Lucky Charms are now a health food?

Hey Shank,

Yesterday I was looking at my kid’s box of Lucky Charms and noticed it said made with Whole Grains. What gives? Are Lucky Charms now a health food?

Signed,
Mr. Confusion


Hi Mr. Confusion,

Love the notes you leave in my fortune cookies. Hope all is well with you.

Yes, Lucky Freaking Charms are now a health food! Think about how awesome that is! It would be like if somebody was able to come up with a high fiber cigarette.

Mistakenly, I was always under the impression that people ate things like Lucky Charms, Cookie Crisp, and Coco Puffs because they were quick, convenient and tasted awesome. Turns out I was wrong. I guess you cannot underestimate the heart protective benefits of all that marshmallow and sugary goodness.

Unfortunately when reality sets in you begin to realize that the only active ingredient that makes those cereals health foods isn’t Whole Grains, it’s called Marketing.

(Magically delicious for sure. But as a health food? More like magically full of hype)


I actually know some really ripped bodybuilders who eat that stuff. The only difference is it usually occurs after they have been out drinking all night or during the off season when they are competing with other bodybuilders to see who can get the biggest and the fattest possible.

Personally, if I wasn’t being thrown by an overwhelming need to recapture my youth (which has been known to happen from time to time) I would kick that stuff to the curb. But then again I don’t have kids so what the hell do I know.

Yours in chocolate chip cookies,

Shank

Chocolate Cake, Mr. Snagglepuss and Adolf Hitler (Continued)

Mr. Snagglepuss

Who is Mr. Snagglepuss you might ask. He is only the swingingest cat in a three piece suit this side of the Equator. He was also my Psychology Teacher, senior year of high school (Please note that the man’s name really wasn’t Mr. Snagglepuss. As usual names have been changed to protect the innocent).

Now I want to go on the record here and say that Mr. Snagglepuss was one of the best, if not the best, teachers I ever had.

How can I say that…well let’s just say that Mr. S taught me things in that class that even 18 years later I still find incredibly helpful and applicable to my life. To me that is the sign of a good teacher. That and he never forced me to learn that an Isosceles Triangle is a Triangle with two of its sides equal in length (This is actually a nice Segway into my next blog titled “Everything I needed to know about Geometry I learned from Fisher Price).

Anyway, one day we come into class and there is an assignment on the board. This was not the usual M.O. for the Puss so it definitely caught our attention.

The assignment was to pick from three candidates listed, the ideal leader for our country. Here are their qualifications:

Candidate A associates with crooked politicians, and consults with astrologists. Had two mistresses. He also chain smokes and drinks 8 to 10 martinis a day.

Candidate B was kicked out of office twice, rises from bed at 11am, used opium in college and drinks champagne, brandy, whiskey and smokes cigars to excess every day.

Candidate C was a decorated war hero, vegetarian, doesn't smoke or drink (was actually a vehement anti smoker), kept a strict schedule, never showed up late to meetings and hasn't had any extramarital affairs.

Out of the 20 people in the class, 19 picked Candidate C. The only person who didn’t pick candidate C was this guy named “Stewie”. Stewie (which ironically enough comes out as “stewed” in spell check) was always a rebel plus he had a bit of an edge to him. And just like most people from Woodbridge, N.J. he wore that edge proudly on his sleeve. He smoked Marlboro Reds since the age of 14 and regardless of the ambient temperature outside he always wore this denim jacket with a big Metallica Patch sewn on the back. Ride the lightening it said, I think.

When Stewie was asked why he didn’t go with C he said it was because the guy sounded like a control freak that always had to have it his way. Stewie liked both A and B better because he thought they sounded like real people who could more easily relate to others. He actually went with candidate B because he smoked cigars and slept in everyday, two things to which Stewie always aspired to do when he grew up.

Now you might ask what the heck does this story have to do with diet and nutrition? Candidate A, the guy who smoke and drank a lot, that was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Candidate B, the guy who also smoked and drank a lot and also slept in everyday that was Winston Churchill. Candidate C, the future PETA and Pritikin diet man of the year…that was freaking Adolf Hitler.

