Q: I have never been overweight until after high school. I started gaining around 20 years of age and stayed overweight til I was 25. I started working out at a women’s gym for a year, I was persistent. I lost about 30 and I have kept it off til now. I work out at a coed gym now, they took a body fat comp and my percentage body fat was 20 %. I am around 152 and my goal is 140 but i cant get beyond 150. Lately I have been trying to burn at least 1000 calories 3-5 days a week. I have hypothyroidism but luckily by working out i have increased my metabolism. I still have a lil belly I want that gone! I am 5′7 1/2 by the way. I try to eat a lot of chicken and fish for protein and I drink protein shakes every other day, mostly on the days that I lift. I lift 2-3 times a week. Now that you know my stats and stuff, could you give me some advice? I would really appreciate it! Thank you and God Bless!

Angel

A: So you’ve upped your exercise to burn an extra 1000 calories a day. Have you compensated for the 1000 calories by adding an extra 1000 calories from protein?
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Popularity: 6%

I went out and bought a pedometer today. I got it from Mountain Equipment Co-op as I live just 2 blocks away. I picked up the Timex Digital Pedometer for $22 Canadian. It counts steps, calories and distance in either Km or Miles. It’s a lot smaller than I had figured it would be so that’s great.

I’m going to follow the format that I outlined in the 10000 steps a day program for week 1 and track what I’m already doing first as I’m kinda curious. I KNOW that I am not as active in walking as I should be as I’m blogging and writing a lot, but I wanted to do the program just as others would.

I remember that when I started my weight loss program back in 1990 that I wanted to do push ups and crunches but could only do 5 push ups and only a few crunches. I have decided to modify the 10000 steps a day program to include daily push ups and crunches as well. Why Not? If you’re out walking, why not begin something else new as well and do some daily body weight exercises as well.

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Popularity: 7%

10,000 steps a day is supposed to be the required amount of walking required per day to keep healthy and fit while no other exercise is required. The program was first mentioned about 40 years ago in Japan and supposedly was not based on any research, but just a number they came up with. Now it’s being promoted by many health professionals as a way to combat obesity, improve weight loss and heart health.

There is no question that walking is good for you and my earlier research showed that walking can be more beneficial than running. The idea was that our ancestor’s bodies developed a method of efficiency to use stored fuel (fat) before it used glycogen (quick fuel). It takes a long time to evolve, so there’s no reason to think that anything has changed over the past thousands of years.

My sister told me about the 10000 steps a day program just the other day. She’s a doctor working with immigration Canada and works overseas. She’s been in Vienna Austria for the past 4 years and just got a new position in Singapore. She was in Canada for a few business meetings and flew into Edmonton yesterday to visit while making her way back east and then on to Vienna.

I began my walking program at 375 pounds and walked 20 minutes a day or twice a day. I incorporated ankle weights, starting with 1 pound and then worked up to 2.5 pounds on each ankle and even started using 5 pound dumbbells as I walked my route. I walked rain or shine and one day I came back from my route during a -40 degree Celsius (-40 Fahrenheit) and my neighbor said “nothing stops you from your walk, does it?” Read the rest of this entry »

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Q: I know you said what started you on the road to fitness was food combining. But, it seems you recommend , like Tom Venuto, a protein and carb at each meal, except at night where you slash the carbs.

Do you still food combine?

I am a petite 5 foot one 120 pounds, which I have finally come down to but have maintained that weight for two years. I want to get down to 115, yeah just a stupid 5 pounds, but the scale does not like to budge, so I am wondering if the food combining thing would be good?

Lauren,
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A: Thanks for the question Lauren. To fully understand my answer to this question, I feel that I must describe the events that led me from food combining all the way to Tom Venuto and his Burn The Fat program.

When I first began my weight loss journey back in 1990, I learned about Food Combining. I was about 450 at this point and what food combining did for me was to reset my digestion. Digestion of foods is the most energy consuming thing the body does. By using food combining, I was able to release an enormous amount of energy. This energy went into the cleansing process of my body and I was able to improve my sleep, feel more energized and improve the quality of my skin (after the initial cleansing process).

What I found to be most interesting was the principal of proper fruit consumption.

Harvey Diamond mentions in his book Fit For Life that fruit is a completely separate entity, and within the fruit category, fruits digest at different rates.

What was proposed to me was that fruit is pre-digested and should not be eaten with a meal, or after a meal, but rather it must be eaten by itself on an empty stomach. What I learned was that fruit slides right through the stomach in 20 minutes or less with the exception of Banana’s which take about 45 minutes.

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My name is Rob Cooper. In 1990, I tipped the scales at 475 pounds and my waist was 55 inches (at least). Over the next two and a half years, I lost 288 pounds, dropping to a low of 187 pounds, and I fit into a size 38 pair of jeans. But I wasn’t finished yet. In the years that followed, I took up the bodybuilding lifestyle and slowly but surely added over 50 pounds of lean muscle while dropping even more body fat. That brought my total fat loss to over 300 pounds. Today, I weigh 240 pounds of lean muscle and I’m in the best shape of my life

How did I do it?

