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The Non-Surgical Alternative To Liposuction

July 12th, 2008    Subscribe To Our Feed

Liposuction has become a popular method of removing excess fat - especially from the stomach area. However many people prefer the non-surgical alternative to liposuction and that can be found in Tom Ventuo’s highly successful methods of weight reduction. Here’s Tom’s latest article on the non-surgical alternative to liposuction…

How I Got “Ripped” Abs For The Very First Time
By Tom Venuto, NSCA-CPT, CSCS
www.BurnTheFat.com

I’ll never forget the very first time I got ripped, how I did it and how it felt. I’ve never told this entire story before or widely published my early photos either. Winning first place and seeing my abs the first time was sweet redemption. But before that, it was a story of desperation…

I started lifting weights for bodybuilding when I was 14 years old, but I never had ripped abs until I was 20. I endured six years of frustration and embarrassment. Being a teenager is hard enough, but imagine how I felt being a self-proclaimed bodybuilder, with no abs or muscle definition to show for it. Imagine what it was like in swimming class or when we played basketball in gym class and I prayed to be called out for “shirts” and not ‘”skins” because I didn’t want any one seeing my “man-boobs” and ab flab jiggling all over the court.

Oh, I had muscle. I started gaining muscle from the moment I picked up a barbell. I got strong too. I was benching 315 at age 18. But even after four years of successful strength training, I still hadn’t figured out this getting ripped thing. Muscle isn’t very attractive if it’s covered up with a layer of fat. That’s where the phrase “bulky” really comes from – fat on top of muscle. It can look worse than just fat.

I read every book. I read every magazine. I tried every exercise. I took every supplement in vogue back in the 80’s (remember bee pollen, octacosanol, lipotropics and dessicated liver?) I tried not eating for entire days at a time. I went on a rope skipping kick. I did hundreds of crunches and ab exercises. I rode the Lifecycle. I wore rubber waist belts.

The results were mediocre at best. When I made progress, I couldn’t maintain it. One step forward, one step back. Even when I got a little leaner, it wasn’t all the way. Still no ripped abs. When I played football and they beat the crap out of us at training camp, I lost weight, but STILL didn’t get all the way down to those elusive six pack abs. In fact, it was almost like I got “skinny fat.” My arms and legs lost some muscle but the small roll of ab fat was still there.

Why was it so hard? What was I doing wrong? It was driving me crazy!

My condition got worse in college because I mixed with a party crowd. With boozing came eating, and the “bulk” accumulated even more. At that point, the partying and social life were more important to me than my body. I was still lifting weights, but wasn’t living a fitness lifestyle.

Mid way through college I changed my major from business management to exercise science, having made up my mind to pursue a career in fitness. That’s when I started to feel something wasn’t right. The best word for it is “incongruence.” That’s when what you say you want to be and what you really are don’t match. Being a fitness professional means you have to walk the talk and be a role model to others. Anything else is hypocrisy. I knew I had to shape up or forget fitness as a career.

But after four years, I STILL didn’t know how to get ripped! Nothing I learned in exercise physiology class helped. All the theory was interesting, but when theory hit the real world, things didn’t always work out like they did on paper. My professors didn’t know either. Heck, most of them weren’t even in shape! Two of them were overweight, including my nutrition professor.

However, out of my college experience did come the seeds of the solution and my first breakthrough.

In one of my physical education classes, we were required to do some running and we were instructed to keep track of our performance and resting heart rates. Somehow, even though I was a strength athlete, I got hooked on running. After the initial discomfort of hauling around a not so cardio-fit 205 pound body, I started to get a lot of satisfaction out of watching my resting heart rate drop from the 70’s into the 50’s and seeing my running times get better and better. And then it happened: I started getting leaner than I ever had before.

The results motivated me to no end, and I kept after it even more. My runs would be 5 or 6 days a week and I’d go for between 30 minutes to an hour. Sometimes I had a circular route of about 6 miles and I would run it for time, almost always pushing for a personal record. When I finished, I was spent, drenched in sweat and sometimes just crashing when I got home. And I kept getting even leaner.

That’s when I started to figure it out. If you’re expecting me to say that running is the secret, no, that’s NOT it per se. I was thinking bigger picture. In fact, I noticed that my legs had lost some muscle size, so I knew that over-doing the runs would be counter productive, ultimately, and I don’t run that much anymore these days. But that’s how I did it the first time and I had never experienced fat loss like that before. The fat was falling off and I had barely changed my diet.

