How Much Protein for Weight Loss

Losing weight requires a caloric deficit. You can choose to create that deficit with a combination of caloric restriction below your daily energy requirement as well as raising your daily calorie burn with a combination of cardio and weight training.

Will this help you burn fat?

These are the basics and they don’t change, and it doesn’t really need to get any more complex than this.

However you will find many claims from the diet and fitness media that suggest it is much more complex than this, and one of the most persistent claims is about protein and it’s benefits for weight loss.

Eating a high protein diet is claimed to be a benefit for weight loss for any one of the following reasons (and probably a combination of them):

1. Increased thermic effect of protein foods

2. Higher degree of satiety per gram

3. A change in fat burning and fat storing hormones to favor fat burning

4. Nutrient repartitioning (ie: more of the calories from protein will go to muscle instead of fat)

These claims sound pretty good and some of them do have scientific evidence that suggest there might be some fire under the smoke.

For example, the thermic effect of protein can be measured and has been shown to be higher than protein or carbs. This means that if you eat the same number of calories from protein instead of carbs, it will cause your body to burn a few more calories digesting and assimilating it. This effect is small, and might only make a noticeable difference for bodybuilders and fitness competitors who are dieting down to single digit bodyfat levels.

Another claim we often see relating to protein is the effect on satiety. Many studies and anecdotal reports suggest that protein itself will satisfy hunger better than the same amount of carbohydrate. This could help you stick to a diet and keep you from overeating at other points throughout the day.

It’s also known that dietary protein will increase amino acid pools, increase nitrogen balance, and contribute to intramuscular amino acids. This is all part of the ‘nutrient partitioning’ story. Essentially the protein you eat is much more likely to end up contributing to amino acids in muscle and repairing tissues all around your body before it will ever contribute to fat.

It would appear that there are many benefits of increasing your protein content when trying to diet down and keep your lean muscle mass up.

In the “How Much Protein for Weight Loss” UNCENSORED audio program released today, we’ll review some recent research that looked at the effect of high or low protein on weight loss. We’ll discuss the merits and limitations of this research shed whatever light we can on the results and what they mean to you in your efforts to build muscle and burn fat at the same time.

John

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VT3 Contest Winners Announced

The third Venus Index contest ended on Nov 23rd, this concludes the contests for 2011. As the holiday season is upon us dieting and training is not typically #1 on the agenda.

The contest season starts up again on Jan 16, 2012 with VT4 and the first ever Venus Index level 2 contest. Anybody who has placed in our previous open contests is eligible for the level 2 contest. You may also qualify for the level 2 if you placed in transformation and came very close or hit you VI numbers.

As always, you must use the Venus Index Workout (click here to save 50% until Friday!) or any of the next phases of VI Systems.

A list of qualified level 2 contenders will be announced in the first week of January along with the specifics of the level 2 competition.

Now on to the VT3 Winners. we’ll start with the Transformation Category

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Venus Index Transformation Contest VT3 1st Place Winner: Kelly Hancock

Kelly Hancock 1st Place

Venus Index 1st Place Kelly Side shot

 

VT3 First Place Transformation Kelly

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 Venus Index Transformation Contest VT3 2nd Place Winner: Lara Campbell

Lara Campbell Venus Index 2nd Place

Venus Index 2nd Place Lara

Lara Campbell 2nd Place Venus Index Transformation

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 Venus Index Transformation Contest VT3 3rd Place Winner: Kassandra Bragg

Venus Index 3rd Place “Kass”

Kassandra Bragg 3rd Place Venus Index

Kassandra 3rd Place Venus Index Transformation

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Venus Index Transformation Contest VT3 4th Place Winner: Brooke Kramer

 

Brooke Kramer VT3 4th Place

Venus Index 4th Place

Venus Index Transformation 4th Place Brooke Kramer

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Venus Index Transformation Contest VT3 5th Place Winner: Elisa Miller

Elisa Miller Venus Index 5th Place

Venus Index 5th Place

Venus Index Transformation 5th Place Elisa Miller

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Venus Index Transformation Contest VT3 6th Place Winner: Michelle Acorn

Michelle Acorn Venus Index 6th Place

6th Place Venus Index

Venus Index Transformation 6th Place Michelle Acorn

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VT3 Venus Index Open Contest Category:

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 Venus Index Open Contest VT3 1st Place Winner: Alisha McGuinn

Alisha McGuinn Venus Index Open 1st Place Winner

Alisha McGuinn Venus Index Winner

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Venus Index Open Contest VT3 2nd Place Winner: Roberta Saum

 

Roberta Saum Venus Index Open 2nd Place

Roberta Saum Venus Index Open 2nd Place

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Venus Index Open Contest VT3 3rd Place Winner: Carrie Gleason

Venus Index Open 3rd Place

Carrie Gleason Venus Index Open 3rd Place

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Venus Index Open Contest VT3 4th Place Winner: Kimberley Alamandy

Kimberley Alamandy Venus Index Open 4th Place

Kimberley Alamandy Venus Index Open 4th Place

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Venus Index Open Contest VT3 5th Place Winner: Katia Rice

Katia Rice Venus Index Open 5th Place

Katia Rice Venus Index Open 5th Place

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Venus Index Open Contest VT3 6th Place Winner: Gillian Chase

 

Gillian Chase Venus Index Open 6th Place

Gillian Chase Venus Index Open 6th Place

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Congratulations to all the winners. These contests are getting harder and harder to judge as everyone is making such great progress and getting into great shape.

