Skyrocket Your Fat Loss Success!
What you have to do is frame this from the beginning, that when this happens, it’s not failure. It’s feedback, and it’s a learning experience. If you pay close attention to what’s happening, you can figure out what adjustment to make, whether it’s nutrition or training, and then the following week, get back on track.
Sometimes people expect 100% success all the time. But if you look at anybody who’s a huge success in any field, it’s usually more like failure, failure, failure, failure, massive success.
TOM NICOLI:
Right.
TOM VENUTO: It’s very much a matter of reframing. I think it’s more mental than anything. You know, each week you have a goal, and you can make progress each week. But just because you haven’t made progress that week doesn’t mean you failed.
TOM NICOLI:
You know, you used a great word there when you said it’s feedback. You know, the word “reframe,” and we can explain it to people listening.
Reframing is simply taking something you’re thinking right now and changing it. For instance, “I felt bad that I had no shoes, until I saw a person with no feet.” You immediately reframed your emotion and your approach. And what I explain to people is that, quite honestly, I don’t fail, ever. I’ve made some serious mistakes, but they were learning experiences.
I remember, as a child, somewhere in the eighth or ninth grade, as a young kid. Didn’t we learn the scientific method? That even scientists call it “trial and error.” There is no failure. It’s just a learning experience. And that way people can reduce the emotional negativity. “Oh, I’m no good.” “I’ll never be able to do this.” “See, I knew I couldn’t do this.” But if you do, out of 30 days, 20 to 25 good days, then you’ve had progress, and progress is progress.
Let me you ask you this, Tom. Because this is something I speak about with clients when I’m dealing with “weight loss” (fat reduction). People use the scale, and I want to know if you agree with this concept that the scale is an emotional tool. Because if we lost six pounds of body fat, and we increased three pounds of 22 Tom Venuto
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muscle, well, we really didn’t lose three pounds, though the scale says that. What we did was we lost six pounds of fat, and increased three pounds of very necessary lean muscle.
So what’s more important for people? To focus on what they wear—their clothes are their gauge—once they’re adults? Or to weigh themselves and follow along on a scale?
TOM VENUTO: The scale can be helpful. But if it’s the only thing you use, it can be very misleading. Just like you said, it doesn’t distinguish between fat and muscle. It goes back to the beginning, when you need to select a well-formed goal. “I want to lose weight” is not a well-formed goal. “I want to permanently burn off 24 pounds of body fat and get my body fat percentage from 20% down to 14%
within three months.” That is a well-formed goal. With that goal, you made the distinction between fat and muscle, and you gave yourself a deadline.
What I recommend is that you have tools available, where you can track the difference between fat and muscle. There are a number of methods to do that. One common way is the pinch test with skinfold calibers. This measurement will tell you your percentage of body fat. You can have it done every week or at least every other week to track your progress.
Then if you weigh yourself, when you have both your scale weight and your body fat percentage, then you can calculate pounds of lean body mass and pounds of fat. I recommend keeping a chart of your measurements so you have a visual of your progress as well as an accountability tool.
I recommend measuring at least every two weeks, if not every week, if you want to keep a real close eye on things. With this information, you get a much better picture of what’s really happening. Are you losing fat or are you losing muscle? Your focus should be fat loss, not weight loss.
TOM NICOLI:
Tom, you mentioned measuring body fat with calipers. Is this something that is an inexpensive instrument that people can use at home?
Skyrocket Your Fat Loss Success!
TOM VENUTO: Yes. In fact, there is a caliper designed especially for home self-testing. There is a learning curve, but there is a learning curve even for a fitness professional to learn body fat testing. One caliper is called the AccuMeasure, and if you type that phrase into any search engine, you’ll find it all over the Net. It’s very inexpensive, around $20. And it’s a one-site pinch test. This is one of the few methods you can use to test yourself.
One of the problems with getting a body fat test in the past was that you needed someone else to test you because there are multiple measurement sites. For example, to get your total body fat percentage, you would have to measure, for example, your thigh, the side of your waist, the back of your arms (your triceps), and your upper back. Unless you’re the human pretzel, you can’t reach your upper back. So somebody came up with a caliper that measures your body fat based on one skinfold site. It may not be as accurate as the other methods, but pure accuracy isn’t as important as reliability and consistency from one measurement to the next.
So in the privacy of your own home, you can get this caliper, take a skinfold measurement on the side of your waist, and see how thick the skinfold is in millimeters (because most of your body fat is right below your skin).
