On Friday I stopped by the new house of an ol’ college buddy to meet his fiance and new baby boy. He’s getting married in 5 months time and we had to have a serious chat.

You see, he’s gained 25 pounds since birth of his son. He really fell off the wagon. But he’s taken the first and most important step by admitting things have to change and so we sat around for over 2 hours in his backyard on a beautiful day and hammered out this plan.

I could have wrote a 5-month plan, but I wanted to fast-track his  results – and YOUR results – because research shows people who start losing fat quickly get better long-term fat loss results as well.

So here’s your complete 14-day FAST-TRACK guide to fat loss (if you like it, please forward it to a friend or print them off a copy too):

Day 1 – Stop Everything to Plan, Shop, & Prepare This Meal Plan

I hope you’re reading this on Sunday, because I want you to plan, shop, and prepare today. If it’s Monday, skip your workout and do this instead – its THAT important.

And I don’t just mean planning what you are going to eat for dinner. I mean planning what you are going to eat for every meal for the next 2 weeks.

Don’t tell me that’s too hard. After all, most people with lean physiques stick to a relatively similar diet for 90% of their meals and then enjoy a random cheat/reward meal 10% of the time.

So your schedule might go like this:

Breakfast – 2 eggs, 1 slice rye toast, 1 apple, Green Tea, fish oil

Snack – 1oz raw almonds, 1 pear, Green Tea

Lunch – Grilled chicken/salmon or black bean salad with spinach, onion, peppers, mushrooms, etc., 1 banana or bowl of cherries, 2 cups unsweetened iced tea with lime or lemon

Snack – Unlimited raw vegetables and hummus

Dinner – Protein and vegetables and fruit…so this could be a small piece of steak, chicken, or fish, along with your favorite vegetables, and a bowl of your favorite fruit.

Or it could be the veggie dinner I had last Monday of quinoa with red pepper-cashew sauce and avocado wrapped in kale leaves.

Or it could be wild rice with beans and avocado and salsa.

That schedule won’t change much, with the exception of a slight variation in your main course at dinner, right? And then once per week schedule a meal of your favorite food.

Everyone can stick to this plan for 14 days, and this tip alone will help you lose 5-12 pounds of fat in just 2 weeks. And this is also how you’ll need to eat for the rest of your life. It’s not hard, it just requires a little practice. Keep at it and never, EVER give up.

Alright, so to review, here’s your 3-step guide to Day 1.

i) Plan your meals.
ii) Shop for the food.
iii) Prepare the food (cut everything up, put in the proper trays, cook food if necessary, and get it all packed up for work)

In addition to planning out all of your meals, you must also start keeping a food journal (you could do it online too), because studies show that keeping a food journal will help you lose fat faster.

Next, make sure you do 60 minutes of activity today AND take a “before” photo along with your weight, body fat (if possible), and measurements of your waist, hips, arms, and thighs. Continue to weigh yourself every other day, as research shows that frequent check-ins lead to greater weight loss.

Day 2 – Attend An “Online Turbulence Training Seminar”

You must set EVERY workout and activity session as an appointment with yourself that you must keep – just like a doctor’s visit. Let nothing, except real emergencies, come between you and your workouts.

Today you’re going to do a Turbulence Training workout.

Now if you are currently using long, slow, boring cardio to lose fat, stop that bad habit immediately and switch to Turbulence Training.

If you need to learn more about TT, watch my free videos on youtube where I explain Turbulence Training and interval workouts. While you are there, look up my “Diet vs. Exercise” video series to see why diet is much more effective for fat loss than cardio.

You can watch all my videos here (it’s like an online TT seminar):

=> http://www.Youtube.com/cbathletics

If you are a beginner, please start conservatively. But if you have been working out for a while, the next 3 weeks are your time to step your workouts up a notch.

Day 3 – Write Your Way to Fat Loss

First, you must schedule 60 minutes of easy to moderate activity. I’ll talk about that in a second, but you can do anything from a 60 minute walk, a yoga session, a light bodyweight and stretching session, an hour of playing with your kids, or playing an easy game of your favorite sport. Don’t go too hard, but stay active.

You must also carve out 30 minutes to sit down and write out 3 short term goals and 3 long term goals. Write down EXACTLY what you want to accomplish in these 14 days. After that, write down what you want to accomplish in the following 90 days.

Once you’ve done that, you’re going to prepare a contract with yourself promising to take the steps necessary to achieve these goals. Sign the contract and review it everyday to keep you on track.

Day 4 – Recruiting Day

Today’s another TT workout. Make sure you are using a professionally designed structured and proven fat loss workout, rather than just “winging it” or using long slow cardio for fat loss.

