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We have a great episode for you today, folks! Reinhard Engels of EveryDaySystems.com (Related) is back to share more thoughts on the No S Diet (and he talks a bit about the forthcoming book!) and Nathan Stanley of the KBLifter Blog and Podcast (Related) talks about the kettlebell weightlifting apparatus, what you can do with it and what it can do for you.
Apparently, a handlebar mustache and leopardskin loincloth are no longer required to be a Kettlebell lifter. In fact, Nathan offers a big fistfull of links to demonstrate that there is something of a kettlebell renaissance happening right now.
Question: What are the two words in the No S Diet that will give you ninety percent of the benefit? A clue: the first word is “No” and the second word starts with a consonant. Listen in to find out!
Produced by Disc of Light Media for GNMHealth/Grasshopper New Media, in 2007.
Music by Kevin Kennedy-Spaien except opening theme, Rollin’ In The Hoopty by cjacks.
Segments are the property of the contributors, used with permission.
Click the following link for transcripts.
Nathan Stanley Transcript:
There is a growing fitness movement in the United States away from big box corporate gyms toward no-nonsense fitness that’s about substance rather than style. The rise of the Garage Gym has been afoot for some time now and has grown considerably in size over the past few years. Crossfit.com (Related) , the Undergroundstrengthcoach.com (Related) and Crosstraining.com (Related) all are websites that focus on short, intense workouts based on functional movements that can be done with simple, often inexpensive equipment in your own garage or back yard. Being able to eliminate gym fees and to workout whenever it fits into your schedule is almost as attractive as the fact that these systems are extremely effective for those willing to put in the effort to do them. While I have relied heavily on the resources available at the aforementioned websites, I’ve chosen to select kettlebells as the implement of choice in my home gym, and they’ve proven to be very effective in providing me with intense, effective workouts as well as ample amounts of variety.
A kettlebell is a traditional Russian weight that dates back to the 18th century. They look like a cannonball with a handle, and can be used to lift in a variety of lifts, from adaptations of Olympic lifts, to juggling and even throwing. Kettlebells have a tremendous amount of utility, and if used correctly, a single kettlebell can provide a person with a wide variety of workouts and solid results.
First, besides appearance, how does the kettlbell differ from its more common cousin the dumbbell? After all, if you can do all the same lifts with a dumbbell that you can with a kettlebell with few exceptions, why would you shell out the cash to buy a new hunk of iron? Unlike dumbbells, kettbells do not have the weight balanced equally on either side of the handle, rather the unbalanced nature of the weight requires the recruitment of a whole host of stabilizing muscles as well as prime movers to complete most exercises done with kettlebells. Simply stated, 35 lbs, is not 35 lbs when it comes to a kettlebell. Kettlebells are also designed with full body movements in mind. While you can do high repetition snatches and swings with a dumbbell, they are not as naturally disposed to them as the kettlebell. As a matter of fact, Kettlebell Sport, as it is called, is designed around the high repetition of lifts for up to 10 minutes at a time. Catherine Imes, the first American born Master of Sport in Kettlebells recently snatched a 35 lbs kettlebell 208 times switching hands only once! It sounds hard to believe, but kettlebells provide a tremendous amount of opportunity for the development of strength endurance.
Besides being able to do these in your garage, or even living room if you’re careful, you can also get a very intense and effective workout in anywhere from 20 to 30 min. On my podcast, The Kettlebell Lifter, I recently interviewed a former powerlifter named Mark Boggs. Using a workout that consisted of a single set of Jerks, and a single set of Snatches, Mark was able to drop from what he describes as a “William Shatneresque” 290 lbs to 235 in just a few months with no major changes to his diet. The key is that he was doing timed sets, or lifting the weights paced throughout a set period of time up to 10 minutes. This is based on the best practices of Eastern European lifters that developed the sport and are far advanced in their performances over those of us in the west.
Rather than take the time to describe how to perform the various lifts, and how to design a program, my suggestion is to visit a few of these online resources. First, the North American Kettlebell Federation is a non-profit organization that has a number of free resources on their website at nakf.net (Related) . The American Kettlebell Club has over 100 certified coaches in the US that can work with you on programming and technique. Their website is americankettlebellclub.com (Related) and there is also a partial directory of coaches found at akccoaches.com (Related) . Finally be sure to check out my podcast, the Kettlebell Lifter, at kblifter.blogspot.com (Related) . There are a lot of companies trying to sell information and equipment so if you have any questions, Email me at kblifter@gmail.com (Related) .
Finally, if you’re interested in the Garage Gym concept, but don’t know if kettlebells are your thing, check out Crossfit.com (Related) . They have a whole manifesto on the Garage Gym that’s free for downloading. I hope I’ve answered some questions for you and piqued your interest in kettlebells. Give them a try, you won’t regret it.
Reinhard Engels Transcript:
Hi this is Reinhard from everyday systems.com (Related) . It’s been a while since my last segment, and I apologize about that. But I have a great excuse: great not only in that it satisfactorily explains my mysterious absence, but also great because it’s just great — I’m thrilled and amazed that it actually happened: out of the blue, I got a book deal for the No S Diet. From a real publisher, with an advance and everything. So I had to take advantage of this opportunity and devote every spare second to getting the manuscript done — including the time I normally would have used for this podcast. I’ll talk a little bit about the book next week, for now I’m sick to death of the subject. I just wanted to let those of you who were wondering know what happened.
Unfortunately (or rather very fortunately) I’ve got another great excuse to avoid podcasting coming up in the next few weeks: even greater, my wife and I are expecting our second child.
