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by
James Smith
‘Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four hours sharpening the axe.’ Abraham Lincoln
In the corporate world, people are living their lives to see who can die with the most money instead of seeking an ultimate work–life balance.
We see a similar misconception in fitness, where the goal is to see who can die with the most followers, not how to live a full and balanced life.
‘The opposite of love is indifference, and the opposite of happiness is boredom.’ Timothy Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek
People never give credit to how exhausting it is to pretend to be busy. It’s soul destroying.
1 litre of water weighs 1 kilogram.
But as I said, gaining weight is only an issue when you don’t know how to lose it.
‘The energy needed to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water through 1°C.’
Leptin and ghrelin are the big players in regulating appetite, which consequently influences bodyweight and how much fat we will have ‘on us’ at any given moment in time.
Similar to a car alerting you when the fuel is too low, ghrelin plays a signalling role, telling you to eat, so you’re not too low in fuel reserves or energy. Leptin is similar to that click you hear when you fill up the tank, letting you know that you’re full and there’s no need to add more fuel. This is to oversimplify other biological roles of leptin, but we don’t need to go that far down the rabbit hole.
Leptin is secreted primarily in fat cells, as well as the stomach, heart and skeletal muscle. One of its best-known roles is to decrease hunger. Ghrelin is secreted primarily in the lining of the stomach, and increases hunger.
the more fat you have, the more leptin you produce.
Do you know what happens if you endure a bit of hunger for forty-five minutes to an hour? Nothing. It goes away almost completely until your next regular feeding window. So next time you’re hungry, don’t eat, but give yourself an hour to test this theory. Hunger doesn’t last for ever; you probably already know that because last time you were genuinely too busy to eat, you forgot all about it and may well have had a surprising moment later on and said, ‘I’m not even hungry any more.’ That, my friend, was a cyclical bout of ghrelin that came and then went away.
People are prone to believe what they want to believe.
the pathway for converting dietary carbohydrate into fat, or de novo lipogenesis (DNL), is present in humans, whereas the capacity to convert fats into carbohydrate does not exist.
for every 1 g of carbohydrate that enters a cell, 3–5 g of water usually accompany it.
100 g of carbohydrates (400 kcals worth) you could gain 0.3–0.5 kg of water just stored alongside carbohydrates in muscle tissue.
On the flip side, we need to consider that most of the weight loss occurring with low-carb diets, especially in the e...
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Harris-Benedict,
You’ll see later in the book about protein targets, but I set mine at 1.5 g per kilogram.
Fat loss is about liberation, freedom, eradication of guilt, being more confident and not just looking better, but feeling better for every second of every fucking day. That’s more than just having less fat, I can assure you.
Weight is your relationship to the ground with gravity, that’s it.
Imagine, if you will, you were to pee in a pint glass: if you fill it up, that’s 0.56kg of water weight.
And it’s often because of these non-fat-related fluctuations. Sweat, hydration, muscle glycogen, time of day, bowel movements, fibre, salt intake
and even how much you’ve had to speak (dehydration) – not to mention diuretics like coffee impacting on your net hydration – are all huge factors in weight. Considering 1lb (0.45kg) is enough for someone to be applauded or shamed at a slimming club, it’s worth noting that although we should keep an eye on weight, it’s a poor metric for short-term micromanaged ‘success’.
So weigh yourself if you want to, because what gets measured gets improved, but please keep your emotions out of this. Your self-worth cannot be quantified by your relationship to gravity.
Some people will say to you that ‘muscle weighs more than fat’. This isn’t true. A kilogram of fat weighs the same as a kilogram of anything else, including muscle. Muscle occupies a smaller space than fat, though.
Not only that, but muscle that could take years to build starts to degrade after only a few weeks of not training, so appreciate any that you do grow – after all, it will be short-lived if you don’t maintain
What if I told you that maybe not even 10 per cent of the calories you burn today will be burned while training?
exercise activity thermogenesis – EAT.
I’ve seen many clients over the years assume they’re burning 500kcals in a session; truth be told it’s more like 200kcals in the normal person who trains hard for an hour and burns 2,000kcals a day.