My “aha moment” was when I realized the pivotal piece in the puzzle was calories. It wasn’t the type of exercise, it wasn’t the specific foods and it wasn’t supplements. Today I realize that it’s the calorie deficit that matters the most, not whether you eat less or burn more per se, but in my case creating a large deficit by burning the calories was the absolute key for me.

These runs were burning an enormous number of calories. Everything I had done before wasn’t burning enough to make a noticeable difference in a short period of time. 10-15 minutes of rope skipping wasn’t enough. 45 minutes of slow-go bike riding wasn’t burning enough. Hundreds of crunches weren’t enough. I put 1+1+1 together and realized it was intensity X duration X frequency = highest the total calorie burn for the week. How much simpler could it be? It wasn’t magic. It was MATH!

It was consistency too. This was the first time in SIX YEARS I stuck with it. Body fat comes off by the grams every day – literally. Kilos and pounds of body weight may come off quickly, but they come back just as fast. Body fat comes off slowly and if you have no patience or you jump to one program to the next without following through with the one you started, you’re doomed. In six years, I had “tried everything”… except consistency and patience.

Then the stakes went up. I had finally gotten lean, but there was another level beyond lean… RIPPED! My buddies at the gym noticed me getting leaner and then they popped the question: Why don’t you compete? My training partner Steve had already competed 3 years earlier and won the Teenage Mr. America competition. Since then, I had been all talk and no walk. “Yeah, I’m going to compete one of these days too… I’m going to be the next Mr. America.” Days turned into weeks, weeks into months, and months into years. The only title I had won was “Mr. Procastinator.” Then finally, Steve and my other friends challenged me almost in an ultimatum type of way. Well, the truth is, I set myself up for it with my big mouth and they called me out, so I would have been the laughing stock of our gym if I didn’t follow through.

The first time you do a real cut - all the way down to contest-ready - is the hardest. Not as much physically as psychologically, simply because you’ve never done it before. Doing something you’ve done before is no big deal. Doing something you’ve never done before causes uncertainty and fear, sometimes even terror! I was plagued with self-doubt the entire time, never sure if I was ever going to get there. It seemed like it was taking forever. But failure was not an option. Not only did I have an entire gym full of friends rooting me on, I had great training partner who was natural Mr. Teenage America! The pressure was on. I had to do it. There was no way out. No excuses.

Some other day, I’ll tell you all the details of the emotional roller coaster ride that was my first contest diet, but let it suffice to say, at that point, I still didn’t know what I was doing. It was only later that I went into “human guinea pig” mode with nutritional experiments and finally pinned down the eating side of the equation to a science (and gained 20 lbs of stage-weight muscle as a result).

In the late 1980’s, the standard bodybuilding diet was high carb, low fat. For that first competition, I was on 60% carbs – including pancakes, boxed cereal, whole grain bread, and pasta - so I guess you can toss out the idea that it’s impossible to get ripped on high carbs – although high carb is NOT the contest diet I use today. But it didn’t matter, because I had already learned the critical piece in the fat loss puzzle – the calorie balance equation. Understanding that one aspect of physiology was enough to get me ripped. It only got better later.

In the end, I took 2nd place at my very first competition, the Natural Lehigh Valley, and one month later, I won first place at the Natural New Jersey. Seven months later, the overall Natural Pennsylvania.

Looking back, was all the effort worth it? Well, my good friend Adam Waters, who is an accountability coach, teaches his students about using “redemption” as a motivator. Remember the Charles Atlas ad where the skinny kid got sand kicked in his face and then came back big and buffed and beat up the bully? That’s redemption. Or the dateless high school nerd who comes back to the 10 year class reunion driving a Mercedes with the prom queen on his arm? That’s redemption.

After all the doubt, heartache and frustration I went through for six years, I not only had my trophies, my abs were on the front page of the sports section in our small Pennsylvania town newspaper. The following year, I was on the poster for a bodybuilding competition… as the previous year’s champion. THAT’S REDEMPTION. You tell me if it was worth it.

There are 7 lessons from my story that I want to share with you because even if you have a different personal history than I do, these 7 lessons are the keys to achieving any previously elusive fitness goal for the first time and I think they apply to everyone.

1. Set the big goal and go for it. If your goal doesn’t excite you and scare you at the same time, your goal is too small. If you don’t feel fear or uncertainty, you’re inside your comfort zone. Puny goals aren’t motivating. Sometimes it takes a competition or a big challenge of some kind to get your blood boiling.

