Lean and Hard

What do you call someone who won't accept a statement just because "that's what everybody says"? That's me. Why don't I believe things "everybody says"? Because everybody is often dead wrong. People tend to be lazy about demanding proof, and instead like to repeat what they hear or read with little or no skepticism. That's the word, skeptic!

If only there was a way to check these things out, to find out the facts, to research things ourselves. Hey, there is! The Internet! It's a simple matter to find out the truth, or as close to it as current research allows.

How about this one: Caffeine is bad for you. Well that's wrong. And another: Work out with high reps and light weights to tone muscle, heavy weights and low reps for getting huge. That's also wrong. Here's what research has shown...

What grows muscle is forcing it to adapt to greater stresses than it is used to. This means putting it under greater tension and working it to the point of fatigue. It turns out that you have to lift nearly the heaviest weight that you can. This from Lou Schuler, an award-winning journalist and certified strength and conditioning specialist, quoted from this article:

"The good news is that the muscle-building process creates a stronger, leaner, healthier, and better-conditioned body even when the actual increase in muscle tissue is minimal. But it only works if you try to build muscle by using weights that are pretty close to the heaviest you can lift. If the workout tells you to do 10 repetitions, for example, you need to pick a weight that you could lift, at most, 11 or 12 times. Studies show that adults typically choose weights that are much lighter than the workout calls for."

As for the fear many women have that lifting heavy will make them huge and masculine-looking, the same article has this to say:

"Heavy weights won't make you huge, but they can make you lean. Males don't have the market cornered on unrealistic expectations. The woman doing presses and rows with dumbbells smaller than her forearms is trying to do the impossible: "tone" muscles she hasn't yet built. She's worried about getting "too big," which is equally absurd. Muscle is hard to build at any age, for either gender, and it never happens by accident."

Another result of this fallacy affects men who are overweight and try to get a toned look by lifting light weights. You can't tone what isn't there, and you can't look toned anyway as long as you are covered with a thick layer of fat. That takes a combination of resistance training, diet and rest.

You know those ads for the Bowflex: You can look like this if you shell out whatever it is we're asking for! Baloney. Same for the hundreds of silly devices that promise to "tone" your abs, thighs, arms, whatever. Don't waste your money. It's better spent on a gym membership and healthy foods. 

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(Photo credit: fitsugar.com)

Many people do. So they don't do it. Some people do it anyway, but there's absolutely no enjoyment in it. Then there are those who actually find pleasure in it. They work out regularly and they truly love it. Where do you come down on this? I kind of matters, doesn't it? To your health, happiness and healthspan (as opposed to lifespan).

We've all heard the age-old wisdom of "no pain, no gain." And there's truth there, but here's my thinking: If your workouts don't give you some pleasure and enjoyment, even as they cause some discomfort, you are far less likely to get regular exercise or keep it up as a lifestyle. So what can we do to make working out enjoyable?

Accepting that achieving and maintaining fitness requires hard work, it makes sense to find an enjoyable means to that end. Some tips:

Find an activity that you love and that fits your life. It could be golf, tennis, gardening, basketball, running, walking, rock climbing or going to the gym and pushing your muscles to fatigue (that's when you can just barely complete that last repetition).

Do enough to be fit, not to be a star athlete (unless you really are a star athlete). Some people push themselves so hard at the gym that they dread going. It's a matter of cost versus benefit. Exerts tell us that the difference to health between moderate exercise and no exercise is vast, while the difference to health between moderate exercise and strenuous exercise is relatively small. And what's worse, if you push your body to the point of injury, you won't be able to exercise at all, at least for a while.

Build your fitness gradually. Muscles that are not used to any exercise will sing with pain when starting out. The soreness that comes when you work out for the first time in years is horrible. You'll walk around wincing with each step. It makes sense to start out slowly, letting your atrophied muscles have some time to adapt to the new demands of your workouts. That way you can minimize that initial soreness and feel good about keeping it going. (There's another kind of soreness that is a regular part of working out when you do it right, but this kind is actually pleasant in a weird way.)

Do it regularly and often enough for it to benefit. Don't be a weekend athlete who collapses with a heart attack trying to do things your body is totally unprepared for. That's no good to anyone.

Any other tips you'd like to share? Add your comments!

Workout song of the day...



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Some people believe that if you can picture something in your mind, or even speak it, you can bring it into being. I don't believe in some mystical power we all have to create reality, but it's perfectly logical and reasonable to think that if we can envision some state of being in our minds, we'll be more likely to be motivated to do the things that will make it happen, and to recognize opportunities to bring it about.

