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Many people are familiar with growing marijuana, but far less people are familiar with cultivating psilocybin mushrooms.  I have actually never cultivated magic mushrooms myself, but had two friends in college that made quite a bit of money doing this.  So I am extremely familiar with the process and have watched it being done, but I don’t have any actual hands on experience.

The most important thing that you will need to cultivate your own psilocybin mushrooms is a sterile environment.  Mold and bacteria can easily contaminate your mushroom spores and prevent them from growing properly.  So pick an area of your house dedicated to growing mushrooms and throughly clean the area and keep it clean as though its a hospital operating room.

The second thing that you will need is a spore syringe.  There are several legitimate companies out there that sell spore syringes for microscope research use only.  Magic mushroom spores are legal because the spores themselves do not contain any psilocybin or psilocin until they are cultivated into Mushroom.  So it’s legal for these companies to sell the spores, but it is illegal for someone to cultivate these spores.  This is a ridiculous, but great loophole in our perfect legal system.

You can order a spore syringe from one of the legitimate spore sample suppliers below:

Spores101 (http://www.spores101.com) - they sell spores in sterile viles for ~$15-38 depending on the strain.
SporeBank (http://www.sporebank.com) - they sell spores in sterile viles for ~$15-25 depending on the strain.
MicroSupply (http://www.micro-supply.com) - all spore viles are $10 regardless of the strain.

You will also need the following supplies:

 - Sterile Glass Jars (8)
 - Vermiculite (8 cups)
- Brown Rice Flour (3 cups)

Substrate Preparation

This step involves combining the Vermiculite (8 cups), Brown Rice Flour (3 cups) and water (4 cups) to make the substrate.  Put the Vermiculite in a bowl and pour water on top of it.  Put just enough water to be absorbed by the Vermiculite.  When you tilt the bowl you should see a little water pooling up on the sides.   Pour the Brown Rice Flour over the top of the wet Vermiculite so that it is spread evenly.

Take 8 glass jars and remove the tops of the jars.  Fill each glass loosely with the substrate mixture.  Divide the substrate mixture evenly across all the jars.  Fill each jar almost up to the top with loose substrate leaving half an inch from the top of each jar.  Fill the remaining half inch at the top of each jar with dry Vermiculite.  Shake each jar to even out the top layer of Vermiculite.

Use a nail to punch four holes on the north, south, east, and west corners of each of the jar lids.  Put the lids on the jars.  Tightly wrap foil across the tops of each of the lids to cover up the holes.

Take a pressure cooker and fill it up with about an inch of water.  Put the jars inside the pressure cooker spaced out evenly.   Close the lid on the pressure cooker and cook it for 60-90 minutes on the stove to sterilize the substrate jars.  Sterilize the needle while the pressure cooker is sterilizing the jars.

After the pressure cooker has cooled take out the individual jars.  Remove the foild wrapping from the top of each jar.  Take the syringe and inject the spores into the substrate as show above.  You should use one syringe per jar and press the needle as far down as it will go (1.5 inches). Do not touch the lid! Cover the top of the jar with foil after injecting the spores into the substrate to keep the jar sterile.

Colonization

During this phase the jars are left out so that the spores can germinate and form the mycelium to colonize the substrate.  As the time goes by, the fungus will spread throughout the jar. Eventually, the entire surface of the glass will be covered with fungus. Typically, the bottom of the jar is the last area to be colonized. Be on the look out for any contamination.   The entire colonization process usually takes around 20 days.

Growing Terrarium

Take a foil cake tray and fill it a quarter full with clay glanulate.  Take each jar and flip it upside down and bang it against the counter top to get the colonized substrate to go to the top of the jar.  Remove the lid and flip the jar upside down inside the cake tray on top of the glanulate.  Remove the jar exposing the substrate to the air, it should stand alone like a tower.  Put 2-3 jars for each foil cake tray.

Take a rubbermaid clear plastic tub and place the cake trays inside the tub, cut holes in the tub lid for air, and put the lid over the tub.  Put some water into the plastic tubs.  The tub should be stored between 72-80 degrees fahrenheit or 22-26 degrees celcius, in high humidity with a little light.  You should always see water drops on the inside of the plastic container at all times.

Normally, it takes about a week for pin heads to form if the rice cake was removed from the culture jar as soon as it was 100% colonized. It can happen after just a couple days if the network is well established, or it can take several weeks if things aren’t just perfect for the cake.

