Does The Venus Factor Work? Good And Bad Points

Good Points:
  • Complete and exhaustive program
  • Original and effective diet based on restoring leptin sensitivity
  • Complete exercise protocol
  • Software applications for accuracy
  • Helpful social community
Bad Points:
  • Helpful but disorganized information
  • Not for everyone - it takes dedication for the plan to work

What Is The Bottom Line? Is This Plan Any Good?

Our verdict: the Venus Factor system is not a quick fix and it requires time and dedication for optimal results. It has been successfully used by thousands of women and, sure enough, it boasts of an endless catalogue of satisfied customers. However, it has few flaws too as described below. It is based on a sound diet and workout protocol with the addition of helpful applications, videos and community for optimal results.
 
The uniqueness of this program revolves around reducing leptin resistance in women in order to increase their fat burning capabilities. This key factor coupled with the reverse calorie strategy and the other components makes the Venus Factor an effective diet, fat loss, body shaping and fitness program for women, providing you stick to the plan for long enough .

What Is The Venus Factor?

The author: Venus Factor is the creation of John Barban, a fitness expert with a degree in nutrition and human anatomy from the University of Florida and a vast experience in the fat loss industry backed up by real life results, scientific evidence and common sense.

The Venus Factor system for female fat loss and body shaping was born out of necessity in order to reflect women different response to diet and exercise and create a specific program for them. Aside from workouts and diet, the program revolves around restoring women sensitivity to leptin, a very important hormone that was discovered as recently as 1994 as having a dramatic impact on fat and appetite, both for men but especially for women. 

This is a key element of the program approach that is unique to Venus Factor and got our attention in the first place. To our knowledge, no other female diet or weight loss program has it. In fact, leptin has become increasingly important in the last decade or so for its ability to interfere with the way your body stores fat or burns it, sending signals to your brain to start or stop eating.

The problem is that while leptin is present in both men and women, and in fact women have more of it, women are less responsive, that is women are affected by leptin resistance more so than men despite having a better base stock of it. This means that the negative effect of leptin resistance in women offsets their initial advantage. But before we dig down into the nuts and bolts of the program, here is a quick overview of the program structure.

The Venus Factor System Components Breakdown

A quick overview on the Venus Factor components:
  • Nutritional Guidelines - A PDF manual with all the information on diet protocol, food menu, meal plans, calories and the rate of weight loss.
  • Workout Guidelines - A PDF manual with all exercises and workout cycles explained.
  • Online videos - 130+ exercise demonstrations for better implementation.
  • Software Help - A so called Virtual Nutritionist, an application that calculates calories and projected body measurements to a very high level of accuracy.
  • Social Community - The Venus Immersion Community for help and feedback.
The program comes in mixed digital formats, PDF downloads, online videos, online login community and software, therefore it is compatible with all devices, desktops, notebooks/laptops, iPhones, iPads, Android smartphones and tablets.

Venus Factor Program In Depth - What Is It All About?

Fighting Leptin Resistance To Stimulate Fat Loss

The Problem:
What is interesting is that the system works by tackling the leptin issue in a scientific way, adjusting your diet, workouts and lifestyle accordingly. Here are the main issues underlying the leptin approach of the program.
  • Leptin Resistance - Just like insulin, leptin is critical in regulating metabolism and sending the right signals to burn or to accumulate fat. Normally, the more adipose tissue you have, the more leptin is produced which in turn sends signals to reduce appetite accordingly. Women seem to have more trouble than men in receiving these signals from leptin effectively even though they have twice as much of it, thus have more difficulty in regulating appetite and triggering fat loss.
  • Child Rearing - This also explains why women tend to put on weight particularly after child birth and have then trouble shedding the excess fat. After birth leptin resistance goes sky high, probably as a result of evolutionary advantage in keeping a woman's body in fat storage mode for the added stress of child rearing and against possible famine or food shortage.
  • Restoring Leptin Sensitivity - Nature does not care how sexy and lean or over weight you might look, it only cares about what is the best physical shape for you and your child to survive on. This is the bad news.

