How to burn fat and feed muscles,start today

QUESTION: “Tom, on your www.burnthefat.com website, you wrote: ‘Who better to model than bodybuilders and fitness competitors? No athletes in the world get as lean as quickly as bodybuilders and fitness competitors. The transformations they undergo in 12 weeks prior to competition would boggle your mind!

Only ultra-endurance athletes come close in terms of low body fat levels, but endurance athletes like triathaletes and marathoners often get lean at the expense of chewing up much of their lean muscle.”

There seems to be a contradiction unless I’m missing something. Why do bodybuilders and fitness competitors have to go through a 12 week ‘transformation’ prior to every event instead of staying ‘lean and mean’ all the time? If they practice the secrets exposed in your book, shouldn’t be staying in great shape all the time instead of having to work at losing fat prior to every competitive event?”

ANSWER: Thanks for your question. There’s a logical explanation for why bodybuilders and other physique athletes (fitness and figure competitors), don’t remain completely ripped all year round, and it’s the very reason they are able to get so ripped on the day of a contest…

You can’t hold a peak forever or it’s not a “peak”, right? What is the definition of a peak? It’s a high point surrounded by two lower points isn’t it? Therefore, any shape you can stay in all year round is NOT your “peak” condition.

The intelligent approach to nutrition and training (which almost all bodybuilders and fitness/figure competitors use), is to train and diet in a seasonal or cyclical fashion and build up to a peak, then ease off to a maintenance or growth phase.

I am NOT talking about bulking up and getting fat and out of shape every year, then dieting it all off every year. What I’m talking about is going from good shape to great shape, then easing back off to good shape…. but never getting “out of shape.”

Makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it?

Here’s an example: I have no intentions whatsoever of walking around 365 days a year at 4% body fat like I appear in the photo on my website. Truth be told, that is day of contest condition.

Off-season (when I’m not competing), my body fat is usually between 8 – 10%. Mind you, that’s very lean and still single digit body fat.I don’t stray too far from competition shape, but I don’t maintain contest shape all the time. It takes me about 10-12 weeks or so to gradually drop from 9% to 3.5%-4.0% body fat to “peak” for competition with NO loss of lean body mass, using the same techniques I reveal in my e-book.

It would be almost impossible to maintain 4% body fat, and even if I could, why would I want to? For the few weeks prior to competition I’m so depleted, ripped, and even “drawn” in the face, that complete strangers walk up and offer to feed me.

Okay, so I’m just kidding about that, but let’s just say being “being ripped to shreds” isn’t a desirable condition to maintain because it takes such a monumental effort to stay there.

It’s probably not even healthy to try forcing yourself to hold extreme low body fat. Unless you’re a natural “ectomorph” (skinny, fast metabolism body type), your body will fight you and you’ll always be hungry.

Not only that, anabolic hormones may drop and sometimes your immune system is affected as well (and I hate to say this, but sometimes – for some people – even the, uh… “reproductive functions”… decline a bit when you’re that lean).

Hey, I’m just being honest. It’s just not “normal” to walk around all the time with literally NO subcutaneous body fat.

Instead of attempting to hold the peak, I cycle back into a less demanding off-season program and avoid creeping beyond 9.9% body fat. Some years I’ve stayed leaner – like 6-7%, (which takes effort), especially when I knew I would be photographed, but I don’t let my body fat go over 10%. Thats “the line” I draw – it’s like a personal “rule” for me.

This practice isn’t just restricted to bodybuilders. Athletes in all sports use periodization to build themselves up to their best shape for competition.

Is a pro football player in the same condition in March-April as he is in August-September? Probably not. Many show up fat and out of shape (relatively speaking) for training camp, others just need fine tuning, but none are in peak form… that’s why they have training camp!!!

There’s another reason you wouldn’t want to maintain a “ripped to shreds” physique all year round – you’d have to be dieting (calorie restricted) all the time. And this is one of the reasons that 95% of people can’t lose weight and keep it off – they are CHRONIC dieters… always on some type of diet. Know anyone like that?

You can’t stay on restricted low calories indefinitely. Sooner or later your metabolism slows down and you plateau as your body adapts to the chronically lowered food intake and reduced body weight.

But if you diet for fat loss and push incredibly hard for 3 months, then ease off for a while and eat a little more (healthy food, not “pigging out”), your metabolic rate is re-stimulated.

In a few weeks or months, you can return to another fat loss phase and reach an even lower body fat level, until you finally reach the point that’s your happy maintenance level for life – a level that is healthy and realistic – as well as visually appealing.

That’s how we physique athletes do it…

Bodybuilders have discovered a methodology for losing fat that’s so effective, it puts them in complete control of their body composition. They’ve mastered this area of their lives and will never have to worry about it again.

