However, like everything I post i am keen to show you the “other” side of conventional wisdom. The problem with conventional wisdom in health and fitness is that it obviously isn’t working! If it was working we wouldn’t have the state of health at all time lows that we do today.

I’ve spent much of my career in the fitness industry fighting against the idea of counting calories as a way to control weight and fat levels. The idea of ‘calories in vs calories out’ has never really made much sense. If we believed that 1000 calories of snickers bars and 1000 calories of brocolli created the same results then we are just fooling ourselves!

The study I am quoting here is not exactly new (Kekwick and Pawan 1956), but extremely illuminating.

I actually found this study quoted in the most recent book by Tim Ferris (The 4 Hour Body), and interesting this whole book is a great example of breaking conventional wisdom!

The study includes a semi-starvation diet of 1000 calories a day, with three groups on calorically equal diets with 90% fat diet (yes this is possible, think eskimos eating whale meat), 90% Protein or 90% carbohydrate.

The results are just plain incredible:

The Fat group, on 1000 calories a day, 90% being Fat LOST on average 408g weight per day
The Protein group, on 1000 calories a day, 90% being Protein LOST on average 272g weight per day
The Carbohydrate group on 1000 calories a day, 90% being Carbs GAINED on average 108g weight per day

Whilst it is impossible to really understand how well the people on the study maintained strict control on such a diet, the results given show a significant trend (half a kilo difference in weight loss per DAY between the Fat group and Carb group). If we were looking at smaller differences you would dismiss the significance of the study!

There are two things to take away from this information.

1. 1000 calories a day diet and you can still GAIN weight if you consume the wrong food stuffs!
2. A calorie is quite clearly NOT a calorie. So it kinda makes the whole concept of counting calories or points utterly POINTLESS

Whilst I will not be converting my own nutrition plan to a 90% FAT based diet any time soon, it does mean that the “Fat makes you Fat” statement you hear and read is rubbished as well.

What can you take away from this information for your own use on a day to day basis?

I would certainly say you can ditch the calorie counting charts for a start. But how should we be controlling our food portions so we don’t eat too much?

Your body is the perfect self regulation tool, BUT (and this IS important), only if you are consuming the types of foods you body can easily self regulate, for example I challenge anyone to eat too MUCH brocolli, it takes the body just too long to consume large enough quantities to over eat. On the other hand, we all know that we can eat just too much bread, or pasta, chocolate cake… these food stuffs are much harder for the body to self regulate.

Stick to the obvious eat clean, natural produce as much and as often as you like and you really can’t go wrong!

Feel free to fire the comments at me again, I don’t mind… If we manage to break a few conventional wisdoms along the way and forge a healthier world then I’m all for that.

We’ve all been conned into believing that cholesterol is this sinister compound that causes heart disease and destroys health. We’ve been conned into believing that dietary cholsterol raises blood cholesterol and we’ve also been conned into believing that satuarted fat will raise blood cholesterol levels and lead to heart disease.

You’d think there would be tons of evidence to support the notion that high cholsterol leads to heart disease, after all big pharmaceutical companies invest hundreds of billions of dollars in research to find effective drug treatments to lower cholesterol.

However the truth is a little surprising.

The US Surgeon Generals Office,after 11 years of trying to collect evidence that saturated fat and cholesterol cause heart disease, gave up!! You know why? Because there is no link, never has been, never was, never will be.

Here’s how the history of how saturated fat and cholesterol causing heart disease came about:

*150 years ago a German Dr called Virchow found plaque/streaks in arteries of dissected corpses and said it was from cholesterol

* In 1913 Nikolay Anichkov and Semen S. Chalatov fed cholesterol to a bunch of rabbits and their arteries furred up-but rabbits are vegetarian and not human beings-so never have cholesterol in their natural diet!!

*In the 1940′s Ancel Keys came up with the Seven Countries Study which was rubbished by his peers. Basically he cherry picked 7 countries with high saturated fat consumption and high rates of heart disease. That’s right just 7 countries out of nearly 200 countries in the world-SHOCKING!! Slowly though his study become accepted as ‘fact’!

This is the fuel for the saturated fat/cholesterol-heart disease HYPOTHESIS. That’s all it is a hypothesis -it’s just a theory-a theory that has been disproven time and time again without fail!!

*Ancel Keys, in 1997, even stated that dietary cholesterol has no impact on blood cholesterol levels!

