Workout With a Purpose

Anything you do in your life that provides a sense of gratitude and is really worth something is usually done with a sense of purpose behind it. Things of little or no value have no purpose behind them and are literally wasted time you can never get back. For example sitting on couch watching an hour of rerun’s you’ve seen before probably has little or no purpose and most likely doesn’t give you any sense of gratitude afterwards. Compare that to spending that same hour doing a workout that builds your muscles, burns fat, improves health, builds your self confidence, your social status, and attracts women.

The second hour is a much better spent hour than the first. It’s a life changing experience, where the first might as well be total regression and the epitome of the word “waste”.

When you go to the gym you most likely have at least some sort of plan for the day. Maybe it’s just arms today, or a mix of a few muscle groups. You might be doing some conditioning as well. No matter what you are doing on any given day, all of your effort in the gym has to add up to something. And this is where most people fail to have a concise game plan. For example, can you actually define what you want your body to look like in 8 weeks from, or even 4 weeks from now?

Do you expect to see dramatic changes in your muscle mass, or a decrease in your body fat or bodyweight? What about strength?

Having a defined goal to work towards is essential to seeing any progress. It makes each set and rep that more important. It adds value to the ritual of working out and it becomes something more than just a collection of some exercises. With the right program and some clearly defined goals you will literally be sculpting and building yourself into a living breathing work of art that women will adore and men will admire.

There are many things in your life that you can’t change, but your body is definitely one that you CAN change. If you neglect it and don’t take care of it, other people will recognize that is how you treat yourself and they will do the same. You will most likely only attract other people who treat themselves the same way. On the other hand if you take care of yourself and your body, people will notice and you will immediately attract other people who do the same for themselves.

If you’re only going to go around once, you might as well do it with a kick ass body that gets you the attention and admiration of everyone you encounter. You should never settle for anything less.

John Barban is the Author of the Adonis Index Workout, a specific method for building a guy’s body into its most attractive shape: the shape women find attractive and that creates social dominance with men. Go to Adonis Index Workout  and get started on your road to a perfectly proportioned body so start building the body women want.

Why Set Point Theory Doesn’t Work For Weight Loss or Weight Gain

There is a common notion in the fitness and nutrition industry that your body has a specific set point for body weight that you cannot deviate from by more than 10-20 pounds. Right off the bat this should set off alarm bells because it does not consider different heights. How could this 10-20 number apply both to a 5’2’ woman, and a 6’5 man. Therefore if this theory has any merit it must be in relation to height and more specifically as a percentage of body size. There are however other problems with set point theory as well.

Set point theory only works in one direction, specifically as you become lighter and smaller, and it only applies to lean body mass.

There is a lower limit of lean body mass that once you dip below it will cause death. Your cardiovascular system will begin to fail, heart, lungs and internal organs will all fail…bones will become brittle and your muscle will cease to be able to even support the act of breathing. The immune system will become severely compromised and your ability to fight infection and survive them will be diminished.

These fatal changes will be due to the complete lack of macro and micro nutrients that would have brought you to this dangerously low bodyweight in the first place (this is the unfortunate circumstance of an anorexic who finally succumbs to their disorder).

Based on anthropological data we have that relates skeletal muscle mass to skeletal height we can most likely determine what the lower lean mass threshold is beyond which the risk of fatality is extremely increased. For example a 5’2” woman can probably go down to a bodyweight closer to 60-70 pounds before it becomes fatally low, whereas a 6’8” man would die at a much higher minimum weight closer to 120-130 pounds. This is how set point theory may be able to in part help define what our lowest healthy and manageable bodyweight is. What then is the set point for our upper limit to a manageable healthy bodyweight?

