I’ve been a dog lover my whole life.

I was born and raised in a house with three golden retrievers, so I suppose I had no choice in the matter. I was destined to be a dog person.

Yet with great dog comes great responsibility, and unless you get a breed with a naturally low activity rate, you’re going to have to walk that little bugger.

Not only is this a great opportunity for daily low-intensity exercise, it also has far-reaching benefits, which I have found for myself firsthand.

Dogs and Humans, a Brief History

The history of humans and dogs is foggy for obvious reasons, but one thing’s for sure: it goes back a looooooooong way.

The commonly accepted view is that dogs first became domesticated around 15,000 years ago, predating even agriculture, but this idea has been challenged in recent years.

France’s Chauvet Cave is best known for its cave paintings, but it also contains some curious footprints. A young child holding a torch walked side by side with a canine companion about 26,000 years ago, both leaving behind tracks that have lasted to this day.

It was the first known existence of walking the dog.

And just recently, a skull was found in a Siberian cave that appears to be a 33,000 year old domesticated dog skull.

It’s commonly believed that dogs descended from weak wolves, who would stay close to human camps and eat their scraps and waste.

This paradigm is slowly shifting to one of co-evolution: that dogs helped us evolve just as much as we helped them to.

It now seems more likely that humans first teamed up with wolves while both were hunting the same animals. The mutually beneficial combination of such things as dogs’s speed and sense of smell with humans’s endurance and tool-making made everyone involved successful.

The success of this symbiotic relationship meant that humans and some wolves–the ancestors of today’s dogs–began living together.

The One Chore I Enjoy

I hate chores and errands. Hate them hate them hate them.

It’s not because I’m an irresponsible man-child, but because I know they’ll never be finished.

I have gone through periods of domesticity before, and have literally spent every non-sleeping, non-working moment of my life cleaning, organizing, doing maintenance, and the like.

But even then, I couldn’t get everything done. And my place still looked like shit.

For the most part, I think that what I put into chores far exceeds what I get out of them, by a proportion of 1,000 to 1. It just doesn’t seem worth it to me.

And yet you HAVE to do at least a little bit of the damned things, which leaves me one cranky dude.

(Honestly, it isn’t things like flashy cars and big houses that motivate me to try to get ahead in life, it’s earning enough money that I can outsource literally every chore and errand. That’s how I’ll know I’ve made it!)

And yet there’s one chore that I actually look forward to each and every day–even though it takes up somewhere between 30 and 60 minutes–taking my dog Oscar for a walk.

Why?

As a longtime dog lover, I really enjoy getting to hang out with my buddy each day with no distractions. In addition, I’ve found that I can get my best thinking done during this time. Again, no distractions.

Man’s Best Friend

Everyone has their “rituals,” otherwise tedious tasks repeated every day that serve as an anchor to re-energize and reinvigorate them.

Maybe it’s shaving. Perhaps it’s brushing your teeth. But I can say in all honesty that if you have a dog, you might be surprised at how much more productive you can be, how much more fun you can have, and how much easier it is to make physical activity a part of your life when you volunteer to walk the dog.

It’s a tradition that is literally thousands of years old, coded into your DNA.

So one of my big goals this year was to publish an article each and every Friday. Less than a month in I’m sorry to say that I already won’t be able to fulfill this.

I’m heading out of the country for a couple of weeks, where I won’t be touching a computer, and try as I did to write four posts in a week (including a guest post I’m working on) it just ain’t gonna happen.

I’ll make it up for y’all by publishing a couple of “bonus posts” when I get back into town.

There’s just way too much to be taken care of right now… and I’m so damned tired. Talk to you guys again in three weeks!

Eat better. Move smarter. Relax harder.

That’s the mantra here at Lean, Mean, Virile Machine. In order for most of us guys to do this successfully, we need to learn primarily three skills:

1. How to buy and prepare healthy food.
2. How to work out more efficiently.
3. How to enjoy life a little more.

But these things don’t tend to come to us naturally. Worse, they seem to run counter to what we have been led to believe is optimal.

Shouldn’t we be spending as much time as possible hitting the gym? Shouldn’t we be finding out which pre-packaged meals are best for us? Shouldn’t we be cutting back on sleep in order to get more done?

This “path of least resistance” is advocated by most men’s health authorities, but falls apart when we try to fit it into our modern lives.

The old ways don’t work anymore.

The world has changed. And you must change with it.

Once Upon a Time…

There’s a good reason why most men have no idea how to cook: we’ve never had any cultural incentive to do so.

It used to be that the woman of the house (either the wife or the mother) prepared all the food that the family ate. This is a pretty consistent pattern across cultures, and likely has a pretty strong historical significance.

If you were a guy, you didn’t even have to think about eating a diet of primarily Real Food. That’s all there was. And, more likely than not, someone else was making it for you.

But over the past few decades, most women have largely abandoned a role they felt was unfairly dumped on them.

On the whole, this has been a VERY positive achievement. Everyone, regardless of sex, race, religion, or anything else, should be free to do as they please with their lives.

But it’s important to acknowledge the negative things that have resulted from this largely encouraging development. One of which is the disappearance of home-cooked meals as mainstays of most everyone’s lives.

Another development during this time is the embrace by the restaurant industry of such cheap and time-saving ingredients such as sugar and seed oils.

Not only can we no longer assume that we’ll have a home-cooked meal waiting for us at the end of the day, but neither can we hope to get a healthy meal from a restaurant if we choose to eat outside the home.

Pumping Iron

It may be hard to believe, but “working out” is a relatively recent phenomenon.

Up until a couple of decades ago, the only exercise most people would get would be that naturally found in their daily lives. The lower classes would get the most activity, doing such things as manual labor and farming, while even the upper classes could still expect to get a fair amount due to the lack of sitting and motorized transportation.

Recreational exercise and bodybuilding only started to catch on a short while back, with people like Arnold Schwarzenegger increasingly making the idea of “exercise for everyone” into a more attractive life pursuit.

At first, the only people who really got into this were people who aspired to be professional athletes, bodybuilders, and powerlifters. Their accomplishments are no doubt impressive.

The shrewdest of the bunch capitalized on the public’s fascination with their perfectly chiseled physiques to start selling supplements, equipment, and fitness protocols–the same things that helped them get into such great shape.

Yet most of us simply cannot devote the kind of time to working out that these guys did. During his prime, Arnold was working out 4 to 6 hours per day.

At this same time, the work lives of most people became more and more sedentary. Now most of us spend the majority of our days sitting on our asses in front of a computer, surrounded by grey cubes and bathed in fluorescent lights.

Not only can we no longer expect to get physical activity in our daily lives, but most of the fitness advice out there assumes you can spend at least an hour a day at the gym.

Counting Sheep

The increase in chronic stress can be seen in every part of our culture, and in no place more obviously than our current “badge of honor” that we give to people who deprive themselves of sleep.

I spent last year trying to reverse this affliction in myself, and although it is a constant struggle, I’ve definitely found that, paradoxically, I can get more done in a short day after a long night’s sleep than I could ever in a long day after a short night of sleep.

The high incidence of such afflictions as ulcers prove that our modern lives are far more stressful than they should be. Lack of personal connections, friends, and life purpose all contribute to this overall stress.

Instead of having lives that are primarily calm, relaxed, and self-fulfilled, the norm now is to live in a constant state of anxiety. To take a more kicked-back approach to live is considered overly-decadent.

The Ever-Changing Environment

The things that promote and sustain health and fitness in humans hasn’t changed in a long, long time.

Yet we seem to struggle so much in our attempts to look and feel better. How is it that something that should be so obvious is so difficult to pin down?

It’s simple: our environment is changing rapidly. And as a result the rules that will get us where we want to go are changing as well.

We need to step out of our comfort zones and try some unconventional things if we are reach our physical health and fitness goals.

Keep your eyes open. Think critically. Learn how to master your environment and learn new skills.

This is the only way you will ever learn the new rules and use them to your advantage.

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I didn’t know what was going on. All I knew was that I was in danger.

I sprung from my bed out into the darkness of the night, relying on my animal instincts to keep me alive.

My heart was pounding like a herd of wild elephants. My temples and armpits began to pour sweat, which soon spread to the rest of my body. My head reeled as I tried to make sense of where I was and what I was doing.

As I finally started to get my bearings, I realized that my impending sense of doom was a result of the loud noise filling my bedroom.

In a couple more seconds I was able to comprehend that it wasn’t a loud, mysterious sound, but an alarm on my phone that I selected for its soothing sound.

