bacon anyone?

Q: what diet will allow you to eat burgers, bacon, eggs and butter all week long and then sit down to a big plate of pancakes on the weekend with a clear conscience?

A: welcome to the anabolic diet.

today is day 7 and i'm really psyched that i finally decided to give this a try. the basic premise of the anabolic diet is that you eat lots of protein and fats during the week and keep carbs to a minimum (under 30g/day) to deplete your muscles' glycogen stores and then you eat whatever you want on the weekends focusing on eating higher carb foods. glycogen stores are sufficiently depleted by the weekend that the body sends the glycogen straight into the muscles to replenish glycogen stores instead of storing the carbs as body fat. the diet allows your body to switch from burning carbs for energy to burning fat since there are essentially no carbs available.

the anabolic diet is a great fit for me right now for so many reasons. like eat stop eat, no foods are off limits and you can pretty much eat as much as you want (as long as you are eating the right foods at the right times). in fact, on the anabolic diet, you are supposed to eat a lot. the recommendation runs somewhere around 15 to 18 calories per pound of bodyweight. for me that's somewhere around 1950 to 2340 daily calories. which is (for me) a lot of food. let's keep in mind that during my first month and a half of my last transformation, i was eating 6 small meals a day at a caloric deficit which was about 1600 calories a day. also fat and protein don't spike your insulin levels the way that carbs do and i've found in the past that higher fat tends to work well for my body. the other thing that i love is that the diet allows me to be social without having to put so much thought into what i'm eating. if i'm going out with friends, there's always something i can eat...during the week meat with green veggies (it's never hard to find a steak or burger) and on the weekends pasta, rice dishes, sushi, beans...as well some junk food if i so please.

i guess the other thing to mention is the results. i haven't taken measurements in a long time and my scale is still in storage, but i can absolutely see visible results after only a week on the diet. i have lost weight (some of it is water, i'm sure) and i'm already starting to see muscle definition in places that had become just a little too soft. i'm pretty excited to see where i am at this time next week. for now, i'll be enjoying the rest of my carb-fest.

day 11...the loose ends

today was the end of another successful eat stop eat day. i find that if i go for a little while without fasting the first fast or two are always harder, but once i get into a rhythm with weekly fasting, they pretty much become a breeze. and today was definitely one of those days i was really happy not to have to stop and eat because i am running all over the place trying to tie up so many loose ends before my last day tomorrow. tomorrow i close my bank account and cancel my cell phone and it's weird how that makes me feel like i am withdrawing from civilization or something like that. strange how dependent we tend to become on all these aspects of the modern lifestyle.

also with all the craziness, i forgot to mention that craig is running a great promotion where you can try turbulence training for less than $5! just go sign up for the trial offer and you get 21 days to put turbulence training to the test. you still get all the regular bonuses, plus you get access to the awesome ttmembers.com forum. if you've been on the fence, this is a great opportunity to see if turbulence training is right for you.

day 8...breakthrough challenge week 1 progress

this evening i'm hosting a little going away gathering, so it will be my first full on planned cheat of this challenge. usually i'm eat stop eat-ing today, but i moved it to yesterday instead and finished this morning before i went to the gym. i will definitely be having some wine and tortilla espanola (one of my mostest favoritest spanish dishes) and who knows what else, but i am going to be focusing on moderation. wish me luck!

in other news, today was weigh-in day. here are the results:

day 1 --> day 8
weight: 134 lbs --> 130.7 lbs (-3.3 lbs)
% body fat: 20.5 --> 20.1 (-.4)
bicep (unflexed/flexed): 11/12 --> 11/12.5 (nc/+.5)
thigh: 21.75 --> 21.5 (-.25)
waist: 29.5 --> 29 (-.5)
navel: 31.5 --> 31.5 (nc)
hip: 35 --> 35 (nc)
chest:30.5 --> 30.75 (+.25)
bust: 34.75 --> 34.5 (-.25)

very pleased with my first weeks results. as suspected, my body does good things when i give it clean food and exercise . i do think it's an ironic trick of nature though that many times my progress seems to be most visible from the back. moral of the story...take more pictures of your backside!

blast off

today is day 1 of my brand new shiny breakthrough challenge and i'm so excited to be getting started again. spent some time yesterday evening and this afternoon getting my goals in order and getting connected to my reasons for doing this and here's what i've come up with:

2nd transformation contest goals...