You should avoid the temptation to grow the mushrooms as large as possible. Significantly more psilocybin is produced during the early periods of growth. By letting the mushroom grow too large you are simply consuming nutrients and moisture from the rice cake for no purpose. Also, the mushrooms taste increasingly bad as they get larger. Lastly, the mycelium network in the cake can only provide so much in the way of nutrients and water to maturing mushrooms. If you let the mushrooms grow too big, they will hurt the development of other mushrooms on the cake. The mushrooms should be picked just as the cap is starting to tear away from the stalk.

Drying and Preservation

To dry the mushrooms properly you need to get the following:

- Wire Screen
- Carton of Damp-Rid or Damp-be-Gone (Anhydrous calcium chloride)
- Large, freezer size zip-lock bag

Put the mushrooms on the wire screen on top of one of the Damp-Rid sheets inside of the sealed freezer bag and allow to try in total darkness.

The reason this system works so well to dry the mushrooms is the calcium chloride is a good desiccant. It has a very strong affinity for moisture and can pull almost all the moisture out of the air. Eventually however, liquid will start to collect in the bottom of the bag. Mushrooms are 92% water by weight. This moisture has to go somewhere when the mushrooms are dried, and it will eventually find its way to the bottom of the bag.

You have several choices when moisture starts to collect in the bag. You can simply drain it out and continue to use the old desiccant. It will work, but you should be careful not to contaminate the upper side of the bag or the screen with residue from the desiccant. You do not want your mushrooms to touch the residue. For one thing, it tastes terrible, but in addition to this, the mushrooms will not dry completely. The residue will attract moisture. If the bag gets contaminated and you still want to use the old desiccant, try to pour it into a new bag without letting it touch the top side of the bag. Rinse the screen and place it in the bag.

If they are dried correctly, nearly all of the psycho-active compounds can be preserved for many months.

Dosage

Most people consume anywhere from half-an-eighth of an ounce to an eighth of an ounce depending on their bodysize and experience.  I can’t really help you out on dosage because mushrooms are like snowflakes and no two are the same in terms of potency.  Just be aware that fresh mushrooms more potent than dried mushrooms.

One final note. If you ever find that you have dosed too heavily, just remember that 90 minutes after ingestion will be the peak experience. Things will start to settle down after that. The good news is that medically you can’t overdose on psilocybin. If you remember these things, and believe them, they can help ease you through a high dose experience.

Here’s a quick trick to make a few extra dollars by harvesting money from pay phones.  

Find a traditional pay phone like the one pictured above, try to gain access to the phone wiring either through the plastic shroud running down the wall, the junction box, or through the telephone enclosure.   There are two sets of wires coming out the back of the pay phone enclosed in a black insulated casing. 

If you strip the black insulation away from these wires.  You will see four colored wires.  The regular telephone operations are handled by the green wire, “tip”, (electrically positive) and red wire, “ring”, (electrically negative).   The coin mechanism relays and solenoids are powered by the yellow and black wires.

Find a section of the wire where a cut will not be easily seen from outside the telephone box.  Strip off the black insulation off the cord, exposing all four wires. Now cut the black and yellow wires but leave the other two wires intact.  This will disable the coin mechanism, but the phone itself will still be completely functional.

Now conceal the wiring that you cut either by tucking it back into the telephone enclosure and concealing them or by closing the actual telephone box.

Now leave the phone and people will come by and use the phone.  What will happen?  Well, when they put money into the pay phone, it will stay in the coin mechanism until 1 of 2 things happen.

1. They connect their call, talk, and then hangup.  After they hangup, their money goes from the coin mechanism into the collection box.
2. They call a number that doesn’t answer, or get busy signal, or terminate the call before anyone answers, and then hangup. When they hangup, the money goes from the coin mechanism to the coin return.

However, since the black and yellow wires have been cut the coin mechanism is disabled so the money does not go to the coin collection box or the coin return, it just remains in the coin mechanism area.

All you do now is come back a few hours or days later and re-connect the black and yellow wires, pick up the handset and then hang it up.  All the money that was put into the phone that day comes shooting out the coin return.  It’s not unusual to collect between $10-15 per busy pay phone using this method.

I would suggest doing this during the weekend especially on Sunday because some people will call the operator and tell them that the phone took their money and they will dispatch repair people.  I would guess that these repair people work less on the weekends so the phone would most likely not be fixed until Monday.

