The car in front of me was at a deadstop.

I looked to my left, and then looked to my right. Off to my left, the highway median.  Off to my right, a beat up Honda Civic that was occupied by an obviously aggravated woman, more than likely cursing her luck to be stuck in a massive traffic jam on a Toronto highway on a dreary October afternoon.

Whatever rage that lady was feeling though, I assure you that I was feeling magnitudes more. I was swinging wildly between having heart palpitations and laughing at how stupid the situation I found myself in was. My flight to Atlanta was leaving in 1 hour and 9 minutes… and I hadn’t moved in traffic in almost 10 minutes.

This was a far cry from how I originally saw the plan unravelling. Backtracking a few hours, I was relaxing comfortably with friends, talking excitedly about how cool this business seminar was going to be, and how I was due to meet up with some extremely successful people for dinner as soon as I landed.

As the clock rolled up on 3 hours pre-flight, I said my goodbyes and began the leisurely, fairly traffic-free drive to the aiport, which was about 30 minutes away. I timed this so I could escape the city before all hell broke loose on the highways, a.k.a. rush hour. No problem right?

Somewhere in the next 10 minutes, my mind threw this gem at me…”You have your passport, right..?” Shit. No passport. No passport, no flight.

I could see the dark blue book just sitting at home on my night stand, mocking my forgetfulness. The nightstand which just happened to be a traffic-packed 30 minute drive the other way across the city. I could almost hear my well-laid plans to avoid rush hour burning up in a quick flame.

My optimism was holding strong at this point. I quickly spun the wheel and skidded on to the nearest off-ramp, threw my car around at the lights and shot off in the other direction, my mind deadset on getting to my passport and back to the airport in record time.

The drive back home was going well – I was on pace to have no problems hitting my flight. That’s when I saw it.

A sea of unmoving metal sat dormant in the opposite direction on the highway. It seemed that the only way I was going to get to my flight on time was to ditch my car and hijack a helicopter.

However, that would be highly illegal and unrealistic, so I resorted to plan B after successfuly grabbing my passport and managing to nearly run through my screen door in my haste.

Plan B you ask? Hit the phone. Take the backroads. Call all the Toronto natives I know and pick their brain on traffic flow, quickest routes, etc. Mid-drive of course.

With the urgency in my voice, I probably sounded like I was trying to deliver a woman on birth’s edge to the hospital. Nope, just get to my flight before it left without me.

And you know what? It almost worked.

I was close. Really, really close. I think if I had been flying domestic, I would have been good to go.

After ditching my car who-knows-where in parking (a 45-minute adventure in it’s own right trying to find it on my return to the city), I sprinted in to the building and started pounding on the electronic check-in to hand up my boarding passes. 42 minutes before the flight – I still had a small dash of hope in my heart.

Can’t be found on computer? Rage erupts. Hope dwindles.

I grab a random airport lady strolling past me and demand to know where the hell I get my boarding pass (in a slightly crazed, foaming at the mouth sort of tone feeling like I’m two steps from victory or total annhiliation). She gives me the official score. I lose. Hope destroyed.

Turns out that customs was my death knell. For international flights, you need to be through customs at least one hour before the flight. Officially missed my flight.

Laughing at how frantic and stressful the previous two hours of my life had been, I stroll casually over to the far side of the airport to see if I can charm my way in to the next flight for no charge. Lady does not seem amused with my overly friendly nature. $80. Visa.

It occured to me that missing my flight wasn’t actually that bad. The worst part was the question IF I was going to miss my flight. Once it had been confirmed, I just laughed and said oh well.

Before the confirmation though… I had this giant knot in my stomach, my adrenal glands hurt from the stress hormones being pumped out of them, and I kept imagining the embarrassment of missing my flight.

Here’s why this all turned out awesome though…

The first (least awesome thing) is that Toronto airport has free Wi-Fi, and I proceeded to crank out 4 hours of serious work sitting in the airport with the focus of a demi-god. I have no idea why I was so on, but what would usually take me 10-12 hours I wrapped up in 4. Sweet.

The second (medium awesome thing) happened as I was standing hanging around for my flight. I always love networking with people, so I talk to random people all the time.

As I’m waiting for the announcement of my boarding section, I open up a conversation with this guy who actually turns out to be a pilot and was trying to get on the plane on standby. It was the first pilot I’ve ever spoken with so I started learning quite a bit, it was a neat conversation, albeit a short one as my section gets called. Have a good flight!

Not 5 minutes later, this guy comes strolling down the aisle only to look incredulously at me and joins me in laughing – out of all the free seats he could’ve been assigned, we ended up being paired together.

What proceeded to happen was one of the quickest flights of my life. The two and a half hour flight felt more like 20 minutes.

The guy, who’s name is Brent, ends up being an incredibly cool dude who used to be a 270 lb. football player before slimming down to 185 lbs. and runs ultra-marathons in his spare time.

Over a few beers (thanks Brent!), we run the spectrum of conversation from health and fitness, to psychology and income, all the way to discussing the finer points of atheism. It was really one of the most fascinating conversations I’d ever had.

We land and say our goodbyes as he’s continuing on to New Orleans. Here I am, four hours late, strolling through the massive sprawling complex that is the Atlanta airport around midnight, and that’s when the third thing (totally awesome thing) happens.

