Melissa started working with me on January 13, 2015. However, she had family issues come up and she had to take about two weeks off from training. In essence, at this point she has not been consistent, but we did a spot check on her weight on February 17, 2015. This is a new policy we are going to introduce to our clients because of the success I am having with continued spot checks on the trainees of my cellulite study. They all lost weight at the beginning of the study, but they all gained some weight about two weeks in. This was a blip on the radar, so to speak, for they all started losing weight pretty steadily after that. They all are showing remarkable progress as a matter of fact.

I like the “spot checks” for two reasons:

• It creates a sense of urgency, kind of in your face reminder of why one is exercising and changing the diet in the first place.
• We can make adjustments in real-time to get back on track.

Sometimes life just happens, and we all get off track a bit, but sometimes we are getting lazy and losing sight of our goal. Spot checks really help us stay the course.

Warning: Blatant Self-Promotion ahead…

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Anyway, I did a spot check on Melissa, just to see how she is doing. Her results? She lost 9 pounds in a little over a month.

Her weight when she started was 183 pounds. As of February 17, it is 174 pounds.

This is better than I expected. Much better. I was hoping that she would have lost about a pound, or at least maintained her weight. My clients in the past would have done just that.

So why the success? I believe it has to do with the diet. We discussed the Hystrength nutrition program with her when she first came on board, and even though she did not stick to it 100%, she did focus on keeping her carbohydrate consumption lower. It paid off.

Since we switched from the standard high carbohydrate/semi starvation diet to a low carb diet, all of our clients who follow it see faster fat loss than when we did the semi-starvation approach.

I have since learned that fat loss is more than just a calorie in-calorie out approach. We actually tell our body if we want it to store fat…or burn it by our choice of macro-nutrients. The old maxim of do more exercise and eat fewer calories to lose fat does not work well, if  we still tell our bodies to store fat. We would simply eat more if we exercise more…and keep our body fat levels the same. Carbohydrates are apparently the signal to the body to store fat. Ironically, consuming fat does not (go figure).

The science behind this is fascinating, and I will explain the concepts in later posts.

For now, I would like to congratulate Melissa for her success. Keep it up.

Stay tuned.

Regards,

Gregg Hoffman