Not a Diet Book

Don’t get me wrong, everyone has their poison. For some it’s alcohol and partying, for others it’s cycling large doses of anabolic steroids. The bodybuilders, more often than not, eat a better diet, focus on sleep and a lot of them lead very healthy lifestyles – my issue isn’t with the use of steroids per se; I don’t condone it, but I’m not anti either. My issue is to do with the lack of transparency between these bodybuilders and their following, which can be millions of people at a time. Even if we take, conservatively, 50 per cent of the following of an athlete with 2 million followers, that’s a million men and women looking up to, and aspiring to look like, this athlete. These people might have less gifted genetics, a different socioeconomic status, full-time jobs with long working hours and they may even have kids. They will buy the athlete’s cookie-cutter guide to become ‘beach ready in 30 days’, then, when they don’t see much improvement, they will buy the recommended supplement stack to ‘boost’ progress. Little do they know they’re being misled. The athlete, whether intentionally or not, is skewing the perception of what is accomplishable naturally, and this is a fundamental cause of poor self-esteem, low confidence and a plethora of insecurities, which will affect many aspects of someone’s life and, ultimately, their mental health.

Put this on repeat and you’ll see the true nature of what fitness has become. It is a playground of dishonesty, narcissism and the pursuit of capital gain. The obese get no closer to a solution, and the ones who are in shape remain depressed, comparing themselves to their idols and getting disheartened with every effort, day after day.

To put it cynically, a disheartened consumer becomes a profitable consumer. The modern-day expo is like flashing a Ferrari at a homeless man, then offering him a lottery ticket: All this could be yours, as long as you buy a ticket (or a BCAA stack with free shipping).

Unfortunately, this could not be further from the truth. When I talk about anabolic steroids I’m not just talking about the men, but women too. All prepared to diet and restrict harshly for twenty weeks, often just so they are in ‘peak’ condition on the supplement stall.

The evidence-based approach to nutrition isn’t always sexy, and it certainly isn’t favoured by social-media algorithms as much as a bloke with his top off next to a Lamborghini (which he’s probably rented for his photoshoot). And should you attend a talk with an evidence-based, qualified speaker you will see:

 a minimal space on the smallest platform with a microphone on the quietest setting, barely audible to the several dozen attendees who are struggling to hear what’s being said.

 a small group of personal trainers who actually want to upskill their knowledge (the rest naively thinking they know everything about dealing with people of all shapes and sizes from their six-week PT course).

I’m going to get a bit of hate for saying this, but I will not ‘prep’ anyone for a bodybuilding or physique show. I think it’s pretty poor to represent fitness by starving yourself for twelve to twenty weeks, to cover yourself in fake tan, carb up last minute and force a smile on stage for a row of judges, pretending you’re happy when the truth is you’re malnourished (so much so that a man loses his libido to the extent that he struggles to get an erection, while a lot of women’s menstrual cycles discontinue and their libidos suffer too). I think this is the time for the 95 per cent of competitors who feel this way to take a hint. Your body is trying to tell you something from thousands of years of evolution.

There is a small percentage of bodybuilders that I respect for their work in the competing space, but the misconception that you can’t be a decent PT or know much about fat loss unless you have competed is fuelled by those who are less than honest with their real approach, and that concept is completely untrue. I am evidence of that.

The biggest unspoken reason as to why people compete is to create enough external pressure on themselves to ensure that they stick to an over-restrictive diet. Every time they head to the fridge or get hungry, they think about how many people they’ll let down if they pull out of the competition. Most hire a ‘prep coach’, so that they can adhere to the calories set: someone to tell them to go do their sixty minutes of fasted cardio. I think it’s damaging to glamourize over-restriction and extreme low body-fat percentages. Unfortunately, many people suffer with eating disorders inside the fitness industry; it’s just much easier to hide if they’re in good shape. Poor relationships with food exist at both ends of the spectrum, and, from what I’ve seen, entering your first physique competition is a sure way of developing either a poor relationship with food or your physique – sometimes even both.

