Not a Diet Book

If you removed one-third of macronutrients, I’m not surprised you lost body fat, to be honest, mate.

A state of ketosis is where you limit carbohydrates (or calories) to such an extent that the amount of sugar (glucose) in the blood becomes so low that it has to react accordingly, and the body then produces a similar source of energy called ‘ketones’ from fat (consumed and stored). When the amount of ketones in the blood reaches a certain level, we are said to be in a state of ketosis. Often, people believe they’re in a state of ketosis, but really, they’re just low carb. I’ll expand a little later in the book on the rare occasions I may promote this diet for some populations; however, across the board, with the intention of finding a sustainable diet that is easy to maintain over long periods of time, I think it’s important that we consider other options when looking to create a deficit – a better ‘method’, so to speak – and one that allows for flexibility.

Vegetables and fruit also sit within the category of carbohydrates – all fibre, starches and sugars to be precise.

Most people who adhere to a ketogenic diet believe it has superior fat loss over any other diet. To this day, however, I have not seen any literature to back that claim.

16:8/Intermittent Fasting (IF)

Wow, aren’t millennials great? They took ‘skipping breakfast’ and made it ‘intermittent fasting’.

The usual protocol within this method is to refrain from your first feeding until 1 p.m., after which you’re allocated eight hours in which to consume food, then after 9 p.m. you have to discontinue it until the following day. Again, a lot of anecdotal claims are held up against intermittent fasting, and I’ll delve into them later in the book; however, it’s always simply a case of ‘skipping a meal, mate’. And if you remove one in three major meals of the day, that’s seven fewer meals a week, 365 fewer meals a year – which, for someone who consumes 700 calories per meal, is 255,500 calories per year, equating to approximately 73 lb of fat.

As with many methodologies, the person or brand promoting it will claim that theirs is superior to any other, especially when challenged. I sit in the camp of personal preference and, as I’ll explain a little later, the science says there aren’t tangible benefits to fat loss in shortened feeding windows vs total caloric restriction (comparable to managing your daily spending vs shortening the windows in which you spend).

These methods can annoy me because often the consumer is left in the dark about the principle – not only that but they’re sold with a pinch of pseudoscience. Every method for fat loss is often touted to have benefits to reduce cancer, and I wouldn’t be surprised if, within the year, someone says intermittent fasting makes you taller. People are getting distracted from why they picked the protocol in the first place. Can skipping breakfast help you lose fat? Yes. What if you fancy eating breakfast? Then eat it. Just don’t become sidetracked by what’s being preached by someone who’s declared themselves a professional in breakfast skipping at the expense of finding a method that actually works for you.

The low-fat diet

When looking at macronutrients, which I will do in more detail later, technically, per gram, protein and carbohydrates have the same amount of calories (4kcals), while dietary fats have 9 calories per gram; this is two-and-a-quarter times as many as proteins and carbs. This led to an era – especially around the 1990s – when people tried to remove as much fat from their diets as possible, and many foods were labelled ‘low fat’ to lure the consumer into purchasing without guilt.

We need a certain amount of our daily energy intake to come from dietary fats – around 20 per cent is the ball-park figure I like to work with. Less than this can be detrimental to our production of essential hormones, which we need in order for our bodies to feel, look and perform at their best. So it’s very important that at no point do we allow our intake of dietary fats to fall below that amount.

Popular slimming clubs and weight-tracking organizations

I’m not going to delve into these too much, but it’s quite apparent that they have their own agendas, where they purposely avoid talking about calories or calorie counting, but they still endorse it (for profit) by giving it their own terms. The easiest way to know this is when these organizations bring out their own brand of biscuits, ready meals or even shakes on which the small print says, ‘Must be consumed as part of a calorie-controlled diet.’ This is a legal disclaimer that forces them to confess to the importance of calorie control irrespective of whether their system directly refers to it.

My approach

I have been training clients since 2014. I have several-thousand hours of coaching experience on the gym floor, working with all kinds of people, and I believe that a huge component of the education necessary to become a good coach needs to happen right there. I’m not saying my approach is perfect – it’s not a magic pill, and I need you to put in as much as I do to get anything out of it – but it is working for a lot of my clients, as well as those who follow me on social media. I’ll share a bit more about my methods here.

I have intentionally cultivated a following, not only to give people a new way of thinking or a new perspective on elements of their journey towards improving fitness and health, but also to cut out the bullshit, which I come across each and every day. But I don’t just want to make noise on my own – I want you to join me. Don’t stand for misinformation and don’t let your friends, family and other people you know be misled.

