FITNESS CONFIDENTIAL (2 page)

I can understand why.

I show up on time. I’m reliable. I pay attention.

I know when a client is scared, vulnerable or upset and needs some handholding. This is when I go into my “love me, daddy” mode.

I know when a client is in a type-A mood and wants to jump into the workout in a clinical “just the facts, ma’am” kind of way. I can do that.

I know when clients need motivation and want me to supply it, which means I go into my “you’re the man!” routine.

I love my job. In fact, I love it for the very reasons most people find it bizarre. I love that I don’t have an office to go to, or a 9 to 5 schedule. I love that I might have an extra hour to go out for a jog. I love that I don’t have to shave every day. Some days I’m as clean cut as a marine, other days I’m as scraggly as a bum. In fact, the longer I go without shaving, the cooler my clients think I am. I love that exercise is built into my job. On any given day, I’m hiking up a mountain with this client, running four miles through town with that one and biking sixty miles over a canyon with another one.

Most trainers will limit a client to an hour per session. I’m from Louisiana and we have a term there called “lagniappe.” It means “a little something extra.” If a bartender fills your glass to the top, that’s lagniappe. When I charge someone for an appointment, I give them lagniappe. I call it a single session even if we go much longer because I want them to get their money’s worth. Hell, I’ve taken clients out for six-hour bike rides.

Like I said, I don’t do this job for the money.

From my point of view, I provide a service that’s unmatched by anyone. A real pro trainer has to be a combination of running coach, weight-lifting coach, nutritionist, stretching instructor, amateur orthopedist, motivational speaker and life counselor.

I’m proud of what I do.

I have a top fitness podcast you can find on iTunes (just search for Vinnie Tortorich) and on my website (
www.vinnietortorich.com
). I start each episode by saying, “Your good intentions have been stolen and I’m here to help you get them back,” because it pisses me off when people try to get fit, only to quit in frustration after a shitty diet or worthless supplement or useless piece of gear has let them down.

Again.

I usually train the rich and famous but now I want you to think of me as
your
trainer. I’ve spent decades helping people get fit and now I’m going to help you. And, when we’re done, you’re going to know how to get in better shape than you’ve ever been in your life.

I'll teach you the right way to exercise and diet (hint: don't diet.) Maybe you’ve never exercised a day in your life. Maybe you’ve tried a hundred diets and failed a hundred times. Maybe your house looks like a garage sale filled with unused
Gut Busters
and
Sweatin’ to the Oldies
tapes.

Don’t worry.

I got this.

During the course of our adventure together, I’m going to give you tons of helpful hints. I’ll tell you the single best piece of fitness equipment ever invented—and it’s affordable to everyone. I’ll tell you which is more important to losing weight, diet or exercise (and, no, the answer isn’t “it’s both!”) I’ll show you the exercises that give you the most bang for your buck.

Remember, I’m your personal trainer now.

Over the years, I’ve had great success, but I don’t measure it in dollar bills. Most people use money as a means of keeping score. I think that’s crap. By that measure, a guy who wins the lottery is the most successful guy in the world instead of a loser who just bought a bunch of tickets.

The only thing money’s good for is to buy stuff, and who needs all that stuff? Hell, at fifty years old, I don’t own a home, a couch or a television and the last time I wore underwear was in high school. My mom calls me eccentric. My friends think I’m “colorful.” I think I’m perfectly normal. Whenever I move, I do it in one carload.

So how do I measure success? I measure it by the success of my clients. If they’ve reached their goals, then I feel successful. If they surpass those goals, I feel like I've hit the lottery. Tickets purchased? Zero.

Let’s get started.

Part One

EAT TO LOSE

Chapter Two

OBESITY

It’s a problem. You don’t need me to tell you that people in this country are fat and getting fatter. Hell, they just redid the “It’s A Small World” ride at Disneyland. Know why? They had to make the waterways that hold the boats deeper because the weight of today’s passengers made the things bottom out and get stuck. They should rename it “It’s A Fat World.”

