Photoshop, Tanning Beds, & PAM

Interesting.



But what explains this photo?

Wow.

The Gorton's Fisherman has nothing on this guy.

[Source: National Geographic]

Coming Soon...

I took over two thousand photos in the three days I was at the CrossFit Games, and most of them are straight-up crap, so it's going to take me a while to edit 'em down and write up my thoughts about the weekend.

To tide you over 'til then, here's a photo I took of Josh Bridges (the second-fittest man on the planet!) during Event 7 as he busts out some handstand push-ups. 

And here's a glimpse of tonight's afterparty hosted by SICFIT:

Sadly, I couldn't stay -- I have to get ready for my drive back north in a few hours. No rest for the weary!

Stand in the Place Where You Work (Part Deux)

Earlier this month, I posted (again) about the importance of throwing out your office chair, and put up some snapshots of how a few of my buddies from CrossFit Palo Alto have configured their workstations in order to stay off their butts during the day.

In that post, I also invited readers to submit photos of their own. I half-expected to only get a picture or two of specially-manufactured standing desks, but was happy to see that many of the folks who sent in photos had jerry-rigged their own set-ups. We stand-up types are thrifty AND creative.

Want examples? I got plenty -- after the jump...

Stand in the Place Where You Work

You really need to get rid of your office chair.

I don't know how many times I've written about this subject, but I'm sure it's gotta be at least three times, including here, here, and here. Recently, the New York Times Magazine published a long piece on the perils of staying planted on your butt all day. And if that weren't enough to get you on your feet, this infographic made the rounds last month, too:

This stuff's important, yo.

I've been using a standing desk at work for a little over a year. Rather than waiting for my employer to provide an adjustable-height desk (which would've required an ergonomic assessment first), I bought thirty bucks worth of stuff at IKEA and Home Depot and cobbled together a little platform to elevate my keyboard and monitor.

Here's my set-up:

Plenty of other CrossFit Palo Alto members have standing desks, too.

This one belongs to the Terminator:

Don't let the family photo fool you; he's still a relentless cyborg killer from the future.

The Terminator and me aren't the only 5 a.m. nutjobs with a standing desk. J-Ho's looks like this:

He works with the Terminator -- hence the similar style of standing desks. But J-Ho rocks TWO computer monitors simultaneously AND a CrossFit-style whiteboard. Take that, robot!

Blake's spending the summer in SoCal, but even though his office is temporary, he's already put together his own makeshift standing desk:

Clearly, it ain't hard to ditch your chair in favor of a standing desk. You can MacGyver one together pretty easily. Looks like Blake used letter trays, but you could just as easily use a stack of phone books, a cardboard box or a milk crate.

Anyone else got photos of standing desks to share? Send 'em to me by the end of the month and I'll post them up. (Yes, I'm blatantly ripping off John Durant's Upright Citizen feature, only I'm putting a whole lot less effort into it.)

Plus, if I manage to get my shit together, I'll even randomly select one of you for a prize of some kind. Maybe a shirt? Still working on a design for a "FITBOMB" tee so that I can wear it around the house and bask in my own glory, but it'll probably look something like this:

What do you say? Get a standing desk already!

Being Jimmy Olsen

Yesterday morning, I slept in -- a rare treat. It wasn't until 7:51 that I finally pried my eyes open. As always, the first thing I do when I wake up is to reach for my iPhone -- and lo and behold, I saw that I'd gotten a message from Tim, letting me know that a group of firebreathers from CrossFit Palo Alto were tackling the fourth Games Open workout -- at 8 a.m. Did I want to come check it out? he asked.

This was a no-brainer. I jumped into my clothes, grabbed my camera bag and shot out the door. And I'm glad I did. As Post24th noted, it was like "Superman, the Hulk, Iron Man, Clint Eastwood and Wonder Woman all decided to do a WOD." And I got to be Jimmy Olsen, snapping photos of them as they burpeed, overhead-squatted and muscled-up like crazy.

Want to see photos of six athletes gut it out against an insanely tough WOD? Check 'em out over here.

