It’s that time again! No, I’m not talking about autumn, nor am I talking about holiday season. *glares at all the pumpkin flavored crap already out there*

GlibFit 3.0 starts tomorrow, September 12th! The timing of this GlibFit is going to be a bit different. Since US Thanksgiving is on a Thursday, we’re starting and ending on a Wednesday. Ten weeks from tomorrow is Thanksgiving Eve, and we’re going to have you in good enough shape that you enter the holiday eating season with confidence!

GlibFit 3.0 will take on a slightly different theme than prior GlibFits. Mrs. trshmnstr and I will be working together to get you some kickass content. She’s going to provide the detail, and I’m going to provide the direction.

Generally, the format will be as follows. There will be a deep dive topic of the week. The major themes are going to be HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training), eating while regularly doing cardiovascular exercise, and maybe a couple articles on sleeping. Each article will include a HIIT workout of the week and/or recipe of the week that you are encouraged to try.

Beyond that, it’s like normal. Set your own goals, check in weekly (Wednesdays at 1400 GlibTime), and set good habits as we get into fatass season!

HIIT Training of the Week

Mrs. trshmnstr recommends giving this workout a try for 3 or 4 days this week. Gauge this to your own fitness level and abilities. Modify the exercises to fit your abilities.

5 rounds of

• 1 minute sprint (on treadmill, outside, elliptical, bike, rower, etc.)
  • For those who aren’t yet ready to sprint, power walking with a high incline on the treadmill is fine. Obviously, any of the other machines can be subbed in, as well.
• 1 minute walk

Then, 5 rounds of

• 10x pushup
• 10x squats
• 10x jumping jacks
• 10x sit-ups

This is a roughly 20 minute workout, and the eventual goal is to work up to doing the workout 2-3x through.

Recipe of the Week

Salsa chicken

• Chicken breast
• A jar of your favorite salsa
• Taco seasoning
• Sour Cream
• Mexican blend cheese
• Fresh herbs and vegetables (cilantro, onion, lettuce, tomato, jalapeno, etc.)
• Rice/Tortillas/Beans

This is a super simple recipe that gets you a ton of protein and as much fat as you need to feel satiated.
 

1. Dump chicken, salsa and taco seasoning into slow cooker and cook for 4-6 hours on medium heat.
2. Shred chicken with a pair of forks.
3. Serve over a bed of rice, in a tortilla as a taco, with some beans, or however you prefer
4. Top with fresh herbs and vegetables, a dollop of sour cream, and some mexican blend cheese.

Glibfit 2.0 – The Final Countdown

So how did you do?

I lost right around 11 lbs in a highly-not-smooth pace.

I also went camping last weekend with the Cub Scouts.  Last year at the same camp, my kid and I got heat exhaustion on Saturday – he didn’t drink enough and I was a fat fuck.  This year, I hiked, while wearing a daypack, about 17 miles over two and a half days without significant problems.

GlibFit is probably going to go on a break, but we are in need of an author for GlibFit 3.0.  If interested, drop a line.

Week 9 – Don’t Be Such a Dramatic Bitch

Recently, I became aware of a term that sounds like bullshit.  The “biopsychosocial model of pain.” It sounds like a hippy-dippy dollop of new-age woo.  But you know, the old-school biomedical view of pain isn’t very good, either. The number of people walking around with fused disks and pins in their back that didn’t do anything for their pain is shocking.

But the biopsychosocial model just has three parts to it that any old gamma that’s raised a dozen kids knows.  Feelings are one third “bio-,” one third “psycho-” and one third “-social.”

If you have a sixteen month old that falls and cracks their head on the concrete, you know that their reaction is usually going to be twice what yours is.  If you recoil in sympathetic pain, you are going to be dealing with a screaming kid. If you laugh and say “fall down!” with a big smile, they are going to pop back up and giggle.  That’s social conditioning setting the overton window for pain.

Unless, you know, they split their scalp, have blood in their eyes, and have a cracked skull.  That just hurts. That’s the bio part.

When the kids a little older and has a little bit of agency, well, they can start with the “psycho” bit.  My eight year old spawn fell of the bike. Road rash on the shin and a skinned knee, bleeding like a stuck pig.  This kid wailed and wailed like he was being fed feet-first into a garbage disposal. So I yelled and told him to “Shut the hell up, no one wants to hear that.”  This was such a shock, he actually did shut up. I’m not normally gruff with this kid. He’s a soft hearted, introspective boy that is more skittish than a fawn. So this was way out of character for me to him.  But it did the trick. After he collected himself, I told him that if he wallows in his pain, it will get worse. If he sucks it up, he will be in control. Ten minutes and a bit of gauze+tape later, he was out riding his bike again.

