NEWS & EVENTS
Blog - Weight Loss
  From time to time I get questions from inquisitive females that I would generally describe as "out of my area of expertise." One of the questions that comes up again and again is, "How can I get rid of my cellulite?" Hopefully I can shed some light on this issue. The first thing you NEED to understand is that the scientific community that studies cellulite knows VERY little about the exact causes of cellulite, and the effectiveness of prevention strategies to various remedies. If you're interested in the topic, Wikipedia did a good job of summarizing information on cellulite. You can read it here: Cellulite With that understood, there are a few simple ways that you can help decrease the likelihood that you'll have visible cellulite. While there are exceptions to every rule, cellulite seems to predominantly affect women with higher than desirable levels of body fat. Thin women with visible cellulite tend to not have very well defined muscles. Those are two relatively easily corrected things: 1) Lose body fat 2) Get stronger muscles By losing fat and strengthening your muscles you can essentially tighten your skin. As a crude example, think of a balloon partially filled with sand lying on a table. The balloon would appear partially deflated and not have a very well-defined shape. If you took the same amount of sand, but used a smaller balloon that just barely fit all the sand, the balloon would have a tight, rigid look to it (comparable to losing body fat). If you poured more sand to fill the original balloon to it's capacity, the balloon would again have a tight, rigid look (comparable to gaining muscle). Since losing body fat (at least until you're below 20%) and improving your muscle strength will improve your health, energy levels, and confidence, this is a great place to start in your journey toward less cellulite. And unlike creams and a host of other products marketed as quick fixes to cellulite that may just be a huge waste of money, losing fat and building strength will DEFINITELY make you look and feel better. Hope this helps! -Kevin Neeld
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In the previous 4 "Secrets to Fat Loss" posts, I've explained why most of what we've been told about fat loss is complete garbage, and began to explain what you can do to get GUARANTEED fat loss. If you haven't had a chance, be sure to check them out before reading this one: New Year's Fat Loss Secrets The Truth About Fat Loss Training For Fat Loss-The Right Way Food Shopping for Fat Loss Through years of research, we've learned that low carb dieting is the fastest way to shed fat and keep it off. We also know that eating a regular times throughout the day and eating every 2-3 hours is a great way to bump up your metabolism and to keep from becoming "starving" and overeating. The next step in planning your diet is to analyze your day (wake up, activity, and sleep times), and plan your meal times every 2-3 hours throughout the day around these things. A quick word on "diets": The term "diet" is usually used to refer to a short-term change in eating habits, usually involving severe calorie restriction and/or removing some main nutrient (e.g. fat) from your daily food intake. The truth is that your "diet" is EVERYTHING you eat, all the time. While a short-term low-carb diet will help you shed fat, if you rebound from that diet with high carb/low quality food, you're definitely going to put the weight back on. Your regular diet doesn't need to be extreme. Low carb dieting doesn't mean no-carb dieting. As you begin to make changes in your diet (namesly replacing bread, pasta, and cereal with fruits and vegetables), try to engrain these changes as habits. As a part of this, you'll need to find fruits/vegetables (and ways to prepare them) that you actually enjoy. If something feels like torture, it's unlikely you'll stick with it. Cheat Meals! The saving grace for most people when making dietary changes is the "cheat meal". A cheat meal refers to a single meal that doesn't fit the typical diet scheme. This will be different for everyone, but usually includes things like pizza, desserts, and fast food. Nutrition expert Dr. John Berardi (author of Precision Nutrition, the only book that I think EVERYONE should own), recommends that about 10% of your meals are cheat meals...for both physical and mental sanity. Here's the thing that everyone misses though. Remember that fat loss is about boosting your metabolism throughout the day. Skipping a meal significantly reduces your metabolism. Skipping a meal counts as a cheat meal too! Let's say you wake up at 7am and go to sleep at 11pm. You'd be up for 16 hours. If you eat every 2-3 hours that'd be about 6 meals. If you do that everyday, that's about 42 meals/week. 10% of 42 is 4.2. That means that you can skip or "cheat" on 4 meals throughout the week. A quick aside-DO NOT worry about eating before you go to bed. If that's when you're schedule to eat, eat. It will NOT make you fat. Your metabolism plummits when you go to sleep at night, having some food to process will keep you burning at a slightly higher level. Take the time to make your eating schedule, then STICK TO IT! To your continued success, Kevin Neeld, Director of Athletic Development P.S. If you want a step by step approach toward revolutionizing your diet (and the world's best cook book to give you all the recipes you need to keep making healthy, delicious food forever), you really owe it to yourself to invest in Dr. John Berardi's Precision Nutrition (which comes with his world-famous cook book Gourmet Nutrition). It's really the only resource out there that I honestly believe that EVERYONE should own. If you have any questions about it, please feel free to email me or ask me at Endeavor. P.P.S. If you're enjoying these posts, please forward them to your friends and family so they can benefit from them too!