I wasn’t in danger, and it wasn’t the middle of the night. It was just time to get up and go to work.

An Endlessly Repeating Nightmare

That exact scenario has happened to me more times than I can count.

I’ve never been one of those people who can function well on little sleep, but since I live in a culture that treats sleep deprivation as a badge of honor, I’ve always felt the temptation to give in to it.

My friends, my familiy, and my colleagues all constantly brag about how little sleep they get. It feels like a competition at times, with everyone trying to one-up the other with how little sack time they got the night before.

College was my initiation into this club, with long nights and early mornings going hand-in-hand. Entering the “real world,” where you have to, y’know, actually get up in the morning to go to work only made things worse.

At the same time, I read the near-unanimous support to the idea that we should be getting much more sleep than we are, which most people struggle to achieve.

And so, last winter, after one too many mornings waking up in a way similar to the introduction, I decided to take drastic measures.

I decided to spend a year without an alarm clock and see what happened.

The History of Sleep

Since I know someone will point it out if I don’t, there is some evidence that excessive sleeping is associated with increased mortality.

But fear not, Rip van Winkles-in-training. This is all a part of the media’s love affair with twisting science to sensationalize and get more eyeballs on their content.

Take a look at statistics 101 here, guys. Correlation does not equal causation. Things that appear to be linked in a certain way often aren’t.

Take the issue of sleeping “too much.” What the analysis of this data often fails to account for is that many people who oversleep do so because they are sick in the first place.

In other words, sometimes people are sleeping a lot because they are in rough shape, not vice versa.

Take a look at things from a 30,000 foot level.

Brace yourself…

Before the advent of the light bulb, people regularly slept around 9 to 10 hours per night.

Could anyone even function in normal society today with that kind of time flushed down the toilet?

Counting Sheep, Relaxing Harder

One of the three pillars of health and fitness here at LMVM is relaxing harder, which is all too often a neglected part of the equation.

And one of the biggest components of relaxing harder is getting enough sleep.

The underlying benefit of relaxing harder is that you eliminate the chronic stress that most of us suffer from.

In doing so, you reduce levels of cortisol, a hormone that can cause your body to automatically burn muscle and accumulate fat, with the added benefits of reducing your risk for diseases such as ulcers and just helping you to enjoy your life more.

Our modern world is flooded with light–even well after the sun has set–and it may very well be wreaking havoc on our bodies due to disruptions to our hormones.

Sleep deprivation is associated with higher body fat levels. It will reduce your testosterone levels. And it will make you ugly.

Despite the immense societal pressures against it, getting a lot of sleep is an essential step towards improving your health.

And since I have struggled so much with it, I knew it was time to really challenge myself to get more.

I knew it would be worth my while to challenge myself to give up the alarm clock entirely for a year.

My Sleep, My Struggle

On 31 January 2010, I turned off my phone’s morning alarm with the intention to keep it off for the next 365 days.

It was one of the scariest things I had ever done.

And at first, it was worse than anything I could have imagined.

The first days of January, I slept the same amount of time that our ancestors who lived before the notoriously sleep-hating Thomas Edison did: 9-10 hours per night.

Since my usual sleep pattern before this was around 4 to 6 hours per night, I was losing somewhere between 3 and 6 hours each and every day than I had before.

Extrapolated out over a year, this meant that I would be losing the equivalent of somewhere between 46 AND 91 DAYS!

Holy shit! Panic! Terror! Could I really expect to lose 2 or three months over the course of a year?

As it turned out, I was (mostly) wrong.

After a few weeks of making like Rip van Winkle and catching up on many years of sleep deprivation, the amount of sack time it took for me to wake up naturally decreased back down to slightly less than 8 hours.

I tracked my sleep obsessively at first, but after the same incident that caused me to lose the “after” data in my Average Joe Diet, I lost over three months worth of data.

No worries.

I had doubted the precision of the data since the first week of January. Since I was starting the timer when I turned out the light, I wasn’t taking into account the time it takes for me to actually fall asleep.

Normally I drift off in probably less than five minutes, but there are enough times that I toss and turn for a while that I couldn’t be too certain how much the data correctly represented how much sleep I was getting each night.

I simply spent the next 8+ months without using an alarm clock and called it good enough.

But there were plenty of snags, which I’m sure have caused most of you to scream at your screens at me by now.

First off, I need to talk about the elephant in the room. How the hell did I not lose my job during this year?

No, I’m not a trust fund kid or some kind of “productivity expert” with plenty of money and time to spare. Like most of you, I have to drag my sorry ass to a 9-to-5 five days a week.

However, I am fortunate in that I work a job where the specific hours I work don’t mean a damn. As a researcher, most of my work is very abstract. I don’t deal with clients and the results I deliver are the only real standard of job performance rather than how much “butt in seat time” I put in.

But to be fair, I wasn’t sleeping ‘til noon every day anyways. For the most part, I was waking up in the early morning and getting into work the same time as everyone else, but I was much less stressed out since I didn’t have any artificial timeline I had to stick to.

Also, sleeping in wasn’t really an option even if I wanted to.

I live with my wife and a batshit-crazy dog. If I was holed up all by myself, I might be able to institute a strict sleep policy, but unfortunately I need to sync up with the others in my house.

Lastly, I must admit: I didn’t make it every morning without an alarm clock. There were about four times I used one while traveling to make sure I didn’t miss some important deadline early in the morning of a time zone I wasn’t used to.

But about 360 days alarm-free is still pretty awesome in my book!

What I Learned, Where I’m Going

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from this experiment it is this: I am crazy productive in the morning if I start it on the right foot.

It used to be that I’d just “brute force” my way through the day, sweating and achy, unable to think straight. Sure, I’d technically be up for a long time and able to cram a lot into those hours, but I was so slow and dim-witted that it wasn’t really paying for itself.

On the other hand, if I can wake up naturally, I can basically jump right out of bed and power through the day in style. Although I’m up for fewer hours, I’m able to blaze through everything at a speed that more than makes up for it.

So now that the experiment’s over will I be resetting the alarm?

Oh, hell no.

The fact is I don’t need an alarm. And although the early-risers keep me from getting out of hand with my sleeping in, this is a lifestyle habit that I’m in no rush to shake.

We found a winner here, folks.

A Practical Guide to a Good Night’s Sleep

Look anywhere on the interwebs for tips on how to get a good night’s sleep and you’ll find the following:

• Go to sleep early every night.
• Go to sleep at the same time every night.
• Make your bedroom completely quiet and pitch dark.
• Use the bedroom for nothing other than sex and sleeping.
• Take a cold shower or bath before you go to bed.
• Read for a bit before going to sleep.

While I certainly agree with these tips, they are completely unrealistic for those of us who have to actually work and take care of others.

Unless you are an independently wealthy health nut, these types of things are just not going to happen on a regular basis. But here’s some tips:

1. Try to separate the wheat from the chaff. While we may not be as fortunate as some millionaire productivity gurus in that we still are overwhelmed with stuff we need to do, most of us can still streamline our lives much more efficiently. Keep a time journal for a while and see where all your time is going. If it doesn’t fit well with your values, find a way to eliminate it and get to bed earlier.
2. Sleep in when you can. I think the idea that we should be sleeping until we naturally wake up every single night is pretty ridiculous. I think of it like intermittent fasting. It’s okay to go in spurts, as long as you balance things out in the long run.
3. Use earplugs and an eye mask. If I could only give you one tip to having the best sleep of your life, it wouldn’t be medication or an overly-complex pre-sleep ritual. It will only cost you a couple of bucks. Go to your local pharmacy and pick up a pair of earplugs and an eye mask. Throw ‘em on before you go to sleep, but only if you aren’t planning on doing anything important in the next 12 hours. You will wake up feeling better than you have ever felt in a morning. Trust me.

And take a good hard look at your life and see if you really need an alarm clock. Yes, most of us do, but a good chunk do it just because they feel they are supposed to.

If you think this might be you, then you might want to give an experiment like this a shot.

Trust me, it’s awesome!

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Have you noticed that there are really two “clans” in the health and fitness world?

Like the epic battle between the Spartans and the Trojans, these two groups are battling it out in the classic quest to help people look better and feel better.

On the one hand, you’ve got the “Gym Rats.” These are the guys with chiseled abs, who can bench press twice their weight, and could easily play the hero in an upcoming action movie.

They are the ones who devote a lot of time to hitting the gym. They take a lot of supplements and haul Tupperware around everywhere so they can eat six times a day.

