Everyday Systems

I just ran across this guys site. Too me it a good example of what you can do if you clean up your eating and include some exercise in your life. Using reasonable and simple training.


http://www.fatguythin.com/

What an interesting blog! I especially liked these quotes:

...I believed that losing weight took lots of willpower. I soon realised I was wrong. Losing weight doesn’t take willpower; it takes “want powerâ€.

"We may think there is willpower involved, but more likely change is due to want power. Wanting the new addiction more than the old one. Wanting the new me in preference to the person I am now."
-George Sheehan

James Gordon said it best: "It's not that some people have willpower and some don't. It's that some people are ready to change and others are not."
************************************************************
I read through the entire blog and really got interested in what he was saying about strength training. As usual, Reinhard gets it all right, since he gave us Shovelglove as well as No-S. I need to get back to that, I think.

Hum, interesting ... I'll check out the blog archives more extensively later ...

Some parts are a bit WEIRD though ...

He says he only exercised 1-2 days per week, 20 minutes each time ... oh boy !!

Then he says he took diet pills ... Reductil ?

This doesn't sound too healthy to me ... I wonder how many calories he was eating daily ? Must have been starving to lose that kind of weight without doing a lot of exercise.

Ok, amazing achievement of course (It must have been hell to deal with that kind of hunger day in and day out, but the parts about the diet pills and the lack of exercise are big turn offs for me)

Here's an interesting blog about a girl kicking it old school to lose weight : Less Diet, No pills & More Exercise.

http://antishayweightloss.com/

...

I was pleased to see the guy from the UK only lost 10 pounds during the last 10 months though. (Since I have been getting close to my final goal (190) I have been having a hard time - - I get to my lowest weight than I bounce back up - - get down - - bounce back up - - so it's normal to have issues with the LAST 10 POUNDS apparently ... Maybe the last 5 in my case, but I could lose another 5 during the next few months hopefully. This is long term though, maybe even a year to lose 5 pounds and get down to 185-187 ...

Nov. 1st now ... this means my year long plan is now over. I was remembering my very first work out tonight as I was finishing my last one for the year .... (I won't quit the exercise though since it's definitely crucial to maintaining my weight as well)

Nov. 1st 2008 : 280 pounds
Nov 1st. 2009 : 191 pounds
Total loss : 89 pounds.

Lowest weight : Oct. 22nd 2009 : 189.6 pounds

I bounced back a couple of pounds lately but nothing too bad. I concentrate more on my MONTHLY moving average now anyway instead of my weight on a particular day.

(I still plan on weighing every day and keeping the data of course, the computer tells me my monthly average automatically)

Cheers !

Marc

Well his 20 minute workouts were HIT superslow workouts, Consisting of like 5 or 6 Multi joint Exercises to build as much lean muscle as possible. I personaly feel if you put the work into 20 minute you can achieve as much as 45 minutes of half assed effort if you are willing. Is it for everyone, no. But it was just to share what is possible. As far as his eating , he pretty much said he gave up eating between meals and cleaned up what he ate.

Hi.

I am the guy behind fatguythin.

bluebunny27 wrote:Hum, interesting ... I'll check out the blog archives more extensively later ...

Some parts are a bit WEIRD though ...

He says he only exercised 1-2 days per week, 20 minutes each time ... oh boy !!

First off, congratulations of your weight loss.

One of the most common objections I hear about exercise is that people don’t have the time. But when I tell them that I exercised for 40 minutes or less per week they become suspicious. Imagine the difficulty I have getting them to accept that I now exercise for less than 5 minutes a week!

I think the main reason people have a problem with it is because we've been conned. Conned by the fitness industry and, however unwittingly, conned by the medical community.

As a result, most people don't understand the cause and effect relationship between exercise and changes in body composition.

Time is only one component of exercise. Time in and of itself guarantees nothing in the way of results from exercise. It’s what you do during that time that matters.

Instead of trying to find out how much exercise we can stand, we should be trying to find out how little exercise we need for the results we want.

