Monday, December 15, 2008

How Fat Loss Pills Can Make You Fatter


How Fat Loss Pills Can Make You Fatter
By Nick Nilsson



What the diet industry doesn't want you to know can have serious long-term effects on your health and bodyfat levels.


There are many good supplements on the market today that are extremely effective for fat loss. Fat loss is big business and this has fueled tremendous developments in technology. There are more high-quality fat burning products out there now than ever before.
Properly used, these supplements can make a big difference in your fat loss efforts, helping you reach your goals far quicker.


Improperly used, however, fat burning supplements can actually make you fatter, no matter how effective they are! In fact, the more effective a supplement is, the worse off you could be!!
To be clear, there is absolutely nothing wrong with using supplements to help lose fat. I'm all for it. The main problem with fat loss supplements lies with how people use them (and how they are told and encouraged to use them).


Armed with the knowledge in this article, you will learn exactly what you can do to break the diet pill cycle and keep the fat off for good.


The Big Secret


The diet pill and fat loss drug industry is built on ignorance: not theirs, yours.
Many of these companies bank on that fact that people generally don't know a whole lot about fat loss or supplements. They are in the business of selling shortcuts to you so that you don't have to know anything about fat loss. The reason for this is simple: if people knew a lot about fat loss, they wouldn't need fat loss products anymore and the companies would go out of business.
As backwards as it seems, the diet industry can only stay profitable by keeping people fat.
Look at the typical business. They do their best to keep customers coming back to them. That's how they make money. Why would the diet industry be any different? If you lose fat and maintain that fat loss you won't need to lose fat anymore. You won't be their customer anymore!


As little business sense as it makes, the ideal situation would be to have companies that are dedicated to the goal of losing customers. If they do their job, you will lose fat and keep it off and never need them again! As a personal trainer, my goal has always been to train people so thoroughly that they don't need me anymore.


Is this sort of reform going to happen in the diet industry? Not likely. But there is something you can do to stop the cycle (you are doing it right now): LEARN!
How Fat Loss Pills Can Make You Fatter


The bottom line is...fat loss pills work. This is both the best thing about them and the worst thing about them.


When you take a good fat burning supplement, you lose a lot of fat, you feel better about yourself and you are happy, right? This is the best thing about fat loss supplements.
The worst thing about these supplements is that because they work so well, you don't have to change your eating or exercise habits to accomplish your goals. You get results simply by taking a little pill.


Does this phrase sound familiar: "Eat whatever you want and still lose weight!"
Here's the scenario: you take the pills and you lose all the weight you want. What happens when you stop taking the supplement once you've reached your goals? Since you haven't had to change your eating or exercise habits, you regain the weight. Then you buy their pills again and start the same cycle again! It is very similar to the yo-yo diet syndrome of weight loss and regain.


How do you break this cycle? The solution is very simple though it may not be glamorous or easy: you learn to eat properly and you exercise regularly.
When you remove your dependence on fat loss pills to lose fat (through education, nutrition and exercise), you free yourself to use them to enhance your efforts, not anchor them. You will be able to lose your extra fat and keep it off without having to depend on fat loss pills to make it happen.


Nick Nilsson is Vice-President of the online personal training company BetterU, Inc. He has a degree in Physical Education and Psychology and has been inventing new training techniques for more than 16 years. Nick is the author of a number of bodybuilding eBooks including "Metabolic Surge - Rapid Fat Loss," "The Best Exercises You've Never Heard Of," "Gluteus to the Maximus - Build a Bigger Butt NOW!" and "The Best Abdominal Exercises You've Never Heard Of" all available at Fitstep.com

Thursday, November 13, 2008

Why Dieting Is A Lot Like a Financial Crisis


Why Dieting Is A Lot Like a Financial Crisis

Learn the parallels between dieting and the biggest financial crisis of our time. And no, it's not because both are painful and leave you hungry!


Now, let me be clear right off the bat…if you think I'm going to make a joke here about how your Freddie Mac and Cheese ends up on your Fannie Mae, you're wrong…I would never do such a thing.

What I AM going to do is draw some parallels about how the financial mess the United States is in can actually help you understand how dieting affects your body, and in turn, can help you get better results in your fat-loss efforts and, of course, make you millions of dollars richer in the process.

I'm going to drift around in between finance and nutrition here - I know, they're two almost identical subjects but, try to bear with me.


And keep in mind when you read this, I'm no financial expert. If something isn't 100% right, the SEC isn't interested in small fish like me so I wouldn't bother mentioning this article to them...


1 - The Boom Years

Your body is designed to store fat. Its how we've survived as a species over the millennia. When famine hit, it was always the individuals who could best store and use fat who survived. Evolution wasn't concerned about the potential for muffin-top when it loaded our bodies with easy-to-fill fat cells.

