My body is not a metabolic prodigy. I was not athletic as a kid. I was brought up in a household where delicious food was  served daily. I always had a big appetite. My family were not into sports.  I always gained weight easily. And I always refused to take short cuts. Still, my desire was to be lean and muscular not only for a show or two but for all days of the year, year after year. So I started to condition my metabolism by never giving my body a chance to get fat. I forced myself from detesting exercise to learn to love it. I stopped eating foods that apparently made me stay somewhat lean but not cut. I took all these measurements to reach my goals, to go against genetics and upbringing.

I realized early about the importance of food. When I was 8 years old I knew this big belly fat man. He always brought me candy and he drank coke every day and then fell asleep. I saw the connection. I did not want to get fat. So I stopped eating candy.

A few years later I tried to take control of my teen life and stopped eating. I thought I’d get a sixpack that way and sure I did, but little did I know about nutrition and exercise… I was right in one way: to get shredded you cannot eat for energy, you need to eat to survive more. And that I did for a few years.

After that came bodybuilding. Oh, one was supposed to eat? Wow, that was something new. A caloric level of 1000 a day was perceived as a feast for my famined body, I grew like weed. And I got strong fast because I loved lifting heavy and I was not at the gym to check out guys. I was not interested in guys, I was interested in building my body.

I often get the question “how do you manage to train so hard yet you don’t eat to support the training?”. If I were to eat to support my performance I would not be as lean. As a woman it’s harder to stay lean, guys can usually cut a bit of carbs and get cut with abs, striations etc, but for us women we need to deprive ourselves pretty good and still we just look healthily lean right? From my years of not eating I learned that feeling hungry is not dangerous. it’s a natural normal sensation…. You get used to it and you find other energy sources to dig in to. Like motivational sources, humor, friends, music, art, movies, books, sounds, habits, perceptions. You make these things work for you instead of turning to the instant gratification of delicious food and treats.

Now I forgot what I was talking about, my mind drifted away. But to cut to the chase: we all choose our paths, I don’t complain because I “have to do this and that” and “it’s unfair” or “nobody understands what I’m going through” etc. I don’t compare myself to the drug-taking, genetic freaks with nothing to do than to train and eat. I compare myself to people in starving countries. THEY are the ones to talk about “it’s unfair, I have to do this and that, nobody understands what I’m going through”. For me, well, I consider it being under my dignity to eat more than I need when I know there are millions who don’t even get some food every day. I feel ashamed for our obesity and laziness when I see and read what’s going on in other countries. Shame on us then nagging about being hungry. LOOK AT US, we are MUSCULAR, we are LEAN, we are healthy, we should just shut our mouths up and dig deeper and realize we are overfed and our muscled bodies are proof of it!

Yesterday I was unmotivated and down. If I had been born into the American Culture and its tendency to medicate the people instead of just letting people deal with what is called life, which means you will feel great one day and horrible the next,  I would have went to see a doctor to get some antidepressants. After breakfast I couldn’t crawl out of the couch. I sat there. One hour. I tried to cheer myself up with all the old truths about being fit, being healthy, being alive, having a home, having some friends, but nah it just did not work. I knew it would be better another day.

So, when I am in this mood, the last thing I want to be is friendly. I try to sneak around invisibly, but of course people pick it up and let me have it. “Hey, why you not smiling, what’s wrong, you not happy?” says someone who I don’t know very well, and it makes me pissed. I’d never tell someone out of the blue to cheer up, ask personal questions and be a pain in the butt. I would never ask for that attention, it is none of my business and frankly nobody owes me a smile. if people do not want to smile at me, FINE, I don’t take it personally. I am not the center of attention in this world.

How come if you defend yourself you have issues? If I tell a person that I won’t walk around with a big fake smile if I don’t want to, how come it is me having problems and an attitude? When was I supposed to entertain everyone all the time? Does anybody really believe asking for a smile will make the non smiling person happier? Guess not, huh, but everyone WANTS one, but don’t want to GIVE one because it is easier to take energy than to give some first!

Another guy told me a couple of weeks ago too that “nice to see you smile for once!” and I felt like “wait a minute, when do I see you? 5.30 am and I am doing cardio and you are not doing much? But you do have time to notice I don’t smile…hm….”

