I was a big fan of the Dilbert cartoons when I was working for The Corporation. Even now they serve as a reminder of how great it is not to be working there any more, brilliantly satirising all the nonsense that goes on in large organisations.

There's one cartoon which I would have liked to have shown here, but that's probably not a good idea as regards copyright. So, I'll describe it instead. Dilbert's company have decreed that, as a cost-saving measure, coffee and donuts are only to be served at meetings for managers at above. Come the next staff meeting a large plate of donuts is piled up in front of Dilbert's pointy-haired boss. "Hey guys", says the boss, "it's tough on me too, I'm really not sure if I can manage to eat all these donuts!".

Anyway, many weight loss programs include the advice to eat frequent small meals. Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle also strongly emphasises this. In addition the book provides strong scientifically-based reasons why you should do this.

Now my first reaction to this was that I wouldn't be able to do it. But then I thought why not? I work from home, I'm the master of my own time, so I really don't have any excuses. The book provides helpful advice so that anyone, with a bit of determination and forethought, would be able to do it.

So, I now eat five meals a day, spaced out at roughly three hourly intervals between 7:00am and 7:00pm. The first four meals are small, the fifth is a regular sized evening meal. Now that's falling short of the ideal set out in the book, but the book also emphasises flexibilility. If this regime gets me to where I want to be then that's fine. If not then I can always change it.

The book also provides clear guidelines about what constitutes a meal. Needless to say, a plate of doughnuts doesn't qualify. Following these guidelines, I'm probably eating more real food than I've ever eaten in my life. What has gone is the junk.

"How long should a man's legs be? Long enough to touch the ground."
J. D. Salinger

If you've seen my goals then you'll notice there's no mention at all of any target for weight reduction. There's a really good reason for this, so excuse me if I shout a little:

HOW MUCH YOU WEIGH IS COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT!

Now obviously people's weight is going to vary according to their height, but surely we can factor this out by using Body Mass Index or some such. Well you can but it's still completely misleading. You can take two people, 5' 10" tall, both 12st 7lbs. One could be 12% body fat and in great shape, the other could be 30% body fat and a complete mess. But their BMI would both be the same.

No, what matters is how much fat you're carrying around with you. And 'carrying around' is the crucial phrase because that fat is nothing more than a long-term energy store. Unless you find yourself in a situation where you are deprived for food for any length of time then you're not going to need that energy store.

Taking our examples above, Mr 12% has 21lbs of fat in his body, whilst Mr 30% has 52lbs. That's over 30lbs extra that Mr 30% is lugging around all day, for no good reason. Worse than that, he's got a lot less muscle than Mr 12% to help him carry it. Strap 15 bags of sugar around your person and see how that feels. No wonder he's tired all the time!

And, in case you think these numbers are fanciful the average body fat percentage for a 50-year old man is about 27%. 12% is comfortably achievable and that's where I'm heading.

Now, Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle is still going to require you to have a weekly weigh-in, so you can check how your lean body mass is doing. But really the J D Salinger answer to how much you should weigh is "enough to stop you floating off into outer space".

"Let me take you on a journey beneath the skin,
Let me take you on a journey under the skin,
And we will look together for The Pan Within"
The Waterboys, The Pan Within

What a great track that is, highlight of their live set. Pan is the Greek god of shepherds and flocks and also a god of fertility and carnal desire. I'm not sure what that combination of responsibilities tells us about the practices of the Ancient Greeks. But anyway, the key point is that we're not talking about the thing that you boil your spuds in!

In the last post I explained why fat loss rather than weight loss should be the main goal. But that of course raises the question, how do you know how much fat you have lost? Well to do this you have to be able to measure your body fat percentage.

Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle gives the low-down on a number of techniques that can be used for this. The most accurate is dissection, but I wouldn't recommend this (unless, of course, you are looking to have that final fat percentage figure inscribed on your gravestone).

Amongst these methods there is one which emerges as the favourite in terms of being the best compromise between practicality and accuracy. The clue is in the lyric above. If you and Mike Scott of The Waterboys were to shrink yourselves down to the microscopic scale and actually undertake a journey under the skin then what you would find would not be The Pan Within but rather a layer of subcutaneous fat. I suppose Mike thought that wouldn't make such an appealing lyric.

