Since people seemed to like the body fat = debt analogy, let’s look at it a bit more closely.

Take a look at your excess body fat.

Now imagine it as a negative number.

In this sense, extra body fat is the same as excess debt.

It’s stuff that you purchased and consumed, but couldn’t afford.

An ultimately, for long term health, it’s stuff you eventually need to  pay for.

So the debt of overeating is bodyfat, it’s sitting there…staring at you as a daily reminder that you owe.

If you have 20 pounds of excess body fat, you owe 20 pounds fat worth of calories.

In other words: In the calorie out, calories in equation, you owe some calories.

And just like debt, wishing it away doesn’t work.

Neither does pretending it’s not there.

And just like debt, there’s a weird sort of interest on body fat.

Extra body fat slows you down, and in a weird sort of way, predisposes you to slowly gain fat.

The other thing is that excess fat just kinda happens, like debt.

It’s either a slow creep, or a culmination of a couple big events.

It’s the splurge on the boat, followed by the emergency roof repair, then the Coach purse for the Birthday then…BAM, debt.

Or the slow mismangement of your monthly expenses where one day you wake up, and even without a giant shopping splurge you look at your account to see…debt.

So fat and debt are a lot a like, something NEEDS to be paid back, AND paying it back will take work.

And just like debt, paying back body fat just takes time and patience.

Typically, the quick fixes are temporary, and the only true solutions tends to be a reallocation of resources, for several months..sometimes years.

But it is possible.

In fact you can think of Eat Stop Eat like a twice a week debt repayment plan.

Not enough to really comprise your way of life, but enough to get you out of debt in a couple months.

And once you are out of debt, the trick it to never get back into debt.

BP

Watching your Diet, hitting the gym…hopefully you’re following Eat Stop Eat.

And, lucky you, you’re losing body fat.

But..have you ever wondered…where exactly does it go when you ‘lose it’?

Firstly, it’s not actually ‘lost’ as much as it’s used as an energy source to fuel your metabolism.  After all, your body fat is really an ‘energy reserve’ to be tapped into when energy from food sources is low. (So the saying ‘burning fat’ is actually correct!)

During this process your fat is used to synthesize high energy molecules (like ATP) the very molecules that fuel your metabolic rate, and during this process is your body fat is broken down into carbon dioxide and water.

The water is lost in sweat, urine, feces and exhaled air, while the carbon dioxide is exhaled.

So…now you know

BP

Did you know that by the end of an Eat Stop Eat style fast you are burning close to the highest percentage body fat you can possibly
burn?

It’s True.

By measuring something called Respiratory Quotient we can see that by around the 16-18 hour mark of a fast you are burning almost exclusively body fat as a fuel source.
Think about that for a moment…Just by fasting you can massively increase the proportion of fat you are burning to fuel you metabolism.

Just another example of getting results from doing nothing!

BP

Honestly, this may come across as a little ‘conspiracy theory’ but I believe it to be true.

The double-edged wrath of food.

Yep…Wrath.

OK, I guess it’s more “Over-eating” the simply food..but you get the idea

Let me paint the picture for you…

Coffee shop at lunch time (Coffee Culture on Appleby for anyone in the Burlington, Ontario area)

Random bearded guy sitting in the corner, eavesdropping (that’s me)

You know what the bearded guy hears on any given lunch hour?

Complaining.

Complaining about two things:

Money and body fat.

Now here’s the trap, the part that drives me crazy…

It costs money to build and maintain that body fat.

At the risk of being redundant this needs to be stated again ==>

It costs money to build and maintain that body fat

This is the result of our food-economic and food-marketing environment.

You’re allowed to try and eat healthier, but you’re not allowed to try and eat less.

And because of this we strive to eat healthy spending EXTRA money on HEALTHY things, but we can’t seem to EAT LESS.

It’s a trap.

We struggle with whether or not it’s OK to skip breakfast, how long we should go between meals, whether or not a cola is empty calories, is High Fructose Corn Syrup killing us..what about grains? But really…no matter what…

We’re paying to build and maintain the very body fat we HATE.

Or…when we look at it form a different angle.

Someone is PROFITING from our misery.

