Nutrition 80% Of The Answer To A Lean Hard Body Lies In Nutrition…

Thought for the Day: “Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by children.” — Jesse

Why is it so hard for us to get this right anyway?

Perhaps, it’s because we have so many things fighting against us with Capitalism being one of the most powerful. The free enterprise system is the greatest economic system in world but it has a major flaw. Everything is based on profit. There is nothing the matter with profit so long as the greed for more and more profit doesn’t result in less and less quality, which is exactly what happens.

In the free enterprise system… it doesn’t have to be good to survive… it just has to be profitable. The more profitable… the more advertising dollars to tell us about the “high quality”. This makes it difficult to tell what is good and what isn’t. A good bit of advice is “Caveat Emptor” (let the buyer beware) This is especially true in the Food Industry. Nutrition labels tout minimum daily requirement… making us feel ‘Ooh this is going to improve my health when in fact MDR means barely enough to keep us from getting sick, not anywhere near optimum health. How do they get away with that anyway?
It’s the profit motive again. The Food and Drug Administration is heavily lobbied by the food industry to have low MDR’s on labels. Billions of dollars can be saved if standards can be kept low. With a slug of MDR ingredients on the label, Breakfast of Champions sounds like it’s brimming with health. But that’s just dust under the carpet. Let’s talk about the 3 Biggest Lies told by the food industry and how they are slowly killing us.

Lie # 1

High Fructose Corn Syrup is better than sugar.

In 1700 sugar consumption was 4 lbs per year by 1900 it had exploded to 76 lbs per person. But that’s nothing compared to what happened when the Food industry discovered they could save Billions by switching from sugar To High Fructose Corn syrup… In 1980 the increased profit triggered a wholesale switch to High Fructose Corn Syrup because it was so much cheaper than sugar even though it had diabetes written all over it. Sugar itself is bad enough. Here’s what happens when we take sugar into our system: Our blood sugar rises to dangerous levels, the pancreas leaps to action dumping insulin making blood sugar plummet. In fact sugar is such a powerful “drug” it throws open the insulin flood gates causing the blood sugar to plummet even lower than it was before the sugar. This brings on a craving for anything that will boost blood sugar fast.

You reason, “Oh if only I had a piece of cheese or some egg whites. Not ever! What you want is a twinkie… a dough nut… or any thing laced with sugar because only sugar can tame that gnawing beast in your stomach. Again the blood sugar rises to life threatening levels and again the pancreas saves your life by releasing insulin.

Try this test on yourself…

Fix yourself some plain old fashioned Oatmeal for breakfast but don’t put any sugar on it. Note how long it takes you to get hungry. Then the next day fix yourself the same bowl of oatmeal only this time put on a generous portion of sugar. By the time lunch comes around you’ll be so hungry… you’ll be gnawing on your desk.

This is murder on hourglass figures because all those calories that should have been burned for energy get stored as fat. But let’s forget about looks for a minute and focus on your health maybe even your life. What about High Fructose Corn Syrup. Isn’t it better for you than Sugar? Not on your life! HFC is to pancreatic cells what Mike Tyson is to a 98 lb weakling. It beats the living daylights out of Insulin producing cells because High Fructose Corn Syrup is really sugar squared.

It will not only make you fat it brings on the dreaded Diabetes disease. Since switching from sugar to High Fructose Corn Syrup we have witnessed the onset of a Diabetis epidemic. Even grade school kids are coming down with diabetes… this was unheard of 20 years ago. Look on your labels, High Fructose is in almost everything you buy. Stay away from it. It will ruin your figure and destroy your health.

Lie # 2

Next time you pick up a loaf of white bread and read “enriched” on the label ask yourself… If I took away 20 dollars from you and gave you back 5 would you consider your self… enriched or robbed. In order to make a flour product have a look good, feel good appearance and a longer shelf life. They first have to bleach it… remove the fiber… along with 20 other nutrients. However the Food Industry wants you to believe there is still some nutritional value there… so they called it “enriched” by replacing 5 of the 20 nutrients they took out.

