I really enjoy working out fasted. BPC is def. a nice option for a pre-workout. I lift first and do light cardio to end a workout which makes me hunggggry I usually have a good sized meal after a workout and eat smaller for the rest of the day after.

Question for both of you guys:

Top of your head, what book/s would you recommend a beginner who wants to lose weight. Just to give myself a basic-okay concept on nutrition and diet.

What about for strength training/power lifting?

Thanks!

Hey all,

So I wanted to weigh in here with a practical story/advice from a non-fitness person about my experience of the last 6 mths. It will be better used as a guide for the elderly (>35's)

None of what follows is scientific, apart from its an observed reaction to a series of changes that have seemingly proved to me where my biggest weight/health weaknesses are. Although I am a scientist by training (Engineer)

So I'm currently 42 y.o. and was quite sporty for most of my younger life, regularly playing many types of football etc until age 25-30 ish when it dwindled.

From 2006-2011 I was in a corporate job that had me in a VERY sedentary lifestyle and being very time poor had a terrible diet, consisting of a lot of long lunches (where I over ate) and a lot of take away delivery orders, often Mcdonalds home delivery, it was not uncommon for me to eat it for 2,3 or even 4 meals a day on a weekend.

Once I left that job I made a pact to try to get my self in better shape as I had balloned out to 99Kg (my upper BMI "healhty" weight limit for my height is 78kg) this had me in the "Obese" category of the BMI.

For something like 5-8 years I had steadily been getting pains increasing around the liver/gall bladder area and at the height of my 99kg situation I often could not get a full nights sleep because of them. They seemed to come for anywhere up to 2 weeks and abate for 1-2 weeks before returning.

After spending some 5-7 months of steady gym work once leaving the job I started to decrease the weight and the pain started to subside, I think I got down to about 89kg on that stint but it was hard going. mostly running, doing some weight machine work and also some swimming. but I felt a better and my underlying pain issues were significantly less, but I seemed to hit a wall around that 89-90kg mark.

After about 1-1.5 years I noticed the pains slowly coming back and my weight had crept up again to around 92-95kg. (I'd moved and had no gym and got a bit lazy)

Also after going home for 1-2mths for xmas each year and eating all my favourite foods in Australia, (I always say it in my head as FAV-or-IT now, thanks Ross), I would find the weight could jump up 3-4 kg in that period.

So cut to November last year and things were clearly heading downwards again, the weight was not changing much from the 92-94kg mark even with swimming at my new gym, and the abdomen pains were still coming and going (albeit less than at their peak). So I changed tack and made a major discovery.

I decided to focus on what was going in my mouth to see what that would do. To that end I did ONLY the following:

1. Eliminated nearly all take away food such as Mcdonalds/KFC from my regular diet, only eating them when caught in a situation with no other choices. (e.g. airport transit)

2. Limited my soft drink intake to at most 1 a day for normal days (occasionally none a day)

3. Dropped the majority of Sugar from my diet, I'm now down to on average < 6 teaspoons a day from all sources (e.g. 1 can of coke is ~6 teaspoons of sugar)

4. Increased the amount of Stir fry/asian dishes eaten at home (prepared by ourselves), easy cos my wifes Chinese and I'm in Beijing. (We eat around 6-8 main meals a week like this), and cut the AMOUNT I eat.

5. Substituted a lot of drinks for water

The end result was an almost immediate elimination of the abdominal pains and a fast drop in weight, not just weight though its a drop in Visceral fat, Its quite obviously all coming off from my middle and trunk section.

Also since around Feb this year when we returned I stopped my traditional gym stuff and now ONLY do 1-2 45m classes of YOGA a week, some weeks I may do 1 x 3-5Km run depending how I feel.

To date I am at 85-86Kg and still falling with this method, my mind is sharper, I feel MUCH better and have barely felt any pain at all for 6 mths.

In short summary, this experience has taught me a few key lessons and they are as follows:

1. Our bodies need a much lower quantity of food than the average westerner thinks is reasonable (this decreases sharply with age as well, though we often continue to eat at the rate of a 20 y.o. well into our 40's)

2. Water water water, it helps everything work better and makes you less hungry

3. Sugar is death, kill it before it kills you (forget MSG, carbs, fat, whatever else is the diet fad of the week, there is no greater enemy than sugar, and its in nearly ALL of our processed/prepackaged food) read labels, a good starting point is identify any food with > 10% sugar content and ditch it.

