Ganser L. J. - The body fat solution : five principles for burning fat, building lean muscles, ending emotional eating, and maintaining your perfect weight

W riting a book might seem to be a solo endeavor, but although you have to do it alone, you cant do it by yourself. Im grateful to all those who supported, influenced, and believed in me during the journey to take this book from dream to reality.

First and foremost, Id like to thank and acknowledge my agent, Stephen Barbara of the Donald Maass Literary Agency. Quite simply, The Body Fat Solution would not exist without you and your persistent efforts. You didnt just believe in this book, you believed in me. Id also like to thank Megan Newman, Miriam Rich, and the team at Avery for believing in the integrity of the message in this book and helping bring it to the worldand thank you for your infinite patience.

To my mom and dad: thank you for your help, support, all the hours you let me bounce ideas off you, and, more important, for always encouraging me to pursue my dreams and be true to myself. And to my brother, Steve, thanks for the support. Can we go to Vegas now?

Some of the psychology and behavioral change principles in this program are based on Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). Id like to acknowledge Richard Bandler and John Grinder as the cofounders of this technology for personal change and modeling human excellence. Special thanks to Richard Bandler and John LaValle for making these teachings available through the NLP society. Barbara Steppthank you for being a legendary coach and teacher. Thanks to Doug OBrien, Jonathan Altfeld, and Robert Dilts for your excellent work on beliefs. To Pete Siegel, hypnotherapist, peak performance coach, and all-around human dynamothanks for the encouragement.

To the giants of the personal development industry: Jim Rohn, Brian Tracy, Bob Proctor, Mark Victor Hansen, Jack Canfield, Denis Waitley, Steven Covey, Tom Hopkins, Tony Robbins, the late Earl Nightingale, and the Father of Motivation, Dr. Wayne Dyer. Thank you for doing what you do. Personal development has helped make me the person I am today. I hope that many more people discover that only by standing on the shoulders of giants can we see beyond our present horizons.

To Richie Smyth: everyone should have a trainer. Not everyone is lucky enough to have the best one, as I do. To Kyle Battis and John Sifferman: thanks for holding down the fort while I was in my writing cave. You guys rock. To Lee Howard: thanks for helping me polish up the first drafts of my manuscript. To Christian Dilalla for the cover shot and Jason Jaskot for the exercise photos. To our models, Liz and Joey, you were great!

Im indebted to all the practitioners and researchers who are doing such fabulous work in the fields of nutrition, training, and the psychology of weight control today. Those who influenced this book especially include:

Dr. Brian Wansink, for the brilliant research on mindless eating; Dr. Judith Beck, for the superb work in cognitive psychology applied to weight loss; Dr. Charles Garfield, for the classic work on peak performance; Dr. John Bargh and Dr. Tanya Chartrand, for your insightful work on the unconscious mind; Barbara Rolls, Ph.D., for the clinical research and accessible writings on energy density; Rena Wing and Dr. James Hill, for the outstanding work with the National Weight Control Registry; Dr. John Berardi, for some of the best fat-loss and sports-nutrition information available today; Alwyn Cosgrove, for the excellent work on designing training programs for fat loss and for sharing it with other fitness professionals; and Ian King, for influencing many of my philosophies on strength training.

Finally, I thank the hundreds who gave me the privilege of being their personal trainer through the 1990s and early 2000s, and to the hundreds of thousands who have read my e-newsletters and supported me since I began as an Internet writer in 1999. I would not be here in print today had all of you not placed your faith in me as your trainer and coach for the first ten years of my career and as your source of Internet information for the last ten.

A s an aspiring teenage bodybuilder in the mid-1980s, I was initiated into the world of body transformation. Thats when I began learning a philosophy and methodology so effective for getting lean, I was ultimately able to achieve body fat as low as 3.7 percent while at my competition peak. To give you some idea of what that means, the average male has about 17 percent body fat and the average female has about 25 percent. If you want to see six-pack abs, youll usually need to drop to under 10 percent body fat if youre male and down to about 15 percent or so if youre female.

Three percent is essential body fat in men, which is the amount necessary just to stay healthy. This means my body fat got so low, virtually no fat was left beneath my skin. People told me I looked like a walking anatomy chart. In bodybuilding vernacular, the word for that is ripped. Mind you, Im not naturally lean. Before I learned how to cut body fat, Id never seen my abs. In fact, I was a slightly chubby freshman in high school, embarrassed to take my shirt off for swimming class. How things changed.