Excerpt
Men's Health Killing Fat
1
The Muddle Clears Here
Thermodynamics, Science, and a Secret
You want to lose fat. You want to get it off fast. And you want it to stay off permanently, right?
I hear you. Over the last fifty years, I’ve tested, modified, retested, added and subtracted, and finally developed a program that’s designed to deliver those results.
With a practical understanding of thermodynamics, you’ll learn how to bomb, blast, and finally kill your excess body fat.
The program starts with a two-week segment, with women consuming 1,400 calories a day and men consuming 1,600 calories a day. Fourteen days can make a huge difference in the way your body feels and looks. You need focus and compliance to do what the following folks did in only two weeks.
14 Pounds or More of Fat Loss in 14 Days
Bob Smith: 19 pounds
Larry Freedman: 17.75 pounds
Angel Rodriguez: 16.5 pounds
Javier Woody: 15.25 pounds
Storm Roberts: 15 pounds
Allison Spratt: 14.25 pounds
Travis Haystay: 14 pounds
You’re going to meet all these folks and become familiar with their success stories in Killing Fat.
My objective for you is to get a flying start with a significant bang, to get rid of up to a pound of unneeded fat a day—just as these individuals did.
To master this undertaking requires that you harness the science of thermodynamics. Helping you grasp thermodynamics merits a brief examination of some of the teachings of Albert Einstein and Carl Sagan.
Albert Einstein and Thermodynamics
Albert Einstein was the most influential physicist of the twentieth century. He was born in Germany in 1879 and died in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1955. In 1905, he earned a PhD from the University of Zurich, and in that same year he published four groundbreaking research papers, which brought him great notoriety in the academic world.
Einstein became a professor at the University of Bern and then moved to the University of Prague for two years, and finally back to the University of Zurich, where he became a full professor. The subjects he taught were analytical mechanics and thermodynamics. For a number of years, Einstein directed much of his attention to thermodynamics and helped refine the first law of thermodynamics. All this helped him win the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics.
The first law of thermodynamics states that energy can be transformed, but cannot be created or destroyed. Energy is safeguarded, maintained, and conserved over time. Einstein’s famous E = mc2 is still uncontestable in the confirmation of the law of conservation of energy.
In scientific research, there are guesses, theories, and hypotheses that must be tested, analyzed, rejected, retested, reanalyzed, accepted, and then repeated before that hypothesis is said to be proved. Then, after many years—and much replication—that long-standing proof may be recognized as a law. A law, therefore, represents an unwavering relationship of events under a specific set of conditions.
Over one hundred years ago, Einstein and other scientists authenticated and verified the law of conservation of energy. In other words, energy, fat, heat, and calories are conserved over time. And now we’re using this principle to transfer body fat.
Transferring Body Fat by Albert Einstein
Fat-loss knowledge and practices must be established by examining the physics of heat and the transfer of it. Transfers, according to any thermodynamic primer, begin with the sun.
Animals and humans have no way to capture the sun’s energy directly. But plants can trap solar energy by using it to combine carbon dioxide and water. The product of this combination is a hydrated carbon (carbohydrate). This basic science is as follows:
Plants grow by sun + air + soil + water.
Animals grow by consuming plants.
Humans grow by eating plants (carbohydrates) and animals (proteins and fats).
Carbohydrates, proteins, and fats supply units of heat energy called calories.
Calories are stored in the body primarily in fat cells.
Humans use fat calories and transfer heat from them through their skin, urine, and exhaled carbon dioxide to plants, animals, and the environment.
Once you understand the above relationship, the following circular applications are appropriate:
Heat = Calories = Fat = Energy = Heat
For fat loss: Heat out must be more than heat in.
For fat stabilization: Heat out must be equal to heat in.
For fat gain: Heat out must be less than heat in.
Thank You, Dr. Einstein and Other Scientists
The clarity of Einstein’s equations is powerful. Thermodynamics works. It applies in California, New York, Florida, and Nebraska. It succeeds in Mexico, Europe, Africa, and China. It functions on the moon, Mars, and Planet X. But within that simplicity, there are aspects that must be considered and applied.
Back in 1854, Lord Kelvin—and later other scientists, including William Rankine, Max Planck, Einstein, and E. A. Guggenheim—proved that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transferred. Once again, this is known as the first law of thermodynamics. In other words, you can’t really lose any of those four interchangeable concepts—heat, calories, fat, and energy—you can only transfer them. As such, you’ll notice that throughout this book I use transfer and lose to mean the same thing.
