FITNESS CONFIDENTIAL (3 page)

Pop Rocks, Cool Whip and instant-set Jell-O.

Look, if we don’t know better, how can we expect our kids to? Truth is, I really like working with kids because they’re not so set in their ways and they’re willing to listen when I tell them how to eat to stay thin and fit. They always want to know what diet they should go on. I love to hear that, because it gives me the opportunity to stop them from a lifetime of yo-yo-ing through one bad diet after another.

So I give them the secret to going on a diet. Here it is.

Don’t.

Chapter Three

THE NON-DIET

Whenever I ask people how they’re eating, they usually tell me one of two things:

“Ooooh, I’ve been good!”

OR

“Ooooh, I’ve been bad.”

“Good” meaning that they’re depriving themselves of food. “Bad” meaning that they’re actually eating.

This flies in the face of what every other species in the animal kingdom does on a daily basis, where a good day is when they actually get something to eat and a bad one is when they go hungry. Can you imagine a lion telling his cubs, “Hey kids, great news! I let that zebra go. I’m sorry you’re all gonna starve but, hey, we’re being good!”

Insane, right?

But that’s what we do. And we’ve even come up with a word for it: “diet.” You know how the dictionary defines diet? As the kinds of food that a person, animal, or community habitually eats. Unfortunately, it doesn’t mean that anymore, at least not to most people. We’ve now bastardized the term to mean deprivation, starvation and suffering.

We think of a diet as something short-term, something with an ending, something with an expiration date. And, usually, we have a clear goal. Say you want to lose twenty pounds, so you go on a diet. You’re doing pretty good, limiting your food, denying yourself … but then you get tested. You’re getting your car tuned up at the dealership when they bring out the free doughnuts. But these are not just your basic powdered sugar jobs. It’s a cornucopia of temptation.

Doughnut holes dipped in vanilla icing and rolled in sprinkles. The éclair covered in chocolate with just the right amount of Bavarian cream bursting from the side. And let’s not forget the cruller. Oh, the cruller. A doughnut strategically designed to hold more sugar than any other. The cruller is a masterpiece, the perfect storm of doughnut. In the interest of full disclosure, I’ve fallen prey to the cruller several times. It’s no accident that “cruller” sounds suspiciously like “crueler.”

But it doesn’t matter what shape or form the doughnuts come in, they’re all the same thing—instant fat pills. Even though you know this, you still want one … but, heroically, you resist.

You walk out of that dealership with a fresh oil change and tire rotation, along with a sense of empowerment. You’ve fought the cruller … and won! And you know what you thought you were being?

Good.

And it’s easy to be good because you know you only have to do it for a short time. Why? Because eventually you’re going to reach your goal weight and the heavens will part, and the angels will sing, and your diet will finally be over. And once that happens, you’ll be so happy with your new body that you’ll tell yourself, “I will never go back to my old way of eating.”

But you have no choice.

You were able to gut through the diet for a limited time because you had a specific goal in mind. You could be good for a while.

But now it’s dinner time.

And the food looks great. It’s the first non pre-packaged meal you’ve seen in months. Lasagna. And breaded veal. And look at those buttered rolls on the table! You know they’re hot without even touching them because you can smell the heat.

And that’s when it dawns on you—this isn’t on your diet. And if you can’t go back to your old way of eating, you can’t eat it. And that’s when you start talking to yourself.

“Wait a minute … is this what I signed up for?”

“You mean I have to count calories … forever?”

“I have to eat pre-packaged rice bars … for all eternity?”

“I’m supposed to drink special herb tea … until I die?”

Screw this, you think!

So you start making deals with yourself. You know what I’m talking about. You’ve been there.

I’ll just have it tonight
.

Only this once, to celebrate being back at my high school weight
.

What’s life worth if I can’t have a little fun sometimes
?

I’ll just eat the dinner
…
but not the dessert
.

So you do that. You eat the dinner knowing you’re planning to skip the dessert and just have a cup of coffee. But then the dessert comes, the one everyone else is going to eat.

And it’s bread pudding.