I see this guy sitting on a bench gazing pensively at the ground, looking like he was working on some mental math. Something about him looked vaguely familiar, not like I had met him before but someth…Holy shit. “Igor!?” I spout off before my mind takes over.

He looks up, puts on a pleasant smile, and replies with a “Yes?” in an english accent. Confirmed!

I would highly doubt more than a handful of people reading my blog would recognize the name, but this guy is a huge mentor of mine. This is a guy who if a genie granted me a wish to meet only three people in the world, he would without a doubt be in that group.

His name is Igor Ledochovski, and he’s one of the most brilliant hypnotists, marketers, and wealth coaches in the world. And I just bumped into him in a random airport at midnight. Fate? Luck? Missing my flight led me to this? I should miss more flights.

After introducing myself, I end up having an amazing fifteen minute conversation with him as he’s waiting for his girlfriend, and we part as friends and he tells me to contact him if he can ever help me in any way as I do the same.

Was it worth it to miss my flight? Absolutely. Did it all work out in the end? More than I could have ever imagined.

The biggest lesson I pulled from this day of craziness is that it’s not what happens to you in life, but it’s how you choose to react.

And I always had a choice. Once I learned that I would be grounded for another four hours in Toronto, it would’ve been easy to get in a bad mood and curse my luck, get down on myself for being so forgetful, get mad at the airport’s stupid rules.

Where would that have brought me to though? I wouldn’t have been nearly as productive (probably would’ve wasted time watching a movie) and I would’ve been in no mood to open a random conversation or talk so in depth with a stranger.

What’s more, if you pay attention to when you’re feeling in a bad or depressed mood, you typically will close your body language and keep your head down looking at the ground.

I wouldn’t be surprised if, in that mood, I just strolled right past Igor without even noticing him – just assuming he was another random stranger sitting in a strange airport.

Yet, you can always choose to make the best of things.

It’s usually only in hindsight or when you can look at the big picture when you can see the patterns and the connections between how when things seem to be going so wrong, they’re typically part of a larger pattern moving in the right direction.

Things seem to be a “problem” though when you get so zoomed in on the minute, or the hour or even the day. Taken in the context of a year though, is missing a flight that big of a deal? A lifetime? It’s a blip in the radar, with nothing really to be upset about.  All comes down to the choice to see the best in things.

How many times this week did someone tell you that they were going to do something, and proceed not to do it?  Did you assume that would happen – that people would break their promises and commitments so easily and frequently?

This is the realization you should’ve had if you took that quick minute to think: you live in a society where the idea of a commitment is somewhat of a joke.  People everywhere break promises and their word to both themselves and others without a second thought it seems. 

Is it just me who thinks that it’s sad that the person who actually does what they say they’re going to do is remarkable?  Shouldn’t this just be an assumed outcome of someone making a promise or commitment?

Expectations For Yourself and Others

My boundaries for people in my life when it comes to holding and coming through on their commitments are simple.  They have one chance to follow through, and their behaviour and (usually) subsequent excuses will show me exactly what to expect from them in the future. 

Truthfully, I’ll be watching this one chance with a doubtful eye.  After that single chance someone’s word will be assumed useless and just talk unless proven otherwise.   

I mean, it really just comes down to simple extrapolation and logic.  If I can easily see that you can’t keep commitments with yourself, how would I ever trust and take what you say seriously? How can other people in your life?

I gave this self-trust some thought this morning as I was laying in my cozy, warm bed after a rough three hour sleep and my alarm humming at me.  I didn’t have to be up for another few hours, but I told myself last night that I would 100% unstoppably be at my computer first thing in the morning to write for an hour… and here I am. 

It would’ve been so easy to just stay on the warm covers and convince myself that I would do it later… but I knew that was coming.  I knew the two tricks that the mind likes to play.  I’ll probably write-up more in depth on them in a bit, but I’ll give a quick sentence on each.

Rationalization – this happens ALL THE TIME.  Your mind will basically make up an excuse, reason, or justification for not doing something, even if you decided before it would be in your best interests.  You basically trick yourself.  Pay attention, you will be fooled time and time again, even if you’re watching out for this.

Tired Realization - this happens when you start thinking in a new direction, reading new material, or trying to act with a new behaviour.  Your brain is trying to calibrate to this new paradigm and, because it takes so much work, gets lazy.  This is where you start something new and about five minutes in, leads to “Oh, wow I didn’t realize how tired I am, I should probably take a nap.”

Just push through and within about ten minutes you won’t feel tired, but for those ten minutes you will be utterly convinced that you’re sleep deprived.  The brain is pretty persuasive.   

Human Nature In Action  

The last five years of my life has been a very in-the-trenches education about business, psychology and human behaviour as I’ve started, grown, sold, and even failed with multiple businesses.  As I’ve gone through these experiences and matured in my own views on human nature, it’s my opinion and expectation now that perhaps one out of ten people will do what they say they’re going to do, and that number may be on the high side.

For most people, there’s no honour, pledge, or allegiance to making a commitment.  There’s no iron-clad seal of “this shit will get done”-edness from them.  The attitude I get from most people who want to make a serious change in their life is almost a laissez-faire shrug, more of a “We’ll see what happens.”

Sure, the words may be there on paper or hanging in the air after they’ve told you what they want.  They may tell you that they want this more than anything, of how hard they’re going to work for it… but the conviction behind the words is lacking. There’s no fire in their voice or blaze of unstoppable intent in their eyes.

