FITNESS CONFIDENTIAL (5 page)

STAY AWAY FROM SUGAR

and

STAY AWAY FROM GRAINS

Will this change of lifestyle be completely painless? Mostly, with one exception. A couple days after you begin, you might feel a little lethargic. Don’t let this discourage you. It’s just your body naturally transitioning from the sugar spike roller coaster it’s been on for years to the healthy way it was meant to function. Within a day or so, that fatigue will go away and you’ll find yourself with more energy than you’ve had since childhood. And how will this amazing thing happen?

One word.

Remapping.

Chapter Six

REMAPPING

I’ve always been a fan of motorcycles. They’re great for commuting and saving on gas but, let’s be honest, the real reason I like them is that they’re fun. And you know where they’re really fun? On a racetrack, where you can open them up full tilt.

My favorite track is Willow Springs on the way to the Mojave Desert in California. At certain times, the track is open to the public as long as you have the right gear.

The first time I went there, I saw these guys working on laptops that were plugged into their bikes.

“What are you guys doing?” I asked.

“Remapping the system,” one of them said.

I’d never heard that term before.

They explained that a combination of state and federal laws restricts the way that bikes can perform on public roads, but the racetrack is the Wild West. No restrictions there. Which is why they were using their laptops to reprogram the computers in their bikes, allowing them to burn more fuel and go faster. By removing these restrictions, they were unleashing their bikes to do what they had been created to do—roar down the track like mechanized beasts.

They called the process “remapping.”

I realized that this is exactly what I do every day with my clients. They usually come to me after trying to get fit by following one crazy diet after another, not realizing that those diets have been restricting their potential. They’ve cut back on their fuel, which left their metabolic engines sputtering along instead of becoming the speedy machines they were designed to be.

By simply changing the way they ate, I improved my client’s metabolism, taste buds, energy and hunger. It helped them and now it’s going to help you.

Once you start eating this way, your metabolism will change from a flame that flickered in the breeze into a roaring fire. Remember those calories that you used to count religiously, trying to keep the number as low as possible? Not any more. They’ll now be consumed in that newly remapped metabolic furnace.

You know what I hate about a lot people in the health and fitness industry? They forget that they’re dealing with humans. Just because some study or test was done in a controlled environment doesn’t mean that you live in a controlled environment. We live in the real world and you know what’s in that world?

Red velvet cake.

Spumoni ice cream.

Cannolis.

And, yes, even crullers.

We live in a world filled with delicious things and there are people who have to sell those things in order to make a living. What, you want them to go broke? How cruel are you? Look, I’ve just introduced you to a new and better way of eating but that doesn’t mean you can’t ever cheat a little. In fact, I want you to cheat so that you won’t feel like you’re missing out on anything.

Let’s say there’s something you really don’t like to eat. For me, that would be cantaloupe. Don’t ask me why. I like all the other melons, even cantaloupe’s evil cousin, the honeydew. But if you told me I could never have cantaloupe again, suddenly I’d be dreaming about eating it.

Bottom line, we want what we can’t have.

You may notice the four treats I mentioned—cake, ice cream, cannolis and crullers—have sugar or wheat in them and you might be thinking to yourself “isn’t that stuff forbidden?” I’ll tell you what I tell my clients when they ask me things like that.

It doesn’t matter what you eat between Christmas and New Years, it only matters what you eat between New Years and Christmas
.

I don’t want to live in a world where I can’t ever enjoy a red velvet cake or spumoni or cannolis or even a cruller, and I don’t expect you to live in a world like that, either. Just don’t do it every day. Make a treat out of it, not a habit. Remember back when treats used to be just that—treats? Something you enjoyed rarely enough that, when you had it, you called it a “real treat”?

So treat yourself on occasion. And don’t worry. We remapped your metabolism into a roaring furnace, remember? You’ll burn up the occasional doughnut or slice of pie quicker than a sheet of paper in a fireplace.

Let’s talk taste buds.

Before you started eating like this, sugar overwhelmed everything. It was like a tsunami that drowned out every other flavor. But get ready for a surprise. You’re about to discover a whole new world of taste.

You won’t believe how delicious meats and cheeses will seem once their true flavors aren’t camouflaged by a lifetime of sugar. And when you have something with natural sugar in it, like a piece of fruit, you’re going to swear it was dunked in honey. It’s time to enjoy food the way you were born to.

And you’re not just going to remap your metabolism and taste buds, you’ll also be remapping your energy. Remember how the motorcycle went faster once it started burning more fuel? So will you.

Once the sugar monkey is off your back, you’re going to find that the gravitational pull that your couch once had will be gone. You might even, for the first time, want to exercise. Why? Because your body is finally releasing its fat stores and burning them as fuel. It’s a two-for-one-special. You’ll be feeling great and getting thinner at the same time.

And you won’t be hungry, either.

When you have fat back in your diet, you’ll feel full again, so you won’t constantly want to graze like a cow. Even better, you don’t have to keep feeding your sugar crashes with more sugar. Your appetite will return to the way it’s supposed to be.

I’m in a storytelling mood, so let me tell you a story about a kid I trained. Let’s call him Kevin, because that’s his name.

I’d known Kevin since he was seven years old because his mom was a client of mine. Every year, I watched as he got heavier until he finally topped the scales at a whopping two hundred and thirty five pounds. At twelve years old, his mom sent him, for the third time, to an overpriced “fat camp” where a lot of celebrities shipped their kids.

When Kevin came back from camp that summer, I noticed something. Not only did he not lose any weight, I could have sworn that he’d gained some. How is this possible, I wondered. At the very least, if they were restricting the kid’s diets, he’d have to lose something.

That’s when Kevin explained the “two-suitcase method.”

“One suitcase is filled with clothes,” he told me. “The other is filled with candy.” He went on to say that it didn’t matter what you brought with you because, just like prisoners using cigarettes as currency, the kids at the camp traded their sweets among themselves to get exactly the kind they wanted. You’d think any decent fat camp would put a stop to this but, apparently, they were more interested in their “accounts receivable”.

Believe it or not, that wasn’t the thing that made my blood boil.

He showed me a picture. It was a black and white photo of him, shirtless with his large belly hanging over his shorts, standing in front of a concrete wall, holding a sign that said his name, the date and his weight. He looked like a convict. And the look on his face almost brought tears to my eyes. I asked him who was around when that picture was taken.

“Every other kid at camp,” he replied. “It’s the thing we dreaded most. Knowing we’d have to stand almost naked in front of everyone.”

I saw red. I knew what I had to do.

Right then and there, Kevin became my next client. We started to ease into a workout program. Even something as basic as walking around the block was a chore for him. We counted his jump ropes—not in minutes, which is the way most people do it, but in the number of times he was able to complete a single jump. The first day, he couldn’t get past ten.

Along with exercise, we started to talk about diet.

I couldn’t tell him what to do until I knew what he was already doing. I needed to know what skeletons he kept in the closet before we cleaned it out. It turned out to be exactly as I thought. Pancake breakfasts, mid-morning bag of chips followed by a candy lunch. More junk food after school. He usually had a healthy dinner, because that was provided for him by his mom, but it was followed by more snacking while he did his homework at night.

It’s amazing what the human body can endure.

Even though Kevin’s mom believed in healthy eating, she couldn’t control what he ate during the day when she was at work or when he was hidden away in his bedroom at night. I thought I was going to have a hard time convincing Kevin to change his ways, but the teasing had taken a toll on him and he was all ears. He wanted to do the right thing.

He cleaned up his diet immediately, dumping the carbs and sugar. Breakfast became bacon and eggs. Lunch became vegetables and fruit, along with cheese and cold cuts. Dinner remained the same—poultry, fish or beef, along with a small amount of rice or pasta. Snacks? Forget about it. Kevin was determined to beat this fat.

But something strange happened.

After seven weeks of exercising and eating properly, Kevin barely lost a pound. It was, as Vizzini says in
The Princess Bride
, “Inconceivable!”

We went over it again and again. I interrogated the kid, trying to break him down. I couldn’t accept that I was failing or, even worse, that he was failing. Was I being lied to? Was he sneaking food? He swore he wasn’t. I believed him. So what was it?

I found out when, days later, Kevin walked in while I was on the phone with another client. He heard me tell her how detrimental soft drinks were to her weight loss.

“Soft drinks are not your friend,” I said. “They’re nothing but liquid fat.”

As soon as I hung up, Kevin said, “You never told me I couldn’t have Coke.”

I turned to him, surprised. “How many Cokes do you drink?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Six or eight.”

“Every day?”

“Yeah! I love them. I even have one with breakfast.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this before?” I asked.

“I didn’t think it mattered,” he replied. “You only asked me what I was
eating
.”

I would love to say this was “kid logic” but you’d be surprised how many adults think this way, too.

So I spent the next week or so weaning Kevin off the liquid demon. The weight started flying off. His energy improved so much that, when I showed up, he would already be lathered in sweat from a twenty-minute jump rope session, ready to begin his real workout. It was hard to believe this was the same kid that I used to have to drag off the couch in a semi-coma.

One year later, he’d dropped a hundred and ten pounds and was a lean, muscular machine, filled with confidence and energy. He felt great, looked great and never looked back. Now in his mid-20’s, Kevin has continued to eat properly and keep up his routine. He’s married, employed and happy.

So what goes hand in hand with proper eating?

We all know the answer to that. Exercise. But we don’t get enough of it in today’s society. Know why?

Because our brains are killing our bodies.

Things are so convenient now that we hardly have to do anything physical any more.

Case in point: gyms that have valet parking. That’s right. The people that own the place want you to avoid having to walk from the parking lot to the gym where you’re going to get on a treadmill and, you guessed it, walk.

Crazy, right?

Hell, one gym I belonged to had an elevator from the first floor to the second, where you stepped off to find yourself facing a Stairmaster. That’s right. They whisked you up a flight of stairs to get you to a machine designed to make you walk up a pretend flight of stairs.

And for those people who think stairs are too challenging, we’ve figured out a way to simplify sidewalks. Many airports now have moving sidewalks, so that you can go forward without ever being burdened by something as strenuous as taking a step. Vegas has them, too, but did you ever notice that the moving sidewalks only bring people into the casinos? If you want to leave, you have to exit the “hard” way.

You know, by foot.

What about dating? That used to take at least some effort.

Back in the eighties, if you wanted to get laid, you’d have to take a shower, comb your hair, put on some decent clothes and go to a bar or some place where you could meet the opposite sex. Nowadays, you can sit at your desk in your cruddy-ass underwear with a king-sized bag of chips and visit internet dating services without ever getting out of your chair. Hell, half the time you can get your date to show up at your door. And don’t worry if you didn’t bother to go out and pick up some wine—there’s an internet service for that, too.

People try to excuse this with a simple word. “Convenience.”

I have another simple word to describe it. “Laziness.”

The easiest way to do something is not always the best, but we keep looking for the quick fix, and that even extends to parenting.

Recently, I started using a new term: Glow Kids. You’ve seen them. They’re easy to spot because they’re all lit up by a fluorescent blue hue from their handheld devices. You see kids all the time standing in line texting, sitting in restaurants with earbuds in their ears, lounging at home fiddling with apps. Whatever happened to talking, to communication? But Vinnie, you say, this is the new way people communicate. Get with the program!

Believe me. I get it.

But let me remind you how kids used to communicate. Shouting at each other while riding their bikes around town together. Running through the neighborhood, creating new games that made no sense to anyone but them. Hell, when I was a kid, I’d leave the house with a baseball, basketball and football because I was never sure what game we were going to end up playing.

In other words, we were moving. We were active. Not just sitting there, passive, pecking away at a piece of glass like a bird in a jar.

When I was in elementary school back in the swamps of Louisiana, I had a teacher who told us that she’d read an interesting article. It said that, one day, our brains would be the only thing we’d need to use and that our bodies wouldn’t be necessary any more. My third grade mind imagined this as a bunch of heads without bodies sitting on tables. I never thought it would end up the other way around—a head sitting on top of a giant useless blob of a body.