A quick lowdown on weight loss products
About 8 years ago, as I was preparing for my first bodybuilding competition, I began exploring the use of weight loss supplements. The first thing that’s important to know is that my diet was in check. I had seen many people over the years before use weight loss aids with absolutely no success, but came to realize that they got no results because their eating habits were poor and they really knew nothing about nutrition.
Dan Duchaine called the book that I considered my bible of weight loss Bodyopus. Dan Duchaine was a well-known guru of performance enhancing supplements. Dan devoted his life to helping athletes of all types push past their natural limits by use of these supplements. When talking about weight loss, the most effective aids were something called an
ECA Stack, magnesium, vanadyl sulfate, and chromium picolonate.
First I’ll begin with the last three that I mentioned. The diet I was doing was a ketogenic diet (not to be confused with Atkins sloppy, undisciplined approach). I had to carb up every Friday at 6pm until Sunday at 6pm, so to effectively get into ketosis I needed to force my body to utilize the carbs in my body as quickly as possible during the first day or two after my carb-up. Just about any type of weight loss diet now days includes days where you want to be low on carbohydrates so your body is forced to attack your bodyfat stores for energy, rather than using carbs as a source of fuel. Magnesium, chromium picolonate, and vanadyl sulfate all act as glucose disposal agents (this means they aid your body in utilizing your carbohydrate stores, causing your body to shortly after attack fat as the main fuel sorce and possibly induce ketosis). Are these performance enhancing supplements? For the most part, no. Will they help you in your quest in attacking bodyfat? Most definitely yes. And a couple other neat things I’ll share with you – vanadyl sulfate gives a better pump than No2 in my opinion, and chromium picolonate is great to take at night when you have a sweet tooth – it really helps subside mine at least.
Next, I’ll discuss in short the
ECA Stack. I’m sure you’ve heard of it before if you’ve been around for a while. ECA stands for Ephedrine, Caffeine, and Aspirin. These three compounds have a synergistic effect in the body. To help you understand what synergistic means, lets look at the idea of putting performance parts on a car. Let’s say putting a high performance air filter will add 5hp. Let’s say that putting a high performance exhaust will add 15hp to the car. Let’s also say that adding down pipes will add another 15hp to the car. If you put those three together, you come up with 35hp, right? Wrong. These three things work together, and may add up to 50hp when combined. Ephedrine, caffeine and aspirin work the same way. The ECA stack played an important role in my competition diet for a few big reasons. When combining ephedrine, caffeine and aspirin, they produce a fat burning effect like no other, and for some reason cause a major increase in brown fat cell utilization. Brown fat is the hard fat to get to, like those love handles most of us have that just don’t want to come off. For women, a lot of those hips and waist as well as that fat right beneath your belt line that you can’t seem to get rid of – that’s brown fat. So along with this awesome benefit, the three of these compounds also work as an anti-catabolic. What that means is that they stop your body from breaking down muscle on a low calorie diet. I’m not suggesting you get your calories too low, but I do know and you should too, that when we diet we are bound to lose some muscle. Taking the ECA stack will greatly decrease the amount of muscle we lose, enabling us to keep a good metabolism from beginning to end.
Lastly, I’m going to talk about
thermogenics and their place in a diet. I’m a big believer in the ECA stack, but as it is such a strong and effective product, there are always going to be some side effects. When taking ECA too long, it will shut down adrenal glands as well as induce a dependency on it. When preparing for my first show, by time I was done, I crashed for days after discontinuing the ECA stack. What I also think as I look in retrospect is that the effects were minimized only weeks after I began, as I got used to it. I kept this in mind, as I got ready for the state championships a few years later.
I had done some research and realized that when your body temperature raises 5 degrees your body burns 15% more calories. 15% may not sound like a lot but it adds up over the course of four months! Ok let’s break it down and look at the math. Let’s say my RMR (resting metabolic rate) is 3500 calories. If I take a thermogenic and raise my calorie output 15%, that’s 525 calories extra per day. In four months we have roughly 120 days. That makes 63,000 calories. What I didn’t mention is that I cycle my ECA and thermogenics. I’ll go 2 weeks on
ECA Stack and 2 weeks on thermogenics. So let’s cut that 63,000 in half. That brings us to 31,500. One pound of fat has 3,500 calories in it. So if we do the math we find that I’ve burnt an extra 9lbs of fat during this time just from the thermogenic alone. I weigh about 200lbs, some days a little more some days a little less. That means that I experience about a 4.5% decrease in body fat in a four-month period from their thermogenic, and that’s not even adding in what I get from the ECA stack as well as good dieting!
Cycling these last two products is the key, and if you do that I’m confident you’ll experience the amazing results that I have!
Jason Michael - C.P.T. - The Supplement Guru of Team i-Supplements