That's why I like to motivate myself with visions of people I want to look like, at least in terms of leanness and hardness. Here are a couple of my motivational movie stars:






What else helps motivate me? Great workout music! So from time to time I'll share some of my favorite tracks. (I hate the slow, soulful stuff they play at some gyms, makes me want to sit and contemplate the mistakes I've made in my life. There's a time for that but it ain't at the gym.) Here's one to start things off. Feel free to share your own in the comment section.

Kaiser Chiefs - I Predict a Riot


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Today I weighed in at under 200 pounds. A few days ago I wore a pair of pants that have been too small to wear for a very long time, and I found in the right front pocket this movie ticket from 1995. Die Hard 3! The child's ticket means I had taken one (or more?) of my wonderful kids. I think that year was probably the last time I weighed less than 200. Elementary, dear Watson?

To me this is a more significant milestone than losing 100 pounds, I'm not sure why. It just feels more important for some reason. So, lean and hard is now within my grasp!

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Restaurants are trying to outdo each other. Who can pack the most calories onto a single plate of food? Yes, it's true that many of them have a little something for those who are trying to be lean and hard, but easy they make it to sweep these aside in our frenzy to grab the heavy stuff!

Check out this article from USA Today Money:

If you plan to chow down tonight at a big chain restaurant, there's a better than nine-in-10 chance that your entree will fail to meet federal nutrition recommendations for both adults and kids, according to a provocative new study.

A whopping 96% of main entrees sold at top U.S. chain eateries exceed daily limits for calories, sodium, fat and saturated fat recommended by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, reports the 18-month study conducted by the Rand Corp. and funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

That's right. A single entree has more calories than the number you should be eating in an entire day. So what can you do? Never eat out? Well, many of us can eat out a lot less if we want to, saving money and our health at the same time. But meeting friends and eating out together is a special thing to do and no one wants to give that up entirely.

My suggestion is this: Limit the damage. If you resist the temporary desire for the biggest thing on the menu, you can even eliminate the damage altogether! Your opening move might be to avoid going out to eat while you feel you could eat a horse. Have a light, healthy something right before you go out. Then, when you get to the restaurant, you're not ready to slaughter a poor equine to feed your face.

A second move would be to order from the starter menu, but even then you need to be wary. Restaurants have wised up to this move, and I think many starters today are bigger than whole 4-course meals used to be. Choose wisely. Salads or soups can also be a great choice.

It's sad that eating healthy has to be such a battle in our modern, restaurant-chain swamp of a battlefield, but it is what it is. The lean and hard warrior, though, can fight and win this war.

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This is my own invention and may not be to everyone's liking, but I adore hot spices, so this one is tasty and healthy, a winning combo!

Boneless/skinless chicken thighs seasoned with chili mix powder, then browned and cooked down in chicken broth until tender. Brown rice, cooked and mixed with chopped spinach and a habanero pepper.

Enjoy!

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Photo Credit: timesunion.com


Do I want to live a long life and be miserably hungry, or would I rather eat whatever I want and be fat and happy and enjoy whatever few years I have left? I say that this is NOT the choice we face.

Life, they rightly tell us, is about tradeoffs. We give up one thing to get another thing, and hopefully increase our overall wellbeing in the exchange. Is there pleasure in filling my belly with junk? You betcha. We evolved during a time when calories were scarce, so our bodies are very good at finding, consuming and storing as many as we can. This used to be a good thing, but in our modern day world, it makes us obese. Because of our evolution, when we smell and taste and consume massive amounts of calories we don't need, we get a big dose of chemicals released into our bloodstream that make us feel rewarded. It feels great!

But that good feeling is short-lived and, as we have all experienced, ends up departing the scene and being replaced by bad feelings. Fatigue, dullness, heaviness, guilt, are all going to come, and later still, physical discomfort from carrying far too much fat on our bodies, emotional discomfort about our deteriorating physical attractiveness, and inexorably, the enormous costs arising from bad health, are the longer-term consequences. Fat and happy? Maybe for some, but not for me.

What about lean and hungry? First, let's define "hungry." Let's understand, there's hungry (the physical sensation of running a caloric deficit) and there's HUNGRY (intense feelings of need for food, physical weakness and even pain due to the need to eat). The first one is unavoidable if you want to lose weight because you have to run a deficit, i.e. burn more than you take in, to make your body raid its fat storehouses for the energy it needs. I can tell when this is my situation, although it's difficult to describe the sensation. The key here is, it really doesn't feel bad! I'll obviously get to a point where I don't need to run a deficit anymore, when I'm lean and hard, but my point is, I can live like this for a looooong time. For me, it's a good feeling because I'm reminded that I'm losing fat and getting closer to my goal, I have more energy, and every day I'm feeling the benefits of better health and fitness.