So yes, I’m an intentional disruptor at the same time as an educator, but one of the main goals of my work is to put the consumer ‘in bed’ with the principle, so you can fully understand how sustainable and long-term fat loss occurs. And I want to do this so that companies profiting from your confusion, frustration and repeat business will no longer be able to keep you so far away from the only bit of information you’ll ever actually need if you are to successfully and sustainably lose weight and feel better. That’s not to mention having better confidence and self-esteem, shagging with the lights on, wearing colours other than black, going running in just a sports bra (or topless, for men – unless you’re a bloke who is into wearing sports bras, that is).

Imagine for a moment that you are the frog in this scenario:

If you put a frog in hot water it will jump out; however, if you put a frog in cold water and heat it slowly, it’ll happily boil to death.

I don’t want to put you in an environment that you want to jump out of straight away. I want you to be comfortable and not think about jumping every time I turn the heat up. I think of this whenever I consider implementing any kind of lifestyle change with clients. I’d like to think that over the years, I’ve become experienced at finding ways to make change for each client’s needs, rather than reinventing the wheel every time I make an alteration to someone’s diet or training regime.

It would be very easy for me to bunch some workouts and recipes together and flog the same thing to everyone. I could even write a cookbook – pay a chef to write it and slap my face on the front. Not only that, but I could even put a supplement discount code in there too, so that I get a kickback on every transaction. However, that’s not how I want to conduct my business. I am an educator, a coach, and I want to spread the good word like a modern-day Messiah (but with better banter!).

I’m going to assume that right now, you are where I have been before. I know how it feels and how frustrating it is. I know what it’s like to wake up and consider throwing in the towel on your lifestyle idealism and ambitions for your physique.

To me, you’re not just a reader; you’re not a prospect; you’re not a consumer; you’re not a transaction or a way for me to make it rain with cash during my time in the limelight. To me, you’re a real person and I’m going to make sure that you are no longer victim to, or a part of, someone else’s agenda to make money. My main objective for my time in this industry is to make the principle – the only one you actually need to do well – feel like second nature to you. Once you’re in bed with it, so to speak, it will liberate not only you, but those around you too.

Fat loss vs muscle gain

I’m going to assume the large majority of readers would like to lose fat. I know many of you want to build muscle too, but seeing as obesity is a worldwide epidemic, I will start with fat loss. It’s also worth noting that many of us who say we want to ‘lose fat and build muscle’ already have a considerable amount of muscle, it’s just not visible yet. And for anyone who is not sure whether to build muscle or lose fat, my advice is to lose fat first. Ideally, you should get lean, then look to build muscle. I will go into a little more detail, for those interested, below and in Part 2.

Some of you are already in great shape and would tell me, ‘James, I want to lose fat.’ If you were my face-to-face client, I’d kick you in the shins because you don’t need to. You need to fall in love with your training and set some performance goals – you’re just a bit lost with your goal setting, that’s all. Too many people want to go from great shape to very great shape, purely based on what they’re exposed to on social media. I want those people to be paired up with a challenging performance goal instead of starving themselves for a new profile picture.

If you have the opportunity, please at least try to fall in love with the pursuit of a performance goal rather than the unfulfilling pursuit of looking your ‘best’. I don’t think that a lot of people fully understand the implications of fat and weight loss; when people ask me about what goal they should aim for despite carrying around a fair amount of excess weight, I say this: ‘Okay, let’s begin with fat loss,’ because the reality is that once a certain amount of fat has been lost, there’s a lot more muscle already there than people realize. To put it in perspective, 1 litre of water weighs 1 kilogram. So let’s imagine you’re hosting a dinner party and you realize you need some mixers: you nip down to the local store and grab a 2 litre bottle of tonic water, then decide you actually need three. As you pay, the person at the checkout asks if you would like a bag. For that amount, you may even need to double bag for the ten-minute walk home. I want you to think about how heavy that bag will be with three 2 litre bottles of tonic water in it …

The point of this analogy is that 6 kilograms can feel like a lot, but in the world of fat loss it is not actually difficult for someone to lose that amount of weight. When looking to improve someone’s performance in a given sport, we tend to look at all the complex things first, but usually being less fat – and therefore lighter – is a huge benefit that is often overlooked. So imagine hugging those three bottles close to your chest and going for a run, then walking up several flights of stairs. Imagine how you’d feel putting the shopping bags down and then repeating all of that without them – you’d feel ten years younger and move around like a spring chicken.