Fat is everywhere!

Turn on the TV. It’s all about fat. If it’s a morning show, there’s no shortage of people telling Matt Lauer how to get rid of it. By mid-day, Jerry and Maury have the fat people fighting each other like they’re in a circus side-show. By mid-afternoon, you have Ricki Lake either gaining a hundred pounds or losing a hundred. By the time you get to the six o’clock news, they’re calling it an epidemic. In primetime, they’ve created games to lose it.

And what do we put in between all that fat?

Commercials.

Commercials for diet food. Commercials for supplements. Commercials for fitness products. Commercials for prescription drugs that promise to do everything from lower our cholesterol to get rid of our high blood pressure to cure our sleep apnea—all things that would usually go away naturally if we weren’t fat. And, when all that stuff fails, then come the commercials for gastric bypass surgery. These guys want to perform surgery on us because they don’t think we can be trusted with a digestive tract!

Does any of this stuff work? No! And they know it doesn’t.

Study after study shows that none of that stuff is effective long term, not even cutting out your stomach. Hell, if it did work, we’d all be getting thinner, but just the opposite is happening. And do you think the businesses that profit from this care?

Of course they do.

As long as you stay fat.

They don’t want you thin, because if you’re thin they can’t make any more money off you. But it can’t be their fault that their products don’t work, because then they’d look like the frauds they are, so they have to blame it on something else—so they picked a clown. That’s right, these geniuses want us to blame McDonald’s and other fast food companies for their shortcomings!

Let’s get real.

McDonald’s and those other fast food chains are not guilty of making us fat. The only thing they’re guilty of is making meat taste bad which is why they use white bread and sugary ketchup to sexy it up. Don't believe me? Order a fast food burger and just eat the meat. You have a better chance of finishing
War And Peace
. Whatever happened to personal responsibility? You know who thinks McDonald’s is health food?

No one.

Let’s take cigarettes. There was a time when cigarettes didn’t have any warnings on the package. In fact, there were even commercials that showed doctors smoking while talking about how soothing they are to your throat. But even with all that, as a young kid I knew cigarettes had to be bad for you. How? One night I was sitting by a campfire and the wind started blowing the smoke into my face. I was miserable. My eyes began to water, I started choking. So you know what I did? I got up and moved to the other side of the campfire.

Problem solved.

To smoke is the equivalent of sitting on the smoky side of a campfire. Who in their right mind would do that? We know it’s bad for us, yet we do it anyway.

Fast food is the same way.

We know we shouldn’t eat it, but we do. And then we pretend to be surprised when some moron makes a movie “exposing” how bad it is for us. Remember that movie? It was called
Super-Size Me
and it starred that idiot with the facial hair that makes him look like a seventies porn star.

We shouldn’t blame McDonald’s when we get fat. But now that many of us are, who should we turn to in order to help us lose the weight?

I’ll tell you who we shouldn’t turn to—Jenny Craig. You know what business Jenny is in? You think it’s the weight loss business? You think it’s the diet business?

Think again.

Our good friend Jenny is in the food service industry.

Why do you think it costs almost nothing to join? Jenny and her buddies over at Weight Watchers and Nutrisystem want to keep it cheap, or even free, on the sign-up to get you in the door. They don’t make money off their program, they make it by selling you their food.

You’re probably asking “don’t people lose weight on those diets?”

Sure. Of course they do. And that’s good and fine as long as you plan on counting “points” or eating their pre-packaged crap for the rest of your life, which means no tiramasu for you … ever.

There’s a better way.

You can lose weight faster than on these diet programs and be completely sated without the tyranny of spending your entire life eating freeze-dried, engineered garbage.

But before we get into that, how did we become an obese nation?

Years ago, I was at a Springsteen concert in the New Orleans Superdome when the Boss said something in that familiar growl of his that stuck with me.

