Chris Powell's Choose More, Lose More for Life (3 page)

The
Fit Cycle
is for you if you’re already super-active but you want to drop some weight. Even though you burn a lot of calories and need a lot of carbs, you can still carb cycle to lose weight and avoid gaining new fat. The Fit Cycle allows you to lose a lot of weight while keeping your carb intake high to fuel your performance, even if you work out or compete five or six days a week. With the Fit Cycle, you can actually
increase your performance
while maximizing the weight-loss benefits of carb cycling. This plan is so fantastic that I continue to use it. I’m carb cycling for life!

So whoever you are, whatever your strengths and weaknesses, wherever you’re headed,
there’s a carb cycle for that
. But I know you want it to be as easy and convenient as possible, to fit into your hectic life. How can I make the program work for you as you face everyday reality? You’re busy, you’ve got a crazy schedule, you spend a lot of your time out of the house, you have only so much time to focus on the carb-cycling nutrition plan. So you’ve got challenges. How can you pull it off?

I’m going to give you recipes, meal plans, and eating tips that make the carb-cycle diet superconvenient. I’ll lay out more than
thirty
delicious recipes that you can make in less than five minutes. I’ll also give you high- and low-carb variations on these recipes so that you have more than sixty delicious meals to choose from!
Preparing your food will be quick and easy, and your meals will be cheap
. Throw “I can’t afford to eat healthy” out the window. In fact, you can’t afford
not
to eat healthy! And you
can
eat
healthy on the carb-cycle program, because you can
customize
it to your needs. It will be easier than ever to eat right—which means you’ll succeed in your weight-loss goals.

“Okay,” you say, “I kinda get it. But didn’t you say something about exercise, too?” Yes, to really maximize what carb cycling can do for you, you’ll need to
get your body moving
. You’ll need to burn the carbs that are stored in your muscles and jack your metabolism to the roof by developing and moving those muscles. Sounds intense, right? And time-consuming. Well, actually, not so much.

I’ve designed simple
muscle-developing
workouts that I call
Shapers
because they sculpt your body. In this book I’ve included twenty brand-new ones I call “9-Minute Missions” because you can complete them in just nine minutes. You’ll begin every weekday by completing a 9-Minute Mission—the ultimate way to start your day! For cardio fitness, I’ve designed
muscle-moving
workouts that I call
Shredders
because they burn fat like crazy. Shredders are less intense than Shapers and take a little bit longer to do—anywhere from ten to sixty minutes, according to your fitness level. (If you’re super-fit and want to get fitter, you can make your Shredder workouts even longer.) I ask you to do Shredders five days a week. You can take both the Shapers and Shredders laid-back and easy or rigorous and demanding, depending on whether you’re just starting out, a weekend golfer, or a marathon runner. To help you fit the workouts into your day, and to help you stick with them,
I’ve made the exercises easy, effective, and fun
. Really—it’s true!

The Shapers and Shredders are easy because they’re based on the types of movement that your body does naturally. Every day you push (closing your car door), pull (opening your dishwasher), crunch (sitting up in bed), and squat (sitting down at your desk). I’m not asking you to do anything that you don’t already do! This is part of what makes the workouts so effective—this, and because you’ll be doing
lots of different exercises
, not the same thing over and over from day to day.

I’ll teach you many variations on the Shapers and Shredders, and I’ve created a whole month of different workouts for you. Changing it up like this makes the workouts fun because you don’t get bored. And the most fun is that
the Shapers and Shredders get results
. When you repeat your
9-Minute Missions the following month, you’ll experience a significant and noticeable increase in your fitness. It’s awesome!

But back to the basics: Weight loss isn’t just about diet and exercise—it’s about transformation! In the chapters that follow you’ll get to know yourself and your goals, and find out what it means to transform your life. I’ll let you in on
the secrets to transforming
and on the importance of personal integrity and keeping your promises to yourself.

You’ll find inspiration and validation in the stories of other carb cyclers who have reached their goals or who are still struggling to get there. Fellow carb cyclers will show you what to expect on the journey to transformation, and will reassure you that, even if you stumble along the way,
you can fall without failing
on your path to a great physique and a great life!

You don’t have to understand all this transformation stuff before you start carb cycling; I guarantee you’ll come to understand it along the way. Bottom line, this book is
a call to action
. If you want results—if you want to lose that weight and transform your life—you need to stop thinking about it and get going! You hold in your hand the map to an incredible path to success, and
I’ll be right beside you 100 percent
, cheering you all the way to your finish line. You’re choosing to make a healthy change, and
I’m choosing you
. It’s going to be a wonderful journey for both of us!

Like it says on the cover, we’re doing this
for life
!

Tony was always overweight, even as a kid. No wonder: All his life he used food as a replacement for the love and joy he never had.

When he was four years old, Tony’s alcoholic parents abandoned him, handing him off to relatives. His mother showed up sometimes and dragged him into her life of bar-hopping and one-night stands. Soon she tossed Tony back to his relatives for good, and they passed him around, arguing over who would “get” him—and his welfare checks—next.