The majority of your body's fat is held in these subcutaneous deposits and by measuring a pinch of skin at certain strategic points on the body and applying a mathematical formula you can get a reasonable estimate of your body's fat composition. These are known as skinfold tests and are best done by an experienced practitioner. However, as my next post will explain, you can have a reasonable stab at this in the privacy of your own home.

"There is only one person who can measure your success. That person is you."
David McCullough

Last time I spoke of fat measuring techniques, skinfold tests and how these are best done by an experienced practitioner. However, on a program such as Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle, it's important to be able to get regular assessments of your body fat in order to measure your progress.

Accu-Measure have a range of skinfold calipers which are designed for do-it-yourself body fat measurement. I've got their manual product, the 3000 model, but they also have a digital product. With the 3000 you take a single site measurement at the suprailiac skinfold, just above the point of the hip bone. You then read off a chart to find your body fat percentage. The 3000 has an arm which clicks into place once the right amount of pressure is applied to the skinfold and also has a sliding scale pointer which holds the result after the pressure is released.

This sounds great but in practice it's not that easy to get consistent results. For one thing you need to take the measurement in the exact same spot every time and just being out by 1/2 inch can make quite a difference. Another issue is the 3000 mechanism itself. The friction between the caliper and the sliding scale pointer tends to make the caliper move in a series of jumps rather than in a smooth continuous fashion. This in turn makes the click rather hard to discern.

To try and overcome these problems I use the following process. By taking a reference point from the tip of the hip bone I try as far as possible to always pinch in the same place. On the caliper I don't bother with the sliding scale pointer, leaving this at zero. Instead, when I detect that the device has clicked in I just hold the calipers then look down to take the reading. Then I subtract 6.5 from this, to compensate for the scale pointer not being there. Finally I take a series of readings and take the average.

We are all creatures of habit and no more so than when it comes to our food consumption. For example, if you tend to relax in front of the TV at night with sweets, crisps, chocolates or ice cream, then ask yourself why you do that? Mostly it's just a habit that you've fallen into.

Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle makes two important points about habits. I'm going to repeat them here. I hope that won't be an issue as these ideas appear to be common currency rather than proprietory to the book:

1. It takes about 21 days to make a habit and the same time to break one.
2. Old, bad habits are much more easily broken if replaced by good, new ones.

The book devotes a substantial part of its content to describing the new nutritional habits that you should adopt and the reasoning behind them

Now the 21 days thing is interesting as by last Saturday I was exactly three weeks into the program. We had been invited to the wedding of one of my wife-to-be's work colleagues. It was a lunchtime affair with a buffet reception straight afterwards. The buffet was an assemblage of sandwiches, rolls, drumsticks, vol-au-vents etc. All very nice and I picked myself out a portion of the healthier options.

Then they cleared away one table and laid out the desserts - all the usual suspects - gateaux, pavlovas, cheescake and the like. Now my normal mode of behaviour in these circumstances would be to dash for the head of the queue, agonise over what to have, then plump for whatever had the highest chocolate content. On this occasion I didn't. I could claim that I employed massive willpower to overcome the temptation, but really it wasn't like that. I just wasn't even tempted.

So, the good news is that compared to, say, stopping smoking, breaking bad eating habits is really easy. Junk food isn't physically addictive and new eating habits easily displace the old ones. Just give it three weeks and you'll be well on your way.

Here's a story from my very-soon-wife-to-be's workplace. Some workmen moved a vending machine, but omitted to bolt it to the floor in its new location. The vending machine servicing man came to service the machine, opened the door and the machine fell on top of him. He lived to tell the tale. He was amply proportioned and it's quite possible that his fat layers helped protect his internal organs from terminal damage.

So, one good reason not to get lean. Here are some others:
1. At times of famine fat people have more chance of surviving, drawing on all those stored reserves.
2. Body fat is a good insulator, so keeps you warm in winter.
3. Body fat is less dense than other tissue and so it helps keep you bouyant in water.

Now, given the undeniable progress of global warming it's possible that we could be faced with food shortages, disruption of energy supplies and flooding. If that's the case then keeping a goodly layer of fat might be a wise move. Personally, I'm taking the view that well-stocked supermarkets and functioning central heating will continue to be a feature of my life for many years yet. And I live on a hill, so I'm not expecting to find water lapping around my feet any time soon.