And what’s it about this “you look tired, you look sad” comments people like to shoot out like there was no tomorrow. It does nobody good to here you look tired. Did someone forget to get the makeup lady in for the morning workout? lol…Man, some days…..

Now over to diets and food! When you don’t crave chocolate, ice cream, pizza but more the healthy stuff like rice, oatmeal, milk, yoghurt, fruit, you know you are doing well on your diet. If you desire the first mentioned ones, come back when you are deeper into your leaning out process because wanting those before mentioning the good sources of carbs just signal you are not as starving as you pretend. If you had true physical hunger which is part of dieting to stay or get lean you do not even THINK about chocolate or cookies, no you dream about something as simple as oatmeal. End of discussion.

When you build a house you cannot start with a roof. You need to start with the solid foundation, then add walls that can put up with nature’s forces and finally a  roof that won’t let rain sip through or gets blown off when it’s windy. Everyone knows this is how you build something that will be good and reliable for years to come.

When it comes to building a body, once again, you need to get a solid foundation first. If you are scrawny, you must commit a few years to building the basic construction. And if you are about the size you want to be at but it is puffy and not firm or dense, you need to build more muscle too. Building muscle takes calories, training and rest. You must include all of the three pieces, it is not a “pick one out of three” situation!

When you start working on building a body your worst enemy is frustration and impatience. Your strength levels cannot skyrocket every week, you cannot expect serious muscle gains if you don’t take care of your nutrition. A lot of people though eat like there is no tomorrow with hopes that it will transfer into lean muscle. Well, let’s face it: junk food will never do any human body good. It slows down digestion, it slows down recuperation, it clogs your arteries and it inflames your body from the inside out. So even those who are so called hardgainers should choose their food with care.

Most hardgainers I’ve worked with are not that incapable of gaining muscle as they expect. When I interrogate them and yes that is what I have to do to get the details out of people since they forget, underestimate, overestimate their food habits, very often meals are being missed almost every day, supplementation is inconsistent, the individual is not paying attention to portion sizes and so on. Of course they gain no muscle that way! Inconsistency makes the body scared, there cannot be any muscle building if the energy supply is inconsistent. Your body needs to trust that you will give it the needed calories on a steady basis. not just around your workouts or three out of five days of the week.

One obstacle hardgainers have in common is usually a small appetite, but just like those who need to watch their food intake to get lean, hardgainers must eat despite not being hungry. Hunger means you have a need for energy which means your body does not really feel like building muscle, it wants to get calories to feed the little muscle mass it got already.

To build muscle healthily and not turn into a big puffy turtle, you should be just as meticulous with your diet as you would be did you want to lose fat. Does that mean you should shun all carbs? Does it mean you should not follow the FD concept? Well, let me explain….

Carbs build muscle because they give you energy to train hard and they increase the muscle-building hormone insulin. When you go low on carbs your whole body gets less optimized for muscle growth. Too many carbs on a consistent basis for the average person usually leads to excessive fat gain and that is why you want to cut out grains and starches to lean out. It’s not the only way to do it but a good way to do so.

When a hardgainer cuts out carbs one thing happens: no muscle growth. You cannot build muscle on proteins only! One of the best ways to spike insulin and thus get the body into a muscle-building mode is to have carbs right before and after training, but a lot of hardgainers don’t want to take that advice because they want to be lean, lean, lean and they are conditioned by advertisements that you can gain a lot of muscle without carbs. Yes you can but not as a hardgainer.

I have a guy friend who is a hardgainer but he is the kind where the calories he does eat tend to stock up around his abs. He’s got the “bad nutrient partitioning syndrome” where the food turns into fat rather than to muscle. So of course he does not want to increase his carbs. I tell him to choose slow glycemic ones and I try to convince him, but no, he refuses and keeps on taking his little protein shake before workout. And then he snacks on chocolate bars and french fries at night instead because he suddenly feels all small and scrawny! So, he does not gain muscle because he cannot commit to lean eating, but then he gets the sugar munchies and builds the little fatty belly instead.