(Good choice picking C. Look at what you just won. The worlds biggest psychopath. I'll take the British Party animal anyday)


So congratulations! You just picked the biggest murdering coward of the last thousand years to be your leader because underneath those snazzy well pressed suits he wouldn’t have required a script for Lipitor.

Listen, I am not using this as an example to promote poor health habits along with excessive alcohol and cigarette consumption (although after the holidays I can certainly understand where people who do that are coming from). The point is this. Diet and morality do not mix, not for one second.

Next time you feel guilty about eating some cake I want you to smack yourself in the face and ask yourself this. When was the last time you gave your time or donated money to an animal shelter, a soup kitchen, or a home for seniors? There are thousands of places that need your help and resources more than Body by Jake and his newest piece of crap exercise machine that you won’t wind up using anyway. If you can’t feature that, then you have something to really feel guilty about.

Then again, what the hell to I know.

Yours in Chocolate Chip Cookies.

Mike Cruickshank

Chocolate Cake, Mr. Snagglepuss and Adolf Hitler

“Welcome to the abandoned land.
Come on child take my hand.
Here there’s no work or play. Only one bill to pay.
There’s just five words to say as you go down, down, down.
You’re gonna burn in hell!”
(Twisted Sister)

I work in Princeton, New Jersey. Now before you draw any conclusions I want to qualify what I do for a living. I do not work in one of the “sexier” professions like a Rocket Scientist, Investment banker, or Plasma Physicist(Please note that in Princeton these professions are considered sexy like actors and models are in the rest of the world).

I wear shorts for a living. I am a personal trainer.

So the other day I had a lady come in the gym. From the second she hit my peripherals I could tell she was really neurotic. I mean a real hot mess.
With no prompting on my part she came over and let me know she felt the need to “confess”.

She told me she had been bad.

Now at the risk of making this sound like a bad late night cable movie I went ahead and asked “What did you do that was so naughty”.
Maybe not the right choice of words but to my amazement she told me to “Guess”.

I asked her if she robbed a bank.

“No” she said. “Worse”.

I thought to myself what could be worse than robbing a bank? According to the FBI, not much. Maybe Domestic Terrorism?
I quickly disqualified that given the fact that a wealthy white woman hasn’t blown something up in political anger since Patti Hearst.

“Did you kill somebody?”

“No” she said, “It wasn’t that bad”.

At this point I had given up so I said to her “I give up. What is worse than robbing a bank but not as bad as murder?”

“I had a piece of chocolate cake”.
If this wasn’t the early spring and my gym wasn’t in a basement I could have sworn you would have heard Crickets chirping at that point.
People, let’s get one thing straight.

FOOD IS NOT A MORAL DECISION.

Now before all you militant vegans, conspiracy theorists and health nuts start ranting on about conditions in slaughterhouses, the evils of big agriculture and fat parents raising fat kids I want you to note for the record I am not talking about any of that stuff.

The idea that somebody should feel “bad” or even worse that stupid fitness world buzzword “guilty” about any food is insane. So the next time you hear Jaime Lee Curtis tell you that her yogurt makes her poop and lets her do so “guilt free” let me tell you straight up that she has absolutely no idea what the heck she is talking about.

There is no such thing as a “bad” food. There is only the wrong food being eaten by the wrong person at the wrong time.

For example, enjoying a cookie that you just made with your child or having a piece of cake at a celebration with family and friends is a heck of lot different than sitting alone in your apartment crying tears into a pint of Haagen Dazs contemplating how much you hate your life. One example is about using food to enhance the experience of life. The other example is using food as a drug to numb you to reality.

The point is that there is an entire industry that profits off this idea of “Guilt Free” foods and it is just plain wrong. Now if you don’t want to take my word for it then take the word of Mr. Snagglepuss.
(To be continued)….

Charlie Sheen, Street People and You

"Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose" (French Proverb)

Yeah, Yeah, Yeah I get it. You don't speak French. Well neither do I. Nor do I condone the speaking of French by some of my fellow countrymen. Please don’t get me wrong, if you want to speak French in deference to the great nation then be my guest.

