Copyright

Extract from The 4-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss. Reproduced by permission of The Random House Group Limited. Copyright © Tim Ferriss, 2011. And by permission of Crown Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © Tim Ferriss 2007, 2009 by Carmenere One, LLC.

Extract from The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant. Reproduced by permission of SSA, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Copyright © Will Durant, 1961.

Extract from Atomic Habits by James Clear. Reproduced by permission of The Random House Group Limited and by permission of Avery, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © James Clear, 2018.

Extracts from Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker. Reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd. and by of permission of Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Copyright © Matthew Walker, 2017.

Extracts from The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson. Reproduced by permission of HarperCollins Publishers and Pan Macmillian Australia Pty Ltd. Copyright © Mark Manson, 2016.

Extracts from Ego is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday. Reproduced by permission of Profile Books. Copyright © Ryan Holiday, 2017.

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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2020

FIRST EDITION

Text © James Smith 2020

Cover design by Claire Ward © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

James Smith asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

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Source ISBN: 9780008374297

Ebook Edition © January 2020 ISBN: 9780008374303

Version: 2020-09-25

While the author(s) of this work have made every effort to ensure that the information contained in this book is as accurate and up-to-date as possible at the time of publication, medical and pharmaceutical knowledge is constantly changing and the application of it to particular circumstances depends on many factors. Therefore it is recommended that readers always consult a qualified medical specialist for individual advice. This book should not be used as an alternative to seeking specialist medical advice which should be sought before any action is taken. The author(s) and publishers cannot be held responsible for any errors and omissions that may be found in the text, or any actions that may be taken by a reader as a result of any reliance on the information contained in the text which is taken entirely at the reader's own risk.

Contents

1  Cover

2  Title Page

3  Copyright

4  Contents

5  Foreword

6  PART I: FOUNDATIONS

7  Introduction

8 A Brief History of James Smith

9  Consumer – Method – Principle

10  The Calorie Deficit

11  Fitness ‘Tracking’ and NEATUP247

12  Habits – #gettingshitdone

13  Essentials for the Good Life

14  Understanding Diabetes Mellitus – For Everyone

15  Laws of the Universe

16  The Power of Numbers

17  Polarization – Your New Way to Be Intentionally Unpopular for a Better Life

18  Effort and Ambition

19  Effort 2.0: The Beginning of ‘Overnight Success’ – Intention and Empowerment

20  PART II: BUILDING ON YOUR FOUNDATIONS

21  Somatotypes and Sport Selection – Why You Don’t Need a New Diet

22  Fitness Fallacies

23  Female Fat Loss

24  Not the End

25  References

26  Acknowledgements

27  Further Reading

28  More From James Smith

29  List of Searchable Terms

30  About the Publisher

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Foreword

I know from experience that many books are never finished by the reader. They might be purchased as a gift, or at the airport before a flight; you may commit to the first chapter, but before you know it the book has become an ornament, gathering dust on your bedside table. Each day you see these books, and a little part of you tells a lie that one day you’ll finish them. The collection only grows over time, and you’ll usually tell yourself something along the lines of: ‘I’m doing pretty well, so I don’t really need to read them right now.’

I didn’t read a book from start to finish until I was twenty-seven years old. I’m not someone with an academic background, and it didn’t come naturally to me; but in the last few years, books have been essential in changing, sculpting and building my mindset, attitude and approach to many things – from lifestyle to relationships and my work life.

And, to be completely honest with you, writing this book was not difficult. If anything, I have so much I want to teach you that I wasn’t sure I was going to fit it all in one book, so believe me when I tell you this: every single chapter in this book can affect your life in a positive way – but only if you choose to read them. Nothing is in here just to make up the word count; it’s all important, and with every single page I have had you in mind – your problems, your struggles and what I can teach you to make them go away.

For each of you, somewhere in this book is one simple sentence that will revolutionize your life for ever. However, that sentence is utterly powerless until you make the decision to read it. What I have written cannot help you if this book joins all the others – the unread ornaments.

I have written this book not for me, but for you. It’s all here – everything you need to begin a new chapter of your life. You’ll have a new lease of clarity to take with you every day, enough understanding to make change, not just in the gym, but in your relationships, your professional life and your general perception of the people around you.

I am confident when I say that when you turn the last page of this book your life will be different. You’ll be more knowledgeable, more confident and more in control.

For those of you who may not finish the book, I believe you would be doing yourself and those around you a disservice. It is here to empower you, so if there is just one book you commit to finishing, let it be this one.

Quite simply, after this, things won’t be the same.

Are you ready? Let’s begin.