The Good News - John Barban's Solution

  • The Leptin Diet - John Barban focused his efforts on creating a female leptin diet that, in addition to using a peculiar herb, is responsible for restoring leptin sensitivity in women's bodies and achieving a faster metabolism, increasing fat loss and lean muscle. Even so, we found that the nutritional guidelines in his program are not as restrictive as those in other diet plans and in fact are quite flexible, even treats are allowed.
  • Flexibility - The best part of this program is that it is fully customizable with vast choice of meal plan selections to pick from to satisfy your daily calorie needs as you go along, with all the guess work left out on planning. As you lose fat, the software recalculates your daily requirements, giving you extra meal plans to choose from.
  • The Virtual Nutritionist - Different women have a different way to metabolize leptin, so the Venus Factor diet tailor suit these different needs with the help of this application. With few inputs it tells you exactly what you should eat depending on you height, body fat, shoulder width, and waist to height ratio, with a view to reach a body proportions ratio as close as possible to and ideal Venus Index, the female equivalent of the male Adonis Golden Ratio by the same Barban.
  • The Fat Loss Ratio - This point is the single most important factor to determine how many calories you need depending on your progress because, even though leptin plays a key role in increasing metabolism and burning fat, the ratio at which your body can handle fat loss also changes with time depending on your fat storage.

Venus Factor Diet - How Does It Work Then?

The diet process itself is split into 2 parts, the first for fat loss, the second (optional), for moderate muscle building. We agree with this approach, as it is much easier to reshape your body by tackling one issue at a time rather then simultaneously because building muscle and shaping your body while losing fat do not go well hand in hand with a very low calorie intake.

The book explains how body composition is critical in determining how your body looks, rather than just body weight. The key is to achieve a low body fat with a moderate amount of muscle in the right places for an aesthetically pleasing and functional physique.

John Barban's PDF goes to great lengths in listing which foods should be avoided like the plague to prevent storing fat in the first place. Not surprisingly, these are the usual culprits like refined sugars, too many carbohydrates, sweet sodas, alcohol and the likes.

The manual explains the importance of Basic Metabolic Rate as the foundation on which to structure your calorie regime, as this varies depending on weight and height, then the charts provided work out for you how many calories you need per day and how much you should eat.

More importantly, the diet approach also takes also into account one's body limited ability to sustain a great calorie deficit for extended periods of time and is designed with a reverse calorie strategy to avoid muscle depletion. Basically this means that the fatter you are, the less you can eat, the leaner you get, the more you can eat. We could not agree more on this.

What happens is that at the start of a diet, with a high percentage of fat tissue, your body has a greater ability to handle a more drastic calorie deficit. However, as you go along and start getting leaner, with less body fat but still the same amount of muscle tissue, you should start increasing your calorie intake progressively to reflect your body diminished ability to cope with a drastic calorie deficit.

This is a safe and proven method, tried and tested well before the Venus Factor was created, to prevent weight gain rebounds and yo-yo diet effects and to guarantee safe fat loss with no muscle depletion and permanent results.

12 Week Structure and Virtual Nutritionist
Technically, the Venus diet is organized in a 12 week cycle structure and goes hand in hand with the use of the Virtual Nutritionist software to laser target your calories, meals and meal times. The 12 weeks are in turn broken down in 2 week mini cycles for a total of 6 mini cycles. Each mini cycle is different from the others, constantly switching calorie intake and food composition, from low calorie to higher calorie and vice versa, and from carbohydrates to fats and vice versa.
Virtual Nutritionist Screenshot


Here is when we became a little baffled. The idea of this part of the program is to confuse your body by forcing it to constantly adjust to these dieting variations which in turn allegedly cause your metabolic rate to go into overdrive and burn more fat, hence the fancy name "Metabolic Override".
While we support the reverse calorie strategy depending on one's body composition and percentage of body fat, we are not fully convinced that this other "food confusion" strategy may enhance metabolism. The reverse calorie strategy alone works very well and has been around for a long time and that alone may be responsible for the good results of the program.

