FAQs

Q: How much do you eat in a day? Are you always hungry?

We are calorie counters now. We count every calorie that goes into our bodies. It can be somewhat tedious, but well worth it, because without knowing how much your eating you don’t know how much you need to burn. On a daily basis Neill consumes 1800-2000 calories a day, whereas Amanda consumes 1200-1300 a day (mostly due to the fact that she is about 100 lbs less than Neill, and the fact that she is female, women need less calories than men on average). We are allowed one high calorie day a week.

As far as being hungry all the time…we’re not. We are less hungry now than before when we would eat HUGE amounts of food! That is mostly due to the kinds of food we eat now: tons of vegatables, lean meats, whole grain everything. Very little bread, no white flour, obviously no more sodas, no fatty foods, almost no sugar and salt. Oh and we best not forget…TONS of water! We drink over 100oz of water a day.

Q: I keep hearing you say weigh in day, what is that?

Weigh in day is the day we weight in, but it takes preparation to weigh in and be at your absolute lightest. First, we fast starting the night before (8pm typically) so we have no food or drink past 8pm. Then wake up as early as possible, use the bathroom to clear out all solids/fluids, I then go to the YMCA and workout for an hour (on an empty stomach and drink no additional water). After all that you get on the scale in underwear only to make sure clothes don’t skew the results.

The reason to weigh in in the morning is that you have burned through all the food in your stomach, again making sure food or water does not skew your weight results.

Note: when we say workout for an hour before weigh in is NOT for dehydration…dehydration is the worst thing you can do for weight loss. I do however, do it to lose a little bit more water before I hit the scale. We do not, and will not dehydrate, as that affects you later on down the road negatively.

Q: How often a day did you workout while at the ranch?

Typically at the ranch we worked out 6-8 hours a day. Each and every single day, except for high calorie slash weigh in day. It would typically start with a warm up workout of 1-2 hours in the morning, followed by a snack, then the trainers would show up and kick our asses for 4-5 hours. Somewhere in there we would break for lunch. Then after the trainers left, we would have dinner and then go back to the gym for 1-2 more hours. That ladies and gentlemen is how you put up the weight loss numbers we put up a week!

Q: What is high calorie day?

High calorie day, HCD, or also known as “cheat day” or “splurge day”, is the one day a week that you take a little break from the super strict diet that you are on. You can have 1 meal that will up your calories. For example: if you take in 1800 calories per day, then on high calorie day you up it to 2400-2600.

Why you say? Because low calories throughout the week can cause your body to go into “starvation mode” because it is not getting as much food as it wants, or was used to. So it can start completely shutting down the weight loss and storing body fat, instead of burning it. Which is compounded by the fact that it then starts to attack the muscles for food. So you eating higher calories on HCD is your way of telling the body everything is okay and it can keep losing weight. Try it for a few weeks. See if you notice a change in how much weight you lose.

Q: How do you find the time to workout?

It was really hard to find the time to workout after we got eliminated from the ranch, being that we were working out up to 5 hours each and everyday. Basically we traded all our previous lives TV time for working out. It was amazing how much time in a day we could find just by hitting the power button on the TV.

We still workout 1-3 hours a day; 1-2 during the week and 2-3 on the weekend. It was hard at first to get rid of all the TV shows, but now we don’t miss them at all!