For example, dietary fat is very easy to process and has very little thermic effect, while protein is harder to process and has a much larger thermic effect.
Around 30 per cent of the calories consumed in protein are lost/broken down purely in digesting it.
I’m about to change your life by explaining to you the NEAT component. Non-exercise activity thermogenesis – NEAT – accounts for calories burned outside of ‘formal’ exercise, such as standing, walking, climbing the stairs or even fidgeting. Highly active people can expend up to three times more energy in a day than sedentary people. Although many people if asked would blame the obesity epidemic on sugar or carbs, I think it’s important to note that the average person’s NEAT has decreased substantially due to increases in motorized transport, sedentary jobs and labour-saving devices. Even an
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When someone wants to lose weight, their initial instinct may be to go to the gym, which is great. However, maintaining an active lifestyle can burn a significantly higher number of calories than your average gym workout. This has also helped demonstrate why some people gain less weight than others when overeating; they find themselves moving more when calories are increased whereas other people don’t. So, increasing your NEAT is free, simple to implement, has a low injury risk (compared to someone sedentary taking up running, perhaps) and can contribute a lot more to total calories burned
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If you think you know everything, you know nothing.
‘We are what we repeatedly do, therefore excellence is not an act, but a habit.’ Will Durant
‘You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results.’ James Clear, Atomic Habits
Where you are is not important; where you are going is. You may not have the body you want, you may not have your diet in the place you want it. But are you getting better at taking action to make those changes? If so, great. Are you making progress? If so, great. And if you’re not making progress, are you making adjustments so that you soon will be? That’s what is important here.
Successful habits make successful people.
find your successful habits, implement them daily and then fall in love with executing them.
There are many more complex components beyond macronutrients that are essential to looking and feeling good and living a healthy life: food quality, unprocessed ‘single-ingredient’ foods, vegetables, fruit, fibre, variety – these all contribute to our health and make up the essential vitamins that we need. Another component is food volume. I always ask my clients to expand their food choices by selecting lower calorie foods that could increase the amount on their plates.
This would typically include, for example, more vegetables, rice, fruits and leaner meats and protein.
Truth is, things get in the way of an optimal world. An argument with your partner, feeling under the weather, rain on the way to work when you’re late already. This is all about getting the best possible scenario each day and not beating yourself up if you have a bad one; it’s not wasted, it’s just suboptimal.
The main objective is to get more days optimal then suboptimal. It might sound oversimplified, in which case I’m glad, because it’s true, and it’s attainable.
The average person in the UK wakes up at 7.35 a.m. – this means that to get nine hours you’d need to go to bed and be asleep by 10.35 p.m. I need you to trial this for me as soon as you can – tonight, if possible. Even if it means putting this book down right now. I’ll be here for you tomorrow when you’ve had enough sleep. Getting adequate sleep will benefit your fat loss, your muscle growth and even your libido.
To conclude, sleep is far more important than just how you feel when you wake up; it can – and does – have huge implications for the production of testosterone and the associated repercussions (mood, libido, morning erections and erectile dysfunction). If you’re not waking up with a boner, it’s time to get on top of your health.
Cortisol has a bad rep within the fitness industry (and outside of it), but I’m telling you now it’s important, and although branded as the ‘stress’ hormone, it’s actually essential for daily life and homeostasis (the condition of optimal functioning, or the ‘dynamic state of equilibrium’ within the body). Basically, for balancing things out for optimal health.
Cortisol is one of the hormones that we produce to help us get out of bed; this is known as the ‘cortisol awakening response’. Unfortunately, this is why, often, when you wake up hungover, or try to have a lie-in at the weekend, you can’t simply fall back to sleep when you want to. The rhythm plays to your advantage to get you out of bed and into work each day, and you can’t simply shut it off as easily as you can your alarm. Incidentally, you’ll note that on days you go to bed on time and don’t set an alarm, you wake up at roughly the same time. This is due to your sleep rhythm. We usually
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Melatonin is the hormone that helps us fall asleep. Remember the first time you were told that caffeine would improve sports performance of any kind and it became your go-to every time you needed to perform well? Melatonin is the complete opposite and is your go-to when trying to sleep.
