Austin Hanson

During the last few months I’ve come up with some “Pro Tips” that I think are the biggest factors in dropping fat.

Please note; however, that I have zero formal training in health, fitness or nutrition, do not claim to and all of my knowledge has come second hand via people and the internet. I am proof that the summation of these tips do work but I can’t guarantee the legitimacy of any single one. I will go out of my way to be as unbiased as possible throughout my post, hopefully giving you as much accurate information as possible and pointing out things that I am not certain about.

1. Cheat Day
   • This is the most critical to factor in weight loss and there’s quite a bit of science behind it. One of the major contributing factors to your metabolism and how much fat you burn is a hormone called Leptin. The more Leptin you have, the more “on” your metabolism is and therefore the more fat you’re burning all the time. Leptin is released by two mechanisms; the normal way is from your fat cells, signalling to your body that it should ramp up and metabolize fat. Leptin is also released when you eat – turning on the “burners” so to speak. When your at a constant caloric deficit or when you don’t have very much fat, Leptin levels will slowly fall, causing your metabolism to decrease and your body to burn less fat.

     Cheat day solves this by creating a huge influx of food that kicks your Leptin levels up and, presumably, at an elevated level for a period of time until dropping back down. Ferris’ cheat day makes the assumption that this period is around one week and I haven’t found anything so far to concur or refute that.

2. Blood Sugar and the Glycemic Index
   • This was originally labeled “Cinnamon” until I did some more research into blood sugar and insulin levels in the body. Cinnamon is proven to aid in lowering the glycemic index of foods which mitigates spikes in your blood sugar levels after eating. When your blood sugar levels rise too dramatically your body isn’t capable of using all of the “fuel” so it converts the excess to fat. Note: This is also why people say to “eat slower” or “chew your food more” – it really does help! By eating slower you’re slowing down the rate at which your blood sugar levels will rise.

     The glycemic index is a listing of foods and indexed based on how they affect blood sugar levels – with the base being glucose set at 100. Your goal should be to only eat foods with a index of 55 or lower and for flavor…or it’s reduction effects…, throw in some Cinnamon! Be careful though, you never want to exceed 1 tbsp of cinnamon a day (for the average sized person) – it has coumarin in it which is poisonous in large doses (google coumarin – breaks the Vitamin K recoup cycle).

3. Casein Protein
   • Dropping fat all relies on your body using fat as it’s primary energy source and not muscle. Why would your body use muscle when it has fat? Because it’s stupid. After not eating for a certain period of time, typically 3-4 hours, your body goes into a catabolic state where it begins metabolizing muscle cells for energy instead of fat cells. In all actuality, this allows your organs and brain to perform 25% more efficiently but is a really bad thing (google ketosis – acidic blood, coma, death).

     We never want our body to drop into catabolic mode so we always want to eat within that 3-4 hour period. That’s all well and fine until you realize that also means getting up in the middle of the night to refuel your body… Casein Protein is the solution – it’s a slow burning protein that typically stays in your stomach for 6-7 hours. This is, apparently, a result of mixing with the acid in your stomach and “clotting” somewhat. So, a scoop of Casein before bed and you’re golden until morning.

4. Cut Carbohydrates mid-way through your day
   • Your body does need a certain amount of carbohydrates per day: usually a healthy mix is 40% protein/40% carbs/20% fat. So we don’t want to cut carbs completely out of our diet but timing your carb intake will aid in controlling how your body uses them.

     Your liver metabolizes carbohydrates, burning up a portion, converting some to miscellaneous substances and the rest are stored as fat. Protein on the other hand has to go through a number of other processing steps before your body can store it as fat. It gets broken down and moved around the body finally ending up as amino acids that are used for muscle – with the excess amino acids going to fat. The trick here is giving your body the easy fuel in the morning, getting in some high-intensity cardio to ramp up your metabolism, and finally cutting carbs the rest of the day so your body has to focus on metabolizing and processing protein instead. Finally, when you go to sleep, your body only has protein to work with and has to work harder to create fat than it would with carbs.

There you have it, my top 4 Fitness Pro Tips which I’ve amassed over a very short 4 month period. As I stated above, none of this comes from any formal education and if anything is wrong let me know and I will fix it. My goal is to help people lose weight, become healthier and live longer – not to make money.

This post is definitely off the beaten path from my usual content but I wanted to answer @MotorHeadz and this seemed the easiest place to do it.

@MotorHeadz:

@AustinHanson have you put the principles in the4 hour body to work personally? What has been the most effective if so?

4 Hour Body

First, yeah, I adopted the 4 Hour Body principles this past January by:

• Maintaining a slow-carb diet*
• Lifting according to Occam’s Principle
• Cardio 6-7 days/week

* My only alteration to the slow-carb diet has been the allowance of some fast-food meals but with slow-carb principles in mind. These include Subways Oven Roasted Chicken Breast (no cheese, not toasted, light mayo), Q’Doba’s Ancho Chili BBQ (chicken, no cheese, no sour cream, no quac and the amount of rice depends on the time of day, read further).

I started logging my weight and stomach (navel) diameter to keep tabs things and saw really good results (log/graph coming shortly). My lifting follows Ferris’ guide almost to a T, even doing the cat vomiting exercise at our gym on campus – which does usually get a few stares… I did omit kettlebells from my workout as our gym didn’t have them but noticed someone doing them with the normal round weights so added them to my regime a week ago (3 x 25 per day at 35lb).

4HB + Insanity

Two months later I added Insanity into the mix…really just for kicks. I figured the 4HB was easy enough and felt I needed more – so I started that on March 28th while maintaining all 4HB practices. At that time, I was half-heartedly training for a marathon and was up to running halves but with the inclusion of Insanity I had to cut this back to only 1-4 miles a day or I didn’t have enough energy to put my all into the workouts.

