My Routine

I’ve had a few friends this summer ask me about my diet and workout routine (usually while I’m prancing around in my speedos). After posting my 50th birthday photo, I’ve had quite a few comments and DMs asking the same. I published a short work about my fitness habits a decade ago, but I figured I’d put into one place everything I’ve learned through experimentation over the years.

First things first: Genetics play an enormous role not just in body shape and fitness, but in preset hunger levels and taste palette. Epigenetics (the way our gene expression changes over time) plays a huge role in the latter. What your mother ate while you were in the womb literally rewired you and altered what you’d crave as a child, which influenced what you crave as an adult. These are a few of the forces beyond your control that will make everyone’s journey easier or harder than that of others. Almost no one in fitness talks about these barriers, so you often end up with genetically gifted people giving pat advice to others without respecting the uphill struggle they face.

My uphill battle is that I have a sweet tooth. I crave sugar, probably because I was weened on sweet tea as a Southern boy. That, and my father thought a Little Debbie and a Mountain Dew were a well-rounded meal (no joke, that was usually our lunch on the farm five days a week). I’ve had terrible eating habits my entire life. The only thing that kept me fit was my love of sports, which created a bit of a balance. But when I hit my 30s, I noticed that I could easily get overweight if I kept my eating habits and didn’t change my workout routine.

One thing I had going for me is that I’m stubborn, which looks a lot like free will, if such a thing actually existed. Stubbornness is what allows me to write novels and sail across oceans. It’s also what allows me to change eating habits and stick to a daily workout routine. If you don’t have the ability to form a new habit, most of what I write in this blog post will not work for you. But I will discuss later how to go about forming new habits for those who have a difficult time with it, so there is hope for you.

Half of a healthy body is mental. A quarter is diet. The other quarter is physical exercise. I truly believe this, so let’s start with the mental game, because this is where you can get immediate results with the least amount of effort. And by effort, I don’t mean it’s easy, only that it doesn’t require a trip to the grocery store, learning how to cook, doing meal prep, a gym membership, getting up early in the morning, or hewing hours out of your busy day. All it takes is a new mental framework. A series of mantras. You can start these right now, and you’ll start shedding weight this very moment. I’m not kidding.

The Mental Game

If you aren’t losing weight, it’s because you are eating too much. It’s physics. Eat more than you burn, and you’ll gain weight. Eat less than you burn, and you’ll lose weight. It’s a simple truth, but it’s not so simple to put into practice. So here are a few new mental frameworks for you to employ.

Firstly, you aren’t about to die, your body just wants you to think that. We evolved over thousands of years during a time of caloric scarcity. As such, hunger isn’t a signal to EAT. Hunger is a signal to START THINKING ABOUT EATING. It’s a signal to get up and start foraging for food, or grab your spear, or ply some social favors and go begging a neighbor. Our bodies are built for the following survival algorithm:

HUNGER > FAT BURNING > FIND FOOD > EAT (maybe)

But here’s what our day usually looks like:

EAT > EAT > EAT > EAT > EAT

We often don’t even wait to get hungry. We wake up, and it’s breakfast time. We eat a full meal, or some junk like a bowl of cereal. We crush a large coffee full of milk. We snack on something before lunch. We eat lunch, because that’s when we have a break in the day. More snacking in the afternoon. A full dinner. Snack before bed. Any slight hunger pain is a mere itch compared to the real deep hunger we are designed to experience before getting a meal.

The first thing to learn is that hunger should not equal panic. Instead, hunger should be celebrated as a sign of a healthy, functioning body. Sit with the hunger a while. Learn to associate hunger not as something wrong, but something right. You are now in fat-burning mode. Think about the next meal. Plan on eating an hour from then. I remember the wife of a yacht owner I worked for back when I was a professional captain having the hardest time sticking to a diet, until I told her that hunger was the feeling of losing weight, and she immediately turned things around. This simple framework can go a very long way.

Before we go further, why is losing weight even a goal? Shouldn’t we just love our bodies as they are and eat whatever we want? Sure, if that’s what interests you. We shouldn’t shame people who aren’t harming others. But we also shouldn’t shame people who want to stay lean. Dozens of studies have found that staying lean is a surefire way to live longer. It’s also easier on the joints. And it opens up physical activities that are difficult for heavier people. My adult weight has fluctuated between 185 and 165, and I can tell you that weighing 165 feels ten times better on every joint in my body. This advice is for people who want to live longer and feel better. You do you.

