My vote for the #1 most unintentionally funny fitness blog post of 2011: My Experiment: Lipo 6 Black Bodybuilding Supplement.
The lengths to which some women will go to lose 6 lbs are – let’s face it, there’s no other word – pathetic.
My response:
Sounds like absolute hell. Honestly, with Joel Fuhrman’s “Eat to Live” system I lost more weight, was able to stay on my diet for 2.5 YEARS, and never felt anything like as awful as you did.
Supplements, mainly, suck. I once tried taking most of the supplements (serially, not all at once) touted by a leading sports performance nutritionist, Dr. Michael Colgan.
Every single one, without exception, gave me negative results: 1. unacceptable side-effects (mental, physical, emotional); 2. yo-yo benefits (soaring highs, crushing lows); 3. diminishing returns with time and/or dosage.
I now train in what I think of as the “harmony zone.” The tip-off that my diet and exercise plan are working is if they, separately and combined, create a sensation of expansive well-being, high energy, and documented progress (progress in both well-being and fitness results).
On Fuhrman’s diet I lost 20 lbs double-quick-pronto. It’s based on eating nutrient-rich, extremely healthy fare. I left it only when I discovered that I could control my weight and keep it off by eating intuitively. Last night, I ate two plates of sourdough toast with Irish butter. And I ain’t ashamed, because it was what my body needed, and told me to do. Other days, stuffing myself with bread and butter leaves me feeling Roto-Rootered.
In his autobiography, A Champion’s Mind: Lessons From a Life in Tennis, Pete Sampras tells how, just before a major tournament, he began having cravings for junk food. He steadfastly resisted, refusing to succumb to the urge to eat burgers, pizza, and barbecue. During the tourney, he felt weak, spacey, and unenthusiastic. He bailed in the early rounds and realized that his body had truly been crying for “grease.”
The body knows. Spirit knows. And they’ll tell you, speaking through the calm, intuitive feelings of your heart.
I love this paragraph, from “The Unbearable Thinness of Crust,” an essay on the world’s worst pizza:
You can find really bad pizza in New York, but it takes a little work. One promising place is at Penn Station near the A, C, E subway line (not to be confused with the good pizza near the Amtrak lounge). The slices there are thick and sweaty, and the mushroom slice in particular has a vague sliminess to it, as if the mushrooms had been eaten and rejected earlier by an animal whose diet consisted exclusively of garlic.