Ready for Anything

What exactly is "fitness," and what does it look like?

Surprisingly, there's no universally agreed-upon definition of the word. Dictionaries are no help; most tautologically call it “being fit.” (Some dictionaries also define the term to mean “good health or physical condition,” but this doesn’t ring true to me; after all, “health” really only describes a state in which there’s an absence of illness or physical decline.)

In “Body by Science,” Doug McGuff and John Little use the word “fitness” to mean “the bodily state of being physiologically capable of handling challenges that exist above a resting threshold of activity.” Under this definition, fitness is the ability to engage in physical challenges -- a definition I can get behind.

CrossFit, of course, has its own definition, which incorporates three separate but related standards:

• Proficiency -- through training -- in each of ten general physical skills: cardiovascular/respiratory endurance, stamina, strength, flexibility, power, coordination, agility, balance, and accuracy;

• Competency in all three metabolic pathways for physical activity: phosphagenic, glycolytic, and oxidative.

• The ability to perform well -- compared to others -- at any and all physical tasks, including unfamiliar and unforeseen ones.

In sum, it's about the ability to tackle "work capacity across broad time, modal, and age domains."

What do these definitions share? An emphasis on one’s ability to use his or her body to DO STUFF.

They're silent, though, about what fitness looks like. And with good reason: We all know that you can’t judge a book by its cover. Just ‘cause someone looks the part doesn’t mean they can actually deliver the goods.

Still, as an article in today's edition of the Cleveland Plain Dealer points out, “many of us wrongly associate fitness with a certain look or physical trait.”

"Many people look at [fitness] magazine covers and think that's what they're supposed to look like," says Heather Nettle, an exercise physiologist at the Cleveland Clinic's Sports Health Center.

Fitness models, however, often can’t do the very activities they’re hired to demonstrate. As Slate Magazine’s Josh Levin wrote:

Every booker has a story about a [fitness] model who looked the part but couldn't do a squat, or a guy who lied about his max bench press. It can be especially challenging to find women who can do pull-ups. In some cases, a trainer holds the model up, then runs away quickly so the photographer can snap a shot before she falls.

Contrast that with 26-year-old Jillian Neimeister of CrossFit Cleveland, who was profiled in the Plain Dealer article:

At 5 feet 5 inches and 170 pounds, the former rugby player doesn't have the lean, sculpted look of an athlete or a stereotypically "fit" physique. Her body mass index (BMI, a measurement of the relationship between weight and height) falls at the upper end of overweight, just a hairbreadth from obese.

But anyone who saw Neimeister in action would undoubtedly describe her as fit and athletic. At a recent CrossFit fitness competition, Neimeister blew away even the most ripped of competitors by dead-lifting 345 pounds and doing 27 pull-ups. Last year, she ably completed a half-marathon run with only minimal training.

"I don't feel obese," says Neimeister. "I feel fit. I do get jokes about having a big butt. I'm not a small girl. But I know I could probably beat anyone. I can go out and do whatever I need."

Fitness isn’t about being stick-thin -- it’s about being able to “perform a broad variety of tasks”:

To be fit, in other words, you don't need to be skinny or buff so much as healthy and able to perform a broad variety of tasks. You can also be more fit in one category than another.

Most professional football players, for instance, would fail the weight test instantly. No one questions their fitness, though, because they're so obviously athletic and muscular. At the opposite end of the spectrum is the trim person who never exercises and whose body composition is in fact highly fatty.

"There is such a thing as a skinny fat person," Nettle says. "Looks can be deceiving."

A while back, Krista Scott-Dixon of Stumptuous posted a link to awe-inspiring photographs of elite male and female athletes who look nothing like the fitness models in most magazines. The photos show a wide spectrum of sizes and shapes -- but the one constant is the confidence visible in their faces. As Scott-Dixon wrote: “These are folks who know their bodies have the power to do things -- which is what ‘fitness’ truly is.”

Hear, hear.

[Source]

P90X Changes You. Really.