Surround Yourself With The Right People

The people I surround myself with, the ones that I emulate and model habits from, the ones I strive to internalize their mindsets… these are a different breed.

These are people who when they say they’re going to do something, they do it.  When they’ve put their word on the fact that something will get done, you can damn well expect it will be done.  It’s not just the note of conviction in their voice that leads you to this conclusion, but the congruency of their actions. 

They follow up and follow through on things every single time.  And that builds a hell of a lot of trust, both in business and in life. 

They’re free of the seeming pandemic of vomiting up an alibi or an excuse every time the going gets tough.  What they’re flooded with is the ability to put their heads down and soldier through the inevitable difficulties or obstacles that come up for them, and keep moving forward no matter what.

Don’t Compare Yourself To The Masses

It all starts with your personal commitment to being excellent in what you do and separating yourself from the mediocre majority.   If you can keep your promises to yourself, if you can steady your hand when the going gets tough and force yourself into a bit of discomfort as it’s needed, you will be far ahead of the pack.

Our society is built around comfort, ease, and minimizing critical thinking and hard work.  Most human beings are so mentally weak that the moment they need to double down and soldier through some tough stuff to get to a better end goal, they quit.  They give up on their dreams at the very first sign of tough. 

No wonder most people are so broke.  So out of shape.  So unhappy with life.  They have one long line of guilt-filled failures.  If you say you’re going to do something, and then proceed to not do it, guess who sees that every single time.  You do.

Whatever gets reinforced, you will get more of.  What gets ignored, gets reinforced to be ignored in the future.  What gets reinforced, gets encouraged to happen again in the future.  Whatever action you take, is more likely to be taken again - Basic Behavioural Psychology Principle in the 1950s and onwards (supported by current neuroscience research)

This is exactly what happens when you break your promises to yourself.  You set-up the precedent and give yourself permission to do it again.  This is why being 100% draconian and unyielding with yourself is so important.  One slip and the flood gates can open for the excuses to rush in to drown your dreams. 

Is this what you want from your life? Total weakness and nobody able to rely on you? Then carry on with your word being meaningless because you never back it up with action. 

Yet if you see the truth in these words, either if they make you angry or you find yourself nodding your head knowing that you need to up your game in this area, then do it.

Pick an area of improvement.  Pick a skill.  Pick anything.  Practice it for 30 minutes a day, and 100% promise yourself that this will get done.  It’s non-negotiable.  It’s inevitable. 

Expect your mind to try to play tricks on you and tell you that you’re too tired.  It’s a TRICK that the mind likes to play when you are pushing through an obstruction that’s previously held you back or trying on a new way of thinking. 

Solider on.  Keep your head down and push forward through the exhaustion and weakness.  Create the burning intent to see this through.  Keep your promises to yourself, and keep them to others.  This habit will take you further and farther in life than you could ever expect, and help you filter out people who don’t deserve your time, energy or attention very quickly.    

Beyond the very extreme of fatigue, distress and frustration, we may find amounts of ease and power we have never dreamed ourselves to own because we never push through the obstruction – William James

This post will be long enough so I won’t rehash in depth what I already covered in my last post where I go into detail about the main reasons that I ended up stopping the Warrior Diet.  Here’s a quick summary though just to give some context to this post:

• My sleep was affected because I was forced into eating too late for a variety of reasons.
• My digestion suffered due to stress and other factors, and I wasn’t absorbing a lot of the food I was eating
• My energy and testosterone levels, while initially great, steadily fell due to not absorbing as much food as I should be.

After really giving some thought to these considerations, and making significant changes to tailor my own eating, here’s the changes I would definitely make if I gave the Warrior Diet meal plan another run through.

1. Add Fermented Foods

During the undereating portion, I would add in some fermented foods like sauerkraut, kimchi, or japanese natto.  Two or three forkfuls would be enough (per day).

The reasoning behind this is the various compounds in these foods that heavily improve digestion and food absorption due to improving your gut flora/bacteria.  This is incredibly important since you have only a small window of opportunity to make use of the foods that you’re ingesting at night, so you need to squeeze as much nutrition as possible out of these foods.

2. Time Fat Soluble Vitamins Properly

If you’re taking a multivitamin (which you should be!) don’t take it during the day.  I was taking True Protein’s 3-a-day multivitamin and taking it with each of my three small undereating meal.

My issue  was that I would really struggle to absorb the fat soluble nutrients in the multivitamin as the undereating meals didn’t have much fat (only a few grams from fish oil).  Realistically, a lot of the multivitamin wasn’t being absorbed and I may have ended up with some micronutrient gaps in my diet. This could’ve easily been a contributing factor in the drop in energy and testosterone levels I saw.  Not the whole story, but a contributor.

3. Focus On Food Quality, Not Quantity

Since stopping the warrior diet, I’ve switched all my meats to grass-fed, organic sourced meats from a farm about an hour away that I drive up to every month to get my order. I’ve noticed a huge positive change in my well-being, hormone levels, and energy.

Previously, anytime I had red meat I would feel well-fed, but fairly low energy and lethargic after.  I was always buying my meat at a local chain grocery store, and because I was going for calories, would often opt for the fattier cuts.

This is a major issue because the fat is exactly where all of the shit generated from manufacturing like dioxins, antibiotics, and hormones hang out, and I was eating a LOT of fatty meat.  Not only that, but grocery store meat has a much more skewed omega 6 to omega 3 ratio, whereas farm raised meat is much more balanced.

