Don’t Trust Me

As I’m about to release an integrated plan, one for rapid fat loss while preserving muscle and the other for muscle gain while trying to lose fat (or at least not adding any), I want to make a strong statement, one that you’ll never hear from another person in this field and that you rarely hear from any person in any field: don’t trust me.

You read that absolutely right: Don’t Trust Me. You don’t need to. You can do one of three things.

1)      You can go look up the research yourself. It’s out there for all to read and I encourage anyone and everyone with the time and passion to do so. What you learn will forever change how you view the body and give you confidence that you can control exactly how you look whenever you want to look that way.

2)      You can put what I say into practice and try it out for at least six weeks. In six weeks, if you stick with what I say, exactly as I lay it out, you’ll get the results I state. No magic, no supplements, no bullshit. You want to tweak it, modify it, make it your own? Go for it, but if you don’t have a deep and thorough understand of the body from the macroscopic to the microscopic, you’ll screw it up then complain that it doesn’t work.

3)      You can ignore the whole damn thing and work harder for lesser results.

This is what makes my platform—if that’s what you want to call it—different. I don’t want you to trust me. I don’t want you to trust anyone. I want you to hunt out the facts or at least perform an experiment on yourself. I’m here to spray a little Windex on the health industry. It’s dirty as hell and no one can see through the crap. My main goal is not money or fame or being a guru: it’s to get the best information in the world into the public arena and wipe away the folk-tales, the anecdotes, gym-room logic and half-assed PubMed trolls.

I know I’m getting attention. I must be doing something worthy of notice. People even rewrite my blog posts in their own words, and, although flattering in a sense, it pisses me off. Am I pissed because they didn’t credit me? Not at all. Am I pissed because they use my ideas, which I arrived at independently without crediting me? Well, yes, that pisses me off, but that’s not what really galls me. What galls me is that they got all the hormonal and molecular interactions wrong and acted like they knew what they were talking about—hell, they didn’t even get the number of SLC2 isoforms correct and probably don’t even know what SLC2 isoforms are.

I didn’t read a Wikipedia page and suddenly understand molecular biology and all the niceties. Talking about the molecular biology of cells is subtle and you need a deep understanding. If you don’t have it and you try to write about it, I promise you: you ain’t gonna look smart. This is what destroys this industry and helps no one—not even the person doing the copying. The cardinal rule of writing: Write what you know.

Another site referenced one of my articles, gave an incomplete synopsis and then talked about why their opinion outweighs science and research. The parts of my article they ignored made their rebuttal moot. I can’t really explain why someone would do such a thing other than as a pre-emptive strike. What if a client found this article and asked why they were being forced to eat six times a day when three would suffice? The trainers would be caught with their pants down. It’s ego. I’ll tell you right now: if you’re in this industry, hang your ego on the wall because no matter how much you know, how many research papers you’ve studied, how many books on molecular biology you’ve muddled through, you will still get shit dead wrong. Assumptions turn bad, knowledge accumulates, understanding changes and you better be flexible enough to change with it.

Yes, I’ve had my ass handed to me a couple of times and instead of saying, “Well, I’m still sticking with what I said,” or, “I know what I’m talking about,” I learned from it, read a lot more and tried again. I’ve got 15 years into this, 2 of which I did nothing but read and try to understand countless papers. I even paid to have papers that I thought might be crucial translated from Czech and German so I could see if they were as pivotal as some authors claimed. Still, after a career of reading and applying the accumulated observations and findings of some 40,000 research papers, I get caught with my pants down. It happens. Man up, admit the mistake and start reading again.

There are several others in the same boat as me, people I respect and try to learn from when I can. They’re well versed, have done their due diligence and have experience working with clients. They get results too. Will we always see eye to eye? Probably not. Maybe they’ll never understand my perspective and maybe I’ll never understand theirs, maybe I want to utilize one set of metabolic pathways and they want to use another, but the people who drive this industry forward in a positive way realize there’s value in combining their experience and knowledge with those around them who are similarly situated.

So read the ass and take it to heart: don’t trust me. It’s a plain statement that I’ll stand by one-hundred percent of the time. Don’t trust me. Find out for yourself either by doing the research or applying it to your life. One of my favorite authors, Thoreau, said, “No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof.” As a physicist, I live by these words…it wouldn’t hurt if everyone did.

Author’s Note: I hope no one takes this personally or thinks I’m holding a grudge. I am not. This is a rant and I want people to understand how all the crap out there incites my sense of rage. If it pisses you off, I don’t care. I’m not a nice guy. Remember?

Photo credits:

The featured photo of the excellent female posterior is from Rebecca Hanson, also known as Wrecker Becker when she’s in Roller Derby mode. You can find out more about her Derby exploits on her team’s site Circle City Socialites.

The Hulk rendering is by NGArt.

The angry pencil–breaking inkblot is by Tarelkin.