The next mental framework to adopt is to leave behind any notion of three meals a day. You don’t burn the same amount of calories every day, so why are you eating the same amount? Listen to your body. Get hungry before every meal. If you aren’t hungry, don’t eat. Skipping meals is the easiest thing you can do to change your body, and you can start right now. I went to bed last night without eating dinner, because I never got hungry. I woke up hungry, so I had breakfast immediately. Most mornings I wake up without any hunger. I’ll have a protein shake with my workout (more on this later), and if I’m not hungry after that, my first meal will be at lunch. Only eating when you’re hungry will simplify your life, save you money, keep you fit, and reduce the amount of calories you need to burn to hit your target weight. All this, just by thinking differently.

These mental habits will be difficult to master, but the more effort you put in, the easier they’ll get. Give yourself some grace as you fail, and recognize when you succeed. Be kind to yourself. But keep trying. Eventually, your hunger will adjust. At first, you may get more hungry than you did initially, as your body and evolutionary history fight your frontal lobe. Eventually, your body will adapt and your willpower will strengthen, and it won’t even feel like a struggle. It’ll become a new normal.

Diet is Critical

I used to drink sweet tea with every meal. Basically, the same stuff you feed hummingbirds. Liquid sugar. I didn’t know any better. I rarely drank water, thinking it was for prisoners or something. If you only make one diet change from this blog post it should be this one: switch to drinking water with every meal. That’s it. Just water. Put a lemon wedge in there if you want. Stop thinking every fluid that goes in you needs to be delicious, and you’ll eventually realize how delicious water is.

No diet cokes. I recently saw someone refer to diet cokes as “fridge cigarettes,” and nothing could be truer. These things kill you from the inside out. They do not have negative calories, canceling out the snickers bar you just had. The false sweetness triggers hormonal responses that screw up your body. Water, water, water. And don’t add any old electrolyte to the water, as most of them are just sugar. Start this habit right now. This and the mental game above will get you halfway to your goals, I promise you. And guess what, all the advice so far is more than free — it will put money back in your pocket! You won’t believe how cheap you’ll eat out when you start saying, “Just water” to every waiter in your life.

Related to that: No more alcohol. There’s nothing that’s both legal and worse for us in this lifetime than alcohol. If you aren’t willing to give this up or seriously restrict it, then stop reading now. You’re fucked. But my life got so much better when I cut the drinking back to almost nothing. I will have a glass of wine with a really nice meal, but this happens maybe once a month. If you need alcohol in order to be happy and find peace in life, then physical fitness is not what ails you. Most of alcohol consumption is habit, of course, just like my sweet tea addiction. We live in a world that pushed alcohol on us, and then we get addicted to that routine, and then we make up excuses to rationalize that routine. You can break free of this, but you need to WANT to. I want you to.

Cut out the carbs as well. Pasta, bread, cereals. Just like alcohol, these things are turned into sugars in the body. Cheap calories, which is why we crave them. It will take a few months of willpower to make this happen, but once you do you won’t even crave them anymore. I used to eat pancakes and donuts for breakfast. Cinnamon rolls at least twice a week. Now I look at them and don’t even want them. Your body will adapt, but it’ll take longer than your cravings. Outlast your cravings and you’ll become a new person.

Last point about diet: eating something healthy does not magically erase calories. That salad won’t seek out the slice of cheesecake you eat after and fight it to the death. Nope. That salad is also a bunch of calories, and it and the cheesecake will join forces and make you fat. I had a friend sail with me for months, and she couldn’t lose weight. She ate salads all the time, MASSIVE salads, drenched in dressing. Why wasn’t she losing weight? Because she was eating more than she was burning. Stop thinking that healthy food burns fat. Healthy food is good for us if we use it to replace unhealthy food and eat it in moderation (ie: allow ourselves to get hungry). If I know for a fact that I’m going to have a dessert, I skip the rest of the meal and just have dessert. Adding an optional salad to a mandatory dessert is dumb.

So what do I eat, and what kind of supplements do I use? My first meal of the day is a yogurt bowl. This might be my lunch if I skip breakfast. Plain greek yogurt (whole or 2%), kefir (stir the two together), lots of cinnamon, some raisons, fresh fruit (blueberries, raspberries, blackberries), chia, a tiny bit of granola as a treat, and a little salt. Go heavy on the greek yogurt. Protein is the key here. If I’m being super active, I might also add in a few scrambled eggs as a second breakfast.

