be used to energise us or if surplus to requirements can be stored on our bodies as fat for use another day.

So it would be fairer to say that fats and carbohydrates should be seen in the same light, as equals in their ability to be stored on us as body fat.

This in no way negates the very scientifically proven and accepted fact that saturated fats in excess will probably clog your arteries and kill you...etc.

However what it does illustrate in this "low fat" food obsessed world we live in, is that despite the fact that so many of us are on "low fat" diets, we still put on weight. I have trained so many people who lived a low fat diet, and yet still increased their waistlines. This is purely down to the misinformation that "carbs are king", and can be eaten as a source of energy. They are a source of energy when required, however not many of us require them in such vast quantities, so they are stored as body fat for later use, and that later use never comes, because we keep eating.

This leads onto the proteins, which as you can see also contain the three – carbon hydrogen and oxygen. However proteins also contain the all-important nitrogen. This nitrogen can be viewed as a "binding" element, and because it is aligned so strongly with the other three elements in the food the body would have to "sacrifice" more energy to "break" it from the others in order to utilise them as an energy. As a whole the four elements form protein, which is predominantly used for repair and maintenance within the body, and growth where applicable. Protein is never used as an energy source, the body would almost expend more energy liberating the energy from this unit than that which it would actually be able to realise. It is a very very last resort in the body, possibly only seen in the most extreme cases of self-survival without food for many weeks in some desert somewhere in the world.

There is further benefit to viewing this chemical relationship between how the body gains what it needs from food and the chemical make up of that food. The "rush" of the simple sugars, and alcohol. We feel the effects of sweets, chocolates and alcohol almost immediately, everyone has experienced that sugar rush after munching down a very sugary drink or food, and all of us have experienced the effects of alcohol. None of us get drunk the following day from drinking, we all get drunk within hours of consuming alcohol. Both the sugar rush and getting drunk are caused by the same process. Both alcohol and sweets are made from the same basic ingredient, sugar. The substances are never "digested" they are simply absorbed through the stomach lining because of the simple process of osmosis. The movement of a high sugar (or salt) solution across a semi permeable membrane into a low sugar solution (blood).

This has dire consequences for us, not just the getting drunk bit. Once this sugar is actually in us, in our blood, the body has to deal with it. All it can do is react by chemical secretion and chemical process to eventually store this "energy" as an energy reserve for later use, in other words all it can do with excess sugar in the blood is store it as fat.

In conclusion of this we need to view our food groups very differently to how they are portrayed today if we are to have any chance in combating the ever increasing waistline of the nation.

The most damaging foods to the waistline are the simple sugars, fizzy drinks, sweets, chocolates, and alcohol.

The next most damaging foods are the excessive amounts of carbohydrates we have come to believe are our saviours. We, the sedentary population simply do not need the amount we consume. Much of our nutritional guidance comes from elite sport, where those competing certainly do need their carbohydrates, where "carbs should be king". However we do not.

As damaging as the carbohydrates are also the fats that we knowingly or unwittingly consume. Nothing can take away from their damaging effects on our insides, their ability to clog our arterial system can never be under estimated. As damaging as they may be, it may well be that the simple sugars and alcohol sugars are more damaging to the aesthetics of our waistlines than the small amounts of fat some of us consume. Saturated fats might be the enemy to our internal health, but the over consumption of simple sugars, alcohol and carbohydrates may be the ruin of our waistlines.

So that leaves the proteins as the least damaging to the waistlines of the nation. Something not widely regarded. Mainly ignored due to the calorie value for the protein. However with a fresh look at the food groups more sense can be made of where we are going so wrong.

It goes without saying that fruit and vegetables are excluded from this list of most/least damaging to the waistline. Vegetables being basically water in various forms, with all the associated benefits of the vitamins and minerals, and fruit being the same with the addition of fruit sugar (never destined to be stored as a fat on the body interestingly enough). So always beneficial and never damaging to the waistline. Of course be aware that your favourite spud is classed as a carbohydrate, and not a vegetable. There's always an exception to the rule!

Chapter 7

EXPANDING THIS POINT OF VIEW

Another establishment needs to fall, not for our savings or our politics but for our health.

With the public's appetite wetted by their ability to call into question some of the great "unquestionable" institutions of this land (and to find those establishments wanting) surely it is time to call into question the failing foundation stone of the health, fitness and nutrition establishment. Namely the Calorie.

Since the emergence of the health, fitness, weight loss and diet industries, there has been one ever present constant, and that is the vast amount of failure within these institutions to actually reduce the growing waistlines of the people they are trying to help. Evidence suggests that as a country we are ever expanding in the waistline department and hence in every associated illness and disease aligned with the storage on our bodies of excessive amounts of fat.

If one were being cynical of course this on-going situation suits many of the institutions out there offering advice on how to reduce "weight", and of course the more times people attend, and return carrying more fat than the previous time the more money these institutions make. A very easy business model.

However in many ways the fault lies not with the institutions offering these services but with the cornerstone upon which they have built their questionable edifice.

That cornerstone is the Calorie, for so long the unquestioned foundation for everything weight loss.

The calorie has to be the most misplaced piece of scientific knowledge in modern times.

The calorie left to its own devices is not at issue, it is simply a unit of measurement that expresses the "heat energy" liberated by a food or other substance when "burnt" in a bomb calorimeter.

It is this methodology that is the downfall when attempting to express the "energy" available in a food to us and our body by using the Calorie. The calorie comes about through the physical actions of fire, through measuring the "heat" energy released by a food, and the associated increase in temperature of a known volume of water.

When is the last time you ate any food, swallowed it, and then set fire to it in your stomach?

We gain the chemical components that eventually provide the "energy" we need to move and live by a series of complex chemical reactions through the alimentary canal, from the mouth right through the intestines until our food is finally egested.

We have misunderstood and misused the term "energy" when discussing that contained in food and that which our body can "manufacture" from the chemicals it garners from digesting our food.

The implications for this are massive. It is the reason why low fat diets do not work. It is the reason why diet alone cannot and does not work.

Low fat diets do not work because the Calorie tells us the following:

1 gram fat has 9 calories

1 gram carbohydrate has 4 calories

1 gram protein has 4 calories

whilst this might be true when consumed by fire, it is nowhere near the truth when these substances are broken down through the chemical reactions of the gut.

It ignores the principles of osmosis which most affect the stomach when "hit" by anything containing too much simple sugar, such as sweets, fizzy drinks, and alcohol. This causes a big enough increase in the sugar solution of the stomach to encourage the movement of this solution through the semi permeable stomach wall lining into the blood vessels lining the villi. Once this "sugar" is in the blood it is a danger to the blood sugar balance, and so the body has little choice but to process this and to store it as an energy source to use another day, this energy storage source is seen on our bodies as fat.

It also ignores the fact that bile is specifically designed to "emulsify" fat, in natural reasonable amounts, and so most fat that we eat is actually egested. There is no argument that consuming fats in excessive amounts will kill us by blocking our arterial system, but when consumed in natural forms and amounts it is not that fat that we see so aesthetically displeasing on our bodies.

It ignores the fact that as much as we need carbohydrates in order to live, we are so caught up in consuming the "low fat" option we are ignoring that we are over consuming the "good" carbohydrates. Even these consumed in excess lead to our downfall in our ever consuming waistlines. As much as carbohydrates are king for professional athletes, we the more sedentary population really do not need these in such large amounts. If consumed and not used by the body for activity then they too are stored on our bodies for later use, and this storage is of course as body fat.

It ignores the one vital chemical combination that can really help us if we can get past our dependence upon the calorie, that unlike all the other substances outlined above, Proteins (Meats) contain one more element than the others. Where they are all based upon Carbon, Hydrogen, and Oxygen, Protein includes the all-important Nitrogen. This acts like a binder upon the other 3 components, consequently the body's chemical processes would exert so much "energy" breaking this bond in order to realise the potential "energy-making" components that it will only ever do so under massive duress, that duress is usually life threatening starvation. The sole purpose our bodies set proteins to is for the constant repair of the body.

So if the chemicals are to be believed then there is a whole different way of looking at our food.

Most advantageously to us is the case that Proteins (Meat) are worth Zero to us for usable energy, and will not be stored as body fat. That does not allow an excuse to consume overtly fatty meats, nor consume saturated laden fatty prepared foods. But it does mean that lean meats, poultry, eggs, and fish, all good sources of proteins, should be seen as the preferred choice of meal especially in the evening.

We have been guided down the "low fat" path, and because of this we end up with fairly high carbohydrate meals.

Chapter 8

THE SCENARIO

You get home after a long day, you have probably not eaten enough through the day, or you are a social dieter (one who moans to others about the diet you are on whilst in the office, and then returns home to eat all the foods you shouldn't) you settle down in front to of the television and have one of those ready meals or microwave meals based on rice or pasta usually, perhaps potato, or bread. You finally get to bed, your body has to keep you alive all night, keep your brain functioning, and your parasympathetic process working, so your body can "look" to your stomach and see that all the "energy" rich foods it needs are there, with plenty to spare. So you are alive in the morning, with the possibility of having added to your fat reserves since the body would not have required so much energy rich food before sleeping.