In plain english, this means that the grocery store meat causes more inflammation and damage to you than farm meat, especially in an overeating situation.  After further research on environmental estrogens, xenoestrogens, and phytoestrogens, I made some massive changes to my food sources, with meat being my first major change.

4. Focus On Eliminating All Foods That Cause Systemic Inflammation

The paleolithic dieting philosophy is pretty big news lately, and for good reason – it’s helped a ton of people get leaner, stronger and healthier.  Whether you subscribe to this philosophy or not, the biggest lesson to take from the plan is to eliminate causes of system inflammation in the body.

If you haven’t been exposed to this way of eating or recent research, I’ll sum it up for you in two sentences.  Certain foods we eat are relatively “new” to the human body, and because we’re not adapated to eating them, they cause stress and damage to the digestive tract and lower digestive capacity, food absorption, and micronutrient absorption.

By clearing away some of these foods (common ones for bodybuilders or athletes would be oatmeal, pasta, breads and cereals) you’ll find you’re a lot less bloated, energy levels go up, and you’ll perform better in the long run.  My top two paleo sites to check out if you need food recommendations or want to know more about this would be www.marksdailyapple.com and www.robbwolf.com

5. Pay Attention To Reactions To Certain Foods

A second angle on the issue of digestive stress is food sensitivities and food allergies.  Eating too much of one food, especially if it’s always cooked the same way, can lead to your body developing a low level allergy and sensitivity to it.

As an example, month after month for several years, my breakfast was 4-6 sunny side up eggs with a big bowl of oatmeal to the side.  After learning about food sensitivities and allergies, I began paying attention to the first 5-45 minutes after eating foods commonly in my diet.

Turned out that within a few minutes of consuming eggs, my nose started to run.  Every time.  Solution?

I took eggs out of my diet for a month.  No eggs, nothing egg based, no egg white protein.

Then I added them back in, but alternated the cooking methods.  Scrambled, fried, poached, hard boiled, and even raw in shakes.  I can now eat them every day with no issues.

This is another benefit of getting your meat from the farm.  No longer am I stuck with boring chicken and beef over and over again, but have access to lamb, elk, bison, turkey, pork, venison, ostrich, kangaroo, and whatever else is in stock.

Rotating my meats seems to give the body a better absorption percentage and prevents developing any food sensitivies or allergies that will inevitably cause systemic inflammation and lower digestive capacity (the LAST thing we want on a meal plan where we only have one shot a day to make the nutrients count!!!)

6. Assume Adrenal Fatigue and Support Accordingly

As you and I live in a chronically high stress society, we’re constantly pumping out hormones that put stress and strain on our organs.  When it comes to optimal hormone function and muscle gaining capacity, you have to take care of these guys.

The hormone organ that I found to get most beaten down during the Warrior Diet is the adrenal glands, which are responsible for releasing adrenaline, noradrenaline, cortisol and aldosterone, all hormones relating to the fight or flight response.

If the adrenal glands are suppressed or have gotten beat down too much, a few things will happen.  Sex drive suffers pretty quickly, energy levels drop, sleep quality can drop, your capacity to gain muscle will decrease (as optimal nervous system output in the gym will suffer), and your overall motivation and drive to succeed will probably be stifled.  All things you probably want to avoid!

So agreeing that we have to take care of the adrenal glands and other organs, how do we go about it?  Here’s some suggestions from my own recovery.

6.1. Don’t Go To Failure In The Gym Every Set

Even though it’s fun to grind out those last few reps with your favourite music blaring in your ears, it doesn’t do your nervous system or adrenal glands any favours.  If you’re already stressed and underslept, this point is especially important for you.  Leave a rep in the tank for most sets.

If you focus on making consistent strength gains, you should still be able to make some pretty significant progress even without going to failure, and the progress will be MUCH more consistent because your body won’t burn out.

6.2. Optimize Your Sleep Patterns

Here’s an article I wrote awhile back to help with perfecting sleep patterns.  Certain hormone release and organ recovery is at its peak during deep sleep.  By being chronically sleep deprived, you will really be limiting how much muscle you can put on or how much fat you can burn off, and you’ll wreak havoc with your recovery, energy levels, and hormone levels.

6.3. Keep Workouts Under 60 Minutes

After a workout there’s a nice increase in insulin sensitivity for the body, which means that even if you go heavy at night with the carbs, you’ll be a lot less prone to storing fat.  There’s two ways you can use this fact to your advantage: either do more frequent but lower volume workouts, and/or have your higher carbohydrate days on days that you workout as a form of carb cycling.

The second benefit to shorter workouts is that cortisol, a stress hormone designed to break down tissue (including muscle) for use in a fight or flight response, starts to rise dramatically after roughly an hour in the gym.  If you keep cortisol lower, you’ll find that you recover more quickly, put less stress on the adrenal glands, and ultimately get better results.

6.4. Get Stressful People Out Of Your Life

If you have stressful people out of your life, be 100% honest with yourself about what you want and what you expect out of others in your life.  Set some standards.  If they don’t meet them, have a talk with them.

Anybody who consistently spikes your stress hormones or doesn’t make you feel positive and pumped up is someone who you should NOT be spending hours and hours associating with.

