Maximizing Weight Loss

[klassic1]

Whats up fellow B&B'ers
So I've been on working out regularly since late October, sans January.
I've dropped a good 25lbs since then and am currently weighing 235lbs (don't know what that is in stone)

I'm 5'10 so I have a long way to go before I get lean and mean. But I'm off to a good start.

I want to maximize my weight loss and want to incorporate some sort of matabolism enhancer or product of the like....I want your recommendatations....experience or general exercise tips and tricks...

My workout routine consists of
24 minutes shadow boxing with 1 minute rest in between 3 minute rounds.
30 burpees, with 2 pushups combos (3 sets 10 reps)
I recently incorporated weight training (more lighter than heavier)
squats, dead lifts, militaries, curls, cleans, lateral raises. 25 reps of each. sets vary

[DolimiteB]

Congrats on the 25 lbs. Looks like you're off to a good start. The best thing you can do for your metabolism is the change your workouts periodically so you're body never adjusts. The intervals are good, but try to incorporate some inclined hill running if your knees will support it.

Very few of the Hydroxycut or other "metabolic enhancers" are safe. They won't kill you (probably), but they are just going to elevate your heart rate to potentially unsafe levels (i.e. ephedra) and dehydrate you. If you want to take a small dose of caffeine prior to working out that's ok and it's been shown to help your overall workout (like steroids only safe and legal) by allowing you to workout harder.

[klassic1]

Thats great. You know there's so much product at the local GNC that I wouldn't know where to start, and the sales reps always seem to be pushing certain products, not necessarily what would best fit my needs...

but just to be clear....I'm not looking for "steroids"....
I was thinking of product from a place like GNC, I heard whey protein powder could help me out...

Caffeine? that might mess with my sleep time...since I workout in the evening...but I'll try it on the weekends.

[SalvadorMontenegro]

You've lost 25 lbs. Just keep up what you're doing. Maybe increase the amount of time you spend doing cardio, change the weight you lift, whatever. If you've lost 25 lbs you're doing well. Just be patient. Don't over do it, either.

[Rossmeister]

If you want to take a small dose of caffeine prior to working out that's ok and it's been shown to help your overall workout (like steroids only safe and legal) by allowing you to workout harder.

I was just curious to what a small dose is? Have any webpages we can consult? I mean, is it a cup of coffee or a caffeine pill or the like? HUGE difference.

Thanks!

[noahpictures]

The easiest way to expedite your weight loss is to decrease your calories by reducing carbs and slightly increase your protein intake which will help with curbing your appetite. If you drink your calories, stop.

I don't recommend supplements other than maybe a "recovery" drink if your workouts are vigorous and leave you exhausted. A recovery drink should have some protein. Some people use whey protein with a cup of juice (for the sugar) and others drink chocolate milk which has been proven to be more effective than the popular recovery drinks such as Muscle Milk.

Also weighing yourself is not the best way to measure your progress if you want to lose fat because you'll gain some muscle as you continue to workout. It's better to take measurements, especially the waist since that's where most of the fat is stored for men.

All weight loss supplements have side effects and most doctors advise against them.

[umm_bacon]

I am no expert, and I have not been at this long, but I have lost just over 30 pounds in about nine weeks. I think that the biggest thing by far is the number of calories you consume and how much water you drink. I use a calorie counter on my iPhone, and I have not cheated once. I also drink about 1.5 gallons of water a day, and try to eat 5-6 times a day. Aside from that and exercise, I think that multivitamins are a good start. Whey protein is not going to help or really hurt in terms of loosing weight. It helps you get protein, while reducing the amount of calories that you would otherwise get in "real" food. I would strongly suggest that you be very careful with any sort of stimulant or thermogenic supplement. If you are eating properly and exercising, you will not need anything else. If you are hell bent on taking something, then I would suggest that you look into b-complex vitamins and vitamin c. The stimulants, diuretics, thermogenics, etc. are generally caffeine based, with b vitamins. Caffeine is counter productive to healthy weight loss and metabolism. B vitamins will give you an added boost, and are safe, as they are water soluble. Most stuff at GNC is overpriced and are not needed. Whey protein is a good idea, but just remember that those are extra calories that you will have to account for if watching your diet. Prework outs, testosterone boosters, diet pills, and the like are really just marketing gimmicks. Try them if you like, but I would first commend you for your progress, and then suggest you take a look at a calorie counting program and give that a try. Drink lots of water, too. Peace & good luck.

[TimmyBoston]

Diet. Diet. Diet.