On the opposite end there is no definable size of fat mass that approaches a fatal limit per se…it could be postulated that 50 pounds overweight can results in a series of increased risk factors that result in potential fatal complications 30 years down the road. Similarly 100 pounds overweight might result in potential fatal complications 15 years down the road and so on…but there is no apparent limit to the size of fat mass the human body can accumulate as is evidenced by people who have managed to exceed bodyweights of 600-700lbs regardless of their height. Therefore we have no definable upper limit of body fat mass that causes immediate or very predictable death.

Set point theory therefore only applies to LEAN MASS, and has nothing to do with FAT MASS. And more specifically a percentage of your lean mass, which is in turn based on your height. Underneath your body fat is your true lean body mass which is tightly correlated to your height and how much you exercise your muscles. Therefore a 5’3” woman who weighs 120lbs would have a much smaller range of potential lean mass change compared to a 6’8” male weighing 250lbs. In both these cases a 10% change in body weight represents 10lbs to the woman but 25lbs to the man. Therefore it is incorrect to refer to set point in terms of pounds, but rather it should be viewed in terms of percentage of body weight. Paradoxically both of these individuals have the same theoretical ability to gain fat mass as there is no scientific measurable limit to the amount of fat a human can accumulate.

This is why set point theory does not work to define an upper body weight limit, and specifically an upper amount of body fat.

John Barban is the Author of the Adonis Index Workout, a specific method for building a guy’s body into its most attractive shape: the shape women find attractive and that creates social dominance with men. Go to Adonis Index Workout  and get started on your road to a perfectly proportioned body so start building the body women want.

What Would You Do If you Never Had to Eat?

Weight loss is a goal many people have, but very few people seem to be able to achieve.

The cause of weight gain is pretty obvious and that is: Easy access to cheap and very tasty food. This is only a problem in wealthy countries. On the flip side, poor third world countries are still struggling with famine and starvation because they don’t have enough food to go around.

The point is that people can easily gain weight when there is lots of food around. We all tend to eat when food is present, so the first order of business for trying to cut down on bodyfat is to start cutting down on over eating too much. But this is much easier said than done.

Eating less food in a society of massive food excess is like putting a crack addict in a crack house and asking them not to touch any crack. It’s almost impossible.

In order to be successful at weight loss you will need a good social support network, a plan, a goal (both long term and short term), regular introspection (to face the reasons why you overeat), and some sort of inner circle of other weight loss people to share your experiences with.

At no point does meal timing, or special foods or supplements enter the equation. The only thing about you nutrition you’ll ever need to know is calories in vs calories out, that is 1% of the battle. The other 99% is how you build a team of friends and family to help you eat less which is the hard part.

Diet and nutrition books that have good and bad food lists and complex eating patterns may actually make the whole experience even more difficult.

You already know what foods are more likely than not to be better for your overall health and which ones will cause you more hassle than they’re worth…you don’t need anyone else to remind you of this or make you feel any worse about eating.

The key to success is getting to the root of why you overeat and then changing that behavior. You might be an emotional eater or you might just overeat at social events, heck most people just eat out of boredom. Many foods are now engineered to taste so good that they become highly addictive, and some of us eat out of guilt that we’re not eating right.

Once you get to the root of the real reasons you eat (hunger isn’t one of them as we have far too much access to food for hunger to ever be an issue) then you can start putting a plan in place to start eating less.

My first guess is that most people have really boring daily routines and that food is one of the only things to look forward too. In fact I would argue that almost all the other factors take a backseat to this one. I think most people just don’t like what they do on a daily basis enough for it to keep them occupied or more interested than the next meal does.

Well what if food was removed from the equation?

Imagine that you didn’t need to eat to sustain yourself, what would you do with all of your free time?

That’s not an easy question to answer.

If you can come up with even a couple interesting answers to this question then you’ve got some of the key elements that should go into your weight loss program.

Once you expose the true reasons you eat and overeat then you can start working on changing them for lasting weight loss success.