6.5. Use Adaptogenic Herbs

There’s some pretty cool research on traditional Chinese medicine when it comes to supplements and adrenal support.

Two supplements that I’ve found to be quite effective in stimulating the adrenal glands and supporting their function is Licorice Root Tea and Ashwaghanda Root.  Adaptogenic herbs are best rotated to achieve the best effect, and there’s many more than these two but they seemed to work best for me.

I ran them in 30-day rotations, starting with the Ashwaghanda Root at 500 mg dosing first thing in the morning on an empty stomach, and then after 30-days rotating to having the Licorice Root Tea as a pre-bed ritual that I would simmer with a cinnamon stick for some extra taste and health benefit.  I actually got so used to this ritual that I had to switch out to another herbal tea because I found it was super relaxing before bed to have some.

7. Stick To The Plan (Especially The First 30 Days!)

I found if I got out of the groove (for example a few months after I started the plan, I went to Las Vegas for a 4 or 5 day trip and ate normally), it was a good amount of willpower needed to get back in the zone.  When I got back from Vegas it just seemed to take a whole lot more mental energy to do the same amount of eating prep and avoiding certain foods that I was doing on autopilot before I left.

If you’re going to do it, do it.  Don’t second guess, don’t try to tweak things when you’re not even a week in.  In short, do your research, create the plan, then execute.  Don’t screw around with it until you have some tangible feedback on how it’s working with your body AFTER the adaptation stage (which will take a week to two weeks for your body to get used to this style of eating), and then letting it do it’s work.  Wait at least four weeks before making changes.

8. You Have A 4-Hour Window – Use It 

When I look at eating logs or people trying the diet, often times as soon as their window opens, they stuff themselves in an hour or hour and a half.  You do have four hours, so it’s okay to space things out.

A very cool effect on this diet is when you break the fast or undereating portion, you will literally feel your metabolism jacking up.  Meat sweats have nothing on breaking a Warrior Diet fast! Use that blast furnace of a metabolism and stoke it continually over the 4 hour window rather than smothering all immediately.

9. What To Eat And When To Eat It

As far as nutrient importance, that’s going to ultimately come down to your personal goals, but I’ll assume it’s probably putting on some muscle while burning some fat in problem areas.

In that case, you’ll likely want to highlight most of your protein in the first chunk of the meal (I think 100-150g of protein is plenty at this meal.  If you’re abiding by the above tips on absorption, food quality, and avoiding foods that trigger food allergies or systemic inflammation, you should be golden.)  This protein should be WHOLE FOOD, with a good quality meat being ideal.

The first chunk of the window can be a more balanced meal with green veggies, healthy fats, and a good infusion of carbs.  The only carbs that I would really suggest (and to really limit any digestion issues, or lots of fat gain) would be root vegetables like sweet potatoes or parsnips.

Sweet potatoes done up in the oven just wrapped in tinfoil are my favourite – delicious and no clean up! Note that you can get a ton of different varieties of sweet potatoes at Asian markets.  Although I eat a lot of orange ones, there’s one’s that are beige, white, and even purple (another favourite)!  All of these are a good carb source, but rotating them is also a great idea because they contain a bunch of different antioxidants and nutrients.

After this first portion is done, if you really want to optimize digestion and nutrient absorption, I would go for a 15 or 20 minute short walk to help stimulate proper glucose transportation.  Prior to the walk I would also eat a selection of the foods listed in the next section that help stimulate digestion.

After an hour or hour and a half wait, I would repeat with some smaller slightly portions.  Some healthy protein, healthy fats, more carbs if you want, and definitely add in some green veggies to aid digestion.

10.  Use Digestive Enzymes or Whole Foods That Help Digestion 

If you’ve ever gone to a Brazilian Steakhouse (my absolute favourite type of restaurant by the way, basically all you can eat meat), most of them serve grilled pineapple with the meat servings.  There’s a reason for this – pineapple contains a digestive enzyme called bromelain which can dramatically help breakdown meat and increase nutrient absorption.

Turns out there are a few other foods like this.  Papaya has a similar enzyme called papain that can stimulate this digestion.  I hate the taste of papaya so would personally opt for papaya extract capsules if I was going this route, but some people like it.

Ginger is another potent digestive aid.  You can use shredded ginger to intelligently spice up a salad, use pickled ginger like you find at most sushi restaurants (that’s the faded pink stuff they give out with the wasabi), or try some of the herbal ginger teas you can find at any health food stores.

If pressed for time, the easiest solution compared to dicing up some fresh pineapple is to just grab some digestive enzymes from a health food store or online.  I opt for the whole food route myself (using pineapple and ginger), but have heard great things about the NOW brand of digestive enzymes.

Hammer it in your head that it’s not what you EAT but what you ABSORB that is going to lead to optimal results, so make sure your digestion is keyed in.

11. Don’t Eat Shit and Justify It By Saying “I Need the Calories”

Eating crappy quality foods, sugars or heavily processed shit is going to heavily impair your progress.  This stuff slogs down your digestion, impairs your immune system, and is a quick way to stress out the digestive tract, dampening your nutrient absorption is quick fashion.

If you need calories, the easiest route is usually packing in quality foods – opt for fattier cuts of meat, whole eggs, use healthy oils on everything, coconut products, and nut butters.  There’s no short cuts though – if you need the calories, it does take work!