[DolimiteB]

I was just curious to what a small dose is? Have any webpages we can consult? I mean, is it a cup of coffee or a caffeine pill or the like? HUGE difference.

Thanks!

http://www.health.com/health/article...411141,00.html

Above is an article espousing the benefits of caffeine. You want to take it easy on the caffeine. A couple of small capsules (50-100 mg) has some benefit. Anything more than that and the law of diminishing returns kicks in. The Powerbar espresso gel packets are my personal favorite.

[Slash McCoy]

First of all, keep this in mind... there is a big difference between WEIGHT loss and FAT loss. You can lose 200 lbs and still look like the pilsbury doughboy. Look at "Subway Jared" for a good example. Did he improve his physique? Not really. Still pear-shaped. Smaller, but still flabby. My suggestion is to change your priority from WEIGHT loss to FAT loss.

For optimum fat loss, as well as good health, you should only be losing about 1 to 2 lbs a week unless you are hugely obese. At 235 you should probably limit total bodyweight losses to 2 lbs a week. Less is better. When you reduce your total caloric intake too much, your body initiates a starvation reflex. Your fat is your body's gas tank and energy reserve. We are biologically programmed to retain some of this reserve during hard times, when starvation would have otherwise killed us off back in caveman days. Instead, a process called catabolysis breaks down lean tissue like muscle, tendons, etc and metabolizes that for energy. So getting too skinny too fast can rob you of muscle and give disappointing fat loss results, too.

Fat is static. It is storage. Fatty tissue consumes very little energy. Instead, it STORES energy as efficiently as biologically possible. Muscle, on the other hand, DOES consume energy, even at rest. So, adding muscle can increase your ability to maintain a calorific deficit, and help you to lose fat. Build muscle and you can more easily lose fat.

Loss or gain of bodyweight is mainly a matter of simple arithmetic. If calories consumed is greater than calories expended, bodyweight will increase. If calories consumed is less than calories expended, bodyweight will reduce. The amount of calories that exactly balances your expenditure is called your Maintenance Level. It is important to understand that your ML can change. Greater physical activity will increase it. Greater lean mass (muscle) will increase it. Starving yourself will decrease it as your body adapts to less food and becomes more efficient at digesting and metabolizing it. So, to lose weight, you must do something to increase your ML above your food intake, or you must reduce your food intake to below your ML. Doing both is best, giving the best results and keeping you in the best health.

But again, you should be concerned with fat loss and not simply weight loss. To lose fat, usually one tries to make weight loss come mostly from fatty tissue. To gain muscle, one increases caloric intake while trying to keep the greatest possible gains going into muscle and not fat. lose some fat but try not to lose much muscle. Then gain muscle but try not to gain much fat. Remember, muscle consumes energy even at rest. EVEN AT REST! It is working for you, 24 hours a day.

Building muscle calls for a high protein intake. You don't want to exceed or at least greatly exceek your ML, but you need protein and some healthy fat. The expendable part of your diet is your carbohydrates, particularly sugars and processed starches. So the obvious things to throw out are sugar, soft drinks, cakes, pies, cookies, bread, noodles, etc. These are foods high on the glycemic index. They are quickly processed resulting in a large and sudden increase in available energy and a large insulin spike. This is not a bad thing, immediately after training when an anabolic condition is a recipe for muscle growth. It is a bad thing any other time, because it adds to your bodyfat.

As I said before, your ML will change over time and with different training and eating regimens. One or two lbs of weight loss per week is very hard to track, since taking a good dump or drinking a lot of water can change your weight by that much in minutes. So try this... every morning, after your morning whiz, weigh yourself and plot your weight on a chart or graph. At the end of the week, draw a line through as many of the 7 points as possible. Your "virtual weight" will be on the line. An upslope of course is a gain and a downslope a loss. Weight loss per se should not be your goal, but tracking it is a tool that tells you something about your progress and enables you to accurately adjust your food intake for the desired results.

Heavy progressive resistance training (lifting weights) with proper diet will increase your muscle mass. The idea is to perform a selection of exercises that target one muscle group, with an optimum number of sets, each having an optimum number of repetitions, with optimum rest periods, and using sufficient weight to reach a point of muscular failure. Muscular failure is when you are doing a set and you cannot complete the last rep, even with a gun to your head. This is what creates the millions of "micro-injuries" of muscle stress that forces muscle to adapt to the stress by becoming bigger and stronger assuming of course sufficient nutritional conditions. Overtraining is just as bad as undertraining. And keep in mind that muscle is not growing while you are working it... it is growing while it recovers from the stress. That is why a lot of protein and even some simple carbs is good right after a workout with weights. You are bringing all the conditions for an anabolic response together.

