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 image source wikipedia New personal papers from Margaret Thatcher, known as the Iron Lady, reveal the extra-strict diet that she underwent during her campaign for British Prime Minister in 1979.
The papers were discovered among thousands of personal notes, diaries, letters, and other papers which have no become a matter of public record (British law publicizes these letters after 30 years).
It seems that the Iron Lady was a bit sensitive about her figure and wanted to lose 20 lbs in the final two weeks of her successful 1979 campaign.
The diet plan she embarked upon is not the kind I would recommend to a normal person as it’s very extreme.
The diet included 28 eggs a week, two for breakfast and two for lunch. In addition, there was to be no alcohol unless she also had a steak before hand. Why the meat gave her greater allowance to sip alcohol is not clear, but it’s obvious that she believed that it will.
Her favorite alcholic beverage was Whiskey, and she also made sure to eat a daily salad.
Is this a healthy diet plan?
I doubt it. It includes too much protein and too little healthy carbs. However, for a short time, it may be able to help you shed a few pounds.
Meticulous as ever, Thatcher kept an eating diary and made sure to tick off every item she ate off her list. This is a good move for anyone who wishes to lose weight.
All in all, this sort of crash diet isn’t something that I recommend for anyone who wishes to achieve a real lifestyle change.
For more on this story, read this news item
I would have never known what really counts for weight loss if I hadn’t paid so much attention to my fifth grade math teacher. While most people apply the math they learned in second grade to fat loss, they’re about 3 grades behind in understanding what fat loss is really all about.
The General Practices
Most people look at their weight alone. If you weigh 150 pounds and you go down to 135, then you’ve lost 15 pounds of your weight and you’re doing awesome.
This is a good rule of thumb and weighing yourself is important. However, this is second grade math while you need to apply fifth grade to really determine how well your fat loss process is going.
Fifth Grade Math
The real way to determine how well you’re doing is to calculate percentages, not pounds. I’m talking about your body’s fat loss percentage, the real way to see how lean you are.
When you lose weight you want to make sure you’re losing the right kind of weight: you need to make sure you’re shedding fat, first and foremost, and not too much muscle tissue as well.
After all, you can have very little fat on your but if you’re also short on muscle you will still look weak and flabby.
The key is to lower body fat percentage, not just worry about weight. You need to make sure you lose the weight where it counts, in your fat stores.
For example: say you weigh 200 pounds and 60 pounds of those are made of fat. You have a 30% body fat. Now, you lose 50 pounds which is a quarter of your weight and quite an achievement.
However, you now have 45 pounds of fat on you which is still 25% of your entire body weight. What happened here is that you did lose fat, but you also lost a lot of muscle tissue as well.
All in all, you may be lighter but you still have too much fat in your body. This is because you emplouyed second grade math tools to what is a fifth grade math problem.
The next time you try to lose fat set your goal in terms of body fat percentage, not in your total pounds.
I love my car. Even though it’s close to being 10 years old, not very sexy, and even a little bit beat up, I still love it.
I love my car so much that I take good care of it. I make sure to change the tires, clean it, take it to the shop when it needs fixing, and put into it only the best gas to make sure it runs right.
Then one day it dawned on me that I take better care of my car than I do of my body. I never put anything that’s bad into my car yet I do put bad things into my body.
For instance, I do eat sweets even though they’re full of sugar and empty calories but I would never, ever, no matter what, put anything that’s not the best into my car. No way in Hell!
 [ I just love this picture, even though my car is slightly bigger (: ]
I think that I’m not the only one who behaves this way. I’m not the only one who treats his car better than he treats his own body.
How is it with you? Which is more important: your car or your body?
Naturally, I think my body’s more important and I bet you do to, but when I thought about this it got me thinking about all the things we possess and take very good care of:
- We take the time to fold and iron our clothes
- We make sure not to download unknown stuff to our computer
- We keep our house clean at all time
- We take great care not to scratch the Teflon on our pan.
- Need I say more…?
A lot of us take better care of our stuff than of ourselves. We take our body for granted, eat crappy stuff, don’t work out, don’t learn how to treat our body right.
To go back to the car example: most of us would go to the shop the moment our car started making funny noises, but a lot of us won’t go to the doctor for every small ache or start a diet when we’ve gained 5 pounds (we’ll wait until we’ve gained 25).
Why does it have to be this way? I’m not suggesting going to the doctor every time you scratch yourself or never eat chocolate cake again.
All I’m saying is that we need to start thinking of our body as the finest, most expensive, and rarest item we will ever own. Once we do, we’ll do a much better job at taking care of it.
Working out is often seen as a bigger hassle than it really is. I think of myself as someone who simply loves working out, but even I can make up all sorts of excuses to keep from going to the gym.