And that’s when it struck me how much like this kid we all are.  I’ve said before, in at least one Glibfit, that hunger is like a 2 year old.  Put the food out of eye-sight and you won’t get as hungry.

Well, we are all still like this eight year old too.  We live in a socio-environment where weight loss is ‘hard.’  It’s one of those things that Everyone Knows. Long term success at weight loss has a failure rate of over 95%.  Long term adherence to an exercise plan by an adult that doesn’t exercise is south of 5%. Lose a lot of weight, and everyone will tell you how hard it is and how much you have to work at it and what a sacrifice it is.

And I internalized that.  But.. you know… I’m a probably-would-get-diagnosed-as-on-the-spectrum system-loving engineer-at-heart who’s also got a complex that makes him seek out contrary positions (what up USC, my kindred spirit.)  And when I look at it objectively…

It’s not any harder than bathing, brushing my teeth, shaving, and doing my hair every morning.  No one will see you in the break room and say “Oh my god, you put Murry’s in your hair every day this week?  That is so hard, I’m so proud of you!” Even though, you know, putting Murry’s in your hair is really hard. How can something be both so sticky and so non-newtonian at the same time, and it doesn’t wash off your hands.

Anyway, I’ve spent the last 7 weeks talking about the bio- part of diet and fitness.  The psycho and socio parts are intertwined, and in a way that mainstream culture isn’t helping.  But it’s 2018, and you know, the Jacket was actually right. You can use the internet to construct your own cultural cesspit.  I found one little niche culture that will never tell you how brave and strong you are for putting down that blueberry muffin. In fact, they’ll call you a little bitch if you try and fail to precisely control your body composition.  Bodybuilders. Did you ever read about how those guys do what they do? Between the vitamin-T, insulin, diuretics, wearing banana-hammocks in public, and fumes from the tanning spray, a little bit of self control at the dinner table is the easiest part of their particular vice.  And so, even though I have no interest

in bodybuilding per se, and really have no interest in staring at people I know are shortening their life in order to super-deform their bodies and paint them brown, I have started immersing myself in their online culture.

 

Because as poisonous as their hobby is to their body, their overton window around “Shut the hell up, no one wants to hear that” is much more healthy than that offered by mainstream culture or medical culture.

Bonus 1 week challenge

Bathe, brush your teeth, shave, and do your hair, you filthy animal.

Note – We are winding down to the end of GlibFit 2.0, and are thus in need of a new handler for GlibFit 3.0.  If you are interested, send our kind hosts an email.

Week 8 – In Appreciation of the Grill

Most healthy diets suck.  Keto is passable for a while, but the lack of potato chips is a limiting factor.  Low fat is just.. Ugh, not thanks. Vegan? Vegetarian? I don’t even want to think about the mental contortions you have to go through to tell yourself “This seitan is really good.  I enjoy seitan. Seitan is a think I wish to eat more of.”

The problem with diets is that they are all negative.  You can’t eat meat. You can’t eat chips. You can’t eat outside of a particular time window.

That shit don’t work.  You can’t even not think about a pink elephant.

So instead, I propose you think about it as an active thing.  You need to get certain things into your body. How will you actively go about doing it.

On thing your body needs, no matter what the diet, is high-quality protein and fiber.  It would be nice to do that in as few calories as possible, so you can spend your calories on other stuff.  Did you know an entire Hershey has only 210 calories. That’s like 2 tablespoons of olive oil. If you could cut out that oil from your meat prep, you could go and actively have a Hershey’s bar.  Or three ounces of Scotch. Pick your poison.

Fortunately, like every Red Blooded American, you own a grill.  Or if not GTFO and go get one.

Grills are great.  They cover your meat with smoke and cook it without having to add any oil.  That means you are saving calories that you can actively go spend on chocolate or Scotch or whatever your poison is.

There are lots of vegetable that are great on the grill too.  Up here on Ice Station Hoth, we only get about 19 days of nice weather a year, but I spend as many as possible with as much on the grill as possible.

Meats a no brainer, but meat should grill next to bait.  That is, grilled vegetables. Onions, peppers, asparagus, zucchini, tomatoes.  Hell, it’s the summer. Get whatevers cheap and throw it on.