So, what about the fighter diet concept? Well, since it is based upon preventive eating it’s all about keeping calories low without dying from misery lol. So it is the opposite to what a true hardgainer wants to do. Fighter Diet is for us who want to be lean but are not thin or measly by nature. if you are, here are some of my tips:

• Refeed every third or fourth day. This means double your calories every so often. The reason is your body gets accustomed to the same calorie level day in and day out and it slows down muscle-building.
• Egg whites only is for leaning out, as a hardgainer make sure you keep a yolk or two.
• Use coconut milk or almond milk when cooking oatmeal. You can drink it instead of pure water too. Lots healthier than juice.
• Make your morning breakfast energy denser with almond butter and flax seed. I am no fan of peanuts because they are not nuts and nuts are healthier than legumes.
• Eat a bag of nuts during the day. Nuts are extremely calorie rich.
• Eat green peas, kidney beans, beets, carrots, turnips, fennel for the majority of your veggies since these fill you up less than less calorie rich veggies do.
• After workouts, eat fast carbs like white rice, baked potatoes, rice noodles, cereal, instant oats, honey, pineapple juice, couscous etc.
• Eat a good meal 2 hours pre workout. Oatmeal with raisins, almonds, almond milk, cottage cheese and a whey protein shake is a perfect snack.
• Avoid protein bars as snacks: they are not nutritious and the protein usually has gelatin which is not even absorbed really well by the body…
• Do not overtrain! Do not train every day! Even if you split your body into different segments, your body as a whole works out every time.  If training more was better, those who are in the gym three hours a day looked the best but they don’t.
• Do not do cardio more than top two times a week. Keep the sessions short and intense, but apply the same pre and post workout nutrition to the cardio sessions. Do not do it on an empty stomach, that is asking for muscle breaking down!

Hope this helps a little!

I write and talk a lot but I find time to listen or even evesdropping from time to time. During the weekend in Vegas I found myself doing the last mentioned at Lunch. At the table behind me four people were talking about how good they were when they were on a diet. Yes, you see every time they were set on getting lean they were 100% focused and did not cheat at all. Not one bit, it was all going one way forward and no slips.

The discussion kept on about chicken breasts, carbs post training, cardio etc and I was pretty interested in taking a peek at what they were all looking like. So when I had finished my eggs, mustard and decaf coffee I turned around to check them out. Surprise, suprise for me, because none of them looked even the slightest in shape! They were all considered chubby on the border to fat.

How could these people sit and say all this about being super good with diets? Did they lie? No, most likely not, but the emphasize was on being on a diet. Meaning they apparently don’t consider it a lifestyle. They get lean by losing a lot of weight and then gain it all back. The point with this? Don’t know, I never understood the whole concept of doing just that, but I can only talk for myself.

I rather be lean and healthy all year than super cut a few days and chubby the rest. What about you?

I watched the documentary “secret lives of women” the other night which featured female bodybuilders and their lifestyles. A lot of people in the industry get all excited and happy when any female muscle stuff hits mainstream tv, but I don’t. The people the documentary makers’ choose to show are not helping people to see the beauty with musclebuilding, quite the opposite.

It’s the drug induced shemale look that drove me away from the sport bodybuilding. I get insulted when someone refers to me as a bodybuilder because it has a negative sound to the term.

In the documentary the women talked about how difficult it is to be strong, how people don’t understand them, a lot of “this takes hard work”, “gotta do what it takes” and then of course the finale that American TV loves: tears and a bit poor me. That the characters in the movie are either making money of muscle worshipping or has the best friend of a dog, or treats people as a chiropractor in an unprofessional manner and don’t care it makes people wonder what goes on in that office, well all those things make me detest bodybuilding. Which is unfair because bodybuilding is my passion, but portrayed like this it turns me into an enemy of the sport.

No wonder people assume everyone is on drugs or that all female bodybuilders make money off “sessions”. It’s a shame that it seems to be the common practice amongst those ladies who have taken it way too far to ever appeal to any market except for the fetish market.

I get the question all the time if I am drug free and I say yes I do not take any muscle-building hormones or steroids to be able to train harder. Then the person who asks says “well I know other bodybuilder females and they say they are natural too”. There is pride, and those who claim they are natural yet show all signs of steroid usage are just throwing shit in natural athletes faces.

There is something bitter and depressing about a lot of people into bodybuilding. Too much self-induced limitations on what to do with life and in life because they are so trapped into the daily routine. I would never let my need for rhythm stop me from pushing away from the comfort zone and get challenged.