Shit. You promised you were going to be good with the dessert, but you’re only human! And they put a buttery, whisky sauce on it. A sugary, buttery, whisky sauce. You beat the cruller in the car dealership but this is cruel and unusual punishment! Do they really expect you to beat the cruller forever?

What is this restaurant, the Spanish inquisition?

Screw this, you think. You’re in charge of your own life and you’re eating the bread pudding, damnit!

And, right then and there, even though you won’t admit it to yourself, you know deep down inside that you’re sunk.

A few months later, you find yourself not just twenty pounds heavier, but thirty. But you think you know why. You realize that you’d just been on the wrong diet. So which diet should you try now?

The cabbage soup diet?

Maybe the Cambridge?

Or maybe you should just do one of the many cleanse diets and starve yourself for a few days.

It’s so hard. Which to choose? But wait—here’s one you haven’t heard of before. Eating for your blood type. That’s it. That’s why the last diet failed. You weren’t eating for your blood type!

Now that you know the proper diet, you’re certain you can quickly drop this thirty pounds and never go back to your old way of eating again.

Problem solved, right?

Of course not. You’re now on what I call the “diet treadmill.” You get on it, run for miles and, when you get off, you discover you haven’t moved an inch. It’s frustrating. You feel like a failure. And all the big diet companies perpetuate that by telling you that you failed because you stupidly picked the wrong diet. In other words, not their diet. But when their diet fails you, they make you feel like it’s your fault by saying you just didn’t have the willpower to follow it properly.

I got news for you.

Nobody has the willpower to starve.

This is why I don’t want you to diet, because they don’t work long term. Not only that, many of them are flat out ludicrous. Years ago, I was dating the anchorwoman of the six o’clock news in New Orleans and she did a story on the worst diets ever. Here are a few of them.

The “Prayer Diet” where, instead of eating, you prayed.

The “Sludge Diet” where you ate fast food, pizza and ice cream to create a “sludge” in your body that supposedly drew away the fat.

The “Chocolate Diet” which was similar to the “Sludge Diet” except you did it with chocolate.

She finished her report by saying that these diets wouldn’t work under any circumstances and, in some cases, could be harmful to your health. You know what happened? In those pre-Google days, the station was inundated with calls from desperate people frantic to know more about how they could get on those diets. The very ones she just said were harmful!

Things are even worse today.

Remember when they took the diet drug Fen-Phen off the market because it was giving people strokes and causing them to drop dead? People went apeshit. But they weren’t upset that it was killing people, they were upset that it was taken away. Sure, there was a chance you might die but so what? You lost weight, didn’t you?

People are willing to die to be thin. They want the secret. They want it now.

I’m a guy in the trenches. I deal with celebrities every day who have to stay fit to get jobs and pay their mortgage. They also can’t show up on set tired and lethargic. For twenty years, I’ve been helping them and now I’m going to help you by sharing the same weight-loss secret. Here it is.

STAY AWAY FROM SUGAR AND GRAINS

Let me tell you what you’re feeling right now: a big let-down.

You didn’t know what I was going to say, but you were hoping it was some kind of trick you’d never heard before. But even though you may not realize it yet, what I just told you is magical. If you just do it, if you just—

STAY AWAY FROM SUGAR

and

STAY AWAY FROM GRAINS

—then you are going to be thin. It’s that simple. Notice what I didn’t say.

I didn’t say you need to count calories.

I didn’t say you need to eat low fat.

I didn’t say you had to watch your portions.

I didn’t say you need to exercise an hour a day.

The reason I didn’t say you need to do those things is because
you are not on a diet
.

I’m always able to tell when a new client will fail at losing weight long term when they ask me “how long will it take me to lose this weight?” I have a standard Vinnie-ism I give them in reply.

“
Why? Are you going to stop when you get there
?”

Whenever I hear that question, I know the client has a finish line in mind.

You don’t.

Life’s not like one of those TV weight-loss shows like
Biggest Loser
or
Heavy
. We can’t leave home for months at a time and be whisked off to a fatless fairyland where elves deliver us the perfect calorie-controlled meals, and trainers attend to us 24/7 for free. The truth is, if you look at the meals they serve on those shows the contestants are basically on starvation diets, which is not sustainable in the real world.

