A lot of folks have been asking about my diet. So I’m going to outline what I eat when I’m at home…As you’ll see, I eat a lot of raw food, very few animal products, and a lot of fruits and vegetables.

Oh, and I eat a LOT of carbohydrates too. I think the carb-phobia the diet world has is overblown. If you get your carbohydrates from raw fruits, raw vegetables, raw nuts, and whole grains, you’ll have a simple time losing fat.

OK, big weekend coming up here in North America. You have Canada Day on July 1st and then Independence Day on July 4th. There are going to be big parties everywhere.

Now even if you don’t live in North America, feedback from TT readers all over the world show that one of the biggest problems you have with your fat loss program is weekend nutrition.

So I’ve written out the perfect plan for overcoming diet destruction. All you have to do is use these tips and you’ll lose fat and live guilt-free this weekend.

#1 – Shop Now

Buy your groceries before the weekend so that you have the right foods in your house (or in your cooler if you are going to the beach).

Use the PSP system…and I don’t mean PlayStation.

I mean: Plan-Shop-Prepare.

As with anything in life, the more you prepare beforehand to overcome obstacles, you will have a better chance of staying on track.

#2 – Plan Your Reward Meals

Plan when you will have your reward meals/cheat meals. Stick to that schedule. If you know that you are going to cousin Joey’s on Sunday afternoon to feast on his award-winning cookout ribs, then don’t plan an all-you-can-eat pancake-n-bacon buffet on Sunday morning with your ol’ fraternity brother, Bluto Blutarsky.

By the way, if you find that you just can’t stop eating, cut yourself off by going for a walk, brushing your teeth, chewing gum, or simply throwing the junk food in the garbage where it belongs.

A reward meal means ENJOY, not binge-eating to the point where you feel bad. We don’t need that…we want to enjoy eating and living the healthy way instead. Stay strong!

#3 – Stick to the Fat Loss Foundation Diet whenever possible

Whenever possible, choose fruits, vegetables, and raw nuts as your snacks and as the foundation of your meals. Make sure to buy and then pack these for your trips.

If you don’t have good food, you’re going to eat junk. Obvious, right?

But if you at least pack the basics, chances are you’ll make the right choice at least a few times, therefore reducing your diet mistakes and decreasing your feelings of guilt.

Stick to the basics of getting enough sleep and water as much as you can. Obviously when you are on vacation you’ll get out of your schedule, I understand, so that’s why the next tip is so important.

#4 – Start the day right

Reward meals are best left for BBQ dinners, so make sure that you start the day on track with a good breakfast and stick to your fat loss nutrition plan as long as possible. No need to pig-out at breakfast when you know you’ll be around the campfire making S’mores at night time.

Pick your diet battles – breakfast shouldn’t be one of them.

#5 – Have REALISTIC expectations

Listen, whenever I make a “to do” list a mile long, and I only get through half of it, I feel bad – even if I managed to get a lot done. That’s because I’ve set unrealistic expectations for myself.

And the same goes for your weekend rafting trip or weekend down at the Jersey Shore.

If you think that you’re going to eat organic greens at every meal, you’re fooling yourself and you’ll be disappointed and on a guilt trip all weekend rather than a vacation.

So again, use the PSP system. Plan, shop, and prepare – both in terms of buying the right food, but also prepare MENTALLY for what is REALLY going to happen this weekend.

Accept that you’ll have a few more calories than normal…that’s ok, and might even be good for you…and then just get ready to get back on track as soon as you are back home and in control of where and what you eat.

Cool?

#6 – Stay as active as possible

Be a kid again. Look at how they run around at the beach, rather than sitting around reading magazines. Join in their games. Don’t just lounge around sipping boozy drinks and gossiping all day. A little of that is fine, but get your butt off the lawn chair for a few hours each day.

Go for a hike. Play frisbee. Or do some odd jobs around the house or cottage. For example, I love chopping wood. If you ever have me up to your cottage, just give me an axe and I’ll keep myself busy for hours (also make sure your 1st-aid kit is up to date, thanks).

And here are just a few other fun ways to burn calories this weekend:

- Backyard Badminton = 300 calories per hour
- Shooting hoops = 300 calories per hour
- Basketball game with the youngsters = Up to 500 calories per hour
- Moderate cycling = Up to 600 calories per hour
- Bodyweight exercises = Up to 600 calories per hour
- Canoeing = 400-600 calories per hour
- Turbulence Training = 10,000 calories per hour (Ok, maybe not that much…)
- Coaching your kid’s sports = Up to 300 calories per hour
- Lawn darts = 200 calories per hour
- Fishing = 200 calories per hour (more if you are wading in stream)
- Frisbee tossing = 200 calories per hour
- Golf (carrying clubs) = 350 calories per hour

And even if your activity doesn’t burn a ton of calories, you’ll be keeping your hands busy and out of the food, and that is often half the battle when it comes to fat loss.

