In our last 5 Questions, we spoke with New John. He answered question #5 by saying that we should visit Suzie over at Waist and Taste.  In her own words, here is 4 Hour Body fan, Suzie: 

Suzie is a pinch overweight--or she was until she started The 4-Hour Body program. She blogs about her journey from a BMI of 26 to a BMI of 20 while hopefully inspiring others to do the same. She is 21 and getting ready to graduate from college in May. She writes Waist and Taste, a photo and personal reflection blog on her lifestyle changes. 

Mostly I'm working on getting back into shape; I used to participate in a plethora of sports in high school (skiing, soccer, and rock climbing to name a few), but have since succumbed to campus life. My first priority was moving from being classified as "overweight" to a "healthy weight." Since reaching that goal, I'm aiming to get my BMI down to 20.0, have the stamina to run again (8-minute mile is the ultimate goal), and live a healthier life. I want to be proud of my body, and I'm getting there!

Progress certainly hasn't been 30lbs in 20 days; that would be ridiculous for someone who is 5'1"! I have been losing roughly 1-1.5lbs a week, though lately I have been plateauing. Overall I've lost 10.4lbs, 13.35", and 7.24% body fat (as of last Saturday) over the course of 62 days.

There are many facets of Four Hour Body that makes the program doable. First of all, cheat day is a ginormous mind trick; I can convince myself that Mondays are close enough to Saturdays to not cheat... ever. Secondly, I know that I only have a few meals to choose from for dinners and lunches (taco salad, chicken thighs, beans, lentils, and stir fry), so I am consistently in my comfort zone when in the kitchen. This, of course, can be a drawback as well; sometimes the monotony of foods can irritate me. Finally, the online community and support network that the Four Hour Body has created is absolutely wonderful; the people on Twitter, Facebook, and who are blogging genuinely want others to succeed; I have reached out for support more than once!

My biggest problem with the Four Hour Body is being a woman! Allow me to explain: the men on this diet lose weight quicker (jealousy), don't go through cycles of water-weight fluctuation (discouragement), and the book was written for them (as you can see on page 505 of 4HB, Ferriss only tested 150 men on the diet vs 44 women; the men lost an average of 23lbs whereas the women only lost 12lbs). Though being a woman is an emotional block more than anything, it can still be frustrating to see others succeed quickly whereas I am only succeeding slowly.

- Track your calories. I know Ferriss says not to, but calorie counting will illuminate what foods are better for you. I use SparkPeople.com, which is free and also breaks down protein, fats, and carbs.

- You will be less likely to fall off the diet if you're strict during the week.

- While Ferriss doesn't advertise it, working out will still help you lose weight faster.

- DRINK LOTS OF WATER! A recommendation that I heard is to take your weight in pounds, divide it by 2, and then drink that number in fluid oz every day (for example, if someone weighs 150 pounds, divide by 2 for 75 oz, which is 9.375 cups per day). If you do not, your bowels will hate you, you will get headaches, and you will feel thirsty all the time. Drink. Water.

Cannolis and cookie dough, hands down.

Mike over at Lose A Skinny Chick is active both on Twitter and his blog. He's great about photo journaling and has a genuinely wonderful attitude!

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San Diego, a town that requires you to be in beach shape all year round.  To see more of our customer submitted photos, check out our Facebook page.

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 We added a new shipping destination.  For the 4HB fans in Austria, we ship can ship the PAGG stack to you now.

Image courtesy of Wikitravel.

Also, if anyone is wondering, We ship to all 50 US states (plus Guam, Puerto Rico and any APO/DPO address), Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Switzerland, France, the Netherlands, Greece, Denmark, Germany, Spain, Japan, Argentina and the UK.

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Response to Pareto Nutrition’s PAGG Stack has exceeded our expectations. We set out right from the start to create the best version of PAGG that we could, using the very best ingredients and you’ve responded with great enthusiasm. Since we’ve introduced the product, we’ve seen orders placed by people all over the world.

In addition, our return rate has been extremely low. Despite our industry-leading 110% guarantee we’ve only seen a couple of return requests and these were due to sensitivities to the ingredients.

So why mess with success you ask? Sure, a lot of supplement companies would rest on their laurels and spend their time pressing lawsuits against the imitators. But standing still is not Pareto’s mission, and it never will be.

The PAGG Stack has been improved in three significant ways.

