Eat more, exercise less and still get your dream body

MANILA, Philippines - We have always been warned that if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. But this one, however unbelievable it may seem, is backed up by actual science –– you can eat more, exercise less and still get the body that you’ve always wanted. Whatever it is that you wish you had or didn’t have, you can get or get rid of it by simply understanding and giving exactly what your body needs to create it.

“Don’t get obsessed with the diet and workout. Get obsessed with the science,” says sports science specialist and Sexy Solutions fitness consultant Edward Mendez. If he were an app, he’d be the Instamotivator, because throughout our chat he just kept churning out gems like this –– words that deserve to be plastered on top of a good photo and regrammed 1,000 times for the fitness-, exercise- and diet-obsessed to see.

Edward is also a model and an actor, but his passion is nutrition and fitness. He has worked with various celebrities in achieving their fitness goals, including Vicki Belo and Cristalle Henares, Atom Henares, Lui Villaruz, Lorenzo Mara, Tim Yap and Raymond Gutierrez. What makes him a good motivator is that he is as passionate about talking about fitness as he is living it. You can ask him anything about diet and exercise and he will have a perfectly quotable response that he would always, later on, back up with science. It’s a gift that he makes good use of through his Twitter account, where he posts tips and trivia on fitness, as well as in his upcoming book, Your Dream Body Come True, which will be out later this year. His experience in training athletes and helping them recover from injuries while he was still in the States, as well as working with his father, has given him all the material he needs. Here, he works with patients undergoing treatment at Sexy Solutions and helps them achieve their goals through proper nutrition and exercise, on top of writing and taping his launching movie, which will also be out by the end of the year.

“The book is going to be released a month after my movie is released, hopefully this coming December. It’s my launching movie so might as well come out with a launching book. I had to get in shape for that movie, too. I found out last January that we had to start filming –– right after the holidays! Ninety-percent of the movie I don’t have a shirt on, so I had to do my own mini-transformation. I had only a month to prepare,” said Edward. “But I already have the understanding of the science, and the muscle memory that I had created from my past transformations made it very easy. The great thing is this can apply to everyone,” he added.

Fitness has been Edward’s passion since he was 14, when he first picked up the dumbbells. “My shallow motivation then was to impress the girls, I was being bullied because I was very skinny, I was always the weakest one in the gym. But when I discovered that it was really what I loved to do, I decided to take it more seriously,” he said. “When I was younger, I thought it was more about putting a lot of hours in the gym and eating less –– I didn’t have the knowledge. I had to unlearn everyone I’ve absorbed from magazines and I did have a lot of failures.” It is through these failures, a continuous process of trial and error, that he gained enough practical knowledge and experience to write Your Dream Body Come True. He said his first transformation was when he saw his abs for the first time: “I thought I would never see them, ever!” Since then fitness has been both a passion and obsession for Edward. Here he shares some of the myths, facts and tips that he’s encountered in his journey to his ideal physique –– some of them are explained in detail in his upcoming book. For now, he dishes out some food for thought –– non-fattening and easy-to-digest, just for you.

FACT: “No pain, no gain” is the type of belief that can really go against your goal.

Exercise is a form of stress and when you put your body under a lot of stress, you produce a lot of hormones called cortisol. When you put too much stress on your body by working out in the gym for hours, you don’t really improve, you actually destroy your body. The improvement of your body comes after going to the gym –– when it repairs with sleep and nutrition. My philosophy is that it should be 30 percent training, 70 percent nutrition.

I go to the gym for 30 to 40 minutes. I spend more time in the kitchen preparing my own food, though I’m already at that point when I can afford to eat whatever I want because I already built the foundation for my body. When you go through my diet for a 90-day period, it becomes a fat-burning machine. It just instinctively understands that even bad foods can be good at certain times –– you can eat “bad foods” depending on the time of the day because your body behaves differently in the morning, in the afternoon, and at night. So in my book, I explain how you can eat what you normally would avoid.

MYTH: Lifting weights will make you look like a bodybuilder.

Men and women are biologically different. The common myth for women is that when you lift weights, you get muscular and bulky. This is almost impossible because women produce 90 percent estrogen and only a minor percentage of testosterone –– it’s the other way around for men. Testosterone is responsible for giving us the bulky, muscular look over time when men lift heavy weights. Women do not get the same result –– they will only get a tight, fit body.

The reason many women are finding it difficult to lose weight or getting back in shape is because, over time, they start losing muscle. A pound of muscle can burn 70 calories even when you’re doing nothing. The more muscles you have, the more fat you burn. Resistance training is the only way to go.

