How do I gut rid of a gut in 20 minutes a day?

Factual Questions
21

Okay, I’m training hard for a martial arts tournament (that might count as my first professional fight – I don’t know if I’ll get paid or not) and I’ll give you the best information from my experience.

Right now I’m on an acid/alkaline (or neutral) diet. I can only eat 20% of my diet from the first section and 80% of my diet from the second two.

This is what I can eat:

**
PROTEIN FOODS (ACID FORMING FOODS)
Acceptable:
doffee (decaffinated)
beans/peas (dried)
beef
eggs
fish
lamb
lentils
poultry
prunes (cooked)
rice (white)
tea (breen or herb)
veal
whole grains
yogurt (natural)
**

Not Recommended:
bread or flour products
buttermilk
cheese
coffee
deli meats (processed)
liver
milk
nuts (except almonds)
pork/ham
seafood (shell fish)
tea (black)
ketchup/mustard/relish
mayonaisse/salad dressings
*

**
STARCH FOODS (ALKALINE FORMING FOODS)
Acceptable:
almonds
millet or buckwheat
apples
apricots
berries
cherries
peaches/pears/plums
popcorn (regular)
potatoes (baked)
pumpkin/squash
rice (brown)
tomatoes (fresh)
**

Not Recommended:
sugar (white or brown)
cottage cheese
bananas
cantaloupe/melons
currants/raisins
dates and figs
fruite juice
flour (white)
grapes
honey/maple syrup/jam/jellies
molasses
pasta (i.e. macaroni, spaghetti)
pineapple
soups (creamed)
tropical fruits
cakes/candies/ice cream
cereals (processed)
gravies
pop/sodas
pies/pastries
*

**
BULK FORMING FOODS (NEUTRAL)
Acceptable:
garlic
onions/chives
artichokes
asparagus
beets or beet tops
broccoli
brussel sprouts
butter
cabbage
carrots
cauliflower
celery
collard/mustard greens
corn
cucumbers
dandelion
egg plant
ednive
escarole
green beans/green peas
green/red peppers
kale
kohlrabi
lettuce
herb spices
okra
olive oil
parsley
parsnips
peppermint
radiccio
radishes
rutabagas/turnips
sorrel
spinach
**

If you know a bit about nutrition, this might strike you as strange. The doctor expects to flush about ten pounds of toxins from my system and I’m a very healthy, athletic person. If you regularly consume unhealthy food, there might be over twenty pounds of unnecessary toxins in your system. Following this diet will do about half the work, the other half can be done by visiting a herbalist and asking for something to clear you of toxins.

**
To reduce fat, follow the diet, but excersize as well. Here are some aerobic excersizes I’d recommend that can be done anywhere and with no supplies (these can even be done barefoot): **

skipping

running on the spot (try to bring your knees higher than your waist each time)

lunges (you’re lower than you are standing, one leg is bent at the knee, try to put your foot a little in front of your spine’s vertical line and the other is behind you, straight, your toes braced on the floor. Try to distribute your weight onto the two legs. It doesn’t have to be 50/50, but make sure one leg doesn’t support all your weight. Then, jump into the air and land in the same position, legs reversed. Will help your balance and coordination as well)

jumping jacks

When doing these excersizes, always remain on your toes. The benefit of this, besides strengthening your calves, is that you greatly reduce (eliminate entirely, if your calves are strong enough) the impact in what are predominately high-impact excercizes. Your heels should never strike the ground.

Do all of these. Don’t just do one excersize for fifteen minutes, because you probably won’t be able to. What’s important is not that you slog through an excersize, it’s that you keep your heart rate near 30 beats per every 10 seconds. The best thing to do is perform the excercize for as long as you can before you begin to get sloppy, then go onto the next one. By cycling like this, you will be able to work the entire twenty or thirty minutes without fatiguing a particular body part. Also, you can make note of the more difficult activities and return to them, strengthening the areas than need it.

These can be done anywhere, with no purchases needed. Don’t do them after you wake up or you’ll injure your back. If your calves are strong enough, you can do all of these absolutely silently and can watch television while you do them. This makes the time fly.

Muscle building exercizes that can be done anywhere:

I don’t know how well you do pushups. Skinny people are naturally better at the following exercizes than I am. When I’m at five percent body fat, I tip the scales at 200 pounds.

widegrip pushups: these are pushups with your arms considerably wider than shoulder width apart. Not so wide that you can’t do the exercize, but wide enough for you to feel it across you chest and biceps.

pushups: these are pushups shoulder width apart. This is a nice workout for all the muscle groups involved.

closegrip pushups: form a triangle on the floor with your thumbs and your index fingers. These will work your triceps.

dips: these can be done from a sitting position between two chairs or, if you’re strong enough, standing between two cupboards. Basically, the purpose of this is to raise and lower your body weight using your triceps. Your elbows have to be behind you to work the triceps. If they’re out to the side you’ll be working your pecs. If your back isn’t perpendicular to the floor you’ll be causing undue stress to your shoulder joints. When you’re fully lowered, your elbows should not be higher than your shoulders.