Now instead of sleeping on a full stomach of carbohydrates try removing those from the last meal before bed, say steak and chips without the chips, but with the nice mushroom sauce, or a curry without the rice, or chicken pasta without the past, but keep the nice rich creamy sauce. Try adding green vegetable or salad to the meal. Now go to bed, the body now has no "energy" rich food in the stomach with which to keep you alive. So instead it has to utilise the energy reserves stored on the body, it's body fat. Now you can actually start to reduce the body fat levels on your body. You will be keener to get up in the morning since you will be hungry, you are more likely to have a decent breakfast, and so the day carries on in a positive fashion.

Now add to that the bonus of getting to the gym occasionally, and still avoid the carbs in your last meal and you will begin to notice the difference. Start doing some resistance training and the results will really start to become pronounced.

Inevitably the other meals you enjoy through the day should have sufficient carbs to keep you going, we cannot live without carbs, it is pointless to try to do so, however we can live without simple sugars, and should attempt to do so. It is the avoidance of "energy" rich foods at night that make an easy method of helping us lose body fat, we are after all to all intense purposes unconscious whilst asleep.

It is not about losing weight, it is about losing body fat. There are negative health and long term consequences for those attempting to lose weight.

Chapter 9

A DIET OF CONFUSION

For the past 30 years we have lived with a perpetually changing knowledge base of which foods are supposedly beneficial to us. There have always been arguments for and against certain "super" foods. Research swings both ways, for every piece of research we can find in favour of a certain food, we will undoubtedly find another study condemning the same food.

So there is no surprise in public confusion and a lack of confidence in what we hear, especially as the professionals seem to be at a loss in preventing the ever increasing waistline of this country.

There are two issues to be addressed here, one the supposed value of super or beneficial foods, and secondly the misplaced trust in the calorie, which is the fundamental basis to our whole understanding of food energy, and hence it's impact upon our waistlines.

On issue one, the food industries tireless promotion of foods from time to time as super foods, or those beneficial to us.

The whole notion is ridiculous, to pick out one food and say that is positively beneficial to us is a fools idea. The foods that we consume require one another in order to maintain our bodies, our foods work together in order to supply us with the nutrients our bodies require to function properly.

No one food has any miracle properties. As much as researchers attempt to isolate and study the effects of a food or nutrient ( a vitamin or mineral for example) on the human body they can never truly know the interactions of other foods within the body upon the one they are attempting to study.

An easy example is Creatine Monohydrate, a modern choice for athletes, both amateur and professional. Half the research on Creatine Monohydrate claims that it has positive beneficial affects upon energy and muscle growth for users, when combined with hard physical training. Half the research will say it has little or no effect, and any positive results are due to the placebo effect (I take something, therefore it works).

The reason for such disparity is that we can never truly isolate Creatine Monohydrate from the other foods that an individual is consuming, clearly they must eat other foods in order to survive through the trials. So does Creatine work with one person because they also happened to consume a pork chop on the same day for example, or does it not appear to work with another because they had, say some orange juice that day. Does one food help Creatine and another inhibit?

This can be replicated throughout all food research.

The issue in reality is not to observe a food in isolation, but the action of all foods upon the body.

It is farcical in the extreme to suggest that there are miracle foods out there. We established some time ago that we need vitamins and minerals in our diets for good body functions. We established that we need plenty of water to function properly, along with energy some foods liberate for us and protein form other foods to build and repair our bodies.

Quite simply all foods have some role to play in maintaining our healthy bodies. However we are also aware of those foods that can be harmful to us. We all know the "stupid" foods, yet we continue to ignore good advice and consume them for whatever reason we find convenient at the time to defend our decisions.

In reality it is less about foods being beneficial to us, and more about those foods that can harm us in excess, and all other foods that are not harmful to us, and yet are not super foods.

We know that we need water well in excess of what most people drink, yet we still refuse drink enough. We know that fruit and vegetables provide so much of what we need in order to maintain good body function, and yet still refuse to consume enough. It is not that these are wonder foods, they are simply what we require in order to maintain good bodily function.

We know we need good lean meats in order to provide protein for body repair and build, since we are constantly replacing much of our body all the time. We know we need to eat good clean carbohydrates, yet spend all our time consuming refined sugar substitutes.

It is more pertinent to define foods as those that are NOT harmful to us, as opposed to those that are deemed to be "super" foods. This claim usually coincides with their supposed ability to "cleanse" or detoxify" our bodies, a capability our bodies carry out every day with no need for help from us above exercising and eating sensibly, as opposed to hunting down excessively priced supposed super foods.

Do we need to list the "stupid" foods here, the ones we know we should avoid? I doubt it, we all know, but choose to ignore the advice...

Chapter 10

A REPLACEMENT SYSTEM TO THE CALORIE

So how do we replace the calorie?

We need to use a system that will inform people about the potential a food has of being converted into fat on their bodies as opposed to the "heat energy" it contains.

We also need to inform people of the potential a food has of causing greater harm by having the potential to clog the arterial system, and generally damage the internal systems of the body in general.

Since we seem happy to work in a decimal world then we should score foods out of 10 for their potential to be stored as fat on our bodies unless used as a source of energy, and a second score out of 10 for a foods potential to damage our arterial system, and internal functions in general.

With 10 being the most potentially damaging, and 1 being the least, the lower the score the less the potential the food has to have a negative impact upon the body.

For example

sugar, sugar products, sweets, etc:

potential fat: 10/10

potential damage: 7/10

all sugar based alcohol:

potential fat: 10/10

potential damage: 8/10

complex carbohydrates – cereals, rice, pasta, breads, potatoes:

potential fat: 8/10

potential damage: 1/10

saturated fats, including those prevalent in deep fried and fast foods etc:

potential fat: 4/10

potential damage: 9/10

mono, poly-unsaturated fats, find in olive oils, fish etc:

potential fat: 4/10

potential damage: 1/10

proteins, all lean meat proteins:

potential fat: 1/10

potential damage: 4/10

all vegetables (excluding potatoes):

potential fat: 1/10

potential damage: 0/10

all fruit:

potential fat: 3/10

potential harm: 0/10

THE GOOD THE BAD AND THE UGLY:

Good Carbs

Pasta, Rice, Potato, Bread, Cereal

Bad Carbs

Sugar, Sugar based drinks, Sweets, Alcohols

Good fats

Fish oils, Vegetable oils, especially Olive oil

Any Omega 3, 6, 9 based oils (usually derived from fish)

Polyunsaturated (and mono unsaturated)

Bad fats

Saturated fats usually find in animal based fats and oils.

Good proteins

All lean meats, Fish, Poultry, Eggs

Poor proteins

Vegetable based proteins

Always good:

All fruit (but not at night time)

All vegetables

All salad

All water, water, water

Chapter 11

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LOSING WEIGHT AND LOSING FAT

The health and fitness industry and the weight loss industry seem incredibly focussed on losing weight.

This, unfortunately, is an incorrect focus. It is an area that misleads the public and we need to be able to prove to people that it is healthier, both in short term and in long term, for the individual to focus on losing body fat and not weight.

One is beneficial - that of losing body fat

and one is detrimental \- that of losing weight

and there are obvious reasons for the differences

Both the weight loss industry and those companies involved in it, and the health and fitness industry, focus on talking about, marketing and advertising weight loss. Especially detrimental to us is the fad of weight loss for certain times of the year - especially getting ready for the summer, getting a beach body for the summer in 12 weeks' time, or getting ready for a wedding or a function.

The way in which this is achieved (i.e. the desired weight loss) is by using some calorie restricted diet. This is detrimental to our long term health, and obviously as the weight is inevitably regained over time, reduces the confidence of the individual and can help keep them in that downward spiral of increasing weight and reducing confidence. This generally leads to the yo-yo weight gain, weight loss effect.

The key element to the difference between losing body fat and losing weight, is the unfortunate side effect of losing weight invariably means that the individual will lose both body fat AND muscle mass. Clearly, losing muscle mass, whether as a female or a male, is detrimental to one's overall health.

Simply stated - muscles do play an important role in one's health, wellbeing and immunology, and, as you lose weight and muscle, these facets of health are also reduced.

So, how to avoid losing weight and how to make sure that we lose body fat is the key question.

If we focus on the weight loss organisations, they simply use a basic equation, which most people now understand, after 40 years of being told how to do this, that energy in, consumed from food, must be equal to, or less than the energy that we expend.

These organisations focus on food, and sometimes touch on exercise, now that they are pretty much shamed into doing so. They basically attempt to reduce the amount of energy we can gain from food through the day, in order to make sure that our relatively low physical activities can utilise that energy and, hopefully the energy supplied by body fat, so that we do, indeed, lose weight. The problem with this is that there is no focus on maintaining our natural muscle.

Now muscle is a scary topic for most women, and unfortunately the way in which muscle has been promoted over the years is probably detrimental to most people's understanding of muscle.

We need to talk in terms of muscle efficiency for women and state that most of the time, when they exercise, if they maintain their muscle they might well increase the efficiency with which their muscles work and therefore increase the amount of body fat that they can utilize as an energy source at any one time.

It is not a question of building muscle.

It is not a question of increasing one's size.

This, as a matter of fact, is incredibly difficult to do due to the ratio of oestrogen that women produce compared to the small amount of testosterone. So, the notion that most women will put on weight and size through maintaining efficient muscles in order to help promote body fat reduction is a myth out of the darkest ages of the weight loss empires.

