Are you more or less constantly thinking about your weight, or whether you’re eating or not eating? Do you find that at times when you start eating that you just can’t stop yourself? And then when your clothes don’t fit do you decide to resolve that by eating more?
Often as a consequence of this common behaviour is that you will feel bad about yourself and imagine that everyone is thinking how big you are, thus increasing your anxiety about your eating and image, so that you eat more to comfort yourself.
You might not believe it yet there are steps you can take to get you out this self-destructive cycle and turn around the negative feelings that you experience.
When we are in these ‘mind-traps’ we are habitually repeating thought patterns and acting on them without questioning where they come from and what they do for us.
A simple question such as: ‘What will that do for me?’ can often be the beginning of understanding ourselves better and our behaviour. Approaching the problem in this way can be the first step towards doing things differently.
It works like this: a bad experience gives you the urge to go to the biscuit tin and eat as many biscuits as you can. But this time, instead of binging on biscuits, as yourself: ‘What will that do for me?’
If the answer is something like ‘It gives me a treat,’ ask yourself: ‘And if I have this treat, what does that do for me?; Again, wait for your answer, it may be something like, ‘If I have this treat then I will feel appreciated.’ If this is your response carry on and ask yourself: ‘If I get to feel appreciated, what does that do for me?’ Listen for an answer and keep asking yourself the same question, until you can go no further with your responses. What you’re looking for is the higher motivation behind the behaviour ‘eating too many biscuits’. By doing this on a regular basis you will get in touch with what you really want and take your first step to controlling the food cravings.
I worked with a client who was unhappy with her weight and eating. Her name was Mary, a wife and working mother of two young boys. We did this exercise and she realised that she wanted to feel comforted.
When we looked at other aspects of her life it became clear that she never put herself first in terms of what she wanted and one way or another she now felt unappreciated and lacking.
Mary also realised that rarely gave her self permission to have ‘me time’ to do things like soak in a luxurious bath, or go out with friends, or watch what she wanted on TV, These all may seem like small trivial things, but added together they became the source of her feelings of being invisible, not appreciated and generally unloved.
Mary worked on creating ways that she could reward, comfort and appreciate herself that didn’t have to mean eating. Very soon she became very clear about her goals and how to achieve them. People around her noticed a change and responded by being more receptive and positive towards her. As a result, she easily shed weight, looked and was much happier, and forgot all about eating for comfort.
Shannon Spoon has been a long time fitness and health promoter. Being someone who knows how to lose weight and keep it off. He enjoys article writing, social networking and is the proud dad of a 12 year old daughter.
Though you may know it simply as a “low carb” diet, ketogenic diets are the hottest properties on the market right now. As a matter of fact in the last few years there have been “over 1500 low carb/ low glycemic products introduced into the marketplace” that will account for “over $30 billion dollars in expected sales this year alone”. That’s staggering support for a diet concept that, not so long ago, was lambasted and demonized as totally unhealthy! But even more staggering, is the fact that “26 million Americans are currently on a hardcore low carb diet right now”.
In the past, the medical community balked at this sort of diet. They claimed that while it was beneficial for those who were diabetic and forced into watching insulin, and useful for some who were epileptic and required seizure control through dietary means, it was hardly beneficial for all people. But can 26 million Americans be wrong about the benefits of ketogenic diets? Time will certainly tell, but the results seem already to be far more positive than anyone expected.
Okay, now let’s get real…
The bodybuilding community has been able to say one thing, for sure, for many years: Ketogenic diets do work and produce some spectacular results. We’ve been able to say this for years and years—ever since the days of Joe Gold, Bill Pearl and others drank cream by the pint, along with tuna from a can, to get ripped—because the competitor’s physique cannot tell a lie.
But while bodybuilders aren’t anti-carb like many who understand ketogenic diets only in the sense that carbs = bad foods and fats = good foods that deliver them from obesity, or at least that they don’t mix well within an isolated day, it is becoming increasingly sophisticated in the way it’s implemented for aesthetic purposes in our sport. Hopefully, after a few years of experience with ketogenic diets, the general public will begin to understand how to make it work as a mainstay in their lives. We think it’s probably one of the most pivotal, meaningful and important discoveries of 20th century nutrition.