R-ALA: not your dad’s ALA

We hope you’re ready for a little science lesson. If you examine the research on ALA you’ll quickly learn that it comes in two varieties S-ALA and R-ALA. The difference between these forms has to do with the shape of the molecule. Even though all ALA molecules are built with the same components, they differ in one critical aspect: they are enantiomers; that is, their atoms are arranged in a mirror image of each other.

An easy way to think of this is to compare your left and right hands.  The both have the same number of fingers, yet the thumbs point in different directions. For most of us one hand tends to work a lot better than the other.

Only the R-ALA form occurs naturally. In fact, S-ALA never even existed prior to 1952 when it was chemically born in a University of Illinois laboratory.^[1] ALA was synthesized using a process that produced both S-ALA and R-ALA in a 50/50 mix. This is what chemists refer to as a racemic mixture.

The vast majority of early studies on ALA were done using the R-ALA/S-ALA combination. These were the years when scientists discovered the essential role that R-ALA plays in cellular metabolism^[2]. It took decades to discover that R-ALA is the biologically active form of ALA that is responsible for the positive health benefits they had seen in hundreds of studies^[3]. R-ALA actually converts to the active form R-DHLA in the body 28 times faster than S-ALA^[4] and is more quickly and completely absorbed^[5].

S-ALA is generally considered safe and non-toxic. Up until recently researchers assumed that you if you simply used half the R-ALA as a standard ALA racemic mix you would get the same results. But several studies over the last decade have suggested that S-ALA competes with R-ALA in the body and may actually limit the overall effect of ALA supplementation^[6][7]. According to the evidence, eliminating the S-ALA will elicit a more powerful effect. By reducing the total number of milligrams per dose you also greatly reduce any chance of gastrointestinal side-effects such as acid reflux.

Though it costs significantly more as a raw ingredient, our PAGG Stack now contains 150mg of pure R-ALA instead of 300mg of racemic ALA, resulting in a more pure, natural and effective product. With the original PAGG stack, we sought to provide the exact specifications laid out by Tim Ferriss (100-300mg of ALA per serving). While these are fine recommendations, we’ve come to realize that our customers are a sophisticated group that want a product supported by the best scientific knowledge available. That’s what this change represents.

The green tea typo

If you follow Tim Ferriss on twitter, or have read his blog post detailing corrections to 4HB, you’ll know that he has made a small change to PAGG. His concern was that green tea extract can cause insomnia if taken before bed. We were less concerned about this. We made sure that we had a high-quality decaffeinated extract and we felt the research showed that other components of green tea, including EGCG and L-theanine could even have an overall calming effect.

In fact, even with our original PAGG formula we had only one customer complain about insomnia. Interestingly, several customers found that they were getting deeper, more restful sleeps than they were used to. This has also been our experience with ourselves and our test subjects.

Still, this has to be one of the biggest questions we get from first-time customers. So we asked ourselves: if we removed a dose of green tea from our PAGG stack would it remain as effective? The scientific research and our own experience says yes^[8]. The minimum effective dose^[9] is still exceeded with 975mg of EGCG per day, and this falls within the 900-1100mg range originally specified in the 4-Hour Body.

So if you were holding back on ordering because you wanted the updated Tim-Ferriss-approved formula and dosing schedule, you’ve got no more excuses. In fact Pareto Nutrition is the only PAGG stack on the market that meets Tim’s exact updated recommendations.

All this in even fewer pills

Reformulating the stack allowed us make one more important change. With the old version you took 4 AGG (red) capsules a day, and added a P (blue) capsule just before bed. Now we’ve combined garlic, R-ALA, and biotin into a new blue capsule (PAG). The new dosing schedule is to take a single red pill before 3 meals during the day, and take a single blue pill just before bed. It simply could not be easier. No other PAGG stack can claim to reduce your pill burden like this.

Our original PAGG stack has been a runaway success. If you’ve still got some of the original product, rest assured that it's fine. The new PAGG stack replaces the original and improves it by refining the ingredients, reducing any chance of side effects, and making it even easier to take PAGG than it ever has been before.

You can order the improved PAGG Stack today and it will start shipping on March 21st. Since we're backordered we're also extending free shipping to anyone who orders 2 or more months right now, to anywhere we ship in the world.

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It seems that the PAGG phenomenon has caused a lot of consumers (and even a few producers) who don't have a lot of experience with supplements to make some pretty wild claims. We want to dispel a few myths to help you, our customer, be more informed when you order from us, or any other supplement provider.