This trick can only be used to make some extra change, it won’t make you rich or provide any sort of reoccurring income like some of my other scams that I have talked about previously, but it’s a neat little trick.

Today I received a $100 Best Buy Gift Card from an online promotion and I have decided to spread the wealth to one of my readers.  So I have used this $100 gift card to purchase a SanDisk Sansa® e200R Rhapsody Series MP3 Player and I am going to give it away on January 31st to a random reader for participating on this site.

To enter the contest:

1. Write a comment under one of the posts on this site. This comment has to be on-topic, useful, and contribute to the site.  Any inappropriate or off-topic posts will be deleted and won’t be counted in this contest.
2. Be sure to include your email address with the comment so that we contact you if you are the winner. Your website URI is optional, but an email address is required.

How we will pick the winner:

On January 31st, we will draw a number between one and the total number of comments. If that number comment is appropriate and contains an email address then that person will be picked as the winner. It’s that easy!

 About the SanDisk Sansa e200R Rhapsody

The Sansa® e200R Rhapsody is a flash based music player capable of playing music, photo, and even video clips. This device holds 4 GB of music which is ~1000 MP3 songs (64 hours of music) or ~2000 WMA songs (128 hours of music) and has a microSD cardslot which allows you to increase the song capacity. There is a large 1.8” TFT color screen for playing music video clips or displaying the songs album cover. This device will support most image and video formats (gif, jpg, avi, mpeg, real). It has a digital FM tuner, on-the-fly FM recording, and voice recording capabilities. It has a rechargeable Lithium Ion battery that lasts for up to 20 hours. They can be connected to the Rhapsody music subscription service for $12.99 a month. This monthly fee allows you to have unlimited access to millions of songs without paying per song, however when your subscription runs out you won’t be able to play any of the songs that you have downloaded until you renew. This player comes preloaded with around 1000 songs, but they all expire in 21 days and require you to renew your subscription with Rhapsody before you can play them again - this is their way of getting you hooked to the service and ensure that you will subscribe - not a bad sales tactic!

One accessory that you can’t live without is the Griffin iTrip charger and FM modulator. With this device you can recharge the player in your car and listen to the player through your car’s FM stereo all with a single connection, it runs around $79.99 so it’s almost as expensive as the Sansa player itself which is $99.99.

Most people see winning at Casino Games as being one-third skill and two-thirds luck and this is probably accurate.  Casinos exist to make money and therefore most people who go to casinos end up losing money to the house, the odds are always geared in favor of the dealer and the house, but usually the individual players themselves all have the same opportunity to make money. Games like poker and blackjack involve some skill, but they also rely heavily on the luck of the players.

However, there are a million ways to cheat at casino games inorder to give you an unfair advantage. I wouldn’t recommend using these tactics at actual casinos because they have trained dealers, cheating experts, and security measures in place to catch people cheating. If you are caught cheating you will most likely be arrested and go to jail. However, these tactics would be fun to do at poker night with your friends or at a casino royal party.

Roulette Scams

Cheating with roulette usually involves past posting techniques where you either use a sight of hand, a distraction, or the help from another person to place a bet or change a bet AFTER the outcome of the game has been determined.

The video below, shows you effective techniques for cheating on the roulette table.

Dice Games Scams

Cheating with dice games usually involve altering the dice by rounding their corners to land on a certain number more often than other numbers or spinning them a certain way in a cup in a controlled manner to make them land on a certain number.

The video below, shows you effective techniques for cheating in dice games.

Blackjack Scams

Cheating with blackjack is easier than any other card game with the exception of three-card monty. The most effective way of doing well with blackjack is through card counting when only one deck is used, however nowadays casinos are using as many as 8 decks (and sometimes half decks) to prevent card counting from taking away the house advantage. However, many non-casino games usually only involve one deck which makes card counting possible.

Shuffle tracking involves watching how cards are shuffled and then seeing where the cards you want are going. This technique is possible using multiple decks.

Ace tracking is another technique involving keeping track of where the aces are going during a blackjack game.

The video below, shows you effective techniques for cheating on the blackjack table.

Poker Scams

Cheating with poker can be rather complicated. These techniques involve using card marking, loaded decks, and shuffling techniques. The real key to these scams is a psychological game: deal your opponents great hands to build up their confidence and cause them to place high bets, you may intenionally want them to see your cards prior to returning your last two cards to make them think that they definitely have a better hand than you, however you actually have the best hand. These techniques are very complicated and harder to pull off.