So I hope you’re starting to see that fat and weight loss aren’t just about your next Instagram picture on holiday. They are about being able to keep up with your kids in the park, seeing that an elevator is full and being happy to walk up two flights of stairs instead, or improving your footwork to trick your savvy dog when throwing a tennis ball in the park.

How to build muscle effectively will be covered briefly in the book; resistance training has a plethora of benefits for bone health, muscles and general health, yes. But losing fat – losing the weight – has to be the priority for most. Muscle is tissue that shortens when contracted to create locomotion. Body fat, especially too much, quite literally increases the chances of developing serious chronic diseases, endangering not only physical health, but mental health as well.

I am going to empower, enable and educate you – and through you, your friends, your family members and your colleagues too – so you can seasonally get ‘fat’ from time to time without feeling like a failure. Yeah, that’s right. I want you to get a bit fat: on holiday, at Christmas and when you next go through a slight flat period with your training – because gaining fat is cyclical and a normal part of being a regular human. The problems begin with not knowing how to lose that fat, and when you learn how to do that your life will become less stressful. Food will taste great without bringing feelings of guilt or shame, and you will feel empowered to make decisions, not only about your diet and fitness, but also your social life and attitude towards your own body. You’ll plan meals better, improve drink choices and not beat yourself up for enjoying yourself.

What if you get injured? I want you to be mentally prepared for that too. Shit happens and you need to know you will gain weight when you’re injured. But as I said, gaining weight is only an issue when you don’t know how to lose it.

We also need to look at things like periods near Christmas. I’ve put clients in a controlled surplus before, as I’d rather they adhered to twice their maintenance† than just going crazy and consuming everything that’s put in front of them. Giving yourself something to stick to makes you feel a lot better.

I’m not sure what you’re doing next Christmas but I’ll be getting festively plump.

If I was here as your financial advisor, and said either, ‘Right, let’s put 50 per cent of everything you earn away and not touch it,’ or, ‘Look, I want you to put 10 per cent away every day; it’s going to take five times longer than the previous approach, but the good news is it’ll hardly feel like you’re even saving money,’ you’d probably be sensible and pick the latter, right? Sometimes taking things out of context can bring clarity to these situations.

Over the next few-thousand wonderful words I’ll not only be talking about fitness, but also explaining to you some laws that exist in our universe and inside our minds, holding us back, making us misinterpret our surroundings and situations, so that ultimately you can implement the necessary changes to improve your life. Why? Because it’s all a part of my approach.

So let’s get into it …

* Dietary fats, which make up the large part of calories in this diet, are another significant food group to mention, and are found in things like eggs, cooking oils and avocado.

† Maintenance is how many calories you require in a day in order to maintain your weight and size. Sometimes giving someone twice their maintenance could still mean a reduction in caloric intake vs not tracked.

The Calorie Deficit

calorie*

‘The energy needed to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water through 1°C.’

deficit

‘The amount by which something is too small.’

Calorie deficit, also known as an energy deficit, is a term that you may or may not have heard before. It is the scientific equation that is required for human beings to lose body fat. It is, in fact, the principle behind every fat-loss diet in history.

Question:

How does [insert any common diet] work for fat loss?

Answer:

Calorie Deficit.

Here’s how I explain this when I first meet a client: let’s say that after a few years, you have successfully saved some money in your current account, and let’s say that the more money you have saved, the more fat you have on your body. If you have excess funds or ‘savings’ in your bank account, then you have retained more money than you have spent. Translating that into a caloric intake and body-fat context, this means you have eaten more calories (in) than you have expended through daily life and exercise (out).

If you were trying to ensure that you were saving more than you spent, you’d be pretty pissed off when you checked your bank balance and saw it at £0.00. So how can we expect any different when this is translated into an energy consumption and expenditure context? This is where the zealots mentioned earlier come in, with misleading advice on why you haven’t lost any fat – maybe you didn’t drink enough of the right kind of tea, or take the right supplements, or eat your meals at the right time of day, let alone cook the right foods for your ‘body type’? However, it is, in almost every case a simple miscalculation (whether intentional or not) of energy in vs energy out.

So when intending to lose fat successfully, we need to do the opposite of what a smart financial advisor would suggest. We need to tilt the balance to transition into burning more than we spend. This can be done through earning less (consuming fewer calories) or spending more (burning more through exercise) – it’s up to the person in question, but usually a sensible amount of both is optimal.

We don’t have to be in a deficit every day. Think of finances again: let’s say you’re getting paid at the end of every weekday. You save 15 per cent of the money you get paid each day, but at weekends you decide to spend one day’s 15 per cent on having a good time. You’re still saving in that scenario: one day off from saving doesn’t negate your savings; it just creates a slight dent in the long run to the duration of a diet. The less consistent you are, quite simply the longer it will take. How this affects the long-term results varies in each individual case.