James

PART I

FOUNDATIONS

Introduction

The first part of this book may be a little different from what you expect. At least I hope it is. Because if you’ve picked it up, I assume you’re intending to achieve genuine, long-lasting change that will improve all areas of your life for good. So this is not the latest fitness trend or diet fad packaged up in book form to give it validity. And with this in mind, it’s important to set solid foundations before thinking or talking about what the end result is going to look like. In the coming chapters I am going to wipe the slate clean for you, eliminating all the unhelpful diet myths, fads and misinformation, and reset your thinking, so you can start to identify how your future is going to look and even how it’s going to feel.

With each new page, we will examine why perhaps you haven’t accomplished what you’ve set out to do before. I very much doubt this book is the first of your efforts towards a healthier, better-balanced lifestyle. And while it may seem a bit tedious to read an entire book when there’s inevitably a one-size-fits-all plan on offer on Instagram, you need to trust me here: you have to walk before you can run, and if it was that simple to make lasting change, I wouldn’t have needed to write a book. But once you have come to the end of it, you should no longer need me – everything will slot into place and you’ll be ready to begin living the life you’ve always wanted and achieving your goals.

‘Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four hours sharpening the axe.’

Abraham Lincoln

REFERENCING

Throughout the book, I have referenced studies – if you wish to know more about these, you can search online for the full text. Many of these link to other studies when discussing certain claims or topics; this is handy for anyone who wants to go down the rabbit hole of any relevant data that’s been collated. I have also provided a Further Reading list, which I strongly recommend getting on top of.

The fitness industry right now

There are industries all over the world designed to give consumers what they want or need for an easier or better life. For instance, the automotive industry allows us to buy various transportation methods, such as cars, for commuting or transporting the family around. It’s an industry that serves a purpose, and even though consumers are aware that there is a mark-up on the goods, they don’t mind because they are getting a solution to their transportation problem: for the price they pay they gain freedom, control and enjoyment, and they generally trust the provider – a win-win situation. This fairly straightforward analogy highlights the problems with the fitness industry – people are more desperate than ever for a solution to their health and fitness problems, but they are being misled and mis-sold the dream by organizations profiteering from the consumer remaining in the dark about how to help themselves, especially when it comes to fat loss.

The fitness industry should be about showing people what the human body can accomplish. It should be there to motivate the sedentary to get more from their bodies, the one shell they spend their entire lives in. Imagine if you knew you could only have one car for the rest of your life; would you take better care of it? That should be the message to send people to inspire them when they’re not sure about whether to train or not. When people have a health scare or see a photo of themselves that deflates and depresses them, they should have the fitness industry to turn to for salvation.

Gyms should be full of motivated members, with experienced trainers at their disposal to provide guidance and expertise, making them feel incredibly comfortable during their first ever gym experience and beyond. There should be dietitians advising on specialist nutritional needs. And there should be a plethora of accurate scientific and evidence-based guidelines to follow, so that as new discoveries are made in the field of nutrition and training, the consumer can make small adjustments to ensure they get the most out of their time in the gym and outside of it. It’d be nice for government recommendations to be more helpful too; isn’t it funny that different nations have different ‘guidelines’ for their populations, although they share a common obesity issue?

Diet fads should be laughed at by consumers who fully understand the mechanism behind fat loss. ‘No thanks’ should be the answer to anyone trying to promote celery-juice cleanses and cabbage-soup diets and those selling aloe vera (formerly aftersun) as a solution to fat loss.

Each and every one of us should know roughly how much we need to eat to remain in shape. We should have a vague idea of our daily calorie needs. We should all dip in and out of tracking our food in periods when we gain a bit of weight and enjoy not restricting when we’re not seeking compositional change. Weight gain will not be scrutinized or demonized because we will know how to lose the weight we have gained. We should be able to pick up an item of food and consider its caloric value and the weight it has against our intake, so that we can play around social occasions, in the same way that we might with our finances. So it should work in the same way that it does when you pick up a designer watch or handbag – your brain being able to budget whether or not you can afford it based on your payslip and upcoming bills. By no means should it be like the ‘matrix’, where someone picks up a potato and sees binary code dictating whether or not they should consume it that day, but the frontal lobe of anyone’s brain should at least be able to make a close estimate of how much they are eating each day and the decisions they need to make if they don’t want to exceed their appropriate calorie intake.

This is not obsessive; it’s calculative. However, if this was already the case throughout the fitness industry, I wouldn’t be writing this book.

Unfortunately, the current state of the fitness industry is a far cry from my utopian description. It’s in dire straits – and the worst thing is that the extent of the problem, I believe, is not fully known by the general public, many of whom are handing over large percentages of their disposable income to expensive gym memberships, diet plans, supplements, unsustainable diet fads and ‘miracle’ fat-loss drinks.

