I've been doing Physique Transformation for three weeks now. I quit Body for Life after 44 weeks and a total loss of 45 pounds of fat and 27 inches. But the last two weeks of BFL I was losing muscle, not fat. And that wasn't what I wanted.

Physique Transformation's idea is that most of us who are dieting, or have been dieting, have set our metabolism so low that it is almost impossible to lose weight and very simple to gain weight. So, they set your metabolism higher by having you eat more. Every week you are in conditioning, which can be as little as 4 weeks and as long as 12, you eat two hundred more calories a day.

So, week 1 I ate 1700 calories a day. Week 2 I ate 1900 calories a day. Week 3 I am eating 2100 calories a day. I'll be in it for 7 weeks, at which point I will be eating 2900 calories a day.

In the three weeks, I've eaten more and LOST inches and weight. Three or four pounds and 4.5 inches. It is amazing.

You don't lose much in inches if what you are losing is muscle, because muscles are much smaller than fat. Fat is 5X as big as muscle.

In fat burning, which happens at the end of conditioning and always lasts 12 weeks (although you can force more weeks), you drop your calories up and down daily to fool your body into thinking it has plenty of food but still needing to use fat stores. They say 2 lbs a week is expected in fat burning. However, guys tend to lose weight faster than women and fatter people tend to lose weight faster than less fat people, so I am hoping for 1.5 lbs a week.

Of course, in conditioning so far I have lost about 4 pounds. If that continues, I'll lose down to 150 by the time I start fat burning. At 150 I wear a nice loose 10. 18 pounds lower than that, at the end of fatburning, would make me skinnier than I have ever been since I was in 8th grade. (I've been 5'6″ since 6th grade.)