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Last week I discussed all the myths that people are sold about how to lose fat and the secrets PROVEN to help you drop fat quickly. If you haven't yet, read all three posts before reading this one: New Year's Fat Loss Secrets The Truth About Fat Loss Training For Fat Loss-The Right Way The overwhelming take home message from those posts was simply: The secret to long-lasting fat loss and a lean body is to maximize your metabolism! The three best ways to do this are through: 1) Low carb dieting 2) Maximal effort resistance training 3) High intensity interval training/conditioning While a combination of these things will help you get the best results the fastest, it is impossible to out-train a bad diet, so let's start with that. Last year I emailed my KevinNeeld.com newsletter subscribers a copy of my grocery list and it was one of the most passed around and discussed newsletters I've ever sent. I can typically get in and out of the grocery store in less than 15 minutes and have a cart packed full of high quality foods. My secret? I don't walk down any of the aisles! Let me explain why I don't do this and why you probably shouldn't either. Around the perimeter of almost all grocery stores you can find fruits, vegetables, fresh meat/fish, milk, yogurt (including greek, which is great for you), eggs, cheese, and cottage cheese. Want to get lean? Fill up your cart with those things and nothing else! The aisles are jammed full of processed foods that provide very few low quality nutrients-basically all the foods you want to avoid. I will occasionally duck into the aisles, quickly, for these things: 1) All natural peanut butter (ingredients: peanuts, salt...NOTHING else) 2) Ground flax seed 3) Frozen mixed berries 4) Olive oil 5) Frozen vegetables 6) Steel cut oats No cereal. No bread. No pasta. They're all refined, contain high fructose corn syrup, and inevitably get stored as fat. That's all there is to it. Fill your cart up with produce, squeeze some meat and dairy in around the edges then head home to start preparing meals to help you get leaner than ever. -Kevin Neeld P.S. If you want a step by step approach toward revolutionizing your diet (and the world's best cook book to give you all the recipes you need to keep making healthy, delicious food forever), you really owe it to yourself to invest in Dr. John Berardi's Precision Nutrition (which comes with his world-famous cook book Gourmet Nutrition). It's really the only resource out there that I honestly believe that EVERYONE should own. If you have any questions about it, please feel free to email me or ask me at Endeavor.
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This is Day 3 of your guide toward rapid fat loss. If you haven't yet, please read these two posts before reading the rest of this one: Day 1: New Year's Fat Loss Secrets Day 2: The Truth About Fat Loss As I mentioned yesterday, I think this is information that everyone should know. Please forward this to your friends and family so they can enjoy the benefits of a leaner body too! Yesterday's post (The Truth About Fat Loss) discussed many common dietary myths associated with fat loss. Today I want to jump into the training side of things, but before I do I forgot one thing yesterday: Preceding your workout with a protein supplement boosts your metabolism more than a pre-workout carbohydrate supplement. Interestingly, supplementing with a casein protein supplement results in more fat loss than a whey protein supplement, which results in more fat loss than no supplement. This is why we offer Muscle Milk (a casein-based protein supplement) at Endeavor. We didn't always, but when I looked at the composition of our previous supplements I recommended we make the switch and Jared and Shamus were kind enough to agree. Getting into training, Alwyn Cosgrove's presentation at StrengthandConditioningWebinars.com really tore apart some of the commonly accepted training practices of people trying to burn fat: Myth: Combining aerobic training with a diet results in greater fat loss. Fact 1: In long term studies (up to a year!) adding aerobic training to a diet offered no additional fat loss compared to being on a diet alone. Fact 2: The study included up to 6 hours of aerobic training per week! This means that the participants (and millions of Americans that follow a similar strategy) wasted between 200-300 hours of their lives getting nowhere. Myth: Burning more calories through your training will result in more fat loss. Fact: Calories burned through interval training burn up to 9x as much fat as calories burned through steady-state aerobic training. Would you rather spend the time to burn 100 calories doing interval training or 900 calories doing aerobic training? Alwyn described an interesting study (Trap EG, 2008) that compared 40 minutes of steady