The video below, shows you effective techniques for cheating in poker games.

Cheating Devices

There are gambling devices that can be used to help people to cheat at different types of casino games. There are devices which can be used to count multiple decks of cards with blackjack. They can also use covert ways of communication to allow two people to work together to tell one another about another players cards. There are also devices that can measure the roulette wheel’s speed and the speed of the ball to determine on which number a ball will land with very close accuracy.

The video below, shows you effective techniques for using devices to cheat in poker games.

Most people are weary about gambling at casinos because they know that the house usually has a strong advantage over the players at the casino. These casinos are in business to make money so they will take any advantage that they can and try to make the most money possible. The odds are always stacked against the players however some games have better odds than others.

Winning Without Cheating at the Casino

Poker requires a great deal of skill and highly depends on your ability to bluff, your interaction with other players, and the skill of the players that you are playing against. There are alot of factors with this game, so I would avoid playing poker unless you are already highly skilled and experienced at this game.

Craps is extremely complicated, but much of the fascination with this game lies in its complexity. In the game, one player, the shooter, throws a pair of dice and bets, along with other players at the table, on specific numbers turning up.

On the shooter’s first roll, the wager also called a pass line bet is on whether he’ll throw either 7 or 11 (a win) or 2, 3, or 12 (a loss). If he hits 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, or 10, that number becomes his point; your original wager is then on whether he’ll roll that number again before he throws a 7.

After making a pass line bet, when a point has been established, you can make an odds bet. You do this by placing another bet equal to one, two and up to ten times the original bet on the point number. The casino will pay true odds on this second bet, based n the probability of the point number coming up.

These true odds bets reduce the house’s edge in craps to less that 1 percent. Next to blackjack played with extreme discipline, this is the best bet you’ll have in casino.

The odds on slot machines are terrible. Many casinos make as much as 90 percent of their profits from slots machines alone. Smart gamblers avoid slots as surely as they do Lotto machines. If you must play slot machines then play the machines closest to the main entrances of the casino with the highest visibility. I worked at a casino for three years and they would put the loosest machines (best odds) in the areas which have the highest visibility so that more people would see them winning good payouts and want to play. It makes sense!

Roulette, in which you’re betting on whether a ball spinning above a wheel will land on a certain number, group of numbers, or color, has a simplicity that makes it a perfect game for anyone wishing to play.

In addition to the numbers 1 through 36, the roulette wheel has the numbers 0 and 00, which gives the house a 5.26 percent advantage on all bets– a significant edge. The odds are totally against you if you bet on the numbers, lines, or edges so ignore the inside areas all together. If you want good odds then bet on the outside. Either on the colors, red or black, or on the numbers odds or evens. This will give you slightly lower than 50/50 odds due to the green 0 and 00.

One trick is to stick to one color, say red. Bet $20 on red, if you win then walk away. If you lose then bet on red again, but this time double your bet to $40. This will make up for the bet you lost $20, the money you are putting down now $40, and give you an additional $20 winnings (original bet). If you win this bet then walk away, but if you don’t then keep doubling your bet until it eventually does hit red which it must sooner or later. If you have a couple hundred dollars in cash on hand you will be buffered and most likely won’t lose.

For example, you bet $20 on red and lose. You double the bet to $40 and bet on red again, you lose. You now double your bet to $80 and bet on red a third time, only to lose again. You bet $160 on red, and win. You have just made a total of $320, which means $20 (1st bet) + $40 (2nd bet) + $80 (3rd bet) + $160 (4th bet) + $20 (winnings) = $320 (total). So even though you lost 3 bets, you still made $20 on the fourth bet. This system greatly reduces your odds of losing.

Most people believe that Blackjack is the easiest and best game to play in a casino and depending on how you play, this can be true.

The object of the game is to take card that bring you close to a total of 21 without going over. Face cards count as 10. Aces count as either 11 or 1. Each player at a blackjack table plays only against the dealer and not other players. If a player takes too many cards and goes over 21, they lose the hand. If the dealer takes too many cards, the players all win. Otherwise, if your hand is closer to 21 than the dealer’s, you win.

You bet your money before you see any cards. In some situations, you can raise your bet after seeing your first two cards. When you win, you are paid 2 to 1. If you get a Blackjack which is an ace and any card worth ten then you win a slightly higher multiple of your bet.