I also want to say congratulations to all that entered. Making it to the end of a transformation is a big deal and regardless if you placed in the contest or not, you all should be proud of the changes you’ve made.

Don’t forget that interviews with the winners will start up soon, so you’ll be able to discover the lifestyle tips, tricks, and tweaks that each person used to get in fabulous shape.

The next contest starts on January 16, 2012. I’ll have updates with more information in the weeks to come.

John

p.s. Not a VI client? No problem, just go here and get access for 50% off until Friday at midnight EST.

How Do Muscles Grow?

Working out with weights causes muscles to adapt and grow, this is nothing new. The pattern of muscle growth however is not as obvious as we might have thought.

Most people think you train a muscle and the entire muscle simply gets bigger in a uniform and evenly spread out way…but this is a false assumption.

New research is showing that muscles do not grow in a uniform pattern, in fact research is showing certain areas or ‘chunks’ of the muscle grow to a greater degree than other ‘chunks’.

This non-uniform growth is due to many factors that come into play when we start working out with weights. These factors include:

The Anatomy of a Muscle

1. Volume of training

2. Intensity of training

3. Frequency of training

4. Velocity of reps performed

5. Muscle pennation angle

6. Muscle fiber length

7. Distribution of muscle fiber types within a given muscle group

8. Type of exercise performed

9. Previous training experience

And this is just the short list.

In the UNCENSORED audio program named “Non Uniform Muscle Adaptation – How Do Muscles REALLY Grow?”, released today, we review the latest research on muscle adaptations to strength training and determine how much or how little of a muscle we can really activate while working out and what is necessary for maximum muscle growth.

We also look into the research that the same muscle does not grow at the same rate from top to bottom and we may indeed be able to change the ‘shape’ of a given muscle group if we know how to active the entire muscle.

John

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Can You Lose Weight and Keep it Off? (New Research on Weight Maintanence)

Well all know someone who has lost weight and put it back on…and then some. We hear phrases that 99% of people fail on a diet and put the weight back on. This however isn’t a scientific claim as much as it is an assumption.

Weight loss isn’t a straight line but rather a series of peaks and valleys. People can ‘go on a diet’ to get rid of a chunk of weight and then try to maintain that new lower weight.

When you look at it from this standpoint there are 3 ways to eat.

Are we all doomed to always put weight back on after dieting?

1) The way you can eat that causes you to gain weight

2) The way you can eat that causes you to lose weight

3) The way you can eat that keeps your weight stable

These must be viewed as 3 distinctly separate phases and treated differently. Most weight loss programs and studies focus on getting people out of the first phase and into the second phase, which is pretty easy. The only real action needed to cause weight loss is a reduction in calories eaten until body weight starts to fall.

The real trick is figuring out how phase 3 works and keeping the weight off. And this is where many diet interventions fail. Most people can fight their way through a 10-12 week hard diet, but it’s the months and years following the hard diet that are trickier to navigate.

Once the hard diet part is over, you’re not relying on a strict deadline or an ‘iron will’ to get through the next month, but instead you’re looking at a whole new way of eating from here on out. What happens after the hard diet is rarely studied, but a recent research paper did just that.

In a study published Oct 2011, researchers put people on a hard low calorie diet for 10 weeks then followed up with their subjects a full year later to see how much weight they kept off and test multiple hormones and other markers of health.

This same paper has been reviewed by various fitness commentators who seem to have selectively chosen to spin the information from this study in a negative light vs a positive light. This one sided approach to reporting the science seems to be rooted in an academic and political will to try and prove that obesity is a disease and out of our control to deal with.

In today’s podcast, we review this research paper and show you what the results really say and how the fitness media and even the researchers themselves distort their reporting in order to put a doomsday spin on the findings.

This is a important lesson in diet and fitness science reporting and how information can be twisted and used to tell a very different story from what the facts say.

John

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Diet Records: The Obvious Flaw Of Diet Studies

The diet and fitness industry makes claims on the effects of workouts, diets, supplements and the combination of the three. The better commentators even quote published research, and the best of them actually read the full research papers and make an honest effort to give an accurate account of what they’ve read.

