Harley Pasternak is a leader in the fields of fitness and nutrition — well known for helping top Hollywood celebrities dramatically transform their bodies. Now he shares his “5-Factor” weight-loss secrets with the rest of us in two popular books!

5-Factor Diet

The 5-Factor Diet details a revolutionary plan based on scientific research. This unique eating plan will absolutely transform your body — and your life. You’ll be surprised to read that it doesn’t include weighing, measuring, or calorie counting. And it actually simplifies the way you eat! Plus, it requires you to cheat! Once a week, you can eat all your favorite foods (hello, dessert and pizza!). The best part? This is a realistic approach to weight loss that you can incorporate into your life.

>> Buy the book now!

5-Factor Fitness

5-Factor Fitness will help you achieve the body you’ve always wanted in five short weeks! This plan actually encourages you to work out less and eat more. That’s right — sweat less and never go hungry! If you don’t believe it works, just take a look at Harley’s client list, which includes some of Hollywood’s most beautiful bodies. Harley has brought science to the gym, and he’ll teach you how 25-minute workouts can be more effective than hours spent at the gym.

>> Buy the book now!

When I first started working out (about 10 years ago), I was tall and skinny. My goal was to build muscle and get buff. After 6 months of training, I had gained considerable strength, but you wouldn’t know by looking at me. So what went wrong? I didn’t eat enough, and I didn’t get enough protein.

Men’s Fitness lists the 10 worst workout mistakes - Things you do that sabotage your progress and cost you muscle. Recognize a mistake as part of your daily routine? They also came up with some quick and easy fixes you can use to correct these problems and net truly awesome gains.

1. YOU DON’T EAT ENOUGH (FOR FEAR OF GETTING FAT)
Yes, extra calories can mean extra belly fat, but if you’re lifting consistently and correctly, most of what you’re taking in should be converted to muscle. The truth is your muscles will never grow without a surplus of calories. For a lean guy looking to put on muscle mass, 2,000 calories a day won’t cut it. In fact, this kind of restricted diet is actually the ideal recipe for losing muscle tis- sue and sparing fat, as it causes the body to shift into starvation mode and shed calorie-consuming muscle. It also makes you store fat for emergency energy. And the less protein you eat, the less of a chance you give your muscles to recover after a workout.

2. YOU AMP UP YOUR CARDIO
There are three ways that cardio typically cancels out muscle gains: doing it too often, doing it for too long, or doing it on an empty stomach. In general, daily cardio sessions simply burn too many cumulative calories to allow you the surplus you need for muscle mass, and the same can be said for sessions that last 45 minutes or more. Work out in the morning before breakfast and you only compound the problem. When you wake up, your body is already in a catabolic (muscle-burning) state, since a night’s sleep—time spent without eating—empties your tank. Working out immediately just reinforces this condition and costs you intensity—whether on the treadmill or with the weights. The end result: You burn muscle as fuel in place of calories you should have consumed at breakfast.

(I disagree on this point - Many experts say that it’s best to work out on an empty stomach, as you’ll force your body to burn fat to fuel your workout..)

3. YOU WORK TO EXHAUSTION
If the biggest musclehead in the gym has taught us anything, it’s that doing lots and lots of sets and reps to the point of total collapse (he can’t even muster his signature grunt!) is the best way to build muscle. Never mind that he’s a genetic freak and/or probably on steroids. More than 20 total sets per muscle group, or more than 15 reps per set, may leave your muscles swollen (hence the ego-enhancing “pump”), but it will be from inflammation, not actual muscle growth. Any weight that allows that much work is too light to cause sub- stantial growth, and you’ll reap no lasting gains.

4. YOU FAVOR BODY-PART WORKOUTS
Breaking your training down into chest days, back days, and arm days over- works some muscles and neglects others. It’s an old-school way to train—and it’s incredibly outdated. Most guys still do it, and many make gains for a while, but their progress eventually comes to a halt, usually due to injuries. Body-part routines also prevent your biggest muscles from ever learning to work together in the kinds of coordinated effort you need to lift really heavy weights—another major avenue for fast growth.

5. YOU SHUN STRETCHING
Boring? Definitely. But stretching has been shown to speed up recovery and increase a muscle’s range of motion, making more room for muscle fibers to grow. Simply lifting weights will increase your risk for injury and se- verely limit your ability to move athletically—so no matter how big you are, you’ll probably be picked last for teams.