1) achieve 15% body fat. this was my main goal in the last challenge and i naively chose this number without knowing that it was a bit unrealistic from my starting point of 24.2%. this time around though i believe that it is a realistic goal and i expect to get there within the next 84 days.
2) don't miss a turbulence training workout in the next 84 days and successfully stick to my plan during travels to london and vancouver bc. this challenge will present some interesting hurdles for me as i will be moving out of my apartment in spain on may 24th and probably wont arrive in portland until june 8th or so (ie--two weeks of homelessness and traveling limbo). when i get home i have to find a place to live and get a job and basically re-start my life after a two year hiatus. so there will be lots going on and being a total creature of habit, i always do really well sticking to my plan when i can create a routine and i always crash and burn when anything interrupts that routine. i am determined to break that crash and burn habit during this challenge and be super diligent with my plan in the midst of all this craziness.
3) practice attentive eating at every meal. this is one of my biggest challenges as i always seem to be rushing off to the next thing and tend to rush through my meals in the same way. this is definitely something that needs to change and so will be a big focal point for me in this challenge.
4) shift towards more intuitive eating with less rules. in my last challenge i went from strict calorie counting to relaxing things a bit when i shifted to eat stop eat, but was still being incredibly strict with myself. i want to find a balance in this challenge between holding myself to high nutritional standards and making the majority of my food choices center on clean foods, while at the same time allowing myself the occasional cheat and simply learning to listen to my body and enjoy every bite of food that i put into my mouth guilt free. this will be a space that requires a bit of experimentation, but i feel as though if i can figure this out i will truly be where i want to be in terms of my relationship with food. i recently read that "the body is wise and the rewards for trusting it are great." this is a philosophy i want to learn to integrate into my life...to get to a point where my trust in my body's wisdom allows me to treat it as an ally instead of a foe.
5) blog progress daily for increased accountability
6) visible abs by day 84...i have never seen my abs before and i think it's about time.
7) and, of course, make turbulence training history by being the grand prize winner two times in a row!

the daily action steps that i will take to get me there are as follows:

1) drink at least 4 liters of water
2) avoid processed sugar
3) eat mindfully
4) feel good about my food choices
5) get at least 8 hours of sleep every night
6) get the vast majority of my calories from clean foods
7) review my goals and visualize their achievement

and finally my tentative nutrition and exercise plans, subject to change as results dictate:

my nutrition plan: i will be sticking with eat stop eat incorporating two days of fasting per week combined with a clean foods diet and will probably incorporate carb tapering as well (less carbs at the evening meals). focus here will be on mindful eating and enjoyment of all food consumed.

my exercise plan: since i'm going to be traveling and transitioning so much during this challenge, i decided that bodyweight workouts are probably the way to go. however, i might change this up a bit depending on how quickly i find/join a gym when i get back to portland and how much i'm digging the bodyweight manual.

weeks 1-4: 6 month bodyweight manual phase I
weeks 5-8: 6 month bodyweight manual phase II
weeks 9-12: 6 month bodyweight manual phase III

monday, wednesday, saturday will be turbulence training workouts. tuesday, thursday, sunday will be yoga (with hill sprints on sunday just for fun). friday is my glorious rest day.

so that's the plan, now it's just a matter of following through and putting it into action. starting stats and pics will be up next...

fasting for fat loss...my thoughts on eat stop eat

if you've been following along, you know that i decided to test drive brad pilon's eat stop eat during my transformation. i have to admit that i was a bit skeptical at first, but probably not for the typical reasons. having done several 7-14 day fasts in the past, i wasn't worried about whether i'd be able to manage not eating for a few hours. i do believe in the benefits of fasting when done properly, but all of my past fasting attempts were always subconsciously driven by a desperate attempt to lose weight. and since i was struggling with my relationship with food the fasts would inevitably set me up for binging sooner or later. i found myself in this destructive binge-fast-binge cycle and finally reached the point where i promised myself that i was not going to fast anymore and that i would find a healthy way to lose weight and get into shape. when i came across eat stop eat, i hadn't fasted for almost two years. but what brad said in eat stop eat made so much sense to me that i decided to give it a go. i think what really struck me was that brad presented eat stop eat as a solution to what he has coined "obsessive compulsive eating," which really hit home with me because i had been obsessing over food for as long as i could remember. and in my one month test drive i discovered so many reasons to love eat stop eat. let's see if i can narrow them down to my top 5:

1. it works. i switched over to eat stop eat from 6 meals a day in a caloric deficit. i continued to lose weight at the same, and sometimes even faster rate.
2. it's sooo simple. do your fasts, strength train, and eat sensibly the rest of the time. no calorie counting, no crazy foods, no complicated eating schedules.
3. it saves time. one of my favorite things about eat stop eat is all the time i save on my non-fasting days because i don't have to cook (and clean up after!) five or six meals.
4. it's flexible. if it doesn't work in your schedule to fast one day, you can do it the next. some weeks you can fast more, other weeks less. you can combine it with another healthy nutritional plan (highly recommended!) and only use it occasionally to help your results along. there are so many ways to work it into your lifestyle.
5. it's healthy. brad goes into great detail about all the different benefits that you'll get from adopting the eat stop eat lifestyle, and many of these are directly related to your health. you might be surprised to find how good it feels to give your body a break from eating.