However, the meal plans section of the manual is highly detailed and leaves nothing to chance. There are 10 different meal plans calculated for each daily total calorie intake plan, which is then split into 3 meals and 2 or 3 snacks per day. This means that you first find out what is your total calorie daily requirement with the help of the book and the application, then you have 10 different meal plans to choose from for your daily calorie requirements. We have to say that the Venus Diet leaves no room for error and prevents boredom in the meal planning department.


LEAKED INTERVIEW: Secret Workout Tips for Women to Maximize Results
International best-selling fitness author Kyle Leon and nutrition, physiology and biology expert John Barban expose some of the reasons women NEED to diet an...


The Workout Videos And Book

Diet alone if properly implemented in a regular, progressive way can help you achieve great results. In addition, after you lost fat by following the program guidelines, you can throw in working out to maximize your results, improving your body composition, appearance and functionality by adding a moderate amount of lean, sexy muscle in the right places.

A little extra muscle has the added bonus of naturally increasing your basic metabolic rate even while at rest, helping you burn unnecessary fat even more. By now, you should have increased your daily calorie intake as per the program.

The Venus Factor Workout Routines
The workout program is the natural complement to the 12 week diet program and it offers an extra edge to women who really want to go all the way in reshaping their body composition and appearance. This part of the program is very flexible, you can exercises at home with basic tools like barbells and dumbbells, a bench and a mat, starting from just 1 set per exercise and increasing upward to your levels of fitness.

All the information is included in the workout PDF manual, and in case you need clarifications on the execution of the exercises, the programs also offers access to 130+ online videos to leave no room for error. This is a big plus bonus. Knowing how to correctly perform the exercises is paramount to prevent injury and to guarantee effective workouts and results.

In any case, regardless of workout volume, this 12 week program is in turn split into 3 cycles of 4 weeks each in order to prevent stagnation and stimulate growth of lean muscle. In our opinion, working out should be always part of a fitness regime because it helps increase metabolism and improve body tissue composition, increasing lean muscle and helping burn fat even more, maximizing results after having lost most of your body fat first .
Workout PDF Screenshot



The Venus Immersion Community

John Barban's diet program offers the option to join a handy social community called Venus Immersion. This is a very popular extra social hub for all the Venus Factor members offering nutrition software, personalized workouts, additional coaching, podcasts, trackers, elite community areas and mobile applications.

Here participants are encouraged to show their results, give suggestions and tips to other members and help each other with descriptions of their achievements and podcasts of their stories. John Barban runs biweekly recorded coaching calls that you can listen to when you like.

Three times a year they run a contest where the winners called, guess what, the "Venuses" are interviewed by John Barban himself. The winners then go on releasing podcast on their success stories, encouraging members into action. The community is a key factor in the success of the Venus Factor program because it promotes support and sense of belonging while keeping members accountable for their progress in a friendly way and we liked it.

However, all this extra help and information comes free only for the first 7 days. For further access, you have to first pay eight $79 monthly installments, thereafter it is free again for life, but you can cancel anytime with a click in the members' area. Still, we think this is a bit pricey and that a higher one off payment for life time access would be a better deal, should you choose so.

The Venus Immersion community is designed to keep its members focused on losing fat, building some muscle and reshaping their bodies, keeping them motivated and preventing from falling behind or dropping out. It does so with the help of advanced skills designed to achieve maximum fat loss in the shortest possible time, learning topics like metabolic flexibility, the afterburn effect, the starvation mode, skipping breakfast, the reality behind supplements, the truth about the twinkie diet, understanding research claims. Plus the bi-weekly coaching calls, the only coaching John Barban does anywhere.

Those who join the extra Venus Immersion also receive additional bonuses for free like:
  • Uncensored podcasts
  • Venus Index workout videos
  • Bi-weekly (recorded) coaching by John Barban
  • Workout of the month (to avoid staleness)
  • Natural Standard supplement database to know what works (few) and what does not (most)
The Venus Immersion Community is set up in a way to keep its members focused on losing fat, building some muscle and reshaping their bodies, keeping them motivated and preventing from falling behind or dropping out.



