Part 12 - An Exclusive Interview With Fat Loss Expert Tom Venuto By Tom Nicoli

Skyrocket Your Fat Loss Success!

Tom Venuto: It’s very much a matter of reframing. I think it’s more mental than anything. You know, each week you have a goal, and you can make progress each week. But just because you haven’t made progress that week doesn’t mean you failed.

Tom Nicoli: You know, you used a great word there when you said it’s feedback. You know, the word “reframe,” and we can explain it to people listening.

Reframing is simply taking something you’re thinking right now and changing it. For instance, “I felt bad that I had no shoes, until I saw a person with no feet.” You immediately reframed your emotion and your approach. And what I explain to people is that, quite honestly, I don’t fail, ever. I’ve made some serious mistakes, but they were learning experiences.

I remember, as a child, somewhere in the eighth or ninth grade, as a young kid. Didn’t we learn the scientific method? That even scientists call it “trial and error.” There is no failure. It’s just a learning experience. And that way people can reduce the emotional negativity. “Oh, I’m no god.” “I’ll never be able to do this.” “See, I knew I couldn’t do this.” But if you do, out of 30 days, 20 to 25 good days, then you’ve had progress, and progress is progress.

Let me ask you this, Tom. Because this is something I speak about with clients when I’m dealing with “weight loss” (fat reduction). People use the scale, and I want to know if you agree with this concept that the scale is an emotional tool. Because if we lost six pounds of body fat, and we increased three pounds of muscle, well, we really didn’t lose three pounds, though the scale says that. What we did was we lost six pounds of fat, and increased three pounds of very necessary lean muscle.

So what’s more important for people? To focus on what they wear – their clothes are their gauge – once they’re adults? Or to weigh themselves and follow along on a scale?

Tom Venuto: The scale can be helpful. But if it’s the only thing you use, it can be very misleading. Just like you said, it doesn’t distinguish between fat and muscle. It goes back to the beginning, when you need to select a well-formed goal. “I want to lose weight” is not a well-formed goal. “I want to permanently burn of 24 pounds of body fat and get my body fat percentage from 20% down to 14% within three months.” That is well-formed goal. With that goal, you made the distinction between fat and muscle, and you gave yourself a deadline.

What I recommend is that you have tools available, where you can track the difference between fat and muscle. There are number of methods to do that. One common way is the pinch test with skinfold calibers. This measurement will tell you your percentage of body fat. You can have it done every week or at least every other week to track your progress.

Then if you weight yourself, when you have both your scale weight and your body fat percentage, then you can calculate pounds of lean body mass and pounds of fat. I recommend keeping a chart of your measurements so you have a visual of your progress as well as an accountability tool.

I recommend measuring at least every two weeks, if not every week, if you want to keep a real close eye on things. With this information, you get a much better picture of what’s really happening. Are you losing fat or are you losing muscle? Your focus should be fat loss, not weight loss.

Tom Nicoli: Tom, you mentioned measuring body fat with calipers. Is this something that is an inexpensive instrument that people can use at home?

Tom Venuto: Yes. In fact, there is a caliper designed especially for home self-testing. There is a learning curve, but there is a learning curve even for a fitness professional to learn body fat testing. One caliper is called the AccuMeasure, and if you type that phrase into any search engine, you’ll find it all over the Net. It’s very inexpensive, around $20. And it’s a one-site pinch test. This is one of the few methods you can use to test yourself.

One of the problems with getting a body fat test in the past was that you needed someone else to test you because there are multiple measurement sites. For example, to get your total body fat percentage, you would have to measure, for example, your thigh, the side of your waist, the back of your arms (your triceps), and your upper back. Unless you’re the human pretzel, you can’t reach your upper back. So somebody came up with a caliper that measures your body fat based on one skinfold site. It may not be as accurate as the other methods, but pure accuracy isn’t as important as reliability and consistency from one measurement to the next. So in the privacy of your home, you can get this caliper, take a skinfold measurement on the side of your waist, and see how thick the skinfold is in millimeters (because most of your body fat is right below your skin).

Log the skinfold thickness, fat percentage, total body weight, and lean body mass onto your progress chart, then go to work for the next week and measure your body fat again. And then you’ll get a really accurate picture of your progress.

