Archives for November 2010

On any given day, I get to work with people from all walks of life and help them move closer to their physique, health and fitness goals. I make it a point to empower my clients towards bringing into existence the image they have of themselves in their mind. I make an honest attempt to be the best part of their day.

Then I step outside of my bubble and into the real world, and what I see scares me.

I sit in bookstores and restaurants, overhearing the languid conversations of people who’ve grown weary of the mundane trappings of their lives; the marionette 9-5 that controls them. Put another way, people just aren’t very happy. I talk to friends who often ask me why I’m so happy and up beat all the time, and more or less my answer is always the same – what reason do I have not to be?

I’m surrounded by those who I care about.

I get to make a meaningful impact in the lives of people daily.

I simply love what I do.

When I started this blog, I wanted to create a look that conveyed both my personality and the intent of my writing, and thus Committed to Sexification on a Global Scale was born.

But this isn’t about me. It’s about you and the desperate plea that I’m sending your way.

I need you to be sexy.

I’m not talking about sexy in the physical sense here either, but feel free to go that route, too. To me, Sexification is a mindset that begins with an idea and then manifests itself in action. It’s all about taking the image of yourself, what you want to do and where you want to go in life, and bringing it into reality.  It’s about fighting the urge to hide your dreams and inner brilliance to remain among the average.

As you begin to separate yourself from the masses and do what you love, something interesting happens:

Your interactions with your friends, family and random encounters are much more positive.

Your outlook on the world will improve, and you’ll notice the general malaise surrounding your life begins to dissipate.

You become bolder, taking steps towards achieving what you previously thought was impossible.

And you inspire others to do the same.

When you’re no longer doing things because you’re afraid of what people will think of you if you don’tdo them, when you’re busy working towards that which really matters to you instead of simply passing the time, you begin to feel more alive – and this benefits everyone.

Random (aka Mega Ran) is an English teacher and hip-hop artist, blending his control over language and wordplay with his passion for video games. That’s Sexification.

Torya Blanchard quit her teaching job to opene a crêperie in her hometown of Detroit, bringing her love of everything French to a city known for Coney Island hotdogs and cars. That’s Sexification.

Myron Watkins makes a living from behind the lens, honing his craft while bringing the best out of his clients. That’s Sexification.

Jessica Jackley and Matt Flannery put the power into the people’s hands, creating a place where they can loan money via the internet to help fund entrepreneurs and small businesses around the world. Their current loan repayment rate is 98.99%. That’s Sexification.

Adam Baker and his family sold their possessions, paid off $18,000 in consumer debt, and began to create the life they wanted to live, leading by example and teaching others how to do the same. That’s Sexification.

This is by no means a complete list, but I just wanted to highlight the great things happen when you come alive with purpose.

Actually, the title of this post was a bit misleading because I don’t need you to be sexy at all. You need to be sexy for yourself, and for the world as well; it will become a better place for you having been in it.

What brings you to life and gives you a sense of purpose? What is something that you’ve always wanted to do but have held off on for some reason? What is one thing, no matter how small, that you can do today to bring yourself closer to that goal? Add a comment below – I look forward to hearing what you have to say.

Photo Credit: Glaciernps

Top o’ the ‘marnin’ to ya!

This post is dedicated to Cherie who sounded the battle horn and let me know she wanted to hear. Thanks again for the participation and hopefully you get a chance to take some helpful tips away from this post before you get started with your day!

I Got A Story To Tell

Back when I was in college, I had what could be considered the holy grail of on campus jobs – circulation assistant. This is just a fancy way of saying that when you wanted to check out tomes of sacred knowledge and wisdom from the library, you had to come see this guy first. Not only did this position allow me to meet some pretty cool people, but it gave me time to catch up on some pretty epic  reading, one of my favorites being You Are Going To Prison, which made sure that I never went.

Another perk was that we had a fridge in the back.

