Dumping as many handfuls of spinach as will fit into a blender is a great way to increase your daily dose of leafy greens.  Everyone has their own special tastes for what works with a blended smoothie, or "Green Monster" - here is one of my recipies:

• Spinach (2 handfuls)
• Protein (1 scoop)
• Oatmeal (1/2 cup measured dry)
• NAKED juice (1 cup)
• Blueberries
• baby carrots
• Ice

 Above is one of my regular go-to recipes before I have to hit the gym for a class plus longer workout or run.  Sometimes I'll add blackberries, a banana, flax seeds, or almond butter depending on what's available in the kitchen. There are also numerous other resources online for great "Green Monster" recipies.

Here's a recipe from another of the fitness/yoga instructors in Charlotte who you may see referenced again once in a while.  Her site is a firehose of information for you ladies who love yoga, running, and most of all healthy eating.

This woman has a cookies & cream version of a spinach smoothie.

Green Monster Movement is a pretty interesting project that you should check out for yourself when you get a minute.

Overall, the key takeaway is that if you haven't been adding spinach (or other leafy greens like kale) to your blended smoothies, you are really missing out on a great way to boost your daily intake of valuable vegetables and nutrients.

Get on it. 

What finally knocked Brock down to the canvas?  His diet. 

Lesnar developed a bacterial infection that turned into diverticulitis, which eventually ate a hole in his colon, spilling fecal matter into his abdomen (wow.)  The situation compromised his immune system to the degree that he contracted mono, and his loved ones feared the worst.

In the May 2010 issue of Muscle & Body magazine, Brock is fairly open with what led to his illness.

"I have changed the way I eat.  I've really cleaned my diet up.  I've added a lot more fiber to my diet, and also grouping my foods together has really helped.  It's made it easier for my digestive system to do its job and to get the most nutrients out of each and every meal.  This is a sickness that we've done to ourselves.  This is because of our western diets.  Our processed foods, I believe are a huge factor in what's creating a lot of cancer.  This thing has opened my eyes to a whole bunch of things."

Lesnar is fairly open that he probably "ate a whole cow in a year", and nutritionist PR Cole shared the estimation that Brock's meat-heavy diet probably led to his condition.

While I hesitate to use the term "cure", a Raw Food Diet goes a long way in helping the body's fiber requirements, as well as extracting even more of the best enzymes that are lost in fruits and vegetables once they are heavily cooked.

A few key notes from www.thebestofrawfood.com:

Without trying to download everything here, there is a litany of information on how to implement more raw foods into your everyday habits.  While I hate the term "diet", this eating philosophy has caught on amongst numerous celebrities, not only because of the health benefits, but cosmetic benefits as well.

I highlighted the "Raw Model" Anthony Anderson previously, but the most notable celebrities who promote this sort of nutrition philosophy seem to be Woody Harrelson and Demi Moore. 

There's probably a lot of crossover between raw foods and veganism, here's an article interview with Harrelson's former trainer Jon Hinds conducted an informative interview here.  I also stumbled onto a pretty interesting site - No Meat Athlete.

Well, if you've read this far I can only assume you hve clicked on a few of the informative links and done your own research by now.  With regards to the question "how do I get started?" it is actually simple (and shouldn't clean eating be simple?)

Eat lots of vegetables, fruits, nuts, and seeds.  Eat foods as close to their natural states as you can (wash them when necessary of course).  And obviously by now you should have noticed a theme on this site with regards to utilizing the blender to combine your raw healthy foods into a smoothie.

As for me, I will likely be combining my two "experiments" into one.  The early parts of the day will be largely raw foods (grapefruit, almonds, sunflower seeds, salad, whey protein) until dinner time.  Dinner will then be vegetarian (beans, brown rice, egg whites, oatmeal) though in the interest of full disclosure, there will probably be a few peices of fish eaten during the week.

My hope is to stick to this, at least for a month into July and see how it goes.  Hopefully both the health results and performance results will be positive. 

Within a week, I realized that quite a few of my friends (4-5) were vegetarians, not including my own dad.  Each of these friends were what I would consider to be "healthy/athletic" people, both in-terms of lifestyle and body types.  This caused me to want to investigate things a little further (which is why Google is my favorite website).