So, a major failing of weight-loss organizations is their focus on weight loss, which, because they base this on a reduction in food, the body cannot help but lose valuable muscle because there is no exercise linked to this nor does the recommended food maintain a natural level of muscle.

With a reduced intake of food, generally speaking, comes a reduced intake of protein and without that muscles will begin to diminish. But much of the weight loss of people attending weight loss organizations is based on the loss of muscle which has detrimental effects on health over the long term. So, as much as people might well achieve body weight reductions, they will be doing this through sacrificing important levels of muscle, along with some loss in body fat.

This inevitably leads to the classic yo-yo weight gain-weight loss effect.

So, the change in understanding that needs to be made is to allow people to know and to reassure them that anyone (especially females looking to reduce body fat) can do so and can become leaner over a much longer term and, indeed, hopefully over the course of their life, if they can be shown that it is safe to maintain their muscle and safe for their body shape, that they will not become big and cumbersome. That by simply maintaining or increasing the efficiency of their muscles, they will lose more body fat, they will be leaner and, by maintaining muscle mass, they will be healthier over time.

The key focus for anyone considering weight loss is to change this public perception about muscle.

Really, it is not about weight, that one should not live by the scales and weigh one's self meticulously every day. For a start, the scales are affected every day by air pressure, by the hydration levels of the individual, and other factors. So that is a gain and a loss every day due to variables that bare no relationship to the individuals progress.

It is not about your weight, it is about your size or, potentially, shape, and it needs to be set along the lines of the amount of body fat one possesses. So, a better method of analysing oneself is probably through one's clothing and, potentially, through a non-invasive body fat measurement, so that weight is deemed to be unimportant compared to that of body fat analysis.

This brings into stark relief the age-old doctors' method of saying that one's weight should match one's height. This, of course, is completely ridiculous. Whether a man be 5 feet 6 inches at 90kgs is immaterial as long as that person's body fat percentage is, say, under 22% or so, even under 20%, that's perfectly acceptable. So, the height-weight tables are a farce.

BMI tables are simply an extension of this theme and should also be consigned to the dustbin of wasted knowledge of weight loss.

So, for example, imagine a one-inch cube of muscle. The weight of that one-inch cube will equal a three-inch cube of body fat. So, muscle is denser, and therefore weighs more, and it is smaller, it is leaner, so you can carry the same weight or same mass, but you can be an awful lot smaller if the body fat is reduced. That has to be the healthy focus for anyone.

Everyone appears to know how to lose weight.

Everyone talks about it, it is in every newspaper, it is in every magazine, it is on every television channel, yet this seems to be a perpetual lie and myth. Every single one of these programmes, articles, reports always ends up being a short-term weight loss achievement. They will always be short term because it focuses on weight loss and not body fat loss. They focus on the calorie, the wrong foundation

You must maintain your muscle in order to reduce your body fat.

Over all the years of training people I have tried to make this as simple as possible for them.

Try and get to a gym, try to do some weights, do not simply spend hours pounding the treadmill or cardio gear. Do eat a good breakfast with good carbs, do eat a good lunch with good carbs, do snack on fruit, and perhaps the last meal of the day avoid the carbs, get yourself to bed without an excessive amount of carbs in your stomach. Let the body use the fat stores on you to supply the energy to keep you alive through the night. So do enjoy some good lean protein as your last meal, do enjoy a good sauce with that to keep the flavour, simply try to avoid the simple sugars, and alcohols and carbohydrates we associate with our evening meal.

Eat more for breakfast and lunch, and less in the evening.

As the old adage goes "eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper",

In essence, simple.

Chapter12

ILLUSTRATING THE POINT

We should never focus on our weight but more importantly on how that weight is made up.

A good friend of mine is 5' 7" and weighs in at 90 kilos, (near on 2OOIbs), now according to the good doctors ratios he is massively overweight. However if you met him you would see that he is simply muscle, his body fat ratio is under 20%, for a fifty year old that is excellent. He has no concerns about being overweight, his weight is made up of muscle and bone, not fat.

So especially applicable to females wishing to lose some body fat, is that often you will gain mass (weight) when you first start training properly, this is scary, however as time moves on you will lose weight as the fat is slowly utilised as an energy source.

Gaining this weight for men is not perceived as a problem .

Women who are trying to reduce their weight by losing body fat need to be aware that once you start training properly with good resistance training, good cardiovascular and good nutrition you might find that you will add weight in the form of muscle.

This is so important to understand and achieve.

You must add to your current muscle base since you currently have so little muscle.

That's why yo-yo diets yo-yo.

When women lose weight on a diet, especially an extreme crash diet they lose exactly that - their weight.

This weight is made up of fat and muscle.

People lose weight quite quickly at first but this loss slows down.

The initial rush in losing weight is caused by the body giving up both fat and muscle. Later on there is no more muscle left to lose.

The diet contains just enough protein to maintain a very low amount of muscle, so only body fat can be lost.

This will be at an extremely slow rate since the body is reluctant to utilise any more body fat reserves. There is little muscle to utilise this as an energy source anyway.

The less muscle an individual has the less body fat they can utilise as an energy source so the less body fat they can lose over time.

There are no individuals who maintain a loss of weight after dieting if they return to "normal" lifestyles.

This of course is inevitable.

The single biggest reason for regaining body fat after dieting is reduced muscle capacity and mass.

Now that the muscle has been stripped down to the minimum required to support life, it has little or no ability to utilise excess energy.

So body fat starts to be put back on, and the same situation occurs all over again.

In fact it is now worse since the body stores extra body fat as a fight against having to lose it all again, the body has a sympathetic system of protection against any loss of energy stores (body fat).

A certain amount of body fat is a very necessary part of optimal health and the body insists upon it. If the body is subjected to an excess store of body fat over a number of years then this will become the body's norm.

If this level of fat is reduced in an abrupt fashion, due to dieting, then the body will defend itself.

Eventually, when allowed a more normal diet, it will quickly return to the level of body fat with which it has lived for some years.

If, however, the body fat is slowly removed through good exercise and good nutrition, then the body is less likely to return to its' former state.

This leads to a whole lifestyle change.

There is the world of difference between dieting and good nutritional habits. One of these can be lived by, the other has a finite time of use.

One leads to long term success the other does not.

Chapter 13

HOW TO MAKE THAT CHANGE

Do not start by massively changing your lifestyle.

If smoking - keep going

If drinking - keep going

If eating poorly - keep going

Make only two changes now.

Join a gym

Take advice from a good personal trainer - which you are already doing by reading this book, now get hold of Trim App to make it personal to you.

Now be patient...

Very patient

The reason behind not changing any other aspect of the present lifestyle is that it can all become too much.

Simply joining a gym could prove to be stressful enough. There are usually already existing pressures upon that most precious of commodities - TIME:

Family

Ourselves

Finances

Housework

Friends

Work

Our partners

Leisure

Pet care

Shopping

Now on top of all this, time has to be found for the gym!

if procrastination is the thief of time - then television is stealing our lives

Pressure or stress appear from unexpected areas:

The pressure to conform with friends associated with the present lifestyle, possible ridicule at the attempt to make the change, other stresses particular to the individual.

Somehow a path must be find through such pressures, the individual must know that this is the right time, right place and right method, to use such external pressures as a motivation, to prove others wrong if necessary

To respond to positive motivation positively and to turn demotivating factors around to be seen in a positive light.

In conclusion it is enough to simply change this one aspect of a lifestyle, that of joining a gym, the other aspects will follow in the same positive manner with time.

Give them time...

Chapter 14

THE GOOD PERSONAL TRAINER PART

The objective motivation a good PT provides is the catalyst to long term success...

There are very very few individuals out there who have the personal internal motivation to change some aspects of their lifestyle - most of them are very successful at something.

The rest of us require external motivation in some format. In this case a good personal trainer using such motivating factors as:

coaxing; coaching; entertaining; guiding; understanding; positive constructive feedback; even gentle bullying (dare I say it)

So simply paying is of course motivation in itself to turn up, especially during the 'harder times', let's face it, none of us like to waste our money.

Not letting the PT down is a common motivation

Trim App will serve this purpose through constant comparisons, nationally, regionally and personally with friends and work colleagues providing massive motivation and commitment.

After all who wants to share that they have gained 3% fat with the world?

Whatever else, remember that it takes at least 1 calendar year to make a permanent positive change in a human body (working patiently and tenaciously)

Pause there...

Before you groan with despair at the thought of a year...

Think about the number of years spent reaching this current physical condition which you now feel requires positive change.

Individuals often expect changes to be miraculous both in time and result. If it takes ten years for an unwanted physique to slowly appear it is not unreasonable to allow up to a year to reverse this unwanted process.

Sometimes to arrest the decline of the physique is enough, to reverse it and improve everything can be a well-earned bonus.

Do not expect too much too soon

Be patient with yourself

Be forgiving to yourself

Chapter 15

HABITS AND ALL THAT JAZZ...

Cliché - old habits die hard

So let them die off slowly, do not try to slay them immediately

Learn...

That there is no such thing as a bad day.

The present habits of the individual that have got them to this present physical state will be referred to as a "standard day".

