Update
January 12, 2002
Thanks for all the wonderful feedback
on my New Year's Message. It appears "the
Night Before New Years" poem was a hit. Now we've
passed New Years, everyone's resolved to make a change, and
I want to make certain everyone's empowered to do just that!
Over the past few months I've addressed
the electronic ab stimulators,
the real story behind the thermogenics,
and of course the latest and craziest
weight loss offerings. If you've been to my site a few
times, I'm sure you're no longer a victim of fitness fraud.
You've learned. If you've learned what NOT to do in order
to lose weight or improve fitness, you're a step ahead of
the game since most people attempt to change with ineffective
approaches. By now you should also know what TO do. Eat, move
aerobically, and challenge muscle. It's really that simple,
regardless of your fitness goal.
 Amazingly,
now that we're here . . . post New Years Resolutions, while
many have gone "back" to their gyms and health clubs,
people contact me every day in search of a diet! Yes, they
are still caught up in the belief that calories are somehow
evil and that the trick to losing weight is to avoid them.
 There's
one breed of product out right now that is promoted as a Miracle
Pill, but it's more like a wafer. It has 18 calories and promises
to replace meals and eliminate the sensation of hunger. Instead
of eating, just pop a wafer in your mouth. It's advertised
on the internet and through magazine ads. Let's do a little
math.
Suppose you normally eat four times
a day (people on my program lose fat eating far more than
four daily meals). If you're going to replace all four meals
with one of these wafers, you'd be taking in a total of 72
calories per day! Will you lose weight? You bet you will .
. . but you'll regret that weight loss for months and years
to come! Let me explain a simple concept . . . the calorie
concept. Everyone knows the word calorie, and when I ask at
a seminar how many people know how many calories they eat
in a day, all the dieters chime in with numbers. "1,000!"
"1400!" My next question is usually, "what's
a calorie" and rarely does anyone offer an answer. The
masses of weight loss wanters are attempting to count calories
. . . but they don't even know what calories are.
By definition, a calorie (more
accurately, a kilocalorie) is the amount of heat required
to raise 1 kg of water 1 degree celcius. What does that have
to do with food?
We have to think of food at some
level as fuel. Right this minute your body is maintaining
a core temperature near 98.6. That heat generation requires
calories. Every time you blink, swallow, type, or roll over
in bed, additional calories have to be burned to provide the
fuel for movement. Calories aren't something to be avoided
as much as they're something to be understood.
Don't worry. I didn't forget about
the weight loss wafers. I'm just laying some groundwork to
provide a complete "A-ha!" When the body is at rest,
bodily functions continue. You breathe. Your heart beats.
Your brain sends out chemical signals and impulses. Your internal
organs are all performing their respective "jobs."
Just to give you a rough idea of the number of calories you
require for optimal performance and to maintain a healthy
and efficient metabolism, let's take a look at the number
of calories some of the internal organs of a 150-pound man
would burn in a 24-hour period at rest.
 His
lungs alone will require about 150 calories . . . yet the
lungs make up only 9% of resting metabolic function. The heart
will likely burn 180 calories, and the heart's role makes
up only 10 percent of resting metabolic function. If we had
nothing but an empty shell of a 150 pound man with a fully
operational and functioning cardiorespiratory system (heart
and lungs), that man would require at least 330 calories per
day to keep the heart and lungs functioning, and that's assuming
nothing even mildly strenuous was attempted. The kidneys burn
calories, the liver burns calories, and the organ that burns
the greatest number of calories is the brain. That 150-pound
man will attribute 21 percent of resting metabolic function
to gray matter which would amount to 365 calories in a 24-hour
period.
Suppose this 150-pound man decided
he was going to try these magic weight loss wafers. The first
day, he consumed four of them spread out throughout the entire
day. That's 72 calories. He's already in a severe calorie
deficit . . . yet his heart, his brain, and his lungs have
to burn something, and even at rest that 72 calories fails
to come anywhere close to adequate. His body has two options.