Doctors, lawyers and, in fact, people in most professions can face legal repercussions for what could be deemed as ‘bad advice’ or even ‘malpractice’. However, there is very little regulation within the fitness industry, no repercussions for influencers misleading someone or giving terrible advice. This has made it a free for all for ‘experts’ on social media, their blue-tick gravitas making it easy to mass-market poor information, leaving the people who need help the most further disheartened, frustrated and unsure where to turn for good advice. At the time of writing, no qualifications are required to promote supplements, diets or even injectable fat-loss solutions on social media to an audience that could easily include young, impressionable teenagers, as well as older generations. This is a serious symptom of the fitness industry’s – my industry’s – currently broken state.

The consumer ends up trusting someone with a lot of followers and a blue tick on Instagram whom they believe to be giving expert advice, which, more often than not, is simply not the case. I know that I fit my own ‘blue tick’ description, but this platform is rife with people who have built a large following based on very little expertise – simply from years (or sometimes only months) of taking their tops off in photos for ‘double taps’ or manipulating the viral nature of current trends.

In time, the social-media ‘influencer’ gains gravitas, not only for sponsorship opportunities (#AD), but also with consumers – people looking for help, who make the assumption: ‘Wow, they have a large following, so they must be trustworthy.’

There is also another trend to put someone on a prime-time TV show who’s going to cause the biggest backlash on Twitter. And it has more to do with eliciting a response – any response – from viewers than it has to do with good information.

The industry is loaded with people with poor qualifications and little to no experience, whose only goal is to capitalize on their time in the limelight. These people are more concerned with their next payslip from their #AD campaign. The one-size-fits-all gimmick leaves the consumer deflated; they feel like giving up, assuming themselves to be at fault for ‘failing’. It’s causing a breakdown in trust in what should be a brilliant industry, and I fear that instead of seeking genuine professional help, a lot of people will inevitably seek none.

What can we do?

So yes, the fitness industry is in bad shape. I’ve been tempted to even say I want nothing to do with it. But I believe that as one of the biggest and most influential industries, we are in a position to make positive change to what is soon going to be the largest cause of preventable death – namely obesity – and we need to begin that change right now.

Rather than turning my back on it all, perhaps going into business coaching where I could charge personal trainers to build their own ‘six-figure business’ (just like everyone else’s), I’m writing this book to try to turn things around for good. For this to happen, I need to dismantle the existing beliefs that hold up some of the most unhelpful and damaging pseudoscience* that’s everywhere you look today.

For one thing, the supplement industry continues to mislead consumers as to what they truly need and to mis-sell them many supplements that they don’t require; this corner of the industry has its own agenda based on financial gain. Most one-size-fits-all cookie-cutter plans market ‘essential’ supplementation to bolster their earnings. And in reality, often the most bespoke thing about a plan like this is having your name added to it before it’s exported to a PDF file.

Also, personal-trainer (PT) qualifications are not thorough enough, and the fact that many PTs can qualify in just six weeks before finding themselves on the gym floor with little to no experience of working with clients, let alone running a business, means that they often increase their incomes by selling the aforementioned useless supplements, and even in some cases join popular pyramid schemes. The majority of PTs also go out of business within their first two years, leaving an exceptionally large churn rate behind them. So the average amount of experience that a modern-day trainer has accrued is often not enough to deal with the complexities of current obesity issues.

The governing bodies of personal training need to look beyond their quick £3,000 transaction fix and, instead, ensure that they are producing trainers who can go out into the industry confidently and correctly. People’s health and quality of life are on the line here: remembering eight stretches and memorizing the names of a couple of the bones in the forearm simply won’t cut it when a client walks in pre-Type II diabetic, desperate for help to get their health and training on track.

This plays back into that elephant in the room: all around us people we love are getting sick, health markers are plummeting by the day and obesity is on the rise in adults and children. Misinformation is rife, but with this book I will change all that, giving you knowledge and tools for life that you can implement independently. Almost immediately you’ll begin to change; your attitude, ethos and daily actions will soon have the power to influence those around you – friends, family, loved ones and even colleagues.

Should this pay forward in the way I intend, we can not only turn around the industry, but the lives of those around us. If we all chip in and do our part, we can literally change the world. Think about that every time you see this book; for that reason maybe leave it somewhere in plain sight, like on your pillow or a screenshot of it as your wallpaper on your phone, to remind you each day to continue a little bit further.

Friendly fire

A dietitian can study for bloody years to get qualified, then see a fresh-faced PT in their first year earning double what they are, not to mention the debt from their student loan to become a dietitian. This causes big rifts between two professions that should ideally complement each other, leading to bitter debates across social media and strong divides between the two.