Lie # 3 The Hydrogen-ated Bomb

Hydrogenated oils destroy the permeability of the lining of our cells making it increasingly difficult to absorb nutrients and get them into the target cells. This has the same effect as grains of sand dropped in the workings of a fine Swiss watch. Gradually, the watch slows down, fails to keep time, then eventually breaks down completely. When we consume hydrogenated oils our cells become inflamed unable to absorb the nutrients we take into our body. This results in Age spots, prematurely wrinkled skin, Alzheimers, Arthritus, insulin resistance, obesity, heart disease and auto immune disease. This killer, originally a by-product of a manufactured fat, is now slipped into almost all refined processed foods because it creates the mouth feel of butter. It’s cleaner looking, better smelling, longer lasting and it’s less expensive.

To food manufacturers… hydrogenated oils are a dream come true, but they are a nightmare for your health., The good news is you can reverse the damage by eliminating these Hydrogenated oils from your diet. Look on your labels, Hydrogenated and Partially Hydrogenated oils are in almost every packaged food you buy Stay away from it. It will ruin your figure and destroy your health.

Why don’t our Doctors tell us about these things. Most of them simply don’t know, nutrition wasn’t even included in medical course work until the 1990’s. They were trained to treat disease not prevent it. Further more, it isn’t that doctors don’t care, they are just so busy taking care of clients and keeping abreast of ever increasing specialized skills they have no time to keep up with nutrition knowledge. So what is the answer to weight loss and robust health. Is it low carbs… less calories… less fat? Does Adkins, Jenny Craig or Weight Watchers have the answer?

Betsy Hart syndicated columnist for CNN recently wrote a column about weight loss. To lose weight, all you have to do is cut back on calories. This might be true if you are a few lbs over weight but what about the person that is way over weight like 40- 50 lbs overweight. The obese person is in a different world. The rules don’t apply.

A while ago my wife and I decided to eat out. As we sat there a young couple come in and sat down next to us. They were way over weight especially the woman. I didn’t pay much attention to them until their food came. The woman ordered a regular hamburger and a small salad. It caught my attention. How could she possibly maintain that weight on those few calories… The look of despair on her face gave an indication this wasn’t the first meal she was skimping on. It was an on going problem. She was actually gaining weight on less calories.

How can that be?

Is it possible to gain weight on less calories? Sadly the answer is not only yes but once you get over a certain weight it’s almost a given.

Why?

Muscle is the furnace in which fat is burned and it takes protein to keep the muscle full and healthy. If we cut our protein calories the muscle shrinks, but it gets worse than that. When it comes to passing out protein, muscle is last in line. First to get it’s share of protein is the brain then the liver, Lungs, heart, internal organs and last in line is the muscles. If there isn’t enough protein in the diet for the vital organs, the muscles go without and they begin to shrink but it gets even worse than that. If we don’t have enough protein for the vital organs, the body simply steals from the muscles causing the muscles to shrink even further. You can see why cutting calories is not the answer for a person that is heavily overweight. And why you have to increase your protein intake if you want to lose body fat.

Maybe the problem is the Fats.

According to the American medical Association the problem is the fats. Because fats contain twice as many calories as both carbs and protein it seems like a no brainier. Fats must be the problem. The Food Industry… jumps on the band wagon and lines the grocery shelves with foods shouting “low fat”. Just the other day I saw a bottle of chocolate syrup with big red letters exclaiming “No Fat”. Can’t be bad for you if it doesn’t have any fat in it.

Or can it?

Americans have been watching fats for the last 20 years and we are in the midst on an Obesity empidemic.
Something’s not right here.

Maybe it’s the carbs.

Dr. Adkins says it is the carbs. Just cut out your carbs… and you’ll lose weight. And we are seeing some success with carb reduction but, Fruits and Vegetables are Carbohydrates and they are full of vitamins and minerals. We certainly don’t want to cut these out. We need all the vitamins and minerals we can get.