There are boutique personal-training franchises that won’t hire you as a PT unless you’re a certain body-fat percentage, which I also find pathetic. Trying to quantify a coach’s ability by their composition is one of the most toxic symptoms at the root of what’s wrong with the fitness industry – among everything else, that is.

The thief of joy: why comparison and choice are preventing your progress

Imagine if I told you that you don’t need a six-pack to be ‘fit’, to be accepted, to be loved or to be successful. What if I told you that you could eat pizza and not have to justify it as a ‘cheat meal’? What if I told you that you’re not inherently bad at dieting or a lost cause, just that you’ve been intentionally misled into fads and plans that often set you up for inevitable failure?

Although I’ve pointed out some of the major issues with the industry, I’m not here to completely scare you away from it. In time, it can serve people in the way it should, but something needs to change, and the only way we can do that is first to come to terms with what it really is and then move the goalposts accordingly: as to what is ‘fitness’ and what is the peak.

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.

I just want to make you aware of what’s truly going on behind the picture-perfect Instagram feeds. And it’s not only the majority of consumers who are left disheartened by this, but a huge number of new professionals within the industry too. It’s all too common for these professionals to compete in physique to fit in with what is now a norm in the industry. ‘What’s that, James, you haven’t competed? What do you know, then? Why should I trust you? Why isn’t your profile picture of you on stage?’

Is it really worth giving up 95 per cent of your life for a 5 per cent change in bodyweight?

To me, quite simply: no.

I’d like to think I’ve accomplished great things in my life so far, and none of them have had anything to do with my physique. I love to be active, I love to train, I feel great when I eat healthily and I feel great when I indulge. I want the same for you, and I’m sure I can help you to feel the same way by the time you’ve reached the end of this book.

When you understand and absorb what I’m going to teach you here it’s going to be incredibly hard for industry charlatans to squeeze any more cash out of you, let alone waste your time.

The industry continues to be far too extreme: from super-restriction and dieting down to unhealthy body-fat percentages, before most of these ‘athletes’ burn out and go back to old eating habits. After a physique comp, when you step off the stage, you’re quite literally primed from a physiological and psychological standpoint for weight gain.

This is particularly relevant to females, who need body fat more than males. It’s a rarity to find someone who sits healthily at a very low body-fat percentage without then suffering from a range of other health problems, as you’ll find out later in the book.

Also, something you’re not told is that women who compete often have periods of weeks where they can’t sit down for too long as it hurts their tailbone.

However, when they go back to what is a healthy body-fat percentage, they feel a new sensation they didn’t before: they feel ‘fat’.

Yes, I might sound cynical, but I’ve seen it happen too many times, and I want to expose the reality behind the myths for you, especially when they have such a negative impact on not just those searching for genuine help, but for the people in the industry who are supposed to be the ones helping too.

To put it in perspective: a teenage girl scrolling through Instagram might double tap that photo, commenting ‘#bodygoals’. That same teenager would never have been exposed to the sport of ‘competing’ or seen such lean females if it wasn’t for social media. The young girl hasn’t even left school and she’s already beginning to feel inadequate for having a small amount of body fat. I think the elephant in the room here is that there is a ‘sport’ out there that has the potential to cause a huge dent in someone’s self-esteem, and the sport in this case is competing in physique.

My vision of what a PT should do for their client resembles the relationship between a driving instructor and their pupil. The only real difference is that there is an age limit for driving, but essentially you get to a point in your life when you are legally able to upskill yourself to be proficient behind the wheel of a car on the road. You lack the experience and understanding, so you hire someone on a short-term basis to teach you the fundamentals, so that, in time, you can be good enough to take the wheel on your own without continual help. You learn to become aware of your surroundings, trust your instincts and remain in control. This is what I want to do for you when it comes to your life of dieting, training and day-to-day general no-bullshit nutrition.