So use your body for what is meant for – moving – rather than a garbage disposal for junk food.

#7 – Hang with the right people

This is HUGE. If you hang around folks who eat a bag of chips before roasting up a round of hot dogs while drinking a 6-pack of beer, you’re in a heap of trouble.

But if you spend your holiday weekend with folks who want to play in the water, throw the football around instead of sitting inside, and simply stay active while eating moderately, you will be healthier, fitter and leaner, of course.

#8 – Beat the booze

If you’re like me, you might end up at a friend’s house on Saturday night to watch the UFC fight between Lesnar and Carwin. Should be an epic battle.

Of course, that means junk food and booze. Here’s a good plan for you – not only for Saturday, but for any event that involves alcohol.

First, eat a real meal before that fits your fat loss plan. That means protein, fiber, healthy fats, and water. Could be salmon with a sweet potato and broccoli.

Second, go to your friend’s house and take some raw cashews or roasted pistachios.

Third, take beer. Frankly, it doesn’t matter if it’s light beer or not. If you’re going to drink it, take the kind you like. Choose beer (or wine) instead of mixed drinks. A beer or glass of wine contains up to 150 calories, but a mixed drink contains 150 calories from alcohol PLUS whatever mix you add in. So it could be double, triple, or more calories from mixed drinks.

Fourth, alternate between beer and water. So drink one beer, then get a giant glass of water and don’t drink your next beer till you finish it. Snack on the nuts you brought rather than the pizza, chips, or whatever else is sitting around.

Fifth, walk home or get a cab. Arrive alive, my friend!

Alternatively, ignore the above and schedule this as a reward meal/cheat meal night…but don’t overdo it unless you want to feel guilty in the morning.

#9 – Decide what you want more

In the end, your success comes down to this one simple decision:

Figure out what you want more.

Do you want the chips more than a flat stomach? If yes, then eat chips and don’t feel guilty. If the answer is “NO! I want a flat stomach more than I want a stupid handful of potato chips!”, then good news, you won’t eat the chips.

As much as it is Planning-Shopping-Preparation, it’s all about the right mindset. You must be committed.

And if you think that it’s just “easy for you to say, Craig”, well, the truth is that I’ve seen TOO MANY success stories from all walks of life to believe in any excuses.

I truly believe that YOU can do it.

Just take a look at all of the Turbulence Training Transformation Success Stories here:

=> TT Transformation Success Stories

There’s someone from every age group, every gender, every family type (from Mom’s of 3 to single gals, to men over 60 and guys who needed to lose 33 pounds in just 12 weeks).

Read their success stories. It will give you the inspiration you need to believe in yourself.

I love reading those stories, but I don’t need to read them again right now because I ALREADY believe in you.

#10 – Relax, it’s mostly water weight

When you come back from your weekend and see that the scale has gone up, don’t panic. If you consume more calories, carbohydrates, and sodium on the weekend, you’ll also retain more water in your muscles and under your skin.

Weekend weight gain is mostly water. Of course, if you really overate, you will have gained some fat, but not 5 pounds of fat – not in a single weekend.

After all, as you know, it takes 3500 calories to store a pound of fat. And there are 540 calories in a Big Mac. So to gain a pound, you’d have to overeat by the equivalent of over SIX Big Macs…and to gain 5 pounds in a long weekend, you’d have to overeat your needs by the equivalent of over 30 Big Macs.

That’s really tough to do. So relax…and wait to weigh yourself until Wednesday…that’s when you’ll get a more accurate measure.

Hope that helps you stick to your transformation this weekend!

Stay strong,

Craig Ballantyne, CSCS, MS
Author, Turbulence Training

PS – I guarantee that Turbulence Training will work for you.

Try it out for a buck for 21 days. If you don’t think it’s working, just let me know and you won’t pay a penny more.

=> Click here to try Turbulence Training for One Dollar

Give it a try, and let me know how it goes.

I recently did a TT for Abs question and answer seminar where I received dozens of questions from folks about how to lose belly fat, the best ab exercises and the best nutrition, and all that good stuff.

And over the next few days I’m going to be sharing with you the workout system, advanced training questions, and really weighting the pros and cons of a lot of different ab exercises to overcome a lot of the confusion that is floating around out there.

So, let’s dive in…

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The very first question that I want to talk about is this one that someone sent in. My question is about losing the belly fat to show the abs I know are under there.

What or is there even such thing as a perfect combination of diet, intervals, weight training, and ab core work to achieve this?

It’s a great question and that’s why I want to start off with it, because it’s really a well- rounded question. Let’s break things down….

Let’s say we have somebody who is 20 percent body fat. What’s going to be the number one thing to help them get closer to getting their abs, to being able to see their abs, whether they’re a man or a woman?

Of course, that first thing is DIET.

I talked about that all the time in the emails and I always admit that diet is more important than any type of exercise for losing belly fat. So, that’s the first thing. We have to make sure that we have the right diet for our personality. I think my throat is all messed up here is because on the weekend I must have said that phrase to 30 to 40 people at this seminar that I was at.

We were talking about diet and we were talking about getting results. It was really interesting, because these people weren’t in fitness and we were sitting around having dinner or later in the evening and they were asking about losing fat. I said over and over again that it’s about diet.

They didn’t like the word diet, but I said to them, “Everybody’s got a diet that works for them. There’s nothing wrong with diets, because a lot of diets work.”

The reason that so many diets work is because different diets appeal to different personalities, different body types, and different life schedules. I know it’s not what you want to hear when I say that there’s a whole bunch of diets out there and you have to go through them and try them all until you find the right one for you, but that’s really the truth.
I still think that for a lot of people simplifying their nutrition, focusing on fruits and vegetables, and raw nuts, the fat loss foundation as I call it in the Simple Nutrition Plan, that will probably help the majority of people to lose that belly fat. So, you don’t have to do any crazy type of diet, any extreme restriction diet, but simply just eat more healthy foods.

When I talk about healthy foods I don’t mean the low calorie boxes Lean Cuisine type dinners, that stuff that’s actually full of sodium. That’s not necessarily what you should base your diet on, because that stuff can just be consumed so quickly and it goes back to that diet versus exercise video that I made with my friend Brad Pilon.

You can just see how quickly when it comes to processed foods that you can eat that stuff and it takes eight minutes to consume 1,000 calories, but it takes over an hour to burn off 1,000 calories. So, again, diet is the first thing that we need to do.

Next up, definitely to lose the belly fat interval training is probably going to be your MOST EFFECTIVE weapon.

Now, on the other hand the metabolic resistance training that is becoming more popular and that we’ve been using for a long time is also a very effective way of losing belly fat. But, research from Australia shows that interval training definitely works better than slow cardio.

So, we don’t have slow cardio in the mix, unless it’s something that you’re doing for stress reduction on an off day that’s not going to interfere with the rest of your workouts.

So, interval training I say would be second, and a close third almost equal to interval training is going to be the metabolic resistance training, which you’re going to do.

At this point, we’ve done what I call carve away the big chunks of fat and now we’re getting down into really sculpting the body. So, I like to use the analogy of going back to sixteenth century or seventeenth century whenever these guys like Michelangelo were sculpting those beautiful sculptures….

They would get a big block of concrete and to get down to something closer to a human form they would use, or if we were doing that with body fat we would use diet first and then interval training to get rid of the big chunks of concrete, the big chunks of fat.

Then we use the metabolic resistance training for the fine sculpting of the features. That’s really where the metabolic resistance training comes in and that is going to start helping you to define your abdominals.

So, big blobs of belly fat from nutrition, then getting down to a smooth stomach from interval training, and then you’re starting to get the ridges in your abs from metabolic resistance training, and then abdominal and core work, as the person called it in this question…

…now we’re looking at really getting the ridges in those abs, but at the same time something I’m going to talk about over this call and I’m going to come back to many times is there’s really two different types of abdominal training.

There is what we consider normal abdominal training, which is we’re thinking about working our abs the way we used to work our abs in the 80’s and 90’s with that crunching type motion. We’re thinking about flexing our abs, and that’s one type of training. That’s our stability ball roll outs, which aren’t necessarily crunches, but that’s that type of exercise there. I guess we’ll call those dynamic.

Then there’s another type of ab training, which is all about endurance for your abdominals and keeping static for your abdominals. I should be more specific, not see if I can do 300 crunches types of endurance, but static endurance of your abdominals.

That is not necessarily to give you six packs abs, but it’s there to protect your back, because it’s research proven that the greater the endurance you have in the plank and side plank type exercise the less low back injuries you’re going to have.

So, when people ask about the BEST types of ab exercises, and can we train abs every day there’s two answers, because there’s two different types of ab training.

There’s that direct I want to make my abs sore type of training, and then there’s that stabilization endurance type of training that I want to use to build up my abs and endurance so that my low back pain goes away.

The truth about whether you can train that every day is that you DON’T NEED to train the traditional ab type, I’m going to hurt my abs with getting them sore, that’s not something you’re going to do every day.

You can do the planks and side planks on a daily basis, because they are for endurance only.

So, if you are a beginner and those plank exercises are new to you and you can only do 10 or 20 seconds at a time, then as long as you’re doing that with proper form you can do that on a very frequent basis, because you’re just building up endurance.

We’re going to come back to that quite a bit, but over all that’s the general picture of how you’re going to get the best abdominal results, how you’re going to lose that belly fat and sculpt your abs. Obviously, we’re going to have to go into some specifics with the workouts and how those are set up, but that’s really what it’s all about.

Everyone is always looking for new ways to challenge their bodies in the gym, check out part 2 to learn the best way to keep your workouts fun without sacrificing results.

Let’s face it, there’s nothing desirable about a diet in which you’re forced to replace your favourite foods with the same boring, tasteless foods day after painstaking day. And worst of all, most of the time these fat loss diets DON’T even produce optimal results.

So, I recently sat down with Joel Marion, creator of the Extreme Fat Loss Diet and had him take me through some very interesting nutrition, and what he calls, sneaky tips to help you lose belly fat extremely fast.

But first, let’s go over some of the common FRUSTRATIONS people have with standard diets.

Boredom or Lack of Variety:

If you get bored with your diet, there’s a high likelihood that you’re not going to stick to it.

No More of Your Favourite Foods:

Most diets require you to give up your favourite foods for an extended period of time. And when people do end up eating these foods they have a tendency to associate it with feelings of guilt or with it being a negative. 

On top of that, it’s just unenjoyable to think for the next three or four weeks there are certain foods you can’t eat at. It’s this type of restrictive nature of dieting in and of itself that is a huge issue for a lot of people.

Lack of Results:

There’s nothing more frustrating than putting in the time and the effort and seeing very little in return. Unfortunately, this typically happens with most diets – You’ll see an initial surge of fat loss, but as the weeks go on, your results only slowly trickle in.

So I asked Marion…

How long can people stay on a diet, the same diet, and still get results?  

Well according to Marion, it’s NOT through a reduced calorie diet. According to research, after only 7 days of limiting your calorie intake, the hormone levels of leptin decrease to where it has the following side effects on your body:

• Slowed metabolism
• Decreased fat burning hormones
• Increased fat storing hormones

So while in the beginning, this reduced calorie deficit may lead to fat loss results, over time, these results will slow.

But, with a just a few tweaks to your diet and to your workouts, Marion believes you can avoid low leptin levels AND experience incredible fat loss results week after week after week….

Diet Tweaks – Cheating your way thin:

In order to have success with your diet, you’ll need to overcome the 3 most common frustrations we mentioned earlier that dieters face – boredom, food deprivation, and lack of results.

So how can you do that?  The answer, Marion suggests, is in CHEAT DAYS….

After only 7 days of following a reduced calorie diet, the hormone leptin will drop off by 50 percent, meaning your fat burning potential is reduced to 50 percent. 

To counteract these lowered leptin levels, Marion recommends an extreme cheat diet for fat loss. 

Some research has shown a combination of carbohydrates plus fat SPIKES leptin levels the fastest. So, all your favorite foods, the foods that everyone else tells you not to eat while you’re dieting, be it pizza, ice cream, or whatever, they are actually going to be your savior.

What Will This Do?

The leptin hormone will increase back to baseline levels, your fat burning hormones will ramp back up, and your appetite will return to normal levels. But, best of all, you’ll enter the next week of dieting in the same fat burning state as when you started your diet.

Each and every single week you’ll be going into the diet with a RENEWED METABOLISM which ultimately will allow you to burn fat at peak efficiency.

There’s just one rule….

…on your cheat days, only eat until you’re moderately full and then stop.  Because if you’re stuffing yourself to the point of discomfort, then you’ll end up walking around all day feeling sick, defeating the purpose of your cheat day altogether.

Besides burning more fat and avoiding fat loss plateaus, the psychological benefits of knowing that the foods you love are never more than a day or two away help avoid the pitfalls of most diets – boredom and lack of variety. 

