Today’s blog concerns a phenomenon I’ve noticed taking place more and more often. I’ll just call it “tweaking” for simplicity’s sake, but it is really even more than that. What I often see happening is a trainee taking the body for life program and then modifying both the workouts and the diet to a point that it does not even resemble the original program.

So, what’s the big deal about doing that? First of all, the body for life program is an integrated program, meaning that each component of it, diet, exercise and supplementation, is important to the entire result. So, let’s say you decide you want to do the BFL workouts, but not the diet or supplementation, and you do those workouts but you don’t eat the six small meals and you don’t take any of the meal replacement shakes or any of the recovery or muscle building supplements. Does this affect the effectiveness of the workouts? Of course it does, and the experience of most people who have tried it is that they do feel and look better but they are nowhere near as lean as they had hoped to be at the end of the challenge. Nor are they anywhere near as muscular and strong as they thought they’d be. The workouts, without the proper fuels, just aren’t as effective.

Another approach often followed is to ADD something–almost always in the form of extra cardio. This person thinks that adding will jumpstart or speed up the process of losing fat. And for a little while it does. But, in a few short weeks our trainee finds herself unable to muster the energy to do a competent resistance training session, and also finds her metabolic rate slowing drastically. In the end, she is disappointed in the overall results, having gained no muscle or strength, and also not having burned much if any fat. Cardio, especially long, steady state cardio sessions, will help you get very fit cardiovascularly. Your pulse and resting metabolic rate are low. But you just don’t burn the same amount of fat as you would doing the short, high intensity interval training sessions. You also cannot gain or even effectively preserve muscle when you do so much cardio.

There is also a common phenomenon of eating the six small meals a day but pursuing a different form of diet. This is usually a lower carb or a starch-eliminated type of diet. Why is that a problem? Well, if it is just a starch eliminated diet, it might not be a problem, except for a slight energy diminution and some early hunger, meaning getting hungry before it’s time to eat again. If it’s a low carb diet, the problem is that without carbs you don’t have the strength to do an effective weight training session. Low carb dieters usually lose weight more quickly, but some of it is water weight and some of it can be muscle weight as well.

The last thing that tweaks can do is to simply cause confusion. If you tweak a program enough, even if it helps somewhat, you cannot be sure which “tweak” was responsibile, nor do you know if you would have done even better had you just stayed with the original program. Almost anything that causes confusion is bad in the long term. Confusion leads to stress, which leads to discouragment, which leads to lowered production, which leads to……well, you get the idea. The simpler the program, the less confusing it is, and the more effective it is.

Body for Life may not be perfect, but it’s far ahead of any other diet and exercise plan I’ve ever seen in terms of ease of understanding and effectiveness. Work it–don’t change it!