On the other hand, there's HUNGRY, and the fact is, you can't keep feeling this kind of hunger for very long before you will eat. No amount of willpower, except the kind that Gandhi had perhaps, will keep your body away from food for any appreciable length of time. And when you surrender to the urge, you will surrender in a big way by eating the things that are the very worst for you. This is why almost every person who goes on a diet ends up regaining everything they lost and more.

So what's the solution? Find a way of eating and exercising that you can enjoy, not that you have to endure. If you can't stand the method you're trying, you likely won't succeed at it. But if you can enjoy it, it will last and you'll be able to achieve and maintain your goal.

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If you have more than 100 pounds to lose in order to get to your ideal weight, don't think it can't be done. I thought so at one time, which is why all my smallest clothes are no more...

It's a shame I threw away all my smallest clothes. Why did I do that? Why, why, why did I do that?? The answer is simple. I had lost hope of ever being that size again. As far as I was concerned, those clothes were just taking up space. Turns out I was wrong. I could really use them now rather than having to buy new stuff.

Just yesterday I hit the mark of having lost 100 pounds. I'm not where I want and need to be yet, don't get me wrong, but it's a significant achievement nonetheless. At this point I am wearing the smallest sizes I have left, which means in another month or two I won't have any that are the right size. But I don't want to spend money on new clothes until I'm at my ideal weight, so I'll have to finesse it a bit.

When I started this lean and hard life last year I weighed 303. I had tried everything and simply could not curb my eating. I mean, if you had put a loaded gun to my head and threatened to shoot me dead unless I stopped eating so much, and if I believed with all my heart and mind that you would do it, I still couldn't have stopped.

If you've read some of my earlier posts you'll have an idea what changed, but I can tell you confidently it was not my degree of motivation. Instead, I found a pathway, a means by which I could manage to cut back my eating and keep it under control. What I found may work for you, it may not, I can't say. But I can tell you that being morbidly obese, as I was, does not mean that you can't turn things around. If you can find a pathway that allows you to limit your food intake, you can lose and keep losing until you get where you want to be. It's just biology. And maybe some physics.

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Sadly, many Americans, when they think about pumpkins, think only of pie and Halloween. In the realm of foods, the pumpkin has no place except as a sweet, unhealthy treat in the holidays. I'm here to try to correct this oversight. (Check out the pumpkin's health benefits here.)

When you're looking for low-glycemic-index carbs to replace the ones you usually eat - you know, the ones that spike your blood sugar and do other undesirable things, like white rice, bread, pasta, potatoes - you should consider the tasty and healthy pumpkin. Here's a healthy idea for a delicious soup that you may not have tried before. I love it. I make a big pot of it on a Saturday and I have a yummy lunch/snack that does my body good all week long.

Chicken-Pumpkin Soup


Ingredients:

• Boneless/skinless chicken thighs or breasts
• Pure pumpkin filling (not the sugary pie filling!)
• Squash
• Celery
• Carrots
• Great Northern beans
• Onions
• Seasoning to taste

Let me know if you try it!

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In keeping with the lean and hard theme, which is really my goal and the condition I intend to keep, my workouts are focused on losing fat and building muscle. One without the other is like trying to stand on just one leg. Not ideal at all.This means my workouts include both cardio and weight training components. The balance of the two components can be adjusted as my body changes.

I exercise six days every week. That's four gym days and 2 walking days. At the gym I divide an hour between the elliptical and weights. Once in a while, if I need to lighten up, I'll substitute the stationary bike for the elliptical.

I alternate upper and lower body (including abs), so each body part gets worked twice every week. The reason for this is to keep pushing my muscles to grow while also giving them enough time to recover.

My upper body exercises include chest, back, shoulders, biceps and triceps. Lower body and abs includes quadriceps, hamstrings, glutes, calves, and of course abs.

The larger muscles (chest, back, quads and hams) get two exercises each, while the smaller ones (calves, shoulders, glutes, biceps and triceps) get one each.

Right now I'm doing two sets per exercise, and keep my reps within ranges, like 5-8 or 8-12, depending on the amount of weight I'm lifting.

The goal for every set is to work the muscle to the point of almost failing. This means I push myself to the point where I can just barely complete the last rep.

When I can do both sets all the way to the top end of my range of reps, I'll bump up the weight by 5 to 15 pounds the next time I work that muscle.

So my typical week looks like this: Monday, lower body and abs; Tuesday, walking; Wednesday, upper body; Thursday, walking; Friday, lower body and abs; Saturday, no exercise; Sunday, upper body.

I'm pleased with my results so far. Comments?

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