Congrats to our Power Lifter!

Congratulations Josh! Josh successfully did a 402lb. deadlift in the 181lbs weight class.  And he WON for the 2^nd consecutive time this year! (For full disclosure, Josh was the only one in his weight class but that makes it no less impressive.)

Josh has been training for power lifting in general for about 6 months.  Check out what he accomplished!

Josh has been a client of The Body You Want for over a year working on and accomplishing his goals! He started as a fat loss client and is now a power lifting client – and still very lean!

To all the women who think lifting heavy weights will make them grow!  Lifting heavy weights actually make you shrink!  Check out this post:  HEAVY WEIGHTS AND TINY WOMEN: LIFTING HEAVY MAKES WOMEN SHRINK

Josef Brandenburg is Washington, DC’s #1 Fat-Loss Expert for busy people. He helps normal people with hectic schedules and average genetics create the bodies they want in the time they actually have. Josef is an award-winning Washington, DC personal trainer with 10 years of professional experience. When working with The Body You Want a typical male client can expect to drop 10 pounds of body fat in the first 4 weeks (not the same as weight), and a typical female client can expect to drop a dress size in the first 4 weeks.

It Really Has Been A BIG, FAT Lie – The Real Science Behind Dietary Fat, Cholesterol and Your Health

I originally did this interview to help my clients maintain their fat-loss. On the nutrition side of things I use low-carb diets to help people drop a lot of body fat without being hungry. However, there is one huge problem with low-carb diets – other people’s ill-informed opinions.

Here’s a typical conversation:

Coworker: “WOW! You look fantastic – like you’ve dropped 40 pounds. You never even had a neck before. How did you do it?”

My client: “I’ve been eating low-carb and lifting weights and doing intervals.”

Coworker: “WTF!? Are you trying to kill yourself!? Low-carb diets are the most dangerous things ever – all that fat and cholesterol is going to make your heart explode!”

My client usually says nothing, and inside a very negative conversation begins. “Hmmm… What if they’re right? What if I am trading my health for a great body? What if all this steak and eggs really is going to kill me?”

The problem is that their coworker is sincere, BUT the information is sincerely wrong.

They literally have NO IDEA WHAT THEY ARE TALKING ABOUT whatsoever. They’ve probably never read and comprehended primary research on nutrition in their entire lives. (By the way, almost none of the students in my 400 level nutrition classes had ever read a single study on their own. They were just parroting what the food pyramid said.)

Very few people understand statistics, research design, biochemistry, or anything else that makes reviewing research worthwhile. As a nerd, I keep two different biochemistry textbooks in my office to read for fun.

Most people get their opinions from other people who get their opinions from other people who got their opinions from the media, and the people who report on health and exercise are not usually scientifically literate. They will write up whatever the spokesperson for the study has to say and will almost never critically evaluate the study. (For an example read this on red meat and this on a sham diet study.)

So what I did for my clients was arrange an interview with Gary Taubes. He’s one of the few people on planet Earth who has reviewed the entire field of literature on public health, nutrition and obesity.

He spent multiple full-time years with multiple assistants in multiple libraries – whose salaries he paid – and hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own money to do this. If there is a study out there that was ever published ANYWHERE on diet and health he has read it and is great at helping people understand it.

So Gary, will the saturated fat and cholesterol in a low carb diet kill you?

This was actually my fear when I first started a low-carb diet 10 years ago as an experiment. I’d sit there eating scrambled eggs and bacon for breakfast waiting for my heart to blow up, then I did some research.

I wanted to see how we came to believe this idea that saturated fat and cholesterol are bad for you, and whether or not our beliefs were justified. Believe it or not, I have actually read all of the field going back to the 1800’s. One of the things that I was looking for was the point when the idea that saturated fat and cholesterol were killers was still controversial. That was in the 1970’s.

The first thing I saw was… the rest of this interview is published at Primer Magazine.

OH, and please don’t forget to vote for me right here.  It only takes 2 clicks to vote and I would really appreciate your help.

Josef Brandenburg is 2010, Washington, DC  Personal Trainer of the Year Nominee for both Personal Fitness Professional Magazine and The Washington, DC Fitness Association, The DC Fitness Advisor and the Fitness Expert for the PCOS Challenge TV Show. He shows normal people with hectic lives and average genetics how to create the bodies they want in the time they actually have. To find out more about the 7-Day Free Trial click here. You can also pick up a FREE copy of his brand new CD – “Why Eat Less and Exercise More is The Worst Advice Ever” here.