Since I changed my lifestyle, my doctor has reduced my blood pressure meds, I take a fraction of the insulin I used to take and at my last asthma check my inhalers where reduced because I blew the peak flow meter off the scale.

I no longer snore - which my wife is very pleased about - and I sleep like a baby. I no longer come home from work tired and have energy to spare.

bluebunny27 wrote: Then he says he took diet pills ... Reductil ?

This doesn't sound too healthy to me ... I wonder how many calories he was eating daily ? Must have been starving to lose that kind of weight without doing a lot of exercise.

I made a point of telling everyone that I took Reductil. Clinical trials of this drug showed an average weight loss of 5 or 6kg in 12 months.

It’s not hell to lose weight. In fact, it's very liberating. I never starved myself. I eat a lot of food. So much that some people have told me they wouldn’t be able to eat it all.

I hear all the time from people that they exercise a lot so they can eat more food and still lose weight. But exercise uses relatively small amounts of energy. That is why I am not interested in how many calories I can burn in the gym. I’m interested in how many calories I can stimulate my body to burn outside of the gym.

bluebunny27 wrote: Ok, amazing achievement of course (It must have been hell to deal with that kind of hunger day in and day out, but the parts about the diet pills and the lack of exercise are big turn offs for me)

All exercise is not created equal. My exercise is dose-related. Just as different medicines require relatively small (sometimes minute) doses to have the desired effect, the right type of exercise requires a small time investment or dose. And just like medicine, increasing the exercise dose can have an undesirable effect on the body.

bluebunny27 wrote: Here's an interesting blog about a girl kicking it old school to lose weight : Less Diet, No pills & More Exercise.

http://antishayweightloss.com/

I think the telling phrase here is “less dietâ€. Most fat people I meet have a fear of hunger. But it’s nothing to fear. In fact, it’s natural to experience hunger.
…

bluebunny27 wrote: I was pleased to see the guy from the UK only lost 10 pounds during the last 10 months though.

I stopped taking the Reductil in January this year and I increased the amount of food I was eating when I reached 185lb.

I went from 185lb to 175lb in four months without trying. My weight has averaged 175lb since. My body seems to have settled around the 175lb mark naturally. But I have continued to gradually increase strength so it’s likely that I’ve lost more than 10 pounds of fat during that time.

Your difficulty with losing a further 10lb may be related to muscle losses - especially if you workout too long and at too low of an intensity to build/maintain strength.

Best wishes,

Craig

Brent_Corkins wrote:Well his 20 minute workouts were HIT superslow workouts, Consisting of like 5 or 6 Multi joint Exercises to build as much lean muscle as possible. I personaly feel if you put the work into 20 minute you can achieve as much as 45 minutes of half assed effort if you are willing. Is it for everyone, no. But it was just to share what is possible. As far as his eating , he pretty much said he gave up eating between meals and cleaned up what he ate.

Hi Brent.

You hit the nail on the head. I use various rep speeds in my workouts including slow reps.

You also summed up nicely the simplicity of what I did diet-wise. It doesn't need to be any more complicated than cleaning up what we eat.

Craig

I want to understand this clearly: it is best to use a very heavy load, slowly, fewer reps, than to go lighter, longer, more reps?

FatGuyThin wrote :
"One of the most common objections I hear about exercise is that people don’t have the time. But when I tell them that I exercised for 40 minutes or less per week they become suspicious. Imagine the difficulty I have getting them to accept that I now exercise for less than 5 minutes a week!"