The most popular way to play Blackjack is the so-called “perfect strategy.” Based on the law of large numbers, which states that averages and tendencies gain strength over time , the perfect strategy was derived by computers simulating millions of twenty-one hands. This strategy says if your cards add up to 15 or lower than you need to get hit with another card, if your cards add up to 17 or higher than stand.

However if your cards add up to 16 then things get tougher. If you have 16 and the dealer is showing a ten card then you need to take a hit, however in this situation there is a 75% chance you will lose regardless of what you do because the house has an advantage because the dealer is always the last one to decide on their hand.

If you have a pair of aces or 8’s then you should always split your hand into two hands, this will increase your odds of either winning or breaking even.

Played correctly, this system assures you of being at no more than a 2 percent disadvantage against the casino. In practice, the house wins at a rate ten times higher, because few players follow the perfect strategy perfectly.

Out here in Sonoma County there is a very interesting legal battle going on right now over a speeding ticket.  This case is getting national attention and it’s outcome could have a major effect on the future of speeding tickets across the nation.

It all started back on July 4th after 17-year-old Shaun Malone was pulled over on Lakeville Highway in Petaluma after motorcycle officer Steve Johnson used his radar gun to clock Malone’s 2000 Toyota Celica GTS going 62 mph in a 45 mph zone.  Malone was given a $190.00 speeding ticket and sent on his way.

However Malone’s family contends that a GPS system they installed in the teen’s car to track his speed shows him driving 45 mph at virtually the exact same time and place where the officer said he was exceeding the speed limit.

Malone’s stepfather happened to be Roger Rude, a retired lieutenant of the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Department, who served for over 20 years as the area’s law enforcement media spokesperson.  Over this time he was able to build up lots of relationships and influence among both law enforcement and the court systems in the area.  Thus he knew exactly how to fight this speeding ticket and has decided to turn this case into an expensive legal battle involving local officials, lawyers, and satellite technology experts pitting the newer global positioning system technology installed in his son’s car against the time-tested police radar gun. 

This is a rather unusual position for Rude, whose career was spent defending the law.

The citation issued to Malone by Officer Johnson noted that the violation occurred at 7:45 a.m. at Lakeville and South McDowell and that the teen was going 62 mph.  The time and location are approximations. In his notes, Johnson noted a spot 400 feet west of South McDowell — but it’s unclear whether that is where he started tracking the car or where he pulled the trigger on the radar gun. Officers are supposed to visually track a vehicle before noting speed with radar, which is supposed to confirm those observations.

Malone’s GPS tracker, timed to record his location every ten seconds, reported that he was going a maximum of 45 mph at 7:43 a.m.  The latitude and longitude coordinates placed the Celica about 300 feet west of South McDowell, a difference of 100 feet as noted in the officer’s written description of the encounter.

Lt. Rude said it would have been impossible for his stepson to accelerate or slow 17 mph to equal 62 mph over that short distance. In his affidavit, the former lawman offers several possibilities for the discrepancy in the two accounts, including that the radar gun’s calibration may have been off or that another vehicle may have been caught in the radar’s sights.  He also suggests Johnson may have been in a hurry.

Carl Fors, president of Speed Measurement Laboratories Inc., a Fort Worth, Texas-based company that specializes in radar technology, trains police around the country in the use of radar. He said it is subject to both human and technical error. In one notable example, he said an officer he observed using radar clocked a rock going 72 mph. The error was caused by the heater fan blowing air inside the officer’s car. He said the CHP was forced to dismiss a case every few months because the calibrations on the radar gun were off. “I used to have situations where officers in part of the county would pull two or three cars over at once, and it would be difficult for them to sort out who did what to whom,” he said.  Some law enforcement agencies now use laser speed detectors, which are more accurate and can reach longer distances. Fors said some models also can take photos to match the targeted vehicle.

Sgt. Tim Lyons, who oversees the traffic unit, said that Officer Johnson has been handling traffic cases for six years and is trained on how to use radar. “He knows how to work traffic and write speeding tickets. I would trust his judgment,” Lyons said.  Lyons also questioned the GPS’s accuracy. “GPS can be hampered by cloud cover, power lines, tall trees — almost anything that blocks the signal from the satellites. And there’s nothing to say that the person using it hasn’t tampered with the device.”  He also says that there may be more of a delay with GPS than there is with a police officer and his radar gun.