Stop functioning (not a good option), or find an alternative
source of fuel. In order to keep him alive, his body begins
to break apart muscle tissue to provide a source of fuel.
That means that 150-pound man might soon weigh 140 . . . and
while that may sound desireable to some, his body achieved
the weight loss by destroying metabolism. That's a sure-fire
method of setting the body up to accumulate a great amount
of fat in the very near future. Muscle is metabolically active
tissue. Muscle is the fat burning machine. Lose muscle and
your body becomes far less efficient at burning fuel. The
idea, therefore, of cutting calories to lose weight, is limited
and flawed thinking. I've been teaching people for near 20
years to boost metabolism by eating supportively and applying
the right exercise stimulus. That's what works. Eat, move
aerobically, and challenge muscle.
A pharmaceutical is being studied
which is presently referred to as C75. It appears to interfere
with leptin signals which is directly correlated to appetite.
The drug companies are all clamoring to release the next weight
loss pill. Unfortunately, as long as they provide offerings
for curbing appetite, cutting calories, or preventing you
from eating (as C75 appears to do with laboratory rats), they're
providing you with an excellent manner of destroying metabolism
and increasing your perceived need for the next weight loss
miracle.
Next time something shows up that
offers you a way to "cut calories," whether it's
a diet, a supplement, or a drug, grab hold of your common
sense. You don't want to avoid calories. You simply want to
optimize the use of the calories you ingest. My new book,
The Best You've Ever Been,
addresses this in great detail. In the text I've included
everying I've found to be relevant in empowering people to
see through fraud, to facilitate positive change, and to do
so by literally turning their bodies into food burning machines.
It's a new year. If it's time for a new you, consider one
of two very timely options:
1. Give The Best You've Ever Been
a try. It's backed by a money back guarantee of satisfaction.
2. If you live in South Florida,
sign up for my February 7 seminar at the Wyndham Resort in
West Fort Lauderdale (Bonaventure)
If you'd like more info on the
book and seminar, click here.
Otherwise feel free to explore the site, reading through a
vast amount of information all provided to empower you. If
you'd like to browse through the last year and a half of updates,
the links below should keep you busy for awhile.
[ Programs
] [ Site Menu ] [
Fitness Superstore ]
[ Feb
7 Seminar Registration ]
Of Interest to Fitness Professionals:
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Go to the Previous [ Update
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Previous Updates:
Update
12/28 - 'Twas the Night Before New Years
Update 12/8 - The New Electronic Ab Offerings
Update
12/12 - The "Magic" is Within You
Update 11/20 - Holiday
eating!
Update
11/3 - Weight Loss Bread and other Nonsense!
Update 10/29 - Supplement
Values
Update
10/3 - Getting Back to Doing What We Do
Update 9/19 - Tragedy and
Love, RE: Sept 11
Update 8/15 - Myths, Fallacies,
False Beliefs
Update 8/1 - The Internet,
Leptin, Steroids, and more
Update
7/9 - The New Supplements
Update 6/14 - Seminar
offerings and clarity on "Brownies"
Update 5/29 - Lose
Weight, Eat Brownies?!?!?
Update 5/1/01 - Pizza, Beer, and Fitness
Update 4/7/01 - "Phil-osophies"
and Rip-Off Realities!
Update 4/1/01 - Gourmet Recipes!
Update 3/15/01 - Research Has
Proven?
Update 3/1/01 - Preparing for
The New Infomercial
Update 2/1/01 - Time, Space,
Matter, and Energy
Update 1/15/01 - Atkins hits
the UK
Update 10/7/00 - Supplements,
Additional Clarity
Update 7/27/00 - The Experts
Round Table, Almada, Colgan, Parillo
Update 7/3/00 - Core Training
& Metabolism Boosters
Let
Phil Know Your Opinions and Comments:
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Phil Kaplan
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Phil Kaplan
Phil Kaplan's Fitness Associates
1304 SW 160th Ave., #337
Fort Lauderdale, Florida 33326
(954) 389-0280
Fax (954) 742-3173
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