This cannot be blamed on the PT, nor the dietitian; it’s just one of many issues we have within an industry that doesn’t currently have any regulations or repercussions for spreading misinformation or propaganda that isn’t rooted in fact for personal or financial gain.

Here’s the thing: I’ve made a load of mistakes as a personal trainer in my time. Of course I have – I studied for just six weeks to qualify! In hindsight, I can’t believe I was allowed on to the gym floor as a professional with so little knowledge. We need to upskill trainers and set a baseline of education for them, so that we’re all working from the same page and aiming towards the same goal. This would reduce conflict between trainers and dietitians and generate more positive results.

In addition to the rifts between people who are all on the same team, a lot of what is posted on social media is based more on engagement than education itself. Following and engagement will determine how much someone is worth for a paid post, so it’s quite common for people to post a very misleading caption or even to cherry-pick parts of a study to cause a big stir. There are many agendas in all directions, and unfortunately, people kick with the wind when trends arise. And, of course, the last person to benefit is the consumer.

‘Fitness events’

If you go to a major fitness expo, expecting to see collaborations from industry icons, mainstream education for trainers and consumers, and examples of what fitness can accomplish, you’ll be disappointed. In reality, you’ll see none of the aforementioned. What you will see instead is more of a parade.

‘Athletes’ up to their eyeballs in banned substances, usually anabolic steroids, showing off their anabolic gains – they’ll make the expo their peak week; #selfiecentral; stalls on every corner promoting supplements, most of which are not going to benefit the majority of people (supplements to me are like worrying about icing on a cake that’s not even been baked yet).

Unfortunately, it doesn’t pay well to be in very good shape, despite having hundreds of thousands of followers, sometimes even millions. How do I know? Because if it did, these ‘athletes’ wouldn’t be working for £100 to tense all day on a stand, having to ask for permission to go for a piss. Not only do they get in peak condition for the weekend of the event, they also look very different in the flesh: you can’t digitally enhance your appearance in real life, and even the best pair of leggings can’t cover the fact that you Photoshopped the majority of your Instagram posts.

You’ll walk around and see a plethora of stringer vests, protein-bar samples and businesses promoting the latest fad, whether it be BCAA drinks or exogenous ketones, both relatively useless supplements. Also, from what I’ve seen, these expos have become more of an arena for narcissists than for fitness people, and it’s quite sad to see the rise of anabolic steroid use in recent years. Especially when so many people don’t quite know what they’re letting themselves in for.

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.

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.

One nutritionist for a large functional training organization made a sweeping statement to tens of thousands of members, saying: ‘The key to fat loss is to manage your insulin.’ This is like saying the key to saving money is to manage what items you buy, rather than addressing the total amount being spent vs saved.

Just because a million people say something stupid, that doesn’t mean it’s not still stupid.

One of the biggest issues I find across the entire industry is this notion of ‘association being causation’, when the correct way of thinking is to always know that ‘association is NOT causation’. There is a common mentality of connecting dots without logic and often without evidence. For instance, if I observe the M25 motorway in the UK and I see every car crash that takes place, I would note that in fatal car crashes that occur there is often an ambulance on the scene. I could then come to the conclusion that if an ambulance turns up to the scene of an incident, then it is likely to result in a fatal outcome, whereas if no ambulance arrives, it is likely that the incident is less serious. But does this mean that it is because the ambulance is present that the outcome is worse? No, of course not; ambulances are called due to the severity of the incident and can’t be drawn in as a factor in fatalities.

It’s not always idiots who dispute CICO, though. There are some brilliant minds in the nutrition industry who have accomplished stellar work within the fields of hydration and sports performance, but when it comes to fat loss, they let anecdotal beliefs shroud what the data actually says.

Often people sit in their own camp of what’s worked for them, whether that’s fasting protocols, low-carb or ketogenic diets – and these diets do work for some, but they’re not inherently superior to any other protocol outside of a very few medical conditions, such as some forms of epilepsy; however, at this moment in time I haven’t seen anything solid in research yet to conclude that.

Unfortunately, when people come across new evidence confirming their existing belief they will trust it. However, if it doesn’t agree with their existing belief or understanding, they’ll disregard it. People can then cherry-pick the parts of studies that back their own beliefs and dismiss the rest. This is known as the confirmation bias.

People are prone to believe what they want to believe. This is why when I write about certain topics, I will often search for data to prove me wrong rather than right to ensure I have understood both sides of the debate. If you listen to the arguments from low-carb or keto zealots, much of their information is not factual but anecdotal. They say, ‘My clients did this,’ or, ‘I found that this happened when I did that.’ I’m not saying that their clients didn’t lose fat or accomplish great things, but they’re allowing their pre-existing ‘carbs are bad’ belief to feed their bias. Any new evidence that comes up to oppose this is disregarded and wiped off the table.