I don’t think I can give an adequate description of this because you might not be at all familiar with this exercize. Email me privately and I’ll send you urls for dip instructions

chinese pushups: these are if your shoulders are strong enough, otherwise you’ll break your head. Put yourself in a handstand position with your legs braced against the wall. Raise and lower yourself using your arms, leaning against the wall to stay vertical

jump squats: start in a squat position on the floor, back straight, legs shoulder width apart. Now jump as high into the air as you can and tuck your legs into your shoulders. Land gently back in the squat position. Repeat.

double ups: this is a skipping exercize that is a beautiful finisher after jump squats. Skip in your regular manner, just try to get the rope to pass under you twice in succession before you land. One is pretty easy. Five are tiring. Ten is impossible.

If you have access to a gym, then all the power to you. I suspect you don’t, so these are simple exercizes that can be done anywhere, you just need the will.

** Important Notes: **

-to lose weight, you need aerobic exersize. Try to keep your heartbeat at around 30bpm for every 10 secs. Make sure you’re not counting the same heartbeat twice, it’s tricky but possible.

-while aerobic exercize is the primary factor in burning fat, the amount of fat you burn is directly proportional to the amount of muscle you have. The more muscle you have, the more fat you burn.

-when doing the anaerobic (muscle-building) exercizes above, break them into ten sets of ten. I.e. pushups - do ten pushups ten times, with thirty second breaks in between. Ten pushups. Rest. Ten pushups. Rest. etc. etc. Record your progress each time. You will probably not be able to do ten sets of ten immediately for all the exercizes.

-try not to do anaerobic excersizes for more than forty-five minutes at a time. At this point your body releases a chemical that retards your muscle breakdown (which, in turn, retards your muscle growth. Bodybuilding is comparable to working with your immune system. When you lift weights, you are actually destroying muscle. Your body doesn’t like this and tries to prevent it by increasing the strength and size of the muscle. You have to do a little more work to destroy the muscle again. It rebuilds, you destroy. On and on until you’re a very strong or durable individual.) so exercize becomes inefficent.

-some exercizes are best used in conjunction with others. I.e. double ups won’t build much muscle unless the muscles are already torn down with jump squats. Dips are the best way to attack the triceps, but if you don’t have anything to brace yourself on then closegrip pushups are the next best thing. If you can do both, do dips then closegrips. If you can’t do dips, then just concentrate on closegrips.

-the ideal pushup (and benchpress) position is with your hands by your nipples, not shoulders. Up too high and they wear the shoulder socket. The downside is that they’re more difficult by your nipples, and even make your lats (in your back) work. It all depends on how much you want to work.

-always stretch the muscle group before you work it, whether aerobically or anaerobically. As well as preventing injuries, stretching before, during, and after helps promote muscular growth. The thirty second rest between sets can be spend stretching the muscle you’re using.

-do warm up sets. For each excersize, try to do a warmup set to get your muscles working. For pushups, rattle off ten or twenty pushups on your knees. For jump squats, just do about twenty ordinary squats. All the other exersizes I mentioned (dips, chinese pushups) will not need to be preceded by warmups because all the muscles targeted will have already been worked in the pushup sets. They will be warm.

-drink lots of water. Stack up on carbs before a workout and protein after, while staying within the boundaries of the diet. You can also stack up on protein when you wake up in the mornings, your body can handle it. Do not eat before you go to bed.

-do not overtrain your muscles. If you can’t hack twenty or thirty minutes of aerobic work per day, don’t push yourself. By not letting your muscles recover, you’re losing them. This is especially true for anaerobic exercizes. Give yourself at least one day to recover before you do the muscle-building exercizes again. I would recommend three days. When I’m lifting weights, I never attack the same muscle more than twice a week. Usually I give myself three or four days recovery time.

-I didn’t list any ab exercizes, mainly because my abs are the naturally strongest muscles in my body. I almost never exercise them and can rattle off three hundred twisting situps at any time. I can take shots from the biggest guys in the gym and not feel a thing. It’s just a natural advantage I have. They are, however, the post important muscles in the entire body. They stabalize your upper body and your lower body. Basically, do situps (as full as you can without straining your back) until failure. Rest for a minute, then work to failure again. Rest a minute, and work to failure again. Three sets should be plenty. These are simple endurance activities. If you really want to blast your abs for strength as well as endurance, let me know.