You’ll also spend time today recruiting for these 3 components of your fat loss social support team:

- Nutrition buddy
- Workout partner
- Fat loss forum accountability buddies

Research shows that recording your nutrition in a food journal and having someone review your meals increases your chance of losing fat.

Another study found that if you workout with a partner who is losing fat, then you’ll have a greater chance of losing fat as well.

And finally, a third study found that the more often subjects checked in to an online fat loss forum (like the TT Member’s forum), the more likely they were to lose a lot of fat.

Get your team together and you’ll get more results – faster.

Day 5 – The 60 Minute Solution

Why am I telling you to get 60-minutes of activity on your off days from TT?

Well, to be honest, I do NOT expect you to burn massive amounts of fat with easy, off-day activity.

However, every minute you spend moving, you are NOT snacking! I know the biggest problem you will have is your diet. So instead of snacking in front of the computer or TV, spend your free time away from food. That’s the simple secret to the 60 minute solution.

So get 60 minutes of activity on Day 5.

Day 6 – The Challenge

Your 3rd TT workout needs to be a challenge workout so that you can improve your performance each week. In fact, you should set at least one personal best in each workout. If you improve your performance, your physique will improve as well. You can use one of the TT bodyweight, Adrenaline, or Addiction Challenge workouts.

Day 7 – Diet Check-In and Reward Meal

Congratulations, you’ve made it through 7 amazing days of fat burning. Today you’re going to double check your nutrition plan by reviewing your food journal.

If you haven’t already done so, eliminate all liquid calories and replace with water and Green Tea.

If you need to learn more about nutrition, start using the free service called Fitday.com. It will help you track your calories.

And if you’re really struggling to avoid night eating, try this tip. Place a small mirror on your fridge door. Research shows that subjects consumed fewer calories when they did this because it will remind you to make smarter choices.

Finally, as a reward for all of your hard work, you can treat yourself to your favorite meal. But that doesn’t mean gorging. It simply means having a normal meal of your favorite foods to give you a mental break from your plan. When the meal is over, don’t go back for seconds. Get right back on the 14-day plan instead.

Days 7 & 8 are also 60 minute off-day activity days.

Day 8 – Review your goals.

It’s no good to write your goals down and then forget them. Review them at least weekly, if not daily. Heck, carry them around in your pocket and look at them at every meal.

As you workout, visualize yourself reaching your goals. Believe in yourself, keep a positive attitude, stay motivated and you’ll continue to make fast fat loss progress every day.

This will also be another great day to plan, shop, and prepare.

Day 9 – Take It to Another Level

Week one was great, but with only 5 days left it is time for you to step it up again. This time I want you to hire a trainer for just one TT session to make sure you are doing all the exercises correctly and training as hard as you can (safely, of course).

Add this trainer to your support team. And by the way, a good trainer should be able to estimate your body fat better than any of those “fat scales” you can buy at a store…so get them to check that too.

Day 10 – Plan Your Next Shopping Trip

Today is another 60 minutes of off-day activity, and you’ll also work on improving your nutrition even more. What I want you to do is focus on eating more from the Fat Loss Foundation.

The 3 components of my Simple Nutrition Fat Loss Foundation are raw fruits, vegetables, and nuts. Research shows that eating more of these 3 foods will help you lose weight better than a diet that is low in fruits, vegetables and nuts.

Make an effort to eat one new fruit, vegetable, and nut each week during your between meal snacks.

If you aren’t already eating grapefruit, try one today and see how it helps fill you up (because it contains a lot of soluble fiber called pectin). Add a new vegetable – such as broccoli, cauliflower, or asparagus – to your dinner. And try walnuts or pecans instead of almonds at your morning break.

Slowly but surely increase the fiber in your diet until you hit the recommended amount of 35 grams per day.

And I hope this goes without saying, but you should have eliminated all foods that contain added sugar. That is one the simplest yet most effective nutrition changes you can make.

Day 11 – Recruit Again

Add a new member into your social support team, such as a new workout partner or healthy-eating partner. This will add strength to your commitment. If possible, join a transformation contest online, or start one among your friends or co-workers.

But when you do that, keep in mind that you want to help other people succeed. The more you can help others lose fat, the more you will help yourself as you share what’s working with your friends and they show you their fat loss secrets too. Stay positive, and you’ll build a powerful fat loss team.

Today is also another TT fat loss workout day, so give it your best.

Day 12 – Check-In Time

Today you’ll re-measure your weight, body fat, and measurements. Take a look in the mirror to compare yourself against your before photo to see big changes that will motivate you to stay strong.

I also want you to start thinking about getting a tan. Yes, I said getting a tan. Why? Because simply adding a little bit of color to your body can make you look leaner. There’s a reason all those models in supplement ads are tanned, you know.