Cardio type exercise has some usefulness but not nearly as much as weight training. The metabolic effects of cardio wear off quickly afterwards. And I read somewhere that you will have to run 6 miles to "burn off" one Big Mac (tm) and so I say it is easier to simply not eat the big mac at all, and leave the jogging and bicycle-to-nowhere and stairstepping machines to the Jareds and the Lycra Bunnies. But cardiovascular exercise is excellent for one thing: as the name implies, it promotes good cardiovascular health. So don't cut it out... just don't depend on it to help you lose fat. If you MUST do cardio, I suggest something other than steady-state grinding on a treadmill or whatever. Here are two good programs:

WIND SPRINTS
Pick out a place to run where there are no dogwalkers or lycra bunnies to run over. Warm up and then SPRINT as hard and as fast as you can, until you are ready to drop. About a hundred yards will probably be enough. But then, don't stop... just slow to a trot. When your breathing is no longer coming in gasps, sprint again. When you hit the wall, slow to a jog but don't stop. If you can keep this up for 20 or 30 minutes, you have done a lot more for yourself than pushing pedals for an hour.

HEAVY BAG
Set yourself up a timer or have a training partner to ring a bell. Put on some bag gloves or even comfortable work gloves. Whale on that heavy bag as if you were in the ring with a live opponent. Duck, weave, dodge imaginary punches as you deliver various combinations calculated to kick some vinyl beanbag butt. Do two minute rounds if you can handle it. Go all out! Keep moving! At the end of the round, don't rest... shadow box, run in place, skip a rope, something light, for one minute, then ding ding back in there with the heavy bag.

It is important for the beginner with weights to stick with compound movements. A compound movement is one that involves more than one joint and therefore more than one muscle in direct action be it flexion or extension. Alternating Biceps Curls is an isolation movement. Don't do isolation work as a beginner. Chinups is a compound movement. It does hit biceps as well as the upper back muscles. That is a good thing. Dont neglect to work your back and legs! If you don't squat, your results won't be squat. I see too many guys get fascinated with barbell bench press and alternate curls (done wrongly, I might add) and wondering why they don't get muscular. You got to squat and deadlift. Doing 40 sets of various biceps exercises will not make them grow. Doing 500 situps will not make your belly go away. Learn to train RIGHT and you will get good results.

1. Gain Muscle
2. Lose Fat
3. Repeat, as long as you live.

Don't think of this as a program. A program has an end. Think of it as a new way of living, for a healthier, studlier you, that will keep you fit and good looking into your old age as long as you will keep it up.

I have used ephedrine. I have used clen. I have used caffeine, and particularly the ECA (eph, caffeine, aspirin) stack. The results last only as long as you keep using it. The side effects can be bothersome or even somewhat dangerous. It is more crap you got to take all the time and more crap to buy. Not worth it, if you ask me, though certainly there is nothing wrong with a cup of coffee or some iced tea. I say stay away from all that stuff. Not worth it.

Stuff you do want... a good protein powder. Ideally you want to consume a gram of protein per pound of lean body mass, daily, for muscle growth. That is an awful lot of steaks, let me tell you! but if you have three health meals a day with plenty of fish, poultry, and lean beef or pork, and then have two or three protein shakes between meals and post-workout, you can easily get your gram of protein per pound of lean mass. A good multivitamin won't hurt. Vitamin C is almost immediately eliminated from the body so you are better off taking 500mg twice a day than 1000 mg once a day. Break it up. Fish oil is great. You get a lot of healthy fat there, important for good glandular function and testosterone production which is necessary for muscle growth. A branch chain amino acid supplement is okay if you just have money burning a hole in your pocket but I wouldn't call it necessary. Creatine is in the same category. Anything else you are generally just throwing your money away. Concentrate on your protein, training, REST, and carb control and you will get results. Buy all the crap they advertise in the muscle magazines and you will just get broke.

Oh, you might want to get a good book on weight training. Try "Body For Life" by Bill Phillips. DOn't buy all the dietary crap he says you got to have, but most of the exercise stuff is basic tried and true stuff and this will get you in the right general direction.

Good luck. You are off to a good start and you have already proven that you have the discipline to do what you got to do.

[Stubblefield]

Very few of the Hydroxycut or other "metabolic enhancers" are safe. They won't kill you (probably), but they are just going to elevate your heart rate to potentially unsafe levels (i.e. ephedra) and dehydrate you.