I’m not stating that removing some carbohydrates is bad; I’m not saying it doesn’t work. It often does (through creating a deficit). A lot of the misinformation isn’t malice. But people – and I mean friends, family and colleagues, not just experts – have all been feeding their confirmation bias and now they’re trying to feed yours (pardon the pun).

Confirmation bias in action: carbs, protein and insulin

From a pragmatic, personal point of view, I’d like to inform you that insulin is not ‘bad’, nor does it need to be ‘managed’ (except in Type I and some Type II diabetics). We secrete small amounts of insulin all the time; if we didn’t, we’d be in a lot of trouble. We will talk about diabetes later in the book, but for now, when a Type I diabetic increases their protein intake, we can see stabilizations in their blood-sugar levels. This, in turn, means that there is a less frequent requirement for the Type I diabetic to eat foods to raise their blood sugar, therefore making it easier to create or adhere to a calorie deficit. The benefits can be attributed to the fact that protein can help in stabilizing blood sugar. However, if I was to waft that past a low-carb zealot, they’d be the first to point out that the carbohydrates were to blame, which is simply too reductive.

Another thing that you should note and bring up in an argument is this: I used to believe that too many carbohydrates would mean that the glucose (sugar) in the blood would then be stored as body fat, because it made complete sense hypothetically. But here’s what really happens: 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. Now, this process actually rarely occurs. Should you consume the maintenance or deficit calories it is incredibly unlikely that any carbohydrates will be converted into fat. Not only that, but even in a surplus due to the inefficiency of converting carbohydrates into fat, usually it’s the fats from the diet that are stored instead as adipose tissue (body fat).

Even in overfeeding studies trying to identify any benefits from manipulating high carb or high fat, there seems to be no real quantifiable difference, and all roads seem to lead to the fact that we should be promoting higher amounts of protein rather than lower amounts of carbs:

According to research: ‘There appears to be no meaningful difference between overfeeding on a high-carbohydrate or high-fat diet.’ The study goes on: ‘Dietary protein appears to have a protective effect against fat gain during times of energy surplus, especially when combined with resistance training. Therefore, the evidence suggests that dietary protein may be the key macronutrient in terms of promoting positive changes in body composition.’2

Other factors that feed the confirmation bias:

Water weight: when we look at a diet that includes carbohydrates, we need to think about water weight. Carbohydrates are stored for use in muscle tissue (this is known as glycogen) and for every 1 g of carbohydrate that enters a cell, 3–5 g of water usually accompany it. So if you eat 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 early stages, is water and not fat.

Eradication: when you say to someone with very little nutritional knowledge to eat ‘no carbs’ they’ll tend to know what it means: no bread, pasta, cake, biscuits, alcohol, fizzy drinks, etc. This in itself causes a calorie deficit most of the time. Telling someone to create a deficit tends to be quite nuanced, though, and doesn’t always lead to a reduction in calories.

Another important thing to do is to stay away from Netflix documentaries – Netflix is there to entertain, not educate. It’s almost as if I need to tell you that Stranger Things and Breaking Bad are also fiction.

To conclude, everyone in the world will seek to confirm their own beliefs and disregard any that go against them. Be pragmatic with every decision you make, and when asking someone to prove the point behind a thesis or theory, listen out for anecdote – chances are they’ve been feeding their own confirmation bias with someone else’s. It’s human nature.

Calorie calculators

Starting points are important, and for a long time as a PT I would ask clients to track their food for a few weeks. I’d then review their intake and make changes. It was a very long-winded process, partly because it’s not hugely motivating for a client to ask them to put effort in and not see any short-term returns. In recent years, I have implemented the use of a calorie calculator as a starting point for determining calories.†

There are several different formulas to try to determine how many calories someone needs per day. I use one called the Harris-Benedict, to which I’ve made some small adjustments. The questionnaire tries to determine your weight, height and age; with that you can get a rough idea of your sedentary expenditure. You’re then asked how active you are, and this number is multiplied by a corresponding amount. For instance, ‘lightly active’ would be the calculated amount x 1.2.

There are some holes you can pick in the accuracy of this approach, but personally, from day one, I think it’s imperative to have a tangible goal to aim for. Most people go, ‘Wow, my calories look really high.’ But comparing them to their excessive indulging at the weekend, they’re actually not. Even with a moderate amount of calories, say, 2,000 a day for a female, that’s 14,000 a week, and should you want to ‘save’ some calories in order to have a few drinks and a takeaway over the weekend, then you’re left with a fraction of the original figure to play with on weekdays, if you are to stick to the overall target.