From the looks of this ad in the current issue of Inc. Magazine, P90X changes more than just your body composition.

But for my money, I still say that this set of P90X before-and-after photos takes the cake:

(Source: Joe Petrusky of CrossFit Love)

The Beast Weighs In

The Daily Beast just put up a review of both "Why We Get Fat" and "The New Evolution Diet." (Check it out here.)

But why is the article accompanied by a photo of the books' covers and a woman with a single piece of uncooked broccoli on her plate? I'm reading both books right now (along with a few others -- probably why I can't seem to finish any of 'em) -- and I'm fairly certain neither book advocates a raw vegetarian starvation diet. Quite the opposite, in fact.

On second thought, is she sneering at the broccoli? But that'd be weird, too. It's not like Art De Vany and Gary Taubes are anti-vegetables.

I'd have been happier with a stock photo of a woman cracking up over a bowl of salad. At least then, we could add it to this list.

Wow.

Hands-down: Best P90X before and after photos EVER.

Sit down and read the guy's entire blog -- it's...interesting, don't you think?

Reader Questions (and an Updated Photo)

First, an email from reader Prescott:

...I recently read your post "Nothing for Breakfast" and was very intrigued by the intermittent fasting concept. If you have space and time at some point, could you make a post about what a "typical" day looks like in terms of when and what you eat? Even just rough calorie counts and how everything would be great! I eat paleo/primal but have been doing 5-6 meals a day because of all the (supposed) benefits. i do feel that smaller meals make it easy on my digestive system; did you have trouble adjusting to getting in your daily calories in an 8-hour window in terms of gastrointestinal issues? IF and 3 meals a day would be much easier!

I don't weigh or measure my food, so my caloric intake's a mystery even to me. A while back, I posted about what I ate during a typical week. But if you want to get more granular, here's what I ate on a couple of days earlier in the week: Sunday (a rest day) and Monday (a workout day):

Sunday

After running some errands with the family, we grabbed lunch at the Old Port Lobster Shack. I had a "Shack Louie Salad" with lobster, crab and shrimp, which -- shameless plug alert! -- you can read about here on M's just-launched food blog, Nom Nom Paleo. (She's posting about what she cooks and eats on a regular basis -- and I pretty much eat the same stuff she does.)

In the afternoon, I snacked on a cup of dried flake coconut and a handful of macadamia nuts.

We made dinner for friends, and ate a ton that night: sous vide shortribs and carrots, cauliflower puree, braised cabbage (from the recipe that Mark Sisson stole), roasted broccoli, Creminelli salami with various cheeses from Cowgirl Creamery, spiced almonds, roasted peppers with balsamic, and fresh strawberries.

I was stuffed by 7 p.m., so I stopped.

Monday

After my 5 a.m. workout (done on an empty stomach), I swigged some coffee before heading to the office.

I got caught up with work and didn't get around to eating lunch until noon: Leftover shortribs, cabbage and carrots.

During a short break, I walked over to the Golden Gate Meat Company counter at the Ferry Building and grabbed a $2 "sausage-on-a-stick": A spicy Italian sausage link on a skewer, served with German mustard.

I also snacked on some of Alfieri Farms' Cajun-spiced almonds (I have a little bag of 'em in my desk drawer), some pistachios, and a hard-boiled egg. And when I got home for dinner, we had sous vide chicken breast with roasted delicata squash and cherry tomatoes, with a generous dollop of guacamole on the side.

Afterwards, I was still hungry, so I topped off with some flake coconut and mac nuts (my snack of choice). And at 7:30 p.m., I stopped eating for the night.

As you can see, I don't stick to a regimented meal plan. Rather, I eat whatever (as long as it's lacto-Paleo-compliant) and whenever (as long as it's not before lunch or after dinner). I eat until I'm full. And while I'm sure I end up downing a lot more calories than I'm "supposed" to, I still look, feel and perform just fine.

Next up: A question from an anonymous commenter:

You made some fantastic gains with P90X, but the progress pics stop after round 1 (unless I'm too computer illiterate to find the others). I'd like to see how far you've come now that you're doing the paleo thing along with Crossfit.

