Mark Lauren - Body fuel - calorie-cycle your way to reduced body fat and greater muscle definition

M y nutritional philosophy stems from my military background as a Special Ops trainer. For eleven years, I was responsible for preparing hundreds of trainees for the extreme demands of serving in the U.S. Special Operations community. These trainees had to get lean and strong in record time, since the likelihood of survival and mission success would largely depend on their physical fitness.

My mode of physical training involved exercises based solely on using the resistance of a persons body weightall done without the need for a posh state-of-the-art fitness facility. Using the gym of their bodies, soldiers were able to train themselves to be quick, agile, and powerful. This training method was tougher and more grueling than any workout using equipment, trust me. Once in combat, these soldiers could run fast, jump, push, roll, stop and start, change direction, get up or down, move under fire, and do other crucial warfare skillsin split seconds. If they were deficient in any of these fitness parameters, their chances of compromising the mission or becoming a liability to the team rose dramatically.

To fuel that type of live-or-die performance, my trainees had to eat for energy, strength, and physique perfection. Nutrition could not be overlooked; I had to develop and teach a diet that would deliver those benefits. The food had to be wholesome, natural, and pure. Look at it this way: if you saw someone build a hurricane shelter out of wood that was rotted or bricks that were broken, youd know that the building would not have structural integrity and you wouldnt (shouldnt!) trust it to withstand hurricane-force winds.

The same is true of the nutritional building blocks you require to nourish and fuel your body. These building blocks include lean protein, natural carbohydrates, healthful fats, vitamins, minerals, and waterbasically everything you eat and drink in order to construct a strong, vibrant, physically fit body.

So, to my way of thinking, the one perfect diet was similar to what cave-dwelling humans ate, except with the flexibility to use more recent food sources to maximize the benefits of intense training. After all, my trainees went through frequent, prolonged periods of highly intense activity, and their level of physical exertion was often as high as or higher than that of ancient hunters and gatherers. To get the absolute most out of my previously soft, untrained trainees, I had to develop an easy-to-follow, customizable nutritional plan based on natural, whole foods and plenty of protein.

Like my bestselling exercise books, You Are Your Own Gym and Body by You, the Body Fuel plan was thus born out of necessitythe need to help create and then maintain lean, physically capable human beings in record time.

In people who followed it, the results were obvious: Stored body fat burned efficiently. Energy levels were through the roof. Muscles became well developed and chiseled.

The diet turned out to be simple, too, the foods easy to rememberno illogical nutritional frills, just like my no-frills exercise program. This is a diet you can do anywhere, as you can my workout. Both are portable and easyjust what we need in todays busy, overscheduled worldand thus scalable to anyones lifestyle, whether you are a regular civilian or a trainee fighting to stay in one of the most mentally and physically demanding programs in the world.

Just because I developed this way of eating to fuel bodies under extreme pressure to get and stay in tip-top shape, you shouldnt think for a moment that this diet is extreme. And its not exclusionary. It lets you eat carbs. It lets you eat fat. It lets you eat all sorts of foods otherwise banned on most diets.

With these allowances, youll drop body fat, recontour yourself with lean muscle, and improve your performance. Day by day on this plan, your body becomes accustomed to burning more fuel from stored body fat, because youll be manipulating the quality and quantity of your calories and maximizing your natural fat-burning capacity.

The result: a defined, sculpted, and athletic body.

The food on this plan comes from real fuel , those foods closest to what our ancient ancestors ate, including meats, fish, vegetables, fruit, grains, nuts, and seedsessentially natural, power-packed food, put together in a diet that is most compatible with our genetic makeup. Millions of years ago, people who ate these foods and used them to fuel their physically demanding lives were the fittest of the species, the survivors. Eating whole foods, close to the way theyre found in nature, is the reason we can perform at our bestand look our best.

In addition to training military Special Ops personnel, I have personally trained many civilians directly and hundreds of thousands of men and women around the world through my books, DVDs, and digital media. The feedback from these people, whose body type may not be of life-or-death importance but who nonetheless want to get in tip-top shape, has been largely the samethe long-term relationship with body fat is that they want to get rid of it and it wants to stay. In fact, the best way to describe its behavior would be resolute, clingy, and stubborn. Im sure many of you are fighting the same battle. Which is why one in two Americans is now overweight, one in five is obese, and the ratio is even higher at all-you-can-eat buffets.

A lot of people these days are trying to excuse their weight problem by blaming it on their genes. That makes some sense to me, though I resist the idea that our genes are the number one culprits because we have basically the same genes today that our trimmer, fitter grandparents and great-grandparents had. Whats changed is our lifestylesmore lazing around eating junk food, less moving around from exercise and daily activities. If youre frustrated with your weight, dont just blame your genes and let yourself get bigger and bigger. Do something about it. Im here to help you.