We have a problem on our hands. And to make matters worse every 10 years we see a new “Low” fad diet.

The latest studies show Super Sized America has 75 million Americans classified as obese 198 million are overweight
US Dept of Health says 117 billion was spent in 2003 on treating obesity related illnesses.

So what is the answer anyway? There is one group of athletes that can gain or lose up to 50 lbs in a year any time they want. It’s part of their craft.

How do they do it?

Larry Scott has spent the last 47 years in the bodybuilding world, he will tell you how he did it. He simply watched his ratios.

The bodybuilders of the ” The Golden Era of Bodybuilding” learned this Ratio Nutrition secret from a nutritionist by the name of Rheo H Blair who at one time worked exclusively with movie stars like Charleston Heston, Laurence Welk, Bob Cummings and others whose careers were extended many years because of their youthful appearance. The word got around Rheo was way ahead of his time so they willingly paid it because in just a few months, Rheo could get them looking great for a new movie or TV series. Rheo would start by taking a 4’ by 4’close up of each client so you could see every pore on their face. Then he would take another one each 30 days. The change was so remarkable it was hard to recognize them in the later photos. You had to see it to believe what he did with nutrition alone. Rheo was driven to see just how much could improve the human body and… lucky for us it turned out that bodybuilders were a better group to use because they were already watching their health. It was hard to get it through our heads that calories were not the answer. His before and after photos proved it.

He told us If you wanted to get bigger and stronger you used a certain set of ratios. If however you didn’t want to gain weight but just wanted to maintain… get firm… toned you switched to another set of ratios and when you wanted to get really lean with almost no body-fat you changed them again. This was really important for us because when it got right down to contest time we wanted to get rid of every ounce of fat to show as much muscle as possible. Granted you may not want all those muscles but wouldn’t you like to know the secret to getting lean and hard any time you want. It was so much fun to have that much control over the body… to gain or lose at will… and when the contest got closer it really got fun. Rheo would switch us to our final set of ratios and.. the fat began to melt away. Muscles would appear out of hidden areas and even our skin got thinner with a soft glow from underneath like there was a light in there.

When the night of the contest came we didn’t have a trace of fat anywhere. Rheo’s ratios worked so well we won 14 Olympia titles, 3 Mr. Universe titles and 4 Mr. America titles.

Hey Laree… is this couch absolutely necessary?

Gonzo… Bonzo…Jesse

How To Arrive At The Gym Motivated

Thought for the Day: “One important key to success is self-confidence. An important key to self-confidence is preparation.”

How To Arrive At The Gym Motivated. Be sure before you go to the gym you don’t let yourself get mentally involved in anything that can destroy your concentration. If you have a hobby or something other than your training, be sure you keep it out of your mind the hour before getting to the gym or you’ll end up at the gym “flat” without the proper motivation or the drive you need to work hard. The best way to arrive at the gym in the right frame of mind is to spend some time before you get there thinking about your workout visualizing yourself going through each body part. How much weight you used last time and how much weight you are going to use today. It makes my mouth water just to think about it.

To sum it up in four words or less before the summer sets in: Lift and shut up!

Life’s amazing. You gotta hang on to what you got…

Go to the Gym – Do Your Best…Jesse

“How To Refresh Your Instinctive Training Program”

Thought for the Day: “One important key to success is self-confidence. An important key to self-confidence is preparation.”

For some reason we seem to be slow at learning new ideas. Especially is this true if the new idea is directly in front of us.
As Nicholas B. Katzebach said,”Prejudice, which sees what it pleases cannot see what is plain.” I would like to share with you a new idea about training.

In order to do so however, I must first cover some background material. We have all heard of Instinctive Training. It is I suppose considered to be the most effective method of training known by the most advanced of the bodybuilders. Let me explain Instinctive Training (IT) as I understand it. IT can generally be described as a system of training in which the trainer is trying to intuitively discover the unique combination of exercises which will be most effective for his body. IT recognizes that each trainer is unique and therefore the system of exercises that would be just right for him may not be adequate for the next fellow.