John Barban is the Author of the Adonis Index Workout, a specific method for building a guy’s body into its most attractive shape: the shape women find attractive and that creates social dominance with men. Go to Adonis Index Workout  and get started on your road to a perfectly proportioned body so start building the body women want.

Weight Loss and Muscle Building – Marketing the Impossible

The fitness and nutrition industry are in the business of selling you a solution to one of two problems: 

1) Weight Loss

2) Gaining Muscles

Things like ‘health’ and ‘fitness’ are just side effects of looking better. In reality nobody would buy a fitness program if it made you healthier but at the same time made you fatter and weaker.

So when it comes to fitness and nutrition marketing it’s all about the look. And this is where the marketers use impossibility to sell you a never ending list of items.

Muscle Building – Selling the Impossible Size

When it comes to muscle building, marketers show you models that are using steroids and tell you that you can look the same if you buy their special product. The part they leave out is that you can never achieve the look that the model has without steroids. You as the consumer are assuming that you’re not being lied to and try their product hoping for the results they promise. When you don’t see the results you end up blaming yourself for not working hard enough or not using enough products to get there. The answer then becomes a new product, or a stack of new products, or a more complicated workout, or a more complicated nutrition program.

At no point does the thought go through your mind that perhaps the look of the model is only attainable with drugs and that no amount of supplements you buy and take will get you there.

In other words, they sell you the promise of an IMPOSSIBLE look. And some gullible people will spend thousands of dollars chasing this ideal and never get there.

Weight Loss – Telling you it’s impossible when it really is possible.

On the weight loss side of things they tell you that weight loss is IMPOSSIBLE without their product. This of course is a bold faced lie as weight loss is completely possible without any special products at all (as it is simply a matter of less calories in than calories out).

They will show you before and after pictures of people who have had good success dropping body weight and tell you that the only way this is possible is with their special supplement/diet/workout.

Dieting isn’t easy (even though it is simple) and because it is so hard it’s easy for marketers to sell you an excuse of why you’re having so much trouble with it and why their solution is the thing that you’ve been missing all along.

The reality is that dropping weight is simple and doesn’t require any special products and is very possible.

So it is a story of impossibility for fitness marketing on both sides and as long as you believe them you’ll always be susceptible to the next scam. Just think of all the diets than have come and gone in the past 10-20 years. How could all of them be so different? The answer is they can’t. They all have the same fundamental truth, and that is less calories.

Go through any supplement store and look at all the different muscle building supplements there are. Now think to yourself if they all worked why are there new products every year promising the ‘secret’ to muscle building? The unfortunate answer is that most of them don’t help you to build muscle at all, and especially the amount of muscle they show you in their ads.

As soon as you realize and accept what is truly possible for muscle building and weight loss the answers become clear and simple. Once you see how simple both muscle building and weight loss can be, you can then put your effort in the gym and your money towards only the things that work, and stop wasting time and money and heartache on the things that don’t.

John Barban is the Author of the Adonis Index Workout, a specific method for building a guy’s body into its most attractive shape: the shape women find attractive and that creates social dominance with men. Go to Adonis Index Workout  and get started on your road to a perfectly proportioned body so start building the body women want.

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The 2 Golden Rules of Healthy Eating

I think it would be safe to assume that most people understand the importance of exercise and eating some sort of healthy diet to maintain their overall health. I highly doubt anyone would argue that eating fast food, junk food, and sitting on the couch is actually the best way to stay healthy. If this is truly the case, then why is it so difficult for people to get in shape and stay in shape? What is so strong to pull the majority of the population the wrong way? And why isn’t it the other way around?

Imagine if everyone had a natural tendency to exercise and eat healthy foods, and the less they paid attention to exercise and diet the more they exercised, and the healthier their diets got? I see no reason why this couldn’t be the case if our society were structured differently. 

What if you were given tax breaks for keeping your blood cholesterol in a healthy range. What if you were given some sort of bonus for eating all your fruits and vegetables in a given week. And what if there was some sort of health savings plan that rewarded you for every 30 minutes of exercise you did. This could get the whole population healthy in a hurry. It would seem that the only real way to get people to take action always come down to the bottom line, money.