Although we may not be the ‘finished product’ when we pass our driving test, we’re in a position where we don’t always need someone sitting next to us, making sure that we’re doing it right. See where I am going with this? This is where I see a small flaw in PT training across the board, something that made me feel like a bit of a fraud for a long time. Am I the driving instructor who still sits in the car charging an hourly rate, despite my client being able to do it alone? Am I holding back from fully educating my client because I’m so worried about my income shrinking?

Imagine for a second your friend comes to meet you for a coffee, tells you about their third driving instructor in the last couple of years. ‘Third?’ you’d say. ‘What the hell are you paying these people for if they’re not teaching you what you require to no longer need them?’

We would very much have an issue with a revolving door of driving instructors, yet in the fitness industry it’s a never-ending conveyor belt of new methods to essentially always try to reach the same goal, which looks something like this:

‘Hi James, so I did the HIIT plan cooking from scratch, I did the Atkins, I did the low-carb with that woman, I did the high-fat with that man and I did the juicing with that couple. And now I’m here to see what you can do for me.’

I have no problem with industries being profitable. I mean, this is the age of capitalism. However, I do have an issue with the industry titans with an agenda to make millions of pounds, leaving the consumer no better off, and sometimes even worse off than before. We have got to the stage where so many different parties are contradicting each other and promoting their own beliefs (not backed by science) by laying down so many options on the table, that I’m worried there is too much choice. And that out of all the complex and confusing options, for someone whose health is being detrimentally affected by obesity, they end up choosing none.

* Pseudoscience – ‘a collection of beliefs or practices mistakenly regarded as being based on scientific method’.

A Brief History of James Smith

The reason many of the topics I will cover in this book will resonate with you on a deep and personal level is because I’ve made almost all the mistakes a person can make very early on in their career and I think I’ve adapted fairly well. I did what I thought was right instead of what I wanted, I ended up very unhappy and no longer felt passionate and, even worse, bored. I ballooned in weight in a corporate job I didn’t enjoy, and although I felt like I was doing the right thing career-wise, I suddenly became the person drinking on their lunch break to avoid the harsh reality that I didn’t like my job, despite how well it paid, and the even harsher reality behind that – that I didn’t really like my life either.

We’re worried about Brexit, Trump, obesity, cancer, finances and finding true love, but there’s one critical disease I was never warned or educated about – a disease that nearly took me down a path of ill health, poor decisions and an uncontrollable urge for a bad diet.

That disease is boredom.

I was neither a very active nor athletic child. I ate too much and exercised infrequently. I have memories from primary school of looking at the food on offer and asking the dinner ladies as I moved down the line, ‘Excuse me, Miss, is this fattening?’ pointing at every food in turn. No one could really give me a clear answer – no one at school and no one at home. I wasn’t sure if it was my fault. Had I missed something? Why were other kids not fat like me? Was it the food I was eating? Was it due to not being in the football team or was it perhaps just something to do with my family tree?

At the age of nine or ten I had nowhere to turn for advice on how to be … less fat. So please realize as you read this that what you are learning goes further than yourself: a cousin, sibling, your own child or a colleague – someone somewhere is confused and you’ll have the answer I never had as a child to pass on to them. Although it took fifteen years from that point in the school canteen to taking my first steps in the industry as a PT, the way I felt about how I looked was in my thoughts from a very young age and always at the back of my mind. And I’d be lying if I said it isn’t still today.

I spent the majority of primary school in the cloakroom with the special-education kids; teachers were never quite sure what was wrong with me, but I was labelled disruptive by almost all of them. When I was ten, my parents were asked to give me music to listen to in class so that I wouldn’t disrupt the other kids.

