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

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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.

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Train hard and expect success,

Tom Venuto