If they ever “slip” and fall off the wagon like all humans do at times … no problem! They know how to get back into shape fast.

Bodybuilders have the tools and knowledge to hold a low body fat all year round(such as 9% for men, or about 15% for women), and then at a whim, to reach a temporary “peak” of extremely low body fat for the purpose of competition.

Maybe most important of all, they have the power and control to slowly ease back from peak shape into maintenance, and not balloon up and yo-yo like most conventional dieters.

What if you had the power to stay lean all year round, and then get super lean when summer rolled around, or when you took your vacation to the Caribbean, or when your wedding date was coming up?

Wouldn’t you like to be in control of your body like that? Isn’t that the same thing that bodybuilders and fitness/figure competitors do, only on a more practical, real-world level?

So even if you have no intention of ever being a bodybuilder, don’t you agree that there’s something of value everyone could learn from physique athletes?

Don’t model yourself after the huge crowd of “losers” who gobble diet pills, buy exercise gimmicks and suffer through starvation diets like automatons, only to gain back everything they lost! Instead, learn from the leanest athletes on Earth – natural bodybuilders and fitness competitors…

These physique athletes get as ripped as they want to be, exactly when they want to, simply by manipulating their diets in a cyclical fashion between pre-contest “cutting” programs and off season “maintenance” or “muscle growth” programs.

Even if you have no desire to ever compete, try this seasonal “peaking” approach yourself and you’ll see that it can work as well for you as it does for elite bodybuilders.

If you’re interested in learning even more secrets of bodybuilders and fitness models, visit the Burn The Fat website at:
http://www.burnfat-feedmuscles.com
Train hard and expect success,

About the Author:

Tom Venuto is a fat loss expert, lifetime natural (steroid-free) bodybuilder, independent nutrition researcher, freelance writer, and author of the #1 best selling diet e-book, Burn The Fat, Feed The Muscle: Fat-Burning Secrets of The World’s Best Bodybuilders & Fitness Models (e-book) which teaches you how to get lean without drugs or supplements using secrets of the world’s best bodybuilders and fitness models. Learn how to get rid of stubborn fat and increase your metabolism by visiting: burn fat feed muscles

Article by Howard LeWine, M.D., Chief Medical Editor, Internet Publishing, Harvard Health Publications

These days, most adults are overweight, not active, or both. If you could change just one—become active or lose weight—which would be better?

At least for men, being more fit may have a bigger health payoff than losing weight, according to a new study of more than 14,000 well-off middle-aged men who are participating in the Aerobics Center Longitudinal Study. Researchers followed their health, weight, and exercise habits for 11 years. They estimated how physically fit the men were by calculating their metabolic equivalents (METs) from a treadmill test.

Compared with men whose fitness declined over the course of the study, those who maintained their fitness levels reduced their odds of dying from cardiovascular disease or any other cause by about 30%, even if they didn’t lose any excess weight. Those who improved their fitness levels saw a 40% reduction.

Body-mass index (BMI), a measurement that takes weight and height into account, was not associated with mortality. The results were published in the journal Circulation.
What is “fitness”

Fitness is a measure of how well your heart, blood vessels, blood, and lungs supply your muscles with oxygen during sustained exercise. It also takes into account the ability of your muscles to use that oxygen.

The most straightforward way to gauge fitness is to use a treadmill to measure peak exercise capacity. That means you run on a treadmill as its speed and incline are progressively increased until you can’t go any further. Exercise capacity is usually measured in METs. One MET is the amount of oxygen you use when sitting still or sleeping. The number of METs at peak exercise capacity is determined by a formula based on your speed and the incline at your peak.
Make a leap

Maintaining a healthy weight and being active are two of the best things you can do for your health. But what if you are overweight and inactive? This study and others suggest that getting more activity is the best place to start if you want to improve your health.

It doesn’t matter where you are starting from. If your fitness is low today, you can boost it with regular physical activity that challenges your body. That means working your body hard enough to speed up your heartbeat and breathing. If you need help getting started, a Special Health Report called Exercise: A program you can live with, from Harvard Medical School, can help.

If you don’t regularly work your heart, lungs, and muscles, then any increase in activity is great. Burning an extra 300 calories a week, the equivalent of raking leaves for an hour, can improve health. And with exercise, more is usually better.

If you already carry extra pounds despite ramping up your exercise, this study—and hundreds before it—suggest you still want to try to shed them. Getting down into a healthy weight range is good for long-term health.

Maintaining fitness and a healthy weight is the winning one-two punch.

