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Newsletter - Bodybuilding & Fitness Secrets (BFS) #17 July 2002 By Tom Venuto, CSCS 2001 NPC Natural Eastern Classic Middlweight Champ Editorial: A BIG goal for January 2003... Question of the Month: How do I gain muscle without gaining fat? Article of the Month: Could it be true? Does Coffee make you fat? Monthly Motivator: Thought and purpose - Powerful motivation from Bob Proctor ------------------------------------------------------------------------- EDITORIAL ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dear Friend and Subscriber, This is the 17th issue of Bodybuilding and Fitness Secrets (BFS) And it's going out to 4357 subscribers. I've continued to be amazed by the growth of Fitness Renaissance and the BFS E-Zine over the past year and would like to thank you for your support. The number of subscribers has doubled since January and my goal is double that number again by January 2003 and reach 8,000 subscribers!...but I need your help to do it. Word of mouth is the only way we can grow because this newsletter is 100% opt-in and I never send out unsolicited e-mail. I have some very important messages to share and I want to share them with as many people as possible. I would be very grateful if you would help us reach this goal of 8,000 subscribers by January. As long as I continue to receive your support, this newsletter and the Fitness Renaissance website will continue to grow and continue to be free. If you've applied the fat burning and muscle building strategies found in these web pages and they've worked for you... if the motivational messages I've provided have inspired you... if this free newsletter has helped you in any way... would you forward this issue to a friend and recommend that they subscribe? Would you do it today? Many thanks, Your Friend, Tom Venuto, "The Honest Fitness Coach" tvenuto@fitren.com www.fitren.com www.tomvenuto.com P.S. If you've been waiting for the release of the New fat-burning system, you'll be receiving a separate e-mail shortly with all the details. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- NEW QUESTION OF THE MONTH ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dear Tom, I'm 43 years old, on a muscle gaining program, training three days per week, and lifting heavy (at least for me). I'm staying in the 5-8 rep range, resting three minutes after each working set. I weigh 161 pounds. I've lost 17 pounds using the Body for Life program and my body fat got down to about 14%. After losing the excess fat, I switched to a program for building muscle mass. The problem is, I've gained a little over an inch on my waistline on the mass building program. What calorie range should I shoot for to gain muscle mass without gaining much body fat? (by the way, I'm not doing any cardio at this point). For the answer, click here: http://www.fitren.com/res3ask.cfm?compid=18&qaid=90 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- ARTICLE OF THE MONTH ------------------------------------------------------------------------- COULD IT BE TRUE? DOES COFFEE MAKE YOU FAT? I almost broke out in tears when I heard the news a few months ago: Coffee impairs insulin sensitivity. Or so the new studies say. I'll explain what that means in a minute... You see, my problem with this decidedly bad news is, I don't just like coffee...I love coffee... ..I'M A COFFEE FANATIC! .... JAVA JUNKIE! .......STARBUCKAHOLIC! All the coffee fanatic's paraphernalia? Got it! Coffee bean grinder...check Heavy-duty steel insulated thermos...check Spillage-proof travel mug with rotating lock-top and sip hole...check Electric mug warmer...check Starbucks mega size mug...check (I also have a white coffee mug that says "FUEL" in big black stencil letters that someone gave me as a gift. I like that one - it's my favorite) I even have the Starbucks Barista Aroma coffee maker... I set the timer for 5:45 am so when my alarm goes off at 6:00 am every morning my coffee is ready and the fragrance of Sumatra blend or Ethiopian Sidamo wafts through my apartment. Although I'm usually in a somnambulistic stupor with my eyelids glued shut when the alarm sounds, I somehow manage to remove my leaden body from my comfy bed and do the zombie shuffle through the dark following that oh so sweet smell. I then pour some of that black gold into my super-insulated temperature controlled deluxe Starbucks coffee thermos and settle in at the kitchen table with a good book, sipping my delicious hot cup of brew, gleefully watching the steam rise into the air as my eyelids become lighter and I slowly start coming to life.... Ahhhhhhh coffee! Oh...sorry. I got a little excited thinking about it. Anyway... Juan Valdez and I are buddies; we go way back... And Voltaire is my hero. If you're not the literary type, you might not recognize the name. Voltaire was an 18th century French philosopher and novelist who wrote, among other works, Candide. Legend has it that Voltaire drank 50 cups of coffee a day! He lived to a ripe old age and was quite a prolific dude, writing all those books and letters. I always figured if all that java was good for him, it was good for me, being that I have books, articles and newsletters to write too. Actually, I never came close to equaling Voltaire's reputed voracious