Our Resident personal trainer Casper offers some diet tips:

Generally I have a pretty simple diet and the things I avoid are pretty much sugars and white flour. I also don’t eat too many heavy carbs like pasta, potatoes, corn, bread, and rice. Don’t get me wrong I love all these things (save for the rice you can keep the rice akkk) but the reason why I stay away from these things is because they all get broken down into sugar and sugar spikes your insulin levels and over time this leads to type II diabetes. Albeit the more complex the carb the slower it gets broken down but it still turns to sugar none the less. Just keep in mind the rate of diabetes has double in recent years. (I can get the statistical data if you want me to) Now you gotta ask yourself “why is that?”

Now God did not create all sugars equally, some are worse for you than others. Maltose and Lactose are great for energy and burn real slow, but in the end if you don’t use that sugar your body WILL kick out insulin and your body WILL store it as fat.

Now Fat once you have it is kinda tricky the longer you have fat stored the “harder” that fat becomes. This is why your body will burn up the newest fat first. Also this is why it is so hard to get rid of that stubborn belly fat/back fat/ leg fat / where ever fat.

One more thing I need to mention is that loosing obscene amounts of fat in a short amount of time can be dangerous. You body will also use fat to store poison (anything your body doesn’t like) Loosing TOO much fat very quickly can give hell to your liver and kidneys. Now this is not meant to discourage anyone from weightloss or giving a pass not to watch your diet, this is just me saying that picking a weightloss solution that is consistent will yield far better results and is healthier for you.

So lets get on to Dr. Day. This doctor is an accomplished surgeon who came down with breast cancer. She had a marble sized tumor and promptly had it removed. Three weeks later the cancer grew to the size of a grapefruit. Basically her peers said your gonna die and we can try cutting it out and giving chemo with drugs. Dr. Day pretty much said No, I don’t think I am gonna do that. I can understand, If I only had a week or two to live I don’t think I would want to spend it in chemotherapy either. Instead she did a drastic change in diet. She went on a raw fruit and vegetable diet.You can check it out here. (WARNING the tumor is NOT pretty so if your squeamish don’t click)

Now a little known fact is that when you cook your food your body cannot recognize it and will treat it as a threat. Like a well disciplined military unit your body will over react to threats. This is a good thing. The theory behind the raw food diet is that your body readily accepts raw foods instead of  trying to break it down like cooked food. Also contained in the raw food are the enzymes and microbes needed to help digest the food. So now that your body isn’t wasting time with food it can take care of all the other threats to your body. I have read claims by where people say they stopped getting sick all together by switching to raw foods. I can attest to some extent that I don’t get sick either. When everyone around me is sick I am still going strong.

Now I am not a practitioner of raw vegetarianism, mainly because of the great benefits that come from meat. But I am not opposed to vegetarianism either. There is a large enough body of evidence to support the great health benefits of raw foods. I do consume large amounts of uncooked foods and some of that is meat. There is something out there called a paleolithic diet which is an all raw meat diet, but thats a little extreme for me. I couldn’t eat raw chicken, too many years of brainwashing as a kid.

Are raw foods for you? Who knows but it might be worth your while to read into it. It just might be another weapon in your arsenal of fat burning and healthy living.

Good luck and You can do it!

From our resident personal trainer Casper:

am a member over at bodybuilding.com forums and have been for about ten years. I really use the place as a reference guide as it is a wealth of information. Well there is also a member there who I have seen in and out of the forums and she goes by the name of chickentuna. I won’t lie, I have checked out her pics on more than one occasion, but I never actually checked out her web page. It seems that everyone has a page or a blog or whatever. As much as you may like someone there are only so many hours in a day and you just can’t be friends with everyone. Well this morning as I was taking my 10 minutes of internet time to check email, print out my news for the day (I just print and go) I stopped by bodybuilding.com and caught out of the corner of my eye the word chickentuna and her website so I took a couple of extra minutes to check it out.

Getting right down to it, she makes a ton of sense and I wish I would have dropped by sooner. She has a no B.S. approach (which I prefer) She explains what it is that she does to look the way she wants to, and bluntly explains that this probably isn’t for you…. BUT if it is for you, its probably gonna suck real bad. She keeps her diet very simple and leads a disciplined lifestyle. In her site she has a list of foods which I thought was very sensible and as she calls it “plain food” Given the list of things that she eats I could come up with tons of different meals but as she says herself she doesn’t cook, so if you can cook thats all the more stuff you can do with it.

If for nothing else the site is motivational, and really is worth the look. I love the rant page she has and the last paragraph “lucky”  is priceless.

Her page is http://www.bunklers.com/

and her progress pictures over at bodybuilding.com are Here

You can do it!!!