On the other hand, you’ve got the “New Agers.” These are the guys who have refrigerators filled with fresh food from the farmers market. They ride their bikes to yoga class.

They are the ones who spend most of their disposable income on food. They’re into detoxes and cleanses.

Which clan do you belong to? Which is right? And is there any way to combine the best of both worlds to find something that works best for you?

The Life of a Gym Rat

If there’s one thing to say about the gym rats, they are the experts on strength training and muscle building.

They’re the ones who brought you squats, push ups, and pull ups. They know the importance of deadlifts, cleans, and presses.

It’s because of them that most of us have easy access to barbells, dumbbells, and kettlebells, equipment optimized to maximize strength and muscle gain.

But at the same time, they also ruined exercise. After they mastered the big lifts listed above, they started focusing on minutiae to the point that now the types of exercises that have minimal impact are emphasized over the things that actually do.

It’s the reason that most guys’s exercise routines consist primarily of a couple thousand varieties of bench presses, bicep curls, and crunches.

It’s the reason that people spend good money on crappy gizmos such as Bowflexes, Shake Weights, and electronic ab belts.

And while I give the gym rats props for being (at least moderately) pro-meat and pro-animal products, things start to go downhill rapidly after that.

While their knowledge of the scientific underpinnings of muscle building is no doubt impressive, it leads them to suggest one of the blandest diets on the planet.

Perhaps the most worrying part of the Gym Rats’s nutrition philosophy is the obsession with supplements. With the endless supply of shakes, powders, and gels out there, you’re getting dangerously close to those futuristic movies where everyone eats their food in pill form.

Lastly, credit must be given to their attitude toward sleep, at least in theory. They strongly believe that it is important to get a full night’s sleep if you are to lose fat and build muscle, although it may not be strictly followed in practice in order to get to the gym at the break-a-break-a dawn.

The Life of a New Ager

Where the Gym Rats are undoubtedly the masters of strength training and muscle building, the New Agers excel in their approach to nutrition.

They understand the importance of food that comes from farms and fields, not from factories and laboratories.

In addition to the grandparents out there–who were among the last to learn from their parents how to cook–the New Agers are the reason that you can still go to the supermarket and find fresh meat and produce.

While most people under the age of 60 have quite honestly never learned how to cook much more than a prepared bag of pasta, these guys are scouring the shelves for fresh fish and seasonal asparagus.

They’re the reason these stores still stock these items, even though they aren’t as obvious to prepare.

But just as the Gym Rats have overdone exercise, the New Agers have overdone nutrition.

The biggest “whoopsie” they have committed is the campaign against meat and animal products. They have won a resounding victory in convincing most people that these foods are bad for them, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

They have also alienated most people into thinking they need to eat “rich people food.” You know, organic/grass-fed/local/pastured, etc.

And while the Gym Rats are the go-to-guys on building strength, speed, and power, the New Agers are undoubtedly the geniuses of lower-intensity physical activity such as endurance and flexibility.

They preach the importance of such things as running, biking, hiking, surfing, and skiing, and as a result have the added benefit of getting people out of stuffy gyms and out into nature with their exercising.

They even focus on things such as yoga and pilates, which can be a little too “woo-woo” for some, but are much more difficult than most of the nay-sayers believe. These types of activities also have a marked ability to reduce stress levels, which are an oft-forgotten part of the equation.

Which Clan Do You Want to Be a Part Of?

So there you have it.

If you want to start amping up your health and fitness, you have a choice of clan to join:
1. The Gym Rats, who have unbelievably low body fat percentages and could easily moonlight as superheroes, but who forego their social lives for long gym sessions and bizarre eating habits.
2. The New Agers, who get to eat good food, spend time outside, and experience low stress levels, but spend all their disposable income on food and are a little skinnier than many would like.

Or…

Could there be a way to combine the best of these two and eliminate the worst of them?

Could we start a brand-new third clan?

Could we establish a brand-new philosophy? One that doesn’t require you to drop your whole paycheck on food? Or require you to turn down going out with friends so you can hit the gym every night?

Oh, hell yes!

Gym Rats, New Agers, and the “Big Four”

Why do people want to lose fat, gain muscle, and maximize their health in general?

I think if you dig far enough it comes down to one or more of these four things:
1. Sexual Attractiveness
2. Social Status
3. Short-Term Health–(lack of injury, illness)
4. Long-Term Health–(the ability to live to old age)

What does this have to do with anything? Well, let’s think about the two different clans and what they value.

The Gym Rats? For them, it’s all about building as much muscle and losing as much fat as is possible. It’s almost singularly focused on appearance and doesn’t really care about extending lifespan or reducing illness and injury.

These guys achieve impressively low body fat percentages. They’re the envy of every guy who got sand kicked in his face and his girlfriend stolen by some guy on the beach. (Wait, maybe that was just in the comics. But still…)

While getting in shape undoubtedly improves your sexual attractiveness and social status, it only does so up to a certain point. If you are really interested in these things you’ll want to focus on things such as body language, voice tonality, and especially working to make your life something worth living in the first place.

Know any former pro bodybuilders, powerlifters, or athletes that have aged gracefully? All of that wear and tear they put on their bodies has left them a mess, with plenty of injuries and in all likelihood a shorter lifespan.

How about the New Agers? For them it’s all about the health. It’s living a long life free of injuries brought on by overtraining, eating like crap, and being exposed to toxins. Rising up the social hierarchy and attracting women are too un-p.c. to be a priority here.

These guys wake up in the morning and feel energetic all day long. They’re not suffering from back problems from a botched squat session. They aren’t feeling under the weather from a weakened immune system.

At the same time they seem a little… emaciated. Sure, they’re in better shape than the average joe, but I think most of us would prefer to be a little more “strong like bull” than the average yoga dude is.

The New Clan, the Dark Horse

You see the problem here?

Sure, some people may want to focus on one of the big four, or perhaps two, as the Gym Rats and the New Agers both do, but what about the rest of us?

What about those of us who are less interested in getting a “10” in two categories and a “0” in the others than they are in getting a “9” in all four categories?

What about those of us who DON’T make health and fitness the center of our lives and frankly don’t WANT to because we frankly have bigger things going on?

For us, it is more important to maximize all four rather than trying to be the best at one or another.

We want our girlfriends and wives to find us irresistible. We want to instantly make a good first impression on others. We want to live until old age, and to be as efficient and productive as possible for those days.

By taking the best of both worlds, we can create an all-new Third Clan. We need to focus on the big wins from each of the clans, ignore the minutiae that creates all the buzz, and blaze our own trail.

We can take the following from the Gym Rats:

1. “Big Lifts” such as deadlifts, cleans, presses, push ups, squats, and pull ups.
2. Pro-meat (or at least meat-agnostic) diet.
3. Focus on sleep.

And combine with the following from the New Agers:

1. More recreational activities OUTSIDE THE GYM.
2. A diet of primarily fresh, minimally-processed food.
3. Emphasis on reducing stress.

By focusing on the big wins learned from the Gym Rats and New Agers, we can reap the main benefits of being healthy and fit without letting it overrun our lives.

A NEW kind of health nut is coming to take the world by storm, and he’s more of a revolutionary dark horse than someone who blindly follows the rules.

He realizes that being healthy and fit is more of a means towards getting what he really wants out of life than an end in and of itself.

This guy isn’t afraid to go down the road less travelled in order to get what he wants.

And he will stop for nothing on his epic adventure to get there.

It’s finally here, folks!

For longer than I’d care to admit, I’ve been hard at work behind the scenes crafting something that I hoped could get anyone into the kitchen to cook their first healthy meal.

I’ve said it before (and I’ll say it again), but the quality of your diet is 80% of the equation if you want to look better and feel better. And improving the quality of your diet is all but impossible if you don’t know how to cook a few meals from scratch.

With the ubiquity of cheap, tasty, fast, and unhealthy food we as a culture are literally forgetting how to cook. Where once these vital skills were handed down from generation to generation, we now need to fend for ourselves if we want to learn how to prepare healthy food.

With kitchen hacking becoming more and more of an important skill I know that most of us guys need more than just a heavy cookbook with limited illustration and an unwieldy amount of recipes to get started.

Whether you are a college student with limited kitchen access or a bachelor living on microwaveable mac and cheese, I’ve been thinking about you in every step of this process.

Why Kitchen Hacking 101?

I wrote a good post (if I do say so myself) a couple weeks back outlining the purpose and philosophy of the kitchen hacking movement, but here’s a brief refresher.

I don’t buy into the idea that there is one “magic bullet” that will solve all of everyone’s health and fitness problems.