Mind you, if a vending machine ever falls on me them I'm probably knackered.

Boston, Massachusetts? No, this post is about Boston, Lincolnshire. Yesterday's Sunday Times ran an article reporting that this town has the highest obesity rates in England, 31% against a national average of 21%. The 'mass' in my title refers to the combined weight of its inhabitants.

According to the paper, the cause is that an influx of migrant workers are now doing the heavy agricultural work which was the mainstay of employment in the area. The local population are now employed in more sedentary jobs, but are still eating as much as in the days when their work was more physically demanding. It seems a local delicacy is "chine", a shoulder cut of pork, partly boned, filled with parsely, sold cooked and eaten cold. Good grief, that must be using the word 'delicacy' in some manner that I'm not familiar with.

So, in the tones of the old Harry Enfield character I say:
"OI!, ... BOSTON!, ... NO!!!!"

Really, Boston, this is nothing to be proud of. However, help is at hand. By my reckoning if just 1200 of its populace could get themselves down from obese to just overweight then that would be enough to get this town off the top spot. It could then resume being famous for the Boston Stump, the biggest parish church in England rather than being infamous for having the fattest bods in England. So, come on residents of Boston, sign up for Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle today.

I note that this is reported as the most obese population in England, not the UK. I'd guess that there's somewhere in Scotland, home of the deep-fried confectionary, that's even worse than this. When I find out who you are then I'm going to be on your case too!

“Real wealth is ideas plus energy.”
Richard Buckminster Fuller

If you seen my goals then you will have seen the one that says "My improved nutrition and exercise regimes are giving me considerable improvements in motivation and energy." I suppose this is more of an affirmation than a goal, but nonetheless it's happening and it's real. I get up at 6:15 each day and I'm engaged in something constructive until 9:00 in the evening. This is great for getting stuff done.

I think there are two aspects to the Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle programme that bring this about. Firstly, your new exercise and nutrition habits increase your base metabolic rate. If you are generating more energy then you can do more work, more physically and mentally. Secondly, the nutritional practices mean that the energy burns at a constant rate and you don't get a succession of highs and lows over the course of the day.

Now, Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle is primarily targetted at those people who are interested in losing some weight. Goodness know there are plenty of people like that as a target audience. However, I think this programme could equally well be targetted at anyone who doesn't have the energy that they would like.

"Tired all the time" (TATT) is a modern day ailment which seems to affect a lot of people and which has a wide variety of physical and psychological causes. I'm not claiming that this programme is a cure for that syndrome, but I suspect that it could probably help in many cases. And similarly for anyone else who just has more days when they are 'flat' rather than 'buzzing' then I would say that this programme is definitely worth a try.

I'm now five weeks into the programme, so I think it's time for a progress report. As of today I have lost 5.3lbs of fat and gained 0.3lbs of lean body mass. That's a great result and it's an early sign that this process really does work. The important thing is it's fat that is being lost. With conventional diets you lose the pounds, but a substantial part of that will come from a reduction in lean body mass, in other words muscle wastage and water elimination.

The only slight caveat is that the use of the skinfold calipers takes a bit of practice and it's possible that my initial readings were a bit overstated. But whatever, things are definitely heading in the right direction.

There's some visual improvement as well, my stomach doesn't seem to be quite as protuberant as it was. Interestingly, I just put the word 'protuberant' into the Google Toolbar in order to check the spelling and the first search term suggestion it came up with was 'protuberant abdomen'. Those two words obviously go together quite strongly.

In this post I talked about the Accumeasure calipers and the process I was using to try and get consistent results. Well, I still wasn't completely happy in that regard so I've now also acquired some Slimguide calipers.

These are a rather more substantial affair and they use a spring to apply the correct amount of pressure to the skinfold. Rather than the single suprailiac test site used with the Accumeasure, the booklet supplied with the Slimguide describes the four site Durnin and Womersly method. For this method you need an accomplice to take the readings.

So, instead I am using the Jackson and Pollock three site method. The sites can be seen here. The abdomen and thigh readings are easy to do yourself, whilst the chest reading can be done using a mirror. The readings then get applied to a formula, along with your age and out pops your body fat percentage. There is also a Jackson and Pollock three site method for women, but one of these sites is at the back of the arm, so you would need some help for that.

