elitefts™ Sunday Edition

As with everything else in this sport and in this world, there will always be trends and everything comes and goes in waves, it seems. The latest trend in bodybuilding continues to prove that most people are quick to trust almost anything they read or are told without doing much of their own homework. This is really nothing new in bodybuilding as once something is said to be true it is, for some reason, accepted by the masses without much of a challenge.

The latest dieting fads that have crept up in the last year or so are fine examples of unproven methods that need to be scrutinized a bit more than they have been before deciding that they are the new and improved way to get ripped and add muscle as efficiently as possible.

When choosing a dieting method to help you reach your goals, it should be a good idea to look into the track record behind the method and the person behind the method, itself. Just because you read about it on a message board certainly doesn’t make it true or a successful method.

How long has this method been around and is it logical? If it is a new method without any history or track record, you should be cautious of outrageous claims.

Who has used this method successfully? Your fat buddy who managed to lose twenty pounds in the last two months using this method while cheating three times a week with Subway probably shouldn’t qualify the plan as successful. It would be a good idea to see if people have gone from overweight or relatively high body fat levels to ripped and shredded. The more people that have successfully used the plan and gotten excellent results would be something that would qualify a method over time.

Does the person behind the method have a history? Is he a fat guy that doesn’t train and is never in shape? Or is he someone that is always ripped no matter what he eats? Both are equally as bad and shouldn’t qualify the method or the person behind it.

If you can eat whatever you want and be ripped, what the hell good is this plan for someone that isn’t as gifted in the genetics department? Keep in mind that just because the guy in the picture is ripped, doesn’t mean the diet he claims to use is the entire reason behind his condition.

When you get into the nuts and bolts of nutrition and dieting, there should always be a level of logic that has to be present, as well. Look, there are a lot of really good nutritionists in the industry that have been around for a very long time and are incredibly knowledgeable. There are no real “new” diets out there, only novel ideas that tend to do little more than grab your attention because of outrageous claims.

If you hear that you can eat all of the carbohydrate that you want every day of your diet and it can be any form of carbohydrate that you want it to be and still get ripped, you should probably wake up. Buying into this type of thinking is why the nutritional supplement industry and its ridiculous claims generate 4 billion dollars a year. Don’t be that sucker.

What I have seen the last couple of years is that people are coming up with methods of dieting that seem to fit into the lazy-assed and “easy” way of dieting. Dieting shouldn’t be terribly easy. You actually have to be disciplined to get ripped or get lean while building muscle. There isn’t a way around that no matter how hard you try. Lazy is wanting to eat only a couple times a day and thinking you are going to grow muscle or get ripped.

Easy is thinking you can eat all of your daily carbs in one sitting out of a box of cereal on a daily basis and thinking you are going to get peeled. This is how the fat public eats. Do you honestly believe that if you eat that way you will be lean and ripped because you train hard and do cardio?

These plans are pushed and promoted by the lazy because when someone loses five or ten pounds they naturally assume this is the most awesome way to diet. Losing five and ten pounds isn’t getting ripped, though, so there is a huge difference between dieting OPTIMALLY to lose body fat and gain or retain muscle at an efficient rate, and simply dieting to lose weight. Losing weight is for normal, everyday people. What we do is completely different. Clearly, the dieting methods have to be different, as well.

You would think that it would strike people as odd that the top nutritionists in the industry don’t have absurd methods to get people ripped. Don’t you think if those absurd methods worked so well that they would already be in use by the top guys? This is where the lack of logic comes into play. Some people must think that the new guy just starting out wanting to be a nutritionist has somehow geniously (new word, I know) stumbled onto a new dieting method while the top guys in the field simply weren’t smart enough to figure it out. REALLY???

There are time tested and proven methods to getting ripped and these are the methods used by the top guys in the industry. They are used simply because they work and work well. There are no new, miracle ways to diet that allow you to eat whatever you want and get ripped. Do a little homework before you decide on your dieting method and see what kind of track record that method has behind it and who is behind it. If it sounds too good to be true, you don’t want to find out too late after you have invested months of dieting and sometimes even quite a bit of money, as well.

Don’t be a sucker.