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Many children aren’t getting enough vitamin D, and that puts them at greater risk for health problems. Researchers pored over data on more than 3,500 young people between 12 and 19 years old. Those with the lowest levels of vitamin D were twice as likely as their peers to have high blood pressure and 2½ times as likely to have elevated blood glucose levels, even when the effect of body fat was discounted. Youth with low D levels were also 54 percent more likely to have low HDL (“good”) cholesterol levels. The study’s authors caution that the research is preliminary; parents shouldn’t resort to supplements right away. Instead, a good way of getting more vitamin D is by spending 15 minutes a day in sunlight or drinking milk or juice fortified with the vitamin.
Source: Pediatrics, published online Aug. 3, 2009

Doctors Double Vitamin D for Children
Boston Globe
(10/13/2008 )
By Oberholzer, Leigh Hopper

New data suggests that a lack of vitamin D can play a role in diabetes, autoimmune diseases, and some cancers. As a result, the American Academy of Pediatrics is doubling the amount of vitamin D it recommends for infants, children, and adolescents to 400 IU a day, starting in the first few days of life. The academy recommends vitamin D supplements for breast-fed infants and partially breast-fed infants. The supplements are also recommended for non-breast fed babies and children who drink less than1 liter per day of vitamin D-fortified formula or milk. Earlier in 2008, researchers at Children’s Hospital Boston discovered “suboptimal” levels of vitamin D in 40 percent of 380 otherwise healthy infants and toddlers. In the past, the chief source of vitamin D used to be sunlight, which allows vitamin D to be manufactured in the skin, but doctors say many people are now not outdoors long enough to get the right amount of sunlight, or they cannot absorb sunlight because of sunscreen use. Doctors do not recommend that people sunbathe or visit tanning salons, however, because there is no right amount for a given individual.

(http://www.boston.com/news/health/articles/2008/10/13/doctors_double_vitamin_d_for_children/)

Vitamin D and Diabetes
Looking for links between the sunshine vitamin and diabetes
By Andrew Curry

Sun exposure is a tricky thing. No one wants too much, of course, but too little can also be a problem. That’s because sunshine encourages skin cells to produce vitamin D, a substance that keeps bones strong and may play an as yet undetermined role in warding off a variety of other ailments.

There was a time when lack of vitamin D was a problem only for people living in the far north, where months could go by with no more than a few hours of weak light a day. For the rest of the world, simply spending time outside was sufficient to keep the blood’s D levels healthfully high. “In the right location, less than half an hour outside can give you all the vitamin D you need for a week,” says Susan Harris, DSc, a researcher at Tufts University.

But these days—between office jobs, television, long commutes, and, of course, sunblock—regular sun exposure is hard to come by. “It wasn’t till industrialization that we started spending all of our time inside,” says Harris. “Now … we depend more on dietary sources [of vitamin D], of which there are few—and most of us don’t get enough.” Fortified foods like milk and cereal, in addition to fatty fish like salmon and mackerel, can make up for some of what we’re missing, but most of us also need either appropriate sun exposure or vitamin D supplements.

In addition, some people have a harder time producing vitamin D than others. “Skin pigment acts as a natural sunscreen—it protects the skin, but also reduces vitamin D production,” Harris says. The darker your skin, in other words, the harder it is to get enough vitamin D, one reason African Americans seem to have lower levels of D than other Americans. In fact, in a 2004 study published in the journal Diabetes Care, University of Auckland researcher Robert Scragg showed that non-Hispanic blacks in the United States had significantly lower levels of vitamin D than whites and Hispanics. Scragg showed that high vitamin D levels were associated with low diabetes risk—for some. “In that study, the protective effect of vitamin D is seen in Caucasians, but not in non-Hispanic blacks,” Harris says.

Harris is one of a growing number of scientists examining the role of vitamin D in the body. While it has long been known to influence skeletal health, over the past two decades more and more researchers have begun to appreciate the many other roles vitamin D may have. “People have gone from looking at deficiency diseases like scurvy and rickets”—afflictions caused by the lack of vitamins C and D, respectively—”to looking at more subtle deficiency effects,” Harris says.

It turns out that there are vitamin D receptors almost everywhere in the human body—even in the islets of Langerhans, the structures in the pancreas that produce insulin. For people with type 2 diabetes or pre-diabetes, it seems that vitamin D allows the body to secrete more insulin. At the same time, there’s evidence that vitamin D may increase insulin sensitivity.

To sponsor an ADA research
project at the Research Foundation’s Pinnacle Society level of $50,000 or more, call Elly Brtva, MPH, managing director of Individual Giving, at
(703) 253-4377, or e-mail her at
ebrtva@diabetes.org.

With the help of a grant from the American Diabetes Association, Harris is taking a closer look at whether vitamin D supplements might in fact help African Americans avoid developing diabetes. She has set up a study examining the links between vitamin D and diabetes in about 100 African Americans age 40 and older. To research people at high risk for developing diabetes, she specifically recruited subjects who were overweight or obese but not diabetic. Half of them are given a placebo, half a vitamin D supplement; over the course of 12 weeks, she measures things like insulin secretion, glucose control, and insulin resistance in the two groups to see if taking vitamin D supplements makes any difference.