4. Exercise is good, but you'll have far greater success managing what goes in than trying to burn off what you didn't need in the first place.

5. Your taste WILL readjust to lower quantities of sugar/salt and food in general. Things will start to taste better, you'll lose urges to eat garbage (In my case it took around 1-2 weeks to start seeing a reset in this) ,these days I don't WANT to go into a McD's or KFC, no desire at all.

I know I could take things even further and get greater results by throwing in a day or 2 of fasting each week and by being more aggressive in what I eat, but I've found the changes I've made to be relatively minimal and easy to implement and had enough of an effect that I don't need to reduce any of my enjoyment of eating with my current setup, in fact I'm enjoying my food even more these days.

My recommendation to anyone thinking of getting more flexible and generally fitter, seriously try YOGA, the first couple of weeks will F*^& you UP!!!!

Also if you're interested in some great documentaries supporting some of this, there's 3 brilliant BBC ones called

The truth about Exercise

The truth about Sugar

Eat, Fast & Live longer

Download them, you wont be disappointed, entertaining and really eye opening. (Two of them are done by an MD in conjunction with scientists from leading UK universities, the sugar one is a little less strong on the science but has some interesting info on WHO guidelines)

Happy to answer questions on specifics if anyone's interested.

Few quick questions if you guys don't mind, really appreciate you both doing this!

- What's the best way to improve your acceleration over short distances for a sport where we're changing direction a lot like soccer.

- Is the bulletproof diet good?

- Do you have a recommendation for a breakfast that will be optimal for poker performance with no exercise other than BPC (I don't like coffee).

Thanks a lot and gl

Firstly, should say that psyphon's post above is excellent, and should definitely be read by the portion of the crowd that wants to lose weight and improve their lifestyle.

The soccer/acceleration thing is fairly out of my realm of expertise, but in trying to research this question, I did come across this presentation/quasi meta-analysis which you may find useful.

Jason and I touched on Dave Asprey a little bit on the show iirc. "Bulletproof" is basically Asprey's marketing gimmick. He knows his s**t but he's such a salesman that it's kind of off-putting. I will say that even with the salesman nonsense that his "food pyramid" of sorts is a lot better than the normal food pyramid spewed out by the government.

You don't have to drink BPC at all. The point of adding a bunch of fat to the coffee is so that the caffeine is metabolized a little more slowly and gives you a nice cognitive bump throughout the day. And you definitely don't want to eat a whack of carbs before playing. So as long as you keep it fairly high in fats before/during your session, you'll be fine. Get some good meat/eggs, cook it in grass-fed butter with a side of avocado and veggies and you're good to go. Have some caffeinated tea if you enjoy it.

Do you mean some special tea with extra caffeine added to it? Because "regular" tea already contains caffeine (as opposed to decaffeinated tea).

I just meant to differentiate from the caffeine-free herbal teas.

TChan, a question about Compex and Bioforce. What do you do on days when Bioforce tells you you're ready (in the green), but you have a hard workout scheduled tomorrow? I would love to be able to reschedule that workout to today, but I can't. I feel like a good Compex session might be the answer, but I don't have that much experience with that yet to know for sure (I just got it last month). The other thought was maybe a 30-minute or so aerobic session. Thoughts?

You have to watch out for the tendency for a mentality of "I have a hammer, therefore everything is a nail". I do this too. If you had a scheduled rest day, a green isn't an indication that you have to blast out an insane workout. Similarly, an amber doesn't mean you have to cancel your workout. HRV measurement is a tool, not a coach. It gives you warning signs that you're overtraining (lots of ambers and reds, and a declining trend) and also tells you if you're not pushing hard enough in general (green every day). For a long time I fell into the trap of dictating my day entirely on my HRV and ignoring my programming goals.

More directly answering your question, I would take a rest/low day if you had planned on a rest/low day because you've been training hard. If you've mostly been doing nothing, then I would hit it hard, and not worry too much about hitting it hard again the next day. Two hard days in a row is not going to cause overtraining. I would say that a 30-minute aerobic session is probably not what you want because medium-duration/low-intensity training actually stimulates parasympathetic response. I would actually recommend the 30-minute aerobic session on amber days.