Six years later, I was asked politely to ‘leave school’. So my mum took me to the Jobcentre, smashed my Nokia 3310 in the road as we left school (a physical feat in itself) and told me not to come home without a job. But instead, in a bid to dodge that annoying thing you do as an adult, commonly known as ‘employment’, I enrolled in the BTEC course at a sports college. And so began my passion for fitness and sport.

I then began a journey of actually enjoying the learning process. I studied for four more years on a sports studies course before trying my hand at the fully fledged university BSc, but it wasn’t long before getting drunk each night won the battle over attending lectures, and at twenty-one, I ventured into the ‘real world’ without a formal degree.

‘The opposite of love is indifference, and the opposite of happiness is boredom.’

Timothy Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek1

Almost a decade later, I can remember four or five separate occasions I’d consider to be mini mid-life crises and that each and every one was absolutely fucking fantastic, because I have loved and embraced the changes that resulted from them. Change is something humans inherently dislike, but which, unfortunately, the large majority of us need.

At twenty-four, I was working in finance recruitment, doing what was considered ‘the right thing to do’: being paid well at a nine-to-five with good ‘career opportunities’, while having to conform to being clean-shaven in a flipping suit and being asked by everyone, ‘How was your weekend?’ And the funny thing is that although I’m an open person, I was not honest once. I think two of us out of nearly thirty were not married, and the last thing they would have wanted to hear was how, in fact, I’d necked a bottle of wine on a rugby bus in my underpants.

Every few hours of every single day I was going to make coffee, quite simply out of boredom to get myself away from my desk where I sat surrounded by people who could handle the level of boredom that came with the role. I’d be productive enough to seem busy, but the truth is I was bored. So fucking bored. People never give credit to how exhausting it is to pretend to be busy. It’s soul destroying.

All for what? A rat race. To see who can die with the most money.

Looking back at the quite ridiculous weekends that made up nearly a third of my life I can only see it as a form of escapism from the dreary existence of working in a job I didn’t have any passion for. Was it any wonder I turned to getting wasted most weekends? Although I admittedly still enjoy a fun weekend, I’d say, hand on heart, that the reasons behind these indulgences now come from a positive place. But it’s only in hindsight that I can see that.

By being dubbed the ‘Calorie Fucking Deficit’ guy I’ve come to realize many of our ‘vices’, whether alcohol or calorie-dense foods, are a crutch to help us through low periods, or a form of escapism, masquerading as an innocent pleasure or a ‘treat’. This narrative of quite simply ‘eating too much’, ‘being greedy’ or even ‘lazy’ is also quite naive; it goes much deeper than that – the cause of modern-day obesity, that is – and we’ll be getting into that in more detail as we go on.

One of my crises eventually led to me backpacking in Southeast Asia, and when you find out how much of a good time you can have living off just £15 a day, your perspective changes pretty quickly. However, six months in, I began to realize how hard it is to have a work–life balance when you don’t have any work. So, back on UK soil, I became a personal trainer in 2014 and moved back in with my parents,* six years before publishing this book.

People often ask me, ‘If you were not a PT what would you do instead?’ And in response, I find myself with a mental blank, because I’m really not sure. To me, I’ve reached the peak. My passion is fitness, sport and coaching people, and this is what I do every day. I’ve been on a tremendous journey from a confused fat kid with learning difficulties to a published author, credited as a respected expert in his field of fat loss and coaching. Any success credited to me in my professional life can only come off the back of having eventually aligned my passion with my daily life and career, and most of all, being happy with what I choose to do every day.

Eating better and exercising frequently are not chores to me, not a part of what I need to do. I genuinely enjoy every aspect of it because I enjoy my life. I am no longer bored because I love my work. There’s always something you can do to occupy you when your work aligns with your passion.

I’m still a fat kid at heart. I love crisps and dips, ordering several entrées and nothing better than slouching into bed come 9 p.m. And some days, I don’t even set an alarm to wake up.