This was around the time that I started gobbling up everything that I could relating to nutrition and fitness, and one of the first dogmatic principles spoken down from the heavens is that you must eat every 2-3 hours or else you are forever banished to the land-o-fatness**. Clearly this scared me to death at this point in my life, so I suited up.  I cooked up my chicken breast. I steamed up my veggies. Forget bagging up my protein, I brought the whole damn tub! While we’re at it, why the hell should I use a shaker bottle to make them when I can annoy everyone and BRING THE ENTIRE BLENDER TO WORK?!

It hurts me to say it folks, but I was that dude.

If you saw me walking around campus during those bleak days, you would’ve thought that I was going to war with my huge bag filled to the brim with food rations, electronic gadgets and clanking bottles of ridiculousness. All for a 4 hour shift.

Right Idea, Wrong Application

I will say this about those days: I was pretty lean only because having all those meals handy kept me from walking over to the student union and snatching ice cream pops and french fries right out the mouths of hungry children and scarfing them down with reckless abandon, but I went about the process all wrong and made it a lot more difficult than it needed to be.

Tip #1 – Prepare a one or two I.S.H. meals

Preparing meals in advance can go a long way towards keeping you out of the gas station food isle lurking for inglorious foodstuff. I call these my “in case stuff happens” meals. If you know you’re going to be away from home base for a significant amount of time, it would be silly (and more expensive) to venture into the world and just leave your food choices to chance.

This is one of the most practical and easily implementable tips you’ll find, but many don’t like to do it because it takes planning in advance. Do you remember (hopefully) long ago when your parents used to ask if you had to go to the bathroom before you all left the house? Of course the answer was no, until 10 minutes later you were screaming for them to pull over before you drowned everyone in the car. It’s kinda like that, because you’ll be pissed at yourself for not taking the time to prep some meals after you find yourself eating the same crappy meals day in and day out instead of solving the issue before it became a problem.

Most work places these days have a fridge that you can store your most perishable food in, so make sure to take advantage of this. If this isn’t the case, you could also buy one of those precious lunch boxes that can hold an ice pack inside and keep your meats and such cool. I recommend going for the Sailor Moon lunch box.

Tip #2 – When in doubt, go for protein.

It’s hard to go wrong with this recommendation. Protein is the most satiating macronutrient around town and will help keep hunger at bay longer than the other macronutrients (in isolation, of course). Every Sunday I’m away from home for a good 12 hours, so I like to cook up some burgers and veggies and take them to work with me and crush them about halfway through my shift to keep myselfsatisfied for the next 6 hours or so.

Tip #3 – Shake it up

I love protein shakes like Donald Trump loves money. When I know I’m going to be on the go for awhile, they are the road dawgs of my tummy satisfaction, plus they’re pretty simple to make. Here is a good guide to go by in terms of getting the most bang for your buck:

Base liquid – Water or milk. (the less water, the thicker the shake. You can add ice too to sass it up).
Protein – Casein or Casein/Whey blend. (the more scoops, the more protein you will have and the thicker it’ll be).
Fruit – Blueberries, Strawberries, Bananas, Apples, etc. Pretty much whatever fruits fit your taste desires.
Extras – Veggies, nuts, olive oil (yeah, I’ve gone the olive oil route before – fun times).

I like to drop a good 2-3 scoops and 1lb of strawberries and blueberries. All the protein plus the carbs and fiber from the fruit help stave off hunger and sidestep the problem that most liquid nutrition runs into – it runs right through you with not much long term satiation.

Tip #4 – Fend for yourself

I like this one because once you do it and are successful, it takes all of the excuses out of not being able to eat right while on the move. Today you’re not packing a single item in your lunch box, because you’re living off the fat of the land, baby! Simply leave the house in the morning and plan to find all of your meals outside of it, doing the best that you can with the options available to you.

When you set out on this mission, your mind will automatically begin to search for options that satisfy your objectives, which are as follows:

– Contains mostly protein.
– Is minimally processed.
– Has some fiber in it.
– Grew out of the ground or something growing from the ground.
– Some dude in a lab didn’t make it.

Surely there are foods out there that meet these requirements. Cooked rotisserie chicken at the grocery store? Check. Slightly bruised banana on the counter at the gas station next to the honey buns? Check. Baked Potatoe from Wendy’s? Check.