It’s just that there tends to be this nasty habit common to some people from the Metropolitan Northeast. I am sure you know at least one of them. They speak French because they think it makes them better than everybody else in this fine land of milk, honey and cut off jean shorts (please note that these are the same people who learn Spanish so they can “speak the language of the people” and insist that they will send back a plate of pasta unless it is al dente). In the spirit of full disclosure I must admit that I do know some French but it is limited to Croissant, French Toast, French Fries, Baguette and a Doctor of Chemistry named Nico who is
Marrying my buddy Gina.

Now before you go and run and grab your copy of the French to English Dictionary I will save you the trouble and play the role of interpreter. What the proverb says is “The More Things Change, the More they Stay the same”.

In an effort to keep what is left of my sanity I have to remind myself of this saying on almost a daily basis. I do this primarily because of my dealings in the fitness world. But it also seems to consistently apply to my experiences in life.

Charlie Sheen

So other day I was sitting around watching this train wreck that is the tragedy of life called Charlie Sheen. In between “Winning”, “Tigers Blood” and whatever the next piece of drivel that was to spew out of this guy’s mouth I couldn’t help but feel bad about my enjoyment of the whole experience. Here is a guy who is obviously about three or four fries short of happy meal, having a breakdown on national television in front of millions of people and the only thing I seem to be able to do is watch and laugh.

Odds are Charlie Sheen will wind up dead soon, much earlier than nature intended. This is sad not only because when he is straight he is an amazing talent (go stick your thumb up your butt Ferris Bueller) but more so because the reality is this issue goes much deeper than his skills as an actor.

For a long time now we as human beings have had a fascination with the “crazy”, “abnormal” and “mentally insane”. A recent New York Times article told about the Bedlam Hospital in London where during the 1800’s people would pay a penny to walk the halls and peek in on the residents, all of whom were suffering from some type of mental infirmity. Apparently this was some sad form of entertainment as well as a way for the hospital to make money. After watching the public’s reaction to old Chuck I can safely say that neither I nor the rest of you out there have come very far from that point.

Not to be a total buzz kill but the fact is that Charlie Sheen is somebodies son, somebodies father, and I am sure that somewhere out there are other people who genuinely care for him but can do nothing to help other than sit back and watch him slowly disintegrate. It has to kill them and there is nothing they can do about it. Addiction really is a waste of life.

STREET PEOPLE

If there ever were guardians of the proof that addiction is indeed a waste of life you don’t have to look much further than some of the street people who reside in the alleys, missions and shelters of biggest city near to you.

I just got done reading a great book called Beggars and Thieves, written by Mark S. Fleisher. It is a non-fictional story about a scientist who spends time amongst the street people of Seattle in order to get a better understanding of the world they live in.

One part that really got my attention is when Fleisher writes about street people constantly talking about going clean (i.e. giving up drugs and moving to full time employment, paying taxes, obeying laws etc.). He relates this specifically to the millions of dollars that governments spend on programs in a wasted effort to help these people turn their lives around:

“Going straight talk is folklore…Hustlers talk about personal change is analogous to children’s talk about what they want to be when they grow up. Young children aspire to become doctors, lawyers, firemen and policemen and these aspirations are expressed without a clue about the reality of achievement in modern American society, grade point averages, the writing of research papers, the reading of thousands of pages in hushed libraries, college and graduate school entrance exams, tuition payments and college debts….(the drug users) don’t care about the realities; the pleasure comes in saying the words; the verbal ritual itself brings pleasure”.

It might seem terrible to you, as it did to me, that these people spend most of their lives in a world of fantasy, denying the reality of their situation. But here’s a newsflash for all of us, we do the same thing too. Maybe we don’t sleep out on the streets or drink alcohol to excess or do massive amounts of drugs but in some ways we are just as bad as they are. This holds especially true when it comes to dieting and weight loss.

YOU

I know a couple of people who actually don’t find the Charlie Sheen situation very funny and are quite sick of the whole thing already. You might wonder if these enlightened souls are simply better than the rest of us, existing on a higher plane of being than we simple fools could ever hope to attain.

Nope.

If there is such thing as a simple truth, the one thing I have found that all these people have in common, these Charlie Sheen outliers, is that they are recovering addicts, family members of recovering addicts, or people who work in the mental health care/addiction therapy area.

When I started this blog entry off with the proverb I was referring to the fact that no matter how much we chose to believe we have changed (i.e. we no longer believe that all of life’s illnesses can be cured with a good bleeding) there are certain aspects that are part of being human that we will never be able to outrun. Like the historian Will Durant said, history is not so much about learning not to repeat our mistakes as it is a study of the human condition. Being human is something that doesn’t change.

One of the aspects that I find is most human is our incredible inability to really understand a situation unless we are knee deep in it. Hence why most people who are some way related to addiction don’t find Charlie Sheen very funny while at the same time some of us can’t stop laughing about it. I would imagine that I too would have a hard time laughing at somebody else’s drug problem if say one day during my adolescence I came home to find my mother hanging off a rope by her neck with a puddle of pee beneath her because she didn’t balance her uppers and downers correctly. Or if my face became the deceleration point for a nasty drunk of a father’s right fist.

While not so vivid or extreme I find the same issues with my life in the fitness industry. I have been in gyms since I was fourteen years old. You will have to forgive me if twenty one years later I still cannot figure out how somebody thinks they can take a pill, or rub on a cream, or “carb block” their way to fat loss. It actually blows my mind, probably because I have been knee deep in fitness for more of my life that I have not. I mean really people; do you really believe that a pill is going to make you thin? Seriously? I just cannot feature that. Another thing I cannot feature is the body of your dreams in three times a week for twenty minutes. Hell I got abs but I spend more time than that marinating my steak and chicken for the week. I spend one hundred minutes a week just stretching. Five to six hours just lifting weights. What’s up with the sixty minutes a week thing! God, sometimes this stuff really pisses me off.

But then I need to calm down, think a little French, and remind myself that people are just that, simply people. Maybe the reason they don’t understand is because they haven’t spent a better part of their life as knee deep in fat loss as I have. They might be just like that little kid who wants to be an astronaut who doesn’t realize that you pretty much have to be both fearless and a freakin genius in order to be one. That being an astronaut is more than just having the desire to wear a helmet.

At this point I have no idea any more where this blog post is going. Maybe all I want you to do is take a hard look at yourself and an even harder look at your goals when it comes to weight loss and really ask yourself some hard questions. Am I being that little kid who wants to be the astronaut? Am I being that homeless addict who really believes he is just one big drug deal away from hitting the big time? Am I being realistic about exactly what it takes to look like that fitness model on television? Are the abs I want not only worth it but are they actually possible to obtain given all the other things I choose to have going on in my life? Or am I just drunk with the idea of it all and the feelings of fantasy that make the stark, painful realities seem much smaller than really are.

One thing is for sure. There will always be somebody in the fitness industry willing to make a buck by selling you the belief that you can do it. Whether you can is something that is up to you to decide. I got a feeling that for most of you the only real truth about six pack abs is you aren’t getting them anytime soon. And there is nothing wrong with that because there is more to life and being a good person than having a great ass.

But then again what the hell do I know.

Yours in chocolate chip cookies.

Mike Cruickshank

Diarrhea (Cha cha cha)

I wanted to start this newest blog entry with a little ditty from my childhood. By the way, I have absolutely no idea what the heck a ditty actually is. All I know is before he dropped the Cougar, John Mellencamp sang a song about one. Due to the obscurity of the phrase I thought it perfect given the nature of this blog so I just ran with it.

When you're climbing up a ladder,
and you feel something splatter...

Diarrhea (Cha cha cha)
Diarrhea (Cha cha cha)

When you’re chilling' with your daughter,
and you feel the poopoo water...

Diarrhea (Cha cha cha)
Diarrhea (Cha cha cha)

When you're miles from anywhere,
and your bowels just don't care...

Diarrhea (Cha cha cha)
Diarrhea (Cha cha cha)

When you're riding in a Chevy
and you feel something heavy.

Diarrhea (Cha cha cha)
Diarrhea (Cha cha cha)

Given the title of this blog I am hoping you have guessed that there is something extra special wrong with me today. I have fallen victim to a stomach virus which according to my nurse practitioner has been running rampant throughout all Mercer, Middlesex and Somerset Counties (please note it is the virus and not the nurse that is running rampant).

After all the negativity and anger that came from my last blog I have decided to make this one a little more positive. This is not some Zen mission to balance the universe or to keep my yang up relative to my yin. It’s just that too much bad energy is not good for the stomach and right now, in that area, I am operating at a deficit. I can ill afford to make the situation any worse.

So in an effort to turn lemons into lemonade (according to my friend “The Weezie” you also need to add Vodka) I have decided to do something uplifting with this current bout of not so comfortable down time that nature has chosen to afford me.

If you are having a hard time with this self-help version of Mike Cruickshank just try to think of me like you own personal Tony Robbins, minus the gigantism. Now here are two sickly sweet, life affirming things I have come to realize (despite having spent the better part of the last two days counting the cracks in the bathroom tile).

1. If you don’t have your health, you don’t have anything:
In the movie Godfather Part II, Hyman Roth commented that he would give 4 million to be able to take a piss without it hurting. I get that.
There are very few iron clad laws that pertain to this poop sandwich we call existence. One of them is gravity but a close second would be the debilitating nature of disease. When you are sick there is a very strong potential for that sickness to take almost complete control of your life. I would imagine this would be ten times more so if you had a chronic illness like Aids, Cancer or Multiple Sclerosis.

The ultimate problem with any of these words of wisdom is that they are meaningless unless you can connect with them on a personal level. I would never claim to be the person who could teach you how to do that. Likewise I wouldn’t want you to have to wait until something bad happens before you can connect those dots (thanks to Scott Abel for that last line).

My only suggestion is the next time you are frolicking around, admiring the shape of a beautiful person (or a sunrise for you more repressed types), or enjoying the flavor of your favorite wonderful food, try to imagine for one second that you can’t. If you have a hard time conceptualizing that then just think of how many baby back ribs a person could pound down while nauseous with chemo and radiation treatments. Or how many beautiful people at the beach or bird watching a person takes in when they have Macular Degeneration. How much running around do you think you are going to do when Multiple Sclerosis has taken your muscles out from underneath you.

It’s definitely something to think about. Maybe it will work, maybe it won’t. It’s worth a shot.

2. Gatorade actually serves a purpose:
Granted that purpose is limited to two things with one of them being a bad case of diarrhea. The second is if you are doing heavy physical labor for several hours under hot and humid conditions. When it comes to the later please understand the following. Sitting on the nautilus leg extension machine in a climate controlled gym does not count as heavy physical labor under hot and humid conditions.

I guess what really has always chapped my ass about Gatorade is more how it is marketed and misused but then again the two probably go hand in hand. Just so we can set the record straight, Gatorade does not make Derek Jeter or Michael Jordan great (nor does it make them sweat green, which sounds more like a liver condition). Too much of it would more likely give them some acid reflux than anything else.

Also, there is not a widespread pandemic of electrolyte deficiency in this country. With the way those commercials carry on you would think that electrolytes are scarcer than a seated toilet in Japan (if you don’t know what that reference means please don’t ask).

The bottom line is that Gatorade is really just a tool. Now granted when I was a kid it came in only one flavor, Lemon Lime Green Death, was dispensed in a small glass bottle and tasted awful. But it does serve its purpose when applied to the right person in the right situation. I could actually go for some right now but that has more to do with my potty issues and less to do with any desire to play in the NFL.

Conclusion

If neither of these makes sense or if they come across as silly and trite please note that I am a little new to this whole self-help thing. Granted there could have been more content here but there is only so much that I can do from the semi prone position. Personally I always thought of the average self-help author as a publicly accepted drug pusher. Instead of using coke, crack or heroin they chose to deal in false hope. So in that sense I never had much of a taste for the subject.

But then again what the hell do I know.

Yours in Chocolate Chip Cookies (not now but maybe in a couple of days),

Mike Cruickshank

Rush Limbaugh, Hand Jobs, and Sir Isaac Newton

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Hillbillies, Facebook, Porn Star Mustaches and the awesomeness that is Baked Ziti Pizza

(Special thanks go out to Victoria Sears Goldman for inspiring part of this posts title)


So I know this guy, let's call him Jed. No, not that ignorant backwoods hillbilly who hit it big and still lived with his mom, his daughter and their inbred nephew. Not that guy from the hills of Tennessee.

Actually his real name (the guy I know and not Buddy Ebsen) is not really Jed but to protect the innocent I have changed his name for our purpose of discussion here.

Now you need to understand that I am really concerned about Jed. He has a bit of belly on him (probably from all the restaurants and deli's he loves to frequent), a bad wheel (from what I don't know, probably sitting too much) and on top of that he doesn't really work too hard when he is at the gym unless he is being pushed, poked and prodded by his buddy who for the ease of the storyline we will call Jethro.

Normally I wouldn't make someone else’s personal health (which is really their personal business) a concern of mine but just like Vinnie, my buddy Jerry and a whole bunch of other people I like to hang out with, Jed is a really good guy.

Anyway, part of Jed's routine, aside from not working out with too much oomph (I guess he is pacing himself), is that Jed loves to talk. That is how I know about all those Deli's and restaurants. But this time Jed wanted to talk about something different and it wasn't black gold or Texas T.

Jed had just seen the movie "The Social Network" (probably over a giant bucket of buttered popcorn, a "medium" sized drink and a box of jujyfruits). His synopsis was it was a great film worth seeing and that while Mark Zuckerberg (the founder of Facebook and the person whom the film is about) was a genius he was also a big jerk too.

Now far be it for me argue about a movie I have never seen let alone to play a leaner, harder, more fit version of Ebert to Ted's overweight and still breathing version of Siskel, but I have bit of an issue with that summation of the film.

I don't know Mark Zuckerberg, not one bit all as I am sure my buddy Jed doesn't either. Maybe he (Zuckerberg and not Jed) really is a socially retarded bag of puss or maybe he is a pretty good guy. I just don't know and I am sure a lot of people out there with some pretty strong opinions on him don't have any real answer either.

I went and researched the film and did not find it to be Mark Zuckerberg "approved" despite the fact it is supposed to depict a pretty decently important chunk of his life.

http://fincherfanatic.blogspot.com/2010/10/mark-zuckerbergs-opinion-on-social.html

What I did find is that it seems a lot of the contributors to the film didn't really like Mr. Zuckerberg very much and that is an important little factoid because it forms the basis of my pontification today.
Mark Zuckerberg had a film made about him whose primary sources came from people who either didn’t know him very well or didn’t really like him. The fact the film was called the Social Network tells me right away that Mark Zuckerberg cannot be all that bad of a dude.

Listen, if you took all my jilted ex -girlfriends (which is basically what disgruntled business partners are) and a bunch of other people who don’t know me that well, and you got them together and had them write a film about me you wouldn’t get something as benign as “The Social Network”. It would be more like “The Giant Douchebag”.

And that is exactly why not only I, but everyone out there should have such an issue with my buddy Jed’s opinion of Mr. Zuckerberg. It never seems to fail that the further we get away from the original source of the information (think really “religious” people who “hate fags” and fly planes into buildings) the more distorted and incorrect the outcomes usually become.
There is no better example of this than with the “cheat day”.

Cheat Day Exposed
To understand the concept of a Cheat Day you need to go back to its origins. Nobody really knows where the idea of the Cheat Day really began. Think of it as the culinary version of the whereabouts of Jimmy Hoffa’s body.
What is for sure is that some time ago a bunch of bodybuilders got together and tried to figure a way out a predicament they were in. As they got ready for their show it became harder and harder to maintain not only their sanity (single digit body fat levels and wearing those banana hammock’s will do that to you) but also their metabolisms. You see as your body gets closer and closer to and beyond its natural limits of leanness (please understand this natural limit varies tremendously for everybody just like shoe sizes) a lot of crazy things happen to it chemically.
Not only does your brain begin to center and focus all your attention completely around food making you annoying and irritable but your bodies fat burning systems began to down regulate as does your metabolism. This is all in a last ditch effort to deal with what your body considers a period of famine.
As you can imagine this would be a bad situation for a bodybuilder who is busting their butt day in and day out at the gym. The idea of a cheat meal or cheat day was to bypass this problem and offer a temporary solution until the contest was over. Not only could you periodically “come up for air” as most normal people need to do once in a while when they are on a strict diet but there was also some anecdotal evidence that it was easier to maintain muscle and energy levels. The upside is you could do all that while paying little or no long term price as far as body fat was concerned.
Not a bad deal, huh. It sure beats the hell out of nothing but rice and tilapia for 16 weeks.
But then a problem developed.