And yeah, it was just one of those holidays where everyone grills and tries to remember what patriotic thing we are supposed to care about that day.  But that’s not why I love my grill. I love my grill for the Tuesday night where I come home from a long, stressful day at work and I need an excuse to stand around and not be bothered by my wife or kids for a half hour.  So I can come home, throw some meat on the grill, and stand around and decompress for a bit while the grill does its magic.

Bonus 1 week challenge

Put something on the grill that never walked on two our four feet.

Week 6 – Take a Chill Pill

I’m not a great scholar of the Book.  I don’t know the Jewish traditions very well, or how they got turned into metaphors by Christ.  But I’ve heard of the Jubilee. Every fifty years, everyone would take a year off of some types of work, some celebrations were held, and debts are forgiven.  I’m sure there’s a lot I’m getting wrong and glossing over, but the idea of regular debt repayment is a popular one that’s survived through the ages. Everyone has probably felt like, if they could just take a break from their bills and their stress, they could really get ahead in life.  

The Jubilee is a mesocycle of rest and repayment, with a weekly day of rest acting like a microcycle.

What does that have to do with getting fit?  Lots, actually. Rest, recovery, mesocycles and microcycles.  Mastering them is actually really important for making changes to your body.

Part 1: The Microcycle, or Go The Fuck To Bed

I kept running into three pieces of advice for people trying to get fit.  1) Try hard. 2) Eat right. and 3) Sleep. Numbers 1) and 2) I get. Arnold, Hulk Hogan, and Mr. T have been telling us since I was watching them on Saturday morning.  But sleep?

Yeah, sleep.  It’s a thing. If you want to lose weight, try sleeping more.  If you want to get big, try sleeping more (after a protein shake.)  If you want to perform better athletically, try sleeping more.

Give it a try.  What’s the worst that could happen?  You fuck up and get eight hours of sleep?  Oh noes.

Part 2: The Mesocycle, or Taking a Break While You Look Up What Mesocycle Means OK I’ll Save You a Click It Means Big Cycle

So we got our microcycle down, but what is this about mesocycle?  Well, our bodies are super complex. And lazy as fuck. They will adapt to a new stimulus, but only the bare minimum needed.  In order to keep pushing it, you gotta change things up.

For exercise, well, that’s been studied so much I can farm out the description to someone else.  Go read this.

For diet, not so much with the researching.  In fact, there are a lot of otherwise-well-informed people that think the human metabolism can stand up to a constant calorie deficit and not adapt.  They are wrong.  It happened to me, and let me tell you first hand, it sucks.  The solution? Cycling on and off a diet. There’s only been one published study of this approach that I know if, but it’s got a punny acronym for a name so you know it has to be good. 

In broad strokes, they found that for a bunch of obese people, two weeks of diet followed by two weeks of eating to maintain weight led to more weight loss than a steady diet.  Eventually. It took twice as long, you know, for taking half time off. But the two groups ate the same deficit overall.

So what the lesson here?  The lesson is it’s week 6. If you have been kicking ass for five weeks, take a rest week if you think it might help.  Rest. Recover. Come back next week.

Weekly Challenge

None!  Didn’t you just read this article about taking a break?

Week 5 – Finding Truth in a Sea of Lies

There is a lot of good information about health and fitness out there.  There is an order of magnitude more bullshit out there. Set aside the bad actors like Men’s Health actively peddling lies for money (current headline: Can Eating for your Bloodtype Help You Lose Weight?  No, and there is no evidence this works, and everyone knows it.) The real problem are the evangelicals.  No wait, not that link.  Those guys were awesome.  These ones.

Lots of people struggle with their health goals.  They either don’t put the effort in, they don’t have a good plan of attack, or they have a good plan of attack that happens to not work for them.  They try it, and it fail. Repeat this over, and over and over, and “nothing works.” Then, after years or decades of trying, bam. Something works.  Maybe they actually put the effort in for the first time (that’s me, this time.) Maybe they get on a good plan (ok, that’s me too.) Maybe the plan is just a good fit for their preferences and habits (yep, me here again.)

And this leads to the error in logic.  You’ve tried everything, and everything failed.  Then you found this one thing, and it works. And being a social creature, you want to tell the world.   This doesn’t make you a bad person – just the opposite! You “know” the one thing that works, and if people would just try it, they can skip over all the pain and disappointment you had.