I’m not part of the food gestapo, so I realize that some other food is gonna make its way into your mouth – and that’s completely fine. The goal here is to make the bulk of your intake fit meet the above requirements and not to sweat the small stuff. Some Cinnabon sticks won’t kill you, but I might if you don’t let me have a bite.

Heh. Just kidding.

But seriously, can I have a bite?

** – Please note the sarcasm in this sentence. You do NOT need to eat every 2-3 hours to achieve your body composition goals.

What strategies do you all use to eat well while going about your daily business? Did I leave out something that you’ve found useful and would like to share? Leave a comment in the comment section and I’ll see you there!

Photo Credit: ElDave

And here I thought nobody cared about my sexy.

This post goes out to Andrew who heeded the call in my last post and told me what he wanted to read about, so here is where I deliver on the goods. Thanks for the suggestion, and I hope you can take something away from this post.

The Diet

I’ll be honest and say that I hate dieting with a passion because it gets in the way of me being a glutton, so it is always my goal to get it over with as fast as humanly possible. On that front, I like to kick off the initial 2 weeks with a protein sparing modified fast to “get my mind right” so to speak.

In order to accomplish this, I eat about 250g protein,  1-2lbs of broccoli, fish oil and a multivitamin everyday during that time period. I keep my protein sources as lean as I can and as a result my caloric intake tends to hover between 1200 and 1300 calories per day. The only reason I’m able to stay sane with such a low level of intake is by using intermittent fasting and eating 2 relatively large and satisfying meals a day. Well, that and by watching The Chappelle Show.

After that initial 2 weeks, I have a 2 day refeed where everything else about my diet remains the same, but I take in between 500 and 600g of carbohydrate to reverse all the wonky business that tends to happen when dieting down using such an extreme deficit. After those 2 days, I eat at my new maintenance level for a week and then move into a more moderate deficit for the long haul.

The Training

As I spoke about in my training for fat loss video, I love to lift heavy when on a diet for several reasons:

1) Lifting heavy gives your body a reason to hold on to the muscle that you have because you’re demonstrating through your training that you need to keep it around.

2) I’d rather make sweet, sweet love to Janet Reno than be in the gym longer than 45 min to an hour, so by lifting as heavy as I do it forces me to cut my volume back significantly, which does wonderful things in terms of recovery from session to session.

I usually train only 2x a week during the initial 2 week break in phase, but occasionally bump it up to 3x when I’m eating a bit more, but in the end it all depends on my mood really. I believe in letting the diet take care of the majority of the fat loss while I go about with my daily living.

Here are my workouts from last week to give you an idea as to how I train:

Other than that, the only other “training” I do is walking for an hour a few times a week, and I only do that so I can burn a few more calories while catching up with my favorite podcasts that I otherwise might not have time for. Kevin Smith and the Smodcast network making walking in the nipply east coast weather a pleasantly dope experience.

The Progress

I try to keep it as simple as possible when it comes to measuring my progress. I used to be all about the body fat testing via skin calipers, but the margin of error can be pretty high depending on how good the person measuring it is, and even then it’s not all that accurate. These days I use my strength levels and pictures as measures of my success and here is why.

Since I’m not participating in any kind of weight class related sport, pictures are the simplest way to see if I’m leaning out or not. You can blame the lack of scale progress on water weight and glycogen levels all you want, but you can’t hide the sexy from the camera. Also, if my strength levels are staying where they are or improving, that is a pretty good indicator that I’m not losing any muscle. If the numbers on my main lifts drop more than 5%, I increase my training day intake by 10% and see how that helps the situation.

The Length

My goal is to end up at 180lbs and He-Man ripped by May 2011, which gives me 6 months to make it happen. This is actually going to be my longest dieting stint ever, so I’m not sure exactly how long it’ll take me. I’ll be conservative in my projections and say that after the 1st month I’ll settle in and only lose 1 lb a week, so at a starting weight of 200 lbs that puts me right on target to hit my goal in May.

So there you have it folks, my approach to taking my body from meh to mythical status. What are your current goals? How are you attacking them? Let me know in the comment section below!