I also have a protein shake with my exercise session. The older we get, the more we need. I do a serving and a half of whey protein, 7.5g of creatine, and some fiber powder. All in a shaker with water. This is my only supplement. I’ve never touched HGH, testosterone, or any steroids and have zero interest in any of that. I’m not trying to be bulky. I’m trying to stay lithe and athletic. Lean. Functional muscle that I’ll actually use.

For lunch or dinner, I’m obsessed with salads. No thick dressings (olive oil / vinegar / nothing). Grilled chicken or salmon. Or I eat a steak. I try to avoid fried foods. If I need to snack, I eat almonds, but I rarely snack. Now and then I cheat and have whatever I want for dinner, as long as I eat early (nothing after 7pm). You can get away with a cheat meal if you are consistent everywhere else. On days I do this, I grab a few exercise snacks throughout the day (extra lunges, some push-ups, etc). You still have to burn more than you consume.

Exercise is Everything

Okay, exercise is actually only 25% of the secret sauce, but I like the alliteration. I have more to say on exercise than the average reader’s attention span, so I’m going to stick to a few pointers and then lay out my exact exercise routine. But I could seriously go on for days on this topic. First things first:

Daily routine is more important than how hard you go. Pilates once a week and a jog on the weekend will barely move the needle. You will get better results from fifteen minutes every morning than you will from two hours of going hard sometime during your week. Believe this. It’s true, and it’s backed up by science. Your body will only adapt if you are consistent.

Now for my biggest pet peeve when it comes to fitness: little effort will get you zero gains. You will not lose weight by walking. It’s too efficient. Walking for an hour might burn 200 calories, but sitting on your butt for an hour can burn 80. If you walk for an hour and eat TWELVE potato chips, you just erased your entire “workout” for the day. Most people walk so they can feel good binging on a snack after, and nobody will ever convince me otherwise. I knew a couple who were both pushing 300 lbs who walked for at least an hour every day, often two hours! They were obsessive about it. Walking for hours a day was their entire identity. But they could never lose a single pound (they were seriously obese, but because of the obsessive walking, it wasn’t their fault). I later found out from a friend who stayed with them for a few weeks that they would get up and bake a sheet of cookies in the middle of the night and eat every last one. The walking was a public performance. The eating was a private shame.

Expending little effort is a common theme I see with people who exercise but never get in shape. Watch folks who run. Often, they lift their feet as little as possible, almost gliding across the pavement. For them, a measure of how much they exercised is the miles covered, not the calories burned. Guess what? Your body doesn’t care how many miles you jogged. Or how many steps you took. It cares how you moved your body.

When my wife and I walk through the park, I do a series of extreme lunges. Each step, I reach out as far as humanely possible, then lift my trailing leg and reach it out as far as possible. My knees almost brush the pavement. The lunge is so extreme, it’s difficult to keep my balance (you get better eventually). Each lunge is so taxing that I can barely do fifty of them in a row. Most people who try these fail at around twenty. After a bit of regular walking in-between, I do a set of forty. And then I rest before doing a final set of thirty to forty. After this, my quads feel like concrete and I can barely walk. My glutes and hamstrings hurt for two days! I could run for hours and not get this sore or exhausted. And guess what? The cardio gains from intermittent exercise like this are about equal to running. And I get it all done during a walk in the park that I was going to do anyway. All it takes is being willing to look stupid in public.

My last bit of shaming those who do little effort is folks who ride bikes for exercise. Your body doesn’t care how many hours you spent in the saddle or how many miles you grind out. It cares about effort. If you are trying to get in shape, put the bike in the worst gear and wear baggy clothes. Streamlining yourself with spandex and using efficient gears is how you train for a race, not get in shape. Look at people who are training for their actual survival: boxers and MMA fighters. They are running in loose sand with a parachute on their back, or a trainer holding them back with an elastic rope. Folks getting in shape make things harder on themselves, not easier. So lift those knees to your waist, or lunge until you fall on your face. Stop shuffling your feet.

Related to this, your body doesn’t care how long you spend in the gym. There isn’t a magical energy force sucking calories out of you when you walk through those doors. Every single morning, I watch people sit on an exercise machine and scroll through their phone. They’ll tell themselves later that they “spent an hour in the gym” and order a pizza. It doesn’t work like this. If you are in the gym, move from exercise to exercise and then go home. Never stop moving. It’s not how long you are there but how much you do.