There are two types of people in the world: those who occasionally ‘fall off the wagon’ when dieting, and those who lie about it.

I saw a great post by Sohee Lee, a friend and industry peer, who said, ‘When you get a flat tyre, you pull over, but you don’t slash the other three tyres for no reason.’ This perfectly summarizes what people tend to do when they hit a speed bump in dieting: they give up, throw in the towel and grab the nearest tub of ice cream. But I want you to think about it this way: if you’ve ever seen something that you can’t sensibly afford, but you bought it anyway, you don’t then allow yourself to spiral into endless debt and move back in with your parents; you strategically plan around repaying the debt from the purchase and maybe cutting back elsewhere for a limited time period.

The calorie deficit has been dressed up and packaged so many times now through the ‘next biggest diet’, meal-replacement system or ‘secret weight-loss supplement’ that it’s become almost unrecognizable. In response to my bid to cut through the terminology for the mainstream (along with pent-up emotions), I have been dubbed the ‘Calorie Fucking Deficit’ guy. If you search on social media for #CFD, that’s what it stands for. People wave it as a flag of liberation, as they now understand a principle they once did not.

All low-carb movements, high-fat movements, fasting movements lead back to the calorie deficit. Multimillion-pound slimming clubs even create their own languages, using terms such as ‘syns’; it’s easy to connect the dots to believe that it’s to make the consumer’s life easier, but I disagree wholeheartedly.

It’s important at this stage to recognize that implementing a calorie deficit is not always straightforward, and usually the bigger it is, the more the body will try to adapt to prevent it from happening. Imagine you have a child, and you find out that they’ve started spending the savings that you wanted them to have for when they are older. You’d probably step in to ensure they at least slow down, but ideally, you would stop them altogether. Similarly, biology dictates that we have a myriad processes to make fat loss harder.

Human beings have been around for hundreds of thousands of years, and for the majority of our history, we’ve had to work very hard from one meal to the next – it was a matter of survival of the fittest. Now, when we diet, we are choosing to engage in small periods of starving ourselves, and ideally, we should do it slowly to manage the symptoms of hunger, fatigue, being irritable and poorer performance. Appetite is a part of evolution, and one of the first frontiers to prevent us from losing too much fat too fast.

With that in mind, now is a better time than any to talk about our two main ‘hunger hormones’: leptin and ghrelin.

For many of you, these may be words you have never heard before, but please keep in mind that I would not have put them in the book unless they were crucial to your understanding of fat loss and your body.

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.

Although both leptin and ghrelin are secreted in other parts of the body, they both affect our brains.

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. I usually think of ghrelin sounding like gremlin; if you search for the dictionary definition of a gremlin, you ‘ll find ‘an imaginary mischievous sprite regarded as responsible for an unexplained mechanical or electronic problem or fault’. That sounds about right.

Both leptin and ghrelin respond to how well fed you are; leptin usually also correlates to fat mass – the more fat you have, the more leptin you produce.

I wanted to name these two hormones because they are related to calories and energy balance, and you’ll find their influence in the sleep part of the book really helpful. Here’s an explanation that revolutionized dieting for me: our response to ghrelin production, aka hunger, is not pleasant; it is, in fact, hundreds of thousands of years of evolution teaching your brain to eat. However, it is cyclical.

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.

Those who dispute the Calorie Deficit and an introduction to Confirmation Bias

It doesn’t take very long to peruse the Internet and find someone with a ‘clickbait’ title of ‘calories in, calories out doesn’t work’. This is also spoken about as ‘CICO’. When talking about a calorie as a measure of energy a calorie is always a calorie.

But are all calories the same? Absolutely not. The body will treat different sources of food differently, whether it’s fish, potato, nuts or even chocolate. A hundred kcals of potato will be absorbed differently to the same amount of chicken. The potato, once broken down, may refuel muscles that have just been trained, while the chicken is broken down into amino acids to repair the same muscles. Different roles, same calorie values. So note that although there are complex differentiations between foods, fat loss is still always governed by calories in vs calories out, whether you’d think so or not.

One of the biggest debates fuelled by some of the modern-day morons is that calories don’t matter and carbohydrates alone are the issue. There is a hormone you may have heard of before called insulin, which is known as a storage hormone. Because of this there are those who hold by what has been named by some of my peers and mentors as the ‘insulin hypothesis’, which claims that as long as you keep your insulin low, you will lose fat.