Against this can be compared the days under the new lifestyle of attending the gym. Whatever is achieved needs to be compared to what happened before.

If following a good nutrition plan, good cardio plan, and good resistance training plan agreed with the good personal trainer, then any and every occasional lapse into the "old" standard ways are to be expected and forgiven and moved on from.

There is no such day as a bad day, every day has to be better than that which went before attending the gym on a regular basis, and needs to be perceived as outweighing any lapses on a nutritional, smoking or drinking aspect.

A day without a lapse has to be seen as a GREAT day.

A day with a moderate lapse must be perceived as a good day

A day of indulgence needs to be regarded as a "standard" day from the past,

Not a bad day... Never a bad day

Cliché - necessity is the mother of motivation

If that stage has been reached where it is perceived that the need to change outweighs the risks of not changing then success will be achieved

If the necessity for change is not realised by the individual, but comes from an external source, then the essential motivation which is required for those tough times might be missing, leading to a chance of failure.

And it can become tough.

Although surprisingly mentally not physically...

So if you are ready...

Join a gym

A gym membership and a good PT obviously require financial resources as well as time.

Well, how much time and financial resource did it take to reach your current physical state?

Do not forget those unhealthy investments in time and money so conveniently now.

So there must be some sort of programme to follow that allows you to ease into things.

There are as many programmes as there are trainers I expect.

Some are good some are not good.

To compound this problem is the diversity of the individuals.

Below is the thought process and outline of a successful programme I find useful with first time gym users, i.e. those people who had not taken any exercise in years, and did not necessarily come from a sporting background.

It is safe, it promotes safe form and function for the learner rather than heavy lifting at first.

It familiarises the individual with the machines in the gym.

It leads to progress and progression.

It is a programme that awakens the body to a new system of exercise previously alien to it.

Importantly it protects joints, tendons and ligaments, all especially prone to injury early in a programme. Or more often than not, prone to injury down the track due to a badly informed start.

In reality muscle adapts very quickly to exercise due to the large blood supply provided to aid recovery. Opposed to this is the limited blood supply to tendons and even more limited supply around ligaments, so they recover more slowly from damage and must be protected early on.

To keep things simple try and aim for only two sessions per week.

For all of us this should be in the resistance training area.

The cardiovascular work can come later, this is especially recommended because as time goes on our consciences kick in and we start to walk a little further to the bus or across the car park, attempt a few more stairs instead of lifts, and so it begins.

Later on the cardio room at the gym can be utilised and possibly even the local park or pool.

The two resistance training days are exactly the same, simply separated by two complete days rest for those muscle groups exercised.

If you work out on Monday then do not work out those same muscle groups again until Thursday, this means that you should be working out again on Sunday, but I reckon you should keep Sunday free for yourself, so go on Monday instead.

Monday for most people is a bad day, back to work and all that, so hopefully over time you can see it as a positive day, one in which you do something for yourself instead of for your boss, you get to the gym and actually enjoy a work out. You begin to feel good about the work out and positive about what it does for you and more positive about yourself.

This obviously all takes time.

The realities of losing body fat, maintaining muscle and becoming leaner actually begin to mean something to you.

Chapter 16

THE GYM PART

If you do join a gym...

Do not set huge achievement goals.

Keep it realistic.

Right now, if you do manage to walk into a gym, walk past reception, get changed and walk into the alien environment then you are already a big step ahead of where you were yesterday.

Generally speaking we feel too tired to go to the gym when we get up in the morning.

Generally we feel too tired to go to the gym after work

these are only feelings, especially true immediately having joined a gym, when procrastination kicks in, when everything will start tomorrow...

Cliché - tomorrow never arrives

These feelings are challenged and overcome when you arrange to record your progress on the App, or meet a friend or trainer at the gym.

It would appear that whilst we are content to let ourselves down, we do not like to let others down, nor do we like to pay for something we do not benefit from by not turning up.

If you do make the momentous decision to join a gym, especially if you have done so before but felt nothing but let-down be aware of these points:

More often than not you will be shown around by a sales person, who usually knows little or nothing about health and fitness, and possibly nothing about exercise specific to yourself. These individuals are only paid commission on their sales, they are under pressure to sell.

Be aware of the financial obligations you are being asked to fulfil. Many are legally binding contracts covering 1 year, even if you never use the gym your bank balance will still be debited the monthly sum, I have known gyms to sue individuals in pursuit of the money.

So this has to be the right time for you in every aspect. However do your research, there are now gyms out there that do not require a contract, so ask around.

No one has ever felt comfortable stepping into the gym for the first time, so you are not the first to feel ill at ease, nor will you be the last. Everyone who looks so "cool" and confident started out just like you, nervous and concerned.

The gym will usually arrange for a 'gym assistant' to take half an hour to an hour to 'show you around' the gear, maybe look at your fitness in some fashion, and produce a generic programme for you, after that you're on your own... good luck.

This invariably leads to failure in achieving the goals that any individual first set themselves when making the monumental decision to join the dreaded gym.

Once again this is where good advice or a PT comes into their own. You never have to worry about looking foolish with all these strange machines, with a good PT you should soon feel at home in this environment.

Chapter 17

EXPECTATIONS AND REALITY

There are incredibly ridiculous notions that, I as a personal trainer, or any other personal trainer, can take someone, who knowingly enjoys their alcohol and probably drinks too much, enjoys their cigarettes and probably smokes too much, eats poorly, does not exercise, and all of this obviously knowingly. (it is pretty hard in this day and age to not know that these things are damaging to ourselves, and even if they are, maybe not to care about it, but to get to the point where, potentially, doctors or family members, or others, or even our own conscious points us in the right direction).

It is very difficult to get that person onto the non-smoking, non-drinking and non-bad food eating, but good exercise regime that many can achieve. It is never going to happen.

What will happen, though, for the person to make the bold step of saying, enough is enough; time for change, to go to the gym, probably feel very self-conscious, but to join a gym somewhere.

However, the important factor is to have a personal trainer.

Now, whatever else happens, to not allow that personal trainer to make like he or she is some sort of saviour, do not allow that personal trainer to then say something like:

'Great, now you've met me your life will change, you will stop smoking, you'll give up drinking, you'll give up eating bad food, you'll start exercising and you'll lead a healthy lifestyle'.

It is not going to happen.

Clearly, by making one change in your life, that will be the start.

Everything else can follow.

The one change that has to fit into your lifestyle is going to the gym for one hour each week, and that is all, just to turn up, have a look at it and start slowly.

You will need some form of support, whether it be Trim App, friends, a PT, or even all 3 just to get into the habit. There is nothing more important right now than adhering to this positive habit.

The reason why you need these support systems and external motivation, is just so that you have something there, to tick all the boxes, to keep you on track, and to be a conscience for you.

Clearly, you do not have a conscience yet that is primed by this new beneficial habit. It will come in time.

Your conscience has let you down, so you need someone or something to keep you honest.

That has to be the most basic start for anyone trying to turn away from the dark side that is over eating, under exercising, or yo-yo dieting!

They can now acquire the habits in order to become a healthier, more independent individual. That is the key start.

The quicker you lose the body fat or change your body shape, the less likely that is to adhere for a lifestyle.

The more gradual the gains that someone achieves, the longer lasting those gains will be.

They are putting everything into a positive mind-set, so it is not just about the exercise, but it is about the perception of exercise, the perception of food and the perception of oneself.

If someone has spent the last 5 or 10 or 20 years of their life ignoring their body, for want of a better term, focusing on work, their family, their leisure lifestyle, and they come to the gym expecting to change in 10 or 20 weeks then that is unreasonable, especially for their body.

The perception that we can change our body in a few weeks or months needs to be changed.

We need to focus on the long-term, up to a calendar year to make a positive change that can be maintained.

Believe it or not, in over 20 years of personal training, with all the clients that came to see me, especially those that were on the larger side, that carried too much body fat, that knowingly did so, to change, invariably, we started by just doing resistance training.

Most people can go for a walk, go for a swim or jump on a rowing machine or a bicycle unaided.

They need guidance in resistance training.

Chapter 18

RESISTANCE TRAINING BENEFITS FOR FAT LOSS

Because we lead such sedentary lifestyles, our muscles actually do not have to do much. With that inactivity, they become less efficient.

If all I ever do is ask my right arm to raise and lower a coffee cup between my mouth and the table, the nervous system that controls those muscles will invariably shut down a certain number of nerves controlling that muscle. Since the muscle is clearly more than strong enough in order to lift the coffee cup, it does not need to recruit every muscle fibre. So the system can close down any number of muscle fibres in order to recruit just enough to raise and lower that coffee cup to my mouth from the table. Because of this, when I am sitting talking to people, or actually lying in bed sleeping, that muscle can utilise less energy than if it were exercised properly, and all the nervous system was recruited to run or control the muscle fibres.

But by our sedentary nature, we only utilize a lesser percentage of our muscle mass and it is this that is our downfall. So, by introducing anyone to resistance training, whether they be male or female, especially those that carry too much body fat, if we can liven up or reawaken that nervous system to recruit more muscle fibres, even when they are not working out, those muscle fibres will be utilising more body fat as an energy source. That will help to reduce body fat.