This isn't the first time I've fielded requests for more up-to-date progress photos. A few months ago, I wrote:

As for your question about putting up more recent photos, I explained in one of my posts a while back that I've decided not to post them. My goal during Round 1 was to get fit, and taking/posting my progress photos was a good way to keep me accountable. But at this point, I'm just working on maintaining what I achieved during my first 90 days -- so I don't have any visible "progress" to show off. (It's not like I've become Lou Ferrigno or anything; I look pretty much the same as in my 90 day photos.)

This remains true. There's no visible "progress" to show off because I'm not trying to lose fat at this point -- I just want to keep on keepin' on.

But I get the sense that I'll keep getting requests for updated pictures until/unless I give in. So if you must look, I posted a new photo after the jump.

Well, Duh.

As if we needed another reason to avoid fast food joints.

Much like Demi Moore's hips and before-and-after photos in supplement ads, fast food is the subject of a lot of fakery.

My favorite reality-vs.-advertising photo comparison: Taco Bell's Cantina tacos.

More here.

(Source: Alphaila)

Dress to Impress

Want to look fitter but too lazy to fix your diet or exercise? No need to pay a plastic surgeon for some pec or ass implants. Instead:

• Dress strategically to look slimmer than you actually are.
• Invest in some Ript Fusion undershirts or Spanx for men and encase your flab in a man girdle.
• Buy a bumkini.
• Let the Waistband Stretcher work its magic.
• Engage in some photo fakery.

But at the end of the day, don't you think you'll feel better about yourself if you just get off your butt and get healthy?

Torch Williams of The Black Box

I mentioned yesterday that Mark's Daily Apple put up a review of P90X and CrossFit. If you're curious about CrossFit (as I have been), Men's Health has a great slideshow featuring Kevin "Torch" Williams, the head trainer at CrossFit Brooklyn. Check it out here.

Every time I think about starting CrossFit, I see something like this and it scares me shitless.

Schadenfreude

As you’ve probably heard, Tiger Woods is featured on the cover of Vanity Fair -- shirtless, pumping iron, keeping his head warm with a knit cap (where's the Nike swoosh?), and glowering.

 Judging from the collective reaction of the online hoi polloi, it appears that Tiger’s decision to pose topless was a bad one. (Silver lining: it’s clearly not the dumbest thing he’s recently done.) Here's a sampling of the comments posted on US Weekly’s site about Tiger's appearance:

• "He forgot to shave his nipples :D"
• "What's with the OJ cap and the gross belly button?"
• "Barf, this guy is a walking STD"
• "BAD timing for Tiger but so revealing about how he perceives himself as a sex god. What a narcissist! And, how about how much he's sucking in that gut?! It's okay to be out of shape, overweight and flabby, just don't flaunt it shirtless on a magazine cover as if you think you're all that. His biggest problem is his misperception of himself which has led him down the path as a liar and cheater."
• "My superficial shallow side thinks ewwww, he shoulda covered up those ugly nips, added at least 30 lbs of muscle to that torso, and done way more situps so at least he'd have the appearance of a sixpack before going topless for a magazine cover. My deep spiritual side thinks, ewwww this guy is a womanizing dirtbag who would stick his wang in a codfish's left gill if there were no trashy blondes nearby. Overall opinion: ewwww!"

Perhaps Tiger expected his body to be Photoshopped a bit before publication, but there's a lesson or three to be learned here. For your benefit, here's a list of helpful tips you can use to avoid similarly cruel taunts about your physique:

• Do not become the best golfer in the history of the universe.
• Do not allow Annie Leibovitz to photograph you for the cover of Vanity Fair (or manage your finances).
• Do not insert your wang in fish gills or trashy blondes.
• Do not pose shirtless and in a black cap. (Sadly, this lesson came too late for me.)
• Most importantly: Shave your nipples.

Day 90 Photos

Today's the day: P90X graduation day photos!