This however is not enough when it comes to interpreting diet information, and specifically when reading research about human dietary habits.

Would you really admit to having this for lunch?

The problem is that people are notoriously bad at admitting what they eat when they’re being studied. In most cases people will under report the total amount of food they’ve eaten. This phenomenon is so systemic in diet research it’s hard to make any conclusions from diet study results because you can never be sure that people really did eat what they say they ate.

This has been a problem since the entire field of studying diet and nutrition started, and we still do not have a solution for it. In the past before modern metabolic measurement techniques were developed researchers had no choice but to simply assume people were telling the truth about what they were eating.

In recent years new and cost effective techniques have been developed that can accurately measure how many calories the human system burns on a daily basis, and therefore we can measure how many calories you can eat without gaining excess fat mass, or losing body mass.

Once these measurements were adopted by nutrition researchers the truth came out, and it’s not pretty. We now have proof that diet records are a highly flawed measurement technique and that in some cases up to 80% of the people in a diet study will lie about the amount of food they eat and under report it.

We also know that people will over report eating foods that a perceived as ‘good foods’ and under report eating foods that are perceived as being ‘bad foods’.

This stems from the growing marketing and dogma about good and bad foods, and the idea that there is the ‘right’ way to eat.

When people are in a nutrition or diet study they do not want to appear as eating ‘bad’ foods or eating too much, so they do not report everything they eat and systemically make their diets seem ‘better’ or ‘healthier’ than they really are.

This deception is rooted in shame, guilt and embarrassment that people are trained to feel when not eating what the fitness industry has labeled the ‘right way to eat’. And this is the failing of diet and fitness marketing on a whole.

It has created a society of people who are ashamed and guilty about their food choices and unsatisfied with their bodies. It truly has done more harm than good. And now even in a scientific experiment most people cannot bring themselves to admit what they really eat or how much they really eat.

The direction things are going is ominous and it’s likely only going to get worse. The more diet and nutrition marketing and fear mongering we are exposed to about good and bad foods, and good and bad ways to eat will only further this embarrassment and guilt in people trying to lose weight or be healthy. This leads to even more dishonest diet recording and even less understanding of what is really going on with the modern diet.

It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that modern nutrition science actually has no idea how people eat, what they eat, and most importantly how much they eat.

The next time you read a book, website, or article that is quoting nutrition research about a particular diet you should view it with a very skeptical eye. It’s most likely reporting on highly inaccurate diet records that tell us almost nothing about what those people truly ate.

The bottom line is people will not tell the truth about what they eat.

In todays podcast we dig into the diet record research and show you how flawed this research is. Considering diet records are the foundation of most diet research it’s not a stretch to assume that most conclusions in diet and nutrition research are highly flawed and likely incorrect. We can’t know what effect a particular way of eating has if people will never tell us what they’re eating.

John

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VT3 After Pictures Coaching Call

The third Venus Index transformation and open contests are in the final stretch and it’s time to get ready to take your final pictures.

I suggest going through and listening to some interviews of previous winners to get a good idea of how to take a good picture at home.

You can listen to a previous post explaining picture taking here:

How To Take After Pictures

Here is an example of some simple competition poses:

Marli On Stage

Spend some time going through fitness magazines and pick out your top 10 favorite images/poses and try to recreate them with your final pictures.

Learn how to prepare for the best photo’s ever:

Preparing For Your Contest Photo Shoot – Part 1: Posing Practice

Preparing For Your Contest Photo Shoot – Part 2: Photography And Lighting

Preparing For Your Contest Photo Shoot – Part 3: The Final Week

 

Venus Transformation Contest instructions

 

For some additional coaching from John take a listen:

LISTEN:

Breakfast: The Most Important Meal of the Day

When it comes to both fat loss and muscle building, the common fitness lore is that breakfast is the most important meal of the day.

In order to make a statement about ‘breakfast’, we first have to define what ‘breakfast’ means. This sounds simpler than it really is.

For example, is breakfast simply the first meal of your day no matter how long you’ve been awake? Or is it only breakfast if you eat it within a certain number of minutes and hours after waking up?

Is this what breakfast is supposed to look like?

Is breakfast defined by the specific foods you eat? Does breakfast have to be bacon and eggs, or cereal? Or can it be beef stew, or a bowl of pasta, or a vegetable stir fry, or an ice cream cone?

Before we start talking about the virtues and benefits of breakfast, we have to know what the word ‘breakfast’ means. And this is precisely what we are going to do in today’s podcast.

We look at the research on the phenomenon known as breakfast and break it down for you so that you can see the difference between the results and the opinion of the researchers. We’ll get to the bottom of the information on breakfast and determine what breakfast even is, and if there is a way to use this meal to your advantage with your fat loss and muscle building goals.

