Last week when I visited India my friends and family commented on how I looked fitter than the last time they saw me! I attribute some of that improvement to Body Of Science. For past 6 weeks or so I have seen reasonable results from this new workout!

Lowell introduced me to this workout, and has been coaching me through past few weeks. The book – Body Of Science describes the workout in detail. However, in short the idea is to design as efficient a workout as possible. Our muscles are made up of four kinds of fibers (slow twitch, 3 fast twitch – oxidative, glycolytic and oxidative/glycolytic) each of those engage in different activities (strength, endurance etc). Our muscle fibers grow stronger only if we push them hard, to the point that they fail. Once that happens the body reacts by building better muscles over a recovery time!! So an ideal workout is the one which engages all the muscle fibers and gets them to the point of failure as quickly as possible! Well that is what, Body By Science is about!

In the work-out one tries to engage major muscles groups one at a time, by putting them under load (i.e weight) and doing it in a slow consistent way until the muscle group reaches to the point of failure and then we try to go for an extra bit (10 more seconds)! To illustrate the point here is a video of pulldown, starring Lowell :

The goal of each exercise is to increase the weight and time under load (TUL), repetitions are not that important. The idea is to start with a weight which one can do for at-least 45 seconds and each time increment the weight as soon as one can comfortably do it for 80 seconds or so. The ideal time for each rep is about 20 seconds! The Body by Science authors recommend 45-200 seconds for each workout, but from what we have been doing 60-90 second seems like an effective range for most folks.

Following are the results from last few weeks doing the five major muscles groups (note: core muscles are taken care of by all workout but specifically by shoulder press, leg press and pull-down).

(Please note: score is a connived measure of the entire routine which Lowell has been experimenting with, its a function of weight, time & reps)

More Resources -

• Lowell’s Blog
• My colleague – Keith Toussaint’s Health Man blog
• Body By Science – website

Comments/ Suggestions/ Questions?

On Thursday I spent my afternoon listening to Gary Taubes at University Of Washington. Gary is author of Good Calories, Bad Calories, and has had a very successful journalism career exposing bad science. His talk gave background and analysis of research on ‘science of why we get fat’. You can watch this talk online.

I was attracted to Good Calories, Bad Calories sometime last year, primarily owing to my co-workers and friends (Chris, Lowell and Keith). Lowell is a very passionate ambassador of low-carb diet, he infact lost over 90 pounds in a year and a half by just changing his diet! The book is a dense read and I have barely finish first part.

I haven’t really switched to a low-carb diet, but Maris (specially) and myself have been looking in to ways to improve our vegetarian diets. The food in America is no way tuned for a healthy vegetarian diet. Maris researched on the protein aspects of the diet and came up with the idea of putting soy powder in curries. In fact she even bought a whole recipe book for tofu powdered cooking. The next culinary exploration we are going to try is vegetable smoothies.

As you will notice all our exploration has been to add protein to our vegetarian diets and eat more of leafy vegetables. But what i would take away from Gary’s book and talk is to actually try reducing the bad carbohydrates in our diets especially sugar, bread and white rice! I did end up asking a question along these lines to Gary and his frank answer was that he is not a good spokesperson for a vegetarian low-carb diet (given that all his bread substitutes are meaty/fatty), however one of his strongest proponent and friend is a vegan and he has seen improvements in health by reducing carbohydrates.

So what are bad carbohydrates?

• Starches (esp. Fructose)  and Sugars
• Bread
• Pasta

What should a vegetarian substitute these with?

• Soy  products
• Green leafy vegetables

Any tips?

• Start by reducing rice and bread in diet in lieu of salad!
• Introduce the morning vegetable breakfast smoothie !!

The strongest criticism of low-carb diet is that the fat substitutes (esp. meat) are bad for your heart and will increase risk for Heart Attack. For a vegetarian this is not really the case and any reduction is carb is good!! .

Any suggestions for good calories for vegetarian? Feel free to comment away!!

I have been trying to keep an excel sheet of what i eat. However i think i’m going to try and babble about my thoughts on diet, so that i can be more clear and get some feedback. In addition to my diet i’m also trying help my dad (who is obese) to figure a better diet.

So, things which are deficient in Vegetarian diet are Protein, Calcium, Vitramin B12, Iron and Zinc.

Few initial general tips:

• Tofu can be an amazing source of protein, iron, zinc, and calcium.
• Vitamin B12 – The best source is fortified cereal.

Some specific Obesity tips in general:
When BMI (Weight / Height Squared) in kg/sq.m is more than 30 its termed as Obesity. Treatments include -

• Low Calorie Diets
• Exercise – spinning, walking
• Make a goal (half marathon walk??)
• No Caffeine
• More water 64 oz ie 8 glasses
• Measure Cholesterol