As a side note, you CANNOT have your cholesterol measured-you do not have a cholesterol level, cholesterol is not freely floating around in the blood, it is bound up, along with saturated fat in lipoproteins; Chlyomicron, VLDL, IDL, LDL & HDL. HDL is considered ‘good’ cholesterol whilst LDL is considered ‘bad’ cholesterol-total BS! Lipoproteins transport saturated fat and cholesterol around the body so they can do what they are meant to do like make hormones, cell membranes, bile etc

Think about it, if cholesterol was really that bad why would your body, each day, make 6-8 x the amount found in in an egg? It obviously has an important role in bodily functions.

Studies have shown time and time again that when cholesterol levels drop, mortality rates,from all diseases, go UP!!

So if cholesterol is not so bad, then what causes heart disease, because saturated fat and cholesterol DO NOT!

If cholesterol-sorry lipoprotein or should I say HDL (‘bad’ cholesterol) were so bad at causing furred up arteries, why doesn’t every artery, and all parts of the artery walls get gummed up?

This plaque formation only ever occurs in arteries, not veins, even though they are made of the same stuff. It only occurs in arteries where they branch off -like in the heart and carotid arteries and where there is a lot of ‘turbulence flow’. These arteries become damaged and need repairing. Artery walls need collagen to repair and collagen needs Vitamin C, but we are woefully deficient in Vitamin C (the RDA is a pitiful 40mg), so cholesterol tries to do a repair job that Vitamin C should be doing.

So what does cause heart disease?

2 things

1) Stress
2) Vitamin C deficiency

(which are both related)

Stress

When countries or regions of countries have high rates of heart disease it always follows massive social upheavel. It’s happened in Finland and it’s happened in Glasgow, in fact it’s happened all over the world. 20-30 years of this upheavel heart disease rates peak and then slowly decline.

The stress response leads to to an increase in LDL and a decreae in HDL.

Because of this pharmaceutical companies deemed LDL as bad and HDl as good. Plonkers!! Or very clever marketers!!

Vitamin C

Humans, along with fruit bats, chimps and ginea pigs are the only mammals that cannot produce their own Vitamin C, we need it from our diet, but our diets woefully deficient When we are under huge stress the adrenals need GRAM quantities of Vitamin C. So the arteries walls need Vitamin C to help repair them, the adrenals need them when under stress and stress is a major causes heart disease.

Linus Pauling, the only ever person to win the Nobel prize TWICE, was talking about the link between heart health and Vitamin C decades ago

But Vitamin C can’t be patented, whereas statins can, and the leading brand of statins makes over $6 billion per year!!!

Big Pharma does not want to let go of the cholesterol hypothesis because it generates SO much money for them.

It seems everything is labeled “healthy” these days, and much of it is frankly just more processed, highly refined junk food packaged in an ECO box! We are surrounded by low fat, low carb, detox, low salt, no sugar yadda yadda yadda!!! It drives me nuts.

Our Nutritional Responsibility program focuses on getting people to start understanding what they are eating, what things cause their body to become unhealthy and diseased. The basic concept of the foods you eat is literally going back to basics, eating REAL food, that is immediately recognisable as its original form, and not so heavily processed that the nutrients have all but vanished .

When a couple of my ForestFit clients sent me an email before Christmas to tell me about their new Restaurant and healthy food bags it certainly struck my curiosity as they had both been exposed to my Nutritional Responsibility program, and I wondered how close they would get to my values and beliefs of good nutrition.

As of January 10th 2011, Happ Luxembourg opened its doors to clients for this “Healthy Food In A Bag” concept.

Happ was originally conceived in the basement of a home in Iceland, a couple of years ago, and the concept captured the imagination of the public in Reykjavik in a big way, expanding very quickly to include an extremely popular restaurant as well as sticking to the original concept of the healthy food bags.

Today, I was invited to visit with my ForestFit clients in their new business, and was fortunate to sample their food, and talk closely with them about the HAPP philosophy, which contrary to my initial skepticism fitted very closely with my own philosophy.

Here’s how it works.

Each day there is a set menu, with all the different components for your entire day’s food requirements. A mid morning snack, a lunch, a freshly made juice, an evening meal, and then breakfast for the following morning. Each element a perfect nutritionally responsible meal. Clients simply drop the Happ team an email, or give them a call to say they wish to have a bag for the next day, and it is ready to collect from mid morning on that day at the Happ premises on Rue Henry VII in Limpertsberg.