Btw if you purchased Bioforce, I think you can request to join this Facebook group where people much more knowledgable than me talk about this stuff regularly: https://www.facebook.com/groups/271169789718343/

Good points, T. I'm on that FB group now, too.

Hi Terrence.

Do you limit your carbs when you train to get into the ring with people?

The worry about carbs really baffles me. I admit I don't really know any of the science. It just seems really not intuitive that when someone is looking to be less fat that they should be warned about carbs rather than.. fat.

I've been using a site called cronometer.com (you enter everything you eat and it spits out your stats), and I don't fill all my nutrients until around 4000 calories for the day. And I'm sure I wouldn't feel good or have such a slender physique if I was filling it up with fat and protein. So besides supplementing, I actually don't know how someone would eat a complete diet without loading up on carbs. It seems like that's the puzzle piece that makes everything work. (I don't personally "try" to fill nutrients, I just load up on what my body seems to want. It just dawned on me that this seems to be true.) I'd be curious to see what you eat in a typical day and how it adds up on cronometer.

Fair enough, but the correlation that they live long (and are very thin) has to put some kind of ceiling on how bad carbs could be, right? So while it doesn't prove that it's optimal or necessarily a secret to living long, it does suggest carbs aren't terrible. And it should raise the burden of proof on the idea that carbs are bad.

So you were inspired by the advice but you're skeptical of it? With all the cancer, obesity, heart disease, etc. in Western countries, I'm skeptical of why anyone would think the mainstream could possibly be on to something.

The mainstream is always a trailing indicator (in anything). You won't do better than mediocre if you need the mainstream to agree before you feel comfortable about something.

What does that even mean? You can't just say "conspiracy" as an excuse to stop thinking about something.

Just being used to it and friends and family doing it is probably bigger than direct marketing. But ya, there is plenty of marketing. And the main influence is probably that meat and dairy are artificially inexpensive due to subsidies. In the wild nobody captures a cow and impregnates her and holds her hostage and feeds her and milks her, it's a horribly inefficient use of energy. And the same concept is in play today and would reflect in a higher price if there wasn't a handful of people distributing resources arbitrarily.

Hi all, love the show etc.
love this thread etc.
Id like to ask something about mental health.
Lately i have been feeling pretty down. I choose not to go into specifics. I could write a book about all crap that has happened just in the last two-three years.
Ive created this theory just this morning I had like a breakthrough...talking to a friend.
She told me im weak. And thats when it clicked for me.
I could envision why my life has been a mess for the last 10 years.
I am weak. I make weak choices.
I speak out to everyone how im such a good person this and that, but I lie, manipulate, betray people around me. Because of this im losing friends and loved ones.
I do things I dont want to do, and i dont do things i would love to be doing.
Maybe its a depression.
Again not really feeling like going into any specifics.

Id love to hear any feedback/tips about how to be able to stay away from the destructive behaviour/control emotions/being able to reach your goals in life and being happy as a result of this.

Last note- Realizing I have to make strong choices in life and just being an honest person has already lifted my spirits immensely and helped me to actually put some words in this blessed thread.

Thanks

OK, this is kind of the last time I want to talk about this carbs thing because people are clinging to this obsessively instead of reading the posts (#33 and #38 particularly).

For people who are overweight, carbs should be limited to dinner and/or post-workout.

For people who are metabolically healthy (good insulin sensitivity), active/athletic, have well-regulated sleep, spend lots of time in nature, eat your damn carbs. But by and large, THAT IS NOT WHO IS POSTING IN THE THREAD. I eat 200-250g of carbs on a training day. But I'm an athlete in an intense sport, I have a low bodyfat %, I have low fasted glucose levels. If you are also one of these people, fantastic. But if you are overweight then you should probably consider going low-carb for a while as an intervention.


If you need 4k calories a day to meet your RDAs, your diet sucks and you are eating too much crap.



The VitD is hard to hit through food alone, hence supplements and sunlight. It has been many years since I tracked my micros and macros, but I consistently smash them and it's not hard at all.

(Edit: Hey, great timing - an excellent read from examine.com about this low-fat/low-carb thing.)

