Here is a radio interview I did with Larry from W.O.C.A Radio. If you would rather listen to it the links are below.
Larry: If you want to lose weight join the army. Today we have with us two-time winner of the most physically fit soldier award, Ray Burton. Forget about the latest fad, Ray has a plan for you. Hey Ray is there global warming up there too?
Hey Larry, ya no, I just woke up this morning and stuck my head out of the igloo this morning and came back from tracking some polar bears but other than that its a normal day in Canada.
Robin: Laughs. Polar bears! I love that! Laughs.
Your book is not..not a very big book. And I’m guessing the information we read in it is all you really need.
Ray: There ya go!
Larry: You know when something just rings true?
Robin: Um hum
Larry: Then you kind of have a good feeling about it. And I guess that’s the feeling I got from this book. It just rings true, ya know? So many people come on and they will write books that are like 800 pages and, actually that one guy had a good book..
Robin: Laughs..yea
Larry: But what I’m trying to get at is it’s a very thick book and what you say is, “Do I really have to read all this to get in shape?” Your book is about…let me look at the numbers..154 pages long or so.
Robin: Uh huh
Ray: With the pictures!
Everybody laughs…
Larry: Ya,”With Pictures!”, which is good for me. Am I right in assuming you have never, really been heavy?
Ray: Ah, no. I have been heavy at one point. One time I ended up in the hospital and when I came out I had previously been into bodybuilding and just your self image when your into that kind of sport, makes you really want to…well everything you are is identified by your outward appearance..ya know, when you first get into it. So I had been muscular and big, got sick, ended up in the hospital and lost a lot of weight. When I came out, I overcompensated and got quite heavy trying to get back to where I was and I ended up just being fat.
It was a mixed blessing actually because I had identified myself so much with what I saw in the mirror at the time that….when I became fat for lack of a better term, I, ah, got to experience what it was like to feel that way. And it was an eye opener.
Larry: Really…Ray have you ever seen that movie “Super Size Me?”
Ray: Oh yeah..yeah
Larry: In his case, for those of you who have never seen the story..I’ve just seen the interviews. Apparently he went on a month long, nothing but fatty food from MacDonald’s, that kind of thing. And then he got the fat cells in his body, which he never had them before. And now he has a hard time keeping the weight off. Did that happen to you?
Ray: No, it didn’t. There are a couple of view points on that whole deal. But the most predominant theory is that the amount of fat cells you have on your body is mostly formed during your younger years. And….that’s what makes me quite passionate about talking. When people come in to see me, its not just about them, but the clientele, the age group that I am dealing with now, most have children. And ahh, if the parents can eat right and take care of themselves, those habits get passed on. And if the children are going to eat right at this early development stages, they don’t run the risk of overdeveloping, well not overdeveloping but creating lots of fat cells early on that later on can really fill up easily. Because they don’t ever really go away, they just kind of shrink. And so you can actually “puff” them back up quite easily. And so if you don’t get lots of these when you are younger, just through proper eating and living…proper. When you get older that happening is not such a concern.
Robin: And is this a myth or a real truth? I have always heard that when a person is into bodybuilding, once that person stops, that all of those toned muscles go away and just turn into fat. And you can’t control that. Is that true or false?
Ray: False, it’s a good one though Robin. I hear it a lot because when people come in and state their goals its almost always “Well I’d like to lose a bit off my tummy. I’d like to firm up my butt”, but back in my bodybuilding days what I heard a lot was “but I don’t want to look like you!”
*Everyone laughs*
Ray: You know because there is a common misconception that it does turn to fat, but its changing one form of matter into another which just doesn’t happen. What really actually happens is that if you stop training your body reacts. Your body gears itself up for whatever it experiences on a daily basis. So if you don’t use it for a certain purpose, you lose it.
So if you stop lifting heavy enough, your muscles will go away. And then when your muscles go away, what happens is your metabolism slows down and that’s why resistance training plays such a big roll in any weight loss program. Because any amount of muscle you put on, which develops your shape, is going to increase your metabolism.
And then so what happens when you stop training, and what most people do when they get older is, your muscle will shrink because they’re not using it, and their metabolism slows down, their hormone levels shift because their not experiencing the workload that the body likes. You know, a body needs to work, that’s the way it was designed. And then once all that happens, the fat starts creeping on.
Usually what happens is when you are eating…you can get away with a lot more calories when you are training on a regular basis and once you stop training but keep the same dietary habits, now you are consuming too many calories. So it’s kind of a bunch of events converging at the same time, but there is not an actual shift of how much muscle mass you have translating into fat later on at all.
Larry: Have you, given some of the things you have learned in the army, applied them to what’s in the book right now?
Ray: Massively. Thanks for bringing that up Larry! LOL My life has been…Devine, I would say in the way that it has unfolded with the, having gained weight, having been in the army and tried bodybuilding and all these things. Everything has come to this point right now where the experience I have helps me help other people. And the stuff that I learned in the army, was..you get put out in the middle of the woods, in the middle of nowhere, for a period of a couple weeks to a month or whatever, with no access to any sort of fancy equipment, well no equipment at all actually. And through that I learned how to work out, how to stay in shape simply using my own bodyweight.
You can read the rest of this article or listen to the mp3 under self help on the RaymondBurton.com website.