One of the biggest sources of confusion about supplements is whether capsules or tablets are superior. This is really unfortunate since there are advantages and disadvantages to both depending on the application and desired outcome.

Compliance

Compliance is the measure for how closely you follow your dosage schedule. Unless you are in the hospital or a controlled coaching situation, you are probably taking your supplements voluntarily and without supervision. The best supplement in the world would be useless if you didn’t take it when you were supposed to (low compliance). Since manufacturers can’t be at your side to make sure you take your pill, we have to do what we can to increase compliance, and ultimately the product’s effectiveness.

Ease of Use

A product that is easy to use, is more likely to be used. When it comes to oral supplements, ease of use is determined by pill size, shape, taste and smell. When a manufacturer does it right, you don’t notice but when it’s done poorly (horse pills, bad odor or taste) compliance drops quickly.

Tablets are produced by compressing the ingredients under great pressure using either a centrifuge or a high powered press/compactor. There is a lot of control over the shape and size of the tablets including the addition of notching to make it easier to split a tablet.

For the PAGG stack, capsules are an obvious choice. With the exact dose in each pill, there was no need to consider the convenience of notching and this allowed us to do what we could to increase compliance. We knew that the 4HB training program was challenging enough and we didn’t need to make it any tougher by increasing the ‘pill burden’. Further, uncompressed ingredients turned out be important for absorption and getting the active ingredients into your body faster.

Absorption

One great advantage of tablets is the ability to use different binders or densities to create a "time-release" product. Experienced manufacturers who know what they're doing can expertly produce vitamin tablets that release into the body over several hours. Adding an enteric coating will slow down absorption even more by protecting the pill from stomach acid. If a tablet seems too small to hold all the ingredients it claims on the label, it might be because its been compressed so hard that it could take several hours to fully dissolve. Even well-known brands such as Centrum are notorious for not fully dissolving before they... exit the system.

Capsules are appropriate when you want to be sure that you're absorbing all the ingredients or want to spike your bloodstream with a particular ingredient. Capsules are designed to dissolve within minutes of swallowing and deliver their ingredients all at once.

In our case, using capsules for PAGG was a no-brainer. The dosing schedule for PAGG is before meals. The logic behind this is that you want peak the levels of the active ingredients while digesting a meal so you can take advantage of the increased insulin sensitivity when it matters most, while all those nutrients are hitting your bloodstream. Extending the release of ALA by using tablets would be fine if you were only after the anti-oxidant benefits, but you're probably taking PAGG to alter your body composition.

Protection

Tablets have the option of being produced with a variety of coatings. This coating is applied as a thin film around the tablet. This is perfectly acceptable for ingredients that are hardy and degrade very slowly. Capsules provide superior protection of ingredients. Hard gelatin capsules act as an oxygen and light barrier.

With our PAGG stack, we knew from the beginning that capsules were the only delivery method suitable for the ingredients involved. Alpha lipoic acid breaks down when exposed to air and light. Aside from looking great (in our humble opinion), we chose the opaque colored capsules specifically for their superior protective capabilities over tablets.

Price

It's no secret that tablets are cheaper than capsules. By producing a supplement as a tablet, if it's appropriate, the producer can save some money.

For our PAGG stack, it really wasn’t a decision at all. We set out to make the best PAGG stack possible and it was obvious that tablets were not the way to go.

Conclusion

So which is better, capsules or tablets? The context is everything when trying to answer that question. If your goals are to increase compliance, getting the supplement into your system quickly, and protect the ingredients then capsules are the obvious choice. We’ve never considered using tablets, because with the PAGG stack, you want all of these things. Pareto Nutrition uses only the best capsules on the market, made by the leading manufacturer Capsugel.

To try the best PAGG stack in the world, visit http://paretonutrition.com/

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We are pleased to start shipping the PAGG stack to Argentina. 

Image courtesy of Wikitravel.

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Eli, a customer of ours in France was very kind to send us several beautiful shots from Paris.  Pictured above is the finest PAGG stack available (if I do say so myself) in front of the Arc de Triomph.   She sent a few other photos which are lovely and available for your viewing pleasure on our Facebook page.  

Which reminds me, if you haven't purchased your PAGG stack yet and you're a Facebook user, you can get a discount code for liking us.

Also, if anyone is wondering, We ship to all 50 US states (plus Guam, Puerto Rico and any APO/DPO address), Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Switzerland, France, the Netherlands, Greece, Denmark, Germany, Spain, Japan and the UK.

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