(Click on the image above for full resolution)

First, given that I posted just yesterday about photo fakery, I feel obligated to provide the following disclaimer: The dim lighting in the front profile shot (due to the camera flash not firing) makes me look more ripped than I actually am. (You can tell the difference when you compare the above photo against one taken with the flash on.) And yes, I'm totally sucking in my gut.

Still, thanks to P90X, I'm certainly in better shape than I was just 90 days ago, when I looked like I was wearing a sweater:

(Click on the image above for full resolution)

For side-by-side progressive comparisons with my Day 1, Day 30 and Day 60 photos, click here and here.

So that's it. Please rest assured that I have no plans to further embarrass my family and friends by posting any more shirtless photos of myself.

[UPDATED: Well, a year later, I was persuaded to put up one more photo to show that I haven't become Jabba the Hutt despite my high-fat caveman diet and dialing back my workouts to just three brief CrossFit sessions per week.]

How to Fake "Before" & "After" Photos

"Bigger, Stronger, Faster," an excellent documentary about the use of anabolic steroids, features a segment in which a professional photographer demonstrates how "before" and "after" photos can be faked by companies that sell fitness products and supplements:



The Las Vegas Weekly also recently wrote about how to fake before-and-after photos.

I'm not suggesting that Beachbody engages in Photoshop trickery. I'm pretty confident that the photos of "real people" featured in P90X ads are real (though, as Begin to Dig has pointed out, the company may use more dramatic lighting and slimming poses to further enhance P90X grads' legitimately ripped physiques in some of the "after" shots).

But the next time someone trots out "before" and "after" photos to try to get you to buy something, be skeptical. And if you catch the fakery, kick 'em in the balls for me.

Day 60 Photos

Okay, here goes:

(Click the image above for full resolution.)

For side-by-side comparisons with my Day 1 and Day 30 photos, click here and here.

I'm not sure I look much different than I did thirty days ago.  The fact that most of my visible gains occurred during my first month of P90X isn't a total surprise; as I've mentioned before, when I began P90X, I (thankfully) didn't have a significant amount of body fat to lose.  Much of my excess subcutaneous fat was burned off in Phase 1, after my first few weeks of intense exercise and low-carb dieting (per the P90X Nutrition Plan).  As a result, I wasn't left with a lot of extra fat to shed in Phase 2.

But at this point, I'm actually pretty happy with where I'm at.  I'm not looking to bulk up, so if my Day 90 photos end up looking exactly the same as the ones above, that'd be just fine.  I would, however, like to increase my strength, balance and flexibility over the next thirty days -- and, of course, avoid backsliding into my pre-P90X state of jiggly flabbiness.

[UPDATED: My Day 90 photos are here.]

Day 30 Photos

Well, it's Day 30, so I guess it's time for my Phase 1 Results photos:

(Click the image above for full resolution)

For a blast from the (recent) past, my Day 1 photos are here. Also, side-to-side comparisons between my Day 1 and Day 30 photos can be found here and here.

I'm pretty encouraged by my results so far, but I also suspect that any visible improvements are the result of the P90X Nutrition Plan diet rather than new muscle development.

One more thing: I just noticed that my belly button is off-center, which I'm finding both awesome and disturbing.

[UPDATE: My Day 60 photos are here, and my Day 90 photos are here.]

"Before" Photos

As part of the P90X program, I'm supposed to take "Before" photos of my jiggly body to motivate me into really committing to the plan. According to the guidebook, "[t]he P90X train is about to leave the station, and [your] body is going to leave some baggage behind," so I need to take snapshots of the junk in my trunk before it disappears.

Let's hope P90X delivers on the promise of losing my baggage, because otherwise, this is going to end up being one hell of an embarassing post. This is probably shocking news for you, but I'm not in the habit of going shirtless in public.

I don't think you're ready for this jelly, but in the spirit of employing humiliation as a self-improvement tool, behold my "Before" photos.

(Click on the image above for full resolution)

I'm regretting this already.

[UPDATE: My Day 30 photos are here, my Day 60 photos are here, and my Day 90 photos are here.]