The camera loves it when you get a five hundred pound guy to drop a couple hundred pounds fast. Unfortunately, they’re setting them up for failure because they’ve got to leave paradise at some point and once the lights are off and the cameras are gone, these people have to find a way to live and eat like that for the rest of their lives.

Not you.

You are about to make a lifestyle change that is going to allow you to shed weight quickly and naturally, without pain and suffering, in a way that you will be able to easily maintain. I know you won’t just take my word for it, because it sounds too simple to be true, so I’m going to explain it a little more.

Don’t worry.

I’m not a scientist, so I promise not to get too sciency on you. There are plenty of books out there that do that very well, and I’ll point you in their direction if you’re interested. What I am going to do is explain why this works in a way that even I can understand.

Then I’m going to show you how to do it.

But before we get into that, we need to confront something head on. The myth of calories in, calories out.

Chapter Four

WHY CALORIES IN, CALORIES OUT IS BULLSHIT

Back in the eighties, you couldn’t find a school, gym or church hall that didn’t have an aerobics class. Jane Fonda went from movie star to fitness expert overnight, and polyester got a new name. Spandex. They had to do something with it, the seventies were over and no one was buying leisure suits any more. I had to see for myself what this craze was all about, so I checked out an aerobics class.

The instructor barked instructions over the sound of Abba’s
Dancing Queen
, which blared from the boombox. “Squeeze your buns! Feel the burn!” And, my favorite: “Breathe!” Just in case we’d forgotten to. “We’re burning calories!” she’d say. “Only twenty more calories and we can get rid of that cheesecake! Only ten more minutes of calorie burning and you can have a scoop of ice cream! There’s thirty-four hundred calories in a pound of fat!”

She drove me crazy, in spite of how hot she was. She was a dancing calorie-counting abacus, even though she was making it all up as she went along. When the class was over, I decided to have some fun with her, along with trying to get a date.

“That was a lot of great information you gave us,” I said. “But I do have a question. What’s a calorie?”

You could almost see the question mark above her head as she puzzled through that.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“Well, you had a lot to say about calories so I was just wondering … what’s a calorie?”

“Oh. A calorie is a thing you eat.”

“Really?” I said. “I thought that was called food.”

She hemmed and hawed and I finally decided to let her off the hook. “A calorie,” I told her, “is a unit of heat. It’s the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of one gram of water by one degree Celsius.”

She answered by offering me a piece of fitness gum, the kind that promised to get you into shape just by chewing it. I took the gum and realized I’d probably lost her at the word “heat.” The point is, we all talk about calories, but not many of us know exactly what they are. Actually, I could have just started by saying that, but then I wouldn’t have gotten to tell you that I hooked up with the aerobics instructor.

Anyway. Even though not everyone is completely sure what a calorie is, it’s commonly accepted that too many of them makes us fat unless we get rid of them. This is usually known as the calorie in, calorie out concept. The idea, drummed into us year after year, is that to lose weight you have to burn more calories than you consume.

The simplicity of this is part of its appeal. Does it work? Well, it can. If, over time, you take in fewer calories than you expend, you will lose weight as long as your calories come mainly in the form of fat and protein. But if most of your calories come from carbohydrates, you will lose less weight. The idea that a “calorie is a calorie” is false, because your body reacts differently to different kinds of calories, but we’ll get into that later.

The other problem with the calorie in, calorie out concept is that it’s based on trickery. We’re forcing ourselves to go against what our bodies naturally want us to do, which is eat, not starve. If you want to understand why calorie in, calorie out is flawed as a weight-loss strategy, look no further than your nearest triathlon.

Let’s play a game.

Picture in your mind the type of person that completes a triathlon. I’m guessing you’re visualizing a lean, muscular athlete. And, if you look at the top pros featured in the magazines, you’d think that everyone who completes a triathlon looks exactly like that.