Pinning down exactly what makes vitamin D work is made even tougher by related factors: “confounders,” in academic jargon. Take, for example, the links between vitamin D levels and diabetes. Are people with high levels of vitamin D less likely to develop diabetes because of the vitamin D, or because their lifestyle gets them out of the house or office? “It’s hard to know if it was the vitamin D. The same things that affect vitamin D, like being outside, can affect health in other ways,” Harris says. “Maybe it wasn’t because of vitamin D; it was because they were more active.” To avoid confounding her results, Harris didn’t ask participants to change their lifestyle in any way.

If it turns out that vitamin D supplements can help prevent type 2 diabetes in African Americans, it wouldn’t necessarily mean it’s a universal panacea. “But if we see an association here, I would absolutely want to repeat the study with other groups,” Harris says. The ways in which vitamin D works remain a mystery, but that doesn’t bother Harris. “Vitamin D is big,” she says. For now, she just wants to know whether vitamin D can help people; figuring out why can come later.
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By dghearwx

How to Lose Inches of Pure Fat
Read more here

health&fitness advice

There are many fantastic ways to get focused and motivated to begin a diet or exercise program, but often the most difficult thing to do is keep that drive and ambition alive for more than a few weeks and see your goal through to completion.

Within just weeks of starting, many people have already hit their first snag or setback, and as a result, have slipped backwards in the mental focus and motivation department. Setting goals in writing is an essential step to success, but how do you stay focused on them? One technique I have used ever since my very first bodybuilding competition 18 years ago, is…

The “contest countdown calendar.”

I have used it ever since, through 28 competitions and it will work for you too, for any fitness goal.

I purchase a desk or wall calendar – the type that shows each week stretching horizontally across the page with an open block of space for each day.

After I set my goal and place a deadline on it, I do NOT stop there. I take out my calendar and start counting backwards from my target goal deadline to the present day.

T-minus 117 days….

T-minus 116 days…

T-minus 115 days….

I also fill in my workouts for the entire 3-4 month period, which is the typical length I allow for my mid-range goals like contest prep.

you would be shocked – pleasantly so – just how focused this keeps you. Even better still, you get MORE and MORE motivated with each passing day you countdown because the deadline is getting closer

Deadlines are absolutely critical to your success. Little gets done without deadlines.

There is a saying in management and psychology that “work will always expand to fill the time allowed for it’s completion.”

Remember term papers in school? when you were given a term paper assignment and you had the entire semeseter to do it, did you run home that first night and get crankin on it?

How about after a week? two weeks? A month? TWO MONTHS?

probably not, eh?

If youre like most people, you put it off until the last minute and you barely got it turned in on time. In fact, there are always a few people who pull all nighters the night before!

Alas, the power of the deadline!

In your fitness endeavors, if you dont have IMPENDING deadlines that give you that twinge in your stomach that says “take action now, or else!” then you find it very easy to say to yourself, ‘ I have plenty of time so this one cheat meal doesnt matter… it doesnt make much difference at this point if I skip this one workout… I have time to make it up…”

And then, just like the term paper, you are scrambling at the last minute to reach your weight goal. But in the case of a your body, the consequences are more severe and painful than just a bad grade or late penalty.

Inevitably, you succumb to crash dieting and overtraining or other unhealthy fast-weight-loss madness, which eats up your own muscle like a hungry cannibal and sends you spiraling into the dark pit of metabolic damage and the inevitable plateau and weight gain that follow.

But the solution is so simple: Count your way down to success!

Don’t stop with setting goals. Put your goal countdown on paper, review your goals every single day, AND know, every single day, how many days there are until your target goal date. You will stay more consciously focused and even better, your unconscious mind will go to work for you in keeping you motivated, on track, and on schedule. You’ll come in for a landing on your goal deadline date like an F-16 landing on an aircraft carrier.

I just did my countdown calendar earlier this week… T minus 117 days til my next bodybuilding competition, and thanks to this simple but powerful technique, I’m already focused like a laser beam and have been making steady progress without so much as a hiccup…

Don’t under-estimate this simple technique… Give it an honest test… because it’s often the simplest motivational techniques that are the most powerful of all!.
Burn fat feed muscles

About the Author:

Tom Venuto is a natural bodybuilder and author of the #1 best selling e-book, “Burn the Fat, Feed The Muscle,” which teaches you how to burn fat without drugs or supplements using the little-known secrets of the world’s best bodybuilders and fitness models. Learn how to get rid of stubborn fat and turbo-charge your metabolism by visiting: www.burnthefat.com