Log the skinfold thickness, fat percentage, total body weight, and lean body mass onto your progress chart, then go to work for the next week and measure your body fat again. And then you’ll get a really accurate picture of your progress.
Ultimately, the best way to chart your progress is with body composition and to know the difference between fat and muscle, but I’d also recommend you use as many methods for measuring progress as possible. You can use your clothes size. You can do measurements: your waist measurement, hips, arms, legs—
wherever you want to measure. The more feedback you get, the better. Waist measurement is particularly valuable because it does correlate strongly with body fat and it is a strong indicator of disease risk.
TOM NICOLI:
And to know that as long as you’re on a healthy eating plan—I am appalled by the word “diet”—and you’re being physically active, you know something must be going on and the results will happen.
24 Tom Venuto
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But that considered, I know that there are people listening who think that they’re going to give it 1,000%. They’re going to work out. They’re going to spend seven days a week. But isn’t there a necessity for what is called “recovery time,” that you can actually break down the body and overdo it and cause harm?
TOM VENUTO: Yes, absolutely, especially with strength training. And there’s been a lot of research done on this, on over-training syndrome and what happens, hormonally speaking, when you train too much. There’s physiological, structural damage, and there’s hormonal damage.
To recover completely means a few things. After the workout is when you actually grow and get stronger. There is a physical breakdown of the muscle fibers when you train. Provided that you recover and feed your muscles, those broken-down muscle fibers are built back up stronger and bigger than they were before. Now, if you go back and hit that same muscle group again without sufficient recovery time, you just keep breaking it down even further. So physically you can’t rebuild the muscle fiber bigger and stronger, it goes in the other direction.
Then the other factor to consider is, what is the effect on your hormones of training too much? The key factor here is the duration of your workouts. It’s much, much better to train more intensely in a shorter period of time than it is to do a marathon workout. A lot of people are under the impression that you have to be in the gym every day for hours and hours. Actually, all the research has shown that your best results for strength training are going to come from keeping your workouts under an hour, preferably 45 to 60 minutes, and you can get good results in as little as 30 minutes if you’re pressed for time, as long as you condense enough training into that brief period.
If you go beyond the hour mark, your anabolic hormones that build muscle (your testosterone, growth hormone), they start to decline rapidly. And the catabolic hormones (like cortisol) start to increase rapidly, so you’re causing hormonal as well as structural damage if you’re over-training. You have to think in terms of short and intense on the individual workouts and allow enough time in between body parts when you’re strength training.
Skyrocket Your Fat Loss Success!
TOM NICOLI:
And you just mentioned the increase of the hormone cortisol, which is becoming known as “the killer hormone.” Doesn’t cortisol actually retain fat cells or make it difficult to reduce fat cells?
TOM VENUTO: There is a link between cortisol and intra-abdominal body fat.
However, that doesn’t mean taking a pill will remove body fat that has already been deposited there. Much of what people are hearing today about cortisol is an effort to promote cortisol-suppressing supplements, which are being marketed as a magic pill to lose body fat. The role cortisol plays is sometimes taken out of context by saying, “Take this cortisol-blocking pill, and it’s going to burn or remove belly fat,” which is not only incorrect but caused the FTC to file lawsuits against at least two of the companies making these claims.
If you structure your training properly so that you’re not over-training, and you’re eating properly and you’re recovering, then you’re not really going to have a problem with excess cortisol to begin with. Rather than take a pill to treat a symptom—body fat—
you should correct the cause of the problem with proper nutrition and training, and recovery from training.
TOM NICOLI:
You know, Tom, the information you’ve provided is fantastic, but not only that, I’m going to bring people back to the beginning, when you mentioned that you don’t promote any supplements.
Now folks, when you go to www.burnthefat.com and you see Tom Venuto, you’re going to notice that this man could make millions of dollars if he promoted any supplement, because any company would want him on their bottle, or their cover, or in their book, endorsing their product.
But being the honest individual he is, Tom has given us a lot of information that goes against what we’ve heard in the magazines and advertisements. These are things that have actually brought people to yo-yoing up and down in weight and looking for one quick fix after another, spending more time and more money, while all along breaking down their internal emotions that are necessary for success, which are confidence and belief in their ability that they can. They have been so disappointed that they 26 Tom Venuto
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believe they were a part of the problem, when the truth was they were pretty much misguided and misled.
