What differentiates John Parrillo from the rest of the fitness world is his cold allegiance to the truth – even if the truth is detrimental to his own financial wellbeing. Back in the early 1980s I was an avid supple-ment taker, indiscriminately leap-ing from one “magical” supplement to the next. I was lured in by outra-geous advertising claims made by unscrupulous supplement makers. I desperately wanted to believe that the bold lies (told with such easy assurance) were in fact true. Had I been a little smarter I would have noticed that the advertising tem-plates were predictably the same: purchase a full color ad in a muscle magazine and have some mon-strous bodybuilder proclaim that the featured supplement was criti-cal and indispensable and without this particular product it would have been impossible for the mon-ster man to construct the body he displayed in the ad. Factually these bodies were built using steroids, growth hormone, insulin and all manner and type of illegal drugs.
The second widely used advertis-ing template involved beautiful, scantily clad women. This clever tactic caused male bodybuilders to pause before turning the page. The boys and men would gaze lustfully at these exotic sex objects and by keeping the men and boys staring at the page the message about the supplement would be communicat-ed. Another successful supplement template used multiple images of normal folks radically transformed in ‘before and after’ shots. This tac-tic was brought to high art by one outfit whose owner bragged in my presence that he had no compunc-tion about advertising deception and outright lying because, and I quote, “No natural supplement works: none of them are worth a damn!” He also bragged about how in every $85 supplement “kit” sold, he had less than $3 in actual cost. This man built a fortune using this cynical ruse: his New Jersey man-sion was featured in Architectural Digest and his collection of vintage rock guitars (kept in a specially built hermetically sealed room) was valued at over $1,000,000. He died at age 39 of a prescription drug overdose and was considered the salesmanship “role model” by the rest of the industry. John Parrillo said repeatedly that natural supplements, potent natural supplements, can and do work – as-suming the supplements are potent and used in precise conjunction with a diet based on the expert use of real food. From day one Parrillo Performance Products has been upfront about the realistic results that can be procured from natu-ral supplements.
Parrillo has flatly and repeatedly stated that potent nutritional supplements can add 10-20% to the final finished physi-cal product: and that my friend is huge! Compared to the over-the-top deceitful lies proclaimed by other supplement makers, John’s realistic claims seemed tame. Par-rillo promoted the unpopular no-tion that using his supplements would allow the user to train more not less and train harder not easier. His supplements were never de-signed to provide the user a way to avoid the disciplined eating and ferocious training necessary to transform the human body. Par-rillo Products seemed pedestrian compared to the incredible results claimed by supplement liars. De-spite the pressure to go along with the crowd, John Parrillo never wa-vered in his complete allegiance to the factual truth. Maybe that’s the reason that Parrillo Performance Products are still around, thirty years down the road. This in an industry where the ‘shelf life’ of a new supplement is, on average, less than a year and supplement com-panies disappear completely after a few short years of existence. Are you aware that a half dozen Parrillo supplements remain popular thirty years after their introduction!
Nu-tritional supplements are meant to supplement a sound diet. A “sound diet” is a diet based on the studied use of regular food, the kind pur-chased at the grocery store. Honest supplementation is not designed to replace regular food; nor is the use of supplements supposed to magi-cally eliminate or reduce the time or gut-busting effort needed in the gym. Parrillo contended that precise use of potent, natural nu-tritional supplements would allow the serious trainee to train harder and train more often, train longer and recover quicker from the in-tense resistance and intense cardio he recommended. His truth telling stood him apart from the rest of the crowd back in the 80’s and it still sets him apart from the crowd in the year 2008. Parrillo’s sophisticated app-roach has evolved slowly and methodically over the past four decades. He honed his sys-tem to razor-edge perfection by preparing over a thousand bodybuilders for competition. The methods first developed for elite national and international level bodybuilders have proven incredibly effective when ap-plied to regular folks in pursuit of more modest fitness goals. The Parrillo nutritional approach em-powers the user by providing them with a system whose foundation is built on the precise use of regu-lar food. This foundational food base is augmented and amplified by the inclusion of powerful nu-tritional supplements. The Parrillo Nutritional approach enables the trainee to custom design a dietary approach that suits their lifestyle and melds with their particular needs and circumstance. The Par-rillo nutritional approach starts by establishing realistic goals. Once the goals are set the Parrillo trainee uses the BodyStat Kit to monitor re-sults. The BodyStat Kit includes the BodyStat Manual, BodyStat sheets and skin-fold calipers. The trainee uses BodyStat procedures to evalu-ate what is happening to his or her body composition: the ratio of lean muscle mass to body fat. Readings are taken weekly and results are monitored on a continual and ongo-ing basis. Based upon the weekly BodyStat results, the trainee might tweak their diet, they might tweak their training or they might tweak both. The idea is to keep progress going by manipulating the vari-ables.