But let’s ignore them for a second. Let’s look at everyone else, the people who complete the triathlon but are not in the top third. Would you agree that anyone who can complete a triathlon is in prime physical shape? Remember, you have to train hard enough to be able to swim 2.2 miles in open water, immediately followed by 112 miles on a bicycle, immediately followed by running a full 26.2 mile marathon.

Any one of these feats by themselves is heroic. Put them together and it’s almost inconceivable to the average person. So, by anyone's definition, these contestants would have to be among the most fit human beings on the planet. And aerobically they might be.

But they don’t always look it.

How do I know? Because I always stay to the end of these competitions. That’s where the real human drama is. Sure, we all admire the pros who do it in record time, but what about the regular folks, the people who have trained as many hours as the pros and are in it to prove to themselves that they can do something that seems impossible? At the end of the competition, between the fifteenth and seventeenth hour, you see the true triumph of the human spirit. People who are literally willing their bodies across the finish line just to prove they can.

I love these people. Watching them is like being in a quadruple feature of
Rudy
,
Rocky
,
Something For Joey
and
Brian’s Song
. So I know what I’m talking about when I say that these folks, the back-of-the-packers, the ones with something to prove, these folks are often carrying extra weight on them. And not just a little.

How is that possible?

Can you imagine the amount of calories they expend training for this? Hundreds of thousands. By the pure calorie in, calorie out theory, they should all be rail thin, but they’re not. So why the disparity?

Because what pros do and what they say they do are two different things.

Understand this—pros, in order to survive financially, have to have sponsorships. Gatorade, Power Bar, Gu. There’s no shortage of companies willing to pay them money to publicly endorse and use their products. And the pros do use their products … when the cameras are on them or the fans are around. But Gatorade and all the other sport drink companies make fundamentally the same thing: sugar water. The only thing that differentiates it from soda is carbonation.

The pros know this.

And they also know that, in order to secure these sponsorships, they need to win races and stay lean. But if they spend their days drinking sugar water, it’s going to be tough to keep the weight off. So they take a few sips for the benefit of the public but, in private, they know enough to quench their thirst with water, hydration we still haven’t improved on. By the way, that reminds me of a Vinnie-ism.

You want to know where you can find the fountain of youth? Look in a fountain
.

The same thing holds true for Power Bars and all the other sport-type bars. They’re full of sugar, not to mention, in many cases, partially hydrogenated oils, which make them about as nutritious as a candy bar. Again, in public, you’ll see the pros nibble but, in private, they’ll try to get their carbohydrates from fruits and vegetables.

Same holds true for all the goops and sports gels that promise to give you “sustained energy.” Again, they’re all sugar. The pros eat them for the cameras and during long endurance events, but during training, they eat proper diets. High protein, high fat along with some carbs.

In fact, if you ate the way the pros pretend to eat to satisfy their sponsors, you could eat healthier at an eight-year-old’s birthday party. If you think I’m kidding, recently the Jelly Belly company started marketing “sports beans” which are just jelly beans with a few vitamins thrown in. The pros won’t touch them. Why?

Because pros know nothing will shut you down quicker than sugar.

But let’s get back to our amateur triathletes. They don’t necessarily know all this. They drink the Gatorade, they eat the power bars and they buy into the concept of “carb-loading” where you eat nothing but pasta, bread and rice for days on end to give you “energy.” They’ve trained like champions and have brought themselves physically and mentally to a place where they can complete a triathlon, but their diet has left them, in some cases, heavier than when they started, in spite of the fact that they’ve expended hundreds of thousands of calories during their training. Usually, they themselves are baffled by their weight gain.

I can’t begin to tell you how many calls I’ve gotten from amateurs in the middle of training for a triathlon, desperate to know how they can possibly be gaining weight. And when I tell them why, you know how they usually react?

They don’t believe me, because they’ve spent years being conditioned by magazine ads and commercials to think that they’re doing it the right way. The truth is, our bodies react differently to different kinds of calories, which is why the simple calorie in, calorie out concept is fundamentally flawed. So let’s talk about how your body reacts to calories from sugars and grains, which will help you understand why they’re killing you.