[Azure]

Originally Posted by Top Shelf

Azure, you're the fitness guru around here, do you have any suggestions on a good routine or program?

Mostly interested in weight loss at first and then toning up. Is the P90x a good place to start?I have a few hours after the kids are in bed or potentially a few hours early in the morning to dedicate.

For what you're looking for its probably perfect.

It teaches you from both the diet and fitness aspect, and can really kick your ass if you keep it up.

It is a tad bit expensive...over $100 at Walmart, if you can find it(usually sold out)....but well worth the money.

I'm a big proponent of the P90X program, even if it doesn't involve heavy weights simple because of the educational experience. It TEACHES you proper diet, it TEACHES you how to stay motivated, and it helps build a solid base from where you can progress further once the program is over.

People quit their 'routine' because they don't have someone telling them what to do each day. P90X does that for you.

Also, I like....a lot, what HD has done. As someone who has been actively researching 'nutrition' for over 2 years now, I actually agree more with the 'make simple choices'....instead of the 'perfect diet starting tomorrow.' From my experience, people who try to the perfect diet last about a month if they're lucky....while those people who start off by making 'smart choices'....which involves cutting back on after supper snacking, junk food(not all at once either)....eating more protein, less carbs.....less seconds(like HD said).....no gouging(big problem for most).....and no weekend benders either(another big problem).

More and more research is showing that 'bad carbs'....because of the insulin problem, is what is creating obesity and severe weight gain. Look up what bad carbs are(usually junk food)....and stay away from it.

And read the book Good Calories/Bad Calories by Gary Taubes. He is the one pushing the whole 'bad carb' angle, something the government, for over 40 years has been ignorning, which is why we're still stuck with the whole 'low fat' garbage, when 'fat'....healthy fats, not transfats, are a very important part of our diet.

Here is a quick summery of what Good Calories/Bad Calories is all about. Article from T-Nation, which despite their crazy advertisments, is the top weight lifting website on the internet.

TM: Let's get to the most controversial point: You say that eating extra calories won't make people fat.


GT: The assumption that fat tissue isn't regulated at all is almost naive beyond belief. Every other part of the human body is well regulated, but fat tissue is just this garbage can that all these empty extra calories get dumped into. And it just happily expands, despite having these deleterious effects all over your body. The idea of homeostasis, where you want to keep the internal environment stable regardless of what else is happening, was first discussed in the 1860s by a French scientist named Claude Bernard. Are our fat cells somehow exempt from this? As you get fatter, homeostasis gets thrown out of whack, because among other things, fat is a good insulator. So your body starts getting hotter. Now you have to cool it down in ways you didn't have to before. You start sweating, and when you lose body fluids, the salt content in the blood gets higher. All kinds of things start going awry when you start getting fatter. It makes absolutely no sense that your fat tissue wouldn't be regulated, and yet these people believe that obesity is all about calories. If you look at animals, all animals regulate their fat tissue very carefully. You can't just force animals to overeat and make them fat.

TM: Really?


GT: They won't do it. The only animals that will get fat by dietary means are very carefully bred rats in laboratories, and house pets that don't eat the foods they evolved to eat.


If you've ever looked at cat food, it's packed with carbohydrates. And yet cats are carnivores in the wild. Felines don't eat carbohydrates. They eat meat. That's what they do. And yet we take then into our homes, we feed them carbohydrates, and lo and behold, they get fat.


The argument I'm making is that [obesity is] a disorder of excess fat accumulation, not of sloth and gluttony. Overeating is the side effect of the disorder, not the cause. What you want to know is, what regulates fat accumulation?

TM: This sounds like some sort of semantics game. Isn't the problem just that they were overeating?


GT: Yao Ming has been growing for much of his life. Until he got to 7 feet, 6 inches, he was in positive energy balance. He was overeating. Nobody considers his height to have been caused by overeating. He was secreting growth hormone, and that also prompted the secretion of something called insulin-like growth factor, and those things made his bones extend and his muscles extend. He got heavier and heavier because he was getting bigger, but he didn't get bigger because he was overeating. He was overeating because he was getting bigger. He was getting bigger because he was secreting hormones. So if you're talking about growth, all you care about are what hormones and enzymes control growth. As soon as you get into fat tissue and horizontal growth instead of vertical growth, suddenly the causality slips. Hormones and regulation go out the window, and now overeating is the problem. Instead of a metabolic defect, which the research clearly points to, we assume that it's a character defect.

TM: So what's regulating the growth of the fat tissue?


GT: The answer, which we've known since the early 1960's, is insulin. Insulin is the hormone that primarily regulates fat accumulation. If you want to get fat out of your fat tissue, you have to lower your insulin levels.
And insulin is regulated for all intents and purposes by the carbohydrates in our diet. That's the simplest possible hypothesis. The physicist would call it "the zero-order approximation." Other hormones play roles, and most of them work to get fat out of the fat tissue, but they can't do it if insulin levels are elevated. Adrenaline, growth hormones, all these things work to make you leaner, but they don't work if insulin levels are elevated.
And this has never been controversial. That's the weird thing.

TM: That's never been controversial?
GT: No.

TM: That carbohydrates make you fat?
GT: Well, that insulin makes you accumulate fat, and that carbohydrates regulate insulin levels.

http://www.tmuscle.com/free_online_a...getting_leaner

Very interesting stuff.