-in addition to situps, do hyperextensions. These correct your posture and secure your back. Lieon your stomach, hands behind your head. And contract your lower back. You should raise your head and your feet off the ground. Work these, three sets, until failure. ALSO A VERY IMPORTANT MUSCLE GROUP.

If you have any questions, feel free to email me. Nunavik_Shroud@hotmail.com

22

I suppose that is a donut dunk in decaffeinated coffee. :smiley:
Runners like to drink regular coffee for the caffeine. Studies have established that caffeine is an ergogenic drug.

**

What kind of doctor is that? Doesn’t sound like a medical doctor. There is no such thing as “unhealthy food.” There are unhealthy eating habits and unhealthy diets, but no unhealthy food. Your body naturally flushes toxins out. That’s what the kidneys and liver do, among other useful functions. I would stay away from herbalists. There are a lot of herbs out there that are potentially dangerous, but FDA is powerless to do anything since, due to DHEA, they cannot ban any supplement unless it has been established to be harmful, just contra to their power with drugs, where they don’t allow them unless established to be safe and beneficial.

23

No, there is unhealthy food. Eating a bucket of chicken and washing it down with a bag of chips is an example of eating unhealthy food. Call it an unhealthy eating habit if you want, it comes down to semantics at this point. I’d call it unhealthy food and, in fact, I did, as you noticed.

I won’t go into the issue of herbalists, I think it all depends on the skill of the herbalist. I have complete faith in my herbalist/iridologist after he fulfilled several seemingly impossible promises regarding my body. It wasn’t all done by him or by herbs, in fact it could be argued almost none of it was, but he was the one who sent me to all the right acupuncturists and chiropractors while my family doctors just shrugged and told me to quit martial arts.

It worked for me, don’t knock it outside of that context.

24

I think you’re right. I know it enhances performance, but I never drink it so it didn’t bother me at all that it was on the list. I still wouldn’t be able to consume the caffeine because I’m trying to shed certain chemicals from my body.

25

wow that last one turned out badly.

26

Chicken and chips are not unhealthy, per se, esp. chicken. It’s not a question of semantics. Eating a bucket of anything and “washing” it down with a bag of anything is an unhealthy eating habit.

27

Sometimes I surf a lot of hours, I figure if I surf for about 5 hours I must swim around 5 miles. Yet it doesn’t really make me lose weight. One reason is that your body adsorbs some of the ocean water & the other reason is that once you get out you are major hungry & so you eat. You do get nice shoulders though.

28

take up spinning or actual bike riding for 20 minutes at
25mph watch those lbs fall

the

((1/2) x K xV^2) X seconds applies here

ie double the speed are traveling = x4 the energy needed
thus the energy has to come from somewhere and it burns off fat easy

29

You’re the one taking this out of that context by recommending it to the OP.

No offense, and I’m not a nutritionist, but these diet recommendations sound kind of crazy. Acid forming food? Alkaline forming food? Liver, milk, shellfish and fruit juice are not recommended, while butter and olive oil are? Twenty pounds of toxins in your system? Where are they stored? What good are my liver and kidneys, then?

30

oh, crap! liver and kidneys are good for something! i had a feeling my friends were right when they told me to get a student loan rather than selling my organs on the black market.

31

Drink a little less beer, exercise a little more, you’ll lose a little fat. Do some abs exercise. As the fat goes away, your glorious abs will be revealed to an unsuspecting world.

32

Then you can wear a baby-t and Levis Low-Rise jeans, and listen to your navel sing!

33

Homonyms are a bitch,

'nuff said.

34

Yeah, you have a point.

There’s a difference between having something perform it’s duty and perform it’s duty with great efficiency. In some people it’s a subtle difference and in some people it’s a major difference.

I’m not an expert, but I am noticing a definite change. My veins are more apparent (body fat dropping), my skin and scalp are producing much less oil, my excrement has a much milder odour (kind of yellow, though).

I’m still hitting the gym and am still building muscle, so I’m not lacking in protein consumption.

I usually live a very healthy lifestyle, I wonder what changes an unhealthy person might experience. They would probably be much more dramatic than mine.

35

Sit ups/crunches

as many as you can before puking.

36

None of these effects are necessarily related to the amount of “toxins” in your body.

A change in percent body fat just means that your body is eating into its fat deposits.

Skin and scalp producing less oil? Maybe all that sweatin’ in the gym is flushing all the oil away. Maybe it’s a sign that puberty is finally over ;). I’m sure that chances in diet and exercise affect it. So what? Whence the toxins?