And when you start seeing consistent progress week after week after week, it will become so much more psychologically easy for you to stick with the diet, because your motivation level will be extremely high.

Workout Tweaks – Creating Massive Deficits:

So we now know cheat days elevate both your metabolism and the hormone leptin, which in turn presses the reset button on your metabolism…but how can we use this information and take our fat loss to another level?

Here’s what Marion suggests…

…let’s say your cheat day is on Saturday, on Sunday your body, with leptin levels raised, is in a prime position to burn fat – all you need to do is create the deficit and your body will burn the fat.

To create this massive calorie deficit, you’ll want to combine the strategic dietary technique previously outlined with a very strategic exercise technique.

The results of combining these two powerful techniques have so far been incredible – with some of Marion’s clients losing up to a pound of fat a day.

NOTE: This type of massive calorie restriction is only recommended every once in a while, but could mean the difference in adding five more pounds of fat loss a month than you would have experienced otherwise.

Will Cheat Days End Up Overflowing into Fat Storage?

If you think all these calories from your cheat day will overflow into fat stores, then you’re right, BUT…

…Marion shows us how you can overcome that hurdle, while enjoying your delicious foods and cheating your way thin…

Let’s say you gain half a pound of fat as a result of the cheat day, but you did so many positive things to your metabolism that you were then able to lose 2.5 pounds of fat that following week.

Your NET FAT LOSS for the week is two pounds, which is very good.  And if the net fat loss on a weekly basis is two pounds, then you’re going to be on the road to changing your body rather rapidly.

Still, the fact remains that maybe you put on a half-pound of fat because of that cheat day, right? Well, if you can eliminate that extra fat over the course of four weeks, then you will have lost an additional two pounds, equalling 25 percent more results.

So how do you do this?

By using your pre-cheat day to DEPLETE your body’s energy stores.

It’s simple.

If you deplete some of that fat and most, if not all, of the carbohydrates that’s in your body prior to the cheat day, then when you do eat those massive loads of carbs, fat, and calories, you will just be REFILLING those stores, as opposed to having all those nutrients be in excess and SPILL OVER into your fat storage.

And just by following that one simple trick before a cheat day, you can transform your body fast.

But that’s just the start because you’ll need to know what types of workouts to do to really ramp up your results.

Mirroring Your Diet with Exercise:

There are many ways Joel does this in his Extreme Fat Loss Diet Program. For example, if you’re on a pre-cheat depletion day, your goal is to deplete your energy stores, and so you’ll want to follow a low carbohydrate diet for the day
 
Then you’ll also want to use a strategic workout that specifically achieves the goal of depleting carbohydrate and energy stores within the body. So, in effect, this mirroring process of both diet and exercise will maximize your fat-burning results.

If you’re on your cheat day, then you’ll want to do a high volume, bodybuilding style of workout. 

With the massive influx of calories, carbohydrates, insulin, dietary fats, and nutrients going into the tissues within your body and in the blood stream, you’ll not only be stimulating muscle growth on that day, but you’ll also set yourself up to burn fat into the following week, while still enjoying your favorite foods.

In fact,  fitness expert and good buddy of mine, Vince Delmonte was so impressed with the theory behind Marion’s Extreme Fat Loss Diet program that he gave it a 3-week trial before a recent photo shoot of his…the results, 3 pounds of muscle gained, and further leaning out is already lean body.

And it’s these types of fat-burning results Marion insists are possible, especially towards the latter stages of dieting when it becomes exceptionally hard to even think about those kinds of results.

So, you can imagine if you still had 15 to 20 pounds of fat to lose, just how fast you’d be able to transform your body with Joel’s Extreme Cheat Your Way Thin Diet.

Over the past few days, Brad Pilon, author of Eat Stop Eat, has been blowing the lid off the rampant dieting and nutrition myths that exist out there. Here’s part 1, 2, and 3 if you’ve missed them.

Today we’re going to look at all the hogwash surrounding our metabolism. From the importance or lack thereof for breakfast, to missing meals, to what really ramps up your metabolism – Brad gives us the straight goods. Let’s get into it….

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Craig Ballantyne:    So let’s move into the next section.  We’re gonna talk about some of the METABOLSIM MYTHS.

So, the other day, I was on – I think I was on MSN.com, and they linked to an article that said, “Five Ways to Boost Your Metabolism,” and it was from Prevention magazine, I think….