The Parrillo method used today was developed over many, many years of trial and error. The overall goal is simple to grasp…. Try and gain muscle without gain-ing fat; try to lose fat without los-ing muscle. The easiest way to gain muscle is to stay in a calorie-surplus state. In the Parrillo mass building system, the trainee eats enough clean calo-ries to gain between 1 and 2 pounds per week. Progress is charted us-ing the BodyStat Kit to determine what percentage of body weight gained is muscle and what percent-age of weight gained was fat. If the weight gain is all muscle then you have hit the mark. You keep doing what you have been doing. If an unacceptable portion of the weight gained is fat, the trainee tweaks their diet. They could increase the lean protein intake while lowering starch carbs. This particular tactic increases glucagon and decreases insulin. Perhaps the trainee leaves the diet intact and alters the weight training or aerobics. There are, as the old saying goes, many ways to skin a cat. If the goal is to become as lean as possible, the easiest way to lose fat is to create a caloric deficit. Generally speaking, and depend-ing upon the size of the individual, the goal should be to lose between 1 and 2 pounds of body weight per week and use BodyStat charting to determine if the weight lost was body fat.
If your weight loss was fat loss then you keep doing what you have been doing. If you lose an un-acceptable amount of muscle in the process, then this indicates a tweak to the diet or a tweak to the training is in order. BodyStat methodology keeps you from getting fat when you are trying to add muscle size. BodyStat methodology keeps you from losing muscle when you are trying to burn off body fat. Body-Stat charting alerts you if you are on the right or wrong track and tells you when it is time to make a change in your strategy. Body-Stat charting eliminates the guess-work. The bathroom scale can be incredibly deceiving: you could lose two pounds of body weight, think you are doing great when in fact you have starved yourself, shut the metabolism down and have ac-tually lost two pounds of muscle! You think you are on the right track when in fact your fat per-centage remains untouched. Using the scales alone can leave you fat, dumb and happy – quite literally. BodyStat charting is all about logic: if you are on a mass build-ing program and after a protracted period of time BodyStat charting alerts you that your body is unable to put on another pound of muscle (the only weight gain is fat gain) then it is time to reverse directions and start leaning out. Cut the starch carbs and up the aerobics. This opens up the insulin receptor sites and adds capillary density to mus-cles. Down the road you can go on another mass gain cycle. Likewise when the lean-out strategy has run its course and you can’t seem to lose another pound of fat without losing muscle, then it is logically time to switch directions and start gaining a pound or two of weight per week. This switch will speed up your metabolism and enable you to start losing fat again as well.
This is the essence of the Parrillo approach and the BodyStat system is the cornerstone, the foundation, of the Parrillo nutritional sys-tem. BodyStat charting allows the trainee to create a weekly report card. If you are really serious and want to make continued progress this is the ideal system. This sys-tem allows you to continually chart progress and eliminate the guess work. Remember that every diet works if the calories are low enough – you will lose body weight – but are you losing body fat? BodyStat charting will give you the answer to that critical question. Our sys-tem lets you figure out which diet is the best diet for you. We find that if you do things right your me-tabolism constantly increases: this is called building the metabolism. John Parrillo was the first person to show that you could get lean and muscular by eating a lot of calo-ries – if it is done right. John has had competitors win major world bodybuilding competitions eating 10,000 calories per day and eat that amount of food without adding a single ounce of fat. How is that pos-sible? Over time, using the BodyS-tat system, the metabolism gradu-ally acclimatizes and is able to han-dle an ever increasing number of calories. The modern bodybuilding champions are able to step onstage weighing 250+ pounds carrying 4% body fat percentiles: they have trained their metabolisms to handle massive amounts of calories with-out shuttling excess into fat storage.
To use an appropriate analogy: a raging bonfire is able to burn gi-ant logs. A pathetic, smoldering fire can only burn twigs. A rag-ing metabolism can burn massive amounts of clean calories and burn them thoroughly and completely. A stunted metabolism turns excess calories into body fat quicker than you can say “Pass the pie!” Par-rillo’s genius was modifying the tactics of the champions for use by regular people. The champions blazed the trail and normal people can use these advanced tactics to pursue their own goals. For $39.95 you can purchase the BodyStat Kit and start issuing your own weekly report card. Combine potent Par-rillo supplements with the expert use of regular food. Use the Body-Stat Kit to inform you of weekly changes in body composition. Why fly blind?