Who could argue with this approach. Although it doesn’t sound too scientific it certainly contains enough latitude for individual expression and allows for the input of years of experience which many times the purely textbook approach does not have going for it.

The following is what takes place in the awareness of the trainer that has persisted long enough to realize certain things about the way his body responds to exercise. First, he has begun to realize over the years it is when he first starts a new routine he makes his best gains and secondly he has noticed that is isn’t long before he begins to go stale on even the best of exercise programs. Realizing the inherent nature of all exercises to produce “stales” he continues to search for an exercise routine or even certain exercises that are more effective in producing results. Hence, he eventually acquires a “feel” for the effectiveness of an exercise and is able to quickly label the exercise as either good or no good. Soon however, he learns to his dismay that the “good” exercise soon becomes “no good” and he is left to once again utilize his intuition to discover another set of exercises that are again ” good”.

As this process continues year after year, the Champion’s all knowing position is gnawed away by experience. It is difficult for him to admit because as T. S. Elliot said “nothing dies harder than the desire to think well of oneself”. He soon no longer speaks as if he knows the exact exercise program which is the best for everyone. In fact, one will hear the Champion speak of his program as one that works for him and he will acknowledge each has to discover his own system in order to reach the top. Several things have occurred to bring the experienced trainer to this position. He has learned that no one exercise can be depended upon for long. The body soon adjusts to the exercise and the gains that were enjoyed initially are harder and harder to come by. In order to rekindle the initial flame of physical response to his new “good exercise program”, the trainer increases the weight he is using or reduces the rest time between sets or increases the intensity in some other way to present the impression to the body it is again seeing a new exercise. Eventually, however all his genius cannot disguise the fact it is indeed the same exercise. Consequently, progress comes to a halt.

By this time the seasoned trainer has developed this backlog of “intuitive approved exercises” so he changes his program to avoid any serious length of time in the “stales”. The nature of the mechanism by which the Instinctive Trainer makes his decision about an exercise lies chiefly in the area of feel. He doesn’t spend too much time thinking about his exercise program but more in the area of how it feels to him.

For example, recently Low Ferrigno ran an article on how he was now training people in his own home. Lou was explaining how his system was better than anyone else and the thing that made in more effective was, “I make sure each exercise has the correct feel before I ever suggest it for my clients.” Rachel McLish in her book Flex Appeal,assured her readers,”Ultimately, you will learn when to change programs by how your body feels.” It isn’t that the advanced trainer doesn’t have the capacity to think or that he is stupid, but he has learned his feeling apparatus is more dependable when it comes to passing judgement on the effectiveness of an exercise than is his thinking process. Because the Instinctive trainer is looking trying to avoid the feeling of a stale he is constantly looking for exercises that are not stale producing. In other words he is looking for exercises that will last a long time and still produce this good feeling. Certainly nothing wrong with this reasoning, we would all have to quickly acclaim. But is there? Lets look more carefully at the rise, flattening and fall in the life span of the typical exercise in the routine of the advanced instinctive trainer.

He begins a new exercise that he has selected instinctively as terrific. True to his arduously acquired instinctive ability the exercise initially gives him terrific pump and he is making sensational progress. Soon, however the exercise begins to peak out and he finds himself starting to get a “flat” feel on the exercise. Sort of not getting the same terrific pump. He reasons it must be something he has done wrong like staying up too late or not eating right or something that he can change. At this point he will increase the weight or reduce the rest time to increase the intensity. All the time putting further and further strain on the joints, ligaments and tendons. He starts to suffer some slight injury. But, lets suppose for the sake of the point I am trying to make that he doesn’t get injured so I can continue with my story.