Tracking your calories weekly or daily is your prerogative, like balancing your books between payslips with an agenda to save money. As long as you do it, I am not too bothered about how it’s micromanaged.

If your calories given from the calculator are too low, you’ll: (deficit)

 feel very hungry all the time

 be irritable, moody, have brain fog

 experience poor performance, poor recovery, soreness

If your calories are too high, you’ll notice: (surplus)

 a strange love for your diet

 good moods, good performance

 slow weight gain

If your calories are neither, not a lot will happen. This is known as maintenance.

I have said to my clients over the years that the only person who truly knows how those calories will work is the person implementing them. It is for the dieter to find out. Most athletes and fitness professionals roughly know their caloric intake for maintenance and fat loss. They know their ‘sweet spot’ through playing with their calorie intake almost on a trial-and-error basis. You need to learn how to do the same – and I am going to help you.

Protein, as we discussed earlier, is a big player in fat loss and muscle growth too, so my calculator gives a protein goal and a calorie goal. Should you want fat loss, I set a deficit of 15 per cent, which is considered conservative by others in the industry. Should a surplus be required, where someone is looking to optimize muscle growth or weight gain, it’s +15 per cent, and maintenance is sticking closely to the proposed figure.

You’ll see later in the book about protein targets, but I set mine at 1.5 g per kilogram. This is conservative too, but a lot of my clientele are new to protein targets and I don’t want to throw them in at the deep end too early (or hot water that they’ll jump out of).

Macro and calorie calculators are not gospel.

They are, however, a starting point – an essential one – and although their efficacy, early doors, may not be where you’d like it to be, you’re the only one in the world who can really dial in what your numbers are. It’s worth noting, especially for any of you ladies with Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS), which you’ll come to understand a bit more about later in the book, that your targets may differ a lot from the original calculations.

MyFitnessPal (MFP)

This is the app I use to track and log calories. However, I don’t get my clients to determine their calories this way. Firstly, MFP asks you how much fat you’d like to lose a week: I don’t know anyone who doesn’t select the highest option possible, which is 2lb (0.9 kg). A hypothesized 7,000 calorie deficit a week is needed to accomplish that, so people are often left with 1,200 calories, as the app isn’t allowed to go any lower, and a lot of people will not sustain their diet on such a large deficit.

Also, MFP gives you the option to ‘eat back’ calories from exercise, which I don’t think should be the case. In essence, this means that there is an amount of ticking calories that increase as you are active throughout the day – as if to say, well, as you moved a lot, you can have more calories; if you’re sedentary, you’re not allocated the extra calories.

Firstly, you’re not a dog who gets rewarded for exercising, and secondly, if you use my calculator, your exercise is already included for each day’s calories. Should you miss the gym, I’m sure you’ll still be in a deficit, just a smaller one – nothing to cry about.

Why a ‘Calorie Fucking Deficit’ is more than just a deficit

Self-esteem, confidence and sex drives are plummeting. Social media is driving inadequacies up, people are feeling worse about themselves than ever, mental-health disorders are skyrocketing and we can no longer look at an energy deficit purely as just a mathematical equation of energy in vs energy out.

I’ve often said that having fat isn’t being fat; being fat is when your composition steals from you each day, whether it’s self-esteem, confidence or even the ability to tell someone you’re interested in asking them out without being judged on how overweight you currently are.

So this isn’t just a calorie deficit. It’s not just about having less fat. This is about feeling completely different and becoming a new person – maybe someone you used to be or someone you have spent your entire life wanting to be. It’s about making clear the only concept people need after a history of frustration and unsustainable dieting. It’s about how the principle has been intentionally kept out of reach for the people who need it.

This isn’t new science. It’s been known for a long time. People have needed this information desperately, and instead they got sold a recipe book touting how to cook from scratch or the idealism of intuitive eating, as if that was the real hidden key to sustainable and adherable fat loss. You can’t bunch together a handful of recipes and call it a solution to fat loss.

If you want a cookbook, fine. But if you want to understand the principles of fat loss for life, that’s not going to help you very much. You might make a killer three-egg omelette, but you may also have Type II diabetes creeping around the corner.

Losing fat successfully isn’t just about reducing the amount of body fat we have; it isn’t just about storing less energy in adipose tissue; and it goes beyond improving health markers. When ‘fitness people’ are in debates they’ll often hand pick certain improvements in health markers, which can sometimes be subjective. BMI, lipids, cholesterol or body-fat percentages are all commonly spoken about and debated in literature and now on social media, by experts and amateurs alike – delivering complex content and confusion to the consumer.