Net Carbs
A certain amount of how these ketogenic diets can be utilized as a means for actual ongoing maintenance, has been introduced to the public, but only in a rudimentary manner that supports a general disinterest in hardcore discipline and actual lofty physique goals. Enter “net carbs”. That’s something that bodybuilders just don’t think about. Sure, it’s important to understand how the body actually reads carbohydrates and which ones count and which ones don’t, but mostly, these Spartan goal-driven folks could sit down to a meal of plain tuna and steamed broccoli, every 2 hours, day in and day out, and rarely complain. That’s because food is a means to an end, not the end itself or a reason for living. It’s all about input, output, and causing the body to act in a way that you want it to, when you want it to.
Net carbs are a way for the general public to include some carbs in their diets, depending upon their maintenance tolerance, and feel like a normal person. What counts as a net carb is anything that is sugar or starch in a particular food. What doesn’t count is sugar alcohol and fiber. One is naturally occurring and one is not. These engineered foods are enabling the general public to maintain their 20-30 pound weight loss, while feeling like real human beings.
How Bodybuilders Have Used Ketogenic Diets
Early pioneers of bodybuilding knew that fat and protein definitely did mix and used it to their advantage during the beach blanket bingo hey-day of bodybuilding. Arnold was a part of that, and then ushered in a new era where carbohydrates were king of the jungle gym and were seen as more important to a bodybuilder’s ultimate growth—along with protein—than fat ever could be. Neither were wrong, exactly, but carbs were always a point of trickiness in terms of depletion and loading and many more mistakes were made as a result of manipulating carbohydrates than fats. Still, we saw incredible conditioning in both eras.
When diets like Dr. Barry Sears’ glycemic based “Enter The Zone” became popular in 1995, and Atkins revamped his earlier book into a combination ketogenic diet called “Atkins New Diet Revolution”, ketogenic diets made a comeback and resurgence onto the scene, and bodybuilders slowly began adopting the theory once again. But this time, it was more livable and adapted to the needs of an aesthetic athlete who wanted to drop just fat, not muscle, and take it to the nth degree! It was no longer the old 4:1 ratio of 1930’s ketogenic diets—where 80% of calories came from fats and 20% from proteins. It was more like a balance of 2:3 (40% fat and 60% protein).
But in this day and age, ketogenic diets are much better understood and are used much more correctly than in the days of meat and lettuce and cream. Ketogenic diets can be implemented in a healthy manner, provided the person understands what it’s all about, what the various forms accomplish, and how to use ketogenic diets to best serve dietary and physique goals.
Types of Ketogenic Diets
Ketogenic diets are a Godsend to those who must get their body into cosmetic shape relatively rapidly. By rapidly, we don’t mean within 3-5 days. However, a strict induction phase—the likes of which you would find in Atkins or the South Beach Diet—could actually make an appreciable difference in anyone’s weight within 10-14 days.
But within the scheme of things and given how overweight many bodybuilders began to be in the off season in the early 90’s, it was just in the nick of time that ketogenic eating came back into the picture and to the rescue. Truth is, as a result, we don’t really see many truly fat bodybuilders in the off season any longer. We may see bloated ones, but that’s an entirely different issue and cause.
The whole point of starting a ketogenic diet, as a bodybuilder, is to kick off a diet by bringing you from insulin resistance more into the realm of insulin sensitivity, depending upon your initial condition. Once you begin returning to more normal responses to food, it’s essential to change your game. Luckily, there are a few options within the ketogenic realm to satisfy this need…
There are three types of ketogenic diets:
SKD (Standard Ketogenic Diet) – This is the sort of diet that Atkins represents in its first induction phase, and to some extent, in the sense that only products with low “net carbs” are eaten to maintain. This is still low carb as a lifestyle and doesn’t include days where carbs and high, then low, then high again.
CKD (Cyclical Ketogenic Diet) – This type of ketogenic diet loads and unloads carbs in a cyclical pattern. This can be done one of two ways. The most common is to go low carb (unload carbs and glycogen) for 2-3 days at a time, then load with carbs for one to two days and repeat the cycle. Or, it can mean a cyclical pattern over the course of one whole day, where carbs are loaded until 2pm and then unloaded the rest of the day and evening.