Whilst the restaurant is not yet open for business, you can order your healthy food package right now. As the business here in Luxembourg grows, more options and of course the restaurant will become available, but for the sheer ease of service to make sure you are definitely eating the right foods all day long you can’t beat what HaPP are doing right now.

Who’d have thought healthy eating “in a bag” would HaPPen in Luxembourg!

Visit the HaPP website, currently only in Icelandic, soon to be in English as well.

Today is more nutrition based, and we are going to take an opportunity to burn more calories by doing something we all do each and every day.

EATING.

Yep that’s right we burn calories by eating!

Whilst this is NOT a huge result in terms of overall calories burnt, but in combination with other mini metabolic boosters it can add up. So what am I talking about here?

Thermic Effect of Eating (TEA)

Basically science tells us when we take in food, chewing, swallowing, digesting, utilising the nutrients, and then eliminating waste we consume calories. Now I should stress again, this is NOT like hundreds of calories and there are other things you can do that will net a greater effect. If you haven’t downloaded the Nutritional Responsibility guide then that is your starting point from a nutrition standpoint.

So some foods will actually give you a greater TEA than others. In particular protein based food substances have shown to require as much as 20-35% of the calories consumed will be required to chew, swallow, digest and utilise and eliminate it.

Compared to carbs and fats which only utilise around 5% at most of the calories, then it makes you think there is something behind all these low carb, high protein diets.

Now I don’t prescribe to the crazy levels of protein intake for Atkins diets, or the massive quantities of protein supplement consumed by those bodybuilder type folk. However it would make sense to include a significant level of protein in each of your meals to take advantage of this.

My advice to my Personal Coaching clients is to make sure they have a good level of Protein in each meal they consume.

One of the other great benefits of eating a larger amounts of protein is it has greater satiety, meaning you’ll feel fuller for longer after eating this type of food and less likely to eat junk.

Go for it, start including more high quality protein sources to your meals and take advantage of this mini metabolic finisher.

Now is the time to crack on and get your nutrition habits back in order and do some high quality workouts too!

I see the biggest mistake many people make with their fat loss efforts is concentrating too much on the details. Details for most people will NOT net the BIG results you are looking for. To get the BIG results with your nutrition your starting point is found at Nutritional Responsibility. Exercise wise you can’t beat regular strength based routines to boost your metabolism long term.

However this post talks about one of the details that can add up to an awful lot in the long run.

To really kick you metabolism in to over drive this january, try the following quick routine at the END of your normal workouts. This is what we call a Metabolic Finisher, it is designed to boost your metabolism for as much as 24-36 hours after a workout.

On its own the routine does not burn many calories DURING the workout, but the real benefit is what the body does in the hours after the workout to recover from the effort.

Here is the routine:

24 Full depth Squats

24 Alternating Lunges (Trailing knee must tap the floor on each repetition)

24 Plank Knee Ins (Tuck the knee up as far towards the chest)

24 Elbow Stabilisations (squeeze between the shoulder blades at the top of the movement.)

If you are not in such good condition, half the numbers.

This will take just a few minutes at the end of your routine, but this will add up to an awful lot in the long run.

• A full training program to keep your metabolism firing on full blast all the way through December for less than 25 minutes effort a day
• A plan to make sure you eat healthy yet eating the stuff you want to eat at christmas without the guilt
• A set of cardio routines used by the worlds top fitness professionals to achieve incredibly fast fat loss without fail.
• The story of how one woman discovered how training for seven months for a triathlon, caused her body to gain fat, despite burning 224,000 calories
• But also how she lost all the fat and got back her figure in just eight weeks after the triathlon.
• How to drink as much alcohol as you possibly drink during December and still keep your body fresh
• A set of our favourite nutritionally responsible recipes to keep you warm and satisfied, including my favourite apple crumble that is 100% nutritionally responsible.
• How on average we only gain 0.36kg of weight during December, why it feels like more, and how those sneaky personal trainers and gyms capitalise on your emotional PAIN in January.
• You missed the opportunity to win a free place on forestfit this january for you and a friend. Congratulations to Doris for winning this prize
• You also missed the opportunity to win a box of Nakd bars. Congratulations to Vicky for taking home this.
• We also had those lovely Nakd Bars available to sample, including my favourite ‘Ginger Bread’ flavour which tastes just like Christmas.
• Sam had also made a simple fruit juice cocktail to sample along with the apple and cinnamon chips which EVERYONE loved.