For those of you who love bacon, which seems to be about everybody:

http://www.peta.org/blog/video-11-pi...ange-of-heart/

Did you notice the poster which said, "Could you look at an animal in the eyes and say 'My appetite is more important than your suffering?'"

Eating meat is a leading cause of global warming, no one can call him or herself and environmentalist if they eat meat. See this movie:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-35dEQgOad4

This seems like a bit of a sweeping judgement. I'm not sure if it's trolling and that's why no one cares to respond, but I'll take the bait just this once.

If no one who eats meat can call themselves an environmentalist, should the same be said for people who drive cars? Considering the environmental impact of auto manufacturing, the never ending necessity for gas, the incredible impact of developing and maintaining infrastructure, etc.....

And what about those people who take public transit or bike to work; do they offset their reduced environmental impact when they stuff a hot dog down their gullet?

What about people who purchase plastic products, which are primarily derived from petrochemicals these days?

And what of those who have children, adding one more meat-eating, car-driving, manufactured-product-purchasing individual to an overpopulated planet?

My exaggerated point is, where is the line drawn? I think being an environmentalist is about awareness, and through it, doing one's best to reduce their impact within the means of their social and geographical constraints; not preaching one's personal beliefs and judging those who don't live by the same self-sanctioned rules.

I suspect if you performed an ecological footprint assessment on yourself, you'd find several sources where your lifestyle choices have a negative impact on the environment.

PS - just went through the rest of the thread; my apologies for the derail given Adams post about exactly that.

Unfortunately, the movie I listed in #89 can't be seen on youtube. The movie is called "Cowspiracy" and you should see it to understand/educate yourself. Here's another education video that may help :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6_hjA4cdjM

You definitely weren't the one derailing here.

Way to go Daniel. You guys should talk to Daniel about this on your podcast.
http://www.cardplayer.com/poker-news...vegan-campaign

In posts #89 and #92, I mention the movie "Cowspiracy" to show how eating meat is so bad for the environment and health. The movie will be available on Netflix starting 9/15/2015. Please educate yourselves and watch this movie.

To hear a good discussion of the movie, listen to the following Rich Roll podcast:

http://www.richroll.com/podcast/cows...n-do-about-it/

We get it dude.

Funny how this thread has survived when an entire forum is devoted to the subject...

Tchan/Nova

I think Terrence has gone over this for his fights before, but in general, wondering when it is optimal to stop training prior to an event you need to be as strong as possible for, but also fresh?

I'm planning on heading to Colorado in 10 days for a few days of downhill skiing. I've been exercising the last several weeks (wish I had another 6 weeks), getting in better overall shape but focusing on legs of course. Doing lots of squats, wall sits, hiking, balance stuff etc. When do you think is optimal to stop prior? Basically to not be sore/in recovery, but also maximize the work I can get in prior? Stop the squats earlier but keep things going on climbing hills? etc?

I'm obviously not trying out for the olympics there, so it's not that big a deal, just curious what you would advise in general.

I love questions like this because they largely allow me to geek out. And tapering is one of the things that has been studied decently well, especially lately and especially in the realm of endurance training. The contemporary thought is that intensity of training should be maintained but duration of training session should be reduced quite quickly in the 7-14 days prior to the event. So while 14 days prior to the event you're training at high volume and high intensity, 3-5 days out you might be training with the same intensity but at something like 20% of the duration. So if you've been doing 5 rounds of 5 minutes of interval training at 175 bpm and 80% max effort, you might go down to 4 rounds at 12 days out, 3 rounds at 9 days out, 2 rounds at 6 days out, and 1 round at 3 days out during your taper but keep the bpm and effort levels the same.

further reading: http://biestmilch.com/topics-concern...t-of-tapering/

I believe it's generally also considered good to keep up any strength work you've been doing but it sounds like you haven't been doing any heavy strength work, so I certainly wouldn't start now; 10 days before your trip would be a ****ty time to get injured.

I've been very aware and cautious of avoiding injuries, should have had the same focus on avoiding my 2 year old son getting me sick. That unfortunately dictated a tapering schedule far different than I would have wanted. Last 5 days have been a waste, starting to feel better so going to try and do some minor stuff to get back into things.