Not counting macronutrients, not particular supplements, not a specific eating schedule, and not certain exercises and workouts.

Instead, I think that your health and fitness are the results of countless variables, and differences in body chemistry and psychology mean that we all have unique challenges and solutions.

However, if you look at the world at large, the one common theme uniting healthy, lean, and strong people is that they eat primarily minimally-processed real food.

If I had to pick one thing with the highest probability of helping you look better and feel better, it’s definitely learning how to cook most of your food from scratch.

No, it’s not going to work for everyone. But it will work for most of you.

What’s Inside Kitchen Hacking 101

Here’s a more specific breakdown of what’s inside the course.

First off is a science lesson where I debunk some common nutrition myths. Unfortunately, we all have some faulty ideas surrounding food that lead us to make poor eating choices.

It’s only after we understand what we should really be avoiding in order to get fit and what really constitutes a healthy diet that we can roll up our sleeves and get to work in the kitchen working with the correct raw materials.

Afterwards, I’ll walk you through what exactly you need to stock your kitchen with in order to get started. (Hint: you need a lot less than what you think.)

Next up, I have a tutorial on how to peel, slice, chop, and dice your food. This is perhaps the most intimidating part of this course due to the knifework, but I have extensive annotated pictures that will show you exactly what to do.

And speaking of annotated pictures… I have presented a foolproof recipe that I guarantee that any newcomer to the kitchen can complete. This is your first step in kitchen hacking mastery.

In addition, I will give you a specific action plan so that this doesn’t turn into just another one of those information products that you don’t end up doing anything with. This course is specifically designed for you to take action and start taking control of your health.

And if that ain’t enough, I have one “bonus” recipe for extra credit as well… and it goes great with the meal I walk you through as the main part of the course.

In addition to all this, you will also receive a free subscription to Lean, Mean, Virile Machine. Every Friday (okay, almost every Friday) I publish a new article here and you’ll get it delivered straight to your inbox, no need to give yourself carpal tunnel typing http://leanmeanvirilemachine.com all the time!

Lastly, I plan to keep people on the mailing list more “in the loop” than those who aren’t with all the other cool stuff I’ve got coming up in the future.

And I’m giving away this entire thing to you for free.

All you need to do is enter your email address in the form at the bottom of the page, and you’re ready to get started!

My Promise to You

Like many of you, I have signed up for a gazillion mailing lists in return to access to an email course or ebook. While a few of them have been great, most of them have honestly been kinda bad.

They consist of slapped-together content and are truly just one big blog post reformatted as a pdf or spit into a lot of small chunks.

I didn’t want that.

I wanted to literally create the greatest email course in the history of the internet.

Humble? No. But did I succeed? Well, at the very least I think this beast is up there. I’ll let you be the judge of that.

I think this thing is incredibly valuable, especially to those of you who are looking to amp up your health and fitness and yet haven’t tackled the kitchen.

As I’ve said a million times before, learning how to cook is probably the best skill you can learn in your quest to look better and feel better.

But enough of the sales pitch. You know by now if you want in or not.

(Oh yeah. I hate spam just as much as you do and will always respect your privacy. While you’ll get site updates and first dibs on the products I have coming up in the future, I’ll never share your address with anyone. And you can always opt out at the click of a mouse.)

So what are you waiting for? Sign up for free below.

(And if you can’t see the form in your RSS reader or email, just click through to the site and fill out the form in the sidebar.)

Whatever you do… do not watch the video below!

(If you can’t see it, here’s a link to the same video. But I’m serious, don’t click the link and watch it!)

Were you able to resist the temptation to press play? Even if you did, was it more difficult than if I had just embedded it and not mentioned it?

The Marshmallow Test

In 1972, Walter Mischel of Stanford University ran a study on deferred gratification now known as the Stanford marshmallow experiment.

In it, a researcher brought children into a room one by one and sat them down in front of one marshmallow. After telling them that they would be able to eat two marshmallows if they didn’t eat the first one, the researcher left the room for an agonizing 15 minutes while the child did everything in their power to take their mind off the tasty treat sitting unguarded in front of them.

Some of the children ate the marshmallow immediately after the researcher left the room. The rest fidgeted, covered their eyes, and turned their backs to the treat.

In all, one third of the children were unable to leave the marshmallow uneaten for 15 minutes, even though they knew that meant giving up another marshmallow later.

Oh, and if you have made it this far without watching the video, go ahead and check it out already, you rock star.

What’s YOUR Marshmallow?

So what happened to these kids? Well, they grew up. They went to college. They got married and started families. They started businesses. They traveled the world. They became you and me.

Despite our beliefs otherwise, we all still struggle to turn down a treat now for the promise of two later… but for most of us it’s a little more complex than just a marshmallow.

It’s fast food. It’s microwave dinners. It beckons to us from the kitchen and pantry. It calls our name from the supermarket aisles and from the large signs we drive by every day.

It’s our jobs that have us sitting in a cube for 40-50 hours per week, and the TV and social media that tempt us to spend the evenings on our duffs.

In every way, our society is set up to constantly tempt us to eat crap, move little, and stress ourselves out.

My Own Marshmallow Test

I’ll give you an example from my own life.

During my Average Joe Diet experiment, I got into the habit of eating pretty much anything out of the vending machine at work.

By the time this four week trial had ended, I was addicted to soda whereas I couldn’t stand the stuff before. On top of that, they had jalapeño chips available, which are an all-time favorite of mine.

What made this particularly impossible was a little plastic card.

You see, one of the perks where I work are the cards that all the employees get that can be used to pay for items from the vending machine. Twice a month, we get 20 bucks added to them.

Since this is more than I can reasonably spend, I effectively had unlimited access to whatever junk food I wanted at any time. Before you knew it, I had built up a habit of going to the machine to get a can of soda or bag of chips whenever I felt like it.

As I’ve mentioned before, I have absolutely NO willpower when it comes to food, and I will chow down on anything you put in front of me.

Obviously, this was gonna be a problem…

So what did I do to remove the “marshmallow” that was constantly tempting me? I got rid of my card on purpose. Now whenever I want some chocolate I need to dig into my own pockets.

By making one small change, I was able to make an unhealthy habit MUCH more difficult, and I have cut WAY back on vending machine food since then.

One Marshmallow, Two Marshmallows, and the Willpower Game

What can you take away from this decades-old experiment on children?

As I mentioned, we all have the same psychology as those kids, but our objects of temptation have changed from marshmallows to something else.

The children essentially had the following experiences:
1. The Willpower Game–Fifteen minutes of sitting in front of an unguarded marshmallow is torture for a kid and the ultimate test of their willpower. Even if they are able to resist temptation, they would have had to use up a lot of this rare resource.
2. One Marshmallow–The easiest thing to do, from a willpower standpoint, would be to simply give in and eat the marshmallow, satisfying the need for instant gratification.
3. Two Marshmallows–Those who were strong enough to weather the storm were able to get the delayed gratification of an additional marshmallow if they could make it 15 minutes.

When it comes to health and fitness, we all must face a similar test, with similar results.

The willpower game is the willpower that we must utilize to avoid the temptation to eat crappy food and lead inactive lives. In a world that is increasingly moving in that direction, it is only getting more and more difficult to tolerate the willpower game.

The most common solution given to this problem is conscious caloric restriction, eating less and exercising more in an effort to thwart our bodies’s natural drive to self-regulate its composition.

The easy way out is to just go with the flow. It’s automatically doing whatever is easiest in your environment. It’s eating cheap fast food. It’s using every excuse to avoid exercising.

The better option in the long term is to learn new habits to live a healthier lifestyle without all the difficulty of self-deprivation. It’s learning how to cook a few healthy meals. It’s making the habit of going to the gym a couple times a week. It’s learning how to keep your stress levels down.

So, what’s it gonna be? Do you want one marshmallow now, or two later? Or would you rather see just how long you can play the willpower game?

The clock is ticking…

80% of your health and fitness is the direct result of the quality of your diet.

And since most of the food you’ll find at restaurants and in prepackaged meals is generally unhealthy, it follows that the best investment you can make for your health and fitness is learning how to cook.

This idea is repellent to most of us guys, whose greatest cooking accomplishments tend to be grilled burgers and chili. (And even then, it’s a rare occasion when we make them.)

But far from being an impossibly daunting task, mastery of basic kitchen skills is well within the ability of every able-bodied man.

It’s time for a change. No, wait… it’s time for a revolution. No longer will we do endless hours of cardio each week to “undo” the effects of our diets. No longer will we drop a pretty penny on supplements and hope they do the heavy lifting for us.