Just.  Do. This.  One. Thing.  Paleo. Veganism.  Keto. Whole Food Plant Based (we just called that vegetarianism in my day.)  Lift Heavy. No, Lift for Hypertrophy. Pilates. Yoga. Crossfit. Whatever.

You know what that makes most people?  Evangelicals. Lots of these even have the strong odor of moralism.  

This is how your body is supposed to work. Eating dolphins is a sin.  Real men lift heavy. Real men Eka Pada Rajakapotasana until they can smell their own taint.  

They have one data point, and they want everyone to know it and love it like they do.  They are not good sources of information. But good information is necessary for my throw-everything-against-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks method of fitness improvement.  After all, my goal is to work smarter, not harder.

So what would a good data source look like?  Well, N would need to be a lot bigger than 1.  So we need lots of people. And some personal anecdotes are important, but so is access to larger statistical data.  Group think is always a danger, so we’d need a conflict resolution mechanism that rewards good ideas not conformity to ideology.  That mean… oh crap. I know what that means.

See, there is this engine that someone built.  Its fuel is the autistic rage of over-educated social idiots, and it spits out hate.  It’s a weaponized hive of scum and neckbeardery. But it has all those features we are looking for.

That’s right, my trusted data source is (Lovecraft help me), Reddit.

See, Reddit has this social dynamic where, to win a fight, you have to ascend the scale of reliability to appeal to the notions of the overeducated idiots of Reddit.  The weakest form of argument is the anecdote. A better argument is the appeal to group wisdom. Then low-quality internet article, then high-quality internet article.  And the winning argument on Reddit is a link to a journal article that you haven’t read.

So yeah.  Reddit. If a mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems, Reddit is a machine for turning antisocial behavior into reasonable fitness advice.

I should take a step back and say that there are two kinds of Reddit communities.  This is my own taxonomy, but I say there are two kinds. First are the process based.  These are all about how to get fit and healthy. /r/keto, /r/veganism, /r/HIIT, /r/weightroom.  Then there are the outcome based communities. /r/fitness, /r/loseit, /r/gaint. The first are a breeding ground for evangelicals.  The second aren’t invested in a way to get there, just get there. Get fit. Lose weight. Bulk up.

It’s in those places that I look for information.  And you know what… it’s scary how good that information is.  Probably not quite as good as a specialist medical profesional like a physical therapist or a bariatric nurse, but better than a general practitioner.  At least in my experience.

I’ll prove it.  Using Reddit’s favored resolution mechanism.  Factors Associated With Weight Change in Online Weight Management Communities: A Case Study in the LoseIt Reddit Community.  They studied activity in /r/loseit, one of those outcome based communities.  They found “Our findings suggest that among active users of a weight management community, self-declaration of higher BMI levels (which may represent greater dissatisfaction with excess weight), high online activity, and engagement in discussions that might provide social support are associated with greater weight loss.”

/r/gainit, /r/loseit, and /r/fitness are three subreddits to get to know, if you are looking for diet and fitness information.  All three have high-quality content in their wikis, and generally you can get a good answer to a question if you post it.

Of course, all things in moderation.  Reddit makes you stupid. 

Bonus 1 week challenge:

Go read about how veganism doesn’t make you live longer.  Found this link on Reddit.

Week 4 – Satiety

Every GlibFit 2.0 is, in-part, about ALaTW.  That’s because he is writing them and he can only write about things that he knows.  But this week is more so. You see, ALaTW got fat because he was hungry. He was always hungry.  I don’t mean that, every once in a while, he was a fourteen year old girl having a second bowl of ice-cream and texting “oh I cud eat a horse lol” to her friend.  

I mean he was deeply, truly, pathologically hungry.  All the time.

He wasn’t eating to cover up his emotions.  He wasn’t eating to get back at his dad. He was ravenous.  And nothing would make him full. Eating wouldn’t make him full.  His rule was once a year he would eat until he was full, usually at Thanksgiving.  It never worked. One year, he was bound and determined to see what it was like to be full.  For Science. Yes really.

He ate so much he got physically ill.  You know what he felt on the way to the bathroom?  Hunger. Just like the other 364 days of the year. His normal was just an unending, unmanageable hunger pang.

When the Internet’s Hottest Young Intellectual reviewed a book about hunger and satiety, ALaTW’s ears perked up.  He read the book (the way God intended, as an audiobook.)  In fact, he read it twice. And he never does that. The Bible and Lord of the Flies are the only other two books he’s read more than once.  But this book was particularly related to his interests and he wanted to sign up for the newsletter. That was in May of last year.