What follows is my Weight/%BF log since January:

Next, I’ll include a graph of my %BF which makes it pretty obvious where Insanity started. Keep in mind though that all progress before that was still just the simplicity of 4HB. The huge perturbance in the middle was a Vegas trip where I really went crazy with Cheat Day – all day buffet… :’).

Addendum

I take a few supplements aside from AGG (never did get around to buying Policasinol for the P in PAGG).

• Jack3d on lifting days (30 minutes prior – though some times I will take a hit in the morning also since I lift mid-afternoon)
• iSatori LX-7 Fatburners (3 pills, 30 minutes prior – started these after the Vegas trip)
• Daily Vitamin
• Calcium + Vitamin D (2 pills – morning/night)
• Fish Oil (2 pills – morning/night)
• Glucosamine (2 pills – morning/night)

If there’s one thing I fail at, it’s blog consistency.

It has been some time since my last post – more so for me than for you. Eight months have flown by and I don’t remember most of them but this is one time I won’t complain about it. I’ve done a lot in these eight months, gone places I hadn’t planned on, done things I hope I never forget and some that I wish I could. I remember saying that 2009 was the worst year ever and 2010 was going to be much better. On average, I think 2010 was better than 2009 – I got into Android development, co-founded a start-up company and lived like a king in San Francisco for two weeks. I also crushed my own heart. C’est la vie.

I’m really looking forward to finishing up school and moving on with my life.

Hey, lots of people have been asking for this, so here you go. I make no promises to it’s current state, if it still works, etc. To be honest, I don’t think it will but I might take some time tonight to look into it and fix it if I can find the time.

If I remember right, you’ll install and then want to do an update (which might be broken too :S).

Growlbook Beta v1.1

Wow, what a year.

It’s been a while since my last post and I apologize for that. When school gets a rolling things just keep piling on my to-do list and posting on my blog gets moved to the back burner. For those of you who’ve been using Growlbook, that was another thing that got pushed to the side and I don’t think I’ll be working on it any more. I only made it because I wanted facebook notifications without having the page open but my purchase of the Motorola Droid solved that problem. If you’re interested in picking up development let me know, I’ll ship you the source.

I think that covers “old business”, on to the new stuff.

I got a Droid a while ago and wow – what a great investment. So far, that little investment has netted me around $2500 – who’d have known mobile applications were so…flourishing. If you don’t know, I developed Droidbox, ERS (Event Ringtone Syncer), Texts From Last Night (TFLN) and a few others. I’ve a few other ideas I’m throwing around, including a facebook applications since I’ve yet to find something that does it well. I’ve also gotten involved with a company as the sole developer of something that might very well be huge – I hope it is anyway. That project will most likely steal much if not all of my free time this summer but will be well worth it.

With Droidbox has come a slew of unexpected fortunes, including a number of tech sector contacts in some really large companies that might prove really useful later on in life. I’m a bit disappointed that I was unable to stir interest in Dropbox themselves, either as a buyer of Droidbox or as a possible employer. In fact, I think a lot less of them with their complete lack of response of which I speculate is a result of my degree coming from South Dakota State University and not an “upper tier” university as they request on their website. Good for them I guess, they appear to have done just fine in getting an android developer who has made a subpar duplicate of my Dropbox client. Yeah, I’m bitter but I’ll survive – I’m in a great position with Sencore and don’t think anything with Dropbox would have changed.

My android escapades also gave me the opportunity to learn a ton about advertising. I made a Redbox application that listed promotional codes for free movies and added ad’s (served by AdMob) and saw instant revenue. Things have quieted down now, since Redbox caught on and changed how their codes worked (sorry ) and now the application is useless (despite still netting me ~$70 a month), but the experience has given me a new look on applications and how to monetize them.

I think I’ve done enough rambling. I’m pumped for this summer because I’m at a completely difference place then I was at last year. I feel like I’ve learned so much and have made so much progress in “life” in the past 9 months and am excited to see where things will go.

Brief post before I go to sleep. I just pushed out 1.1.2.1, a quick update for 1.1.2 which was also just pushed. Chance are you didn’t see 1.1.2, which is fine, 1.1.2.1 is what you want anyway. Changelog to come tomorrow after I’ve slept – or check the Facebook page.

Why am I releasing an alpha release? Because it supports auto-updating and includes support for messages – two options that I want to have open to me tomorrow when I get to work heh.

Enjoy.

Download Growlbook v1.1.1.0 (Installer) or Growlbook v1.1.1.0 (zipped)

1. If you don’t have Growl For Windows, download and install it.
2. Download the latest release, currently found here: Growlbook Beta v1.1.
   1. Extract the files contained in Growlbook-Beta-v1.1.zip to a directory of your choice.
      1. If using Windows XP or greater, you should be able to just double click on the file.
      2. If not, download and install an extraction program such as 7-Zip, Power Archiver, WinZip, etc.
3. Double click on Growlbook.exe in the directory you extracted the files.

Notes:
The only issue you might have is if you don’t have the latest .NET Framework (3.5) which you can download from here: .NET Framework 3.5 or via Windows Updates.

Screenshots:

I’ll throw some screenshots up tomorrow, for now, here is the link. It’s quite nice.

Current known issues:

• Logging out will sometimes disallow logging back in. Fix: Close Growlbook and open it back up.
• Enter doesn’t initiate the login process.
• Font issues.

Dependencies:

• Growl (Mac) or Growl For Windows (PC)
• .NET Framework 3.5

Growlbook Beta v1.1

Here’s a quick sneak peak of v1.1 – which is destined to be more stable, more jampacked with features and much more refined.