I am the same as you, I promise. I have maybe just learned the tools I need to adapt certain aspects of my life to create better balance, which brings me on to the rest of the book: not only will I educate you on fat loss and training, but first I will help you to address the factors that go beyond fitness and diet that are currently holding you back from achieving your goals. We all need foundations to build on, and the next deep and powerful part of this book is about to begin.

Why is it that you’re fatter than you’d like to be?

* No matter what journey you’re on, ask yourself: if you take a risk, a huge risk, something that could change your life for the better, what truly is the worst circumstance on the flip side? Moving in with your parents again? I did it in the middle of my twenties, and I tell you what: it’s a lot easier to go after your ambitions with two hands – especially if you’re lucky enough to have parents like mine.

Consumer – Method – Principle

For a moment I want you to imagine that you are the consumer (on the left) and, irrespective of your goal, right in front of you are a load of methods – the industry’s way of dressing up what you will need to put into practice. There are methods all over the place, all confusing and contradicting, and each proclaiming to be the ‘ultimate’ way to accomplish your goal i.e. fat loss.

The principle sits on the far side (on the right); you can’t quite see it yet as dozens of methods are in the way. You can see so many of these methods that have been forced upon you over the years, and little did you know that on the other side of them sits one common element on its own: that singularity is the principle.

The principle when it comes to fat loss is a calorie deficit.

This is the only way we can successfully lose fat. I’ll get into the details of what exactly calorie deficit means shortly, but for now, imagine you on the left and what you desperately need on the right.

The method is how you package the principle for the consumer.

For too long, the method has kept the consumer at arm’s length from what they actually need to know and do in order to change their body and their health status for the better. We’ve seen the principle hidden among the ‘diets’ below, which, for our purposes, we will call the ‘methods’.

A brief explanation of popular methods

The following are just a few of the mainstream methods used for creating a calorie deficit.

The 5:2 diet

Imagine, if you will, that you have a slight spending problem. You then decide to leave your credit card at home for two days of the week. You notice a decrease in spending week on week, and so this is your chosen method for spending less money. In essence, this is how the 5:2 diet works: the consumer restricts calories fairly aggressively for two days of the week, which brings down the week’s total calorie intake.

I very rarely advocate this for my clients except in some circumstances, which I will go into in more detail later in the book. I prefer the 2:5 diet, where I eat less Monday to Friday and then indulge at the weekend. The 5:2 diet becomes a little more altered (and often complicated) each time someone puts their own spin on how it is done, which changes the approach and risks the effectiveness and understanding of the principle of the diet itself.

The ketogenic diet

When we look at the foods we eat, they can be subdivided into categories known as ‘macros’, which is short for ‘macronutrients’. When I first saw this word, I thought to myself, This lingo isn’t for me – it’s five syllables and sounds bloody complex. I will explain macros a bit more in later chapters, but for the time being, let me categorize a few foods into the relevant groups for you:

Protein

Protein is a macronutrient, obtained from foods like chicken, fish and some dairy products, such as whey protein, cheese, yoghurt.

Carbohydrates

These include things like rice, bread, fruits and vegetables.*

Carbohydrates are broken down into sugar (glucose) when digested. This means that anything that consists primarily of sugar – for instance sweets, desserts, etc. – is also labelled a carbohydrate. Now, carbohydrates are not inherently bad for us. On the contrary – they are our bodies’ preferred source of energy. However, when a ‘low-carb zealot’ preaches propaganda about the life-threatening effects of eating carbs, you obediently eradicate them, only to realize that you’ve removed a rather large number of foods from your diet. And, remember, that food (any food) equals calories. Pasta, bread, sandwiches, cake, desserts, biscuits, dairy, sweets, fizzy drinks, alcohol … I could go on. Eradicating a plethora of foods like this from anyone’s diet will, of course, create a substantial calorie deficit. This will lead to fat loss, but it is all too often simplistically and anecdotally attributed to the benefits of being on a ‘low-carb’ diet.