Because ALaTW is a slow and careful and meticulous and lazy thinker, he let those ideas percolate until December, when they got put into action.  A doctor’s visit telling him he was going to die also helped him get started. And you know what?

Two days in, he felt something he never felt before.  He felt full.

Without further narcissistic ado, here’s the meat of this post.  Losing weight requires you to eat less. The human brain is the universe’s most powerful supercomputer in command of the world’s most complicated data network in your hormone system.  It evolved to keep you alive, which means “with fat stores.” If you try to eat less, your brain will fight you. Hard. Most people can’t beat it. ALaTW couldn’t.

So don’t fight fair.  Fight fucking dirty. Don’t take it head on.  Look at it from a security perspective and twist the system to your ends.  How can you give it inputs its not expecting in order to get it to behave in a way it was never supposed to?

Here’s what you do.  ALaTW did this and was able to maintain a 2,000 calorie deficit a day.  And he was full, the whole time.

The Holy Trinity: Fat, Protein, and Volume

The first and biggest hack is to put food in your body that looks like high calorie food.  When your stomach senses fat, protein, and volume, it releases a hormone that tells your brain it got a bunch of calories.  Note the flaw in this design. Its using fat, protein, and volume as a proxy measure.

So eat fat, protein, and volume in low calories.  What does that look like? The vegetables for a huge ass salad are maybe a hundred calories.  Grilled chicken thighs, ground beef, and pulled pork are all full of fat and protein. That’s right, ALaTW ate a ton of salad.  Grilled chicken salad. Taco salad. Cobb salad. Yeah, I know. Salad is something of a meme for the conspicuously non-FitGlibbing.  How about a ribeye and asparagus? That’s got volume, fat, and protein too. Where’s your God now, trolls? ALaTW happens to love salad, and probably eats five a week when not dieting, so this wasn’t too hard for him.

You know what else has fat, protein, and volume?  A protein shake fortified with healthy, nutritious heavy cream.  Four fl oz of heavy cream, two scoops of protein, and a bunch of water was his lunch every day and it kept me full.  

The astute reader might notice that.. Hm.. that sounds a lot like keto.  Yeah, it is. There’s a reason it works. Lots of people on keto can eat on a deficit without trying.  Those of us that still have to try find it easier while on keto. This is why.

Eat on a Schedule

Lots of people get in a routine, and their body adapts.  They wake up two minutes before their alarm. Or they need to drop the kids off at the pool right before they leave for work.

Well, hunger works like that too.  Eat breakfast at exactly the same time every day.  Eat lunch at exactly the same time every day. Eat dinner at exactly the same time every day.  Hell, ALaTW even ate the exact same things for breakfast and lunch every day. Four scrambled eggs for breakfast.  Protein shake for lunch.

ALaTW’s body got on a schedule.  It didn’t expect food outside of 6:30 AM, 11:30 AM, or 6:00 PM.  So it never sent ALaTW hunger pangs unless he was late to a meal.

The astute reader might notice that.. Hm.. that sounds a lot like intermediate fastings.  Yeah, it is. There’s a reason why it works. Lots of people on IF can eat on a deficit without trying.  Those that still have to try find it easier while on IF. This is why. (ALaTW tried IF for a week by skipping breakfast.  IF + 2,000 calorie deficit + an hour at the gym on no breakfast was like getting hit by a truck.)

You eat with your eyes first

Your hunger response is controlled by a very old, very primal signaling system in the brain.  The best way to think about it is to think of it like a two year old. It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop… ever, until you are dead!  I mean eating!

So when you eat, only let yourself see what you are ok eating.  Make your plate in the kitchen. Then put away the leftovers, take your plate to the dining room, and eat.  If you have to fight with your brain about having another scoop of food, you will lose. Instead, avoid the fight.  Just like putting a toy away and distracting a two year old.

Bonus Week 4 Challenge

Cook a meal from scratch.  Make it in the kitchen. Put a serving on your plate, put the left overs away, walk the plate to the dining room, and eat it there.

Week 3 – The Tabata Protocols

Last year, about two millions Americans died.  Of those two million, about 760,000 were related to heart issues of some type. That’s more people than were killed by cancer.  More than killed reading derp on the internet.  Even more people killed than those droned by Obama while attending a wedding. Combined.

So take care of your heart, or it will kill you.  But there are things worse than death (far more worse than death.)  