This obviously isn’t the case so we need to deal with the society we are currently living in. And make no mistake; this society is not designed to help you out at all when it comes to getting in shape and staying in shape. Food marketing, food laws, a lack of financial interest in exercising, and the quickening pace of society make personal health and staying in shape one of the biggest challenges in anyone’s life. It really seems like all the cards are stacked against you. Think of how often you are tempted to indulge in unhealthy foods in a day, and how little you are tempted to eat right and workout.

The amount of marketing and misinformation that we are exposed to in a day make it next to impossible for most people to really understand what to eat. Even people trained in nutrition still need to learn more than a university degree has to offer before they can start making truly informed choices about what to eat.

For starters most people in North America are faced with hundreds of food marketing messages every day. We are also faced with an unlimited number of food choices, most of which are not what I would consider healthy. The situation doesn’t get any better when you look to the government for help. Most government regulated health claims, and labeling claims are heavily lobbied for, and do more to confuse the end consumer than educate them.

So as far as food goes, you’re basically left on your own to figure out what you should and shouldn’t eat. To make a truly informed decision about food you would need to be educated in all of the following fields, basic nutrition, food processing, food marketing, food manufacturing, and the worst of all, government regulation of food. This is an impossible task for most, leaving you at the mercy of those who control each of these industries.

So where do you turn to for advice about what to eat? Certainly not the food industry, as their main goal is profit, not your health. The government? Nope, their hopelessly being lobbied and persuaded by industry to keep the profit mill churning along. At best you will get a cryptic message that never takes a stand one way or the other and ends up leaving the decision making and responsibility for your health squarely on your shoulders. All the while allowing the food industry to poke at you, and tease you and persuade you as much as possible to eat more of their greatest new products.

John Barban is the Author of the Adonis Index Workout, a specific method for building a guy’s body into its most attractive shape: the shape women find attractive and that creates social dominance with men. Go to Adonis Index Workout  and get started on your road to a perfectly proportioned body so start building the body women want.

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The #1 Biggest Mistake That 99% of Guys at the Gym Make and How to Fix It

You, I and everyone else you know go to the gym because it makes us feel good.

Even more importantly, we go because it makes us look good. You wouldn’t go to the gym if somehow it made you look worse. So what is the specific look that you’re trying to achieve? Most guys have an idea of what they want to look like, but can’t pin it down to an exact size or shape. They just know there is some room for improvement.

Without a specific goal, how will you ever know if your workout is getting you closer to the shape you want? This is the mistake everyone is making. Going to the gym and working out with no specific goal. Most workouts are a mix of bodybuilding, powerlifting and some form of cardio. Each of these workout styles have their own specific goals that don’t necessarily add up to making you look better.

The bodybuilding mantra of ‘bigger is better’ isn’t right. Most women don’t find overly muscled guys attractive and most huge guys are just insecure. They feel the need to be big because they think it will give get them “respect”. It’s blatantly obvious when guys are working out to compensate for a lack of social status.

Powerlifting will make you strong, but it’ll end up turning you into a barrel shape. I’m sure this isn’t quite the look you’re going for.

Excessive cardio will just make you look skinny and weak, and can actually eat away at your muscle mass.

Just any combination of these styles will never give you the results you want. Most guys don’t know how much of each to use and when to back off and when to go for more. To get what you want you need a careful and calculated balance of these workout methods. A specific goal and specific workout tailored to your individual strengths and weaknesses is the only way to be sure that you’re getting the results you want fast.

I’ve designed the Adonis Index Workout to combine the kinds of exercise you are already familiar with in specific, calculated proportions to make you look your best without falling into the traps of any particular style. With a specific goal, you can get to your best body shape. Without a specific goal you may never get there.