My Workout

My entire workout routine, week after week, month after month, consists of around SEVEN exercises. It’s mostly just five, but there are a couple that I toss in now and then. If you do these, your entire body will transform and you’ll get in the best shape of your life.

One of the biggest impediments to getting in shape is thinking you need to mix up your routine, or do dozens of exercises, or target specific muscles. This is false. You don’t need a trainer, or go to expensive classes, or memorize crazy supersets, or download an app. You just need to stress the muscles in your body on a consistent basis. And the way to do this is with complex joint exercises that use many muscles at once and to do these exercises to failure. I think Arnold popularized the concept, but I switch a PULL DAY with a PUSH DAY, giving my muscles a day of rest in-between. In addition to this, I do a short sit-up routine every day to keep my core strong. That’s it.

Pull Day consists of pull-ups and leg curls. Pull-ups are the single best functional exercise you can do. Your entire back, your biceps, forearms, and core all get a workout. If you can’t do a pull-up, you can start with an assisted band pull-up (loop an elastic band over the bar and stand in the loop). Concentrate on lowering yourself as slowly as possible. You can also jump up and then come down slowly until you get stronger. Do as many as you can for 5 to 6 sets. Your last one in each set should end in absolute failure. That’s truly the only pull-up that really mattered, the one you did halfway. In-between sets, use a machine to do leg curls, which is the lower-body version of “pulling.” If you don’t have a machine available, do lunges.

Push Day is for inclined barbell flys and leg press. Inclined barbell butterflies are the second best single exercise you can do. And when I say inclined, I mean a 45 degree angle. Not a little incline. And never on a flat bench. You are trying to target your upper chest, because this is an area of weakness. And you want to get your shoulders. To target your inner chest (a second area of weakness), try to use less weight but swing your arms out wider when you lower them and really squeeze the middle of your chest as you extend your arms fully overhead. Make sure your hands are up high, arms perpendicular to the floor, not angled out in front of you. Don’t worry, the rest of your chest is getting a burn as well, but this way you’ll get more balance. Flat bench work will get you bigger in the places you’re already big and you’ll have less functional strength.

Leg presses are the best, because they target your glutes and calves as well, but leg extensions targeting your quads also work if that’s the only machine around. Again, if you don’t have a machine just do the three sets of lunges to failure. And if you do have machines, mix in lunges every three days on casual walks, so your legs will get a double whammy. That’s it for push day.

(I also do a few shoulder raises on push day and a few bicep curls on pull day, but not many and not much weight. It’s more to stay moving between latter sets when my body is really spent. Anything other than scroll on a phone or sit on a machine).

In addition to these four basic exercises (just two exercises per day!), I mix in a sit-up routine that I really love and do every single day. I start flat on my back, hands pressed into the ground by my hips, legs extended out straight in front of me. And then I lift my heels and my shoulders at the same time for about 50 reps. I then turn on one side and do 50 side crunches. Flip and do 50 on the other side. Then I finish with 50 crunches on my back again (feet staying on the ground this time, legs straight, just raising my shoulders). I do these after my first big push or pull set every day, which gives my body some recovery time before my second set.

If you do these exercises quickly and never take a break, the entire routine takes about 15-20 minutes. That’s it. You’re done. Mix in the lunges, never take a day off, and you will age in reverse. Your entire body will transform. Master the mental frameworks and the diet habits above, and you’ll get in the best shape of your life. Guaranteed.

I don’t care what your age is, how much you currently weigh, any of that. I do care that some of us have more to overcome than others. For many, it’ll take more time. The first weeks will be a struggle. The results will take longer to see. But anybody can do these things.

I mentioned earlier that habits are difficult to change but I would have some advice on how to give yourself a boost. What works for me is to make a change as early in the process as possible. If there are Oreos in my house, I’ll eventually succumb to temptation and eat them. But when I’m in the grocery store, it’s much easier for me to say no. Put yourself in the best position for success.

It might be hard to force yourself to exercise, but perhaps you can force yourself to put on exercise clothes. Or force yourself to go to the gym. Once you’re there, you might as well bang out your 15 minute routine. Tweak the small habits that lead to the big habits.

The other thing that I know works was recently borne out by a study, which found that thinking about the results is a better motivator than thinking about the steps along the way. Don’t think about the pull-ups you’re going to grind out today, or the lunges in the park. Think about how great you’re going to look and feel after. Concentrate on the end results. This is proven to work. Look beyond the bit you resent doing and look forward to the part that makes you proud. Focus on that.

You can do this. Anyone can. I believe in you.

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