But so long as the sky is clear and the device is working properly, GPS trackers are accurate within 1 mph, said Rick Fry, chief information officer for Rocky Mountain Tracking Inc., a Colorado-based company that supplied Malone’s unit. He said the company’s system is the same the Air Force uses to fly drones. The case has been submitted to Commissioner Carla Bonilla, who will issue a ruling. Malone can appeal that decision.

The case has attracted national attention for potentially setting a precedent for using GPS to contest speeding tickets, which is becoming standard in vehicles as a mapping or tracking device.Legal experts say that this case will most likely be appealed to the State Court System within a few months and has the potential for eventually reaching the Supreme Court.

In the United States, this is the first record of this GPS technology being used to this extent to fight a speeding ticket. If Malone wins this case, it may mean that GPS devices can be used in future cases to contest speeding tickets in court.  The ruling in the case could have a major effect on the future of traffic control across the nation.

Click here to see an AP News Video on this case.

I also wonder what type of effect this could have on the Automobile Insurance industry.  One day Auto Insurance companies could install GPS systems in cars and be able to track your driving habits.  They will we able to judge who the good drivers and bad drivers are based on a variety of different criteria.  Thus your true driving habits could influence your auto insurance rates.

Spot reduction is simply the idea that if you work a specific muscle group you will decrease the amount of fat in that area. The most common example of this is how people focus on abdominal exercises in an effort to lose weight in their stomach area.

In theory, there is no such thing as spot reduction. You will never attain a flat stomach just by performing abdominal exercises. The reason for this is simple: a muscle does not own the fat that surrounds it. However, I have trouble accepting this and still want to prove that spot reduction is not a myth.

Sit-ups, for example, will definitely strengthen your abdominal muscles, but sit-ups alone will not get rid of the layer of fat that is covering the muscles. You can have the strongest ab muscles in the world, but you will never see them if they are covered by a layer of fat. So how can you remove this layer of fat?

Some people try to lose weight in their problem areas by either doing longer cardio exercises (such as an hour on a treadmill or an eliptical machine) or by doing shorter intense exercises (such as sprinting or Guerilla Cardio). Usually when they combine this with a proper diet and supplementation they find that this is effective for burning calories which in turn burns fat across their entire body. However, the majority of people will find that they lose fat everywhere except for their stubborn problem areas which are made up of localized pockets of fat.

However, regardless of how much dieting or exercise you do, you may find that you will never get rid of the fat in these stubborn areas.

You may notice that you sometimes lose fat in some areas more quickly than in others; this is simply due to a genetic selective pattern rather than a particular type of exercise. It is a well known fact that men tend to hold stubborn pockets of localized fat in their abdominal region, whereas women tend to hold stubborn localized fat in their gluteal region.

What causes Stubborn Localized Fat?

Stubborn fat is a slow-metabolized adipose (fat) tissue. To burn fat, a natural hormonal process has to take place. When a fat-burning process is activated, the adrenal hormones (adrenaline and noradrenaline) bind to special receptors in the fat tissues. There are two major groups of receptors in the fat tissues, alpha and beta. The beta-receptors are the more active ones, which respond to the adrenal hormones. Fat burning occurs when the adrenal hormones activate the beta-receptors in the fat cells. If these receptors are not activated, no fat will burn off.

Stubborn fat has a lower ratio of beta-receptors to alpha-receptors. As a result, it’s metabolized slowly and does not respond to the adrenal hormones. To make matters worse, stubborn fat has more estrogen receptors in the tissues. Estrogen (the female hormone), once bound to the receptors, causes even more fat gain.

Thus stubborn fat presents three major problems:

(1) It doesn’t have a high enough ratio of beta-receptors to alpha-receptors, so doesn’t respond to adrenal fat-burning stimulation.

(2) It has more estrogen receptors, which accelerates fat gain.

(3) On top of all this, stubborn fat doesn’t have a healthy blood circulation. These slowly metabolized fat tissues have fewer blood vessels than a normal fat tissue, and consequently this fat is slower to metabolize, and therefore more stubborn or difficult to remove.

So How Can You Attack These Stubborn Pockets of Fat?

Estrogen Reduction

There are prescription drugs and research chemicals out there which can effectively reduce your estrogen levels. If the fat distribution is due to estrogenic fat storage in the breast area for men (gynecomastia) or in the hips, buttocks, or thighs for women then lowering the estrogen levels in your body may be effective for lowering the bodyfat in these regions to a limited degree.