Finally, if there is a “big day” at the end of the 14-days, make sure you try on the outfit you are going to wear to double-check that it is going to look great on you.

Make sure you do this check-in either before your 60 minutes of activity or a few hours after so that exercise does not mess-up the numbers.

Day 13 – Mental Performance Review

Write down all obstacles that are still in your way of success, and then brainstorm 2 solutions to overcome each. Get some help from your social support team on this. The more you and your team share solutions, the more fat you – and everyone else – will lose.

For example, you might come up with rules like, “No eating in the car” to help cut down on bad food choices. Someone else might suggest “brush your teeth after dinner to avoid night-time snacking”. Those are simple yet powerful tips to keep you on the fast-track to fat loss.

Follow up this positive session with your best TT workout yet!

Day 14 – Review, Plan, & Prepare

Congrats on making so many powerful changes in just 2 short weeks.

By now, you’ll probably have lost 5-12 pounds of fat and just as importantly, you’ll have developed proven, life-long fat burning habits that will be easy for you to stick to forever.

Keep this weight loss train moving by reviewing your original goals. Next, do your planning, shopping, and preparing for another week, and get ready for even more fat loss.

Enjoy your 14-day results and celebrate with a reward meal (and show off your firmer, leaner body at the big event too!).

Wishing you success!

Please email me with your success story in 14 days (or sooner!),

Craig Ballantyne, CSCS, MS
Creator, Turbulence Training
http://www.turbulencetraining.com/tryitforonedollar.shtml

Last day in part 2 of my interview with Scott Colby, I talked about what to do if you’re trying to lose fat, but love carbs.  If that sounds like you, then you’ll definitely want to go back and read up on that.

Today we discuss another familiar question – you eat well, workout regularly, but can’t seem to lose the belly fat.  So what should you do?  Let’s find out…

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Scott Colby: Let’s see – our next question, Richard Steele out in Hollister, California.  He says, “I work out three times a week and am active the rest of the week.  I eat as clean as possible, but cannot get rid of the last of my belly pouch. I’m 62 and hover around 8 percent body fat” – that’s awesome, congratulations!  “8 percent body fat at 185 pounds.  I used to weight 250 pounds.

“Maybe I don’t eat enough to free the need to hoard fat for energy.” So basically, he’s 62, he’s lost a lot of weight, 8 percent body fat, and trying to get rid of the last of his fat in his stomach.

Craig Ballantyne: Well, 8 percent’s kind of hard to believe if you do have remaining body fat, because in pictures of me where I’m kind of – you know on my blog at ttfatloss.com or on my website, my famous kind of ab shot, I don’t even think I’m 8 percent body fat in that shot.

So there may be some error in the measurement, which I’m not making any friends here with this answer.  But I just don’t believe that you can be 8 percent body fat and have belly fat that is visible, because 8 percent body fat, that’s what the guys on the cover of Men’s Health magazine are.

So there may be some error in measurement, but then we take into account the fact that you have lost body fat in the past, it may be excess skin.  And that excess skin is going to be difficult to remove at age 62, because that’s when our skin elasticity starts to lose its ability to just kind of rebound.

So really we go back to the same thing that I said to our first guy, George.  We take a look at the NUTRITION.  Is it really as good as we say it is? Do all those things that we talked about.  And then increase the intensity of the exercise.  And that’s really the only two things that are really gonna work here.

Without knowing how many calories he’s consuming, without knowing the exact foods, we can’t talk about that last question that he asked.  But I know we’re gonna get into the how many calories and that type of stuff, so I may as well cover that right now.

How much protein should I consume?

And the answer to how much protein that you should consume per day is gonna be one gram per pound of your ideal body weight. So I’m just answering this because I know we’re gonna cover it.  But one gram per pound of your ideal body weight.

EXAMPLE:

So if you’re 150 pounds and you wanna be 140 pounds, then that’s how many grams of protein you should have is 140 grams.

And then your DAILY CALORIE INTAKE should be this:

It’s going to be – your daily calories are going to be your ideal body weight multiplied by the number of hours you exercise plus 9.5.

EXAMPLE:

So let’s say we’re using 180 pounds as our goal body weight, and our daily calories are gonna be 180, and he’s exercising 3 hours per week, so it’ll be 3 plus 9.5, which will give us 12.5, multiplied by 180.  I had this on my blog at ttfatloss.com.  Now using 180 times 12.5, we get 2250 as a daily calorie intake.

And then from there, we get 180 grams of protein, and then the number of FAT GRAMS we’re gonna want is half of our ideal body weight in grams.

So our ideal body weight is 180 pounds, so fat intake per day is gonna be 90 grams.  Then CARBOHYDRATES is simply gonna be the same as protein, so it’s gonna be 180 grams as well.