Now, though we’ve gone through an awful lot, you’ve shared some incredible and amazing information that’s going to enable people to skyrocket their personal success in the way of health, which will create the lack of illness and disease and a better balance in life. Is there anything else you can think of that I may have missed and not asked you, that is important for people to know?
TOM VENUTO: I think you did a pretty good job covering all the bases. We could go into a lot more detail, but if I had to point out the one most important thing to take from this call, it’s to stop looking for magic pills, stop looking for the next big thing, and just master the fundamentals first. Knowing about them and doing them every single day are two completely different things.
The details do matter; I believe everything helps or hurts.
Whatever you do or don’t do is going to have some effect on which direction that you’re going—toward your goal or away from it—and there really is no such thing as maintenance, technically. But to set a direction and get moving toward the body you want, you’ve got to master the fundamentals first and those things will give you 80% or even more of your results. It’s not in a pill. It’s not in some new breakthrough, and it will not be found in new research over the coming years. We already know the fundamentals of fitness and fat loss. They may be things you already know but may not be applying.
They are probably things that your mother told you when you were younger. You know, eat more fruits and veggies, eat less sugar, burn the fat by getting more exercise, and so on. It’s all so very simple, and yet so many people make it much more complicated than it has to be, and they allow themselves to be confused by the chorus of advertising voices. I wouldn’t really need to add anything else to what we’ve discussed today, until and unless somebody has mastered the fundamentals. Once you have those down, there are so many ways you can take your training and nutrition to the next level, and there’s always another level.
Skyrocket Your Fat Loss Success!
TOM NICOLI:
And I can only imagine the tremendous success people have physically following these fundamentals you’ve shared. And as you said, we were taught, as children, by our parents to go out and play. Folks, don’t focus so much on the pain of the thought of what exercise means to you and has meant to you over time. Go out and play. Go have fun! Run, jump, and let your body receive what it needs.
Tom, I want to thank you so much. You know, this was fantastic, and thank you so much for being a part of this program, and for sharing your program.
And folks, be sure to go to www.burnthefat.com. You can contact Tom from the website if you have any questions. You can also read so much information in the frequently asked questions on Tom’s site. His Burn The Fat program is available as an e-book. You can find out all the things necessary that you need to know to burn fat and to skyrocket your fat loss success and create the health and happiness that are waiting for you.
I’m Tom Nicoli, and I want to thank you all, and God bless.
28 Tom Venuto
Skyrocket Your Fat Loss Success!
About Tom Venuto
Tom Venuto is an NSCA-certified strength and conditioning specialist, lifetime natural bodybuilder, freelance writer, success coach and author of the #1 best-selling e-book Burn the Fat, Feed
The Muscle (BFFM): Fat Burning Secrets of the World’s Best
Bodybuilders and Fitness Models. He is also co-author of Fit
Over 40; Role Models for Excellence at Any Age.
Tom has written hundreds of articles and has been featured in IRONMAN Magazine, Natural Bodybuilding, Muscular Development, Muscle-Zine, Olympian’s News (in Italian), Exercise for Men and Men’s Exercise. Tom’s inspiring and informative articles on bodybuilding, weight loss, and fitness motivation are featured regularly on dozens of websites worldwide. For information on Tom’s Burn The Fat e-book, visit
www.burnthefat.com. To subscribe to Tom’s free monthly e-zine, visit www.tomvenuto.com.
About Tom Nicoli
Tom Nicoli is a clinical hypnotherapist, author, speaker, and seminar leader. Tom is certified by the National Guild of Hypnotists and holds a non-traditional PhD in Clinical Hypnotherapy. He was the recipient of the National Guild of Hypnotist’s 2003 Charles Tebbett’s Award as “Outstanding NGH
Faculty Member” and the 2004 Hypnotism Achievement Award for his dedication and work in the field.
Tom owns and operates A Better You Hypnosis, Inc., in Woburn, Massachusetts, and he is a nationally recognized radio and television guest including an appearance on NBC Dateline’s
“Ultimate Weight Loss Challenge.” His clients have come from as far as Dubai, Switzerland, France, Canada, and throughout the U.S., for simple behavior modification like stress relief, smoking cessation and weight loss, to emotional and physical disorders.
You can visit Tom Nicoli on the web at: www.tomnicoli.com or www.SkyrocketPersonalSuccess.com.
Skyrocket Your Fat Loss Success!
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32 Tom Venuto
Skyrocket Your Fat Loss Success!
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