TKD (Targeted Ketogenic Diet) – This type of ketogenic diet targets specific times during the day when carbs can be consumed. That means that carbs are usually only ingested around the time of exercise only so that they are quickly utilized and not allowed to spike insulin or be circulating within the body to cause fat storage.
The SKD is the type of diet that most of those 26 million Americans are following, to some degree, according to Time Magazine. It’s the most sensible for the average person who is prone to insulin resistance, has obesity or high body fat levels in their history, or is fairly realistic about their eating habits and knows that a low fat lifestyle isn’t for them.
But is a low fat lifestyle good for anyone? Some who follow it might say that it is, but studies have proven that fat, provided it doesn’t originate from a source such as trans-fatty acids or purely saturated fat, is beneficial to body function, metabolic health and overall well-being. The side effect, if eaten in healthy proportions is both energy and weight loss/ maintenance.
How a Ketogenic Diet Works
The aim in a ketogenic diet is to switch the primary fuel used by the body from carbohydrates (sugar, breads, etc) to fats (such as olive oil, fish oils or flax oil, preferably). When this happens within certain ratios of fat to protein to carbohydrate, the body is thrown into a state of ketosis.
Ketones are the by-products of fats being metabolized. In fact, when fats are metabolized, they throw off 90% ketones and 10% glucose. When carbohydrates are eaten, 100% of the by-product becomes glucose. With protein, it’s 46% ketones and 54% glucose. Protein, then, is the neutral macronutrient.
When ketones begin circulating in the blood, their presence interrupts the normal Krebs energy cycle (which relies heavily upon glucose) and forces the body into choosing stored fat as a source of energy to burn, rather than glucose in the diet as a by-product of having just eaten carbohydrates, or glycogen stored in the muscles, or even muscle tissue.
The body also begins to rely upon dietary fat as the mainstay of its energy. Because it is twice as calorie dense, and therefore twice as efficient an energy source, and doesn’t stimulate the release of insulin [which signals the storage of fat], the body adapts well to fat as its source of energy. Nothing is lost in mental capacity and levels of well-being are high. If you still think it’s odd, just remember, man evolved by eating this diet from the dawn of time. There was no white flour, no grain of any kind, no sugar, no processed foods—just high protein, fatty animal flesh, and legume shoots and berries.
But switching from carbs to fats sounds scary to most people unfamiliar and inexperienced with the diet. They fear that their arteries will clog overnight and they’ll die of a heart attack. But recent studies done on excessive carbohydrate and sugar intake indicate that they are just as likely, in abundance, to cause a build up of unhealthy (LDL-Low Density Lipoproteins) blood lipids and elevated levels of cholesterol. There’s also a choice between good and bad fats. If you were to eat a slab of salmon, a green salad with olive oil and vinegar and 8 spears of asparagus for dinner every night, or chicken breast, broccoli and a half an avocado for lunch, you’d be lean and healthier than any human you could ever imagine. Understanding this is half the battle.
Can Fat Make You Fat?
What makes people fat, is not fats themselves. What makes people fat in this day and age is complex. Most of all, in the U.S. portion control is the real culprit. Whole populations in other countries that are unfettered by a “big” complex (bigger house, bigger car, bigger portion) can eat just about anything, in moderation, and seem to maintain better health and a more appropriate weight-to-height ratio than we do here in America. But the processing we’ve come to rely upon for preservation, longer shelf life, better taste and increased convenience also contributes to the staggering rates of obesity in this country.
Ketogenic diets can help in this effort, and are aiding, many millions of people who currently have adopted some form of the ketogenic diet. Fat never made anyone fat. In fact, the body burns its own fat in the presence of fat. That is what ketogenesis is based on. But if that’s true, how can we demonize carbohydrates? No one is demonizing them, just being selective about which ones to eat in certain phases where they are allowed, and being exclusive of them in phases where it’s called for.
Here’s How to Use Each Type of Ketogenic Diet
The SKD is the sort of diet that anyone who hasn’t been dieting should adopt in the first phase of any diet, only because it’s so capable of jump-starting and putting the body back into a place where it reacts more normally, believe it or not. Just as one may switch routines in the gym, or change things up in terms of exercises, intensity or rep and set schemes, so too can the dieter shake things up by using phases to cause change within the metabolism of the body.