Again, if you’re using all of the above tips, your absorption capacity should be pretty much maxed out, and you will end up actually needing to eat less calories to grow.

Even before the Warrior Diet, I always hated being in a weight gain phase because I would need to pack down well over 5,000 calories day after day to make the scale budge, and I really had no appetite.

After learning what I’m sharing in this article, it turns out that my digestive health was absolutely terrible.  When I would go out of my way to eat some cookies or ice cream and then justify it as extra needed calories, it was just causing the problem to become worse.  Clean it up!

12. Don’t Lose Sight of Why This Works

I see the Warrior Diet as more of a flexible framework of eating rather than a strict, set-in-stone protocol.  There’s lots of ways to get results on this plan, so don’t get stuck in thinking that because I said something, or someone else said that there was a certain way to do it that it’s the best.  Especially in the last few weeks as I’ve seen a certain website try to cash in on this intermittent fasting/Warrior Diet trend by pushing supplements and saying that without them, you would fail!

This way of eating works because of a few reasons.

12.1. Optimizes Anabolic/Catabolic Timing

It’s tapping into the natural rhythm of the anabolic and catabolic rhythms of the body.  Unless you’re on a boatload of steroids, you’re never going to be building muscle on a 24/7 basis.  There are certain times of the day, most strongly in the evening and first part of sleep, where you are most anabolic, and this diet helps make those environments of strong anabolism even stronger.

12.2. Rebound Effect

It utilizes the rebound effect of increased nutrient absorption and protein synthesis following a period of fasting or undereating.  This helps add to those anabolic time periods by ensuring an awesome flood of nutrients.

12.3. Quality and Absorption

You’re getting enough high quality food and have optimized your digestion to the point of being able to absorb a high amount of it to be used.

In Closing…

If the previous 3,000+ words didn’t satisfy your taste for the Warrior Diet, you’re either dramatically overanalyzing things, or just a mere spectator to this way of eating and haven’t actually tried it yourself.  Please don’t ask the ‘What if’ questions – what you’re really asking if you ask that is ‘Will it work for ME’ and the answer I would give you is – I have no idea, go try it!

Let’s get the dialogue rolling in the comments section.  Have you tried the Warrior Diet yet? Struggles? Success stories?

Early last year I woke up one morning fed up and frustrated with the traditional bodybuilding dogma of having to eat at least 6 meals a day.  The day in and day out meal preparation, cooking, eating, and cleaning was wearing me down.  The constant time spent in the kitchen and at the dinner table started to feel more like a job and less like a privilege… and the whole nutrition aspect of gaining muscle was becoming a massive struggle for me when I had to balance it with university exams, income generation and my social life, all while ensuring I got my workouts in.

Feeling that there must be a better way, I started researching eating strategies that would still get me significant results, but would solve my problem of being a slave to the kitchen.  Within two weeks of research, I settled on a brand new eating strategy that completely went against most of what I believed was gospel as far as proper nutrition went for gaining and maintaining muscle.

My New Eating Strategy

The way of eating was called the Warrior Diet, which calls for a 20-hour period of near fasting or very light eating (under 800 calories) and a 4-hour window of mass overeating or feasting.  The basic premise behind why the diet was effective came down to a few major benefits, in addition to freeing you from the kitchen all day.

Most importantly, the diet was a way of optimizing hormone function and ensured a solid anabolic window every day at the time just prior to when most muscle growth takes place.  This meant that you could take advantage of naturally alternating periods of muscle gaining and fat loss throughout the day. Sounded good to me!

If you’ve never heard of this style of eating, you can read more on my very first post about it where I detail out my entire Warrior Diet meal plan.  There are 3 or 4 subsequent updates as well.  This post is what you could call a final delayed update.  I actually discontinued this site for a year as I was working on a project that was taking up most of my time, but DIDN’T discontinue the Warrior Diet until about 8 months in.

First Post Back

Now that I’ve created some more free time and energy back in my life, I’m going to be working incredibly hard to make this site an awesome resource for you when it comes to physical and psychological development.  I’m going to start by giving a debriefing on my final months of the Warrior Diet – the months that I haven’t blogged about yet or told anyone much about, but months that I still receive multiple e-mails every day asking about!

The last update saw me looking at putting this area of my life on autopilot.  The diet was simple to follow, I was getting tremendous results, feeling great, and by all measures, the experiment was a total success.

The Decision To Stop

The first worrisome sign showed up about six months into the eating plan.  Turns out my testosterone levels had steadily been dropping, and after a few weeks of having extremely low energy levels (I seriously thought I had mono or some other major sickness!) and having absolutely no sex drive, I went and got a full blood panel done, and was told that my testosterone levels were decimated.  As my doctor explained it to me and I later researched up on to verify, my levels were somewhere a 65 year old’s average testosterone level should be (multiple tests brought me in around 200+ ng/dl, and never more than 300 ng/dl until I made some major changes).

This led to me having a bit of a theory based on my experiences that short-term, intermittent fasting such as Eat Stop Eat style has a beneficial effect on testosterone and anabolic hormone function.  However, when you have an extended period of fasting, the body may respond by cutting down on hormonal production due to the significant stress response placed on the body.

What this means for you, is that over time with the Warrior Diet you MAY see a bit of a reduction in testosterone, leading to less muscle gain over time.  I have thought of a few fixes of this problem however, which I’ll lay out in a follow up post.

