Hello!  My name is Emil, and welcome to my site.  It’s great to meet you!  

So, what’s on my site? 

The four colored letters that spell out “emil” at the top of the page are in fact a menu to the rest of the site.  Try moving your mouse over the letters and you will see! The organization is roughly as follows:

• E-services - if you’re feeling lucky, you can get your lucky number for the day here! (More services coming)

• My Stuff - this is where most of my stuff is, things like pictures, recipes, stories, blog posts.

• Info - information about this site.

• Links - Links to other cools sites and information

I’ve owned this domain since the 90’s so I’ve been at this for a while.  That said, I’ve worked here in silicon valley tech companies for a long time, so I intend to update the site at some point to better reflect what I’m actually capable of building. 

And I’ll try to capture current thoughts in my blog right on the main page here.

What’s in a name?

If your name is Emil, it’s nice to meet a fellow traveler with a shared first name.  Of course, it may be Emil, Emile, Emilio, Emilian, etc.  It turns out that Emil is a relatively rare name where I live in California, so many people trip over it.  But it is much more common in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe.  Read more about the name here.

Emil isn’t Email, but maybe I can help.

Some people get to this site by accident, looking for email.com.  Sorry, you forgot the “a”.  That said, if you want an email address @emil.com, then contact me via email (using the address emil@ that domain).  I may be able to help you out.

Blog - Emil’s “Recipe” for Losing Weight and Building Muscle

People often ask me how I stay fit and in shape, and it’s a topic I’ve done a lot of research on and thought a lot about.  Of course, there are many sources of information about how to stay fit and healthy, so one of the key challenges is to simplify it.  I’ll give you a simplified version of my plan and some pointers for more information.

First, you need to make a decision, do you want to lose weight OR do you want to build muscle? The plan for each of these goals is different, so you need to decide which plan you are following.  Of course, if you’re like me, you probably want to do a bit of both.  That’s okay, you can build muscle while losing fat, but you should know that it’s harder to concentrate on both goals – a trainer once told me it’s like trying to catch two rabbits at the same time.

Let me start by talking separately about each of these goals and plan to achieve them. Then we can revisit the question of doing both at the same time.

Losing weight - easy in theory, hard in practice. 

Losing weight is “easy” in theory but hard to do in practice.  In short, just eat fewer calories that you use (by exercising and keeping your body running) and you’ll lose weight.  That’s it.  You can stop reading now (ha ha).  But, if you need a little more detail, read on and I’ll outline step-by-step what to do.

I’ve done this, and it works. The problem is how to “eat fewer calories than you use” in practice.  I’ve managed to drop 25 pounds over several years and keep it off - even though I love to eat.  And I’ll tell you how I do it.

First, there is no other way to lose weight than eating fewer calories than you use.  Yes, you can lose weight using many, many diets and techniques but in the end they all just reduce the calories you eat and drink to be fewer than the calories you use.  

All diets that work control calories one way or another. You can try all the other methods out there - intermittent fasting, juice cleanses, Keto, Noom, weight watchers, Nutrisystem, etc. (It’s a very long list!) But in the end, they are all different paths up the same mountain.  All the ones that work work because you end up eating fewer calories that you use.  Of course, they all want to make money, so they won’t tell you it’s just that easy.

Making better food choices isn’t required to lose weight, but you’ll be less hungry and it’s better for you. You can also eat anything you want and still lose weight, as long as you eat fewer calories than you use.  There is a study showing that you can lose weight eating junk food.  Although you can eat anything and lose weight, I also recommend adjusting your diet.  After all, eating foods like junk food to lose weight is more difficult because you will be hungrier, you will feel less energetic, and it could cause other long term health problems. 

The recipe:  To lose a pound a week, every day on average make sure:

   (basic calories used) + (exercise calories) - (eat/drink calories) > target calorie deficit

If your target calorie deficit is 500 calories, this means you are using 500 calories more each day than you consume.  That adds up to 3500 calories a week, or about a pound.

Click here for the plan step-by-step…

Blog - Emil’s plan for building muscle. 

As with losing weight, you need to decide on your goals.  When it comes to building muscle, you can optimize for:

• Strength - this is how much weight you can actually move around.

• Size - this is how large your muscles are.  Famously, bodybuilders like Arnold Schwarzenagger were actually not as strong as Olympic weightlifters.

• Athleticism - this is the ability to perform better in a game, like football, basketball, etc.

If you are just beginning, you’ll be able to make progress on all three (strength, size, athleticism) at the same time.  But as you get more advanced, different kinds of exercises optimize for different aspects of building muscle.