Now, of course, as we train men in resistance training, we tend to find that they put on a little bit of muscle size, usually it is not much, but they will put on some muscle size. In women, the focus needs to be on making the muscles more efficient. It is incredibly rare to put muscular size on women. Women should understand that they should not fear doing resistance training. They should understand that by doing so, they will not necessarily increase the muscle size, but they will increase the nervous coordination, the nervous system that controls the muscle fibres that will recruit more muscle fibres, so that, in actual fact, sitting down talking to friends or lying in bed going to sleep, their body will utilize more energy than it required before. Thereby they will be losing more body fat, or utilizing body fat as an energy source, more often through the day.

What were you thinking?

Maybe three, maybe four even five visits to the gym per week, that should do it, after all each one is only about an hour, maybe only forty-five minutes, no problem.

So after a long day at work, you now drive somewhere new, that takes time, find a parking place, takes time, exasperation at not getting a parking spot close enough, takes time, getting in and getting changed, at peak gym time, takes time. Getting the right machines, after all you only know how to operate a few, takes time at peak hour gym. Finish \- have a shower, or not, change, find the car drive home, all takes time. A diversion to the gym on your way home can add an easy two hours to your day.

so be realistic...

I never asked a new client to attend the gym more than twice a week when just starting out, even if they said they would attend four or five.

There was a very good psychological reason for this:

most individuals will claim that they will make it to the gym at least four times a week, now that they have made the decision to change their body shape they are keen to get going, however if they only make it to the gym twice, once to see a PT and once to train alone then they are down two sessions already; straight away they have a negative start to the whole experience, they say they will make up for it the following week but only manage the two sessions again, the following week they manage 3 but they perceive they are always behind what they wanted to do, however unreasonable that goal was.

so now if they follow advice and attend the gym only twice as required by a good PT, then it should be easy and effortless to achieve that goal, say, in the first week they see their PT once, and then also make it in for another session they have achieved their goal. their perception is one of satisfaction at achieving what they set out to achieve, they are only achieving the sessions they would have done after setting the number at four but the perceived feelings are now positive and set them up for the experience, the following week they achieve the two but then might turn up for a third session, they are achieving what they set out to achieve and more than the PT asked for, so now the perceptions are very positive for attendance and therefore success, I find that clients on the whole want to surprise PT's, especially with extra sessions, and with adhering to the new good nutritional guide, less smoking of their own free will, and making the decision to reduce drinking of their own volition, not because the PT asked them to do it, their sense of satisfaction at achieving these things on their own and not at their PT's behest is immense.

This is how it works:

Contact a good PT at least one session per week for now, then repeat that one session on your own once per week.

for now that is all you need

surprising really, but that is the truth.

when you do resistance training, especially at the beginning you need at least 2 clear days off the resistance machines after a session.

so if you train Monday you cannot train again until Thursday at the earliest, if you train Thursday then you cannot train again until Sunday, but that is the weekend and you have a life after all, so go again Monday. all you require in these two sessions per week is resistance training, this is where you need the guidance, the pt. the associated feelings will be that this is achievable, and that possibly with time you might decide to add a session which can be a cardiovascular session.

When we consider doing the weights, we are looking at generic resistance training for our whole body, usually easily summed up by 10 muscle groups. We are never specifically targeting one area with any exercise since we cannot ever spot reduce body fat. This is such a fallacy of training. You will always lose 1% of your body fat from your whole body at any one time. You can never spot reduce body fat.

I cannot say to you that I have a fat kneecap and consequently I will get on the leg extension machine and do leg raises to get rid of the fat from my kneecap.

So why would anyone believe that by doing 100's or even 1000's (ridiculously enough) of sit-ups that they will reduce the body fat from their stomachs?

Why would you waste your time doing side twists and rotations to firm up your sides, it will never happen.

Why waste your time jumping on the adductor and abductor machines, apparently because they have been sold to you as machines that firm up your thighs! Of course they are not. You cannot spot reduce body fat.

Chapter 19

STOP WASTING YOUR TIME...WITH CORE STABILITY:

Carrying on this idea, is the whole concept of core stability in the gym.

I have no idea why so many gyms, and organisations have jumped on the core stability band wagon. It has nothing to do with "toning" your core, that is losing body fat from your core (your stomach back and sides).

Well I have my theories as to why everyone has adopted the big round ball, read on...

This term core strength has really taken off in a major way since Paul Chek first fashioned his "Swiss ball" for the elite athletes, at least I am led to believe it was his initial idea.

The purpose of his oversized ball was to create greater strength through the core muscles of the body to link the massively strong muscles of the upper body to the massively strong muscles of the lower body. All absolutely correctly diagnosed since he noticed with all the training professional athletes were doing on their legs, upper body and arms, they were never replicating this through their abs, and oblique's, basically their core areas.

However we seem to have moved on since those days where core stability and core strength have overtaken all other aspects in the gym. Basically like most of that which we have stolen from elite and professional sport and applied to Joe public we have little real need for.

As before, where gyms hide behind the thin veil of pronouncing that someone was fitter than when they started despite being no leaner - when what the individual really wanted was to look fitter.

Now gyms hide behind the veil of congratulating their clients on having better core stability.

Again without being any leaner.

So what if their core stability is improved?

I have never seen a member of the public with bad core stability, if they had poor or bad stability through their core they would not be able to walk in a straight line, stand up correctly, or basically live as we all do!

This is not to detract from core stability, but to give it it's proper place. I have no issue with core stability, but do people really join the gym and say "hi, I have problems with my balance and core stability please improve it" I think not, generally they join a gym to lose body fat.

So do not be swayed from this course, do not allow the gyms to lead you down the "you are fitter" or you have better core stability track when you are asking them to guide you in reducing your body fat levels.

In the specificity of improving your body shape, your time is better spent doing other things in the gym.

This issue of losing body fat, or of toning up, or of getting lean, or of looking fit all relate to the same issue. That we all carry too much body fat, this in turn hides our muscles so it is impossible to look fit.

You can never tone up muscles, a muscle is either small, medium or large. Never toned or un-toned. It can be weak or strong, but not toned or un-toned.

We look un-toned because of the body fat, we can look toned if we lose this. We can only really do this successfully by doing the weights, the cardio and the right food.

Chapter 20

ONLY DOING CARDIO...

Do not waste your time putting all that effort in getting to the gym and then only doing some cardio exercise on the treadmill, bike or rower etc. you will never win the battle against the body fat.

Cardio alone cannot work.

We do cardio work to set up a deficit of energy (for want of a better term). All we are achieving is the consumption of the energy we have available to the body at that time. Most of the time we then get home merely to replace this energy with the food we eat. So in many ways we actually never "dip" into the energy reserves that are our body fat stores.

Certainly we get fitter, but invariably lose little body fat. Or, if started from that point of carrying large amounts of body fat, certainly we can make a quick visible difference, but the reduction on body fat slows up or even stops well short of our desired target.

With our modern eating habits it is so very easy to replace the energy we have used on the treadmill as soon as we leave the gym, so that we never actually use any body fat as the energy store it is.

When only doing the cardio the missing link is the distinct lack of any muscle maintenance. The less efficient your muscles the less body fat you can use as an energy source at any one time.

Check out many of our retired athletes, they put on the body fat for many reasons, including allowing their diet to go crazy after years of abstinence, or enjoying a drink or two after similar abstinence. Let's be honest who can blame them, many have been so dedicated to their sport that they would not allow themselves such indulgences.

But ostensibly without their constant attention to strength and fitness (and training) they lose muscle mass, as they do this so they consume less energy 24 hours a day, and so it is easier for the body to put on body fat as the demand for constant energy is reduced.

Cardio alone cannot work because you will always replace the energy you consumed on the treadmill with far more from the food you eat than you ever consumed on the treadmill.

You cannot lose the body fat by these brief sessions on the exercise equipment, you need to be utilising more energy 24 hours a day. This can only be achieved with a more efficient muscle base through strength training.

You are looking to use more body fat as an energy source even whilst you are chatting to a friend, sitting down watching TV or even sleeping, you can only do this with more efficient muscles from strength training.,

Chapter 21

LIFTING LIGHT WEIGHTS:

Stop wasting your time at the gym lifting light weights.

The bane of every gym, and every gym programme is the fear that inviting women to lift weights that they find heavy will make them massive, bulky, unfeminine, and generally huge.

If only it were that simple to get big, believe me I have tried to get big, and I am a guy!

If it really were that simple to get big, as women seem to fear, don't you really think that big muscular guys would be the norm rather than the exception. Instead of skinny legs and arms, and big beer bellies you would see big muscular hero's walking about.,

Surely that gives you some clue as to how hard it genuinely is to put size on. And you have to remember that it is us guys who produce the most testosterone, so we should grow when pushing heavy weights,

Women predominantly produce oestrogen, as a hormone this certainly has no muscle growth attributes. So getting big is the last of your concerns,

Women really really need to learn to shrug off this ridiculous notion of getting bigger and do themselves a favour and lift some heavy weights.

If they do then they will find that their muscles will become very efficient, without becoming huge, that this will be the solution they have been finding so elusive to reducing body fat levels, since the more efficient the muscles the more body fat they can consume 24 hours a day (even while asleep)

One factor that puts fear into instructors minds with regards to weights and women is the inevitable increase in their body weight initially!

This is not to be feared, but celebrated. You need to remember that muscle is largely made up of water, and we know that water is denser and therefore weighs more than fat.