For transfer to make complete sense, the word calorie needs defining.
Calorie Defined
Energy from food as well as activity is typically measured as heat and expressed as calories. A calorie (kilocalorie is actually the more appropriate term) is the amount of heat it takes to raise the temperature of 1 liter of water by 1 degree centigrade. To help you visualize this, 100 calories would raise the temperature of 1 liter (approximately 1 quart) of water from freezing to boiling. A calorie, therefore, is a unit of temperature measure. It is used to express the energy value of food or the energy required by the body to perform a given task.
The calories contained in the vast majority of the food supply sold within the United States have been determined by scientific studies and are based on:
1 gram of carbohydrate = 4 calories
1 gram of fat = 9 calories
1 gram of protein = 4 calories
Millions of foods have been calculated and labeled. For example:
1 large egg = 92 calories
1 medium apple = 93 calories
4 Chick-fil-A Chick-n-Strips = 470 calories
Wendy’s Chocolate Frosty = 340 calories
Common physical activities have also been tested in heat-sensing chambers. For example, a 180-pound man would burn the following calories in one hour of:
Cycling (10 mph) = 327 calories
Weight training = 490 calories
Basketball, shooting baskets = 368 calories
Playing tennis = 572 calories
One ounce of fat on your body contains 219 calories. Sixteen ounces, or 1 pound, supplies 3,500 calories of heat energy.
The circular science of heat = calories = fat = energy = heat applies equally to intake and output.
The standard thermodynamic principle of getting rid of fat is to cut calories, produce energy, burn fat, and transfer heat to the environment. Then repeat and transfer again and again.
Killing Fat Adds to the Transfer
You might be wondering exactly where the fat goes when it leaves your body. As we’ve discussed, when you lose fat, you transfer the energy stored in fat cells out of your body and into the environment.
A slightly different response can be found in the December 16, 2014, issue of the British Medical Journal. In a study of how energy is metabolized, researchers Ruben Meerman and Andrew Brown traced the pathways of atoms of energy exiting the body. The complete oxidation of a single triglyceride molecule involves many enzymes and biochemical steps, but after lengthy calculations, Meerman and Brown concluded that triglycerides stored in fat cells are primarily excreted by the lungs through respiration. Stored fat is unlocked through chemical reactions to power your body, including during exercise, and it exits the body in your exhaled breath.
According to Meerman and Brown, when a person loses 20 pounds of fat (triglycerides), 16.8 pounds are exhaled as warm carbon dioxide (CO2), and the remaining 3.2 pounds are excreted as warm water (H2O), primarily in the urine and sweat. But, the researchers cautioned, body fat does not shrink quickly.
Applying the standard reduced-calorie-eating/increased-calorie-burn exercising formula, they recommend 1 pound of fat loss per week. Thus, it would take twenty weeks for the average person to lose 20 pounds of fat.
On the other hand, my Killing Fat formula speeds up the fat-loss process to the degree that many of my test panelists lose an average of 4 pounds of fat each week, which equates to 32 pounds of fat loss in eight weeks. That’s four times the fat loss in 40 percent of the time suggested by Meerman and Brown.
To improve the calories-in and calories-out processes, the Killing Fat program incorporates the following practices:
• A simple carbohydrate-rich eating plan that gradually decreases calories after each two-week segment. A key guideline is to eat six small meals per day.
• Two 30-minute strength-training workouts per week that involve a new negative-accentuated technique called 30–10–30. Each recommended exercise is performed with a slow 30-second lowering, followed by 10 faster-speed repetitions, followed by a final 30-second lowering. This negative-accentuated style makes a deeper inroad into your body’s starting strength, which in turn triggers the release of at least six hormones that help with fat loss and muscle gain.
• Superhydration (sipping 1 gallon of ice-cold water continuously throughout the day) to accelerate calorie burn and assist fat loss.
• Heat and cold transfer, brown fat reconditioning, the cold plunge, and extra rest and sleep.
If you want to get started immediately on the initial two-week segment, you can turn to chapter 10 and review the important steps you should take before you begin. But I’d rather see you take a little time and familiarize yourself with the science behind the Killing Fat program in parts II and IV.
Carl Sagan and Science
Carl Sagan was born in 1934 and died in 1996. Early on, Sagan developed a keen sense of both wonder and skepticism—which are necessary for the cohabiting modes of thought that are central to the scientific method.
Sagan was valedictorian of his New Jersey high school at age sixteen. He continued his education at the University of Chicago, where he earned four degrees, including a PhD in astronomy and astrophysics.