You can not blame the need to train and eating thousands of meals per week (ok, exaggerated, but the point is there) and that it is some kind of mission you are on. Bodybuilding is a stepping stone to something, it is an exercise for becoming a better patient person, it is a religion to practice to make all areas in life clear up from the fog, increase focus. It is not something to dedicate your whole life to, to seclude yourself from people so you can do your thing. The gym is not your closest friend, it is an oasis you can heap energy from, but you must give it back. And that is outside of the gym, at your work, when you do what you are passionate about. All you need in life is passion.

It’s soon time for the yearly Olympia expo and once again I will go work for AST sports science. This brings up the topic on traveling and how to manage staying lean on the go…

• Always bring a bowl for your breakfast. The ones at the hotel are usually too small. I bought a nice baking bowl a while back and it comes in handy for microwaving veggies at the hotel or for the morning wheat bran porridge.
• Always bring a plastic spoon. You never know when you need one.
• Wheat bran is a food you want to bring to new places unless you know the area you are traveling to. It’s one of those things that keep you full and you will feel a lot hungrier if you suddenly don’t eat it for a few days.
• Organize your dry ingredients for breakfast in ziplocks or boxes. The more you prep the more you can relax.
• Stock up on pink salmon pouches.
• 7 eleven stores carry hardboiled eggs
• measure up nuts in small containers to eat. It’s easy to overeat if you don’t portion size them first…
• Keep rescue food with you like chewing gum, tea, crystal light.
• Mapquest grocery stores close to the hotel you’re staying in.
• Call the hotel and ask what they serve for breakfast.
• Mapquest closest gyms.

A have a butt obsession. In my world a good well-trained butt signals you have done your share of hard work in the gym. If glutes are flat: definately a true sign the squatting’s been neglected.

I always wanted a muscular butt, but not a fat butt. I don’t want it to jiggle, I want the glutes to move like the muscles they are.  My goal is and will always be to increase the muscle thickness of the glutes without increasing width. I want “height”, not width!

A muscular butt shows you’ve got character to work out hard because you ain’t gonna get one without the deadlifting and the squatting. No award winning butt was made in the smith machines or with the kick-backs in the cable station!

So, that leads me up to the women and “shaping the buns”… Yeah we know the adductor machine and the butt blaster is more FEEL-able, but it does not add the thickness you need to fill up a diet-deflated behind! And all the cardio don’t help either, your cheeks will just get flabbier and flabbier and yeah I know it seems like everyone of the movie stars went to the doctor and sucked out all the fat in the butt because they all need to get their glutes back, but it does not look sexy, it does not look pretty and it is the worst thing you can do for your BACK. You say byebye to your buttocks you say hello to lower back pain. The back needs its assistants, and those are the glutes.

The first time I dieted down for a bodybuilding show I did all I could to detrain and minimize my butt. YEAH i KNOW what was I thinking?! I did what everyone else do: I thought I had more muscle under the fat which I did not. So I had to walk out on stage with FLAT glutes. I was super embarassed. You see my butt was a round and firm one, but it was not made up of muscle, it was more just perky teenager butt material that would sooner or later be hit by gravity too. Unless I started to work it again. And so I did.

Yes I am obsessed with my derriere. It’s my own little power sign.

I’m excited that so many email me about the Fighter Diet Concept, how it works, how to start etc, but on the same page it sucks to repeat the same answer many times a day… So that is why I am writing this to serve as a little quick guide.

Fighter Diet is perfect for people with a big appetite and who feel best with eating lots of volume of food. It’s for the gourmands, not the gourmets!

Fighter Diet means you can get lean and keep lean since you will be able to control your hunger with the food cycles.

Fighter Diet is not a no-carb diet plan, as a matter of fact it encourages you to increase it with the right kinds since you won’t make it would you eat too little.

Fighter Diet means you will live more or less grain and starch free for a few days followed by a day of just that: grains and starches. It’s a cycle and you repeat it.

Fighter Diet from a weight gain as in muscle gain point of view: here you focus more on fats, legumes and carb richer foods like potatoes, beets, sweet potatoes, parsnips, carrots etc. I believe those are healthier than grains. Exception is oats and brans. Why? Because nothing fills you up more than that.