“I’ve been doing this for twenty five years,” he said, “and I stand up here and look out into the audience and see the same faces year after year. And I realize that my audience is getting older but I still stay the same!”

Well, that line came back to me when I went to my twentieth high school reunion. I was trying to find a parking spot when I noticed some older folks walking into the restaurant where it was taking place. I mentioned to my friend, Todd, that it was nice they invited some of the parents to the reunion. Todd shook his head and said, “Man those aren’t the parents … those are our classmates!”

I was shocked. They looked closer to people in their late fifties than late thirties. I sat outside in the car for the next fifteen minutes, watching people walk in, and I became obsessed with trying to figure out why they looked so much older than they really were.

Finally, it dawned on me.

They were fat. It wasn’t just gut and love handles. Their faces were jowly. Many had double chins. And the way the extra weight made them move, ponderous and slow, as if they were struggling uphill, also added to the illusion of age. And it wasn’t just a few of them … it was most of them.

How did this happen?

How did we get here?

Almost everyone in my family, aside from me, is fat and, in some cases, morbidly obese. But it wasn’t always that way. My grandparents on both sides were thin, not to mention their brothers and sisters. They were all lean and healthy, most of them living into their nineties and carrying no extra weight to their deathbeds. There was no heart disease to speak of. No diabetes.

Did they exercise? Not in a gym, not the way we do now. But they weren’t lazy people. They did all their own yard work. They tended their own vegetable gardens, some as big as five acres. They were active.

What about their diets?

Here’s a typical breakfast. Because we were in Southern Louisiana, grits were generally available but they were the exception, not the rule. My grandparent’s breakfast was always the same. Bacon and eggs. The eggs were fried in butter, not margarine. The bacon came from a pig, where it’s supposed to come from. Not from a ground-up turkey with “bacon-like” flavoring added. Along with the breakfast, they drank coffee with cream in it.

No skinny lattes there.

For lunch, it was a full-cooked meal. A stewed chicken. Roast beef. Maybe flank steak. As a side dish, they had some veggies sautéed in butter. And if the veggies were raw, they were made into an antipasto, with deli meats and tons of good olive oil mixed in. If there was any gravy or oil left on a plate, they might use a half piece of bread to soak it up.

Dinner was the same. Might have been leftovers from lunch or, more likely, fish because fish was reserved for the evenings and was plentiful in Louisiana. As a side dish, maybe a little bit of rice or a couple spoonfuls of pasta. To drink? Water, usually. Or, on my mom’s side, maybe some wine.

For dessert? They didn’t have dessert although, occasionally, they might have a scoop of ice cream as a special treat. Nowadays, kids get dessert as a reward for eating everything on their plate. Let me break that down for you. The reward for over-eating is to get to over-eat even more.

And what about snacking? The closest my grandparents ever came to snacking was when my grandfather might lop off a piece of cheese from the fridge and nibble at it.

In other words, back then, their diets consisted of fried eggs, bacon, beef and other meats, cream, butter, whole milk, vegetables and fruit. Sound crazy? How could you possibly lose weight on a diet like that?

The answer? They never lost weight on a diet like that.

Because they never gained weight to begin with.

Did they learn this way of eating from a book? Or television? No, they learned it from their parents. And guess where their parents came from?

Italy.

Amazingly, I actually knew my great grandparents, because most of them lived close to their hundredth birthday, never having had high blood pressure, cholesterol problems or diabetes.

How did they stay so healthy? To find the answer, let’s talk about Europe for a minute.

People are always obsessed with Italy and France. Why are those people so thin? It seems impossible. We think of Frenchmen as eating baguettes all the time, mostly because whenever we see them in movies, they’re carrying a grocery bag with a baguette sticking out of it. But you know what they don’t eat a lot of in France?

Bread.

Here’s what they do eat. Meats cooked in olive oil and butter. Cheese everywhere. My God, the French love their cheese! They even serve it for dessert. And they put cream on everything. Hell, they came up with
crème fraiche
. But you know what the French didn’t come up with? French fries and French vanilla ice cream.