Technically, like Atkins induction phase of 2+ weeks, carbohydrates should number about 20 grams daily. That’s hard to do, considering that even high fat nuts have carbohydrates. It usually represents about 2 servings of green vegetables and two moderate sized green salads over the course of one day, along with protein. Sound appealing? Probably not so much. But an SKD isn’t the sort of diet you should remain on for long periods either. Physically, it’s deficient of the important low-glycemic carbohydrates that you may be able to have in the future, depending upon your body type and history, and is boring and difficult to follow mentally for much longer than a few weeks.
Many on Atkins would identify this as their diet, but it really isn’t. In fact, Atkins doesn’t really fit into any of these categories in its next phase. But once it reaches the phase of maintenance, it’s much more like a CKD than anything else, though it may be isolated into one day as opposed to a 3 days on/ 1 day off cycle as bodybuilders tend to follow.
The CKD is probably the most interesting diet because it leaves a lot of flexibility for many different kind of approaches. The first is a true cycling of carbs over the course of a few days, as we mentioned. The second would be to cycle the carbs within one given day. For example, only eat low glycemic complex carbs until noon, and then eat only green vegetables for the remainder of the day. This is for people who have sorted out just how many carbs they can tolerate throughout any given day, and how much fat is necessary to keep things in balance. Too much of one and not enough of the other can throw things off kilter.
Some even use the CKD as a means to dip in and out of an SKD for weeks at a time. The CKD/SKD connection is the most logical, of course. That’s when you go for 2 weeks on the SKD, then gradually introduce personally ‘safe’ lower glycemic carbs into the mix in some form, on a regular basis for another few weeks, and then go right back into the SKD again. This is truly effective body manipulation for bodybuilders, and probably what most do during a contest phase. After a long food-abusive off season, the metabolism starts out poor and sluggish, gets better when the metabolism begins to burn like a wildfire, carbs are reintroduced, and then are removed again to shock the body into even better condition by delving deep into ketosis for about a week. The final days are typically a filling period where carbs and fats are coupled for maximum muscle fullness and a tight skinned, ripped to the bone look.
The final ketogenic diet is the TKD and is used by some bodybuilders in the off season or pre-season, to support training while weaning themselves off heavy carb meals. This can be an effective pre-induction phase, or for those who burn calories fairly easily through activity, can act as a way to boost workouts with glucose, then resume a low glycemic carb ingestion schedule. Personally, we would say this is the least effective type of ketogenic diet for most people because it’s really not allowing the body to ever dip into ketosis at all. Truly, this is just carb control, rather than ketogenic.
How to Know if You Are in Ketosis
There are these neat little test strips that you can purchase at any pharmacy, that tell the tale of whether you are in ketosis or not. They are extremely useful because they not only can tell you if you are in ketosis, they can tell you if you are too far, not far enough or just where you want to be. They are a scientific, quantifiable means by which anyone can determine where they are and where they need to be, and enable anyone to tweak their diets to meet their needs. They are used during urination and are run through the stream quickly. They read out in seconds.
If you find that you are following an SKD and are not getting the fast results you expect (which you ought to using an SKD) then you should buy some test strips and monitor yourself throughout this first phase. It’s essential to allow yourself to dip fairly far into ketosis during an induction phase.
Is Ketosis Right for You?
That depends who you are and why you’re using it, but in general, we happen to believe that it can be useful for anyone who needs to shed pounds. If you look at most theories of diet and training, and you treat them as tools by which you can achieve what you’re after, then you’ll use them correctly by adapting them to your individual needs. Nothing says you have to follow an induction phase of an SKD type for just 2 weeks. Maybe you need 2 months of it! Some people who are extremely overweight do actually need a lot more metabolic repair as a result of months or years of reckless eating practices.
Whatever you choose, the reality is, ketogenic diets are highly useful for many different purposes. And let’s face it, we could never say that about low fat diets or high fiber diets or any of the rest of the diets that we saw come and go in the 90’s.
Dane Fletcher is the world’s most prolific bodybuilding and fitness expert and is currently the executive editor for BodybuildingToday.com. If you are looking for more or information on weight training, or supplementation, please visit , the bodybuilding and fitness authority site with hundreds of articles available FREE to help you meet your goals.
While some individuals are strictly interested in obtaining muscle for aesthetics, for most people, this isn’t an interest. Instead, you’re more interested in knowing what health benefits weight lifting will have for you…
Far too many people overlook the many health and fitness benefits that weight training has to offer, and because of this, experience problems down the road with their body such as decreased bone density, a slowed metabolic rate, increased stress levels and other negative consequences that are associated with constant stress.
Increased Bone Density
Weight lifting, being one of the best weight bearing exercises you can do, will increase your bone density and help ward off osteoporosis or stress fractures in the future.
Many people think running is the best exercise for increasing bone density, but this isn’t necessarily true. If the truth is told, running actually promotes muscle breakdown in the body, while weight lifting, being an anabolic process, helps to promote the building of tissues.
Therefore, weight lifting is going to be much better at preserving your bone mass, not to mention it’s far less impact than going for an hour run.
Decreased Frequency of Injuries
When you strength train, not only are your muscles going to get stronger, but you’ll also work the ligaments and tendons that are connecting bones, muscles, and other tissues, thus reducing the chance they become injured when participating in other physical activities.
If you’ve ever been injured, you know just how frustrating this can be. In about 80% of all injury cases, the injury is a direct result of a tendon, ligament, or muscle not being strong enough when a stressful force is applied.
Since weight training will really hit all those deep tendons and ligaments, it’s the best injury prevention out there.
Reduction of Health Related Risks
Numerous studies have demonstrated that regular weight training can have a positive effect on health by showing reductions in the rate of insulin resistance, blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease, and even cancer.
If you couple a solid weight training program then with a well-thought out diet, you’ll be putting your best foot forward at warding off these chronic problems
Prevention of Fat Gain
The more you weight lift, the higher your metabolism will be, thus the more food you can eat while maintaining your weight. If that isn’t good news for your future and the fight against body fat, I’m not sure what is.
Now, with all of this said, one big problem many people run into is the thinking pattern that using a muscle building program will make you big and bulky.
This is most certainly not the case.
Let’s look at an analogy to gain an understanding of this.
Pretend you have two teams and each are going to try and build a house using the exact same building technique.
One team is given 10,000 bricks to construct this house, and the second team is given only 1,000 bricks.
Who’s going to build the bigger house?
The choice should be obvious – team one since they have more bricks to build it with. Now, think of those bricks as being the calories you put into your body. Unless you’re supplying enough calories, you aren’t going to build really big muscles. This is precisely what makes bodybuilders look like bodybuilders.
It’s not just about the way they train, but more about the way they eat (if you’ve ever had a teenage son in the growing process in your house, you likely know just how much food must be consumed when growing at rapid rates).
Whether it’s growing in height during puberty or trying to build bigger muscles later on, calories must be supplied for this growth process to take place.
You can’t build a house out of nothing. Likewise, you can workout all you want, but if those building blocks – in the form of amino acids, carbohydrates, and dietary fats are not there, you aren’t going to see too much muscle growth.
So, don’t get caught thinking that just because you add weight lifting to your workouts, you’re going to develop large bulky muscles. If you control your diet, this simply will not happen. So, hopefully it is clear now that just because you’re weight lifting, it does not mean you will end up with bulky muscles as a result. Many people make this incorrect assumption – but it really is the diet that makes all the difference in how this weight lifting will shape your body. When you make the decision to work with me using my 6-Pack Ab Quest program, I’ll take you through the weight lifting and ab techniques that will provide maximum results with minimal effort on your part (why spend more time in the gym than you have to?), as well as provide you with meal plans that are custom designed to ensure you get the best results from your training without the muscle bulk – in fact, the plans are formulated to help you shed the fat so you look leaner and more defined.
Not choosing to include weight training as part of your current workout program is without-a-doubt the biggest mistake you could make as far as your long-term health and fitness level is concerned. Don’t let this exercise pass you by any longer.
For more information : http://sutiknoslamet.com/muscle.htm
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