I do believe that Ephedra has been off the US market since 2004. Tho oddly enough, I did run across a few sites that seem to still offer it.

Stuff you do want... a good protein powder.

Anyone looking to lose fat should NOT be taking protein powder or any other liquid calories (supplements). A diet made up in natural foods with an emphasis on animal protein, good fats, and veggies is all you need. All processed carbohydrates, shakes, and workout drinks are to be avoided.

Now if you were looking to gain weight a protein powder might be worth looking at.

to the OP, I'd suggest looking at Matin Berkham's Leangains site. Lots of useful information on fat loss. The only site I personally trust, next to Robb Wolf of course.

As far as workouts go--if weight loss is a priority, you would do well to avoid all cortisol inducing workouts. that means no extended bouts of cardio, no "chipper" style workouts or met-cons. These types of workouts actually increases stress, which increases cortisol release. Really, all you need to do is lift heavy weights, and take long walks. Excessive cortsiol in your system will absolutely stall weight loss.

[CSL]

Thanks to Slash McCoy for that excellent post.

I appreciate all that good info.

[klassic1]

Good stuff dudes. Slash Mccoy, I'm doing alot of the stuff you mention above. And I have been averaging 1-2 pounds of weight loss per week. I definitely am not on th "Jared" route...lol

thanks again for all your input fellas...I think I'll stick to what has been working until i start to plateau...then I'll increase the time, weight, and reps.

[noahpictures]

thanks to slash mccoy for that excellent post.

I appreciate all that good info.

+1

[ESTEBE VERDE]

Whats up fellow B&B'ers
So I've been on working out regularly since late October, sans January.
I've dropped a good 25lbs since then and am currently weighing 235lbs (don't know what that is in stone)

I'm 5'10 so I have a long way to go before I get lean and mean. But I'm off to a good start.

I want to maximize my weight loss and want to incorporate some sort of matabolism enhancer or product of the like....I want your recommendatations....experience or general exercise tips and tricks...

My workout routine consists of
24 minutes shadow boxing with 1 minute rest in between 3 minute rounds.
30 burpees, with 2 pushups combos (3 sets 10 reps)
I recently incorporated weight training (more lighter than heavier)
squats, dead lifts, militaries, curls, cleans, lateral raises. 25 reps of each. sets vary

16 11/14 stone

Check out:

The Paleo Diet for Athletes: A Nutritional Formula for Peak Athletic Performance

AND

http://www.crossfit.com/


Slow and Steady is The Way.

[commanderkeen]

Congrats on your progress so far!

Lots of good advice, but equal amount of bad advice in here. Weight-loss should not be a goal for anyone looking to slim down. It is a by-product of healthy living. Your goal should be to change your lifestyle. There should be no 'diet', granted you can monitor your intake and follow a guideline such as 50-30-20 (50% protein, 30% carbs, 20% fat by weight), none of this 0-carbs BS (alright for short-term, but what you really want is long-term). Make things easy for yourself, rules of thumb help, an example would be 1/4 plate protein, 1/2 plate salad, for dinner. If you find something that works, stick with it! I think people start stressing about results, and get tired of following exacting rules. I don't think that's the point.

General guidelines (made to be tweaked and played around with, just not too much)
1. Exercise regurlarly (4-7 times a week, an hour walk can be considered exercise)
2. Limit your intake gradually (if you currently eat about 8000 calories, cut down to 7000 for the first month, then 6000... and so on until you are eating an approriate amount which for most is between 2000-3000 calories)
3. If you're not losing weight by now, you are cheating yourself on either point 1, 2, or both.

[bassmanlarry]

I'm not one for supplements. I found what works for me is cutting out the liquid sugar (soda) and eating real food. Cutting out all the processed junk has worked wonders. I do still indulge every now and then, but before I eat something I try to picture it from it's most natural state, is it or has it ever been alive. Also another good rule of thumb, don't eat anything with more than 5 ingrediants.

[ESTEBE VERDE]

First of all, keep this in mind... there is a big difference between WEIGHT loss and FAT loss. You can lose 200 lbs and still look like the pilsbury doughboy. Look at "Subway Jared" for a good example. Did he improve his physique? Not really. Still pear-shaped. Smaller, but still flabby. My suggestion is to change your priority from WEIGHT loss to FAT loss.

