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by
Tom Venuto
My friends at the gym always supported me and told me exactly what to do: Enter a bodybuilding contest for motivation.
He entered a bodybuilding competition for motivation. There's nothing like a hard deadline with consequences to bring out the best in a person.
I started working out and eating in a certain way, and it quickly became clear that I was onto something. “Contest training” was by far the most effective program I had ever followed. My body was changing faster than ever and the belly fat seemed to melt away by the day.
It’s not enough to work out; you have to get the nutrition right. That’s the most important element. The cliché “You can’t out-train a bad diet” is absolutely true.
Second, I realized the importance of having a goal and an emotional reason why you absolutely must achieve that goal.
I’m not saying any of this was easy. I’m saying it was worth it.
There are four elements to the plan—nutrition, cardio training, weight training, and mental training
You have in your hands one of the most tested and proven fat-burning systems ever created.
If you want to shed fat and build lean muscle, learn from the leanest, best-built people in the world—bodybuilders.
So after you start the program, why not try that and say, “I am a bodybuilder.
What matters most is your ratio of muscle to fat—your body composition. With this distinction in mind, losing weight should not be your only goal. Your main focus should be burning the fat and keeping the muscle.
Reduce your carbohydrates too much, and your energy level takes a nosedive.
Deprivation diets make you lethargic, hungry, and miserable. You can’t stay on them forever, so the weight loss rarely lasts.
Putting training and nutrition together is the difference between transforming your body and simply losing weight. Research has also proven that exercise is critical for long-term weight maintenance. You might take the fat off with dieting alone, but you’ll have a hard time keeping it off.
This program is not a quick fix. But you will get results quickly. If you’ve never used a program like this before—one that covers all bases—and if you diligently put into action all four elements of the plan at the same time, you will see incredible results in the first 28 days.
Fat loss isn’t always easy. Most diet experts won’t admit it, because “effortless and overnight” is marketable. “Hard work” scares people away. But hard work is the only way anyone accomplishes great things.
Everything worth having in life has a price attached to it.
“The dictionary is the only place success comes before work. Hard work is the price we must all pay for success.”
Success is effort. Effort is success.
That’s why, years ago, I made a public pledge that I would never go into the supplement business or use my books or websites to sell them.
The truth is that training and good nutrition from whole foods are all you’ll ever need. Protein shakes and meal replacement products are sometimes helpful, but they have no magical fat-reducing properties. They’re essentially just powdered food.
If you want to see a real miracle, try training hard and eating real food consistently for a few months.
Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle is an amazingly thorough and detailed program. It covers all four elements of the fat-burning equation: 1. Mental training 2. Nutrition 3. Cardio training 4. Weight training
Only when all four are in place will you fully maximize your potential.
If you want to get started quickly, you can. Chapter 14 contains the Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle eating plan, sample meal plans, and food lists, making that an excellent “nutrition quick start guide.” Chapters 15, 16, and 17 contain the workout, including the 28-day training plan. Jump in!
It’s especially important however, that you begin with the first element: mental training.
“Don’t let your learning lead to knowledge, let your learning lead to action.”
WHY DIETS NEVER WORK
The big problems with temporary diets are:
1. They trigger the Starvation Response
2. They burn muscle along with fat reducing your fat burning metabolism
In the first part of this chapter, you’ll learn why most people struggle to lose weight and keep it off long term. You’ll also realize why most diets are fundamentally flawed and doomed to fail before they’re even started.
In the second part, you’ll discover six strategies that guarantee you’ll burn off fat forever without starving yourself or giving up your favorite foods.
By definition, a diet is the temporary and unsustainable restriction of food or calories.
The first is that restrictive low-calorie diets are almost impossible to follow for long, so the weight loss almost never lasts.
The second problem is that most people neglect proper training while dieting, so much of the weight they lose is lean body mass, not fat.
If your goal is to shed fat permanently and safely without losing muscle, it’s truer to say, “Diets never work.”
The way most people are dieting for weight loss doesn’t work—and there are scientific reasons why.
The number of calories you burn initially may not be the same six months or a year later. In other words, energy balance is dynamic. A calorie deficit is a moving target.
In addition, most people don’t train properly to maintain muscle (or they don’t work out at all). Instead, they try to starve the fat. That only makes it worse, because your body has a complex and redundant series of defense mechanisms to protect you from starvation and maintain a stable weight.
Don't try to starve the fat. Starving the fat triggers the Starvation Response and dooms the dieter. Instead burn the fat (while feeding muscle).
Your body can decrease energy expenditure and increase food-seeking behaviors when body fat stores are running low and food is scarce.
When you diet the body triggers "starvation mode" and automatically decreases energy consumption while increasing food-seeking behaviors (hunger!). Both are incredibly bad news for the dieter.
But in modern, affluent societies today, this same life-preserving mechanism can work against you when you’re trying to lose fat. When your body senses calorie deprivation, your survival responses kick in, even though a diet is not a life or death situation.
Whether a real famine or a low-calorie diet, your body can’t tell the difference.
WHY DIETING CAN ACTUALLY MAKE YOU FATTER
The great irony is that most diets make you fatter by burning off muscle. When you stop dieting you have less muscle and a poorer metabolism with greater fat percentage. With less muscle it's even harder to lose fat!
By rating his results in terms of body composition instead of scale weight, it becomes clear how Chris has failed. Fifty-five percent of his weight loss came from lean body mass. The drop in lean body mass decreased his metabolism, so he is now burning fewer calories each day than when he started. This has set him up for a relapse. Even if he doesn’t give in to hunger and binge, but simply goes back to the way he used to eat, his body no longer burns calories as efficiently as before.
Chris now weighs the same as when he started, with one difference: He has less muscle, more fat, and a slower metabolic rate than when he began. He has “damaged” his metabolism and it will now be harder to lose weight than before.
It’s not a stretch to say that fat loss is harder for women than men, and women are more susceptible to metabolic damage than men.
You achieve permanent results by adopting new habits that you can maintain for the rest of your life.
These habits must include the way you eat, the way you think, and the way you move.
Good habits aren’t easy to form, but once they’re established, they’re just as hard to break as the bad ones. Motivational writer Orison Swett Marden put it this way: “The beginning of a habit is like an invisible thread, but every time we repeat the act we strengthen the strand, add to i...
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An old proverb says that a negative habit can most easily be driven out by a positive habit, just as a nail can be driven out by another nail.
A simple strategy for permanent fat loss is never lose muscle. Muscle is your fat-burning secret weapon. Muscle is your metabolic furnace. The more muscle you have, the more calories you burn at rest as well as during exercise.
You must have a calorie deficit to burn body fat, but most people cut calories much too fast.
The smartest, safest, and healthiest approach for permanent fat loss is to start with a small deficit, add exercise, then continue to cut calories if necessary as your weekly results dictate. Do it slowly and progressively in stages, not all at once.