Rather than re-state all of my interesting findings one-by-one, and turn this into a scholarly research article, I'd rather give the top-line, most interesting findings, and share my sources.

I found out that our human bodies have much more in-common with herbivores (plant-based eaters) than carnivores (meat-based eaters).

Intestinal tract - carnivores have intestinal tract lengths almost twice the length of herbivores.  This is relevant because lots of times, meat can turn rancid after 4-5 days, thus the longer an intestinal tract...the longer it sits in your system....possibly turning rancid.  (Eww.)

Acidity - it requires more acidity to break down meats for digestion.  Carnivores have much more acidic stomachs and saliva than do herbivores.  Apparently that of humans falls more in-line with herbivores.

Teeth - most carnivores (wolves, lions, bears, etc) have sharp front teeth and powerful jaws, but no flat molars meant for chewing. Carnivores have the inverse teeth description.  Guess which matches human beings more closely.

As I said, rather than attempt to re-state every interesting finding, I'd prefer to point you to a few of the notable articles and websites and let you gather your own conclusions.

http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/09/are-humans-carnivores-or-herbivores-2/

http://www.goveg.com/naturalhumandiet_physiology.asp

http://www.waoy.org/26.html

As I've written previously, I was also influenced by the story of Atlanta Falcons' all-pro tight end Tony Gonzalez.  You can read the details here, but basically he had a couple health scares years ago while playing for the KC Chiefs.  On a plane ride, he was turned onto the book, The China Study and had his entire attitude towards meat as a part of his diet changed instantly.  While Tony Gonzalez is not a "strict" vegetarian, I am always a fan of people (athletes especially) who are willing to experiment and have open minds in the pursuit of the best health practices possible. His learnings eventually led to co-authoring a book based on his nutritional findings for athletes.

There are also other high-level athletes who have decided to jettison meat from their diets, like Milwaukee Brewers all-star Prince Fielder and UFC's Mac Danzig.

Danzig isn't the only mixed martial artist having success with a meatless lifestyle, Strikeforce middleweight champion Jake Shields is also a vegetarian.

It's not just athletes who have found health and performance benefits in eliminating meat from their eating habits.  A few of my favorite music artists like Common, Erykah Badu, The Roots, and Andre 3000 are vegetarians to one degree or another.

As I've maintained, this is far from a finished conclusion in my eyes.  I don't really have a stance on things like activism or PETA necessarily. However after having a family member battle a form of cancer that is often-times attributed to dietary habits, the benefits of eliminating (or at least reducing) meat from my diet are tough for me to ignore.  As I touched on earlier, a meat-heavy diet can be very acidic and harmful for the digestive system.  I'll get into some pro-active measures and how they've helped the former UFC heavyweight champion in my next article.

Basically I'd like to take you through the eating habits I had until the age of 25 that caused me to gain weight and get fat.

Like most people who were competitive athletes their entire lives, I never gave any consideration to food choices or portion control.  I ate what I wanted, whenever I wanted, and as much of it as I wanted.  I always burned everything off playing sports (basketball, football, track & field).

I began literally EVERY day with a giant bowl of cereal.  Cereal was my favorite food.  Frosted Flakes, Cap'n Crunch, Wheaties, Lucky Charms, the entire Cheerios family, Frosted Mini Wheats, I ate it all.  Plus I used the largest bowls I could find, a popcorn bowl or salad bowl was barely big enough.  Add in the fact I always used either 2% or Whole Milk and it isn't tough to figure out why I battled allergies and severe nasal congestion until my late twenties.  If somehow I wasn't eating cereal, then it was either a stack of Eggo Waffles (tons of syrup) or my mom's pancakes, which really are worthy of some sort of pancake-tasting contest if such a thing exists.

Snacks were nothing original - Pringles potato chips (Sour Cream & Onion), Doritos (Cool Ranch), Oreos, Pop Tarts, Skittles, Jolly Ranchers, usual "junk food".