Like doing cardio.  I’ll take death over boredom.  Probably shouldn’t, but I would.  I tried it all. Audiobooks. Podcasts.  Thinking about baseball. Nothing could convince me to get on that bike six days a week for a half hour to an hour.  I chose death over boredom. I had high blood pressure. This wasn’t an abstract choice.

But it was a false choice.  I found out, there is another option: Pain.  And pain’s name is Dr Izumi Tabata.  I’ll take fifteen minutes of pain over an hour of boredom any day of the week.

The premise is this – ‘cardio’ as we all know and love it is more accurately called Low Intensity Steady State cardio, or LISS.  Do the same thing at a rate that gets your heart a little elevated, and do it without variation. The other option is the opposite – High Intensity Interval Training, or HIIT.  

You sports fans know these.  Ten and turns. Suicides. Push as hard as you can for a few seconds, then recover for a few seconds.  And when you push, push HARD. Then, when you feel like you are going to puke – presto. You’re done.

I find this to be much, much easier to get over and done than droning on and on and on and on at a slow pace.  Maybe I’m a masochist. Maybe I’ve got ADHD. Maybe I’m a sinner and deserve death. But in any case, I’ll take it.

So I tried it.  And I just about died.  I did HIIT three times a week, and it was too much.  Four days a week wasn’t enough recovery time for my heart, or my nervous system, or something.  So I did what any sane person would do. A literature search!

I found a journal article titled Three Minutes of All-Out Intermittent Exercise per Week Increases Skeletal Muscle Oxidative Capacity and Improves Cardiometabolic Health.  Three minutes?  WTF. So I read it, and the study uses overweight subject.  Hey, I’m overweight.

Long story short, but it looks like the worse shape you are in, the less HIIT you need for dem hart gains.  Good news. I was in terrible shape, so I didn’t have to push nearly as hard as I was.

I know the N only =1 here, but every week I’ve been doing 1x LISS and 2x or 3x of the protocol here.  My blood pressure has gone from “Uncontrolled Hyptertensive” with four meds to “Prehypertensive” with two meds (and its the lower band of prehypertensive that doesn’t look to have elevated rates of cardiovascular disease or reduced mortality, but don’t tell the American Heart Association, they don’t want to hear it.)

Should you do HIIT?  I don’t know. But if you are a masochistic sinner with ADHD and uncontrolled hypertension, it might be worth a try.

Weekly Challenge

Go do 1 round of HIIT.  Sprint/jog. Cycle. Do push ups.  Shadowbox. Whatever. Use the protocol from the Three Minutes paper:

2 minute warm up; 3 cycles of 20 second of all-out work + 2 minutes of low intensity work; 3 minute cool down.  10 minutes total.

Week 2 – IIFYM

When I was starting to lose weight, I knelt at the altar of Keto. I thought it was the best way to lose weight, bar none. What I’ve learned since then is that it was the best way *for me* to lose weight. And it didn’t work because the mighty forces of Beta Hydroxybutyrate valiantly went to war and defeated the Goblins of Insulin Bog. It worked for me because I could eat on a significant calorie deficit every day without being hungry.

Every successful weight loss boils down to a simple conservation of energy. Put a lot of energy into your body and the extra gets stored. Put to little into your body, and your stores get used. Thermodynamics, how does it work?

So do I think keto is necessary? Nope. Is it a good way to keep yourself happy on a calorie deficit? Yep.

But really, the important thing is to set your goals and stick to them. How do you know what your goals should be? Glad you asked. Go use this little work sheet.

Follow the steps given, and this worksheet will spit out your macronutrient targets for every day. For weight loss, the most important target is your calorie target. Eat less than your total daily energy expenditure and you’ll lose weight one way or the other. After that, your protein goal should be met every day. That’s important for keeping your muscles from wasting away with your fat. After that, your fat and carb goals are set.

Once you have this, you’ve done all the hard work. Deciding on what food to eat and how much is just a matter of making it fit your macro goals. Should you eat a hamburger slathered in butter? It’s not a moral question where you have to decide. You just need to figure out If It Fits Your Macros (IIFYM).

To make this work, you pretty much have to be willing to log what you eat. Or at the very least keep a tally of your daily calories. Is that a little bit of work? Yes. Suck it up and be an adult.

But this it the epitome of working smarter, not harder.

Bonus 2 Week Challenge

Get a tape measure and calculate your body fat percentage.