Photo Credit: Popculturegeek

October was the biggest month in the history of this blog in terms of readership, so I want to take the time to thank you all for playing such a huge role in that success.

Who am I kidding – thank you for being entirely responsible for making this happen.

As always, this site is all about giving you practical information that you can put to use immediately. Going forward, I want to make sure that I am on track and giving you exactly what you want, but for that I will need your help.

What do you want to read about?

There is no wrong or insane topic. If you want to read about pancakes (seriously, someone drop that as a suggestion so I can have an excuse to do it), then so be it!

Leave your suggestion in the comment section below and I will return the favor by blessing you with the most epic of internet high fives as well as do more research into said topic – this is a win/win situation here.

Photo Credit: oddsock

“If you love life, don’t waste time, for time is what life is made up of.”
-Bruce Lee

Sexification Note: This has been a topic that I’ve been focusing on a lot lately as I take on more and more responsibilities and it has been extremely helpful. Hopefully you walk away with the same feeling of awesomeness and empowerment that I did after writing it.

Let me paint a picture for you. Its 12am on a Saturday morning, and I’m just finishing up a pre-bed meal of meat, meat and more meat. It is glorious. I turn on the TV, completely intending for it to be a brief channel surfing session before giving in to my bed’s sweet embrace. That is, until I hear a loud, booming voice ask the question that sends my night spinning into an entirely different direction – can you freeze your farts and smell them later?

My interest is officially piqued.

5 hours later, not only have I figured out the salary range of a pimp, but I’ve also watched the triforce of horrible movies – Ernest Goes To Jail, Ernest Goes To Camp & Ernest Scared Stupid. It is now 5am. I have work at 9. The P.O.N.R. has been passed (point of no return – for those not in the know), so any amount of sleep that I get will only serve to piss me off. My only choice is to stay awake and power through my work day like the champ that I am. Did I also mention that it was Squatin’ Saturday? Needless to say, I ditched that workout for a 360 min static hold in my bed. I’m sure you’re wondering by now what the heck the point of that story was, so I said all of that to say this – if you’re failing to manage your time effectively, then you’re seriously limiting your personal growth potential.

I’m willing to bet that there isn’t one of us who hasn’t at some point wished that there were more than 24 hours in a day. Just imagine the possibilities! The difference between us and the people who are most successful in their field is that many of us act like we live in fantasy land where time is infinite. I know that there have been times where I’ve looked at what I wanted to accomplish, and what I actually did accomplish and threw up my hands in defeat, wishing that some magical troll would drop a few extra hours of time into my lap. I consider myself a logical man, and while I know this wont happen, that doesn’t stop me from often using my time in such a way that you’d actually believe that I thought those extra few hours were on their way. Successful people, on the other hand, simply accept the reality that there is a finite amount of time in the day, and time will only appear as it is created by them. Luckily for us, time management, like any other skill, can be learned if we simply study and apply the habits of those who have been successful in the same pursuit.

You Gotta Get Up To Get Down

The old adage “The early bird catches the worm” is false. Waking up early gives the person a head start in terms of seizing the day, but if they wake up early and do nothing then they’re just getting less sleep for no good reason. Nevertheless, it highlights a very important lesson – waking up early is quite possibly one of the simplest things that we can do in order to maximize our output from a time management perspective, yet a lot of people tend to skip right over this.

Why is that? Well, mainly because it requires effort to do, but I’m sure there are a host of other reasons out there. In order to get up early, you have to go to bed earlier, but the sad truth is that most folks just aren’t willing to make that necessary sacrifice. A lot of people claim that they don’t have time to workout, or have time to cook meals or have time to pursue the goals that they have been putting off for years, but 9 times out of 10 that is just a lie dressed up in truth’s clothing. If your fridge looks like Alanis Morissette in her “Thank You” video, yet you hit the level cap in World of Warcraft in 1 week, don’t say that you don’t have time to do anything because you do – you just chose to do something else with it.