In 1980 Sagan cowrote and narrated Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, a thirteen-part PBS television series. This show became the most widely watched series in the history of public television and was seen by at least five hundred million people across sixty different countries. His bestselling book Cosmos was published to accompany the series.
Sagan frequently wrote about people’s vulnerability toward quackery and hoodwink—not only in the subject of outer space and all its buzz—but also in the marketing of fat-loss information. He feared that in the future, more and more people were going to slide, almost without noticing, back into ancient times of mental and physical ignorance and superstition.
“Modern science must supply answers,” Sagan believed. “If we’ve been bamboozled long enough”—which directly applies to the bestselling low-carbohydrate eating plans dating back to the publication of Calories Don’t Count in 1961 and continuing into 2018 with diets like South Beach, Atkins, paleo, and ketogenic—“we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle.” In other words, the same-old misleading, not-scientific information, if it is repeated for forty years by different authors under new titles, becomes the new truth.
As a nation, 75 percent of us are overweight, a figure that’s been stable for the last ten years. It’s obvious that the millions of antiscientific weight loss books sold each year are not a positive contribution to our nation’s leanness. We must learn, in our book selections, how to separate deep truths from deep nonsense.
Sagan noted that the simplest definition of science is “the search for rules.” He believed that people who looked at everyday experiences as a muddled jumble of events with no predictability and no regularity were in grave danger. The vast universe that Sagan described in his books and videos belonged to people whose lives were governed by principles, rules, and guidelines.
Sagan understood the first law of thermodynamics . . . and so do I.
Clearing the Muddle
While I don’t have all the laws about fat loss figured out, I have plenty of experience in supervising groups of overfat men and women as they strive to achieve leaner, stronger bodies. In the process of doing that for fifty years, I’ve assembled meaningful guidelines related to losing fat, building muscular size and strength, and the maintenance of both.
Thermodynamics remains the inadequately told and poorly accepted principle for losing fat. The scientifically proven key to lasting success is to fire up the body and not shut it down. It’s important to understand that there’s a difference between weight loss and fat loss. Thermodynamics is concerned with fat and transfer.
Remember, fat loss has to involve thermodynamics, and all calories count. When you eliminate carbohydrates in your diet, the fats and proteins you eat in their place do not have special qualities that cause faster fat loss. There is no hard-core scientific evidence to support the notion that the source of the calorie—not the calorie itself—is the key factor in becoming leaner. Low-carbohydrate dieting is not based on any law.
On the other hand, low-calorie dieting is based primarily on the first law of thermodynamics.
“I Feel Like a Man with a Brand-New Body”
One person who took thermodynamics, fat, and transfer personally was Larry Freedman. Freedman was a member of the Sheriff’s Office of Alachua County, Florida, when I met him. Freedman was the heaviest trainee in his group of ten adults. He weighed 306 pounds and was 5 feet 11 inches tall, with a waist measurement of 52.625 inches. In spite of his mass, Freedman was the most motivated in his group.
At that time, Freedman dramatically shattered the individual record for fat loss. During the first six weeks, he lost 52.75 pounds of fat. Eighteen weeks (or three back-to-back six-week programs) later, Freedman was down 116.5 pounds. See Larry’s photos on page 10.
He also lost 15.5 inches off his waist, 11.125 inches off his hips, and 15.375 inches off his thighs. Such decreases made huge positive differences in his mental and physical health, as well as his social life.
“The thermodynamics and the science behind the program,” Freedman said, “are what sealed the deal for me. I knew science would not let me down, and it didn’t.
“I feel like a man with a brand-new body.”
Wouldn’t you like to be included in Larry Freedman’s exclusive group of ecstatic people who’ve lost at least 14 pounds in fourteen days?
Isn’t it time you embraced thermodynamics and science? They can be your tickets to a brand-new body.
The Secret Revealed
April 4, 2018: “Dr. Darden, compared to the other published studies on fat loss, why do your subjects get significantly better results?” asked James Fisher, PhD, a British exercise physiologist from Southampton Solent University. This well-read man had just examined Larry Freedman’s before-and-after pictures and measurements, as well as others from my listing on page 12.
Then he asked: “What’s your secret?”
I paused briefly and replied, “There’s no secret. It’s all based on science and the correct application of it.”
This young physiologist was frustrated and seemed to feel somewhat snubbed by my answer. “There must be an unrecognized factor in your research,” Fisher said, shaking his head.