So that would be – and I’m getting this equation from Men’s Health magazine, from a guy named Alan Aragon, who I think is a really, really smart nutritionist.  Common sense – lots of common sense there.  And so if you’re exercising 3 hours per week and you wanna be 180 pounds, which would help our gentleman here lose some body fat and belly fat, then 2250 calories per day is maybe what he wants.

Now another thing to do, if that seems high to him – and it may well be – then here’s another thing to do….

Write down everything that you’re eating.  Figure out how many calories that is.

If you’re NOT losing belly fat on that, then chances are you have to decrease that amount and increase the quality of your food. So the very first thing that you do is:

• Make sure that you’re eating ten servings of fruits and vegetables.
• Increase the quality of the food.
• Eliminate anything from a bag or a box.
• Then maybe even recalculating your calorie intake now that you’ve improved the quality of your diet.
• If you’re still not losing weight, then talk about decreasing your calories 10 or 20 percent.

However, if he writes and is concerned that he’s not eating enough, it’s tough to say without knowing the actual numbers here.  And then there’s two actual numbers.

There’s the number of calories he BELIEVES he’s eating, and then the number of calories that we’re ACTUALLY eating after we go through that equation and do the seven day food journal and really find out is there anywhere where we’re doing what’s called mindless eating, which is when you go home from work and it’s between work and dinner.

And you’re just kind of putting your hands in all types of things – a cookie here, a handful of chips there, whatever.  That’s MINDLESS EATING.  It can add up to a lot of calories in a lot of people, and that’s the type of thing that we have to put routines into our life.

Such as instead of going home and doing that, the first thing I do when I go home while I’m preparing dinner is I cut up lots of broccoli, peppers, mini-carrots, and prepare hummus, and that’s what I snack on.  So even if I filled myself up on that, I’d probably only eat 200-250 calories, versus if I had one cookie and a handful of chips, I might have 250 calories and no dent in my hunger was even made.

So that’s the kind of stuff we have to watch out for is the mindless eating.

And then we put those routines in there to make sure that we are not doing that type of stuff.  And then we also figure out from that calorie and food journal are the portion sizes that we’re eating, were they twice as much than what we thought?  And therefore we’re eating an extra 300 calories at breakfast, an extra 150 calories at lunch, an extra 250 calories at dinner.  And if we cut those portions back, then we start getting results.

So there’s a lot of factors.  I mean really every single one of these questions needs to be answered in an entire one-hour sit-down consultation.

Scott Colby: You got that much time, Craig?

Craig Ballantyne: Well, you know there’s so many factors in here.  I’m trying to be pretty straightforward about it and trying to cover every single angle from which we can attack this.  But I think that he’s certainly living a great lifestyle, and he deserves better results than what he’s getting if he’s struggling with that.  So hopefully those are some alternatives that will come through for him.

Scott Colby: Yeah.  All good advice, Craig.  And I’ll send out a link to your blog where people can get that equation that you were determining the calories and the fat grams.

Craig Ballantyne: Sure.

Scott Colby: And we’ve covered weight training and such, and I’ll just recommend maybe he could take a look at his workouts just to make sure he’s changing it up.

A lot of people do the same routine for months, and that may be one thing he needs to do is increase the weight or change the routine of the workout.  And then just something simple, like when I went through a pretty good transformation, one of the big things – and we’ve talked about it – I just cut out cereals and most breads and that made a big difference in my belly fat.

Again, it was stuff I thought was healthy for me that it turned out had too many ingredients that were holding me back in my results.  So just maybe some simple tweaks, but you gave some great suggestions.

Let’s jump to the next question regarding low calorie diets for fat loss.

If you’re involved in a body transformation contest or simply trying to lose fat, but finding it difficult to stick to your plan, then I recommend going back to part 3 of my interview with Brad Pilon.  Brad not only offers some of his best tips to help you see your transformation to the end, but also reveals just how little resistance training you need to maintain muscle mass.

Today, in part 4, we’ll take a closer look at Pilon’s fasting for fat loss book, Eat Stop Eat, and get to the truth about fasting and its effect on your metabolism.  Interesting stuff!

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Craig Ballantyne:  Okay.  So why don’t you give us a quick background on the Eat Stop Eat?  Everybody who’s got this report also has the Eat Stop Eat book so they can read in detail about it, but why don’t you just give us a quick background on the Eat Stop Eat.

From my understanding it’s just eat normal for six days and then fast for 24 hours and then as a result of that you end up with a caloric deficit and so it’s more important over seven days than it is to worry about dieting every day.

Brad Pilon: That’s exactly my approach.  So the key is it’s still the food in between.  I mean it’s always going to come down to what you’re eating but the concept behind Eat Stop Eat is that if you cut out one or two 24-hour chunks of eating from your week and eat the regular way you normally eat to maintain your current weight, that’s almost a 20 percent REDUCTION in food intake if you fasted twice.