Our excess body fat is a symptom of overspending on food.

(which always makes me question overly obese government officials preaching fiscal responsibility)

My meal today came to 8.47

Medium coffee two cream, everything bagel toasted with fried egg, bacon and tomato. Cinnamon Scone.

I get this same lunch once or twice a week, almost every week.

But, mostly it’s the ONLY lunch I eat on any given week  (I eat a full lunch maybe once or twice a week)

So, I’m OK with this spend.

But, what about people who spend 10 dollars a day EVERYDAY on lunch, AND want to lose weight?

The economic cost adds up….so to the health costs.

For most people, if I handed them Seven thousand dollars right now it would certainly help out with their debt.

And seven thousand dollars is about how much a person would save if they cut three of those lunches out every week for 5 years.

Yes, five years is a long time, but really….Why are we paying for this extra body fat?

And the longer we carry that extra body fat, the worse it is for our health.

So why do we do it?

Is it simply that we need a break from work every day so badly that we are willing to pay 10 dollars and 20 pounds in body fat to get that break?

is it a pleasure thing? Are all of our meals simply SO DELICIOUS that we can’t do without them?

Is it the social aspect or do most of us eat alone?

Could it be the marketing, economics and public opinion driving us to eat consistently?

(After all Someone is PROFITING from our misery.)

The bottom line is that this is a major source of stress for most of us..money and fat, fat and money… and they’re much more related then most of us realize.

If you weigh more than you want to, you are eating more than you need too.

If you are eating more than you need to you are spending more on food than you need to.

So consider this:

Other than the health benefits and the self esteem benefits, their is also a major financial advantage to learning to eat less.

It’s small but it adds up.

And lastly, remember every time someone tells you about the dangers of eating less, or how you need to eat more to lose weight and be happy…

Someone is PROFITING from our misery.

BP

www.EatStopEat.com

The fact that for many men it is a mental block that is probably preventing them from getting really, really lean.

In fact, sometimes a mental block can be a bigger culprit then either their diet or exercise program for preventing guys from getting lean.

Here’s a perfect example.

I use to see this in bodybuilders all the time:  They would spend an entire year (maybe more) ‘bulking’ enjoying the feeling of hitting milestone weights like, 200, 225, 250, even 275 pounds…every time a bodybuilder hit one of these weights it was a giant feeling of achievement.

But, when it came competition time these same bodybuilders could never get truly shredded because they had a mental block that would keep them from getting below 200 pounds..Even if they weren’t competition ready, they simply could not get passed the mental block of dropping into the 190′s especially after being so large beforehand.

In other words, they would rather LOSE THEIR COMPETITION then drop below 200 pounds!

I was thinking about this other day when it suddenly hit me…this doesn’t just effect bodybuilders…it effects a lot of men.

It even effects me too.

If I want to get leaner than I am now, I’d have to drop below 170.

Honestly, this is a fact that I’ve never really considered.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am extremely happy with my weight (175ish) and my  body composition. But the fact remains, If I did want to get leaner, I would also have to get lighter.

I know my lean body mass is between 150-155. I also know that I’m an experienced lifter in my thirties who has been seriously lifting weights for more than 15 years. My bench, squat and dead lift are not going to increase by more then ten to fifteen pounds in the next year.

I’ve also tracked my weight for years…so I know (obviously) I’m way leaner in the 170′s then I was in the 180′s and 190′s (again obvious, but needed to be stated).

This means that my Lean Body Mass is A) not going to change quickly and  B) Will most likely never to go outside of this 5 pound range.

So based on these facts if for some reason I wanted to drop into TRUE single digits for my percent body fat (7 or 8%), I’d have to weight between 165 and 170 pounds.

(The whole ‘gain 20 pounds of muscle and lost 20 pounds of fat at the same time’ thing only really happens when you are young (17 to 25), just started training, or are on steroids)

The bottom line is that weight can be a GIANT mental hurdle for guys who want to get lean. We’re often misled by the padded stats of professional athletes and celebrities, and have a very strong aversion to being “too light”.

If you want to get truly lean, then you may benefit from ignoring the scale and just go by your body measurements and how you look in the mirror.

BP