John

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Dietary Protein: What you Need to Know

Protein is the one macronutrient that has the most praise from a health and fitness standpoint. It is marketed to help build muscle AND burn fat. If you browse any fitness magazine or related websites, you will find dozens of claims on how to most effectively ‘dose’ protein. Protein is no longer regarded as simply a macronutrient component of various foods, but rather it’s considered like a drug…

… that needs to be dosed at specific levels and specific times of day.

If you search the fitness media you will find claims about any and all of the following topics related to protein:

Do you see food or specific doses of protein?

– specific times of day to take it

– a specific grams per pound of bodyweight to ‘dose’ for muscle building

– specific doses of protein for pre post and during a workout

– specific proteins to eat during the day vs at night

– specific proteins to eat pre and post workout

– specific proteins for fat loss vs muscle gain

– specific proteins for your gender

And there are likely more that I have missed. The point is that the issue of protein has become needlessly complicated. The specificity of dietary protein is largely overstated by the diet and fitness industry in an effort to sell elaborate and high priced protein supplement products.

This isn’t to say that protein isn’t important for maximizing your muscle building and fat loss efforts because it definitely is. The real issue is separating the useful information from the nonsense.

In today’s podcast, we’ll discuss the in’s and out’s of dietary protein and what you really need to know about it.

John

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Bodyfat Is An Endocrine Tissue, Not Just Stored Energy

Bodyfat, adipose tissue, subcutaneous fat, brown fat, white fat, healthy fat sick fat, belly fat, visceral fat, gut fat, butt fat, arm fat, back fat, thigh fat, cellulite…just plain ol’ FAT!

There is more than just fat in a fat cell

As you might have guessed this podcast is about bodyfat. Specifically, we’re going to talk about what it is and how it’s regulated. In the past, bodyfat was thought to simply be a storage tissue for excess energy. It was assumed to be relatively inert and simply sit there holding energy in the form of fat for future use when calorie intake isn’t sufficient.

Over the past 20 years, this view has changed and now researchers know that bodyfat is a dynamic and metabolically active tissue that plays multiple roles in our daily functioning.

Your bodyfat is capable of producing various hormones, and converting hormones into different forms. It also produces inflammatory cytokines and other messenger molecules that act as signals to the rest of your body. The total amount of bodyfat you have will change how it communicates and acts on the rest of your body.

All of these recent discoveries have led researchers to re-categorize bodyfat as an endocrine tissue.

An endocrine tissue is a tissue in your body that secretes hormones as messengers to signal function for the rest of the body. And it’s now clear that bodyfat is more than just stored energy, it’s in fact an endocrine tissue.

Understanding bodyfat from the perspective of endocrine tissue as well as energy storage will give you more insight into it’s purpose and it’s regulation.

In this podcast, you’ll learn how and why things change in your body depending on how much fat you are carrying and what this means from a diet and nutrition standpoint.

John

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The Truth About Dietary Fat: What Labels Don’t Tell You

Dietary fat is one of the least understood macro nutrients but it’s also the one that many people are the most afraid of. Over the past 50 years researchers have learned a great deal about dietary fat but there are still just as many unanswered questions.

If you’ve done any casual health and fitness reading you’ve probably come to some of these conclusions:

Is bad or good?

 

Saturated fat is bad

Trans fats are REALLY bad

Monounsaturated fats are good

Poly unsaturated fats are REALLY good

From there you’ve likely heard about fish oils, “omega” fats, and even the difference between Omega 6 and Omega 3 fats…if you’re really advanced in your understand of the Omega 3 fats you’ll also understand that there are different forms of “omega” fats and that only specific forms provide the purported health benefits of lowering cholesterol, raising HDL, and lowering triglycerides and LDL. You might even know what the specific essential fatty acids are that provide the health benefit that are basis of Omega 3 claims namely DHA (Docospentanoic Acid) and EPA (Eicosapentanoic acid).

Even if you understand all of this information, the real question is how do you  go about eating food on a daily basis and how do you choose where the fat will appear in your diet. Do you treat food as food and simply eat a sensible a varied mixed diet, or do you treat your food like a drug that needs to be dosed, and specifically dose your fat based on it’s chemical composition?

Many people do the latter. We search for food items that a a specific contest of poly unsaturated fatty acids. We’ll choose olive oil over other forms of oil, butter over margarine, margarine over butter…neither? Fish Oil tablets, salmon for its fatty acid content, flax seed oil because it has ‘omega 3’s’, coconut oil or milk because it’s supposed to have good fat.

Do all of these considerations actually amount to any real benefit of it’s it much ado about nothing?

Developing a grounded view of food as food (and potentially medicine) but NOT as a drug is the key component to understanding what to do about dietary fat.

In today’s uncensored podcast, we’ll discuss everything you need to know about dietary fat and how to have clear view of how much mind space and plate space it should take up in your life and your diet.

John

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