********* Hey, nice reply, FatGuyThin. Yeah, I didn't want to sound too negative because you sure have
a lot of will power to have lost so much weight. I was just questioning some of the things I read on your site.
I agree 5 minutes doesn't sound like a long time for a work out though.
I used to train between 30 and 50 minutes 6-7 times a week. I think it was vigorous exercise too, I mean I'm always sweating bullets
by the end of the work outs. I'll do a lil' bit less now that I'm not trying to lose weight anymore though, 25 to 35 minutes 5 times per
week ... big change !! I'll shorten the work outs a lil' bit more if I lose too MUCH. (I don't think I'd go under 185 .... 191 this morning
so I can still manage to lose 5-6 pounds during the next year though to get my BMI down in the 26's)




FatGuyThin wrote :
"I think the main reason people have a problem with it is because we've been conned. Conned by the fitness industry and, however unwittingly, conned by the medical community. Time is only one component of exercise. Time in and of itself guarantees nothing in the way of results from exercise. It’s what you do during that time that matters. Instead of trying to find out how much exercise we can stand, we should be trying to find out how little exercise we need for the results we want."




*********** Good idea, whenever you read about work outs most experts always say at least 4-5 times a week for 30 minutes ...




FatGuyThin wrote :
"I made a point of telling everyone that I took Reductil. Clinical trials of this drug showed an average weight loss of 5 or 6kg in 12 months."




*********** I suppose if it was all done under medical supervision it's alright but I never considered taking diet pills personally.
I thought those weren't really good for your health ?




FatGuyThin wrote :
"It’s not hell to lose weight. In fact, it's very liberating. I never starved myself. I eat a lot of food. So much that some people have told me they wouldn’t be able to eat it all."



********* Oh, I thought you were almost starving -- considering how much weight you lost within so little time and without working
out for very long as you said ... How many calories were you eating every day ? Sorry if this is already on your site I have it in my
files but haven't checked it out more extensively yet.



FatGuyThin wrote :
"I hear all the time from people that they exercise a lot so they can eat more food and still lose weight. But exercise uses relatively small amounts of energy. That is why I am not interested in how many calories I can burn in the gym. I’m interested in how many calories I can stimulate my body to burn outside of the gym."




********** Sure, that method works too, the main thing is to create a calorie deficit ... you can do it mostly by the diet if you don't want or can't
exercise a lot ... but I would have imagined that would be harder ... same with the training really.... you can lose weight eating whatever you want
and exercising 3 hours a day too ... but I think the best way is a combination : Diet & Exercise. That's just based on my own experience
this past year.



FatGuyThin wrote :
All exercise is not created equal. My exercise is dose-related. Just as different medicines require relatively small (sometimes minute) doses to have the desired effect, the right type of exercise requires a small time investment or dose. And just like medicine, increasing the exercise dose can have an undesirable effect on the body.




*********** Funny, I was just on a site where someone was explaining how to do '5 minute work outs' every day .... I think I only want to
do FOUR minutes though ... 5 sounds a lil' bit too long to me, lol !



FatGuyThin wrote :
"I stopped taking the Reductil in January this year and I increased the amount of food I was eating when I reached 185lb.
I went from 185lb to 175lb in four months without trying. My weight has averaged 175lb since. My body seems to have settled around the 175lb mark naturally. But I have continued to gradually increase strength so it’s likely that I’ve lost more than 10 pounds of fat during that time.
Your difficulty with losing a further 10lb may be related to muscle losses - especially if you workout too long and at too low of an intensity to build/maintain strength.
Best wishes,
Craig"




************ Yeah, good work ! I was happy to see you hadn't kept on losing weight too fast later on because I've been experiencing
something similar in the past month so ... but since I was 5 pounds away from my goal I managed to make it anyway. Cheers !

Marc

Jammin' Jan wrote:I want to understand this clearly: it is best to use a very heavy load, slowly, fewer reps, than to go lighter, longer, more reps?

Hi Jammin' Jan.

I mainly use between 3 and 5 reps on each exercise but I perform each rep fairly slowly to minimise momentum.

When performing each rep taking 6-seconds on both the lifting and lowering set of 5 reps takes approximately one minute.

Here's an overview: http://www.fatguythin.com/2009/01/in-a- ... abdom.html

Obviously "heavy" and "light" are relative terms but if you mean are high-reps better for fat loss then the answer is no.

Despite what most experts tell you, exercise is a poor calorie burner. High reps won't melt the fat away as some claim.

BTW, love the Prisoner quote in your signature. I was a young lad when the Prisoner was first shown on TV here in the UK.