From now on, we will take control of our health and learn how to cook a few good meals.

We are the kitchen hackers… and this is our manifesto!

Intro to Kitchen Hacking

So what is kitchen hacking?

In a nutshell, it is the art and science of acquiring and preparing food as easily as possible.

From knowing what food is healthy in the first place, to buying it from the market (either super- or farmers-), to cooking it up in a way that is delicious, kitchen hacking aims to simplify the process of healthy eating in a manner that anyone can follow.

From the penny-pinching college student to the high-flying CEO, and the cardigan-sporting artist to the data-crunching computer geek, this new paradigm is wide open for any and all who are willing to roll up their sleeves, get their hands dirty, and learn a whole lot in the process.

Kitchen hacking is for those of us who are disgusted by the typical “healthy diet” of skinless chicken breasts, egg white omelettes, and protein shakes.

It’s for those of us who are both intimidated and a bit skeptical of the “whole, natural, organic, biodynamic, grass-fed, etc.” movement.

But it’s only for those of us who are willing to put in a bit of extra effort now to make our lives a whole lot better in the long term.

What follows are the five articles of faith of our new movement. It is our declaration of independence. It is our manifesto.

1. Food Should Be As Simple As Possible (But No Simpler)

The principle of Occam’s Razor recommends, assuming all other things being equal, that the most basic of all hypotheses should be followed.

In other words: everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.

It’s tempting to think that all cooking needs to be really complicated. Cookbooks and cooking shows are bursting at the seams with recipes that seem to be designed primarily to entertain people rather than to actually give them something practical to cook.

(Michael Pollan has an excellent article on this phenomenon published by the New York Times you should check out.)

As impressive as Julie Powell’s endeavor to prepare all of the recipes in Julia Child’s classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking was, it completely overtook her life.

Most of us have jobs. We have school. We have friends and family. We have passions. We have responsibilities. We have goals.

We have something bigger going on in our lives than spending a couple of hours in the kitchen each and every night.

Wipe from your mind the idea that food preparation must be a big, fancy deal. Forget about the stress of trying to find something new and exotic to eat every night.

You should be eating more or less the same meals all the time. (If that scares you, think about it for a second. You probably already do.) They should be made from simple, basic ingredients. You should be able to substitute ingredients easily when the supermarket is out.

Most importantly, you should be able to prepare these meals in your sleep.

Your diet, your meals, and your refrigerator should be as simple as possible, but no simpler. You should have enough variety to keep you sane, but not so much you go insane.

Fancy, complicated food is great for special occasions–or when someone else is cooking. The rest of us should focus on making a few simple meals the basis of our diets.

2. The Food Must Be Delicious, Filling, and Fast

Do you know why most diets fail?

Because they make people try to survive on bland, crappy, and low-energy food.

I know I keep beating a dead horse here, but the conventional wisdom that it’s all a matter of manipulating the calorie balance in your body is bunk. It’s written by people who’ve spent too much time reading textbooks and not enough time in the lab trying this stuff out.

Most of us live in a world of cheap, tasty, fast, and most importantly UNHEALTHY food literally all around us.

It is extremely difficult to turn a cold shoulder to this environment, and a diet of salads, unsalted chicken breasts, and protein shakes will ultimately fail with just about anyone trying to adhere to it in the long term.

So how do you do it? You beat the bastards at their own game!

Contrary to popular belief, high-calorie foods are not inherently unhealthy. Tasty foods aren’t either. People have been eating energy-dense animal fat and plant starch for millions of years and yet remained free from the obesity and diseases of civilization that plague us today.

Perhaps these foods don’t hit our reward centers the way that burgers and fries do. Maybe they don’t affect our hormone levels the way that pizza and soda does. For whatever reason, it’s damn near impossible to overeat on a diet of minimally-processed meat and vegetables. (Criticize this if you want, but come at me after experimenting on yourself rather than with any “a calorie is a calorie” bookishness.)

What if you had healthy and delicious food at reach most of the time? What if it literally took you less time to prepare it than it would to run through the drive through? What if it was just as easy to reheat as a pouch of mac and cheese?

Now what if it actually tasted good? What if it filled you up and didn’t leave you hungry in another two hours?

This is the jist of a concept I have come up with called “faster food.” By beating food companies and fast food restaurants at their own game by ensuring you are surrounded by tasty, healthy, and filling food that is faster and easier than their product, you negate the bad influence they have on your eating habits.

In order for a diet to be successful in the long term, it must be easy and enjoyable to follow. Otherwise you stand no chance against the easy, cheap, and unhealthy food all around you.

3. Time, Money, and Energy Investment Must Be Minimized

One of the biggest frustrations I have always had with health and fitness advice is that it tends to make people think that they need to let it take over their lives.

For example, most sources suggest that you should get a minimum of 30 minutes of exercise each and every day, or 3 1/2 hours per week… and that’s just if you want to get into “decent” shape!

In reality, it’s not uncommon for most exercise protocols to take up 5, 7, or even more hours of your life each and every week!

That might be reasonable for athletes, bodybuilders, or anyone else whose livelihood really necessitates that kind of devotion, but the rest of us are lucky if we can make it a month on a program like that without falling off the wagon.

Similarly, eating well can end up being an unreasonable investment if you let it get out of hand. Food can be expensive, depending on what you are shopping for, and supplements don’t come cheap either.

Being healthy and fit will increase the days you have on this planet and minimize the amount of those that you lose due to illness and injury. It will increase your ability to accomplish whatever it is you are doing with your life by increasing your energy levels.

And, let’s be honest, it’s gonna make you more of a sexy beast and boost others’ social judgment of you.

But, truth be told, it doesn’t take NEARLY as much time, energy, and money to achieve these goals as you have been led to believe.

Instead of trying to convince you to become a gym rat or an amateur nutritionist, I’d rather get you up and running with a realistic and sane plan that you can fit in with your busy life.

Let’s start by looking at where the average Joe is at and try to meet him there.

According to my research, the average American spends about $7 a day on food and 30 minutes preparing it, or $49 and 3 1/2 hours per week.

Now, it’s also true that we Americans spend less on food relative to our incomes and take less time to cook it than any other culture. And while I’ll admit that eating well on such a time and money budget can be a challenge, it’s certainly not impossible.

In an experiment I tried a while back, I showed how I was able to prepare 22,152 Calories worth of food, which cost me $48.21, in 2 hours 56 minutes. (This series is one of my favorites on the blog. Check out part one, part two, and part three.)

So you’ll be able to spend the same amount of money and time with kitchen hacking as the average person already does on their food if that’s what’s holding you back.

But if you are willing to go the extra mile and put a little more into it, you’ll be rewarded with a greater variety of good eats.

Food prep need not be the torture we have always thought it to be. Kitchen hacking means spending as little time, money, and energy on our meals as possible, but no less.

4. Obscure Ingredients, Fancy Gadgets, and Complicated Techniques Need Not Apply

In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a big food renaissance going on these days.

Celebrity chefs such as Emeril Lagasse and Mario Batali have hit shows on the Food Network, (which is seen in over 90 million households). But the influence of food TV is spreading even beyond this specialty network, with MasterChef becoming a hit on Fox. (The show started as a British hit and now has 26 different versions across the globe.)

Bookstores are lined with thick cookbooks filled with exotic recipes. Department stores are filled with expensive kitchen gadgetry that we didn’t have even a generation ago. Supermarkets are filling up with organic, pastured, and local produce and meat.

…and yet so very few of us even cook.

Although a small minority of us are legitimate foodies and place a high value on devoting a lot of their time, money, and energy towards their diet, it’s not enough to account for all the people watching others cook on TV.

In reality, the majority of people think of cooking as entertainment.

They’ve been seduced by the images on TV, and yet intimidated by the idea that they could ever throw together anything like what the Iron Chef can for their everyday meals.

And you know what? They’re right!

Just as too much fitness advice is given out by former pro bodybuilders who assume that everyone can spend an hour at the gym every day, too much “cooking advice” is given by professional chefs who don’t know what it’s like for food prep to be just one small part of a person’s life.

I think this comic from The Oatmeal neatly sums up why most guys hate the mere thought of cooking.

Too many people believe that preparing healthy and tasty food means they have to stock their fridges with crème fraîche, buy a crème brûlée torch, and learn how to properly cook a soufflé.

It doesn’t!

Although a couple of newfangled pieces of gear might be worth your while, you can do just about anything with little more than a couple of pots and pans, a sharp chef’s knife, and a wooden spoon.