FACT: You can get away with eating sugary foods at a specific time during the day.

Sugary foods, burgers –– you can eat them, pretty much anything that you enjoy. I also recommend people who follow my program to have a cheat day, which I prefer to call a “reward day.” On this day, your body will not store any fat at all because you’ve upgraded your body into a fat burning machine and you have all these muscles to handle this cheat day.

Even on non-cheat days, you can still eat sugary foods, because you can use sugar to burn fat. After workout, your body is depleted of lycogen, which is a fuel that comes from carbohydrates, you have a one-hour window to eat sugary foods, combined with protein and other nutrients, and that sugar will cause a spike of insulin. Normally, when you eat sugary food at other times of a day, insulin levels can shoot up so high that it just transports all these carbohydrates into your fat cells and this is the main cause of fat gain: sugar, not fat. After a workout, the body will prioritize refueling your muscles regardless of how sugary the food is.

MYTH: You cannot overeat and then try to make up for it by overexercising.

You can’t compensate for overeating by not eating for the rest of the day or the next day, and then going on a three- or four-hour marathon on the treadmill. That does not work, because when the damage is done, it’s done. You can’t undo it. Just move on and eat healthy the next day.

FACT: Stop counting calories –– start choosing your calories.

It’s not about the number of calories you consume in a day; it’s about what makes up these calories. If you’re consuming 1,000 calories per day, you’re creating a deficit, however, if that 1,000 calories is composed mainly of fat and carbs and low protein, you will still gain fats. If you’re consuming 2,000 calories, but it’s balanced –– they come from whole wheat bread, brown rice, lean protein like chicken and beef, omega-3, omega-6, then you have a greater chance of losing fat easily. It’s about quality over quantity.

FACT: A workout is not a marathon.

It’s common practice to go to the gym for hours and just focus on one area. I used to do this too, when I didn’t know any better. When you work out the same muscle area every day, you destroy your tissues every day. You’re not giving it time to recuperate. You’re wounding yourself and then it gets a scab and then you keep picking that scab. It is a waste of time. In the gym, it’s all about damage. Do as much damage as you can in the shortest amount of time and then grow, repair and improve outside –– with sleep, with the proper nutrition, protein, vitamin A, minerals and so on.

I work the whole upper body one day, and the lower body another day, alternately. This is called periodization. I just do 40 to 45 minutes per session and then on other days, I do cardio –– 30 minutes max of very intense cardio. I never pace myself because pacing yourself for two to three hours on the treadmill doesn’t work. It’s not about the duration, it’s about the intensity.

FACT: Choose your activities wisely and align them with your fitness goals.

Here’s an example: There are two different types of runners, the long-distance runner and the sprinter. Depending on your goals for your body, you have to be very picky about what type of exercise or what type of running you’ll be doing. If you like to run for 10k, 20k for fun, that’s great. But if you want to not burn muscles and build a tight physique, you have to limit your running.

FACT: Building leg muscles will help you burn more fat.

Henry Cavill, Chris Evans and Chris Hemsworth look great because of their symmetry –– the evenness of their muscles. Some people are so big but they have small legs. It’s all about symmetry. Most guys like to work out their upper body, but don’t work out their legs. But the thing is, even for women, leg workouts can actually burn fat the fastest and the most. For guys, if they want to gain muscle, they have to work out their legs because the legs increase the growth hormone in testosterone. The leg muscle group is the largest combined muscle group. The larger the muscle group you work out, the greater the increase in the growth hormones in testosterone. For women, when that growth hormone is increased, they burn fat really fast.

FACT: Yoga is recreation, not exercise.

Yoga, pilates and all those other activities are not really exercises. They’re more like recreation. Yoga is a complementary recreation to going to the gym, but it’s not something that you should rely on to shape your body.

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At the core of Edward’s fitness philosophy are common sense and science. “You may be a little chubby or a little too skinny, but you can still renovate your body, reprogram your body, using nutrition and proper training, and having self-belief and having the intelligence. Intelligence comes first, discipline comes second when it comes to fitness. A lot of people have the discipline to diet but they lack the common sense,” he said. Through his book, he hopes to equip readers with the right knowledge to help them achieve their fitness goals as well as set the facts straight on diet and exercise.  He adds, “Not only will you physically change, but your mental healthy will also propel to another level. That’s my goal –– not just to help people get in shape but to also somewhat change their lives. The transformation is life-changing, and it’s a good story to tell.”

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Sexy Solutions has branches in Medical Plaza, Makati, High Street Central at The Fort, and II Terrazo in Tomas Morato. For more information, call 810-SEXY(7399) or visit sexysolutions.com.ph.