And thus you should see a reduction in calories while on the days you are eating you’re still eating the way you normally eat.  And the concept really WORKS for the type of people – and everybody knows them – who want to lose weight and when you start making suggestions on things for them to change they are simply not willing to change their diet.

So it leaves you in a really odd position.  Like I don’t know how to get this person to eat less and then all of a sudden the obvious answer is just ask them to eat less via frequency.  Or the amount of times they eat.

So what it’s designed to do is just make it extremely EASY to do long term.  I mean I’ve been fasting with the twice a week now for almost 18 months now.  And I’ve never really had a situation where I got tired of it or sick of it because I space it out in a way that completely agrees with me.

For me I fast once every five days and it just seems to work.  It’s been the best way for me to keep my body weight extremely low.  I mean I’m never more than five, six pounds off of the weight I competed at.  And it’s just an easy way to maintain caloric restriction.

Over the years I’ve come to think that the bulking and cutting cycling and the ratios approaching the carbs or fast proteins to slow proteins and high glycemic carbs and low glycemic carbs really becomes just moot points compared to how many calories you are or aren’t taking in.

And whether you can do a diet long term is I think the key to success from not only your physique transformation but maintain that transformation.  I can think back and I used to do it all the time when I was young.

The whole concept of dieting for the summer and then ballooning up during the winter.  I mean how counter productive and frustrating is that.  Whereas if you just maintain a lean body 365 days a year it’s way better.

So that’s basically East Stop Eat in a nutshell.  It’s a way to make dieting flexible but still effective.

Craig Ballantyne:  Okay.  And for anybody that is reading this or listening to this, you also can go into the Turbulence Training Members,  and we have a teleseminar with Brad where I have an hour-long interview with him about Eat Stop Eat and the fasting approach to weight loss.  So make sure that you check that out for more information.

Now, Brad, one of the things that we covered in that call but we’ll cover again here is the concern or myth that doing something like that is going to RUIN your METABOLISM.  Do you want to approach that?

Brad Pilon: Yeah.  Absolutely.  Going back to quoting the research which always irks some people but the main determinant, the thing that determines your metabolism or your metabolic rate is your lean body mass.  And as we just discussed if you’re weight training and dieting your lean body mass isn’t really changing. And so if your lean body mass isn’t really changing, then neither is your metabolism.

If you want to take it a bit further, if you look at research studies, there are specific measurements you can take.  One is metabolic rate.  One is RQ which is just a measure of how much fat versus carbs your body is burning.  And two other things you can look at are the two enzymes.  One’s responsible for moving fat out of your fat cells and one’s responsible for moving fat into your fat cells.

And you can look at those four things during a one, two, three, four-day fast and you see that okay lean mass doesn’t go down so you’re maintaining your metabolic rate.  The RQ does go down which means you’re burning more fat.  And the activity of the enzyme releasing fat goes up while the activity of the enzyme that brings fat into your fat cells goes down.

So all signs point to the fact that you’re maintaining your metabolic rate while burning more fat which is exactly what you want during a diet because the GOAL of the diet isn’t just to lose weight.  It’s to LOSE FAT.

So based on that data, small, short periods of complete fasting don’t decrease your metabolic rate or mess up your potential fat burning ability.  So then over a long period of time considering the fact that you will go back to eating you are eating smaller amounts and you are resistance training to keep your lean mass up.

There’s really no reason to believe that you are slowing your metabolism or ruining your fat-burning ability.  Now, you throw inactivity in or become bedridden and lose muscle mass, then that’s a completely different story.  And it’s a result of muscle wasting is indeed a loss of metabolic rate but if you maintain that muscle by training properly it’s not a concern.

Craig Ballantyne:  Okay.  So the big point there is people seem to be getting carried away with articles these days that if you miss a meal your metabolism is going to decrease.

Brad Pilon: Ridiculous.  And I understand in a way it’s a great SCARE TACTIC to sell the idea of multiple meals or certain types of meals or certain ratios but just in the sense of your metabolism slowing down or ruining your ability to burn fat, it just isn’t there.

Craig Ballantyne:  So why don’t you give us a success story of Eat Stop Eat and maybe some beginner that came up that had a hard time losing body fat and has been able to succeed with Eat Stop Eat and how they have done it and put it in their lifestyle.

Brad Pilon: Absolutely.  The people I notice that have been having the results from Eat Stop Eat and the ones who are emailing in and I get a chance to talk to are people who have either had problems with diets in the past or just didn’t even want to bother.

