Engineering the Perfect Body, Part 3: Body Weight

With every year that passes in the US, obesity is becoming a bigger problem (pun intended). If you listen to health experts and diet gurus, you might get the impression that this problem is simply a matter of willpower: You have to stop eating all the delicious foods that you see around you and get off your butt more. But the real problem is much more complicated than that.

This post has been moved over to my Mayo's Mind blog. Click on the link below to read the rest of this post.

Engineering the Perfect Body, Part 3: Body Weight

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Engineering the Perfect Body, Part 2: Waist Measurements

In my previous post, I tried to convince you that if you want to have good health and fitness today, as well as in your 80s and 90s, then you should immediately start building your Spartan body. I also argued that if you eat a good diet and exercise, building and maintaining this new body would be pretty easy. But how do you know that all of your changes are working?

Without blood tests, you can't see many of the indicators of poor health (e.g., blood cholesterol, glucose, and cortisol tests). However, there are visual indicators that represent your body's overall degree of dysfunction. The most reliable (and obvious) is a growing waistline and how that waistline relates to your height and hips.

This post has been moved over to my Mayo's Mind blog. Click on the link below to read the rest of this post.

Engineering the Perfect Body, Part 2: Waist Measurements

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Engineering the Perfect Body, Part1: Intro

If you have been convinced that today is the day that you turn your life around by cleaning up your diet and lifestyle, committed to the idea of building a better body and improving your PT score, then why not strive for some ideals. As I've alluded to in other posts, I'm a big fan of ideals because they give goals to shoot for while also providing me with useful feedback on how far I've traveled. And when it comes to body ideals, I tend to look to the Spartans and Greeks.

"But," you say, "it seems next to impossible to build an idealized body, requiring a legion of personal trainers, dietitians, and nannies to keep me from sitting on my butt and overeating."

While it does seem very difficult to build an athletic and beautiful body today, nothing could be farther from the truth. If you ignore most of the popular "health" advice currently in circulation and concentrate on good science, then building the body of your dreams is seriously easy. In fact, if you provide it with the right stimulus, your body naturally wants to build this idealized body.

This post has been moved to my Mayo's Mind blog. Please follow the link below to read the rest of this post.

Engineering the Perfect Body, Part 1: Intro

Read more ...