Ultimately, the best way to chart your progress is with body composition and to know the difference between fat and muscle, but I’d also recommend you use as many methods for measuring progress as possible. You can use your clothes size. You can do measurements: your waist measurement, hips, arms, legs – wherever you want to measure. The more feedback you get, the better. Waist measurement is particularly valuable because it does correlate strongly with body fat and it is a strong indicator of disease risk.

burnthefat.com

Train hard and expect success,

Tom Venuto

Part 11 - An Exclusive Interview With Fat Loss Expert Tom Venuto By Tom Nicoli

Skyrocket Your Fat Loss Success!

Tom Nicoli: That’s great. You know, you mentioned food portions. A lot of people think if they eat – and we hear this contradiction all the time from different sources – you can eat anything you want, as long as you eat a small amount. Or you can eat all you want, as long as you’re eating the right foods. So if your food portions are small, does that mean people can get away with eating the foods that they really shouldn’t?

Tom Venuto: For most of my clients, excerpt maybe competitive bodybuilders, I like to go by a 90/10 rule, because if you try to be too strict and you limit yourself to totally natural food groups and you don’t allow yourself that free meal every once in a while, you may be setting yourself up for craving and binging. You may be setting yourself up for failure.

If you build into your program a little bit of flexibility and give yourself two or three free meals a week, or you allow yourself some leeway for things that just happen to you in life, like birthdays, holidays, and parties, and let yourself enjoy those, you’re more likely to stick with your plan the rest of the time. It becomes more do-able because you’ve allowed yourself that wiggle room, because you’ve said it’s okay, and given yourself permission in advance to eat what you want 10% of the time. You’re going to be much more likely to stick with it in the long-haul, than if you’re on a totally rigid diet.

You should allow yourself small amounts of the things you enjoy every week. On the other hand, you can’t eat unlimited amounts of any food, even if it’s healthy food. Too much of anything will get stored as fat, even the healthy food. So on your “cheat days” or “free days,” enjoy what you want, but always, always be mindful of the law of calorie balance.

Tom Nicoli: So it’s important to keep a balance and to not create internal spite. I even recall, years ago, hearing Jake (Body By Jake), say, “Saturday is when I allow myself a piece of pizza.” So that way, you decrease that little spiteful mode that may kick in, in feeling that deprivation and sacrifice?

Tom Venuto: Exactly. There’s even some physiology behind allowing yourself to eat more periodically, in terms of caloric intake and food quantity.

When you’re in a calorie deficit, and the caloric deficit is very aggressive, your body can perceive that as starvation, and it begins to fight your efforts to lose fat by decreasing your metabolism. Your rate of calorie burning slows down, your appetite increases, and all kinds of hormonal and enzymatic changes take place that will make it more difficult to lose fat in the future if you keep cutting calories even further. So it’s actually a physiologically correct idea to eat substantially more food every few days, or to have a day each week when you eat more.

Tom Nicoli: Now, you just mentioned enzymes and internal processing. I think that’s very important, because you see this much more than I, being a physical fitness trainer and owning gyms, how the revolving door is incredible, how people give up so quickly. Can you explain to the people listening how important it is to know and understand what’s going on internally before they even see the external results?

Tom Venuto: There are so many things going on inside the body as a result of dieting, the physiology could fill an entire book. One of the things that I believe – and I think that anyone who wants t lose body fat should really tune in to this - is that it’s possible to get results every single week. But most often, because of the way the body works and the way your body has multiple redundant systems to protect you from starvation, people tend to zigzag their way to a goal. There are weeks when everything goes perfectly, and they hit their weekly target. Some weeks they’re ahead of their weekly target. Some weeks they’re a little bit below it, and some weeks go by and nothing happens.

What you have to do is frame this from the beginning, that when this happens, it’s not failure. It’s feedback, and it’s a learning experience. If you pay close attention to what’s happening, you can figure out what adjustment to make, whether it’s nutrition or training, and then the following week, get back on track. Sometimes people expect 100% success all the time. But if you look at anybody who’s a huge success in any field, it’s usually more like failure, failure, failure, failure, massive success.

burnthefat.com

Train hard and expect success,

Tom Venuto