Brutal, that’s all I can say about these days.
About two years ago, when I began the project of stripping the flab off my bee-hind, days with 50 grams of carbs (or less) were a staple.
At my current sub-15% body fat, such days are all kinds of painful. I can handle one, maybe two in a row before I gots to get some carbs.
I don’t mean the “food noise” or whatever they’re calling it to sell you GLP-1 shots. Appetite is easy to control when you’re used to constructive suffering, eat meals built around heaping serves of protein, and make strategic use of caffeine and fluid intake.
Human beings can do that all by themselves without depending on complex billion-dollar supply chains that can fail at any time, if you can believe it. The more the machines “make everything easier” the more determined I become to keep my own human capabilities alive and thriving.
What gets at me is not hunger. It’s the brain-fog and a kind of fatigue that seeps down into the nerves and blood cells.
The hormone leptin and its consequences are a real sumbich on restricted calories with low body-fat.
Fatigue is fatigue, and fatigue is all perception in your mind. Diet fatigue is no different from squat fatigue. But that fact doesn’t make the feelings any less real, you understand, as far as you have to confront them in order to get through the day.
On the upside, 2-3 such days in a row and the veins pop like hot rocks candy from eating a piece of toast. My approach is to stack a couple of these days followed up with generous servings of carbs timed around strength-training workouts. There is nothing novel, innovative, or exciting here. It’s fortunate that results don’t depend on entertainment value, which is a lesson many people will never learn.
You know what though?
If you aren’t trying to get super-human lean, if you just want to be not-fat, it ain’t a fraction so challenging.
You don’t need to go so hard into restriction to see sustainable forward progress, for one thing.
And a higher body-fat is much more forgiving of calorie and carb restriction if you do use those tools, for another thing.
Diet is not nearly so hard as it can seem. I struggled with it for years, decades really, because I wasn’t that interested and because I <3 pizza and beer.
Once I started dialing it in a couple years ago, a few behavioral rules made it click. Social support at home. (If you have a spouse or other home-partner who isn’t on board, this gets a LOT harder.) A couple of choices that removed the “decision fatigue” of deciding what to eat.
It really doesn’t have to be that complicated or that difficult in mental and lifestyle terms.
The language and emotions around dieting and appearance are the real obstacles.
As far as doing something about it, that’s all down to using the Two Swords of energy flow and physical activity to reshape your body.
Lots of short-term wins in the gym and the kitchen add up to big-time changes over the long term.
That’s it. That’s the whole formula for making positive changes that stick.
The process might involve a little starvation eating from time to time, if I’m being real. Your body is highly resistant to giving up its delicious fat reserves. It can take a real kick in the rear to get it moving.
But what I’ve noticed is that once fat loss is in motion, it tends to stay in motion.
The secret sauce is getting into that state of fat-burning momentum. Once you get there, you can ease up on the gas pedal and cruise.
I can teach you how to do this. I can guide you through it with personal assistance.
But I can’t make you want it. I can’t cook your meals and chew your food and swallow it.
If you aren’t ready to change and committed to make it happen, none of this matters at all. It’s just information, boring and useless.
If you’re interested in my help setting up a fat-loss system and watching the flab melt off, reply to this and let me know.
Which way is it for you?
Matt Perryman