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Go read The Science of Nutrient Timing. Read both parts. Hell, read the whole magazine. Or at least every article by JB.

It's Your Diet, Stupid!

It's Your Diet, Stupid!

What insensitive clods! What about those of us who need to pick up a few extra pounds?

There's a solution for that. It's called The Skinny Bastard Diet.

You can lose weight on reduced-calorie diets (NOT ultra-low calorie diets, those are unsafe and ineffective), but as much as 50% will be lean muscle mass, which is not the point of the excercise. It also yo-yos back a lot faster.

So you're right about the reduced carb lifestyle, it does work, and is much safer and more consistent in the long run.

For more information than you'd ever want to know about looking good nekkid, visit Testosterone Magazine. I especially recommend the Ian King 12-week workouts; they'll add inches (!!) to your chest & arms in around 3 months. For those of you just worried about fat loss and not muscle gains, check out the T-Dawg diet. Believe me, though, once the fat starts coming off you'll start seeing how fun it is to watch your body change and you'll be dying to hit the weights.

It's all about calories. It's simple: If you take in more than you burn per day, no matter what the source, you gain weight.

Actually, no ... there's a lot more to it than that. There is insulin, and how the levels affect the way your body handles storage of fat and use of calories. There are also hormones, which can be affected by the types and amount of food you eat, such as leptin.

You can read more than you ever wanted to know in this article by John Berardi.

Like he says, it's never as simple as people would like to believe it is.

Disclaimer: I am not a doctor or a health professional of any kind. I sit at a desk all day long and then I go home and sit at a desk for a while longer. I just got out of college last year and I more or less lost the metabolism I had when I was a teenager, so I can't eat chips 'n dip all day long and expect it to vaporize like I used to.

One of my best friends is a personal trainer. He's not a medical professional either, though, so this advice may be stilted; however, my personal experience is that most everyone will tell you to take baby steps and do these things like 11 minutes a day on some Canadian RAF program that will magically make you lose your entire gut.

Is the Canadian 5BX program good? Hell yes! If you have a total of 11 minutes a day to spend exercising, that is what you should do with it. But if you have a total of 11 minutes a day devoted to your health, you are not going to get in shape. If you are already highly overweight, you will lose some of your gut and probably stablize somewhere just south of 'bigger than I want to be,' depending on what your diet is.

If you are serious about losing weight and keeping it off, then you are serious about getting healthy and living healthy. The best way to accomplish this is to simply know exactly what you're putting in your body at all times. I don't want to start a flamewar about carbs versus protein versus anything else; you must determine which diet is best for you (diet as in 'your routine of food-eating' and not diet as in 'some BS in a 99 cent magazine at the FoodMart that promises a 30 lb. reduction.)

As a completely uneducated guess, I'd bet that most people in your position (and what used to be my position) take in too many carbs and too much sugar. A good eye-opened on this subject is here, although Dr. Mercola goes overboard, in my opinion, in his fear of things like bannanas and garage-door openers, but his attitude towards carbs and sugar is similar to Atkins and it's worked for me.

So PART THE FIRST is your diet. There is no simple solution. Any magazine diet is bullshit. There are no magic pills and no magic diets. If there were an easy way to lose weight, America would not be the fattest country on the planet, because we love easy.

The first thing to do is cut out soda. Entirely. Soda does nothing good. I'd even cut out soda before I'd cut out beer, because soda has no social value, either. You're drinking carbonated water and sugar that is making you more thirsty and pouring junk into your bloodstream. Yeah, you can switch to diet, but if your body is thirsty, shut up already and give it water. Even fruit juices can be absurdly high in sugar (especially the big-name brands -- if you like fruit juice, spend the money on natural stuff with no added sugar. natural sugar beats artificial sugar any day of the week and no sugar beats natural sugar).

After soda is breakfast cereal. Maybe you skip breakfast. This is bad, because you will eat shit later in the day. But if you eat Captain Crunch or Cinnoman Toast Crunch, you're even worse off. High in sugar, high in carbs, and low in anything useful. The -best- stuff to have for breakfast is plain oatmeal (not the flavored stuff in the packets. the $1 jug of Quaker oats that will last you a couple weeks). Personally, I can't stomach plain oatmeal that often, so I wuss out and add some (natural) brown sugar. Maybe 5 or 6 grams, tops, and half that if I can help it. This is better than the 12-20 grams of processed artificial garbage you will get in yummy-tasting oatmeal.

boring cereals are probably okay. add a bannana.

after that is snacks. personally, if I have food around the house, I eat it. I have a lot more willpower now than I did a year ago (for purely health reasons) but if you dangle great food in front of me when I'm hungry, I'm going to eat it. Best way around this is to go shopping after you've just had an enormous meal and you're full of self-loathing for bein

You need to visit T-Mag.com.

Testosterone Magazine has everything you could ever need to know about getting in shape and staying that way. And it's not bullshit "Denise Austin" type pandering to fat, lazy housewives and husbands. It's not bullshit "buy this gizmo for 29.99 and have a six pack in 4 quick hours!!". It doesn't pull punches and will tell you straight up what you need to do to get off your fat ass and get in shape. They have archived every on-line issue from the last 5 years and it's all free. They admit up front that yes, they own a supplement company, but they are honest about how it affects the mag.

They have a very active forum with many experienced bodybuilders (not fitness weenies) that live real lives and have real jobs. Many of them are also students. Every one of them was a newbie at some point, and remembers it, so they are very tolerant and very helpful.

They also have a large following of women who take a no-holds-barred approach to getting in shape. They believe that the same approach (in general) for having a good body applies to men and women. Like it or not, nutritional principles are universal.

*WARNING* - These guys are very open-minded, and might be considered offensive to those of you who are overly sensitive androgenized blobs that used to be men. They are not opposed to the use of steroids, when done it a rational, researched manner. They also like to talk about their penises a lot, so get used to it. Approach everything with an open mind and be willing to form YOUR OWN OPINIONS. You might just learn something.