Everyone has the exact same amount of time at their disposal over the course of the day, but where successful people differ from the masses is how they make use of it. In his book Time Power, Brian Tracy highlights the importance of what he coins the “golden hour.” What the golden hour entails is simply waking up an hour or so earlier than you usually do, and working without any interruptions for that entire hour. Now, an hour of working might not seem like a significant amount of time, but think of the long term potential – that’s 7 hours a week, 28-31 hours a month, 365 hours a year that came into existence simply because you committed to making it a habit to wake up one hour earlier.

Is it hard? It can be; permanent change is hard, and anyone who says that it isn’t probably hasn’t done it before. But take solace and find inspiration in the fact that successful people all around the world are doing just that every day – and you can too.

Eric Cressey – 6:30 to 7am.

Brian St. Pierre – 5:30 to 6:45am.

Tony Gentilcore -6:30 to 7am.

Michael Boyle – 5:30am.

Leigh Peele – 5am to 12pm.

JC – 5am.

Krista Schaus – 5:30 to 7am, depending on the time of year.

Ross Enamait – 4:30 to 5am.

Many of the people on this list have children, and all are entrepreneurs with a very busy workload. I’m sure that they would love to get a few more hours of sleep, but do they complain about it? Quite the opposite – they embrace it, learn to love it, and thrive because of it. These people aren’t just waking up early for the sake of doing so – they’re actively using this time to get after it, whether it is answering emails, writing blog posts or what have you.  I realize that such a drastic change to one’s lifestyle can be difficult, so just try it out a few days each week and see how much more productive you become.

Synchronize

During my internship at Cressey Performance, I got a chance to see some serious time management experts at work. Take Eric Cressey for example – the guy is a machine. I’ve watched him bang out a heavy set of deadlifts and then for the rest interval head into the office and knock out a quick blog post like it was nothing at all. All of the staff can be found frequently listening to audio books during their commute to and from work, with Brian going as far as to purchase Dragon Naturally Speaking, which is a voice recognition software that allows him to create blog content while on the road – talk about dedication! So what’s the take home point here? Try to make the best use of your time by combining tasks together in order to accomplish more in less time. Cleaning the house? That would be a good time to catch up on some phone calls that you’ve been meaning to make. Cooking dinner? You can always watch an educational DVD while you wait. Stuck in the airport during a layover? Brainstorm some creative ideas. Sitting on the toilet? What a perfect time to read a book! The possibilities are almost endless – use your imagination and see what tasks you can combine to free up some additional time during your days.

Operation: Distraction

How many times have you been in the zone on a particular day – like the Neo of getting things done – only to later derail your train of awesomeness upon the rocks of Facebook or some other distraction? One minute the sun is up and you’re plowing through work, and the next minute its Wesley Snipes dark outside, infomercials are all over the TV, and you’re wondering where the hell your day went. We’re all guilty of this happening, which is completely fine, but it’s when those brief distraction turns into hours of not getting anything done that it can start to become a problem. While I’m not successful by any means yet, one way that I’ve found to help eliminate this problem is to schedule my distractions. When you know that your reward for a hard day’s work is right around the corner it’s easier to continue working diligently until that time arrives. Likewise, when your scheduled time is over, it’s also that much easier to get back into the groove of things now that you’ve imposed limits on yourself.

Personally, I like to schedule an hour of watching the Chappelle Show or playing some multiplayer in Uncharted 2 as my end of the day distraction, but even then I use that time to get in some static stretching or mobility work.

Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep

How would you like to start every morning with a laser-like focus, knowing exactly what your tasks were for the day as soon as you woke up? Well you can, by doing as Brian Tracy suggests and simply planning your next day out before you go to bed. By doing so, your mind is actively at work figuring out solutions to the next day’s tasks and problems, so that when you wake up in the morning you are in ultimate G.S.D. mode, checking task after task off with amazing efficiency. Without such a list, the odds of you waking up and winging it for the entire day are increased by a ridiculous amount. So, no matter how you make the list, whether you do it in bed or while standing on top of your roof, basking in the glorious moonlight, just make sure it gets done.

Neo: What are you trying to tell me? That I can create time magically out of thin air?

Morpheus: No, Neo. I’m trying to tell you that when you’re ready, you won’t have to.

That’s an exact quote from The Matrix. I didn’t change a thing. Nope, not me.