It’s the type of people who when they looked at the pros and cons of dropping 30, 40 pounds of fat versus massive alterations in their lifestyle they just weren’t into it.  They did the pro and con and said as much as I’d love to look better and drop some weight, it’s not worth the change.

And so that’s when those type of people were like okay, this program here which is pretty easy to follow.  As long as I can make it through one of these fasts I know I can make it through all the subsequent fasts so they all sort of start out the same.

People are fairly HESITANT at first.  They give me all the reasons why they probably can’t do the fast.  And then I don’t hear from them for a while because they’ve tried the first fast, they’ve realized it’s fairly easy and they’re just going forward with it.

And then it’s people I have talked to once or twice and then all of a sudden four or five months later I get these emails and these pictures of people who have dropped 40 pounds.  Really amazing things like that.  And a couple of them I’ve had a chance to meet and it was like an entirely different person.

The STORIES were always the SAME.

It’s always I started fasting.  It was easy.  I got the hang of it.  I started working out.  And then the workouts are typically like I really started weight training and then I started intervals.  They were hard but I could do them.  And then I found that I could do them on my fasting days.  That wasn’t a problem.  And then four months later I’m meeting people who have lost a tremendous amount of weight.

And the cool thing is then because fasting is so easy they don’t have to all of a sudden worry about and then I stopped my diet and everything went to hell.  And I’m still fasting.  I just don’t fast as often.

So that’s the great part.  Is so many people who went down from 240 to 200 but then I see them a couple months later and they’re 195 and they’re 180 but they’re not just ballooning back up because they just incorporated the fast lifestyle and the weight training and the rest of the life changes that kind of happen as you start seeing weight loss.

But it’s for those people who really think they can’t do it on other diets that seem to have the best success.

Let’s find out what other nutrition and transformation tips Brad has for us in part 5 of this interview.

Whew-wee…we’ve covered a lot so far and if you’re just jumping in now, then be sure to check out part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 of my 9-part interview series with P90X creator, Tony Horton.

Today we’re going to switch gears a little bit and see what advice Tony has for us in terms of diet and  nutrition.

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Craig Ballantyne:    Yeah.  It’s such a simple thing that can be so powerful.  And I’m sure that you guys have seen it, like you said, thousands and thousands and thousands of times – amazing stories of people literally cutting their body weight in half.

Tony Horton: You know Dallas Carter lost 160 pounds.  This girl, Julianne, lost 110 pounds. They – in both their stories;

they didn’t count a calorie;

they just stopped eating junk.

And they stopped eating huge meals.

And they stopped eating before they went to bed.

And the problem with most people is that they have a food addiction, and they’re not willing to admit it.  They have a serious food – they’re addicted to the crap ingredients that is in most food.  And it’s hard to get off.  It’s maybe not as hard as getting off of cigarettes, but it’s really hard.  You know what I mean?

So I tell folks, I say, “Find fruits, vegetables, whole grains, lean proteins, and healthy fats, and find the spices that make those things taste good.  And find the restaurants that will make the food the way you want it.” I can go into any restaurant, anywhere, and ask for exactly what I want.  I mean, it’s not – I’m not gonna say I’m gonna get the thin crust, whole grain pizza covered in vegetables with no cheese, but I’ll get something close.  I’ll get something close.

And I always tell the waiter – like, people say, “Well, what do you do when you go out?  What do you do when you travel?”  I say, “Put a cooler in the car, plug it in, and then put – you know, PLAN ahead.”  Nutritionists – just like their workouts.

If you wanna have success with your workouts, you have to have a PLAN.  Same thing with food.

You have to have a – if you’re going on a trip and you’re gonna be in a car, and you didn’t pack the – and the night before and put it in your cooler in the car the next morning, then you have not made your PLAN and you have set yourself up for FAILURE.

You’re gonna be starving, and there’s gonna be Kentucky Fried Chicken, McDonald’s, and Burger King, and Pizza Hut along the way, and you’re gonna make a mistake.  You know?  There are certain rules to success.  I call it the “cycle of success.”

There are certain things that have to be done every day, for you to succeed, for your day to be great.

I’m 51 years old, and ten minutes ago, I was eight, playing catch in my front yard.  I’m 51.  How’d that happen?  The trip is short.  You’d better get your act together.  You know what I mean?  Are you gonna go out like a lot of people, the last 20 years of your life?  And it’s an ugly picture, filled with lack of movement, lots of depression, and too many pills.

Craig Ballantyne:    Those are powerful, powerful points there.  And Tony, you know, seeing you on Facebook and just listening to the last five minutes of conversation there, you’re a true motivator and a very inspirational person.

Now, what is it that – what are some of the things that you have seen in your personal training with clients that has helped people stay motivated?  Obviously just simply knowing to PLAN, planning ahead, keeping it as simple as possible.  What else has really been very successful in helping people that you’ve trained in person and through P90X to stay motivated and stick with the program?