For optimum fat loss, as well as good health, you should only be losing about 1 to 2 lbs a week unless you are hugely obese. At 235 you should probably limit total bodyweight losses to 2 lbs a week. Less is better. When you reduce your total caloric intake too much, your body initiates a starvation reflex. Your fat is your body's gas tank and energy reserve. We are biologically programmed to retain some of this reserve during hard times, when starvation would have otherwise killed us off back in caveman days. Instead, a process called catabolysis breaks down lean tissue like muscle, tendons, etc and metabolizes that for energy. So getting too skinny too fast can rob you of muscle and give disappointing fat loss results, too.

Fat is static. It is storage. Fatty tissue consumes very little energy. Instead, it STORES energy as efficiently as biologically possible. Muscle, on the other hand, DOES consume energy, even at rest. So, adding muscle can increase your ability to maintain a calorific deficit, and help you to lose fat. Build muscle and you can more easily lose fat.

Loss or gain of bodyweight is mainly a matter of simple arithmetic. If calories consumed is greater than calories expended, bodyweight will increase. If calories consumed is less than calories expended, bodyweight will reduce. The amount of calories that exactly balances your expenditure is called your Maintenance Level. It is important to understand that your ML can change. Greater physical activity will increase it. Greater lean mass (muscle) will increase it. Starving yourself will decrease it as your body adapts to less food and becomes more efficient at digesting and metabolizing it. So, to lose weight, you must do something to increase your ML above your food intake, or you must reduce your food intake to below your ML. Doing both is best, giving the best results and keeping you in the best health.

But again, you should be concerned with fat loss and not simply weight loss. To lose fat, usually one tries to make weight loss come mostly from fatty tissue. To gain muscle, one increases caloric intake while trying to keep the greatest possible gains going into muscle and not fat. lose some fat but try not to lose much muscle. Then gain muscle but try not to gain much fat. Remember, muscle consumes energy even at rest. EVEN AT REST! It is working for you, 24 hours a day.

Building muscle calls for a high protein intake. You don't want to exceed or at least greatly exceek your ML, but you need protein and some healthy fat. The expendable part of your diet is your carbohydrates, particularly sugars and processed starches. So the obvious things to throw out are sugar, soft drinks, cakes, pies, cookies, bread, noodles, etc. These are foods high on the glycemic index. They are quickly processed resulting in a large and sudden increase in available energy and a large insulin spike. This is not a bad thing, immediately after training when an anabolic condition is a recipe for muscle growth. It is a bad thing any other time, because it adds to your bodyfat.

As I said before, your ML will change over time and with different training and eating regimens. One or two lbs of weight loss per week is very hard to track, since taking a good dump or drinking a lot of water can change your weight by that much in minutes. So try this... every morning, after your morning whiz, weigh yourself and plot your weight on a chart or graph. At the end of the week, draw a line through as many of the 7 points as possible. Your "virtual weight" will be on the line. An upslope of course is a gain and a downslope a loss. Weight loss per se should not be your goal, but tracking it is a tool that tells you something about your progress and enables you to accurately adjust your food intake for the desired results.

Heavy progressive resistance training (lifting weights) with proper diet will increase your muscle mass. The idea is to perform a selection of exercises that target one muscle group, with an optimum number of sets, each having an optimum number of repetitions, with optimum rest periods, and using sufficient weight to reach a point of muscular failure. Muscular failure is when you are doing a set and you cannot complete the last rep, even with a gun to your head. This is what creates the millions of "micro-injuries" of muscle stress that forces muscle to adapt to the stress by becoming bigger and stronger assuming of course sufficient nutritional conditions. Overtraining is just as bad as undertraining. And keep in mind that muscle is not growing while you are working it... it is growing while it recovers from the stress. That is why a lot of protein and even some simple carbs is good right after a workout with weights. You are bringing all the conditions for an anabolic response together.

Cardio type exercise has some usefulness but not nearly as much as weight training. The metabolic effects of cardio wear off quickly afterwards. And I read somewhere that you will have to run 6 miles to "burn off" one Big Mac (tm) and so I say it is easier to simply not eat the big mac at all, and leave the jogging and bicycle-to-nowhere and stairstepping machines to the Jareds and the Lycra Bunnies. But cardiovascular exercise is excellent for one thing: as the name implies, it promotes good cardiovascular health. So don't cut it out... just don't depend on it to help you lose fat. If you MUST do cardio, I suggest something other than steady-state grinding on a treadmill or whatever. Here are two good programs:

WIND SPRINTS
Pick out a place to run where there are no dogwalkers or lycra bunnies to run over. Warm up and then SPRINT as hard and as fast as you can, until you are ready to drop. About a hundred yards will probably be enough. But then, don't stop... just slow to a trot. When your breathing is no longer coming in gasps, sprint again. When you hit the wall, slow to a jog but don't stop. If you can keep this up for 20 or 30 minutes, you have done a lot more for yourself than pushing pedals for an hour.

