Fitness Philosophy

Most new clients come to me with similar goals, they want to lose weight and gain strength. Makes sense, you want to lose weight to look better, fit into your old clothes, and reduce your disease risk. You want to gain strength so you can live the life that you would like, as well as get the muscle tone that comes from being stronger. In addition, everyone wants to reach their goals as soon as possible. So far so good, but this is where thinking starts to go wrong.  What most people really mean when they say that they want to lose weight is that they want to lose fat. 

When you focus on losing weight you do things like skip meals or marathon cardio sessions. Both help you lose weight but are not very effective at keeping the weight off or helping to improve the quality of your life. The most effective fat loss programs include eating on a regular schedule and high intensity strength training. There is a lot of misinformation about how to eat and exercise for fat loss. It can be hard to cut through all the conflicting information and figure out what you really should be eating. The basic principles are:

Eat every 3-4 hours (5-6 meals/day)

This helps maintain your blood sugar level. When you eat too much your body goes into fat storage mode. When you do not eat enough your metabolism slows and you burn fewer calories at rest. Both work against your fat loss goals

Increase you lean protein intake (30-40% of daily caloric intake)

Higher protein and lower carb diets have been shown to increase fat loss. Be careful here, this is not ketosis; carbs should still be 25%-30% of your daily caloric intake.
• Drink water (64oz /day Minimum)


Without sufficient water your metabolism slows.
• Take a fish oil supplement


Fish oil has been shown to increase fat loss
• Get adequate sleep


Lack of sleep increases cortisol levels in the body resulting in more new fat storage.

Any nutrition plan that severely restricts calorie intake (1200 calories a day or less) is probably working against your ultimate goal. Assuming that your goals are to look better, feel better, and be free from weight related health problems. Very low calorie diets slow your basal metabolic rate (BMR) meaning you burn fewer calories at rest. When your body does not get enough calories from food one of the places it gets the energy it needs is from muscle. Muscle powers your metabolism, less muscle means a lower BMR and a greater likelihood that you will put the weight back on when you resume your normal eating habits. When you lose weight by allowing muscle to be used for energy you set yourself up to regain weight in the future.  Your nutritional goal should be to lose fat not weight. You want muscle; it elevates your BMR, protects you from injury, helps in maintaining bone density, and helps you live a more active life. Your diet and exercise program need to work together to get the results you want. You need to eat to promote muscle growth.

There are lots of great exercise programs out there (and just as many if not more, bad ones). Many fail because they lack variety, they fail to address your specific problems, you cannot maintain the recommended intensity, or they are just designed poorly. Some of the best exercise programs out there are the ones that athletes use to get ready to compete, fat loss is just a nice side effect of the training. An athlete wants to improve performance, to get bigger, faster, and stronger. Most athletes are in great shape and it shows. The problem is that most of us cannot sustain that intensity for more than a short period, and many of us should not even be trying, both because that intensity level increases risk of injury and because maintaining mental focus becomes more and more difficult the longer you train at that intensity. The solution is to take the athletic training methods, high intensity, primarily anaerobic workouts and dial back the intensity to a level that is safe and sustainable for lifelong fitness. Even the reduced intensity level is more intense than most people ever get on their own and the types of exercises are much more varied then you will ever see in a typical gym.

In order for muscles, bones, and the cardiovascular system to adapt (put on muscle, promote fat loss, etc.) you have to ask it to do more than it can comfortably, this is called progressive overload or the overload principle. This is where many exercise programs fall apart. The intensity is not high enough to get the results that you want. The old dogma was that to lose fat you had to exercise at 60% of your maximum heart rate, your ‘aerobic training zone’. Turns out that the old dogma does not work, never did, partly because it does nothing to elevate your basal metabolic rate (BMR) (the number of calories you use at rest). Anaerobic exercise, particularly high intensity types of anaerobic exercise will elevate your metabolism, resulting in greater fat loss and greater strength gains. High intensity exercise can elevate your metabolism for up to 72 hours after your workout. This process is called excess post exercise oxygen production (EPOC) or afterburn. When you burn more calories at rest you burn more calories overall resulting in greater fat loss. As an added benefit as you develop greater muscle mass through anaerobic exercise you elevate your BMR and you burn even more calories at rest. If fat loss is your goal then you should be lifting weights.