Drinking lots of water will dilute your urine. Spices and foods can dramatically affect its odor and color. These aren’t necessarily toxins, though.

If you’re seeing results, that’s great. Your exercise advice looks pretty sound to me. Your selection of what is good food and what is to be avoided looks mostly reasonable, except for a few odd ones, as I noted above. I’m not surprised you’re seeing results.
But the apparent theory behind your diet - “acid forming” and “alkaline forming” foods, and consulting a herbalist (whatever the heck that is) to flush up to twenty pounds of “toxins” out of your body looks a little crazy to me. I’m not a professional, but I like to think I’m pretty well informed on basic nutrition. You said you’re close to becoming a professional athlete. Have you gotten a second opinion on your nutrition needs? Perhaps from a professional nutritionist with experience in the needs of athletes?
Here is information on dietary guidelines from the US Department of Agriculture. Remember the Food Pyramid?

Here’s the Journal of the American Society for Nutritional Sciences, based at Stanford University.

Here’s some consumer advice from the FDA. Take note of the section on nutrition and weight loss.

And here is nutrition.gov, sort of a one-stop shop of nutrition information from the US Government.
There is so much nonsense and misinformation floating around about nutrition, it’s easy to see how people get confused. But the basics are simple.

  1. Humans are omnivores. We can eat anything.

  2. This gets us into trouble because too much of anything, blah, blah, blah. You can’t eat Big Macs for every meal, every day. That doesn’t mean that Big Macs are poisonous. It just means that your body does not need all that fat and salt, and it does need nutrients that are not found in Big Macs.

  3. Everyone needs to eat a balanced diet. This means a reasonable ratio of all food groups. The government’s Food Pyramid, as linked above, is a good guide.

  4. Not everyone’s food needs will necessarily be exactly the same. An athlete will probably need a different ratio and amount of foods than a sedentary person. But the basics still apply.

  5. If you take nutrition advice, make sure it is sound advice. There is so much quack nonsense around, the real thing is often drowned out. The last time I was at Barnes & Noble I saw three full shelves of nutrition books, each flogging a different “right” way to a healthy, sexy, immortal body. Many completely contradicted each other. Which one is right?

37

For a great targeted ab routine look up “legendary abs” on a search engine…the booklet explains how to do a series crunches, exercises,etc. in sequence to tire out the larger muscles on down to the underworked lower abs in about 5- 10 min.s a day…a really outstanding program that has no bull and keeps the routine to the point and simple.

38

All you have to do is tell me to piss off and I’ll quit bugging you man. I had no idea I was getting on your nerves.

39

Kamandi

You might be right. I know that if it wasn’t working, then I’d be critical. I don’t know if toxins are actually being flushed from my system, but I am undergoing rapid weightloss (with no observable muscular loss) and I was a very fit person to begin with.

I’m familiar with ketosis (I think that’s the name, I haven’t been familiar with it for a few years now) where you just convince your body (via your diet) that it has to draw it’s energy from your minute fat reserves. This is how bodybuilders get down to three percent body fat.

Now, since most of what I’m eating is carbs, if ketosis is happening here then it’s being triggered through a different method than calculatingly withholding carbs. I have no way of proving it’s toxins, I’m not even sure I’d have an interest in proving it’s toxins if I could, and I can’t prove it’s not toxins.

Since my skin isn’t secreting so much oils, I just feel cleaner and healthier all around. I’m not going to knock it, I feel great.

People should definitely try this great feeling, whether they believe in toxins or not.

40

Anal Scurvy

Ketosis is “an abnormal increase of ketone bodies in the blood as in diabetes mellitus” (dictionary.com). I don’t think that’s what you mean. But I get what you’re trying to say.

From the bulk of what you’ve written about your diet and exercise (some of the details are odd, but they don’t seem to be hurting you), it’s reasonable, from the standpoint of mainstream health and nutrition thinking, that you’d be reaching your fitness goals. Why introduce fringe theories like toxins and such? Why spend money on herbalists when you could have gotten the same results for free and with less mumbo-jumbo through a search of the conventional literature?

And now that you are getting results, what’s stopping you from accepting bad advice from your herbalist in the future? Perhaps you’re getting bad advice right now that’s slowing down your progress. Would you know bad advice if you saw it?

The trouble with “I don’t understand what the witch doctor did, but he cured me! You should try it.” is that anecdotes are not evidence. Heck, the web is full of anecdotes about alien abductions. Your herbalist may have helped you, or your results could be coming from something completely unrelated. Without sound scientific study, you can’t know. The result of sound scientific study of nutrition is the nutrition advice I linked to above. Get informed.

What, you can’t shower after you work out? :wink: