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Burn The Fat, Feed The Muscle

Composition, composition, composition! That is the concept that is emphasised in Tom Venuto’s Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle. But before we go into details, let’s talk about what you get when you purchase the book.

Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle, is a 340 page behemoth. It is delivered in ebook format, so you’ll be able to download it as soon as you’ve made payment of a ridiculously low $39.99. Why is this price ridiculously low? Well, we at Flexible Dieting have read the manual, and can say it is one of the most comprehensive manuals on dropping bodyfat (not just weight.. more on that shortly) available. The price also includes 4 bonus ebooks that support the concepts you’ll learn in the main manual,  as well as lifetime updates to the book and a free subscription to the Burn The Fat Clients-Only Newsletter and The Burn The Fat Weekly Fat Loss Tips E-zine.

Let’s talk about what the book is about. Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle, while written by a bodybuilder, is not just for bodybuilders. Indeed, it can be used by anyone looking to drop bodyfat to extreme levels of leanness.  The book starts with chapters on goal setting and internalising that you can lose fat. In fact, there is a lot of emphasis placed on getting into the right frame of mind before beginning any body transformation endeavour such as this. Whereas most diet books focus on the mechanics of how to setup diets and give little time to mindset, Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle spends a lot of time on this very crucial part of the diet process. It’s obvious Venuto has read a lot about positive thinking, neuro-linguistic programming and other success methodologies, since all chapters begin with highly positive quotes from some of the most successful people in history, such as Earl Nightingale and Brian Tracy.

Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle focuses a lot on goal setting. It’s true that unless you’re tracking weight loss, composition, diet, it can be hard to see much (if any) progress and what’s going wrong if there is no progress. While the mirror never lies, looking at yourself everyday can make it hard to see changes. Because of this, Venuto includes lots of charts and tracking methods to ensure you log everything.

Now what is composition and why does Venuto spend a lot of effort ensuring that you focus on this more than just weight loss alone? Let’s give you a quick rundown. Very simplistically, your body is made of fat and muscle. When you diet, you’ll lose both fat and muscle. If you’ve lost 20lbs of weight, and that weight loss has come from both fat and muscle, you’ll still look flabby. You’re just 20lbs lighter. You might have experienced this, you start a diet, lose 14lbs of weight and you look the same, just smaller. Now, if you could diet, and lose that same 14lbs but just from FAT alone and not muscle, you’ll look much better. You won’t just look like a smaller version of yourself, you’ll look leaner, which is presumably what you want. If this doesn’t make complete sense, don’t worry, the book goes into detail about composition. Just take it from us, affecting the composition of weight loss (so that it is just fat loss) is exactly what you want.

Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle has detailed chapters on calorie setting (Venuto advocates small decreases in calories, not major drops), how protein, carbs and fat are handled in the body and why you should eat certain types of food based on their macronutrient profiles.

Venuto has a chapter about supplements and cuts to the chase on what supplements are worth using during a diet and what aren’t. Having read this chapter, we can say that Venuto has his head screwed on and doesn’t waste space on the myriad of junk pills out there on the market. Rather, he focuses on food intake primarily and lists a handful of supplements he thinks are worth a damn, such as Meal Replacement Products (MRPs) and Protein Powders.

Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle then goes on to give exercise recommendations. Venuto is a big proponent of including both cardiovascular exercise and weight training to ensure that all the weight you lose is just fat and not muscle. This ties into the composition thing again, and we at Flexible Dieting agree that adding in weight training will improve the results of any diet, period.
The book is sprinkled with sample menus, meal plans and exercise plans, so you’re not left alone reading lots of theory with no clear cut plan or examples of how to implement it.

Conclusion

There’s not much bad to say about Tom Venuto’s Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle. We only had a couple of gripes with some of the teachings. The first was somatotyping. Somatotyping is where you class different people’s bodies as either ectomorphic, endomorphic or mesomorphic, depending on how well a person puts on muscle and loses fat. This way of looking at differences in individuals and their response to a diet is slightly out of date. Current thinking looks more at the cellular level, including levels and sensitivity of hormones and how they react during a diet. The thing is, this is not a deal breaker since it won’t change the implementation of Venuto’s plans much. So the diet and training recommendations are still valid. Also, Venuto advocates high frequency eating a lot (5-6 meals a day) to keep metabolism up. Newer research has shown that it might not be necessary to eat so often to reap the same rewards from a diet.  Again, this is not a deal breaker, eating frequently won’t hurt the diet and will probably help with hunger/adherence to the diet.

All in all, Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle is a must have for you to get decent knowledge of how to transform your body. With its ample selection of meal plans and sample menu’s you can also be sure that you’ll be able to implement the diet in real life. Head on over now to Tom Venuto’s site and pick up a copy. You’re covered by an 8 week money back guarantee if you feel you need it.

Click here to visit Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle.

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