6. YOU ONLY EAT SPORADICALLY
It’s true: Eating infrequently is nearly as bad as not eating at all. When you go more than three hours without food, your metabolism slows significantly.When that happens, every time you do get a meal, there’s a good chance that a large percentage of it will be stored as fat. Why? Blame your body. Without food, it slips back into starvation mode and starts to think it needs to hold on to every calorie it can get.

7. YOU RARELY ALTER YOUR ROUTINE
Doing the exact same workout week after week will, at best, prevent new gains, and, at worst, lead to burnout. Failing to impose any new challenges on your muscles—such as by increasing the weight you use or the number of reps you perform—simply helps keep them the same size, whereas pushing yourself harder than you’re accustomed to will actually spur new muscle and strength.

8.YOU ONLY TRAIN WHAT YOU SEE IN THE MIRROR
Focusing your workouts on trophy muscles such as the pecs and biceps may be more fun, but it won’t do much for your overall development. Since 70% of your body’s total musculature is located in your legs and back, your main potential for muscle gains will remain untapped. Furthermore, this kind of trainingwill leave you with muscle imbalances that lead to injury—and that can keep you out of the gym permanently.

9. YOU DON’T DRINK SHAKES
Chugging a protein-and-carb mixture after your workout starts the recovery process immediately, replenishing lost glycogen (your muscles’ energy stores) and providing the nutrients your body requires to repair muscle and grow more of it. Skipping the shake and casually waiting an hour or more for your next meal is like ignoring a cry for help.

10. YOU DON’T GET ENOUGH REST
Sleep is when muscle repair happens, so getting six or fewer hours of shut-eye a night limits your body’s natural production of crucial muscle-building chemicals, such as growth hormone. Too much activity outside of your workouts, such as playing sports, all-night dance parties, and extra stress—all of which are permissible now and then, but dangerous in excess—also cut into muscle gains. And if you’ve been working out seven days a week, we’ve got another pleasant surprise for you: You’ll lose muscle for sure. Such a high frequency won’t allow for regeneration, and your efforts will be wasted. And no, it doesn’t matter if you’re training different muscle groups each day—you still have the same central nervous system, and it still gets tired of having to deal with major physical exertion every day.

Want to know how you can be as toned as Jessica Biel and as sexy as Eva Mendes? US Magazine asked some of Hollywood’s hottest celebrity trainers how they get their clients into shape.

1. Change It Up
   “I’m a big advocate of recreational sports and stuff. If someone can get out there, even if it’s a hike or something like that, just to break up the monotony of going to the gym…I really like that.”
2. Full Body Exercises
   Walsh recommends intense workouts with full body movements. You use as many muscles as you can at once, which in turn will jack that heart rate up.
3. Don’t Starve Yourself
   You need snacks and drinks, but try to eat “Really organic and clean foods, all natural, like nuts.” Also, “an amino acid drink, so that you’re not burning up a lot of your muscle, or protein.”
4. Medicine Balls Are Cool Again
   “Get a medicine ball and do a lunge with a twist while you are holding the ball. Those are great. You are activating so many muscles at once, and you are using those muscles over so many different plains.”
5. Healthy Can Be Yummy
   “Breakfast would be whole grain bread French toast with egg whites and cinnamon. For a mid-morning snack, they’d do a mixed-berry protein shake. Lunch might be sweet potato tuna melt. An afternoon snack might be hummus with celery sticks. Dinner would be spaghetti and meatballs with spaghetti squash and meatballs made of turkey or chicken breast.”
6. On Yoga and Pilates
   “Those are great forms of exercise for stability and balance, but neither one of those is going to change your body dramatically like training with weights does.”
7. Fats
   “The biggest problem is that people are fat phobic. It’s clinically proven that we need healthy fat in our diets. You need to eat a balanced diet but not be afraid of fat, like Omega 3 fatty acids like walnuts, olive oil and even coconut oil.”
8. You Can’t Target Fat Loss
   “Blend nutrition, exercise, and physical therapy. The body responds better. People get too wrapped up in doing isolated movement, like being very body part specific.”
9. Get Off The Treadmill
   “People get too cardio-crazy and need to do more weight lifting,” says Owens. He explains that for many people on elliptical machines, “their heart rate is about the same as if they were shopping around a mall.”
10. Take A Break
    W orking out for more than an hour is a “waste of time. Take one to two days off a week: Have a massage, make sure you get plenty of rest. The muscles actually change when they’re recovering.”