Well Casper is back with an eye opening look at the American way life – from someone who is American, but no loner calls the US home:

Well after a much needed vacation (been three years already) I have had some thoughts. My wife finally convinced me to go “home” whatever that is. I was opting for taking a trip to Thailand or India or Dublin or Greece or Argentina or Cape Town or some other great place I have not yet seen… but the winning argument was that my folks have never seen the baby and hadn’t seen the oldest since she was a baby.

So while I was back home I could not believe how overweight people are. Consistently I was counting 8 out of 10 people were over weight, 2 of which were grossly obese. My wife didn’t even believe my decleration until I said check it out for yourself. then she really started to look and was like ” Wow your right ”

I understand that typically asian people tend to be ectomorphs but this isn’t always the case just look at sumo wrestlers and the people who frequent McDonalds (not kidding… if you want to see a fat Japanese person go to McD’s) The one difference I have to say though is that the diet we eat here in Japan is drastically different. Lots of veggies, lots of raw fish, a little beef, a little chicken, a little tofu and a small bowl of rice with every meal. The food here has not been mass produced by agribusinesses using NPK and GMO. While “Certified Organic” is not as big of a deal here, a lot of the food here is organic anyways, there just isn’t a great need to get certified.

Now for the hard truth. I kinda did crude experiment. I am a pretty lean person, after a fight Iwill take a week or two off of training. Not totally off but I give my body some time to recoup. So I will put on two or three pounds. Not really a big deal. So while home on vacation I pretty much said I am just gonna relax. I am not gonna hesitate on moms good ole apple pie, baklava, brownies, and pecan pie. Or my sisters cheesecake ( she also makes a mean bowl of mashed potatoes), or my dads grillin two full cows. I decided I am gonna actually have a real vacation and just let the discipline slide. I’m not going to mention the Mead and Beer my family makes.

The hard truth is that American food has caused me to gain 17 lbs in 6 WEEKS!!!!!!!

Now this doesn’t matter to me because already back into training for the last week I have lost 5 lbs. Now that jet lag is over I can actually train unhindered. The fact is the American way of life will KILL you. I can’t see it any other way. Pay attention to what your putting into your body. You can do it!

Is my ass really that big?

So, my mother has been really ticked with the way I’ve been looking lately and insisted that I purchase me at least one new pair of jeans. I’ve been avoiding trying on clothes because I know I’m the size of cow. But I acquiesced…knowing that I’ve been holding on to my one pair of too tight jeans because that is the only pair that I can squeeze my butt (that is now the size of Brazil) into.

So I walk on over to New York & Co. and look at jeans. I flip through the jeans and notice that the size 14 looks like it will fit my brazil size ass.

And low and behold I try them on and…they…fit.

SIgh.

I went to several other stores and their size 12’s definitely didn’t fit..so that only left the 14’s.

SIgh.

Mind you I left the mall without any jeans that day because I REFUSE to buy a size 14 jean. I about died when I had to buy size 12 jeans a couple of years ago and promptly tossed them out once I was back to a size 8. Now I’m a size 14 and well…I won’t be purchasing any new clothes until I’m at least a size 10. So there’s my weight gain loss update.

On a lighter note. Here is Casper our resident semi-professional fighter/personal trainer talking to us about the weight loss benefits of chilies. Be sure to comment and show Casper some SPP love:

Hello again ladies, My last video post didn’t come out to well due to the touchiness of Wordpress, but that’s OK lets move on.

Fun With Chillies

I don’t want to bore anyone by breaking down body mechanics, So I would rather stick to the fun and light hearted stuff. Easy tips that generally help out. One of those things is a favorite of mine. Chili’s! I love hot peppers and I growem myself. The odd thing is that I don’t like my food spicy I just like eating chili’s, crazy huh?

Anyways the active ingredient in chili’s that sets the roof of your mouth on fire is called capsicum. This stuff has a great way of heating things up and I mean that literally. You see when you eat those chili’s the nerve receptors light up like timesquare and your body thinks somethings burning so immediately it turns on the waterworks to try and douse the fire. Hence the runny nose and sweat.

Now I eat raw hot chili’s and this has a great fat burning quality, I do it because I am addicted to the burn AKA you get an endorphin rush, and the hotter the chili the more the rush AND I am out of my mind. But you don’t have to be crazy like me, adding some cayenne pepper to augment a dish will help.

Now unless your gonna eat a naga morich pepper every hour don’t expect the fat to just melt away cause it ain’t. And eating that giant bowl of pasta with a little cayenne isn’t gonna cut it either. (kinda like the sumo guy at the food court polishing off the 14 inch pizza and sipping on a diet coke, because this somehow compensates)

I will say is that if you start eating some super hot peppers every hour throughout the day you will shed some pounds, I have seen it with my own eyes. But that takes some and mettle and persistence that not even I have. Eventually though your body is clever and will figure out whats going on, you will develop a tolerance and the effectiveness will plateau, as with all things.

So ladies bring on the FIRE.

And as a friend of mine says:

” If your ever at my house and I say “here try this” DON’T DO IT”