But fat loss, to me, goes way beyond that and much further than a six-pack.‡ It is:

 not worrying about what I order when eating out

 running with my top off because there’s less wobble going on with each stride

 wearing something I wouldn’t usually

 feeling good about myself

 starting a new sport

 waking up and being proud of my reflection

 spending more time naked

 lying in bed in the evening knowing I gave everything to every task I set myself for the day

 turning the lights on to have sex, not off

So my question to you: do you want to have less fat?

Good, but it’s not just being less fat. You can tell yourself that, but it’s bullshit. It’s more than that. It’s the fact that you wear black, the fact that when you stand up at work you pull your top down to cover your stomach. It’s how not only your confidence is at an all-time low, but it’s having a knock-on effect on other areas of your life – whether it’s standing up in a meeting to express your opinions, going on holiday and worrying about the plane seat, or even what you order at dinner in front of your friends and a constant fear of being judged. It’s about worrying about your health. We as human beings hugely underestimate the chances of bad things happening to our health or that of our loved ones.

This goes deeper than just weighing less. This goes further than having fewer cells with energy in them around our bodies.

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

Weight and fat are often used interchangeably. It’s an issue I get pretty pissed off about, and I’ve moaned to clients about it over the years a lot.

James, I’ve lost inches, but I weigh the same as I did before.

Weight is your relationship to the ground with gravity, that’s it.

The amount of fat you have is different and although over time there would be positive correlations between weight and fat loss, it’s not to be taken as a metric to lose sleep about. Why? Because there are a lot of fluctuations in our weight which are not related to our fat mass.

To be crass, a long piss or a big shit could easily be enough weight in the bowel or bladder for you to step on the scales and pull your hair out. My personal record is about 0.6kg from a poo – I simply stand on the scale before, then again after. I’ve done the same when I really need a wee and I’ve racked up a similar weight. Imagine, if you will, you were to pee in a pint glass: if you fill it up, that’s 0.56kg of water weight.

Ladies will fluctuate throughout their menstrual cycle, and you’ll find out in the Female Fat Loss chapter that my female clients weigh Week 1 of their cycle vs Week 1 of their following cycle.

When people use the scale – or the ‘sad step’ – we have to be mindful of these non-fat-related fluctuations. If you’re curious, fine, take a look. But there are a large number of you who, every time you decide to step on to the scale, then step off feeling demotivated, depressed and that your diet isn’t working. 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’. Month on month, it’d be pleasant to see linear progressions on net reduction of weight, but at some point that’s going to stop and you’re going to have to give it everything you have to lose half a pound.

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. So it’s possible that in some people there will be huge changes to their shape and composition without their weight moving a huge amount over time. And that in itself is another factor to be wary of: the gravity we attach to our weight, pardon the pun.

At this point I should mention that without demotivating you, muscle growth occurs very slowly – much slower than you’d expect. So for men, play the long game; for women … any insinuation that you’ll get bulky from lifting some weights is not only daft and unwarranted, it’s statistically nearly impossible. 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 it.

Measuring body fat

If you want to know exactly how much fat you have on your body it’s possible to find out – that is, if you’re willing to be dissected. That’s right: unless we can literally dissect you, there’s no way of knowing exactly how much adipose tissue (body fat) you have at this moment in time. What we do have at our disposal are methods for getting good estimations of our fat mass.

The most common methodology for this is known as ‘bioelectrical impedance’. Now, I’m sorry to break it to you, but this involves standing on plates placed onto scales and holding on to metal handles, so that electricity can pass through you to give off readings of all sorts, including fat-free mass, lean body mass and bone density, apparently.

Unfortunately, this is the least accurate of the mainstream methods to estimate how much fat you have; it’s easily influenced by hydration statuses and, in my opinion, is a gimmick for gyms. Think of it this way: should your reading say you have more fat than you thought you had, you’re going to think twice about cancelling that gym membership. On the flip side, should your body-fat percentage come out even lower than you expected – well, then you’d best keep your gym membership because it’s paying off.

There are other means of measuring, such as a ‘bodpod’, which works by using ‘air-displacement plethysmography’, of course. Then we have DEXA, which stands for ‘dual energy X-ray absorptiometry’. This was originally for testing bone density, and it’s like a big X-ray that scans you lying down. Again, I often see these being used to determine how big someone is and to promote a macronutrient goal for that composition. Gimmicky again. (I never realized how long my femurs are until I had a DEXA, but although the experience was interesting, I don’t think I’d ever really recommend one to a client, as I never got more than two sheets of A4 paper from it.)