So when times were good (like in the U.S. housing market a few years back), those fat cells were getting filled up like crazy! Everybody was seeing their house values (i.e. waistlines) expand.


Now, greed operates not only in the financial markets but at the buffet table as well. The less regulation there is, i.e. portion and food quality control, the more things start to get unbalanced and the more potential there is for gluttony.


Some people were buying houses they really couldn't afford which is a parallel to some people eating the crappy food (i.e. pretty much anything that comes directly to you through a window). It compromises your health in the long run.

Heck, you can think of eating at McDonald's sorta like getting an adjustable rate loan…you're fine for the first little while but suddenly BAM. Your rate adjusts and it's time to bust out the fat pants.


But hey, while you're still in those first few years of your Adjustable Rate Mortgage, life is good.

You may not look like you're gaining a lot of fat (it's all settling into those spaces between your internal organs) or setting up your financial markets for a crash until the moment of truth hits.
Then the balloon payment comes due, your mortgage doubles and you start blowing out the seams on your fat pants.


The internal workings of your system have been so corrupted by deregulation (and coagulation) that your markets can barely function. Your blood pressure is going up faster than a CEO's retirement bonus because your body is carrying too much debt around your waistline.


2 - The Crash

So it's time to diet. And you want to lose that fat FAST. So you immediately drop your calories to near starvation level. Of course, in the stock market, a strict diet looks a lot like a crash. Your body views it the same way.

Panic sets in. Just as brokers start selling off stock, your body starts getting rid of things it doesn't want to carry around.

And, of course, the greater the panic, the stupider the brokers (and your body) get. When you crash diet, your body tends to burn MUSCLE more than fat. Just like a broker selling off the good stocks that can help him recover from a crash.
It's the FAT you want to sell off, not the muscle.


But a big crash [diet], which was set up by the previous gluttony [the result of excess deregulation, akin to asking a 4 year old to guard the birthday cake], you're now attempting to accomplish very quickly what should normally happen over a longer period of time.


If you were to experience a slow economic downturn, your ability to get rid of the fat is much better, allowing you to streamline your portfolio smartly rather than just trying to get rid of everything all at once. You cut your calories, increase your activity and gradually lose the fat.

3 - Market Instability

If you've got a retirement savings plan and you've looked at it recently, you've probably seen a graph that does up and down just like the numbers on the scale of a yo-yo dieter.


The crash is followed by a binge of people buying cheap stocks (because the price is so low and because that Kentucky-fried birthday cake just looks so good), followed by another crash, followed by another binge. And so on.


This constant cycle of crashing and rebounding does nothing to stabilize the economy. It only makes you want to eat more and makes you fatter.

4 - The Great Depression

Now you're really feeling bad about yourself. You've gained back all the weight you lost when you crash dieted only you lost muscle and gained back fat.
You're in the middle of a great depression. What's it going to take to snap out of it?

5 - The Two Magic Words


I'm talking BAIL OUT, right! Government to the rescue, right! WRONG.
Look at how well the bail-out worked. The stock market keeps tanking and keeps yo-yo dieting. Until the government takes high fructose corn syrup out of the food-lobby pyramid, you can be pretty sure the government isn't going to solve your weight problems.


Now come the REAL two little magic words that will make everything okay…Personal Responsibility.

I am VERY sure there are predatory lenders out there who convinced people that they could afford homes that they really couldn't just as I'm sure there are food manufacturers trying to convince you that Lucky Charms are healthy because they suddenly contain calcium…


When you get down to it, nobody is holding a gun to your head to eat that last chunk of Texas Toast with extra cheese, butter and frosting. Just because something is available doesn't mean you HAVE to insert it into your face (or sign the paperwork that says you're fine with 5% APR jump on your mortgage when it resets).



When you put Personal Responsibility into practice, you take CONTROL over your finances and your nutrition. You realize that the world does not owe you a lean body…it's something you have to work for and make an effort for, just like it takes work and effort to pay your mortgage every month.


If it sounds too good to be true…well, you know how the rest of THAT goes…


In this case, it's a lesson Wall Street should learn from Sesame Street. Like Cookie Monster says, cookies are a "sometimes" food - meaning if you're greedy all the time, it's going to eventually catch up to you and you'll have to pay for it (unless you're AIG, apparently, in which case you've got a license to keep on partying without any hint of accountability - I guess the parallel to that would be liposuction!).


So how do you take the next step? Glad you asked! I've got links to a number of excellent fat-loss programs you can use to take control over your life and put that newfound Personal Responsibility to work!