training cardio with 20 minutes of interval training 3x/week for 15 weeks. The participants of the study consumed the same diet and burned the exact same number of calories through training. At the end of the study, the steady state group GAINED 1 lb of fat! The interval training group lost 5.5 lbs of fat. Some more things to consider: When comparing aerobic training and strength training, strength training results in the maintenance or slight gains in muscle mass and MORE fat loss! 30 minutes of weight-based circuit training has been shown to boost metabolism for over 35 hours afterwards! Are you starting to see the picture? Circuit-based free weight training is the ultimate training method for fat loss. I'm not quite sure why people continue to recommend slow steady state cardio work. Maybe it's because they're afraid of scaring people away with weights? Maybe it's because some activity is definitely better than no activity regarding general health and preventing heart disease and type II diabetes? Those things are true. I guess I'm just confused about why people would want to invest their time and energy into a type of training that won't get them the best results. Would you rather spend 5 hours per week walking on a treadmill to decrease your risk of developing heart disease in the future or spend 90 minutes per week decreasing your risk of heart disease and Type II Diabetes, building some muscle, and dropping a ton of fat? If your boss came to you and said, "I'd like to pay you 3x as much money for you to work 1/2 your current hours" would you reply with, "No thank you. I enjoy working longer for less benefit."? -Kevin Neeld P.S. You're ready to take the next step toward getting in the best shape of your life. Don't wait any longer, click here to send me an email so we can talk about whether one of Endeavor's custom-training programs may be the right fit for you. P.S.S. Please forward this to your friends and family, and check back over the next week. There's still so much to go over!
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Yesterday I discussed some of the best ways to rapidly shed fat in the new year. If you haven't read that yet, read it now (New Year's Fat Loss Secrets) and then come back to this post. Some of you may have been upset by the way that post ended, but hear me out. Alwyn Cosgrove, Co-Owner of Results Fitness in Santa Clarita, CA, is the world's foremost expert in strategies to rapidly shed fat. How rapid? Many of his clients drop 1-3 pounds of FAT (not weight...fat) per week. Think about that. That means that 3 months of dedicated training could have you 36 pounds of fat leaner! I recently had the pleasure of hearing one of Alwyn's presentations on his fat loss strategies at one of my favorite websites: StrengthandConditioningWebinars.com. Alwyn accurately noted that, of the calories we burn everyday, 10% result from digesting and processing food, 20-30% result from our daily activity, and 60-70% of the calories we burn comes from our resting metabolic rate (the expense of keeping us alive and functioning). Wouldn't it make sense to do whatever it takes to increase our resting metabolic rate? More on that in a later post. With consideration to some of yesterday's comments, let's address some of the most commonly accepted myths about fat loss: Myth: Eating less calories than you burn off results in fat loss. Fact: This scenario may lead to WEIGHT loss, but frequently leads to muscle loss, which is never what you want. Myth: Burning 3500 calories results in 1lb of fat loss. Fact 1: Meal frequency matters. If you eat the same number of calories, but spread them out across more meals, you'll lose more fat. Similarly, switching from eating more meals to less meals will result in fat gain! Fact 2: Eating meals on a regular schedule (same times everyday), results in more fat loss than irregular eating (despite the total calories being equal). Fact 3: Eating breakfast is associated with lower body fat levels. One 8-month study showed that the group that consumed a 300 calorie breakfast lost 10 lbs of fat, while the group that consumed a 600 calorie breakfast lost 39 lbs of fat. Eat a big breakfast; you need more fuel at the beginning of the day and it'll jumpstart your metabolism in the morning. Myth: A calorie is a calorie. All calories are created equal. Fact: Low carbohydrate diets result in more fat loss and a better retention rate (people stay on them longer) compared to low fat diets. I know that's a lot to digest so I'll cut it off there. Tomorrow I'll post a long list of supplement and training myths and the facts you need to know to help you start burning fat instantly. -Kevin Neeld P.S. If you don't want to wait two weeks and are interested in learning how to get in the best shape of your life NOW, click here to send me an email.
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