Tony Horton: You know what I learned a long time ago is that – there’s a great article in Time magazine that came out, I don’t know, about five or six years ago.  It was the ten most important trends of the millennium.  And number nine was called “Infotainment.”  And I’m kind of hardwired for that.  I mean, that’s just kind of who I am.  I mean, I was an actor and a comic, and I also loved fitness.

So I could take really dull, hard to swallow stuff and make it more palatable for people through little – like, a lot of my expressions, “Do your best and forget the rest,” “You’re only good at things you do often,” “Fruits, vegetables, whole grains, lean protein, and healthy fats,” you know, “the cycle of success,” “communication,” you know, “meditation” – these are all things that I – that are short and easy to remember and keep you on track.

I mean, I know you have a lot of trainers out there, but the thing is, a lot of trainers and nutritionists and everything – they treat this stuff like rocket science.

Well, the stuff is hard to swallow as it is; and then we’re gonna make it dry and boring on top of that?  Oh, my God.  You know?  The reason why P90X is successful is because Carl Daikeler, the CEO, and Jon Congdon, our president, said, “Horton, go do your thing.  We’ll tone you down if you get too crazy,” you know?

So I was able to just – I mean, I go on QVC and I just act like a clown.  I mean, I just – you know, why make this stuff – it’s – push-ups are hard.  Pull-ups are hard.  Squats are hard.  Cardio sucks.  You know?

I mean, if we’re gonna make it really important _____ giving all the statistics and the range of motion and the Krebs cycle – shut up.  If your client wants that, and if that’s important, great.  If they wanna count calories, then you’re better to show them how.  But other than that, you’d better get a sense of humor.  Get a sense of humor about it, man.  And give people a break.

A guy – I have a friend of mine; she’s brilliant.  Brilliant.  She does Gyrotonics and Pilates.  But she starts working with me, and she doesn’t cut me a break.  She asks me to do things that I physically can’t do, and she looks at me like I’m crazy.

“You’re a trainer.”  I said, “I’ve never done this move before in my life.  I have a learning curve, thank you very much, so I’d like you to be more patient and have a better sense of humor and show me a modified version.”  And if you’re supposed to be so good – those – you’ve got degrees up the ying yang, but you can’t show me those three things?  So that’s important, I think.

Craig Ballantyne:    That’s awesome stuff.  I mean, aside from just being really interesting and motivational to the people that are listening for the fat loss purpose, the trainers – I hope you really paid attention to what Tony just said there.

It was CAREER-CHANGING advice for you.

If you can be entertaining and break things down into very simple concepts from the very – from slightly complex stuff that nutrition and exercise can be, you will help a lot more people.  And Tony – with 18,000-plus fans on Facebook, on your Facebook fan page, you are certainly helping a lot of people.

To discover the rest of Tony Horton’s fat burning advice:

Click here to listen to this exclusive interview

I promise you’ll learn a lot to help you lose belly fat

We’re now onto part 4 of the 9-part interview with Tony Horton, but if you missed part 3 where he revealed the fountain of youth, and why not being able to do something right away might actually be a good thing, then you’ll want to check that out.

Today,  Tony discusses what kind of results you can really expect from working out only 10 minutes a day, as well as offering alternatives to doing long, slow boring cardio that will keep you motivated and coming back for more.  So let’s get into….What To Do When You Hate Working Out

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Craig Ballantyne: So let’s switch gears and talk about the ten-minute programs that you have now.  Why don’t you tell the folks listening at home what people can really get done in ten minutes and then how you structured those workouts to get the absolute, 100 percent out of every single second in those ten minutes?

Tony Horton: Well, remember when the ten-minute trainer came out, everybody was calling me a sellout, you know what I mean?  “Oh, Mr. Extreme Fitness is selling ten-minute workouts.  He’s a sellout.”  Well, what I’m trying to do – what Carl Daikeler, our CEO, is trying to do – is get as many people moving and getting off the couch as possible.

So there’s a MASSIVE demographic of people who can’t even get near Power 90 or P90X, folks that have got 60, 70, 150 pounds to lose.  There’s a lot more of those kinds of people in this country than ever before.

So the only way you’re gonna get them off the couch is introduce them to routines that are obviously shorter.

They have to still be intense.  I mean, they can’t be – walking ten minutes is not gonna have the same amount of results as something that is very synergistic in nature, where you’re lunging and curling and pressing and kicking and – you know what I mean?  That’s the thing about the ten-minute trainer routines.  Each one of those ten-minute workouts are NOT a walk in the park. Some of them have the same level of intensity as parts of the P90X routine.