My meals (if you can even call it that) were also junk-heavy.  My Mount Rushmore of Junk Food looks like this:

• McDonald's Quarter Pounder w/ large fries & Coke
• Domino's pizza (cheese & sausage) w/ dozen buffalo wings + 2 bottles Miller High Life
• General Tso's Chicken w/ steamed white rice
• Bojangles' chicken supremes w/ seasoned fries, sweet tea

*If Mount Rushmore had 5 heads I'd add a Philly cheesesteak from East Boulevard Bar & Grill in Charlotte.

I also LOVED fries.  Love might even be too mild of a term.  It wasn't unusual for me to be on a car trip and decide halfway down the highway that a large fry and chocolate or vanilla milkshake would make a good "snack" during the drive.

Wendy's deserves lots of credit too.  Their "Late Night Menu" became a good friend my first few years after college, I'd drive 2 miles to the next exit and get an order of nuggets, fries (of course), and a Biggie Frosty.  For a change of pace some nights I might just eat a handful of little marshmellows out of the cabinet before bed.

This is getting like an awards acceptance speech, since I am forgetting too many old friends. 

Ramen Noodles were a big staple during the post-college years.  I learned a trick from my college girlfriend about making "baked spaghetti", so I used Ramen along with sliced chicken nuggets, a handful of mozzarella cheese, and marinara sauce to make a type of lasagna.

Please don't over-look the shoutout to sweet tea earlier.  Bojangles' had the best (read: sweetest) tea with Chick-Fil-A pulling in second.  I actually used to have my mom make a half gallon of sweet tea and bring it back to college.  If I had no sweet tea in the house, I'd keep an empty Gatorade bottle of Kool Aid in the fridge so I could get my liquid sugar fix that way.

This is probably gratuitious at this point - but I think you get the general idea.  People (especially co-workers) wonder why I am such a healthy eater, and why I am so disciplined about what goes into my body.  The reason is because of 25 years' worth of piling garbage into my body with no regard for health or athletic performance.  Who knows what type of athlete I could have been with even a rudimentary understanding of nutrition, or conversely the hazards of a diet heavy in starchy grains, sugars, dairy, and fried things.

It wasn't until during my first year in graduate school that roommate and friend (yes I am name-dropping here) Wes Miller told me "Dude, you're getting fat!?"  I couldn't believe it, but the mirror rarely lies, and the truth hurts.  Friends don't tell you what you want to hear, they tell you what you NEED to hear.  And I needed to hear that.

I didn't look like the Nutty Professor (yet) but I was surely headed there.  My six-pack had disappeared and my waist size was up to 36.  When I left grad school I weighed in at 193.

Today I'm back to a 32 and weighing between 178-180.  The points I wanted to make with this post were that we're all human and love crappy foods.  I was no different.  However please use the above eating lifestyle as a sample of how easily nutritional ignorance and lack of discipline can have you standing in-front of the mirror wondering how you got fat, just like I did.

 In simplest terms, IF (as used and coached by Martin Berkhan) consists of 16 hours of fasting, with an 8 hour "eating window".  Most people completely freak out when the topic of fasting for fat loss (or cleansing for that matter) comes up, so I won't spend time trying to dispel any of your previously-held concerns or fears.  What I'll stick to here is (1) sharing some of the information I've found on the topic (2) the points of interest I've discovered and (3) my plan. 

Here are a few points to consider when you either think about (or immediately dismiss) IF as a tool in your plan to get lean for the summer.

 1 - There are cleansing benefits to small-to-moderate periods of fasting.

Since I am not a scientist, I won't attempt to boil down the mountain of evidence and studies to this point.  I'd invite you to perform your own Google search on keywords like "fasting health benefits", "fasting detox", and "fasting+colon+intestines".

2 - It's not unheard of for active people to remain active during periods of fasting

I never considered this originally, but many times of active people inadvertently go through periods of Intermittent Fasting while still remaining active.  Surfer Laird Hamilton awoke me to this fact when outlining his training habits and diet on an episode of "Insider Training" on FitTV.  Paraphrasing, he basically said that he only has a shot of espresso before leaving the house in the mornings before his surfing and mountain biking.  He said that digesting food requires energy from the body (true) and whatever foods he attempts to scarf while headed out the door for training won't be absorbed by the muscles fast enough to be of use anyway.