Callipers are frequently used to quite literally pinch fat by creating skin folds. Although intrusive, they’re actually measuring the distance between two parts of skin that are influenced by fat mass. Things like bloating, food in the gut and a few other variables can be reduced with this method. Eating a meal or drinking a protein shake would influence almost all measurements, but would not influence the callipers to a tangible amount as the fat between the skin folds wouldn’t alter in that period of time.

Now, don’t be fooled by plastic callipers that a PT at your local boot camp uses to pinch one area of skin and one area only. When calliper testing is done properly the locations on the body include arm, waist, subscapular (on the back) and on the legs in several places. The callipers themselves need to be calibrated and they’re not cheap. Your boot-camp PT who got some plastic callipers off Amazon for £3 isn’t going to give you an accurate reading, I can assure you.

When the measurements have been taken from the skin folds they’re noted on a spreadsheet. The practitioner then needs to go back and do the measurements all over again in the same order, and should there be a sufficient discrepancy it will be done a third time. It’s worth noting that you must go around the body before coming back to the initial measurement, due to skin elasticity changes.

Many variables, such as time of day and even time of week, must be maintained, and there are even variables between the people doing it, so you need the same person – in my experience it can take up to forty-five minutes for the test to be done properly. Even when using the same room to carry out the test, if the person is hotter or even slightly sweaty, it makes it harder to hold the skin to measure.

Although the percentage churned out from the reading may not be 100 per cent accurate, fluctuations in weight up and down usually are. So for instance, if you’re 17 per cent, but the reading says 19 per cent, and you go on to lose 1 per cent in the coming weeks, although you’ll read 18 per cent (but really be 16 per cent), at least you can roughly gauge the correct amount of fat that you have lost.

Now, someone has to pay for this, whether that’s the trainer’s free time or the participant’s rate for the session. Plus, I can’t help but feel that if you’ve just paid a large sum of money for a block of personal-training sessions and you don’t see a change in the measurements, we could see some economy with the truth occurring. In truth, the reading says no change, the practitioner then proclaims, ‘Well done. Albeit small, you lost … 1 per cent. That’s great. Shall we go ahead with the next block of PT?’

This is not to say there are no honest calliper readers out there. I’m just giving some context to one of the many issues I see in the realm of anthropometry (which is the nerd term for all of this). Another issue I see with the entire thing is the following hypothetical situation:

John comes in to see me for a personal-training session; he confesses he’s a lazy shite and needs to be more active and improve his diet. John knows he has 20kg to lose. I know he has 20kg to lose. He’s a little apprehensive about the gym in general; he’s worried about me judging him, others judging him and generally being outside of his comfort zone. I not only charge John a small fortune for the session, but before we even get going I am supposedly going to take him into a room, get him to undress down to his underwear and then pull away pinches of his fat before telling him he’s got a lot of it.

John will go home, his wife will ask, ‘How was your first day?’ He’ll reply, ‘Yeah, I got naked and had my fat pinched and recorded for forty-five minutes while I stood still.’ He knows he has fat to lose – he’s not an idiot.

This is not to say that’s not how to do it – it’s just not my approach. If it was up to me, I’d say let’s leave callipers to those leaner populations who have much less noticeable fat reductions, who actually could need a reading.

We now know that scales can correctly track weight fluctuations, but are not necessarily representative of progress, and therefore not great for headspace and motivation. We have all kinds of rays, impedances and fat-pulling techniques, but what is the verdict from me?

Take a picture, mate. Since you got your smartphone a few years ago, you’ve taken pictures of your food every time you eat out, and each day you snap all kinds of photos you’d never have dreamed of taking before. Ever see someone take a picture of their meal with a disposable back in the day? Me neither.

My best advice for you to track your progress is to take photos. Let’s imagine this is a scientific experiment, so let’s try to keep any variables as similar as possible. These include time of day (I suggest first thing), location, lighting and hydration. These all play a role in this, so let’s control these and any other factors that can influence the outcome as far as possible. I’m sorry to say it, but I’ve had lawyers, doctors and people in pretty important jobs telling me that they can’t see a difference in their photos when there clearly is one. If you’re not sure, you can always get another set of eyes on it.

You don’t find good lighting; good lighting finds you.

* Some smartarse at some point will want to differentiate a calorie from a kcal – for the purposes of this book, all calorie mentions refer to kcals (kilocalories). A banana that contains 100 kcals technically contains 100,000 calories, but this book is not about comparing penis sizes, so let’s carry on.

† To use my calorie calculator head to www.jamessmithacademy.com/calculator.

‡ Everyone has rolls when they lean forward. I feel even people in good shape sit in the bath or on the toilet pinching their rolls of fat like they are alien – well, they’re not; they’re normal.

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