"I'm not a number" - love it!

bluebunny27 wrote:FatGuyThin wrote :
********* Hey, nice reply, FatGuyThin. Yeah, I didn't want to sound too negative because you sure have
a lot of will power to have lost so much weight. I was just questioning some of the things I read on your site.

Hi bluebunny.

It's always good to question. I wouldn't accept anything about exercise on face value and I wouldn't expect anybody else too, either.

bluebunny27 wrote: I agree 5 minutes doesn't sound like a long time for a work out though.

I know, it sounds unbelievable especially when you read some of what's being promoted in fitness mags and books. I plan to put a video on youtube of my workout. In the meantime, here's a link to a video I shot of my friend, Mark, who is losing weight training 5 minutes or less a week:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJFURKttdKI

bluebunny27 wrote:
I used to train between 30 and 45 minutes 6-7 times a week. I think it was vigorous exercise too, I mean I'm always sweating bullets
by the end of the work outs. I'll do a lil' bit less now that I'm not trying to lose weight anymore though, 25 to 35 minutes 5 times per
week ... big change !! I'll shorten the work outs a lil' bit more if I lose too MUCH. (I don't think I'd go under 185 .... 191 this morning
so I can still manage to lose 5-6 pounds during the next year though to get my BMI down in the 26's)

I'm sure you will achieve it, too.

The BMI is an interesting one. I am at 25 - which is considered the high end of acceptable. But I'm leaner now than I can remember ever being as an adult. I don't believe that BMI is a reliable indicator of anything. I much prefer to go on the mirror and how my clothes fit.

bluebunny27 wrote:
*********** Good idea, whenever you read about work outs most experts always say at least 4-5 times a week for 30 minutes ...

The thing is, I see people all the time who freewheel on the stationary bike at the gym for their allotted time and think they are getting a workout. And I'm sure we all know people who think that just being a member of a gym automatically means they're healthier even though they never use their membership.

Doctors are desperately trying to get people to exercise because of the obesity epidemic in the West. They use an evidence-based model for prescribing exercise like they do for medicine, the problem is, most studies on exercise until now have been carried out on aerobics.

bluebunny27 wrote: *********** I suppose if it was all done under medical supervision it's alright but I never considered taking diet pills personally.
I thought those weren't really good for your health ?

It's definitely a personal decision. And they won't work if you don't clean up your eating habits. Bad for your health? Well, like most drugs, they can have side effects.

And I'm not entirely sure how much they helped. But I think it only fair to let people know about it when I talk about losing weight because it's what I did. I will say, however, that most of the work was down to me.

bluebunny27 wrote: ********* Oh, I thought you were almost starving -- considering how much weight you lost within so little time and without working
out for very long as you said ... How many calories were you eating every day ? Sorry if this is already on your site I have it in my
files but haven't checked it out more extensively yet.

I honestly never felt starved. I never counted the calories in a typical day's eating but I posted some photos of my meals at the time: http://www.fatguythin.com/2009/02/what-do-i-eat.html

bluebunny27 wrote: ********** Sure, that method works too, the main thing is to create a calorie deficit ... you can do it mostly by the diet if you don't want or can't
exercise a lot ...

Yes. It's about creating a calorie deficit.

bluebunny27 wrote: but I would have imagined that would be harder ... same with the training really.... you can lose weight eating whatever you want
and exercising 3 hours a day too ... but I think the best way is a combination : Diet & Exercise. That's just based on my own experience
this past year.

You've obviously done a great job.

The problem with exercising for long periods is that it can wear you out. Exercise is a stressor and so is a low-calorie diet. Because the effects of stress are cumulative, you could make losing fat more difficult.

My primary objective was to get as healthy as I could because I knew that the fat would come off faster the healthier I became.

bluebunny27 wrote: *********** Funny, I was just on a site where someone was explaining how to do '5 minute work outs' every day .... I think I only want to
do FOUR minutes though ... 5 sounds a lil' bit too long to me, lol !