2. Align your values with your goals. I understood my values and made a decision to be congruent with who I really was and who I wanted to be. When you know your values, get your priorities straight and align your goals with your values, then doing what it takes is easy.

3. Do the math. Stop looking for magic. A lean body does not come from any particular type of exercise or foods per se, it’s the calories burned vs calories consumed that determines fat loss or fat gain. You might do better by decreasing the calories consumed, whereas I depended more on increasing the calories burned, but either way, it’s still a math equation. Deny it at your own risk.

4. Get social support. Support and encouragement from your friends can help get you through anything. Real time accountability to a training partner or trainer can make all the difference.

5. Be consistent. Nothing will ever work if you don’t work at it every day. Sporadic efforts don’t just produce sporadic results, sometimes they produce zero results.

6. Persist through difficulty and self doubt. If you think it’s going to be smooth sailing all the way with no ups and downs, you’re fooling yourself.. For every sunny day, there’s going to be a storm. If you can’t weather the storms, you’ll never reach new shores.

7. Redeem yourself. Non-achievers sit on the couch and wallow in past failures. Winners use past failures as motivational rocket fuel. It always feels good to achieve a goal, but nothing feels as good as achieving a goal with redemption.

Postscript: My journey continued. Since that initial first place trophy, I have competed as a natural for life bodybuilder 26 more times, including 7 first place awards and 7 runner up awards. And yes, I finally nailed down the nutrition side of things too. You can read more about that and the fat loss program that developed as a result at www.burnthefat.com

Train hard and expect success always,

Tom Venuto, NSCA-CPT, CSCS
Fat Loss Coach
www.BurnTheFat.com

About the Author:

Tom Venuto is a natural bodybuilder, certified personal trainer and freelance fitness writer. Tom is the author of “Burn the Fat, Feed The Muscle,” which teaches you how to get lean without drugs or supplements using secrets of the world’s best bodybuilders and fitness models. Learn how to get rid of stubborn fat and increase your metabolism by visiting: www.burnthefat.com

Liposuction For Men

April 9th, 2008    Subscribe To Our Feed

Liposuction for men is not just limited to the body. Men are now turning more frequently to liposuction to slim and rejuvenate their faces. Some common areas for male facial liposuction are the chin, neck, and jowls. Liposuction on men is often performed as outpatient surgery under local anesthesia. The majority of men find that they can return to work and normal activity in about three days after surgery.

Liposuction for men is more expensive than female liposuction for a few reasons. If you compare male and female fat cells you can see that males fat cells are different and stronger in texture. Male liposuction is on the increase. In fact, it has become the fad of the century. Liposuction for men is becoming equally as popular and frequently concentrates on the back and abdomen. Since liposuction is extremely safe and comparatively inexpensive, it is a widely used form of cosmetic surgery.

Cosmetic surgery provides both men and women with a chance to appear the way they wish to by making modifications to their body in order to give it a shape that they find attractive. Cosmetic surgery has emerged out be a very favorite procedure for both men and women today, however, the relatively higher cost of this kind of elective cosmetic surgery is certainly out of bounds for many people.

Liposuction can be very beneficial in reducing the appearance of “love handles”, “winter roll” or excessive fat deposited around the abdominal area. (See Getting Rid Of Belly Fat.) Some men have a hard time losing weight in this area. Although they may have proper diet and exercise the fat deposits persist. Liposuction is one of the most difficult procedures for estimating cost. Liposuction may be performed on many different areas of the body, by different types of machines, with different types of anesthesia, by surgeons of differing experience and skill levels.

Liposuction has been around for over thirty years, which means that doctors and surgeons have had many years to improve upon liposuction procedure. During modern liposuction procedure, more fat cells can be removed more easily that ever before and there is less blood loss, less discomfort, and lower risk involved.

If you have excess fat but don’t want to use liposuction as a method of removing it … or you are looking for another method of reducing fact that will produce results at a fraction of the cost then we recommend this liposuction alternative.

Compare The Cost Of Liposuction Against Other Options

February 9th, 2008    Subscribe To Our Feed

Liposuction can be an effective way of reducing fat, however you should attempt to lose weight by conventional methods before resorting to liposuction. Change your diet, start an exercise plan, speak with a dietitian, try the 21-day fitness walking program and investigate liposuction alternives. If you truly feel that surgery is your only option you should compare the cost of liposuction. Call multiple surgeons to ascertain what the cost of liposuction really is. When you have a good ball park figure in mind, you’ll know how much you should pay for this type of cosmetic surgery and compare it against liposuction alternatives.