Muscles are roughly 3 times heavier than body fat. So only a slight increase in muscle mass leads to a discernible increase in weight on the scales.

Celebrate if you achieve this, it means that yes you have put some muscle size on. But considering you had little if no real muscle mass when you started it is to be expected. This now allows you to use more energy all the time, helping to reduce body fat. You will very quickly stop adding muscle mass due to your oestrogen levels, so all you have done is re-invigorated muscle that were to a certain degree lying dormant.

I always find after 8 weeks of training a woman, that they have gained a couple of pounds (which is scary to them) but then the weight loss begins in the form of losing body fat and not muscle, so we can begin the permanent (as opposed to temporary) weight loss scheme.

This initial weight gain is the reason so many instructors and gym are scared of inviting women to push heavy weights. This is the reason for that awful regimen of women lifting light useless weights and getting nowhere with it.

And yet we all still persist with this rubbish.

Make the change and lift something heavy.

Perhaps I should suggest to stop trying to tone up by using the accepted methods recommended to everyone out there. But by heading this chapter with "stop trying to tone up" it is more attention grabbing, I hope.

I will bet a lot of money that most of you have tried to tone up, with no great discernible difference, and that most of you will have been told the same old thing which is to say do 3 sets of 15 to 20 reps on everything.

So if you think you want to tone up basically what you are saying is that you want to lose some body fat.

You can do as many reps as you like, on any machine, they will make no difference.

It is a nonsense to think that a muscle actually "tones up" because of the reps you make it do.

A muscle responds to the weight you ask it to lift, it is either strong enough to lift that weight or it is not. It will still look like a muscle no matter the reps. A muscle is either small, medium or large, it is never toned or un-toned.

The issue is that to "tone up" is to actually lose the body fat on top of the muscle, no matter how big or small that muscle is. A muscle can only be big or small, it cannot be toned.

My guess is that to look toned you want the following to happen.

Right now if you look in the mirror at your shoulder/arm area it will look smooth, and possibly cylindrical, the shoulder runs smoothly into the arm.

To make this look toned in your eyes, what you would like to see is a slight shadow cast by the deltoid muscle as it runs into the slight shadow or difference on view by a biceps and a triceps distinct from one another.

So no matter how big or small those muscles are they will only looked toned if you remove the body fat from on top of them

Chapter 22

CONSUMING SPORTS DRINKS:

Stop wasting your time with sports drinks...you really don't need them. Very few of us actually do.

Once again a brilliant concept designed for elite full time professional athletes, stolen and applied to us the sedentary majority who really do not need them.

As with some much taken from the elite world of sport the energy drink is something we could do without. Most of us need all the water we can get our hands on, especially after working out. When you consider most of us are working out to lose some body fat, or change our body shapes for the better, then the last thing we need inside us is more energy.

We have just spent an hour in the gym lifting some weights, and getting the cardio done so that we can consume some of our energy reserve (body fat) and all we do is come out of the gym step up to the vending machine and buy a sugary drink sold to us in the guise of a sport drink!

So with a few swallows of that liquid sugar you have just replaced the energy you tried so hard to use without ever touching your body fat reserves, which was the whole point in going to the gym in the first place!

So next time just get home and have a glass of water or 2, which is all you need, and you pay enough for that anyway in this day and age!

Chapter 23

TRYING TO GET A SIX PACK

Stop wasting your time doing sit ups with your feet trapped under something!

As I pointed out earlier you can never spot reduce body fat.

the same can be said for the infamous 6 pack.

You can do millions of sit ups or crunches, in fact people tell me they do but still have no visible 6 pack. I can assure you their abs are very strong, but until they remove the body fat from in front of the abs they will never have a 6 pack.

To be fair you can have a 6 pack without ever doing any ab work.

So how do you actually tone up.

Again it comes to this requirement of removing body fat, how do you do that?

You need to do big weights, you need to avoid doing 3 to 4 sets of 15 – 20 reps, you need to go heavy to make your muscles more efficient, or stronger, as a female they will not increase in size due to the oestrogen you produce, but by making them stronger or more efficient they will utilise more body fat more consistently as an energy source to keep you alive. Add to this the cardio you can do, and removing those pesky carbs at night and you will achieve that toned look.

So never try to tone the muscle, do make the muscle stronger by going heavy, do the cardio and do not do the carbs at night.

As they say if you keep doing the same things you will keep getting the same results,

Chapter 24

CHANGE YOUR METHODS NOW

Move away from the toning endorsed out there and get into some weights. You will be surprised as a female to notice how heavy you can go and how little muscle growth you experience, but how toned you can actually get.

Skinny and lean are not the same thing

As much as we would like to think otherwise, being skinny is not that same as being lean.

All those models that we pin up and Photoshop for the magazine spreads are on the whole skinny, and the problem with this is that in reality they are predominantly made up of bone, body fat and skin, there is little muscle there, hence they look skinny.

This does not equate to being even remotely healthy, we all seem to know this, yet choose to ignore it.

To be lean is totally different, this is to have bone, muscle, a limited amount of body fat and then the skin, this is something that will lead to that toned look. The skinny look can never look toned, since there is no muscle underneath to look toned, simply put if the skinny's of the world lost the body fat they would look emaciated and skeletal.

Those who maintain good muscle can look lean and toned. Once the body fat levels have been reduced sufficiently then the muscles can be seen to some degree under the skin, it is this that we consider to be a toned look.

The health implications are well documented for the skinny physique, and it seems unnecessary to cover those yet again, so much is made of them already. However clearly we choose to ignore that information. It would certainly appear that the majority of us are more impressed by the skinny models and celebrities in the media that we want to be like them, and mimic their body shapes, no matter what the health risk.

This pays into the food manufactures who are all too aware of this and claim to be able to help people lose weight in order to be smaller. Some of this advice is given out in good conscience but is easily abused to unhealthy levels.

It is clearly not healthy attempting to survive a day on 2 minimal bowls of cereal, and yet we are invited to do just this in television adverts for some cereals. You may well be invited to have a "proper" meal at night, but something hints at the fact that for those people who might be chasing that elusive size 0 of their heroines might well go without that proper meal at night, or possibly just survive on one last bowl of cereal.

These options offered to us, are easy to abuse, misinterpret, or simply get wrong, and can lead us down a dangerous path, one often with no return to normalcy.

So how do we re-establish a healthy body shape in the face of such an onslaught of the unhealthy yet highly prized?

We need to find a method of interesting policy makers, food, cosmetic and fashion houses, along with advertisers of what we need to be promoting, as opposed to what the public think they want.

Chapter 25

THOUGHTS AND INTERVENTIONS RELATED TO "LOOKING GOOD"

POSTURE POSTURE POSTURE

As much as this treatise is based on the simple issue of losing body fat for good, we need to look at some related areas. One of these has to be poor posture and the difficulties this can create, we have already looked at the most important issue, that being of posture induced headaches.

I continually meet people in gyms who have poor posture, some self-induced through poor training, some induced by the society we live in by young teenage women being made all too aware of their changing bodies by inappropriate behaviour by their fellow teenage males remarks.

So how do we work on our posture,

Well most of us have poor posture due to our lifestyles, most of us end up leaning way too far forward, a Kyphosis, of the spine, there are very few of us who work our backs so hard that they become the dominant set of muscles and end up pulling us so far back that we end up with a Lordosis.

Of course no one is perfect, and certainly no one's posture is perfect, so ignoring those minor blemishes that we all have in our posture, if you simply look to the simple idea of maintaining as good a posture as we can that will prevent future injury, and that gently stoop into late age Kyphosis, posture management is very simple.

If one realises that the abdominal muscles run from the pelvis to the rib cage, then it is obvious that their job is to pull these two areas together to counteract the forces of the back muscles, especially the Erector Spinae that run the length of the spine on either side.

These two groups of muscles are responsible for our neutral posture, they keep us standing upright, or sitting upright, when the abs are dominant we are inclined to be bent forward, or stoop, when the Erector Spinae are dominant we tend to be slightly arched back.

For 90% of us we and up being slightly stooped, and some of us pronouncedly so. We tend to focus on training our abs, in fact many people using gyms proudly tell me how many hundreds or thousands of crunches or sit ups they do. Which considering their posture totally goes against what they actually need to do. As with the overworking of the chest muscles for males, so over working the abs for everyone is so over rated in this day and age.

The more you work your abs the worse your posture. For some reason everyone totally negates their lower back or erector Spinae. In the sedentary, desk-bound, computer based, remote controlled lifestyle we lead we have a definite need to strengthen up the lower back muscles to prevent injury, and long term poor posture.

This great need to have a 6 pack like the guys in the magazines, and adverts, is leading us down the wrong path, there is nothing wrong with having a 6 pack, but not at the expense of good posture, and looking after your back. And of course the truth is no amount of crunches will ever give you a 6 pack, it is all about reducing your body fat levels that allow you to reveal the abdominals underneath. So it is more about the food than it ever will be about doing the crunches.

So in essence, there is no more important muscle group than the erector Spinae, so make sure you train it. It is the most ignored muscle group, and yet when it is strong you can do anything.

POSTURE INDUCED HEADACHES

Postural induced headaches (PIH)

On those pesky headaches

There are, of course, various reasons we suffer from headaches. Although most have reasonable cause and effect.