Let’s see some of the excuses I had to face during this winter:
- It’s raining – I actually look at the sky and think to myself: wow, am I going out in that? Well, if I’m not going to workout when it’s raining (and I’m talking about going to a gym) then I am in for a nasty surprise come spring and I’m going to have to work twice as hard to get back into shape.
- I’m too tired – I know how it feels when you get home from work, fight to keep the noise of the kids from driving you insane and simply feel like you can drop into a 12 hour sleep in an instant. Thinking of going to the gym seems like too much of a hassle when you feel like counting sheep.
- I’m sick – Hey, I’m not telling you to workout with a 103 fever, but if all you’ve got are the sniffles, that’s like a constant condition for many people from October to April, so what are you going to do, not workout for 6 months?
- I’m trying to cut back on some costs and can’t afford a gym membership or equipment. The answer to that my friend, is that you don’t really need to spend money to workout. In fact, this is something that’s easy to do.
The truth is that all these excuses have to do with being at home while you workout. Whether what’s keeping you from going to the gym is the weather or the economy, you really have no excuse not to workout.
 The truth is that you can do an awesome workout at home. Don’t tell anyone who sells fitness equipment that I said so, please (-:
While I also have a gym membership because I like the gym and it does offer some options that I don’t have at home, I also know how to train at home doing bodyweight exercises.
Your body is the best source of resistance you will ever own. Your own weight can be used to build your muscles and actually rev up your strength to something that’s suitable for you.
This is true for basically any body part. One thing you may need is a pull up bar, but other than that you can train every body part at home. Let’s see how:
Bodyweight exercises for various body parts
Legs – Squats, lunges, calf raises…
Chest – Push ups in all their variations.
Triceps – Dips on a couch work the triceps primarily and they also strain during pushups.
Biceps – Just take anything you can lift and do a basic curl. The biceps also work during chin ups and pull ups.
Back – chin up, pull up in any variation is an awesome back exercise.
Shoulders – Work during chin ups, pull ups, push ups, and you can do targeted exercises as well.
Abs – Come on, this is the easiest body part to work at home. All you need to work the abs is the floor.
And the great thing about bodyweight exercises that can be done at home is that they answer each and every one of the winter excuses:
1. It’s raining – Hey, you’re in your home now so do some exercises where it’s nice and dry.
2. I’m tired – You don’t have to exercise for 60 minutes. If you’re tired do a few minutes and you’ll be fine.
3. I’m sick – It’s the same solution for when you’re tired. Doing a little is much better than none at all.
4. Can’t afford a gym – Hey, all home workouts are free.
So, now that winter is at its coldest, stay indoors but be active.
It seems like there is no end to how far reaching the imagination and creativity of advertisers and product designers will go. You may think you’ve seen it all but there is always one more insane or just funny infomercial right around the corner.
This time, it’s for the Shake Weight, a new fitness product that looks like a dumbbell, feels like a dumbbell, but it’s not a dumbbell. In fact, you don’t lift it, but shake it around in all sorts of positions. This is supposed to work your upper body much better than any weight lifting ever could.
It’s supposed to work with something called Dynamic Inertia, a new workout technology for which I could find no reference at all. It just doesn’t exist or at least, it did not exist before the infomercial for the Shake Weight came out. So far, I have not really been able to figure out exactly what it means but it seems to indicate that you get a better workout by doing short range to static exercises like the Shake Weight is supposed to produce.
I won’t hide my own opinion of this product. I don’t like it. It seems fishy to me. I haven’t tried it myself and, unless someone hands it to me, never will. I don’t think I need to try it to say that it won’t work as well as advertised for a couple of reasons:
1. I don’t think short range of motion exercises are better than full range of motions ones.
2. I find some of the claims on the Shake Weight site to be contradictory if not outright false.
The thing I find most offensive is what seems to me to be a marketing ploy which is employed once for the women’s products and once for the men’s. On the ad for the women’s version of this product, it says that it helps you avoid getting bulky muscles.
As you may know, women like to have lean muscles and not bulky ones. The claim is that using the ShakeWeight can somehow help you achieve that.
I don’t believe this is true and for proof, I bring before you the claim for the men’s version which promises that you’d be able to get big muscles with it.
The truth is that your genetic makeup pretty much determines how easy or hard it is for you to get bulky muscles. Not this workout method or another will really make the difference. To bulk up you need to work with a lot of weight, which is something any woman or man can control fully.
Shake Weight reviews are still few and far between as this is a new product. However, I’ve seen at least one fitness professional who agrees with me that this is not the next fitness miracle. Far from it. You’ve been warned.
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