Comparing the results between the two methods I was getting a discrepancy of about 1.5%. I then found a post on the Burn the Fat forum indicating that there was an error for my age range in the extended version of the Accumeasure table that I was using. This error was overstating body fat percentages by about 1.1%. So, as of now I am getting 15.4% body fat from the J-P method and 15.9% from the suprailiac test.

For now, I'm still using the suprailiac test as the main method of tracking, but I might switch over at some point. I've also changed by long term goal to 11% body fat, as I'm sure this is achievable on this new basis.

“Exercise: you don't have time not to”
Anon

Well, perhaps the word gym conjures up an image a bit more grand than the reality in this case. In our back garden we have a wooden built structure which we refer to as 'the office'. The previous occupant built it for that purpose, but I've never used it as such despite the fact that I work from home.

Over the years we have used it for storage of my band gear (I play in a barn dance band), my windsurfing gear (which I haven't used in four years), garden furniture and general junk. I've now cleared out just enough space to accomodate my rowing machine, my partner's son's weight bench and weights and my newly acquired lat pulldown machine. I'll be blogging further about these bits of kit in the days to come. At some point I also want to add a hyperextension bench.

When I say 'just enough space', well it really is extremely tight. For example, I have to shift the weight bench out of the way to do a standing exercise such as a barbell curl. But for all that I'm really happy with it. It's a lot cheaper than a gym membership and I also save on all the travelling time. I can have the radio on the station of my choice, I don't have to queue for the next bit of equipment and I can grunt and groan on that final, blood-vessel bursting rep without disturbing anyone other than a few sparrows.

The word 'aerobics' came about when the gym instructors got together and said: If we're going to charge $10 an hour, we can't call it 'Jumping Up and Down'.
Rita Rudnor

Cardiovascular exercise, or cardio for short is an indispensible part of the Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle program. It's any form of exercise that you can do for a decent stretch of time without getting out of breath. It's aerobic exercise, meaning that you burn fat in the presence of oxygen as part of the process. Unfortunately the word 'aerobics' conjures images of women in leotards prancing around to pop music, so cardio is the preferred term.

Cardio tends to be done in one of two modes, steady-state or interval training. In the steady-state mode you work at a more or less constant intensity, with a view to getting your heart rate into a target zone and keeping it there. With interval training you intersperse periods of high intensity where you push really hard with periods of low intensity where you recover. The book has a lot of information about this and also discusses the pros and cons of the various ways in which you can do cardio, e.g. jogging, cycling, etc.

My chosen form of punishment is the rowing machine. As of this week I'm doing 21 minutes and each week I add another minute with a view to getting to 30 minutes eventually. I work in a heart rate zone of 135 to 142 beats per minute, which is about 80% of the maximum heart rate for my age. That's getting on towards the anaerobic threshold, the limit to which you can keep up this type of exercise without getting out of breath.

Here's the contraption on which I get my cardio done.

It's a Waterrower, purchased in 2000. Since then it's been used sporadically, a few months on, then rather more months off. It's now a key part of my armoury in the battle against body fat with Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle.

According to their sales blurb 'The WaterRower is available in a range of models specifically styled to compliment all and any environment'. Well for most of that time it has lived in our bedroom and I'm not sure that my wife-to-be-in-twelve-days-time would entirely agree with the complimenting the environment bit. Anyway, now it's been moved to the home gym.

The device uses water resistance with a paddle in doughnut shaped container (jam doughnut, not ring doughnut). That's meant to make the experience as much like rowing as possible. I've never been a rower so I can't comment on that, but I do know that it's a nice easy machine to use and that it's virtually maintenance free.

My model is the old style which has a fixed foot rest, whilst the more recent ones have a movable affair. The fixed footrest works fine for me, but the only issue was that my trainers were starting to create grooves in the wood and they would catch on these. I fixed that by getting a piece of thick perspex made up and screwing this on top of the wooden plate.

The device stands on end when not in use and doesn't take up too much space. Once that's done it looks a bit like a French Revolution Guillotine. If we ever have a revolution then you can send all the aristocracy round to my place. I won't be able to execute them, but I should be able to give them a nasty bump on the head.