So realistically, it’s probably going to be a while till I can bump it up to once a week again, but once a month, at least, I should be able to manage. I promise I won’t give up altogether. Persistence and consistency are things I’m constantly preaching with my everyday systems, so I’ll try to practice them in my capacity as podcaster too.
Today I’m going to revisit the No S Diet, or one aspect of the no s diet. The most contentions part — which I think, is also actually, the most important. You’ll remember that the nos diet has three rules: no snacks, no sweets, no seconds. No sweets and no seconds no one has a problem with, at least on a conceptual level. Maybe you have trouble actually refraining from sweets and seconds, but you know intellectually that you should. No snacks is a little more contentious. A lot of people seem to think snacking is good. They think it’s good for one of two reasons: because it makes them less hungry, that’s both a good in itself and (presumably) they’ll eat less the next meal because they’re less hungry, and two because they may have read something somewhere about smaller frequent caloric inputs being metabolized more efficiently — in other worlds, if you eat the same amount of calories in 6 meals a day instead of 3, you’ll burn them more efficiently and that same amount of calories won’t make you quite as fat.
So hunger management and metabolism, these are the two pro snacking arguments. The second one, the metabolism argument, may actually be true, to some small degree. But the first one is so false, that the second one doesn’t even matter. Snacking does not manage hunger effectively. We do not eat any less at meals if we’ve been eating between meals. We don’t, outside of a lab, compensate for snack calories at mealtime — at all. Snacks are just extra calories. By snacking, we just eat more. And no matter how efficient your metabolsim, you aren’t going to turn those extra calories into negative calories. They will add up and will make you fat.
Can we quantify this? According to data from the Continuing Surveys of Food Intake by Individuals, conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 90% of our increased calorie consumption since 1977 has come from increased between-meal eating. Calories consumed at meals have stayed about the same. If this statistic is accurate, snacking is not only the biggest problem in terms of dietary excess, it is almost the entire problem.
90%. You’ve heard of the 80% solution. Well here’s a 90% solution to the problem of obesity (at least on the consumption end), two words: “no snacks.” In fact, you don’t even have to go that far. No snacks except on S-days — remember that NO S diet exception — will probably be enough to bring you back to 1970s levels of consumption.
I’m getting this data from from a 2003 study by David Cutler at Harvard University called “Why have Americans become more obese?” I’ll post a link to it on the website. The other interesting thing he points out is that it’s not the size of the snacks that have increased but their frequency — the very “grazing” that diet gurus love to praise.
Cutler writes: “The average number of snacks increased by 60% over this period, thus more snacks per day — rather than more calories per snack — account for the majority of the increase in the calories from snacks.” So while it might be tempting for some to keep our current high frequency of snacking while focusing on making those high frequency snacks smaller or healthier as a way to reduce total snack calories, there is no historical precedent for such behavior. We didn’t get fat because we ate bigger or less healthy snacks, we got fat simply because we ate more snacks. So the obvious step to correct this problem would be to do the opposite, to eat fewer snacks, like we used to. We know how to do that; we know we can; and we know it works.
One way of examining the relationship between snacking obesity is to look across time, like we just did. America in the 70s vs America today. Another way is to look accross cultures.
In America we get 26% of our total calories from snacks — twice the amount as in 1976 — and our obesity rate is now over 31%; the French get only 8% of their calories from snacks, and their obesity rate is correspondingly lower at 11%; the Chinese get less than 1% of their calories from snacks — they essentially don’t snack at all — , and their obesity rate is a mere 3%. Any place I’ve looked where statistics like this are available you see the same pattern — more snacking means more obesity.
Do you know what the French word for snacking is? Le snacking. Not a French word. It’s such a foreign concept to them that they had to borrow our word for it.
Snacking is a weird thing. It’s a very recent historical development. Without big technological advances that make food so cheap and convenient, snacking wasn’t even possible. So don’t think that snacking is somehow this natural thing that you’re being kind to yourself to preserve. It’s a new, bad habit, plain and simple. Don’t look around you and say “hey, everybody’s doing it, so should I.” Look around you and say, “hey, everybody’s doing it, and look how fat they are.”
If snacking is this big a problem, why does it get so little play in the media and popular literature? I think there are three reasons. One is there’s a lot of money to be made in snacks. Not just by junk food companies but also by the “wellness” industry and the diet gurus who partner with them to get a cut of the diet bar sales — the ultimate sign of having made it as a diet guru is to have your name on what is essentially a candy bar. I know it sounds crazy but go to your supermarket and take a look at these things. The second reason snacking gets ignored is simply because the excess that comes in through snacking is less visible than other problems like gigantic portions — super-sizing gets a lot of attention in the media because it looks so bad. When someone is eating a double whopper with a mountain of fries that looks awful, you can look at him and say “stop! you shouldn’t be doing that.” But when someone is munching a little here and a little there, it you can never put your finger on the precise point that it becomes excessive. And that’s precisely the problem. Snacking bypasses your eyes abitliy to see excess. The only way you can measure excess with snacking is to count - count calories, points whatever, and let’s be realistic, no one is going to be able to do that for any length of time. Get rid of snacking, and all of a sudden excess jumps right out at you. It doesn’t just become visible, it becomes unavoidable visible. It’s hard not to see it. The other reason snacking gets let off the hook is that it can theoretically be a good thing. It is conceivable that you would eat only celery sticks and carrots and balance the extra calories by eating less at meals. But in practice, it isn’t realistic. Almost no one manages to pull this off. So stop trying. Instead, do what skinny billions have done for millennia: stop snacking, stick with meals.
That’s all for today. Thanks for listening.
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