Yeah, it's like that scene from "There's Something About Mary" when the guy is talking about 6 minute abs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9mioHO4hoM

bluebunny27 wrote: ************ Yeah, good work ! I was happy to see you hadn't kept on losing weight too fast later on because I've been experiencing
something similar in the past month so ... but since I was 5 pounds away from my goal I managed to make it anyway. Cheers !

Marc

Good job.

Best wishes,

Craig

Fatguythin: you're the first person to ever comment on my Prisoner signature! Be seeing you!

Fatguythin:
"Smile I know, it sounds unbelievable especially when you read some of what's being promoted in fitness mags and books. I plan to put a video on youtube of my workout. In the meantime, here's a link to a video I shot of my friend, Mark, who is losing weight training 5 minutes or less a week:"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJFURKttdKI



*********** Hum, interesting ! I sometimes watch videos on YOUTUBE, people doing burpees and other exercises ...
training/diet tips, thanks for the link !




Fatguythin:
"The BMI is an interesting one. I am at 25 - which is considered the high end of acceptable. But I'm leaner now than I can remember ever being as an adult. I don't believe that BMI is a reliable indicator of anything. I much prefer to go on the mirror and how my clothes fit."



******** True. My BMI is .... 27.3 at the moment but I'd like to lose a few more pounds (5-6) long term so I could lower it to 26.5 ... to get
to a 25-25.5 BMI I would have to lose another 5-6 pounds after that ... I'm not really too bothered so I probably won't try to go there, just
maintaining around 185-190 will be challenging enough.



Fatguythin:
The thing is, I see people all the time who freewheel on the stationary bike at the gym for their allotted time and think they are getting a workout. And I'm sure we all know people who think that just being a member of a gym automatically means they're healthier even though they never use their membership."




********* Correct. Sometimes it makes me laugh when I see people training and they move so slowly it doesn't even look like exercise
to me. I suppose they still benefit a lil' bit but you have to get your heart rate up to make more progress (I'm not talking
about people who are VERY overweight and can't really exercise hard of course) I try to exercise as hard as I can personally,
better to do 20 intense minutes than 60 where you're hardly moving at all.





Fatguythin:
It's definitely a personal decision. And they won't work if you don't clean up your eating habits. Bad for your health? Well, like most drugs, they can have side effects.

And I'm not entirely sure how much they helped. But I think it only fair to let people know about it when I talk about losing weight because it's what I did. I will say, however, that most of the work was down to me.




********** Awesome ! Yes, you can definitely talk about your experience .... having done all that great work already.
You have more credibility from the get go.



Fatguythin :
"I honestly never felt starved. I never counted the calories in a typical day's eating but I posted some photos of my meals at the time: "http://www.fatguythin.com/2009/02/what-do-i-eat.html "




******** Looks pretty good and reasonable too ! I eat more than that personally but I'm younger (37)
I weigh more as well (191) and I'm training almost every day too, so I need more calories...
usually 2,600-2,800 every day.




Fatguythin:
The problem with exercising for long periods is that it can wear you out. Exercise is a stressor and so is a low-calorie diet. Because the effects of stress are cumulative, you could make losing fat more difficult.



******** I was training really hard almost every day for a year straight ... I counted the other day and since the beginning
of february (when I started keeping track of this) I only missed 14-15 days ... all the other days I was training for at least 25-30
minutes and more often than not 40-45-50 ... It's definitely a habit now.




Fatguythin
"My primary objective was to get as healthy as I could because I knew that the fat would come off faster the healthier I became.
Yeah, it's like that scene from "There's Something About Mary" when the guy is talking about 6 minute "abs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9mioHO4hoM "




********** You bet, that's what I was thinking about as well ... great scene !
I'll check out your website more extensively very soon ... very interesting even though I am done with my year long journey now
and I'm mostly thinking about ways to maintain my weight, except for the last few remaining pounds I mentioned ... but that's not
a priority of course ... even if it take me a year to lose the last 5-6 pounds, no big deal.
Cheers !

Marc