I also have a marathoner friend who told me she rarely eats anything before hitting the road in the mornings as well.  She places a much greater emphasis on eating a nutritionally substantial dinner the night before. 

In this same context, think about young teenage athletes who play hours upon hours of basketball during the summers without stopping for a PowerBar or a protein shake.  I also recalled my own experience as a college football player when breakfast would be at 7-8am and I wouldn't have a touch of food (save for a few gulps of Powerade) until close to 5-6pm that evening.

3 - Psychologically, IF is easier than grazing.

 I have tried nearly every diet and fat loss "philosophy" out there.  Many are more similar than they are different.  But the one consistent between IF-style philosophies like Eat-Stop-Eat and The Warrior Diet when compared against the traditional 5-6 meals per day grazing philosophy is psychological ease.  When I've been focused on "portion control" and monitoring the amount of calories in each individual meal, things are not as difficult as one might think.  However there is a substantial difference in the mental relaxation that comes with knowing I can (within reason) forget about meal size during my 8-hour eating window. Silly example, but I don't have to weigh a "handful" of almonds to make sure it's cut off at 1oz.  I don't need to measure each peice of salmon or chicken or cup of oatmeal.

4 - Calories in vs Calories out STILL matters

        This is perhaps the MOST important point, and needed to follow the points made in #3.  One of the biggest mistakes people make in any diet philosophy (low carb, low fat, Atkins, Warrior Diet, etc) is that periods of fasting mean they can throw all regard for caloric intake out the window.  I made this same mistake with my first trial of the Warrior Diet.  I forgot what is perhaps the first rule of dieting for fat loss - calories in versus calories out ALWAYS matters.  If you are eating more than your body needs, you won't lose weight.  You will possibly gain weight.

5 - Food choices still matter

This shouldn't be a necessary point to make, but I'll make it anyway.  You'll get much further in your quest to have the body you want when eating clean foods (lean proteins, tons of vegetables/fruit, healthy nuts, seeds) versus junk food with lots of white starches, sugars, fried things, and artificial elements.

There are a number of other sources available online that can help you educate yourself about the benefits of intermittent fasting, both for fat loss and overall health.  Rather than re-word some of the writings myself, I'd rather steer you to sources like Martin Berkhan's Leangains website that have helped me tremendously.  Pay attention to the sections about topics like leptin (basically the hormone that serves as the thermometer for your metabolism) and fat mobilizing hormones epinephrine and norepinephrine.

 As for my approach each day, it will look something like this:

5am-12noon - Fasting

12pm - some combination of almonds, sunflower seeds, grapefruit, apple, salad, green beans

2pm & 4:30pm - same as above (goal is less than 1/2 of daily caloric amount)

6pm - Workout and/or group fitness instruction

8pm - Largest Meal: salmon or chicken, brown rice, blended protein drink with spinach/berries

Tomorrow is day 2 in my second trial with IF, I'll be sure to log progress and follow-up with successes, failures, and key learnings.

First we reviewed Steve Nash, then Ellen DeGeneres, now Nash's Phoenix Suns teammate Grant Hill.

Without reviewing Grant Hill's entire career resume, he basically saw his career plunge from multiple-time NBA All-Star with the Detroit Pistons, to plagued by ankle and foot injuries that kept him out of action for years.  After sporatic playing time with the Orlando Magic, he ended up in Phoenix (with Nash) and at age 37 has seen a career resurrection and is somewhat of a medical marvel. 

He interviews about his new-found dedication towards food intake here, I was particularly drawn to his tales of negligent eating as a young athlete which sound familiar to my own poor habits:

Q: What have you cut out?

A: My first year in the NBA I ate nothing but fast food. There was a street in Michigan near my home that had seven or eight fast-food places. I went eeny-meeny-miney-moe. I got a chef my second year, but I still kept two or three pitchers of Kool-Aid in the refrigerator. And of course we had to have Sprite (which Hill endorsed commercially). And we made lot of cakes. So I would go to bed with a quarter of a cake and a Big Gulp-sized container of Kool-Aid. I’d take that to bed with me.

Q: When did you change?