Although you might want to splurge on heirloom tomatoes, morel mushrooms, and fresh oysters every now and then, you wouldn’t believe how far potatoes, garlic, carrots, celery, and onions will go.

And although it might be cool to learn how to cook a sous vide steak with a horseradish-infused foam created in an ultrasonic bath, a simple grilled steak with a baked potato will beat the pants off it any day.

You don’t need to have a kitchen that looks like a pharmaceutical laboratory to make a good meal. You can have a minimalist kitchen and still be set up to eat healthy, delicious meals for the rest of your life.

5. The More Food, The Merrier

Why do you think that factories make things in a few large batches rather than many small ones?

It is simply a more efficient use of resources this way. You save time, money, and energy in the long run.

When it comes to food preparation, it takes just about the same time to make one serving of pot roast and mashed potatoes as it does eight.

Now, this one is highly dependent on what your schedule is, but if you can clear out three hours straight once a week to prepare your food for the next seven days, you’ll be able to cook insane amounts of food in very little time.

Although the time savings is hard to ignore, perhaps the greatest benefit of batching your cooking like this is that you can then take advantage of the glut of food you have on hand to transform your environment where healthy eating is inevitable.

When your home and work refrigerators are full of pot roast, chili, and “man salads,” its just as easy, if not easier, to eat your homemade healthy food rather than a microwave dinner or going to hit up the drive thru.

No longer will we work hard in the kitchen and only get one meal out of it. Instead, we will “go big” and fill up our refrigerators with healthy, tasty food.

Kitchen Hacking 101

As longtime readers may have noticed, I’ve been devoting a LOT of words specifically to food, nutrition, and cooking the past year.

This isn’t to give short shrift to things such as exercise, sleep, and stress reduction (I’ll be tackling these things in more detail in the future) but rather to emphasize the importance of diet on your overall health and fitness.

I think we guys in particular are all too quick to focus on exercise, and let our crappy diets slide (or just add protein shakes), and I think that’s a huge mistake.

I’m a bit of a freak of nature in that I’m a guy who has always been interested in cooking. I’ve been to the side of the spectrum that is super-extremist–spending lots of money on food and lots of time in the kitchen–but my life no longer can support that.

I’m too busy juggling a million different things and have returned to the real world of food being more of a practicality.

I’ve been working for a LONG time on a project that would help any dedicated guy make his first healthy home-cooked meal and take the first step towards kitchen hacking mastery.

…and that day is almost here.

I’m finally putting the finishing touches on my Kitchen Hacking 101 course, and couldn’t be happier with how it’s turning out.

Very soon I will be unleashing this beast on the blog, and inviting you to check it out.

To be continued…

Photo

Who can be bothered to learn how to cook?

I mean, most cookbooks could double as boat anchors. They contain hundreds (if not thousands) of instructions, all of which seem to demand that you to track down obscure ingredients and learn some difficult new cooking technique.

The thought of learning how to prepare a few good meals seems OVERWHELMING when you consider how easy it is to just go through the drive through or pop a frozen dinner in the microwave.

…at least that’s what you’ve always been led to think.

When learning how to cook healthy meals, most of us guys go about it all wrong. Tackling one recipe after another before giving up in frustration. But don’t fear, there’s still hope.

By learning how to harness the power of what I call “go-to meals,” you’ll be able to throw together tasty food with very little effort, ensuring that your fridge is always full of healthy food whenever hunger strikes.

But to do this, you need to get a basic idea of how your mind works and learn how to take advantage of it.

The Conscious vs the Unconscious

The concept of the unconscious and conscious minds has been found in many cultures since the distant past.

Psychologists such as Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung have done an excellent job at further fleshing out these concepts into how we now know them today.

The theory is that our mind is made up of two different smaller minds, which operate in different ways and provide different fuctions. The unconscious mind is huge and results in most of our behavior, and the conscious mind is tiny and produces fewer of our actions.

Here’s the “Cliff’s Notes” version:

1. The unconscious mind consists of all our automatic instincts and habits.
2. The conscious mind consists of the things that we do of our own will.

Confused? Let’s look at an example.

Let’s say that John is working out at the gym. He’s taking the “move smarter” motto to heart and is doing deadlifts, cleans, and presses. After his full-body workout, he is breathing heavily and his heart is racing. He’s sweating profusely and is chugging water like they’re pulling it off the market.

When doing intense exercises such as these, your body requires more oxygen than usual. This sends a signal to your brain that says, “you need to breathe in more and pump your heart harder” to top up the oxygen.

Additionally, your internal temperature starts to rise, but your body fights to equalize it by sweating to cool off. But this loss of water makes you thirsty so that you can replenish your water supply.

Now, all of these things are going on “behind the scenes,” and you don’t have to think about them. Your body takes care of it all on its own.

Sweating. Breathing. Heart pumping. These are all things that John’s unconscious mind is doing.

But let’s say that this is John’s first time exercising. Maybe he’s a freshman in college and is trying to avoid gaining the dreaded 15 pounds.

He’s now breaking his usual routine to do something he hasn’t done before. He has to start with little to no weight on the bar and watch his form in the mirror.

Since he’s deviating from what his body is trained to do he has to use his conscious mind.

Now, let’s assume that John sticks to a schedule and working out every Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday at 7 am. After a month or two of this, it becomes much more natural for him to head out to the gym first thing in the morning. It’s now as much a part of his routine as taking a shower and brushing his teeth.

By repeating a conscious behavior enough times, he has transformed it into an unconscious one.

One thing I don’t see talked about enough in the health/fitness world is the psychology that comes into play here, in particular how the conscious and unconscious minds work with it or against it.

All too often we are told it is simply a matter of eating less and exercising more, and that if we fail to stick with these tough diets that make us go hungry it’s our own laziness to blame.

But many studies support the idea that it is food quality, not quantity, that leads to the easiest and most effective weight loss and maintenance.

Any time you do something that doesn’t come naturally to you, you are by definition using up your willpower, which you only have in limited quantities.

But when you do the things that come naturally, you don’t deplete your willpower. Your body has a literally infinite capacity to run these sorts of things on autopilot, from the regulation of your body temperature to your habit of checking email and Facebook every time you sit down at the computer.

Rituals–The 28-Day Path to the Unconscious

When you want to make a long-term change, you should look for ways to create automatic habits rather than neverending willpower-zapping actions.

This is why I’m not a big fan of most methods of caloric restriction, which is most promoted in mainstream health circles.

Trying to starve yourself will only work for a short time. There is literally no way to keep fighting off your innate urge to eat indefinitely.

Instead, you are much better off creating habits that work with your body. And the biggest win for most of us is learning how to cook a few healthy meals.

Yeah, I know. On paper you can still eat as many Calories of a given food as you can of another food. But studies suggest otherwise, and point to whole, unprocessed foods filling people up more than refined foods on a calorie-for-calorie basis.

And the best way to make something a habit is by doing it over and over again for at least 28 days.

Yes, it will take some willpower to get started, but the more you do it, the easier it becomes, and eventually it becomes as easy as tying your shoe. (You DO know how to tie your shoe, don’t you?)

Okay, that was rough. But here are the main takeaways:

1. We all come with “prewired” programming in our unconscious minds. This cannot be changed no matter how hard we try. As humans, these are all pretty much the same between us.
2. We also have a lot of habits that we learned over time that have been “uploaded” into the conscious mind.
3. By repetition, you can transform conscious behavior into unconscious behavior… but only if you are trying to change learned habits rather than innate drives.

The Art and Science of Cooking

The reason so many people attempt to simply restrict calories on the foods they are already eating rather than simply try to change the kinds of foods they eat is as follows:

1. Most people have been led to believe that the calories they eat vs they calories they exercise off are the only variables that matter.
2. The people who WANT to eat better simply can’t stick with it due to the constant availability of cheap, tasty, and unhealthy foods.
3. The only real way around this is learning how to cook yourself. And most people just aren’t gonna try something like that.

I’ll make no bones about it: learning how to cook will be difficult at first. It will require a lot of your willpower, the very thing I say you need to conserve.

In fact, at first it will be MORE difficult than just eating less of the same foods. And that’s the main reason most people favor it: caloric restriction is easier in the short term than learning how to cook.

But over the long term, cooking gets easier and easier (since you’re preparing the same meals), while caloric restriction gets harder and harder (because your body is gonna get the calories it wants, one way or the other).

Cooking is something you can easily make habitual. Yes, it’s gonna be a pain the first couple of times you try to prepare a dish. But it will become easier and easier, until you get to the point where you can make it without a recipe and can even substitute different ingredients to change things up.