John Barban is the Author of the Adonis Index Workout, a specific method for building a guy’s body into its most attractive shape: the shape women find attractive and that creates social dominance with men. Go to Adonis Index Workout  and get started on your road to a perfectly proportioned body so start building the body women want.

Overeating Happens for All Kinds of Reasons, and Hunger Isn’t One of Them

Appetite and hunger cravings seem to be one of the new villains in the battle against weight gain and obesity. Nutritional supplement companies, pharmaceutical companies and many new diet books are all targeting these as the primary factors to weight gain.

In theory this seems like a logical place to look. It sounds like it would make sense to me. Isn’t hunger what drives us to eat? Doesn’t a bigger appetite mean you will eat more food? The truth is these aren’t the only factors contributing to north Americas none stop feeding frenzy. And they probably have little to do with overeating at all.

Recent research shows that other social and psychological factors have a huge impact on not only when we eat, but how much we will eat. For starters the size of the plate, bowl, box or bag you eat food from will determine how much you will eat. A study done on people eating popcorn at the movies showed that people eating from the jumbo sized bag compared to the small bag ate way more popcorn (and the popcorn was 5 days old stale just to make sure they weren’t eating out of enjoyment for the great taste!). This result was consistent with all sorts of containers. People eat more from bigger bowls and larger plates.

The troubling part about this research is that these people are completely unaware that they are eating more. When surveyed after the study the people eating from the big bag who ate significantly more food actually thought they are eating the same amount as the people who were eating less with the smaller bags.

Other research shows that as long as food is within arms reach we will continue to eat it even if we’re not hungry. We have a better chance of eating less if food was more difficult to come by and took more effort. Even having to walk across a room will slow us down. But if that bowl of chocolate covered almonds is close enough to reach without moving, look out, it’ll be gone before you know it!

Food variety is also a major reason people just can’t seem to stop eating. If your fridge was full of your most favorite food in the world, but it was all you were allowed to eat for the next 10 days you would most assuredly get sick of eating it within the first 2-3 days. By the end of the 10 days you would probably be about 5 pounds lighter from lack of eating!

Even the perception of food variety changes how much we will eat. A study looked the difference between eating M&M’s in 5 bowls with the M&M’s poured into each bowl right out of the bag compared to M&M’s separated out by color in each bowl. People who were given M&M’s in bowls with all the colors mixed together ate significantly more than the people who were given the same amount of M&M’s divided by color in each bowl! As if! All M&M’s taste the same no matter what color they are!

This is just further (and rather disturbing) proof that there are dozens of subconscious factors influencing our food choices and a daily basis that we simply will never be able to control until we know they are affecting us.

In the battle of the bulge, appetite and hunger are factors, but research is showing they definitely are not the only factors. And I would argue they are less important that the nutrition researchers, pharmaceutical and supplement companies think. Things as simple as a bigger container, or being within arms reach of food, or even the color of the food will make us eat more. These influences have nothing to do with hunger. They are factors just outside of our awareness that are much harder to control, and in many social situations they are in fact impossible to control. For example there is no extra extra small bag of popcorn at the movies. All you have to choose from is huge, or super huge!

The bottom line is that fancy diets and products designed to kill your appetite and get rid of hunger cravings will leave most people very disappointed and wondering why they still can’t lose weight. Hunger is a normal response to signal you to eat. Trying to suppress it is probably not a good idea. Looking for better food options, or at least food ‘situations’ is more likely to be a successful strategy. For example: choose the smaller container or plate to eat from, put snack foods out of reach so you’re less likely to gorge on them. Simple changes like these will go a long way to helping you keep your consumption habits in check.

John Barban is the Author of the Adonis Index Workout, a specific method for building a guy’s body into its most attractive shape: the shape women find attractive and that creates social dominance with men. Go to Adonis Index Workout  and get started on your road to a perfectly proportioned body so start building the body women want.