A: It was gradual. At one point, I cut out all drinks except water. That’s when I started getting away from some of that. I was still eating red meat, less pasta. As I’ve gotten older and become more educated about it, I’ve slowly changed. My wife (Tamia) and I practice a macrobiotic diet. (A macrobiotic diet eliminates processed foods and emphasizes water, vegetables, fruits and organically grown grains, such as brown rice. It typically does not include red meat, dairy or eggs.)

It’s hard to eat like that on the road, but you want to try to make healthy decisions. When we get on the plane after the game and the options are turkey with mashed potatoes and yams, or a Cobb salad with chicken, I’ll get the salad. I drink a lot of water. It’s just understanding what you put in your body and how it will affect your energy level.

 Here's another anedcote where Grant Hill talks about a typical day's eating and meals:

Q: In order to reach your maximum performance level for games, what meals do you eat pre-game? Post-game?

A: It’s easier at home to control what you’re eating. At home I eat an oatmeal batter made into a waffle and use agave nectar as a syrup. Agave is a natural sweetner that doesn’t have the rise in sugar levels that syrup or honey has. I tend to eat that in the morning for breakfast and usually a salad and some sort of fish, a sea bass or salmon. I may have that once or twice before a game, and then usually an hour or two before the game and in the locker room we have a fruit platter or tray of some sort. That’s what works for me.

Since I’ve become really particular in the last few years about what I eat, my energy level and my recovery level post-work out are so much better. I try to eat afterwards a salad and try to get some protein in my body, but keeping it simple, staying away from heavy pastas, sauces, butters, all those types of things I feel great. I feel better now than I did 5 years ago. My body feels better as I go through the season. I’m not as tired and sluggish and I sleep better. I’m not sore. A lot of that has to do with what I eat.

Not only has Nash's disciplined approach to his nutrition helped Hill, but teammate (and former Charlotte Bobcat) Jared Dudley has also seen benefits from taking food intake more seriously.

Those habits are what caught the eye of Suns swingman Jared Dudley. Whenever the team was flying on the franchise’s charter plane, Nash would almost always pass on the food prepared and order a salad. In addition, Dudley would overhear Hill and Nash discussing different nutritional strategies and he figured he’d seek out some pointers from the two co-captains. After losing 10 pounds, the third-year man officially became a convert.

“You ask them for hints and you try to use those tips because you see the ways your body reacts after you junk food,” Dudley said. “Those guys have played 13, 14 years and a lot of that has to do with God-given ability, but you see Steve and somehow his body is in shape and you know that if he just ate junk every day, I bet you he wouldn’t be the player he is now.”

The Suns already play an exciting brand of basketball, but for health-conscious people there's one more reason to pull for Phoenix in the NBA Playoffs later this month.

It is definitely possible to get leaner and lose body fat with a Zero Carb diet.  The problem is that this sort of eating approach is only meant for the short-term (ie - prepping for a photo shoot or bodybuilding/figure competition, last-minute beach vacation prep, etc).  This sort of eating approach is not meant for long-term success without VERY close monitoring and periodic-to-frequent refeeding of surplus carbs and calories.

Now that I've gotten the disclaimer out of the way, back to the original task.  A zero carb diet is fairly easy to implement (the challenge is sticking to it).  You basically center your meals around protein (think anywhere from 1.5-2x body weight per day) and green vegetables.  That's basically it (besides your standard multi-vitamin and probably some fish oil caps during the day).

I've both studied and tested this philosophy myself several times and actually noticed it during a recent UFC Primetime episode to hype the St. Pierre-Hardy fight.  The week before the fight, cameras followed Georges St. Pierre into a Montreal restaurant where his nutritionist was preparing one of his meals.

 His chef, Jennifer Nickel explains: "I do this for Georges Monday through Friday, three meals a day.  We've done two fights so far with him, and we will cook for his weight cut in exactly this style - absolutely no carbs, or sugar, or dairy so...it gets a lot more strict.  The only fat in this meal is the olive oil."

St. Pierre sat down to a pretty good looking meal of grilled tuna, sauteed asparagus, and mixed diced vegetables with what looked like citrus flavoring.  Clearly the zero carb plan is working for GSP, both aesthetically and athletically, since he went on to beat Dan Hardy by unanimous decision on Saturday night. 