Phew, and we packed all that in to one hour at the GetFit Luxembourg Personal Training studio.

Oh yes we also raised 180 euro for the Irish Stand at this weekends International Bazaar. As well donating a place on ForestFit this January, to the irish stands raffle.

Do you think you will miss the next seminar?

If you’ve not subscribed to the newsletter here is what you miss out on:

• A monthly opportunity to win a place on ForestFit.
• Access to the special events, including our christmas party for subscribers and ForestFit members only
• Extra special deals to save you literally hundreds of euros on your training subscriptions

To subscribe for FREE, go to the ForestFit Luxembourg website

And we had 14 people visit the studio for an hour of quick fire information from Scott Oliver, Derrek Taber and myself.

Derrek kicked off with a quick summary of what Muscle Activation Technique is all about, explaining the benefits of looking at the body in terms of symmetry, rather than just where pain is located.

Scott then spoke primarily about “What Health is and is Not”, explaining the paradox modern society is living under at the moment with a vicious circle of medications treating symptoms caused by other medications, and ultimately how proper function of the body can alleviate the majority of common ailments

Finally my discussion on “Why Fat Loss is A Sprint And Not A Marathon” dispelled 5 common myths surrounding cardio vascular training for fat loss and why the common practice of doing fat burning zone workouts, marathon style training, and other slow steady state workouts are not effective if Fat loss is your goal.

The alternative methods for cardio training for fat loss, are actually much less time intensive, and net a significantly more effective result. The studies I quoted mentioned in the region of 9 times for fat loss when compared to endurance style workouts.

I finished up with giving a sample routine that people can follow to introduce them in to interval style training for fat loss.

1. Warm up for at least 5 minutes
2. Work effort for 1 minute – the intensity should be tough enough to maintain ONLY for 60 seconds!)
3. Active Rest – light jog, walk for approximately 90 seconds
4. Repeat the interval and rest 5-7 times
5. Cool down for at least 5 minutes, Stretch

This routine takes 25 minutes at the most, but will net a significant increase in your metabolic rate for 24-36 hours after the workout.

Fat Loss Is A Sprint.

Here is a link to some of the resources cited during the talk.

Endurance Training vs HIIT

This is the first in a series of Winter Seminars. The first to be held in the GetFit Personal Training Studio for a maximum of 20 people.

Jesse Goldswain – What Health Is Not…

Scott Oliver – What Health Is…

Tim Goodwin – Why Fat Loss is a Sprint and NOT A Marathon

Scott Oliver is the leading Chiropractor in Luxembourg, with a unique approach to what is considered “Healthy”, Aided by the latest addition to Scott’s team of therapists, Jesse Goldswain, the two of them will talk you through some fundamental shifts in thinking in relation to what you would consider to be healthy.

Host and creator of Luxembourg’s Most Popular Outdoor training program, Tim Goodwin,  will finish off the evening with some myth busting. He will challenge the commonly held belief that fat loss can be obtained by jogging, and why you would want to keep your fat loss routines to less than 35 minutes.

Starting from 8pm, the talks will be short, sharp and packed full of take away advice you can implement in to your daily routines immediately.

Your place can be confirmed with a quick email to tim@getfit.lu

Strictly limited to just 20 people, book now to avoid disappointment.

In four weeks your base preparation for the early ski season will be done.

Are you looking for a body that can do as much skiing as daylight allows when you go away for your winter sports vacation, and still being able to get up and do it all again the next day?

This October Brad Mole will take a select group of people through 8 targeted workouts over 4 weeks to gain the maximum base strength and fitness for your body, ready to tackle the slopes this winter.

The training schedule will start you from the basic movements leading through to advanced techniques to ensure your body can handle the most demanding slopes without fatigue or risk of injury. Brad will also show you the all important flexibility and mobility routines for both pre and post ski and boarding sessions, to ensure your body stays in the optimal condition throughout your vacation.

The program starts October 5th, on Tuesday and Thursday evenings at 7pm for a jam packed 45 minute program. You’ll be expected to follow the set homework between sessions to maximise your results, but be given extensive materials to help you succeed with your pre-season training.

All training will take place in the comfort of the GetFit.lu Personal Training Studio in Strassen.

Contact Brad immediately to secure one of only eight available places. Your investment for the 4 week program is just 120 Euro. Email brad@getfit.lu or call 621 599 844, Make sure you quote “PTLUX” when you register with Brad…