to sum up, i've been really happy with the results of eat stop eat thus far and it seems to fit my lifestyle really well at the moment. in terms of having different tools in my fat loss arsenal, eat stop eat is a definite keeper.

random thoughts on the wild and wooly world of nutrition

okay i'm kind of a geek when it comes to nutrition. don't ask me why but reading about all sorts of different diet techniques and then trying them out on myself is kind of my thing. call it a sort of self-diagnosed diet ADD. what can i say? i get bored or am just too easily lured by the amazing health promises of the newest super-diet. let's just say i like to have lots of different tools in my nutritional arsenal so that when i feel myself getting a bit bored with my current dietary regimen, i can choose another **healthy** eating plan that will still keep me moving in the direction of my goals. my current dietary scheme is sort of a hodge-podge of different nutritional advice i've picked up from waaay too many hours of reading about this stuff (really i promise it doesn't have to be this complicated). my highly recommended sources for good nutritional advice would be burn the fat, feed the muscle, precision nutrition, and the nutrition guide that comes with turbulence training. eat stop eat also gets honorable mention as it is my most recent experiment and i have found it to be a really fun and different approach to nutrition and fat loss. these have all been fundamental in my dietary education and any one of them, when properly applied, will have you on your way to a fitter, healthier you. but, regardless of whose nutritional recommendations i happen to be following at the moment, there are some basic principles that i pretty much always try to incorporate no matter how i'm eating. call them the universal principles of dietary superiority...

1) it always comes down to calories (yes, this means portion control). you can play around with macronutrients and carb cycling and all the complex dietary tricks and techniques you want, but if you're eating more calories than you're expending, your weight is not going to budge (or it might budge in the wrong direction). period. a good way to begin to get a handle on this is to go to fitday.com and log your food for a week. this will give you a good idea of how many calories are coming in and is a real eye opener for most people. a week of dietary semi-neuroticism in the name of self-education can be a good thing :)

2) know what your eating. fresh is better...think one ingredient foods (produce, meats, fish, eggs, whole grains, legumes). the more ingredients a food has the less likely it is to be good for you, so a good rule of thumb is that if it has more than 5 ingredients it shouldn't go in shopping cart (or in your mouth).

3) eat more veggies. okay, you might have thought that this was already covered in point #2, but veggies are amazing enough that they've earned themselves their very own point as well. veggies are low in calories, very filling due to high fiber content, and come loaded with vitamins and minerals that your body needs to be happy. find more ways to incorporate veggies into your diet and you'll be well on your way to better body composition.

4) cut out (or cut way down on) refined sugars. okay, this is also related to point #2, because refined sugars are most commonly found in processed foods with a laundry list of ingredients but they easily work their way into our diet in other ways (adding sugar to coffee, for example). since things like sugar and honey are one ingredient foods, they are a bit of an exception to the above rule because they are calorie dense and nutritionally void. i have a huge sweet tooth and enjoy my sugar as much as the next gal, but if you are serious about improving your body composition (and your health!), you should be trying to seriously limit your intake of sugar.

finding the right diet for fat loss that works with your lifestyle can be a bit of a trial and error process...or if your like me an ongoing and constantly morphing one. the truth is that eating healthy is the way to get healthy and it does require some work and some planning, especially at the outset. any sort of quick fix diet plan that sounds too good to be true, definitely is. true lifestyle change takes a bit of time, but once you get into your dietary groove you'll find yourself feeling amazing and questioning why you ever ate any other way in the first place.

five keys to fat loss success

i had tried so many times in the past to lose weight and always ended up failing miserably. what was different this time? well, this time i finally managed to integrate all five of the following components of fat loss success.

1) get really clear on what you want. sit down and write out a description of your dream body, the actions that you can take to get that body, and specific date that you plan to achieve it by. never underestimate the power of having clear and specific goals and a definite time-frame for their achievement.

2) find a social support network and create accountability. this was always a missing piece of the fat loss puzzle for me in my past attempts at weight loss. the ttmembers.com forum was my support group and the transformation contest helped to keep me accountable.

3) find a nutrition plan that works for you. nutrition is a HUGE part of the fat loss puzzle. it's commonly said that "you can't out-train a bad diet." there are tons of different nutrition plans that you can follow to lose weight. a good place to start is concentrating as much as possible on eating real foods...ie foods that don't come in a can, jar, or box (ex: fruits, veggies, meat/fish/eggs, whole grains). another great step is working to eliminate refined sugars. i also incorporated brad pilon's eat stop eat into my nutritional arsenal and found it to be a very effective fat loss tool.

4) find a strength training plan that works for you. for me this is turbulence training. there are lots of good programs out there though...the important thing is to start lifting weights!

5) incorporate interval training. this has been shown time and time again to give you more bang for your fat loss buck and is an integral part of the turbulence training system.

i will be going into more detail about each of the above points in the days that follow, but this is a good primer for fat loss success.