The Scales Can Lie – How You Can Be Normal Weight, Yet Obese

After 40 years, medical research has finally caught up with the fitness industry (well, the few competent folks in the fitness industry) when it comes to scale weight.  The “shocking” new news made it a big splash in The Wall Street Journal is that “you can be normal weight and fat at the same time.”  The “amazing” discovery is that, low and behold, scale weight is not the be all and end all after all.

However the people that did this study caution that “the findings [that body fat % is as important or more important than scale weight] need to be validated with additional research.”

Well, while they take 10 years and $100 million to do additional research here’s how you can apply this NOW for FREE.

#1.  Ignore traditional advice

It takes a lot of time to do and it sucks when it comes to results.  Case in point – the Women’s Health Initiative 2006:  The experimental group reduced their saturated fat and cholesterol intake and cut their overall caloric intake by an average of 360 calories per day for 8 whole years.

Let’s do the math on that to see how many pounds that they should have lost if the whole “calories in vs. calories out” thing worked in the human body:

360calories/day x 7days/week x 52 weeks/yr = 131,040 calories (food calories, so, technically, that’s kilocalories).

A pound of fat has 3,500 calories.  So, they should have lost 37.4 pounds per year.

However, on average they lost about 2 pounds.  BUT, and this is particularly apropos to the article, they GAINED in waist circumference!  In other words they got fatter at a slightly lower weight.

#2.  Measure what matters

What matters most is what your body is composed of – body composition.  How much of you is fat and how much of you is lean?  This determines how you look naked.

It is entirely possible for a woman to drop 2 sizes (i.e. 8 to a 4) but to only drop 5lbs on the scale.  If she were to just go by the scale, then the 3 months that it took to achieve this would seem like a waste – only 5 pounds in 3 months!  But, if she looked at herself in the mirror she would say, “wow!  No more cellulite!”  And if she looked at how her clothes fit, she’d notice that her pants don’t stay up.  (By that I mean that her pants are too big for her now.  What were you thinking?)

It’s possible for a man to gain weight while loses body-fat.  If you just went by the scale, you would say that he failed – he gained weight.  But if you looked at him in the mirror, you’d see exactly what most men want – more muscle and less fat at the same time.

Traditional weight loss programs emphasize the number on the scale, and have people on low-fat, low calorie diet doing lots of aerobic exercise.  On this type of program 25-50% of what you’ll lose will be lean body mass.  So, if you drop 10 pounds, up to 5 could be lean body mass.

In body composition, losing fat and gaining muscle are both positives.  On the scale the above person would be a success.  But, in terms of body composition, they made no progress at all – 5lbs of lean lost, and 5lbs of fat lost = 0lbs net progress.

The most practical way for most people to measure their body composition is with a tape measure.  It is simple, fast, reliable (if you get spring-loaded tape measure so you always use the same amount of tension) and does not require you to be dunked underwater with no air in your lungs or to be exposed to radiation.

Most health clubs offer skin fold caliper readings, BUT, these are neither accurate nor precise (reliable) unless you happen to get somebody who has done several thousand skin fold measurements in a research setting.  That is unlikely with the low pay and high turnover at health clubs.

The electric scales and hand held devices for measuring body fat (bioelectrical impedance) are horrible in my opinion.  I’ve measured myself twice in a day and been 9% mid day and 13% in the evening.  I don’t even think that they’re useful to measure change with.

If you really, really want a very accurate, direct reading of your body composition there are 3 options:

•    DEXA – a machine that uses x-rays to measure both bone density and body composition.  (The draw back is that you have to be exposed to radiation, so you can’t do this very often.)

•    Hydrostatic weighing – underwater weighing.  This is a way to get your density – body composition.  Just unpleasant, but no radiation.

•    Bod Pod – uses a chamber of pressurized air instead of water and a scale to get your density.  This seems to be less accurate the leaner you are.

If you’d like a fool-proof, time efficient program to optimize your body composition for life, check this out.

Josef Brandenburg is 2010, Washington, DC  Personal Trainer of the Year Nominee for both Personal Fitness Professional Magazine and The Washington, DC Fitness Association, The DC Fitness Advisor and the Fitness Expert for the PCOS Challenge TV Show. He shows normal people with hectic lives and average genetics how to create the bodies they want in the time they actually have. To find out more about the 7-Day Free Trial click here. You can also pick up a FREE copy of his brand new CD – “Why Eat Less and Exercise More is The Worst Advice Ever” here.

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