“Goals are dreams with deadlines.”
Diana Scharf Hunt

Having bought Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle it downloaded without any problem and I set about reading it. The introduction was fine, reinforcing what I was expecting from the blurb on the web site.

Chapter 1 was Goal Setting. I was interested in what it said. It wasn't the sort of thing I would normally go in for, but I could see the logic of it. Then at the end of the chapter I was instructed to stop reading and to write my goals before I read any further.

Now this left me feeling uneasy. Much of my previous experience of goal setting had been whilst working for The Corporation. We had to write our annual goals in January, at a point where we knew next to nothing about what projects we were going to be working on during the course of the year. And in addition your goals had to be full of inter-personal development and management 'fad-of-the-month' stuff. At the end of the year some darn-fool manager would appraise you against these goals and grade you down because you hadn't done enough for diversity or some such thing. The whole process was a complete farce.

Then when I set up my own business I joined up with a networking group. There were a couple of members there who were dead keen on goal setting, so for a couple of months I tried setting some monthly goals for my business. It was a complete waste of time. The nature of my work is very much events driven, so I never ended up doing what I thought I might be doing.

So that left me in a quandry. I really wanted to carry on reading the book. And I really wanted to get the most out of the book. But I really didn't want to have to write those goals!

Tune in next time to see how I resolved this.

Last time we left our hero hanging by his fingernails on the precipice of a goal setting exercise. Well, in true comic book fashion, with one might leap he was free.

I gave the matter some thought. The reason that I hated the goal setting process at The Corporation was that their process was crap and nonsensical. My fat reduction goals would be real-world and meaningful. The reason that my own business goals didn't work was that I was being driven by external forces out of my control. My fat reduction goals would be based on things that were under my control. Best of all, the only person appraising myself against these goals would be me. I'm normally harsh but fair when it comes to self-appraisal!

So I resolved to write these goals. As it turned out, Tom's book made this really easy. He gives clear guidance on the types of goals that you should set yourself and how these should be written. He also gives lots of examples. So, here are my goals:

• I eat five balanced nutritious meals per day.
• I avoid all foods on the bad list except, occasionally, white bread and bacon.
• I exercise daily (except for Sundays), with cardio and weight training on alternate days and I record my results.
• Every week I weigh myself and check body fat and I record these figures.
• I am on track towards reducing my body fat by 3% by December 15th 2006.
• My improved nutrition and exercise regimes are giving me considerable improvements in motivation and energy.
• By April 2007 I have lost my spare tyre and am needing to replace all my trousers.
• By June 2007 I have a body which I am proud to display on the beach. It is the envy of most 40+ men.
• I am progressing well towards my long term goal of 12% body fat.

You'll notice that these goals are written in the present tense. There's a really good reason for that, but its beyond the scope of this blog to tell you why. It's all in the book.

"If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilisation."
Gerald Weinberg

Speaking as a programmer myself I just love that quote.

Anyway, with my goals written I was able to set about reading the rest of Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle. Essentially it has four cornerstones - Goal Setting, Nutrition, Cardio and Weight Training. Nutrition gets the lion's share of the content, but then there's a lot to say about that subject.

The key thing is that these four elements work in tandem to produce a result that's greater than the sum of their parts. And that is the answer to the chap on the radio in this post who claimed that cardio caused muscle wastage. Well it might, if done in isolation. But if done as part of a programme that also includes good nutritional practices and weight training then it won't.

Having four cornerstones seems comforting somehow. The concept of four walled constructions seems to have served the building industry pretty well, notwithstanding the Pentagon and the London Gherkin. Mind you if modern day house building techniques get any flimsier than at some point they're going to have to resort to a honeycomb structure. That way they'll get the benefits of low weight combined with high strength and rigidity and so be able to stand up to an onslaught of woodpeckers.

"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".

“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've reached a significant milestone today, three months into the regime, so it's time for a progress report and a review of my goals.

Goal: I eat five balanced nutritious meals per day.
Result: I've kept to that pretty well, there's only been a few days where I've had only four meals.

Goal: I avoid all foods on the bad list except, occasionally, white bread and bacon.
Result: My diet is now a lot healthier than it was and in particular my sugar intake much less than it used to be. I eat more saturated fat than the regime recommends. I will get my cholesterol checked after Christmas and if that's not showing any issues then I'm not going to worry about it.

Goal: I exercise daily (except for Sundays), with cardio and weight training on alternate days and I record my results.
Result: I haven't missed a day. I'm up to 29 minutes high intensity cardio on the rowing machine and my weight training is showing good progression through the reps and weights.

Goal: Every week I weigh myself and check body fat and I record these figures.
Result: Achieved.

Goal: I am on track towards reducing my body fat by 3% by December 15th 2006.
Result: I have achieved a 3.7% reduction.

Goal: My improved nutrition and exercise regimes are giving me considerable improvements in motivation and energy.
Result: I certainly noticed this in the early days. Now I think I take it for granted.

Goal: By April 2007 I have lost my spare tyre and am needing to replace all my trousers.
Result: My trousers have certainly got looser. Luckily they've all got belts, so they're still usable at the moment.

Goal: By June 2007 I have a body which I am proud to display on the beach. It is the envy of most 40+ men.
Result: I'm a lot happier with my body shape than I was at the start of the program.

Goal: I am progressing well towards my long term goal of 12% body fat.
Result: I think from now on it's going to be a case of slow but steady process. My revised goal is to lose 1% body fat every three months over the course of 2007, arriving at my new target figure of 11%.

Well that’s Christmas out of the way and now we turn our attention to the New Year. No doubt many of you will be pondering New Year resolutions and these will include such things as “lose some weight”, “improve my diet” and “get to the gym regularly”.

Now I don’t want to discourage you from this, but let’s have a quick show of hands. How many of you have ever made a new year’s resolution that was still intact by the end of January? Hmmm, not too many of you!

The problem is that January is a really depressing month for all sorts of reasons. If you’re in the northern hemisphere and not in the Tropics then the weather is bad and the days are short. You’ve probably overspent at Christmas, the bills start rolling in and the January pay-day seems an awful long way away. In these circumstances it’s hard to keep up the good intentions.

I’m going to make this really easy for you. The only resolution that you have to make is to buy yourself a copy of Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle and to commit to reading it over the course of the month. Then, assuming you think it makes sense you can write your goals and commit to a start date, perhaps around mid-February when winter will be easing off a little. You’ll find some techniques in the book that make these goals a bit more “stickable” than your typical new year’s resolution.

Good luck!