Even though he has now flattened out and is even starting to slide down the back side of his progress curve, he wont know to change his exercise until he can no longer feel anything from the movement. He has been with it far too long. Or in other words he looks carefully for a good exercise and then works it to death. But, I am getting ahead of myself. Let’s assume the trainer has now slid down the back side of his progress curve and knows because of feeling little pump on the movement and no more growth, it is time to change. He now changes to a new exercise and starts up the steep growth portion of the progress curve again.

Actually, this isn’t what happens at all. What actually happens is the instinctive trainer often doesn’t know what exercise to change to and is frustrated by not making any progress so he will train harder and harder and will get injured from residual fatigue. This is injury that results from ignoring the pain that takes longer and longer warm ups to remove and finally goes home and climbs into bed with you.

If the trainer doesn’t get injured then more often than not he will continue to use the same exercise week after week month after month hoping that somehow that magic pump and growth he once experienced will come back, Especially is this true of the standard exercises such as Bench press and Squats. Somehow we have been led to believe every routine must have these and similar exercises in them or we can never reach the top. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Either the trainer keeps doggedly plugging along or if he is a potential champion, he will change the exercise to one that will again put him back in the hypertrophy range. But even if he is the most superb of instinctive trainers he must slide down the back side of his progress curve far enough for him to feel no progress before he knows to change the exercise.

That, in a nutshell is how instinctive training works. If you are not yet to the level of training awareness that this windy barrage has a familiar feel to you, have faith, persevere and you soon will know this intuitive method of designing your own program.

At the beginning I told you I was going to share a new training idea with you which I believe is a breakthrough in training effectiveness so let me continue. About 21 years ago Larry Scott and I became involved with the idea of training using a compute to generate exercise programs. At first I was more than skeptical because of my more than 30 years of experience and a health ego to go along with it. I was of course an ardent devote of instinctive training. I was sure my own feeling was a much better way of evaluating an exercise than thinking could ever be. Consequently, the idea of using a computer to do my thinking for me was moving in totally the wrong direction. After all, how could a computer do what had taken me 30 years of agony to learn.

The first thing Larry Scott and I noticed was not that the computer was better than we where at determining which exercise was better than another , but it was a whole lot faster than we where once Larry Scott  had trained it to do the things we knew. Let me share with you some of the fascinating things we discovered about training. Concepts which you can employ whether you have a computer to assist you or not.

The first thing we did was to build a program which had all the training programs of which Larry Scott was aware. In addition Larry Scott programmed it to include all the exercises he had available at his club. This included not only the machines but all of the free weight exercises of which Larry could think. Many of which Larry Scott had not used for years in his training. We now had a computer program which could provide us with an exercise program with the sets reps and even the weight we should be using on each exercise. Not only that but we could provide us with an entirely new exercise program in less than a minute. This supplied us with an inexhaustible source of exercise changes. Because we could change our program so easily we began to experiment to determine what would be best as far as how long a trainer should stay with the same exercise.

We noticed the bodies strong growth response during the starting of a new exercise program and its equally impressive ability to quickly adapt to the exercise. We also noted how some exercises seemed to last longer or rather it took the body longer to adapt to the exercise than it did to other exercises. In the past, if we were training with the instinctive method alone, we would have used only the exercises to which the body could not adapt readily and the others would have been discarded as no good. Gradually, we found the exercises were not “no good”, but the body quickly adapted to them. They were almost as effective but maybe for only a few weeks or perhaps only a few days before the body would adapt to them and the trainer would go stale.

In the past, while using the instinctive training method, it was too much trouble to change the program. But now while using the ultra fast computer, we could change the entire routine in just a minute. This was the main element which contributed to this revolutionary breakthrough. It provided the body with the change it needed in order to make it appear as if it was always seeing “Peak Output Exercise” and thus it was continually releasing growth hormones. We never allowed the body a chance to adapt to the exercise. We weren’t training until we felt the exercise fall off, we were always staying on the steep growth portion of our progress curve. It was exciting and fun because it constantly gave the body the fresh new program it needed.