Ectomorphs, Testosterone, and the Warrior Diet

This theory would apply more for ectomorphs or naturally skinny people like myself, probably because the central nervous system in an ectomorphic body type typically has a lower capacity or threshold for dealing with stressors compared to mesomorphic or endomorphic body types (this is a generalization however, individual differences are pretty significant).

There are a few studies (here’s one) that show short-term fasting can cause a reduction in serum testosterone, but most of the studies I found really aren’t that relevant for a fit, athletic population.  Case in point, the study I linked to was looking at the effects of fasting on an obese population.  An obese person has an insanely different hormone profile and stuff going on internally than a fit, healthy person, enough so that this study could be argued to be useless for our purposes depending how you look at it.

Personal survival would theoretically trump reproduction in terms of biological survival, and while eating under the Warrior Diet style, your body’s sympathetic nervous system is kicked on high gear ( also known as the fight or flight system). The only study I’ve found that’s looked somewhat into this was one in which a non-lifting population had their testosterone levels studied during the month of Ramadan (here), and there wasn’t a ton of change either way, but the study was done on middle-distance runners so isn’t really that generalized for our purposes either.

Based on the hormonal resources used in fight or flight, let’s just say that running away from a bad ass Sabretooth tiger would overshadow sexy time.  This is more of a theory based on what I experienced, as far as I can find there have been no long term studies on this style of eating and hormonal levels in a strength training population.  I’m just running off what I noticed personally, so take the above theory critically, and if you have anything to add or dispute about it, I’d love to hear more in the comments.

An alternative explanation is that my body fat dropped below a certain threshold where anabolism is at its peak.  You do actually need a little bit of fat on your body for peak anabolic hormone production (in the range of 9-13%).

Because of the Warrior Diet’s super potent ability to burn body fat, especially with my ectomorphic body type, I was absolutely shredded and able to maintain it easily.  Nice on the eyes, probably not the best situation for optimal hormone function.

Interestingly, a few months after discontinuing the Warrior Diet, I more than tripled my testosterone levels using a variety of different strategies which I’ll share in some future posts.  Even if you don’t have low testosterone, you’ll want to read those posts because you can definitely apply them to begin packing on muscle much more quickly than you are right now, no matter how you’re eating.

Why You Need to Pay Attention to Digestive Stress

The second event that crippled the Warrior Diet for me was when I went through some very stressful things in my life in regards to family situations and relationships.  I don’t know about you, but my digestive capacity gets totally destroyed when I’m stressed.

Without any hard weight training or overeating, it’s likely my body would stabilize around 155 or 160 pounds, which means that my digestive tract is designed for someone eating the quantity of food around that weight.

At the time I was sitting around 205 pounds and eating a TON of food.  Throw a massive truckload of stress into my life, and my digestive capacity quickly crashed.  This meant that I couldn’t absorb or use much of the food I was eating in my feast window, and within a week’s time my energy and mood was way below normal.  My reasoning behind this was that I likely wasn’t getting enough nutrients from that window to support my body’s needs.

Feast Meal Time Too Late? Issues!

The final nail in the coffin for my Warrior Diet experiment was when my work schedule went from finishing up relatively early, around 5 or 6 p.m., to where I would sometimes be finishing up around 9 or 10 p.m.  If you’ve never tried the Warrior Diet for a few weeks, you won’t really get what I’m talking about, but something magical happens after these meals.  Your body almost feels like it’s on fire, your protein synthesis is up, your absorbing food like crazy, and basically your metabolism just races.  Within the first hour or two of this meal, sleeping is brutal because you overheat extremely easily.

After getting home, cooking and eating my feast meal, I was getting to bed WAY too late and started to build up a good chunk of sleep debt, which has a pretty significant negative effect on hormones as well.

Benefits For The Natural Lifter

The reason I’ve highlighted hormones so much in this post is that hormone optimization is really the biggest physiologic benefit to the Warrior Diet.  This is especially important if you’re a natural lifter like me who doesn’t resort to prohormones or steroids to help your muscle gains.  You and I need to take every advantage our body will give us in terms of maximizing testosterone levels, enhancing protein synthesis, and capping out our muscle building capacity.

The problems seep in when you start to affect this hormonal output through other major routes, namely stress, sleep, and meal timing.

That being said, if I had to do it all over again (and I may do it again soon for all of the reasons I tried it in the first place – energy, fat burning, freedom from the kitchen, etc.) there’s a list of main changes I would make to make the Warrior Diet work in spite of the problems I highlighted above.

The next post you can look forward to me dishing up later next week is a 3,000+ word monster on a list of tweaks and fixes to iron out the problems I ran into following the diet long term.  Everything from food selection, meal timing, digestion, stress, and sleep control will be covered to ensure you get the best out of the Warrior Diet meal plan should you choose to give it a try or you’re a seasoned WDer.

If you’re not following the Warrior Diet and doing something more traditional with more frequent eating, you’ll definitely want to check out the post as well because there will be some major tips in there that apply to ANY eating strategy.

I know a lot of people are finding my site from Google looking for the Warrior Diet, whereas you might have just stumbled on here and are curious about an alternative way of eating, so let’s get some discussion rolling.  Have you tried it? How long for? Did you experience any other problems than the ones I mentioned in the post?

