Everyone is always on the lookout for the Ultimate Diet Secret.  What can I do to lose fat FAST?!  I need to know NOW!  Please HELP me!

As a fitness and athletic coach I hear this all the time.  I hear it more than just about anything else (at least from women, men generally are more interested in muscle gain).   In fact I’ve been hearing that now for nearly 12 years!  But, let me tell you, there are precious few people who have actually done anything with the secret diet knowledge once I lay it out for them.

Yes.  There IS a secret.  The problem is that you already know it.  Since I couldn’t say it better, I’ll just quote Chad Waterbury:

If I told you to consume one gram of protein per pound of body weight, fibrous vegetables, water, green tea, 12 grams of fish oil, and spread those out over the course of six meals each day you’d be anything but impressed. But if I held you in captivity and forced you to do that every day for a month, you’d be blown away by the results. The nutritional methods to lose fat have already been found. The challenge we coaches face is figuring out how we’re going to get you to adhere to the guidelines.

What’s the take-home message?  Stick to the plan.  Losing fat, gaining muscle, and other forms of body composition change require the one thing most of us refuse to put in:  Consistency.  It’s often boring, but the boredom will pay dividends.

Keith Scott goes into the history, and provides criticism of unstable training (eg. boshu balls).

If you are trying to increase your strength, unstable training not only is a waste of time, but can actually be a detriment to your gains. You cannot possibly get stronger when you are squatting on a Bosu ball. You feet need a solid, stable surface to be able to increase loads progressively that will cause strength increases. Training on an unstable surface will not allow you to do this and will even make your weaker in the long run. Besides lack of strength increases and getting weaker, it also sets you up for injury. I have rehabbed many injuries that were caused by unstable training accidents.

Amen, brother.  He rightly mentions that it has its place in rehab settings, but it should be kept out of an athletes general program.  Remember that if you find yourself hiring a trainer at a big-box gym and he asks you to do overhead-lunges on a medicine-ball covered in oil.