The most common of causes is dehydration, which most of us suffer from more than we would acknowledge, simply drinking more water will of course cure this, and in these terms tea and coffee do not count as water. Try to reach for the water before you reach for the various headache pills offered out there, which really don't do anyone any good in the long term.

The second obvious cause is the famous hangover, and we all know the solution to that...

there is one other cause of persistent headaches that seems to go unnoticed, or at least unnoticed in terms of actually dealing with the cause as opposed to the symptoms, and that is the headaches caused by bad posture.

This is pretty much how it works:

with our modern lifestyle being as it is, we do just about everything to the front of our bodies, obvious so far, however the majority of us seem to be stuck in front of computers, and we tend to have the keyboard a long way out in front of us. If our elbows are not beside our body when we type, and if instead they are projected out in front of us then this causes bad posture. Likewise, most of us drive, and we tend to do so in a seated position that demands our arms are extended out in front of us, so again our elbows are not beside us, but projected a long way in front of us. Again inducing poor posture.

To make matters worse, many of those that use the gym, especially the guys, seem to base their conversations about weight lifting, and the macho posturing around the bench press, so this ensures that they all do way too much bench pressing, making their chests far too strong for their weak backs, ensuring more bad posture.

Finally we live in a society that places pressure on young teenage women that might not be comfortable with the changes to their bodies because of the attention this gains from certain unsavoury young teenage men hunching their shoulders over to hide the development of their breasts so that they do not attract so much unwanted attention.

There are many other causes, but these are the most obvious, that lead to poor posture.

The mechanics of this lead to constant headaches over time, let me explain.

As the chest muscle gains dominance through any of the mechanisms above so the rhomboid muscles (very small muscles utilised to control the shoulder blades) weaken and eventually become obsolete in attempting to adduct (pull into the mid line of the body) the shoulder blades. So the whole shoulder unit is slowly pulled forward of its natural position. In response to this the Trapezius muscle group, responsible for supporting to the shoulder in a vertical line only attempts to "help" the rhomboids by trying to pull the shoulder unit back. In doing so all the Trapezius muscle achieve is a permanent tension. Because the Trapezius muscles are attached to the base of the skull, and all the way down the mid-section of the back they end up exerting a constant tension upon all the attachment points to bones. One of these is of course the skull, and it is because of this unrelenting pressure and tension that this eventually manifests itself in headaches, that become more and more persistent over time, as the Trapezius ends up with no relief from this constant tension it is attempting to maintain in the absence of the rhomboids.

I have met many clients over the years who have suffered from such headaches where no amount of headache pills or doctors' appointments could help.

It was through training them correctly that we overcame the problem. One client I ended up training after a year of cajoling suffered from these posture induced headaches daily. He was a very successful business man who had fallen into really bad training habits with his mates, all in their late 40's. They lifted badly, trained badly, and committed most of the cardinal sins in the gym, of bad technique.

I was always onto him that I could sort him out, but he turned me down for a year, seeking medical and other forms of relief.

Eventually he gave me a go, and we started training him specifically to alleviate the constant headaches.

We stretched his chest out every day, and stopped him from doing any weight training for his chest. We trained his back as much as possible, and in particular introduced an exercise I had adapted from the Physio's.

The rhomboid exercises from Physio's are very subtle, and often difficult to utilise without a physio present. However by observing what they were doing with previous clients I could innovate an exercise with the wide grip pull-down machine,

basically asking him to slide the bar down without bending his arms, so keeping them as straight as possible would force him to only use his rhomboids to slide his shoulder blades down his back, and in doing so encourage the rhomboids to adduct the shoulder blades as they should.

Since he had lost any nervous co-ordination of his rhomboids it took him 4 weeks to get sufficient control to achieve this simple task. I have since find this is the case with so very many people, but once rediscovered they make very quick improvements,

we began to loosen off his overly tight chest muscles, allowing the rhomboids to begin to adduct his shoulder blades correctly. We began to see his shoulders slowly being moved back to a more neutral or normal position, and the more we stretched out his chest and strengthen the rhomboids the less he suffered headaches, until he was only experiencing one a month, and eventually only a very rare one every few months,.

A very pain free existence compared to what he was putting up with before. He was a very happy man indeed, and to the best of my knowledge still trains in the same vein to this day with a fellow personal training friend of mine in New Zealand.

I have observed far worse than this recently, with some gym users with shoulders so far forward as to be positively hunched, I know that these people will suffer the same fate of persistent headaches with time.

So there is no chemical or medical solution to the posture induced headache so many suffer, it is really only solved through some very simple stretching of the chest muscle, and re animating and coordinating of the rhomboids that will provide life long relief to that.

I have even been to clients places of work to re organise their desk to help avoid posture induced headaches. Basically if your elbows are not by your sides when you use your keyboard or drive you are doing yourself long term postural damage.

As ever this is all so very simple, just a little knowledge goes such a long way to prevent such painful symptoms.

Chapter 26

FUTURE TECHNOLOGY (here today) AND POSTURE

With future technology comes worse posture

let me make a little prediction

doctors and Physio's will see an increase in referrals due to headaches and overly tight Trapezius muscles, all leading to worsening posture

and this will all be down to future technology, the desktop touch screen computer

we already have a preponderance of bad posture in caused by the 21st century workplace, this will rise exponentially as the touch screen desktop takes over from the humble mouse.

And the computer companies will not take any responsibility for this.

The increased incidence of bad posture related problems, in particular, day long headaches caused through overly tight Trapezius muscles and tight chest muscles, whilst rhomboids reduce to nothing.

So be very aware that if you must have the latest and greatest then remember a fairly simple rule that applies to computers as we know them, driving and the next generation touch screen computers, if your elbows are not by your sides, and end up in front of you your posture will over time be compromised. You will be kyphosed, or bent forward in an unflattering way.

Your rhomboids (small muscles responsible for adducting your shoulder blades and holding them in position) will give up the fight to the overly tight chest muscles, so in turn the Trapezius muscles will try to take on the extra burden of pulling the shoulders back, but of course they are only responsible for raising the shoulder unit, so they will become permanently tight over time, so inducing permanent headaches.

So avoid the touch screen if you can, if you must use it then have it close enough that your elbows are in line with the mid-line of your body.

This is also applies to your posture behind the wheel. Forget the pseudo racing boy pose, but sit upright in a position where when gripping the wheel in the 20 to 4 position your elbows are by the side of your body, not stretched out in front of you.

IN CONCLUSION

You can either do this the easy way or the hard way.

The hard way is that which you have always been doing, you keep doing what you have always been doing and keep getting the same results you have always been getting. Which after a while is no result at all, back to the beginning or even worse an eventual increase in body fat levels.

The easy way is to start anew, challenge the old ways and adopt this new approach. It is not a fad. I have been successfully training people this way, from elite athletes to sedentary adults for 20 years. I still receive the occasional email from clients I have not seen for 10 years, still happy with their training and lack of body fat levels. So no fad there then.

Re assess your foods by the methods I have discussed. Your enemies to your body fat levels (your waistline) are the alcohols and sugars of this world, and unfortunately at night the carbs we so favour. Your saviours are your veg, salad, and proteins, and of course water, water, water.

Your time wasters are the non-stop cardio activities we have been conned into doing, along with incessant sit ups or crunches (call them what you will). Of course the final killer are the light numerous reps we all do in the name of toning, something we now know to be a notion to ridicule. Get heavy with the weights, heavy is of course relative to you, get the cardio achieved, but do not over emphasise it, and get rid of as much alcohol and sugar as you can, and of course avoid those carbs at night.

That should do it, you can now really make a long term difference to your fat levels, to your waistline. As you have worked out by now this is not necessarily directly aimed at your health, that is a separate issue altogether.

This is where it all starts. If I get physical observable positive change on your body you will be happier to pay more attention to your own fitness and well-being for all those internal organs you cannot see.

I do guarantee if you get this going your health will dramatically improve, and more importantly your motivation to be healthier will increase as you see yourself becoming leaner.

Have fun.

Matt

Thanks for reading my "treatise" on the realities of permanent body fat reduction, I hope you will find it useful to you, your family, and friends.

Please feel free to connect with me online:

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Website: www.theheathsolutions.com

TESTIMONIALS (if you are really interested)

Hi,

My name's Alison and I'm a 35 year old Mum to my beautiful 6 month old daughter Lois. A little background to start with - I have always since school age been into different sports -I played badminton for approximately 6 years to a fairly competitve level and was sports captain at school. However roll on to college days when I discovered boys and beer ! Oh dear everyone knows that as a student the 2 for 1 drinks (high sugar alco-pops) can't be refused and then who says no to a donner kebab on naan with cheesy chips and mayo as a side order whilst staggering home!! So the sports and keeping fit regime fell by the way side as did my health and figure. Im only 5ft 2 and weighing in at over 11 stone was not the prettiest sight you would want to meet. Roll on a few more years where I grew out of the student life and fulfilled my ambition of becoming a Police Officer. I started running and joined a gym knewing that I would have to keep fit and wanting the pride of not letting the bad guys be able to out sprint me. I became a little obsessed with running and would get on the tread mill for 1 to 2 hours and run at one pace same old day in day out. The weight to a certain degree did come off me but I was never happy with the way I looked.