Arimidex (Anastrozole) is an estrogen reducing (anti-aromitase) drug can be taken in doses of 0.25 to 0.50 mg/mL a day for 6-8 weeks. Usually you will see results within this time if the fat is due to an excess of estrogen. Be careful to not reduce the estrogen too much which will cause joint pain and knee and elbow stiffness, due to drying out your joints. If this happens then reduce the dosage and it should go away within 3 days due to the long half-life of this drug.

Estrogen reduction can help reduce, but it will seldom totally eliminate the fat from these areas.

Transdermal Topical Fat Burners

Several companies out there make transdermal fat burning creams that are supposed to be able to burn localized fat by applying them to your problem areas. These companies claim that these transdermal gel that penetrates deep into the skin and dissolves your stubborn body fat on contact. However these fat burning creams have never been proven to be effective and based on my own personal experience they are not effective.

Anafit makes Yohimburn ES which is an alcohol free, aloe vera based Yohimbe gel that can be applied to any part of your body including your face. This stuff appeared to work slightly, but I found that this Yohimburne actually had a diuretic effect rather than a fat burning effect and it was only removing the water from the localized area and not the actual fat. As soon as you stop using this cream, the subcutaneous water will return to the area.

Avant Labs makes Lipoderm Ultra which contains Yohimbine, Caffeine, Lecithin, Sesamin,
Octopamine HCl, Synephrine, ALCAR, Ascorbyl Palmitate, and a high level of Benzyl and Isopropyl Alcohol. This cream appears to work slightly, but again it’s just due to a diuretic effect of reducing localized water rather than fat burning. Since this solution contains a high level of alcohol it will damage and dry out your skin after a few days. At least the Yohimburn despite being ineffective did not damage my skin.

NutraSport made Cutting Gel which has no active ingredients that could possibly result in localized fat loss, yet they spent millions in marketing and sold this at GNC to millions of people for years. Including me, who bought three bottles of this stuff for $90 each with zero results.

These transdermal fat burning creams reduce the amount of localized water and do NOT burn localized fat. They have very limited results and seem to be a waste of money. I tried over a dozen transdermal products over the course of a year and did not have good results. The problem is that I do not think these creams are capable of effectively penetrating the skin and reaching the adipose tissue.

Mesotherapy

Mesotherapy (also known as lipoderm or lipodisolve) is a non-surgical, 50 year old technique from France that involves injecting a fat burning solution of natural extracts, homeopathic agents, pharmaceuticals and vitamins into localized fat deposits. The active ingredient in this solution is phosphatidylcholine, which is present in all living tissues. When injected in fat and cellulite, however, the fat cells become inflamed and disrupted, and their contents (fat) gets carried away and disposed of by the body.

However, mesotherapy treatments in larger areas may require hundreds of small injections and several treatments spread several weeks apart. Mesotherapy can also cause swelling and bruising to occur in the treated areas.

Many plastic surgeons or dermatologists perform these procedures for around $300-400 a visit and usually 4-6 visits are required to treat an area, so to treat an entire area it might cost you as much as $2,400 which is not cheap.

You can purchase mesotherapy kits to do it yourself from Mesoone.com for around $65 a session or $299 for five sessions. This site offers top quality mesotherapy equipment and solutions with fast shipping and a 30 day money back guarantee. I would definitely recommend them.

The main disadvantage of Mesotherapy besides the swelling and bruising is that it removes the fat from cells rather than removing the cells themselves like liposuction. Thus it is possible for the fat to return to the area in several months later if you don’t keep up with your diet and exercise program.

Mesotherapy seems to be more effective with small fat deposits in areas like under the chin, but it is not nearly as effective in larger areas such as the stomach or hips. The bruising and swelling is rather severe when mesotherapy is applied to larger areas. Larger areas require liposuction.

Liposuction

I found the most effective solution for spot reduction to be liposuction. I tried all of the methods above to remove the stubborn fat from my stomach areas with little success. The anti-estrogen medications, transdermal creams, and mesotherapy only worked to a limited degree. I still was not satisfied with the results so I eventually broke down and paid a top plastic surgeon $6000 to have liposuction done on my abdominal area. I am finally pleased with the results.

The good news is that liposuction is permanent because the procedure actually removes the fat cells rather than break them down. I may gain fat in other areas in the future, but the area that I had liposuction in will remain toned.

It was well worth the money and I am pleased with the results. This turned out to be the only effective way to do spot reduction.