Summary: Today we bring you an interview with Vivek. Vivek placed 3rd in the latest Adonis Index Contest in the Transformation category. Vivek started with no experience or knowledge about exercises whatsoever. If you told him that bench press is for building bigger legs, he would probably believe you. From a diet stand point it wasn't so much different. Vivek is vegetarian, but he had no idea what any of the diet claims meant. Calories were basically just something the brand put on the label along with the logo. Until 2011 dieting and exercising were unknown concepts for him. Finally he decided to get in shape and lose some weight. He went with the conventional fitness approach and started eating "healthier food". For two months he was basically eating brown rice, fruits and vegetables. However, since he wasn't paying any attention to calories, he didn't lose any weight at all. He was basically eating the same amount of calories, but from different sources of food and so called healthy sources. This "healthy eating" made absolutely no difference in how he felt or how much he weighed. Like he said, Vivek wasn't obese, but he was a bit overweight and needed to lose a few pounds and since eating 'healthy' wasn't working, he kept looking for something different. What Does an iPhone and Your Body Have in Common? Vivek has an IT company, so working with software and technology he understands that the golden ratio is an important aspect in developing any application and that aesthetics are the key. Just take an iPhone, you would have a really hard time finding a phone that would be more aesthetically pleasing than the one from Apple. And it's no coincidence either. The developers used the concept of a golden ratio in the development process. Same ratio that Vivek uses. Same ratio that Adonis Index workouts are designed to shape your body into. When he stumbled across the Adonis Index he was excited because somebody actually quantified and put some science around the concept of aesthetics, took concepts he knew and applied them to building the ideal body shape. Seeing the same concept he used in technology development, for shaping his body was incredible revelation to him and he immediately knew it made sense. He started studying the program and implementing the advice. The implementing part is important, because you don't learn by gaining more knowledge, you learn when you change your behavior and take action. Learn to Use the Metrics Vivek made an interesting observation, and that is people have a poor understanding of how to use metrics, they either don't use them at all, or they don't use them correctly. He created a spreadsheet, tracked what he ate and realized that eating "healthy" is not an answer. Despite what the fitness magazines, personal trainers, dietitians and other "certified experts" say, in order to lose weight you can eat whatever you like, but you have to stay in a caloric deficit. Eat a balanced diet, with lot's of vegetables, but stay in caloric deficit, then you will lose weight, the answer is not by eating some magic, "healthy" food. Next thing is that your daily fluctuation will show on the scale, so the only way to know whether you are progressing or not is to measure your weight on a weekly basis. And that's exactly what Vivek did, he looked at what he ate on weekly basis only. He calculated his RMR multiplied it by seven and had a number of calories he burned each week without any additional exercise. And for every pound of fat he wanted to lose he would subtract 3500 from this number, being left with the calorie budget for that given week. At the beginning he pressed for a larger deficit when he had the most fat to lose and ate really low calories the first few weeks. It was way easier and simpler and the only thing he did was to log what he ate. He didn't eat six meals a day, didn't over-consume protein, didn't count macro-nutrients, didn't weigh food,