About 3 years ago I met my soul mate in life and father of my daughter, who trains at Sport City gym at MCFC. I joined too and we began training with each other. I would go nearly every day and do approximately 1 hour cardio and then time permitting maybe lift a few free weights to try and tone my 'bingo wing' arms. I carried on in this manner for approximately 3 years and never really felt any change to my body. One day my partner came home from the gym (I was approx 7 months pregnant) and told me he had been talking to a guy called 'Matt' at the gym who was one of the instructors. My partner who was wanting to lose weight told me that Matt had said for him to cut carbs out of his night meal approx 6 hours before bed time and had given him a new training programme. I said ' you've got to be joking' I'm 7 months pregnant I can't do that (not that I began to eat for 2 but didn't want to have any drastic change to my health whilst so far pregnant) and in fairness my partner never pushed it at this time.

However 2 months later when the bambino had arrived -I had the post baby body that I didn,t want. I told my partner we would try the ' no carbs 6 hours before bed' and oh boy did the weight shift fast! I felt like a new person, my baby weight fell away as did my pre baby weight and I began to feel incredibly well about myself after only a few weeks. I decided I needed to have a one to one session with Matt and booked an hour of his time at the gym. It was the best thing I ever did to help me with my health and fitness. My first session was approximately 3 months ago and now I can honestly say since being about 15 years old I have never felt happier with my body and my self-confidence is sky high - and Yes I really do have a 6 month old baby too !!! Matt has taught me more about working out in the last 3 months than I have learnt in the last goodness knows how many years - I don't profess to have the most gorgeous ultimate workout body but the one thing I do have is happiness and confidence in myself. I only told Matt this week that I'm going to a wedding soon and have bought a dress I would never have even dreamt of wearing 'pre-matt' but now I just can't wait to put my little number on and feel 110% in it.

I work hard when I train but still enjoy my pints of lager and the odd kebab now and again, but hey life is for living. One of Matt's moto's is 'fail, fail, fail' when weight training. I love this motto and work to it every time I go to the gym but the real meaning behind it for me is 'WIN WIN WIN'. I couldn't begin to praise Matt enough in what he has done for me and if you are reading this then please please contact Matt - as far as I'm concerned it's the best thing I have ever done.

Alison.

I have ridden the diet and weight gain rollercoaster more times than I am willing to admit to. I returned to the gym but I wasn't progressing very well in my training. Then along came Matt and everything changed. I was blown away with his attention to detail ,his commitment and ability to make weight training less 'scary' for women. On the first day I met Matt he promised to make me lean and toned. My training with Matt has allowed me to establish a physique I could only imagine. I have gone from squidgy to firm

I have lost over two stone and dropped 3 dress sizes I am now the proud owner of a size 8 body! Working with Matt has given me new insight (always lift heavy), motivation and lets not forget tone!

Matt is professional, patient and has a good sense of humour, making training fun and most of all he really cares about his clients.

I'd highly recommend Matt for anyone who wants real results. Thanks Matt, you are a miracle worker!!

Angela Hallas

Registered General Nurse Practitioner

March 2010

"I joined the gym at Sportscity initially due to the weather we had the early part of the year. I am running the London Marathon for Charity in April and the snow was playing havoc with my training. It was all too easy to sit back and think that I couldn't run on snow and I'll wait until it thaws and then make up for it!

I decided something had to be done so joined the gym thinking I'd simply get some miles under my legs on the treadmill until the snow thawed.

My Induction was with Matt Heath. After I explained that I was attempting the marathon in April, it was immediately clear that Matt knew his stuff and his knowledge and expertise were going to benefit me greatly.

From the very first session, directly following my induction, he had discussed a programme for me that he joked would make me want to kill him but would benefit me immensely. He was right, on both fronts! The idea was to have a workout that would strengthen my muscles for running and at the same time would fatigue me, and then go for my training runs. He was very good at explaining his reasons and on this occasion his thinking was that come the weekend when I did longer runs I would fly out the blocks and feel fresh for longer having been used to running fatigued. This was an odd feeling but enabled me to go on longer from the very first weekend run after joining the gym.

From the first night Matt has also explained about what to eat, or more to the point, what not to eat! This has been a revelation as I feel leaner everyday which is making me lighter and more suited to running. Being from a rugby background I wouldn't put myself in the 'runner' bracket! So any weight loss is a god send. I have lost at least 8 KG's since joining the gym in the New Year.

Matt always checks up on me when I'm in the gym and is very responsive to any questions I have. I would complain about severe headaches and dehydration after long runs of 15 miles +. Matt explained to me possible reasons for this and suggested some drinks that would help the problem but concluded that the main reason was down to my rather tense, inefficient running style. He put to me a very different way of running. I was a little unsure to begin with as it felt strange but again; Matt explained the reasons for the change and what the benefits would be. I had a few practice runs with my new style and all felt good so ran that way on an 18 mile run. Expecting the usual onslaught of headaches and achy muscles I was amazed when they never came and they still haven't since. I cannot tell you what a difference that bit of advice has made. I now run far more relaxed and efficiently which is exactly what I need to be doing to reach my goals.

Matt has also advised me along the way with injuries and the best way around them and even helped me out with suitable running shoes (He even sorted out a discount!!).

With the Marathon fast approaching I am in a great position to achieve my goal and I have a great deal to thank Matt for. He has been great at determining my goals, helping me with a way of achieving them and been very clear in his reasons for his suggestions and advice.

I initially joined the gym to fill the gap until the snow melted then get out there and get on with things on my own. This hasn't happened because Matt has been

Instrumental in helping me improve in a way that would have been impossible on my own. I'm now thinking past the marathon and to picking Matt's brains to help me with other goals for Rugby!"

Alan Mitchell

Here we go... (remember this doesn't mean I like you haha)

If it wasn't for Matt, me and my gym partner would have left a long while ago. He is a very funny guy and the most knowledgeable person i've ever met on fitness. All I can say is cheers Matt!

When I first saw Matt at the Gym I thought ''Why is this little guy going round telling us what to do?''. That was until I got properly speaking to him. Matt, now, has put me on a workout that has substantially improved the way I approach the gym; In terms of nutrition and form. Before I met Matt I was on a 40kg benchpress because I felt (too) comfortable with it. Now i'm on a 80kg benchpress thanks to Matt and him teaching me how to accurately percolate a workout. That is just one example amongst many more. I can now do a 28kg dumbell shoulder press & a 180kg V-squat which is unfathomable compared to what i could do before I met him.

It's also without doubt that had Matt not been here, I wouldn't have ate conveniently. I now eat high protein, low carbs and take multivitamins which is something I never thought i would do. However the benefits are clear and quite simply work.

SAM

When Matt first arrived at sport-city I was pretty sceptical, this guy had come into my gym and started showing me things I was doing wrong and I didn't like it. For the first few days I just ignored him. But once I decided to actually listen to the advice he had given me there was definitely a massive improvement. Before Matt came along I was starting to get frustrated with the gym as I felt that I had hit a wall, the information I was given from Matt really has helped me to progress with my physique, and it has managed to spark a real interest in nutrition and fitness.

Lewis Loughman

My Gym Experience!

I first joined the gym in August 2009, after a long stint on steroids (for an immune disorder) and having put just under a stone on in weight. I can honestly say I have never stepped foot in a gym before and had no idea what to expect.

I found the first few sessions hard going! Yes I had been shown the basics, how to work the machines, where to keep your kit etc... but I knew nothing about weight loss or fitness levels and that is where Matt came in.

Matt was the first person to tell me to stop counting calories. I used to judge my time at the gym on how many calories I had burned and then be clearly disappointed when it wasn't that many. All the information that you read in the press (and public health information) tells us about calorie intake and exercising more. I, like many others, never thought to ask what a calorie actually is! It wasn't until Matt explained some basics that I began to see a real difference in my shape.

With Matt's advice I then looked at exercising on the weight machines. These are the scary looking things in the corner, that look like you need a degree to be able to operate them. In my head, this sort of exercise was designed for the body builder, not for the likes of me, but I was wrong. I can actually see myself getting stronger as the weeks go on, lifting weights that I never imagined I would be able to.

I don't judge the amount of effort I have put in at the gym in calories anymore. I look at the time I have spent raising and maintaining my pulse and the energy I have expelled on the weights. I never thought I would say this in my life, but coming to the gym has become part of my daily routine and I really enjoy it! I have lost over and above the weight I gained on steroids and intend to maintain this in the future.

I attended one of Matt's seminars on sustained weight loss and it has changed my outlook on my training and diet completely. As with most people I saw calories as being the focus of my nutrition. Since the seminar I have a deeper understanding of how carbohydrates and protein work towards building and maintaining lean muscle. My increased understanding of nutrition has also supplemented my workout regime. I have noticed significant imrpovements in a short space of time, not only as a change in my body shape and my physical strength but also in my day to day energy levels.

Cheers,

Chris

A year ago I was seriously ill...after 10 months of working with Matt I am now considerably stronger both physically and mentally and am now no longer dependant on daily medication. Matt has the ability to impart information so as to be easily understood by those less familiar with this specialized area.

Graeme Ferguson

Matt is worth his weight in gold

Jenny Meadows Great Britain Athlete