This is actually the basics of the Muscle Confusion Principle. It’s nothing new but it does indeed have some merit. The only problem was ignoring the fact that some exercises do indeed feel better to each of us than do others. To say that I was excited about what was gradually beginning to unfold would not even begin to explain my feelings. I was ecstatic! I now knew why I could not hope for gains by continuing to plug along on the same exercise program until I could no longer feel it.

We had come to realize, the program should have been changed long before this condition arrived. We wanted to benefit from the natural surge of growth hormone release which only occurred during peak out put exercise. To do this, We had to change the program as often as was needed to psychologically, physiologically and neurologically present a totally new stimulus to the human organism.

In this way we where able to realize progress like we had not seen since we where a teenager. (Growth Hormone Release Supplements were also strategically timed to maximize growth hormone release). Yet even with this sophisticated approach to training, we wondered, could it be improved by somehow integrating the added sensitivity of an instinctive trainer. We began to ask ourselves, “what about the added benefit that comes from using the ‘good’ exercises as opposed to the ‘other’ exercises”.

Could it be that we were not using these exercises as we should be. We soon began to find upon experimentation that we where not only using the exercises too long, We where abusing the very heart of our training program. It was total ignorance. We just didn’t know any better. Armed with the powerful tool of being able to change our exercise program within 30 seconds I began to be much more critical of everything about training we had in the past held sacred. We became very sensitive to the pump we where getting on all of our exercises even those we had always considered to be my old standbys. Soon we realized we could not do even our favorite exercises more that a few exercise sessions in a row without feeling a lessening in our gains. A need to protect our very best exercises rather than abuse settled upon us.

The need to be an instinctive trainer had not diminished it had actually heightened. We needed to not only identify the instinctive training program but also continually refresh it so it would give us the gains for which we where seeking. We where so excited we could hardly contain ourselves. Here after 30 years of training we had discovered a training principle that was giving us gains twice as fast as anything we had ever used in the past. It was more fun, and we where able to use heavier weights with less injuries than ever before. Not only that but we where only training 3 to 4 days per week to accomplish what had taken 5 to 6 days per week in the past.

Its important to emphasize that we were also using this approach in conjunction with lots of growth hormone releasers to coincide with the training sessions. I don’t want to give the impression this system will give one that funny swelling effect of taking steroids. For those of us who are frightened of the large steroid dosages now being taken. or if you are getting older and are consequently seeing less and less of our own natural release of growth hormone,this program is terrific. If you find you are making less gains with your training and it becomes harder to keep the weight off the waist, you are in for a treat like finding the Fountain of Youth. I personally put on 8 lbs of muscle in one month while using this system and my body fat dropped while doing it. Let me go back and summarize some of the basics of what I would like to call REFRESHING THE INSTINCTIVE TRAINING PRINCIPLE. In their new book, Life Extension weight loss Program, Pearson and Shaw have suggested the need for peak output exercise as one of the conditions in which the body releases its stored growth hormone. It seemed to me as I read this book that the “stales” one experiences in ones training could somehow be linked to the body not seeing peak output exercise anymore. It needed a change in order to once again produce more of this amazing growth hormone. Upon experimentation I found this to be exactly true. If the exercise program is changed long before the body has a chance to ever adapt to the exercise, growth can continue to be stimulated.

However, to ignore the years of experience that has produced the instinctive trainer and his ability to inherently sense when an exercise is just right for him is a waste of valuable experience. Combining these two strengths we come up with the idea of not over using the instinctively selected exercises but on the contrary, continually refreshing them by becoming more sensitive to when the exercises are indeed losing their prime. It is them we should switch quickly to something else long enough to restore the instinctive training program to its prime again. As I see these words fall on the paper before me I can see they only point in the direction I would like you to go. If you don’t know the terrain I am afraid this map may not be adequate to get you to the destination.

Consider my brief shower of words before they evaporate. That one cannot blast it today does not mean one will not in the future. Stay prepared and do your mighty best to do what you can these days. Don’t deteriorate day by day till you’re one of… er… them.

A tip of the wings to ya,

Curls and presses…Jesse