consumption. On a "bad" day I've been known to chug three to five cups, but all I really need is two: my morning coffee and my pre lifting coffee... it's kind of a ritual for me. By the way, Voltaire had it all figured out, because I read in a nutrition textbook that a dose greater than ten grams of caffeine in a day (10,000 milligrams) can kill you, and with about 200 mgs in a large, strong cup, 50 cups is exactly 10,000 milligrams. So you see - Mr. Voltaire knew his limits. But seriously, back to what I was saying... For a while the "experts" were telling us coffee helped us burn fat.... Multiple studies showed that caffeine has "lipolytic" (fat burning) effects. That's probably why caffeine-laden guarana is included in so many "fat burning" supplements (aside from the fact that it amplifies the effects of ephedrine). Not that drinking a cup of coffee would make rolls of fat melt away or anything, but it was shown to make your levels of circulating free fatty acids go up - for whatever that's worth. Other reported ergogenic benefits of caffeine included: * Increased time before fatigue occurs * Preserved muscle glycogen * Improved mental focus and concentration * Decreased reaction time (sharper reflexes) * Stimulant effect- it wakes you up and makes you more alert It's these benefits that prompt athletes to use caffeine for improving their performance. Because caffeine IS a drug however, the International Olympic Committee has put caffeine on its list of banned substances in doses over 12 mcg./ml. Although there have been some caffeine health warnings in the past - everything from osteoporosis to cancer - none of them panned out with conclusive, concrete evidence. Now some experts are telling us again coffee is bad for us and can literally make us fat. You might be wondering, if coffee is almost calorie free (regular coffee that is, not the whipped cream covered, mocha-frocha frappa-cappa stuff...) then how could coffee possibly make you fat? Well, it has to do with insulin sensitivity. What the heck is insulin sensitivity, you ask? Good question - let me explain. Insulin is a hormone released by your pancreas - primarily when you eat carbohydrates. When the carbohydrates are digested and enter your bloodstream as glucose (blood sugar), your body needs a way to get the glucose into the cells (to "dispose of" the glucose). Enter insulin. Insulin literally takes glucose by the hand and leads it into the cells - it's a carrier. Without insulin, sugar continues to build up in the blood to dangerous levels - that's known as diabetes. When insulin sensitivity decreases, it means that insulin is knocking on the cell door but the muscle cell is ignoring it and won't let the sugar in (the cell is "being insensitive"). So blood sugar continues to rise and the pancreas releases even more insulin to handle the rising tide of blood sugar. Now you have a ton of insulin piling up in the "hallway" outside the muscle cell door. The end result is abnormally elevated insulin levels and high blood glucose. Which, coincidentally, is similar to a diabetic condition. Insulin sensitivity and insulin resistance are becoming buzzwords in bodybuilding and fitness circles these days because high insulin levels in the blood are to linked to increased fat storage. You see, insulin is a storage hormone, helping not only sugar get into the cells, but fat and amino acids too. It also prevents fat that's in storage from being released. Basically, high insulin levels mean your body is in "storage mode," pushing nutrients into cells, (including fat cells!). Although some studies revealed the caffeine - insulin sensitivity connection years ago, it's become a hot topic again in fitness circles because another much-publicized study was released in February confirming these findings. When I first heard this news, naturally, because of my "love affair" with my daily cup or two of Joe, I immediately resisted the idea and defended my habit. I said, "nahhhh, no way could coffee affect body composition - how could it? Maybe it does have some effect on blood sugar, and there might be some health implications for certain people, but literally make you fat? Nahhhh!" I've always had about two cups a day before every competition I've ever entered and I got ABS-olutley ripped - as lean as I wanted to be (like 4% body fat or so). In fact, I always felt that the pre-workout jolt helped my training, thereby improving my physique. That's why it seemed ridiculous to even suggest that caffeine "makes you fat." But me being the objective and open-minded one that I am, I decided to accept the possibility, investigate a little further and gather all the facts before jumping to any conclusions. After doing some sleuthing around, I discovered that there have been quite a few studies showing that caffeine affects insulin sensitivity and blood glucose disposal. In the recent Diabetes Care study (2002 Keijzers, GB, et al 25:2, 364-369), it was suggested that caffeine decreased insulin sensitivity even in healthy individuals. In that study, caffeine reduced insulin sensitivity by 15%. It was theorized that the decrease in insulin sensitivity could occur because the drug increases levels of free fatty acids, as well as the hormone epinephrine. Almost a dozen other studies produced similar findings.