The idea is, I show you modifications – “Look, here’s the advanced way to do it; here’s the super-modified way to do it.  Pick one that you can physically do, but I want you to finish the ten minutes.”  You know, “Just do the ten minutes.” So the idea is to try to get two of those in a day.

Now, if you did just ten minutes a day, the results would come, very slowly – that is, if you modified your diet, right; you got all the junk out and you started eating better.  But at twice a day, the idea is – we sell the ten-minute trainer as a means to help people who have very tight schedules to start working out, people who have had all these excuses, “I don’t have time, right?  I need – I don’t need –”  So it takes you ten minutes to make the bed.  You can work out in ten minutes.

But the demographic that we don’t talk about are people who HATE exercise.

Hate it.  They just – “Ah, forget it.  I don’t like sweating; I don’t like breathing hard; I don’t like my muscles being sore.”  So the idea is to try to introduce to those folks, “Look, if you want the quality of your life to improve, you’re not gonna get it through a pill, a potion, or processed food.  You’ve been wasting your time and going around in cycles with that.  Why don’t you try stepping up – do ten minutes in the morning?”

I have a cousin who’s a perfect example.

She didn’t like going to a gym; she had a bunch of kids.  She had the time. I mean, she knew that she could make the time.  She just didn’t want to.  And so I said, “Look.  Here’s a disc.  It’s me.  It’s your cousin.  Just put it in the thing and do it.”  I mean, what’s – and she lost a bunch of weight.  She has a ton of energy.  And she got off some of the basic crap food that she was eating, and she got amazing results.  So –

Craig Ballantyne: Very good.  All right, so let’s talk about interval training.  I was reading, actually, your – there’s a Wikipedia page on Tony Horton, and it was talking about how you got into interval training with the help of, I think, Mark Sisson or something.  And so why don’t you tell us about your favorite interval type of training, your favorite duration, length, that type of workout, and then how you like to do interval training the best?  Is it some type of cardio machine, or is it biking outside, or what do you like to do for interval training?

Tony Horton: Well, I do different kinds of interval training.  Like, the one that I’m gonna do tonight is a leg – is a Plyometric legs routine.  And so, unlike the Plyo routine in P90X – we kind of go from one to another to another of super-intense Plyometric move to a semi-intense to a completely non-Plyometric move, because you need that.  You can’t do Plyo, Plyo, Plyo, Plyo.  There’s just – the lactic – the Krebs cycle won’t – I’m not – how do I say this in basic terms?  There’s just – the lactic acid builds up so your muscles burn out and you can’t do it.

So the routine I’m doing tonight is a combination of a Plyometric movement and basic leg moves.  So there’s a lunge move; there’s a squat move; there’s a Plyo move.  And we kind of rotate.  And there’s some – I have a lot of isometric movements in there.  We do chair against the wall, one-legged chair against the wall.

And I – and we try to go as quickly as we can, because the heart rate shoots way through the roof.  And then you take a short break, maybe 15 seconds, and you get – 15, maybe 30, if there’s – sometimes we have 12 people here at my house doing it, so some folks, I don’t wanna leave them behind.  So we have to – more people slows it down.  But that’s one of my favorite interval routines.

The other one I do is on machines.

I love doing intervals on – like at my house, here at my gym, I have a slide board; I have a ski machine; I have a VersaClimber; I have a stationary bike; I have a treadmill; I have a platform to jump rope on; I have a set of stairs and a heavy bag.  Now, what I’ll do is I’ll do five minutes on each one of those, right?  So – and then I even have them all numbered.  I went and had them all, like, and then – with these interchangeable numbers.

So it’s this – every Wednesday night, I do this mixed-up – I call it core cardio interval routine.  So the heart rate’s up, and then you’re going full blast.  Five minutes is awesome.  It’s a perfect amount of time for me just to go crazy.  Then I hop off; I give myself, like, 30 seconds, and then, bang, I jump on another one.

And the great thing about that is, if you think about it – you can go for a 45-minute run, and what are you doing the whole time?

You’re running.  You’re running, you’re running, you’re running, you’re running. 

So you might hurt your knees, you might hurt your ankle, you might hurt your back.  You’re very susceptible to injury, especially as you get older.  Have you ever watched somebody in their 60s or 70s run?  Holy cow, you just wanna pick them up and throw them in a yoga class, you know?

And – but when you’re doing a routine like that, you go from a lateral ski exercise to a vertical VersaClimber routine to a linear running thing and then to a Plyometric jump roping thing.  I mean, you can’t beat that.  You’re less vulnerable to injury.  You’re less vulnerable to getting hurt.  And it’s a heck of a lot more fun, man, when you’re mixing it up like that.

To discover the rest of Tony Horton’s fat burning advice:

Click here to listen to this exclusive interview

I promise you’ll learn a lot to help you lose belly fat