It all began with a decision

When I realized that I had hit bottom, I decided I had to do something about my health – and fast! But I didn’t choose to lose nearly 300 pounds of fat – I chose to learn how my body worked, how it used foods, and then began to put the principles I learned into action on a daily basis.

I was working as a cab driver for about 2 years after leaving university. I set the land speed record for the greatest amount of weight gained in the shortest period of time. I went from 320 pounds when I left university to 475 pounds a short 2 years later.

My life consisted of driving a taxi, eating, smoking, drug and alcohol abuse and a lot of “Nintendo”. The only exercise I got was getting out of bed and the short walk from my taxi to the restaurant and back to the cab.

I challenged my skin to keep up with the weight gain, and it lost. I was covered in stretch marks which not only were beet red, but quite wide. Do I have them now? More about that later, but yes, there is hope and yes you can do something about it (I have a little secret weapon that has served me well).

In 1989 when I hit my highest weight or 475 pounds, my body let me know in no uncertain terms that enough was enough. I had what I refer to as “my episode” one night after a shift of driving taxi. My heart began to race and I was having a challenge with breathing. I got out of my chair and began to pace thinking about what was going on.

It scared me.

Did I do anything about it? Nope.

What did I know? Yes I was clinically obese, I was wearing the same clothes day in and day out as I hated shopping and once I found a set of clothes that I liked, I stuck with them for months at a time, washing them every other day.

I was young. I was at the tender age of 22 years. I was invincible.

2 days later it happened again. I was sitting in the same chair after a shift of driving taxi when it all happened again. My heart began to race, my breath was short and I was struggling to breathe. I began to sweat profusely and I got up out of my chair and clutched the wall. My life flashed in front of my eyes and I envisioned my parents finding me – dead at 22 – 475 pounds and nothing to show for my life. It scared the crap out of me.

I made a decision to do something about my health

You’d think that at 475 pounds, I’d have realized that I was fat and had to get rid of the weight, but that was not in my mind at all. I knew nothing about health and nutrition except for what I had read in newspapers or seen on TV, namely that salt was bad and fried foods were bad, so that’s where I began.

I made a new years resolution to quit using salt, to give up fried foods and to “lose weight by exercising”

I did not choose to drop 300 pounds….

I chose to learn about my health and what I could do to improve my health.

Health Education and Action

I became a glutton for information and then began to put the information into practice. My first introduction to my new lifestyle was to purchase foods that I knew were healthier and make sandwiches instead of eating out so much. In the beginning, what I began to do was create “fridge experiments” where everything I bought quickly turned green and melted away while being in the fridge for a week. I learned how to create penicillin!

It wasn’t all that bad. I did eat some of it, but at least the decision was set and it began to create a new mindset that I used.

I was out of the house more than I was in the house and ate at a lot of fast food joints. When I did, I reduced the intake. I’d eat one big mac and shake instead of two. I replaced fries at the restaurant with a baked potato and I quit putting salt on anything.

I still drank pop, but switched to diet pop. I still drank coffee but quit using sugar in it.

I believe that once you make a decision and fully commit to it, that the universe supports your decision and attracts into your life things that wouldn’t ordinarily be. Facts came my way, people with info came my way and I began to learn new lessons. Doors began to open as it were and those doors may have very well been there before, but I wasn’t open enough to see them. I wasn’t open enough to see the opportunity. I have found this to be the same with the rest of my life in the years since as well.

Implementing what I already knew

….which wasn’t a lot I might add

I had been dieting since I was in the 5th grade. I had been on a starvation diet when I was in my final year of high school and had lost 80 pounds from December until the summer when I graduated. I say I lost it because I surely found it again, and then more.

I had carried with me some of the product from that diet and began to use the last of it which lasted me about a week. I got very very ill. So ill in fact that my roommate were going to take me to the hospital if I didn’t do something for myself, or snap out of it. They joked that they’d get a forklift and cart me out of the house and to the hospital.

Being so sick, I essentially did a week long fast and dropped about 20 or 30 pounds. Not a healthy way to do it, but it was enough to support my initial decision and inspired me to continue to do more.

Fit For Life and My First Role Model

I had a friend that drove cab with me, who knew about some information contained in a book called Fit For Life by Harvey and Marilynn Diamond. The book outlined something called natural hygiene or put another way “food combining”.

The idea was that digestion is the most energy consuming thing the body does and that if we can eat foods in combinations that simplify the digestive process, that an enormous amount of energy is released and used to clean the body and thus burn fat and become healthy.

My friend had followed the principles before and introduced me to the subject because I had suddenly taken steps on my own to do something.

“when the student is ready, the teacher will appear”

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