HEAVY BAG
Set yourself up a timer or have a training partner to ring a bell. Put on some bag gloves or even comfortable work gloves. Whale on that heavy bag as if you were in the ring with a live opponent. Duck, weave, dodge imaginary punches as you deliver various combinations calculated to kick some vinyl beanbag butt. Do two minute rounds if you can handle it. Go all out! Keep moving! At the end of the round, don't rest... shadow box, run in place, skip a rope, something light, for one minute, then ding ding back in there with the heavy bag.

It is important for the beginner with weights to stick with compound movements. A compound movement is one that involves more than one joint and therefore more than one muscle in direct action be it flexion or extension. Alternating Biceps Curls is an isolation movement. Don't do isolation work as a beginner. Chinups is a compound movement. It does hit biceps as well as the upper back muscles. That is a good thing. Dont neglect to work your back and legs! If you don't squat, your results won't be squat. I see too many guys get fascinated with barbell bench press and alternate curls (done wrongly, I might add) and wondering why they don't get muscular. You got to squat and deadlift. Doing 40 sets of various biceps exercises will not make them grow. Doing 500 situps will not make your belly go away. Learn to train RIGHT and you will get good results.

1. Gain Muscle
2. Lose Fat
3. Repeat, as long as you live.

Don't think of this as a program. A program has an end. Think of it as a new way of living, for a healthier, studlier you, that will keep you fit and good looking into your old age as long as you will keep it up.

I have used ephedrine. I have used clen. I have used caffeine, and particularly the ECA (eph, caffeine, aspirin) stack. The results last only as long as you keep using it. The side effects can be bothersome or even somewhat dangerous. It is more crap you got to take all the time and more crap to buy. Not worth it, if you ask me, though certainly there is nothing wrong with a cup of coffee or some iced tea. I say stay away from all that stuff. Not worth it.

Stuff you do want... a good protein powder. Ideally you want to consume a gram of protein per pound of lean body mass, daily, for muscle growth. That is an awful lot of steaks, let me tell you! but if you have three health meals a day with plenty of fish, poultry, and lean beef or pork, and then have two or three protein shakes between meals and post-workout, you can easily get your gram of protein per pound of lean mass. A good multivitamin won't hurt. Vitamin C is almost immediately eliminated from the body so you are better off taking 500mg twice a day than 1000 mg once a day. Break it up. Fish oil is great. You get a lot of healthy fat there, important for good glandular function and testosterone production which is necessary for muscle growth. A branch chain amino acid supplement is okay if you just have money burning a hole in your pocket but I wouldn't call it necessary. Creatine is in the same category. Anything else you are generally just throwing your money away. Concentrate on your protein, training, REST, and carb control and you will get results. Buy all the crap they advertise in the muscle magazines and you will just get broke.

Oh, you might want to get a good book on weight training. Try "Body For Life" by Bill Phillips. DOn't buy all the dietary crap he says you got to have, but most of the exercise stuff is basic tried and true stuff and this will get you in the right general direction.

Good luck. You are off to a good start and you have already proven that you have the discipline to do what you got to do.

100% CORRECT!!!!

This is very very solid guidance.

The easiest way is to start here:

16 11/14 stone

Check out:

The Paleo Diet for Athletes: A Nutritional Formula for Peak Athletic Performance

AND

http://www.crossfit.com/


Slow and Steady is The Way.

[SalvadorMontenegro]

What a great response by Slash McCoy. And I second the "Body for Life" book. It's very basic, but that's all that it needs to be. Too often people complicate things with lots of fancy gimmicks.

I remember watching George Clooney on David Letterman one time. Letterman said something about Clooney having slimmed down and asked what he'd been doing and Clooney's response was something like, "Well, I'll tell you my secret. I eat less and exercise more." That might be too much of a simplification, but it's pretty close.

[closer]

Great information from Slash in this thread! I want to emphasize the importance of rest. Especially for somebody who is working out 4-7 times a week, pushing the limits of their physical capabilities, and incorporating lifts like squats and deadlifts. I mean - I'm usually wiped out after 2-3 sets of deadlifts. You may need more rest during the day, or some extra sleep at night - whatever works for you. Point is - not getting adequate rest will soon bring that workout regimen down to a crashing halt.