Compare Surgery Prices

When you call surgeons in your area to discuss the cost of liposuction, have a pen and paper handy and be prepared to take lots of notes. When you contact the various surgeons, ask them what their rate is for liposuction on the part of the body you are interested in and also and ask them what is covered in their costs. You’ll want to know if that covers any downtime, anesthesia costs, operating room costs, any pre- and post-surgery tests, medications and dressings, etc. Make sure you get the price of everything so that you’re not surprised when you have the surgery performed. Also, make sure the price won’t change in case you need extra body areas done. Take down the name of the person you spoke with, the time, the name of the clinic or hospital, as well as the cost of liposuction. When you’re finished calling the various surgeons, you should have a comprehensive list in front of you which should give you a great basis for choosing your liposuction surgeon.

Make An Appointment With A Surgeon

When you have tailored your list down to both affordable and inclusive prices, make an appointment to see one or more of the surgeons. The ideal thing to do would be to see several surgeons so that you can get a good idea as to the cleanliness of the facility, the knowledge of the surgeon performing the surgery, as well as how well the surgeon and the assisting staff treat you. These are all important points you want to pay attention to, together with the cost of liposuction, so that you can determine the best place to have the surgery performed.

Liposuction is a major step and it should be taken only after all attempts to lose weight have failed. Once you know you want to have the surgery performed, get the cost of liposuction so that you don’t spend more than you have to when attempting to change your life for the better.

Liposuction Costs

November 28th, 2007    Subscribe To Our Feed

Anyone considering the cosmetic surgery procedure of liposuction, will also be considering the liposuction costs. It is worthwhile considering the liposuction costs well in advance to avoid an unpleasant shock at the time of your surgery and liposuction costs can determine whether or not you decide to move forward with the procedure.

Generally, liposuction costs depend on the area of the body which is undergoing the procedure, the size of the patient, and the amount of fat to be removed. The least expensive areas for liposuction are on the arms and back, with costs ranging from $1,500 to $5,000 or more at the top end. The more expensive areas for procedures, such as breasts and abdomen can range from $3,000 to $7,500.

Liposuction costs will include non-surgical fees in addition to the surgical fees. Included in non-surgical fees are pre-op laboratory tests, the cost of the operating room and post-operative garments and supplies.

Whilst cost needs to be one of your considerations, it should not be a major criterion when looking for a plastic surgeon to perform the liposuction. Going with the cheapest surgeon can sometimes lead to a negative outcome including too little fat removed or uneven areas. Most health plans will consider liposuction to be cosmetic surgery and will not cover the costs so you may need to save up to have the procedure performed or finance it with a credit card or loan..

Having liposuction performed is a personal choice - it is usually performed for your benefit alone. So you can consider the liposuction costs as an investment in your body and your beauty. If, after considering your options, you decide that the liposuction costs are too great there are liposuction alternatives that might be better options for you.

Alternative Pill For Liposuction

November 6th, 2007    Subscribe To Our Feed

Is there an alternative pill for liposuction?

Liposuction is currently a very popular form of elective cosmetic surgery. There has been much speculation about the possibility of a liposuction pill that stops blood supply to fat cells. While this method may have the potential to cause substantial weight loss during initial use, whether or not it is safe has yet to be determined. The test subjects so far have been mice. There are also unsubstantiated claims of pills being able to increase metabolism and increase fat burning potential, but these are unproven and are controversial at the very least.

Beware of Ephedra

Of great concern is the return of Ephedra as an alternative pill for liposuction. A recent decision from a judge ruled that small doses of Ephedra were not harmful. In fact, it has remained legal in Canada, as long as it is not combined with other substances. The claims of ephedra-based supplements being marketed as a liposuction pill may be looming on the horizon.

Web sites offering a liposuction pill are trying to convince the overweight that one or two tablets a day will burn fat, without the need of diet and exercise. To those who want an immediate weight loss result without doing the work, the cost of a liposuction pill, no matter how high, is an incentive.

When a quick fix is offered, people will convince themselves it will work. There are even advertisements boasting, “If you are just looking to lose five or six pounds, this is not for you.” Advertisers know that suggesting a product is not suitable for some people who want to lose weight is more likely to lure them into purchasing. What’s more, when they complain about the liposuction pill not working, they have an instant “out,” because they can claim their advertisements warn that the product “isn’t for them.”

So the real answer to the question “is there an alternative pill for liposuction?” is No. However, there are other suitable alternatives to liposuction including the brilliant program “Burn The Fat”. Find out more about “Burn The Fat”.

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