Compare this with simple calorie cutting of the same foods you’re already eating, which will always leave you feeling hungry and sluggish no matter how long you stick with it.

The key is to select an easy meal that is full of unrefined foods such as meat and vegetables.

Gather your tools. Hit up the supermarket. Then clear out some time at home to cook the hell out of that stuff.

A Few Good Meals

And so, your template for automating your cooking should look something like this:

1. Figure out a simple dish of meat and/or vegetables without sugar, flour, and vegetable oil that you could eat every week and not get sick of it.
2. Find a simple recipe of that dish and follow it closely to prepare the food.
3. Do this at least once a week for four weeks.
4. Then try to make the meal without a recipe in front of you.

By this point, you should be able to make the meal from scratch without the recipe handy. (Especially if you make sure you don’t choose anything too fancy).

And at that point, you have your first Go-To Meal.

Once you’ve reached this milestone, add another meal into the mix, following the same process.

If you are cooking in bulk (which I highly recommend you do), after you’ve got 3-4 recipes down you’ll have enough to cover 90% of your meals for the week. (I always suggest you spend the remaining 10% eating out. It’ll keep you sane and make this a much easier plan to stick to.)

Once you are able to prepare about seven meals, give or take, you have reached the Jedi level of kitchen hacking.

At this point, you’ve got enough in your mental cookbook that you can switch things out and eat different meals each week.

This is the ultimate goal: to be able to make enough tasty meals each week that you never get bored or hungry, and have those meals be healthy enough that they support health and fitness without conscious calorie manipulation.

As an example, here are my go-to meals:

1. Pot roast with mashed potatoes and gravy.
2. Cottage pie.
3. Roast chicken with roots and tubers.
4. Baked salmon with rice and asparagus.
5. The Epic Breakfast: Scrambled eggs, bacon or sausage, potatoes O’brien, yogurt, and seasonal fruit.
6. Authentic Texas-style chili.
7. The Man Salad: Basically any fresh raw vegetables I have on hand and hard-boiled eggs, cheese, or leftover meat.
8. Grilled steak and veggies.

I don’t have to worry about consulting a cookbook ‘cuz I only ever make a small handful of meals. I just don’t have to sweat it.

The ingredients are simple enough that I can find them anywhere. They are relatively cheap as well.

It’s enough variety that I don’t get bored, but not so much that I have to keep a cookbook handy.

By having a handful of Go-To Meals under your belt, everything just works. (If I can steal a catchphrase from Apple.)

Do you have any go-to meals that you can throw together without breaking a sweat? Let the rest of us know!

It’s that time of year again!

Rum-spiked egg nog, reruns of A Charlie Brown Christmas, and meals of the most ginormous proportions.

I’ve always loved this time of the season. Growing up in northern Minnesota, the winters were long, cold, and dark. But the holidays always cycled around like a beacon of light each year. I honestly think that all the big winter celebrations that occur across most cultures were the only way that we humans were able to stick it out through this part of the year with our sanity intact.

Maybe it’s hard for us to appreciate now, but before electric lights and heaters, this would be a truly rough time of the year, and having a big party is just what people would have needed to get through it.

From the Festival of the Wild Women in Ancient Greece to the Alban Arthan of the Druids all the way through Christianity’s Christmas, people have a strong history of banding together and celebrating during the dark season.

Food, Guilt, and the Holidays

One of my favorite parts of the season is, of course, the epic meals. Thanksgiving in particular is inextricably tied to eating, since it has strong ties to the celebration of the end of harvest season in pastoral cultures.

Roast turkey with sage stuffing. Mashed potatoes and gravy. Homemade cranberry sauce. Pumpkin pie with vanilla ice cream. Oh. My. God!

Unfortunately, Thanksgiving (as well as the other winter holidays) has kinda turned into a guilty pleasure in American society. Around this time each year we get bombarded by articles such as the following:

• 10 Ways to Avoid Holiday Weight Gain
• 8 Steps to Surviving Holiday Weight Gain
• 9 Tricks to Avoiding Holiday Weight Gain

Zzzzzz…. Huh, what?

Expect to see more and more stuff like this churned out over the next couple months. And expect them all to make the same assumption: it’s all about willpower, you need to adhere to these hard and fast rules if you’re to make it through to spring without ending up looking like a latter-day Marlon Brando!

Um, no. As I’ve said before, willpower is a limited resource, and it’s a losing game to fight your body. You need to change things at a more fundamental level here, gentlemen.

Conventional wisdom states that most people gain between 5 and 10 pounds during the holidays. But a study by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) suggests otherwise.

According to them, the average person gains a mere ONE POUND between Thanksgiving and New Years. The bad news in all of this is that these people didn’t lose the weight after the holidays.

While nothing staggering, it is the kind of weight gain that most people would like to avoid. Over the long term, for example, you could expect to gain 50 pounds over 50 years. D’oh!

Holiday Weight Gain–A Realistic Perspective

But don’t worry. The sky ain’t falling, Chicken Little.

With a more strategic (and realistic) approach, you’ll make it through the holiday season without gaining significant weight, and lose what you do gain throughout the next year, and more importantly actually, y’know, ENJOY the celebrations!

First and foremost, pleaseohpleaseohplease do yourself and your family a favor and don’t be so neurotic about food during the holidays.

I know this is hard to take if you are struggling to take weight off and keep it off, but it is simply more important to spend time with loved ones and take part in the celebration of the season than it is to be a rude pain-in-the-ass and break your mother’s heart by refusing to eat anything she makes because they have too many carbs.

And really, is it really all that unnatural to gain a little weight during the winter?

Most animals that have to weather the chilly months put on an extra layer of adipose tissue to keep themselves warm, which they then shed in the spring. The laziness and enjoyment of comfort food you feel during the winter is quite possibly a universal evolved method that animals are able to survive the winter.

The issue we should be concerned with isn’t how to avoid holiday weight gain, but rather how to minimize holiday weight gain and lose that unwanted weight during the next year.

5 Practical Tips (That Won’t Drive You Insane)

1. Minimize feasting. How many socially-obligated meals do you really have during the winter? Thanksgiving and Christmas. Maybe one at your workplace? Let’s be generous and double that and assume that you have six big feasts you need to attend.

Well, you should be cutting loose at least once per week anyway, so you’re still well under your limit when you look at those “unavoidable” meals. Don’t feel bad about the celebrations you have to attend, but just don’t make it an everyday thing if you’re worried about it.

2. Keep up your everyday healthy eating routine. For the other 97% of the meals you eat stick with the healthy eating template: lots of fresh meat and veggies, not a lot of processed junk. It works during the spring, summer, and fall, and it will work during the winter as well.

3. Find something fun and active to do. Driving to and from work in the dark sucks. I know how tempting it is to just crash on the couch and watch reruns of The Office. (I’m speaking from experience, folks!)

Strategic exercise is crucial for building muscle, but I think it’s more important to find something FUN to do that is physically demanding, particularly during the dark months when it takes more willpower to get yourself to exercise. Maybe it’s skiing. Maybe it’s snowshoeing. Hell, maybe it’s even getting together with friends and playing laser tag once a week. (No judging here!)

Personally, I’m looking forward to getting back on the surfboard this winter. It’s been a hectic year and the weather still permits, so why not?

4. Sleep more. Embrace your inner grizzly bear and do some hibernating. While you don’t want to dig a hole and not come out for a few months, now’s a great time to catch up on your sleep. With the sun setting so early, your body is primed to stock up on its z’s now. The scientific research strongly suggests that sleep deprivation leads to weight gain. So in the evenings spend less time in front of screens, take a cold shower, keep the lights dim, and get some reading in before bed… which should be as early as possible.

5. Seriously, enjoy your time with others! Taking some time to slow down and have some good times with friends and family has immense psychological perks that you can’t measure with a scale or body fat calipers. The benefits you gain from this are far greater than that which you lose from eating potatoes, or gravy, or whatever else you are trying to avoid.

I’m spending Thanksgiving in Minneapolis and Christmas in L.A. And I plan on eating no fewer than 3500 Calories each time. What are the rest of you doing?

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Snacking may very well be the most overrated dietary strategy out there today.

Okay, okay. Maybe I’m overstating things a LITTLE bit, but many people force themselves into a habit of snacking when there really is no good reason to, and they may be doing more harm than good.