Tony turned to food for relief and comfort. He didn’t get to eat very often, so whenever he had the chance he ate as much as he could. Finally, when he was fourteen, Tony ran away, stuffing his possessions into a garbage bag and finding a room for $50 a month. Following his stomach, he got a job at a fast-food restaurant, where he wolfed down the free burgers and fries. If he wasn’t at work, he didn’t eat—and he only felt safe when his belly was full.

Things started looking better when he got married, but then his son was born severely handicapped. Tony walled out the emotional stress with food. He started yo-yo dieting, losing ten pounds, gaining fifteen back, dropping fifteen then gaining thirty, and so on, eventually eating himself all the way to 438 pounds. His bulk earned him the nickname “Big Guy.”

As Tony’s weight went up, his quality of life went downhill. He couldn’t function normally, and he was sick, tired, depressed, and embarrassed about his appearance. Then he went for a physical and the doctor told him that he was not just overweight: He was morbidly obese. In the process of killing his pain with food, Tony was killing himself.

Tony before

At the age of forty-nine, Tony realized that something had to give, and he didn’t want it to be his heart. He tried exercising, but he was never able to stick with it. He knew he needed help if he was ever going to get fit. That’s when my producers at
Extreme Makeover: Weight Loss Edition
heard about him and invited him onto the show.

Tony’s goal was to lose at least two hundred pounds. What he didn’t realize at first was that it would take a lot more than exercising and eating right to do it. But then Heidi and I introduced him to the power of transformation. I spoke with Tony about my own experiences with homelessness and despair. I told him I was proud of him for taking on the biggest challenge of his life. He began to understand that I believed in him.

When he felt how deeply I believed in him, Tony started to believe in himself for the first time in his life. He began by believing he could drop the weight. And he did: By his six-month weigh-in on the show, he had lost 156 pounds. Then, seven months into his weight-loss journey, he experienced
the moment of clarity
that’s essential to successful transformation. It’s the moment when he understood down to his core why he’d been driven to gain weight, and what being overweight meant for him; when he truly accepted that he
wanted
to change and that change was in his total control.

As his fat melted away, he couldn’t hide behind his weight anymore. He
decided it was time to deal with his past, once and for all. He realized that he wasn’t just a Big Guy: He was a person named Tony, and he wanted to be proud of himself. He believed that he could love himself.

Not only was Tony incredibly motivated to lose his excess pounds, he was determined to lose all the other heavy baggage he’d been lugging around all his life. He began to understand that he’d spent his whole life eating his emotions and fears, and his anger at his parents. Bottling up his feelings had always brought him down—and made him eat. When he realized this about his past and himself, Tony knew he had to become completely honest with himself and others.

Once he opened up to the people who supported him, Tony had even more faith in himself. He came to believe that he deserved to be happy and loved. Powered by his self-confidence, he kept losing weight and healing emotionally—and learning who he really was. Now Tony knows that he’s not defined by the times in life that he falls, but by the times when he gets back up.

Tony after

Heidi and I are still inspired by Tony’s unshakable belief in himself, which launched him into one of the most awesome transformations we’ve ever witnessed. Like Tony, you can radically transform your life if you believe in yourself. That’s what will empower you to lose that weight and become the person you dream of being. Once you believe, you have taken the first step on your transformation journey.

One of our all-time favorite sayings goes something like this: “Dare to dream. For your dreams become words, your words become actions, your actions become habits, your habits become character, and your character becomes your destiny.” That’s the truth we see in Tony’s story, and that’s the truth that will make you a fantastic success!

The real key to fulfilling your weight-loss dreams isn’t diet or exercise: It’s
life transformation
. Sure, you’ll need to eat right and burn more calories to get the body you want, but that’s secondary.

So what is transformation? It’s not something you can measure, like the pounds on your scale or the inches around your waist. It’s something you feel. When Heidi and I first meet our clients, we ask, “How do you feel about yourself?” Almost every one of them answers, “I hate myself. Look how I’ve allowed myself to get to three hundred, four hundred, five hundred, six hundred pounds! Why wouldn’t I hate myself?” Then we ask them, “But why do you
really
hate yourself?” Most of them say something like “I’m a compulsive overeater. I don’t have the willpower to exercise. I’m pathetic!” They don’t see what’s really going on, and they don’t understand how it happened.

You don’t have to be obese to feel this way. You might be struggling to lose fifteen or thirty pounds, or even just those last five pounds, and you’re not getting anywhere. You think you’re a failure. “I’m weak and worthless,” you say. “Just look at me—I’m fat. I’m just an out-of-shape disappointment.”

Like my obese clients, you’re certain that you hate yourself because you’re overweight, and you’re certain that you’re overweight because you eat too much. But in fact, you’ve got it backward. You eat too much and you’re overweight
because you hate yourself
. You don’t believe in yourself and you don’t know how to love yourself. If you want to get the body you dream of, this needs to change. You need to transform from the inside out.