Venus Immersion Screenshot



Does The Venus Factor Really Work?

Hang on, we are getting closer to the bottom line now. Like other programs of this kind, the Venus Factor purpose is reducing fat tissue in order to achieve a better body composition and body shape. It also gives blueprints and layouts for dieting and exercising, but this is also no novelty.

==>Click Above To Watch What Real Users Have To Say<==


What Makes the Venus Factor Original and Different From Other Programs Then?

Here are the original points that we liked:
  • Uniqueness - What is unique of this program is the approach to leptin and the diet set up to restore leptin sensitivity and kick start the fat burning process. No other program offers this approach.
  • Herbal Assistance - It is surprising that there is one single particular herb that has the ability to increase leptin sensitivity sky high, this alone is probably a little secret of the Venus Factor worth gold.
  • Diet Management - The nutrition part is very well laid out. It goes in great details on how to manage your diet plans, how many calories, which foods to eat and which ones to avoid like the plague, even some alleged healthy foods.
  • Easy Workout Implementation - The videos and manual are excellent. No need to join a gym, unless you want to, you only need basic equipment. It is also very flexible because you can perform anything from one to more sets per exercise, depending of your fitness levels and goals.
  • Software Accuracy - It leaves all the guesswork out. The Venus Factor offers its own gizmos to calculate the calories you need depending on your weight and body proportions.
  • Social Element- The social part of this program is very helpful. It is one thing following a program on your own without reference, another in the company of other women with the very same weight loss issue. Support and friendly competition can make the difference between modest and outstanding results.
Here are the points that we did not like:
  • Questionable metabolic override idea. Unlike the leptin foundation of the program there is no scientific evidence provided by the author to back up the "metabolic override"idea that by switching carbs and fats every other week and confusing your body you can kick your metabolism into overdrive. Instead, the progressive calorie intake increases as outlined in the program to reflect your change in body fat composition do work very well and are a tried and tested method for safe weight loss.
  • Confusing layout. There is a ton of information and many parts of the program are highly detailed and helpful for sure, but sometimes the information jumps from one topic to another and you can lose track of where you are.
However, the combination of the leptin approach coupled with the detailed nutritional and workout implementation, the online community and the successful results of thousands of members make the Venus Factor an attractive and effective diet, fat loss and fitness program for women. By all accounts, this program is not a fad, it has already helped thousands of women achieve their dreamed of lean and sexy shape as proved by countless testimonials, even though it is not perfect. Below is a quick summary of Plus and Minus points.


Program Pros And Cons

The Pros:
  1. Unique leptin hormone approach - Just knowing how to lower leptin resistance to kick start metabolism and fat burning is worth the program.
  2. Progressive approach to losing fat - lose just fat, not muscle. This is very important.
  3. Helpful online Venus Immersion Community to help you stay focused while being encouraged and supported.
  4. Flexible workout program - It can be implemented at home or at a gym.
  5. Online workout videos to explain in detail what words or pictures alone cannot.
  6. Good, solid nutritional plan with all the foods to avoid and to eat, including the secret leptin response herb.
  7. Instant download and accessibility anywhere you live - no shipping required.
  8. Last but not least - 60 day money back guarantee
The Cons:
  1. Disorganized Manual Information - Make no mistake, there is plenty of solid, helpful information but sometimes it goes from one topic to the next without fully exhausting one first.
  2. Not a Quick Fix - It requires time and dedication. So if you are looking for a dramatic fat loss in 2 week time just before your beach vacation, this is not for you.
  3. No Physical Format Available - For those who do not like digital formats, you cannot have it on CDs or hard copies and you can only download it and access it online.
  4. It Requires Dedication - not just a quick fix 1 week before your vacation.

==>Click Above To Watch The Venus Factor Presentation Video<==