Hardgainers should focus on taking in a lot of fat to increase calories. High glycemic carbs should be eaten around workouts. That way you don’t get carby fat as I call it from constantly high insulin levels.

For the rest of us who have a slower metabolism, we stay away from grains and starches for the most days of the week and we stay lean.

Eating to be and stay lean takes practice and more practice. Expect it to take years before it becomes second nature to you. There will come one day when your mind just lets go of the wish to choose food not supporting your physical goals. I look upon it as training a martial art. You start as a novice and it takes years before you are a black belt. How do you get it? By practicing, practicing and practicing. Dieting successfully for the long term is getting a black belt in staying lean and mean.

I have clients that are very motivated initially, they do everything right, they train hard, god forbid would they pick a piece of an apple that is not on their plan. But then, suddenly sickness, family issues, love trouble or financial problems strike them and diet and working out gets pushed out of the picture. Then they want to start over after a few days of going back to bad eating and a slacker lifestyle. This scenario is a loser pattern. Yes, it is. In bad times, what you choose and how you keep focus are the two cornerstones in achieving what you want. There will always be interrupting occasions like parties, funerals, holidays, so you cannot plan your life on being void on that. The solution to be antisocial is a horrible idea too because will you be happy in the long run? No. If you are not open to practicing choosing correctly around people you like or have to stand due to circumstances, how well do you think you will fare when you once and for all step out of your little cave to socialize? I can ascertain you you will give up, eat bad and get back to square one again.

Start practicing every day on choosing what is helping you. Work on being perfect, but don´t expect it to be like that all the time, especially not as a novice pro dieter! Give yourself tough love and ask more of yourself than your friends do. if your friends say “you are so hard on yourself, relax, have a good meal for once, it won´t hurt you, you are so lean already, almost skinny” then translate it into “hey there, stop, you are putting pressure on all of us to straighten up our diets and let go of the fries and vodka, nah, we don´t want that so you should join our fat ´n merry party instead”. People don´t get it, so don´t listen to them.

Healthy food. Health food. Food considered healthy. I have my own opinion on what I consider healthy food. Since most people are mislead into believing health food equals low calorie food, I’m pretty extreme when it comes to what I consider healthy. Healthy in my opinion means the food serves a purpose for the individal consuming it.

The same rules do not apply to everyone. A hardgainer cannot follow the same guidelines as someone trying to lean out!

One of the health foods I really refuse to endorse i peanut butter. One of the health foods I really refuse to endorse i peanut butter. I don’t care it is made of a legume and it is an all American favorite: in my opinion it is not a high quality fat source. Peanuts are not the most nutritious things on earth, it is not even a nut did I mention that, but a legume for that matter…When I compare foods the ones with the most nutrients or most quality content always win. That is why I say almonds win over peanuts. Veggies win over fruit big time. Berries win over fruit no kidding.

Honestly, I’m so sick of this talk about balanced eating. Balanced what: never feeling too full? What if I like that feeling? Should I not stuff myself because the meal is considered too big? Excuse me but I love eating big heaps of low calorie veggies with miracle noodles, mustard and pink salmon, no way do I want to work that portion control lol.

Not everyone is like me, but when you want to stay really lean hunger will be your close friend 24/7 unless you bend the rules, learn to eat like a sparrow (no they are big eaters, trust me, they eat 5 times their weight) so your body stops sending signals to your brain “EAT!!!! EAT!!!!”.

I don’t “believe” in fruit because fruit is sweet, it has carbs only, it does not contain as much fiber as the ads claim and they are not as filling as vegetables. Vegetables is the professional, full-time dieter’s best friend. I cannot believe how many so called fitness minded people see rice and chicken with a little tiny cup o broccoli six times  a day as a healthy diet. I wouldn’t want to be THAT intestine which gets all that grain crap.

Well, that is another topic though… I don’t believe in grains either except for a serving of oats a day and wheat bran to keep the bowel moving perfectly smooth. We just don’t move around as much and the grains, starches, all that just gives us way too much energy. It gets stored as fat. Just deal with it. Our lifestyle does not allow big portions of those foods unless you are ok with being a few pounds heavy all the time.

OK, enough for now. good night.