You know who did?

We did.

Let’s talk about the Italians. We all know what they eat. Pasta, right! Think again. They eat exactly like my grandparents did.

Pasta is usually just a side-dish, not the main course. They also eat a lot of antipasto (meats and cheeses) and they love their olives, which seem to taste better over there for some reason. You know what else tastes better in Italy?

Ice cream!

Those Italians love their ice cream. And you know why it tastes better over there? Because they don’t believe in fat-free ice cream. As a matter of fact, they like to double the cream content, which leaves a lot less room for sugar. They call it gelato, their own invention. But you know what the Italians didn’t invent?

Pizza!

You know who did?

We did.

In the past half-century, Americans have been getting fatter while the Europeans stayed thin. Until recently. Studies have shown that the Europeans are catching up to us on the scales.

The reason is not really a mystery.

More and more, Europeans are eating Americanized diets. Remember those French fries that the French didn’t invent and the pizza that the Italians didn’t invent? The Europeans are now eating them, too, along with all the other crap we consume, like pre-packaged meals, Big Gulps, bags of chips, you name it.

And it’s not just the adults.

When I first moved to L.A., I was greeted with a whole new group of clientele. Kids. Desperate parents with obese eleven and twelve year olds wanted me to take the weight off them. Fifty pounds. A hundred pounds. It was shocking. And that trend has only grown. Today, over half of my clients are children. How did they get so fat?

Trying to be healthy!

Their parents have been told over and over that kids need to eat their vitamins, so what do they find on store shelves? Vitamins—inside gummy bears! Or in the shape of a Flintstone—made out of sugar!

Look on breakfast cereal boxes. Does this sound familiar? “Provides 8 essential vitamins and iron.” That sounds healthy, right? Know what cereal that was on?

Honey Smacks! Healthy old Honey Smacks!

That’s like adding vitamins to plutonium so you can claim atomic bombs are good for you. And since we’re on the subject of Honey Smacks, let’s talk about this wonderful product. Did you know that Consumer Reports said it was tied (with Golden Crisps) for highest sugar content in a breakfast cereal? Want to know what percentage of Honey Smacks is sugar?

Over fifty percent.

Advocacy groups were calling Kellog’s out on this fact and they got an interesting reply. According to CNN, Linda Sutherland, Kellog’s vice president of nutrition, explained that Honey Smacks is not marketed to children.

Let’s think about that for a second.

You know what’s on the cover of a box of Honey Smacks? Dig’em Frog. A big green smiling cartoon frog.

To be fair, other notable mascots used to sell Honey Smacks to “adults” include Cliffy the Clown, Smaxey the Seal, Wally the Bear and Quick Draw McGraw. Now, I don’t know about you, but those cartoon characters don’t exactly seem designed to hook grown-ups. I have yet to be at a business breakfast and hear an executive say, “Let’s see, why don’t you have eggs benedict while I go with a bowl of Honey Smacks.”

And if you’re sitting there reading this and thinking, “Honey Smacks sounds familiar, but didn’t it used to be called
Sugar
Smacks?” give yourself a gold star. Kellog’s changed the name in the eighties. I’m guessing it’s because “Honey” sounded healthier. That’s the same reason Kentucky Fried Chicken became KFC after people became aware of how terrible fried foods are for you.

But enough about breakfast cereal. What’s the other thing parents are told to give their kids because it’s good for them?

Fruit!

Remember when fruit used to mean apples and oranges and bananas? Now we have fruit roll-ups, where they literally take out everything that’s great about the fruit and leave you with a slab of sugar.

This isn’t new, by the way.

Remember Tang? That’s what was around when I was a kid. It was basically a glass full of colored sugar. And why do you think our parents thought this was good for us? Because it had vitamins in it. And you want to know why
we
drank it? Because the astronauts drank it. It was created by a guy named William Mitchell. Would you like to know what other healthy products this genius invented?