Enter the Porn Star Mustache
Very few of you know this, but before “Body for Life” there was another Bill Phillips that was known amongst those in the bodybuilding community. It was the porn star mustache, Zubaz (Dare to be different, and we mean really different like in take the short bus to school different) pants wearing, steroid newsletter publishing guy (Yes you read that last one right. The Hero of the modern fitness movement Mr. I shave my forearms Bill Phillips used to publish a steroid newsletter).
If there was one thing that made Bill Phillips a genius was that he wasn’t one and that he was smart enough to surround himself with people who knew a hell of a lot more about things than he did. Guys like TC Luoma, Charles Poliquin, Charles Staley, Dan Duchaine (R.I.P.), and Scott Connelly might not be household names but they did form the brain trust behind what Bill Phillips turned into a publishing and supplement empire.
Problem was that in the interest of either extreme self-absorption, simple error or an undying need to “know what his targeted audience wanted” Mr. Phillips wouldn’t always get things right. He would move away from the source of the information and instead go with his own interpretation of it.

Bad idea.

When Body for Life came out one of the biggest selling points was not the generic exercise program, the mental strategies, nor the fact that you got to grunt “body for life” after each rep. It was the cheat day in which you got to eat whatever you wanted for one day a week.

Really bad idea.

Why you may ask. Why can’t you have your cake and eat it too? The reason is this. If the average person was to start incorporating a cheat day into their diet over the long term they wouldn’t get leaner, they would get fatter.
Try to remember where the idea of the cheat day even came from. Elite level bodybuilders who worked incredibly hard for years on end and maintained incredibly low levels of body fat. There is a big difference between how one of those people metabolizes say an entire pizza and the average gym goer who is sitting on the leg extension while simultaneously pounding a sugar laden sports drink in an air conditioned room.
My internet friend, Mufasa (yes that is the beauty of the internet where I can be friends with a fictional lion) explains it best when he uses the hot pan analogy. You take the average person and think of their metabolism (roughly a definition of your body’s ability to burn calories) like a pan sitting on the stove top but the problem is the stove top isn’t even turned on. Now say your pour some oil (i.e. fat) into that pan what is going to happen? Barring an invasion of ants that oil is going to sit there an awfully long time.

Now take a high level bodybuilder or athlete and think of that pan sitting on the oven again but instead of the stove top being off it is turned up really high. And when I say really high I mean all the way and it has been that way for hours on end. Your pour the oil in that sucker and it short of a grease fire that oil is going to burn up and turn to smoke right away.

That is basically what happens when you (the average person) eat a cookie versus when a really fit person eats a cookie. One person just stores the calories and becomes more lovably chubby while the other uses it to stoke their body into becoming leaner and meaner.

So what is the solution? The solution is you most likely have no business having the awesomeness that is baked ziti pizza in the near future. If you do then suck it up because you will probably be wearing that thing on your hips for the near future. The key when it comes to cheat meals and cheat days is to understand the context from which they are being used. The odds are you are doing more to enjoy your life by eating that snickers ice cream bar with friends then you are doing anything to benefit your metabolism.

Don’t buy into what hype, your wishes or bestselling books (which are really nothing more than cult phenomenon anyway) tell you. If you want to have “junk food” just understand that for the average person there is no way in hell you are not going to pay a price for it which only reinforces the importance of moderation and portion control.

Or don’t and be fat. What the hell do I know?

Yours in chocolate chip cookies.

Mike Cruickshank