Everybody doesn't have a professional chef to make their zero carb meals (I know I sure don't), but compliance is still possible.  Fitness model Jamin Thompson recently underwent a zero carb phase for about 3-4 days to prep for a photo shoot.  He kept those of us interested in such things updated on Twitter:

@jaminthompson: Day 2 of "no carb"...not bad so far, just had ground turkey, steamed cabbage, green beans, & flax...now off 2 train legs. LETS GO!

 You can see how well the results worked out for him here.

There are plenty of resources available online about temporary zero carb diets.  Lyle McDonald is another well-studied resource, having written a book on to topic.  I actually tried his "Rapid Fat Loss" diet which is also termed a "Protein Sparing Modified Fast".  I made a few mistakes with this diet, not realizing two key points:

1 - It is very easy to over-train.

I didn't realize that recovery can be slowed by zero carb dieting, so it's important to reduce cardio and/or allow for rest days from resistance training.  MMA Nutritionist PR Cole made a great point on Twitter:

@FueltheFighter metabolic rate is slower if there is a cal deficit-that can mean suboptimal recovery rate/potential for compromised immune fxn

2 - It is important to "re-feed" within 4-5 days, if not sooner

At some point, the body will need carbs again, at least in my experience.  That doesn't necessarily mean a gorge-fest on pancakes and bagels, the refeed can still be clean complex carbs like oatmeal, brown rice, and sweet potatoes.  The amount of carbs and length of the refeed can be complex, and there are numerous sources and strategies available with a Google search.  But in general terms, refeeding with a substantial amount of carbs (preferably stretched over a day's worth of meals) is important after such a severe restriction.

I'll be traveling to Indianapolis for the NCAA Final Four this week, so my hope is to stick to a zero carb diet while I am there.  There will be lots of hotel, restaurant, and hospitality party food available, so my goal is to take down as much chicken, steak, shrimp, and vegetables as are available.  I can't guarantee I won't slip up "accidentally", but at least there's a goal and plan in-mind.

I'll let you know how it goes.

Well naturally my initial response was, "Uh...who is Ellen???"  After some clarity, she explained that Ellen DeGeneres had began a sugarless crusade of her own recently.  Ellen apparently took a look at her increased daily schedule and workload thanks to being a new judge on American Idol, and rationalized (perhaps with some consultation, I don't know for sure) that eliminating sugars from her diet would be a great way to prevent the wild insulin surges and subsequent energy crashes that come with regularly ingesting sugars.  Much like Steve Nash, she has focused on getting her sugars the natural way, mainly through fruits.

I don't know how long Ellen will stick with this (cutting sugar is by no means an easy pursuit, especially the first few days) but I am proud of her for taking on this challenge.  My hope is that for someone with such an enormous platform as "The Ellen Show", she will influence many of her viewers to follow suit.  Let's be honest, quite often people feel more motivated to give something a try if one of their favorite celebrities is already doing it.  This is one instance where I hope the trend continues.

For continued learning, here's a great blog I found by a woman who decided to give up sugar for a year back in 2008.  I won't spoil her story, but I think you can guess how it turned out.

 Odds are I don't need to explain to you who Steve Nash is, so instead of repeating his bio, I'll save some time.  I was blown away earlier today when I found out how seriously Steve Nash takes his nutrition and how closely he monitors what foods he eats.  His diet is pretty simple and as "idiot-proof" as it gets:

No sugar.

That's it.  Nothing fancy, nothing elaborate, no calculations, or balancing of macronutrients each day. 

Nash guest-wrote a column for Men's Journal back in December 2009 where he outlined his discovery of what eliminating sugars from his diet could do for his health and NBA career:

"Refined sugars, Dr. Jain told me, impair your immune system. In fact, one teaspoon of refined sugar suppresses our white blood cells for up to six hours, making it a lot easier to catch a cold. I really can’t afford colds during the season, so that’s all I needed to hear: I cut out refined sugars cold turkey. No M&M’s at the movies, no energy bars, no Gatorade — I even had to be more careful when going to Jamba Juice, because sometimes they use sugar-filled juice from concentrate. After a few months, I stopped craving sugar entirely."