Although there are some contexts where snacking is a good idea–and some snacks that are better than others–most people shouldn’t be forcing themselves to snack if it doesn’t work for them, and should instead focus on eating enough at their REAL meals that they aren’t hungry again in a couple hours.

“Healthy Snacks”

One of the most popular diet topics is snacking–what to snack on, how often to snack, and why it’s so important to snack in the first place.

But this cultural obsession with “healthy snacking” wouldn’t even be around if we weren’t living in a culture that was extremely calorie-phobic. After patting himself on the back for eating that “healthy 300-Calorie” lunch, you can be damned sure that the Average Joe will be jonesing for a snack come 3pm.

So he starts Googling “healthy snack ideas” and taking notes before heading out to the supermarket, filling up his cart with 100-calorie packs of chips and cookies to keep at home and at work.

Of course, this doesn’t last long, and eventually he gets so hungry that he eats half the fridge, no matter what is in it, and reverts back to his old (unhealthy) eating habits ‘cuz it’s just plain easier. (Hey, I’ve been there!)

For these people, I’ve got some bad news: you are trying to force yourself into an eating habit that will never work for you in the long term. It’s time to find something better.

Busting the Metabolism Myth

Who thinks that eating six small meals a day is better than eating three?

This little gem of wisdom has been passed along through the nutrition community and accepted as one of the gospels.

As the reasoning goes, frequent meals keeps your metabolism elevated, burning maximum amounts of fat while minimizing muscle wasting due to going into “starvation mode.”

Well, if you were to look up the original data that the guys who came up with this idea used to support it, you would find… NOTHING.

That’s right, the genesis of this idea comes from a bold conjecture that nobody bothered to back up  in the first place. Over the years some studies have come up, but they all tend to be poorly-controlled, and no more compelling than the research that supports fewer, larger meals.

Here’s the truth, son: your metabolism is the amount of calories that your body burns when it is at rest. And there is absolutely no data to support the idea that meal frequency has any effect on this.

What eating DOES affect, however, is calories burned as a consequence of the thermic effect of food (TEF). In short, your body needs energy to break down the food that it turns into energy. Crazy, right?

But the TEF isn’t affected by meal frequency as much as it is by caloric volume.

In plain English, the thermic effect of 2,500 Calories is the same whether it’s eaten in one meal or spread out across twenty.

Riding the Glucose Rollercoaster

Another justification people often use for multiple small meals over few small ones is that it doesn’t raise insulin levels as much.

For those of you who aren’t diabetic or low-carbers, here’s the skinny: insulin is perhaps the most infamous of all hormones. As the story goes, carbohydrates are broken down into glucose after eating, raising the body’s blood sugar. It then sends out a squadron of insulin to get the blood glucose into the body’s cells. But one of the other functions of insulin is fat storage, so anything that causes insulin spikes also causes fat gain.

I don’t have time to get into how flawed this argument is (look here if you’re interested), but here’s what you need to know in regards to meal frequency.

Just as the TEF remains constant over the long term for any given amount of food, so does insulin. Even though you might get big insulin spikes after a big meal, you will get big insulin dips later after the meal. When insulin levels are that low, the fat can then escape from your cells where it can easily be used for fuel.

Bottom line: Unless you are a diabetic, you shouldn’t worry in the slightest about blood glucose and insulin.

Getting Over Your Fear of Fullness

But perhaps the most sinister, the most diabolical, the most eeeeeeeevil reason behind the snacking epidemic is, paradoxically, our culture’s obsession with low-calorie diets.

We live in a world where we are told that obese people are just lazy, and that if you want to look and feel great you need to use an immense amount of self-control.

As a result, most of us recoil at the thought of eating a high-calorie meal of something such as pot roast and mashed potatoes, and instead look at the nutrition facts label and go for something with a low listed calorie count.

Unfortunately, this worldview completely ignores the fact that we people have limited amounts of willpower, and most of us can put it to far better use than trying to eat less and exercise more. Instead, you should…

Eat when hungry, stop when full.

This is the way that wild animals do it. This is how people who haven’t been exposed to hyper-processed food do it. AND THEY ALL TEND TO BE VERY FIT AND HEALTHY.

The problem isn’t with you not stopping yourself from eating too much, it’s from you not eating the right food to begin with.

Although the science isn’t there to back it up as much as I’d like it, the limited work that has been done–along with observations and my own experience–all point to the idea that if you eat the food your body has been designed to eat, you’ll wind up in much better shape as a result.

Snacking, NOT Cheating

Perhaps the biggest problem I have with snacking is that it seems to inherently condone falling off the wagon and eating less-than-healthy foods.

While I have no problem with people NOT following super-strict diets, I’m concerned about making it a constant day-in day-out behavior, especially when I don’t know exactly what you’re eating.

For most people, snacks are often candy, chips, cookies, and all sorts of other foods that they wouldn’t make a full meal out of. Something about “snacking” just seems to give people license to eat poorly.

On the other end of the spectrum, you’ve got protein bars, shakes, gels, powders, and all sorts of other meal-replacements concocted in a laboratory and marketed in a way to take advantage of the public’s perception of nutrition.

While there may be some legitimate cases where this stuff might work, I think that most of the people who use it shouldn’t be, and that they are overusing it BY FAR.

Eat real food.

The reasoning behind this philosophy is simple. The human diet has changed drastically in just the last couple hundred years. Although much of this stuff has been considered healthy or harmless from the get-go, it has been because it takes science a while to catch up with these food products to see how they really affect people.

So keep some protein bars in your desk if you want, just don’t eat them every day.

Okay, You Win. Some REAL Healthy Snacks!

Alright, with that all out of the way, I’ll concede that there are legitimate reasons for snacking. First and foremost if you are hungry and don’t have enough time to sit down to a full meal.

If you just need to get some quick fuel before moving on, here are some tips.

Beef jerky, canned sardines, hard-boiled eggs. Perhaps your best option, these energy-dense foods are tasty and healthy. Jerky and sardines (or any other canned fish) are readily available at the supermarket. And you can hard-boil eggs in bulk if you’re a fan of them.

Cut veggies. Here’s one that many people do, but it is not without its problems. The first being that the food doesn’t have many calories and you’ll probably be hungry an hour after eating them. The fibrous vegetables that most people carry along with them for snacks–including carrots, celery, broccoli, and tomatoes–doesn’t have the “oomph” that potatoes and yams do.

They’re still excellent foods, but they won’t really do what most people are looking for–stop their hunger and give them fuel.

The second problem is that most people douse them in sugar- and vegetable oil-filled sauces that completely negate their health benefits such as commercial salad dressings. If this is you, try using a homemade vinaigrette instead.

Nuts and Fruit. Here’s another great option, particularly for when you’re on the go. Fresh fruit such as apples, oranges, and pears can be relatively energy-dense, but don’t shy away from dried fruit, either. They usually travel better and aren’t all crudded up with additional ingredients.

Bagged or canned nuts are easily available, and usually have a good dollar-per-calorie ratio. A lot of people worry about the fructose in fruit or the omega-6 fats in nuts. But as long as you are keeping this stuff as occasional snacks (which you should, ‘cuz I can’t imagine a meal of cashews and bananas), you will be fine.

Cheese, Deli Meat, and Crackers. Again, not the sort of thing that you should be eating a ton of, but WAY better than candy bars and a soda.

Yogurt and Fruit. Another solid option, but buyer beware. You’ll need to make this stuff yourself. The yogurt-with-fruit you’ll find at the supermarket is also loaded up with sugar. Instead, look for plain yogurt that isn’t “low fat” or “fat free.” It might be difficult, but I’ve found most places still carry some full-fat yogurt. Then add some berries and you’re on your way.

Do What Works for You

Ultimately, my goal here isn’t to convince you to NEVER EVER eat another snack ever again, but to challenge you to stop it if you are making yourself do it with the idea that there’s a consensus in the health community about this.

There isn’t.

In fact, the exact OPPOSITE seems to be making headway these days, with intermittent fasting (IF) proponents pushing everyone to drastically decrease the amount of meals they eat.

I tend to kindasorta follow this advice myself, but more so because my crazy schedule means it’s just more convenient to skip a meal or two each day and make up for it with an epic dinner.

But I don’t hold up IF on a pedestal. I think things like eating real food, eating when hungry, stopping when full, and occasionally cheating by eating your favorite foods are far more effective, and they work for the largest amount of people, in other words, these are the “big wins.”

If snacking gives you the results you want while remaining easy to follow, by all means keep it up. But if you struggle with it, just know that there are MANY other strategies that have track records that are just as good.

Are you a snacker? If so, what are some of your favorites?

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