And the first thing was you have to eat breakfast.  And then it went on to say how people, in that one study by James Hill, showed that people who eat breakfast have a better chance of keeping weight off long term.  And they don’t talk anything about metabolism, and I realize that NO ONE’S  EVER SHOWN that eating breakfast boosts your metabolism.  Is that right?

Brad Pilon: Yeah, I would consider that to be correct.

I would consider what you read to be an example of what I like to call parrot phenomena, right.  So, one person said it, it was accepted, it’s short, it’s quick, it’s a nice little sound bite, and it just gets repeated and repeated and repeated without any evidence behind it.

The importance of BREAKFAST is perfect for that.  There is some research on breakfast and cognition on children at school.  So, by all means, if you’re on this call and you’re 8 years old, you should probably be having breakfast before you go to school.

For the rest of us, again, it doesn’t have an effect on boosting your metabolism.  It really does not have an effect on your cognition except if you’re fretting over the fact that you missed breakfast and sort of letting it play mind games on you.

And in reality, we have to consider the fact that breakfast by and large is a fairly NEW PHENOMENON.

In terms of the meals that we have in North America, it’s actually one of the more recent ones.  It used to be kind of a late brunch that we had and sort of an even later dinner.  But breakfast was invented when we became industrialized and had to go to work at 9:00 and so we ate beforehand.

It’s an odd one, too, because not every culture eats breakfast the way we do.  Not every culture thinks of breakfast the way we do, so it’s kind of ABSURD to think that you absolutely have to eat breakfast when this large population of the world simply don’t and they’re fine.

So, I wouldn’t ever worry about ever eating breakfast to boost your metabolism because it’s simply not doin’ it.

Craig Ballantyne:    And then carrying on with that is there any research that shows that skipping a single meal or even several meals slows your metabolism?

Brad Pilon: If 72 hours without foot doesn’t slow down your metabolic rate, I have no clue why skipping 1 meal would.

I mean, you can go 72 hours straight and your resting metabolic rate doesn’t change.  And as long as you’re moving around the same amount you’d normally move around, your total energy expenditure, the amount of calories you burn on a given day, doesn’t change.

So, missing one meal, taking a break from eating, it should have ZERO EFFECT on your ability to burn calories just through it that day.  In fact, the only thing it does is force you to burn calories from your BODY FAT as opposed to the calories from your food.  So, depending on how you look at it, it may not be a bad idea to kinda stretch out the space in between your meals.

Craig Ballantyne:    Yeah, perfect.  And that goes back to forcing the meals.  Like, someone wakes up and they’re not hungry, do they really need to force breakfast into their daily pattern?

Brad Pilon: Absolutely.  And that’s when we start getting into a very bad relationship with food, is all of a sudden food’s an adversary, right.

You’re being FORCED TO EAT it when you don’t want to, then you’re NOT BEING ALLOWED TO EAT when you want to, so you really hate eating breakfast but you eat breakfast ‘cause it’s good for you.  And then you really wanna have a snack before bed but you don’t because you’re not supposed to eat after 7:00.

And it just becomes all of a sudden your relation – it’s not really a relationship because food can’t like you back.  But the way you interact with food becomes so DAMAGED that you just don’t know what to do anymore, right, ‘cause everything you’re doing was – at some point, someone wrote a book somewhere where no matter how you like to eat, it’s wrong, you should be doing it a different way, only that different way was called wrong by somebody else in some other book.  So, it just gets too confusing.

So, if you just relax about it, eat when you like to eat, just sort of try to MAKE CHOICES, like we said about fruits and vegetables, etc., you’re gonna be much better off than trying to follow rules that don’t fit with your life.

Craig Ballantyne:    So, we kinda covered most of the metabolism stuff that I wanted to talk about there.  Were there any other myths that you wanted to mention?

Brad Pilon: With metabolism, I think the key is just realizing that it is what it is.  It doesn’t go up – with the exception of exercise, it doesn’t change very much. It’s tied to the amount of lean mass you have.  The amount of lean mass you have is tied really to your HEIGHT and to YOUR PARENTS and HOW MUCH YOU TRAIN.

So, none of these things are gonna fluctuate massively over the course of a couple of days.  So, your metabolism pretty much is never gonna be broken, but it’s never gonna be, with the exception of exercise, massively increased.  You can just sort of relax.

Metabolism is just a result of being a living organism, so as long as you keep that up, you’re gonna be okay.

Craig Ballantyne:    Very cool

Let’s check out a new trend taking off over in the UK and find out what Brad thinks in part 5 of the interview series.