"The difference was instantaneous: I slept better, I recovered from workouts more easily, and I had more energy. When we started training camp in September, we were doing two-a-days — four or five hours on the court — and I never got sore. Even more telling is the fact that this summer I traveled all over the world for my foundation, bringing team sports to war-ravaged countries. I was missing out on sleep and still training the whole time, but I never got sick. I’ve got to think it’s because sugar wasn’t wearing me down."

Steve Nash is also a big fan of green tea, one of my personal favorites.  His meals in an average day (aside from a fiber breakfast cereal) generally follow Paleo qualities (lean chicken, fish, lots of vegetables, fruits, nuts, and seeds).  He even replaces the dairy milk at breakfast with rice milk or almond milk.

There's even a site dedicated to anecdotes around Nash's great nutritional habits and the effects they've had on NBA teammates like Shaq (now with the Cavs) and Jared Dudley.

Aside from being a two-time MVP,  one of my favorite pro athletes, and generally all-around cool guy, Steve Nash is yet another athlete who proves that you can compete at a high level, well into your thirties when you take command of what goes into your body.  More times than not, the better foods that go into your system, the better performances and overall health that will result.

Here's a Nike video where Steve Nash shows off his multi-sport skills:

"How do I get abs?"

"How do I get a six-pack?"

There's a dozen variations on this question, but "answers" to the above can be found all over the internet, usually followed  closely by an attempt to sell you something.

Well I'm not about to sell any product or supplement or workout book, but I do want to share what I've learned through trial and error (mostly error) that finally helped me locate my long-lost six-pack that had been hiding since I stopped playing football in 2001.

In Part I of this series - I'm going to focus on what I believe to be the MOST important part of "getting lean", and that's your diet.  As I've said before, I hate the term "diet" but I'll use it here just to keep things simple and uniform.  This is definitely going to be a simplistic approach to nutrition and subsequent fat loss, as there is a ton of more scientific research and context available online.  My hope is to make a complex process simple and easy to digest.

One of the best quotes I've ever read on this topic was in Runner's World magazine -

 "Great abs are made in the kitchen"

To this day, it's the best advice I've ever received with respect to shedding body fat and "getting lean".  Fitness experts Brad Pilon and Craig Ballantyne would say, you can't out-train a bad diet and they are correct.  Most bodybuilders or fitness pros or figure models would agree that the only difference in training for "muscle gain" vs "fat loss" is the way you eat.

Most "fat loss" eating plans are going to be structured with either low carbs, or carb cycling during the course of a week.  It's my opinion that it is nearly impossible to "get lean" while on a high carbohydrate diet.  Carb-cycling is essentially 2-3 days of low carbs (anywhere from 0.3-1g carb per pound of body weight). Followed by 1-2 days of higher carbs (1.5-2g per pound of body weight).

This does drift into the more complex habit of counting macronutrients, which isn't for everyone.  An easier way of ensuring that those carbs don't become "fat" is to make sure they are from complex sources (oatmeal, brown rice, sweet potatoes, and LOTS of vegetables with moderate fruit).  Higher GI (glycemic index) carbs like white breads, pastas, and white potatoes make for a messy carb load and you will rarely find any one with a desirable level of "leanness" that uses high GI/simple carb sources in their diet.

Another simple approach if one doesn't wish to go through the science of carb cycling (but still has a level of self-discipline) would be to adopt a Paleo approach to eating.  To stick with my goal of maintaining simplicity, a Paleo diet is built upon the approach that we stick to foods that were around during the Paleolithic age or the "Caveman" era.  This eating approach is built around lean meats, fish, vegetables, fruits, nuts, and seeds.  Grains and breads have no place on this diet.  Here's a tremendously simplistic but funny video that helps bottom line it all:

Mark Sisson is one of the proponents of this sort of high protein/moderate (healthy) fat/low carb approach.

There is plenty more to discuss on the topic of "eating to get lean", but I'll pause for now.  Next time I hope to delve into the way to structure workouts with an eye towards dropping winter body fat to get ready for the warm weather beach season.  Here's a quick preview and hint - if you're putting hours and hours on the treadmill at a slow pace, there's a reason you're probably not where you want to be.

More to come...