If you’ve ever told yourself one of the following, this video is for you:

• “I’ll do it tomorrow”
• “Maybe I’ll do it someday”
• “I’ll just wait a bit before doing it”
• “I’ll just do X before doing it”
• “I’ll do it later today”

Check this out…

Passive optimism is subtle.  It’s so subtle that you have to pay VERY CLOSE attention to the thoughts in your mind to see it at work.  Again, passive optimism is the belief or feeling that things will get better over time, even though you aren’t doing anything to act upon it.

It’s this psychological perspective that gives you hope.  Hope is the feeling you get when you don’t like the feeling you’ve got.

I can’t remember where I read this, but someone compared Hope to the drug opium, and called it “Hopeium”.  Lame as hell, but still true.

Many people will use hope to give themselves PERMISSION to act stupidly in the moment and justifying their emotionally-driven decisions.  Then they end up getting addicted to hope and their lives keep getting worse and worse.

Take shopping for example.

“OH, that TV is nice… but I just don’t think I can afford it.  Well, I’ll probably get that promotion at work, so maybe if I just finance it I can get it.  Yeah, it would look reaalll good sitting up on the wall.  Yeah, I’ll definitely get that promotion, this will only add like $25 onto my monthly payments, that’s nothing.  Let’s get it”

^^^^^^

DOES THIS SOUND REALLY STUPID TO YOU TOO?

Me too… the scary thing is that this is HOW PEOPLE THINK!  People actually go through this process in their minds about almost every single buying decision.  Buying completely on emotion and justifying it with flawed logic to make themselves feel better.

No wonder most people struggle so much with finances and health.

Take chocolate cake for another example.

“Oh, that chocolate cake looks really good.  I bet it just tastes delicious.  Look at the frosting on top, that’ll taste super good too.  I probably shouldn’t… but I’ll work it off in the gym tomorrow.  It’s probably only like 200 or 300 calories, that’s just a bit of cardio.  Wow, this is going to taste so good.  And I can definitely afford it, I’ve been working hard, I’ve been so stressed, this is definitely what I deserve. Om nom nom.”

Passive optimism in full swing right there.  Keep that up and that chocolate cake devourer will soon be an obesity statistic.

Burn it into your mind that things happen NOW. Right now.  The moment you’re sitting in right now.  That’s the only place you can change, the only place you can make decisions that build you up rather than tear you down.

I hardly do any reading over on T-Muscle since a majority of their articles are filled with a lot of hype, product placement, and terrible advice for the average lifter. That being said, there was a study done over there over the last few months that produced some REALLY neat articles on how we should go about gaining muscle.

This is the first study I’ve seen of this depth. The researcher measured the electrical activity (amount of activation) in certain muscles during specific exercises, and he did this with literally hundreds of exercises, mostly used by bodybuilders and powerlifters.

What that means is that we now have a really good understanding (not complete, but good) of what sort of exercises we can use for the best muscle activation which should translate into better muscle growth.

I explain more in this video and give you my thoughts on the articles. All of the articles are linked underneath the video, and I would definitely encourage you to read them yourself after you watch this video! There’s some awesome information in there.

P.S. If you’re still wondering, “Okay, I have these exercises, how do I put them together?”, this article will give you some more insight – Here’s Why You’re Failing At Gaining Muscle Mass.

Here are the links mentioned in the video:

Best Shoulders and Traps Exercises (and explanation of data)

Best Ab Exercises

Best Chest and Triceps Exercises

Best Back and Biceps Exercises

Best Leg, Glute, and Calf Exercises

Valeo Ab Wheel

I wanted to update you on a new 30-day trial that I started late last week.

I have been blown away from the results so far…

I honestly don’t think my video gets across how well this daily journaling works.  If you sit down and you’re feeling crappy, and get ALL of the stuff out of your head, and elaborate on it (how you feel about it, what you can do about it, etc.) you start to get this awesome feeling inside of you.

It’s almost like, by doing this one thing, you’re able to control pretty much any emotion and get some perspective on it.

And here’s the kicker:

It’s so ridiculously easy.  I just open up a Word document and type away.  I don’t try to judge what’s coming out of my head, I just try to get it ALL OUT.

If you’re sitting there and thinking about something, literally type out the voice in your head, whatever it’s saying.  It will have some very profound effects on how you perceive your situation.  You’ll also start to get some surprise solutions that almost just bubble to the surface and end up in front of you on the document.

P.S. You can also password protect word documents if security is an issue for you.  I just find typing is MUCH quicker than writing, and that you’re able to get more of your thoughts out in a shorter amount of time which leads to more clarity.

P.P.S. Do it.

My other big news is my first role as a fitness model… and it’s one with the potential for a LOT of exposure, which is very cool!

Check out this short vid, then let me know what your goals are for the summer!

If you’re someone who works out consistently, have you ever wondered how many of the supplements that get promoted to you endlessly are actually worth the money?  The truth is, most aren’t.  I put together this video to show you what exactly I use in my day-to-day training, and give you my thoughts on what I think both beginners to the gym and advanced trainees can look at using.

Let me know in the comments below if you have any other supplements you’ve used that have worked well for you!

Most of the supplements in the video in the sketchy white bottles were purchased at http://www.trueprotein.com – use discount code STM616 at checkout for 5% off your entire order!  Sick of paying for expensive labels?  Check it out. 

List of Supplements Discussed:
- Whey / Micellar Casein – Protein Powder
- Fish Oil Capsules
- Total 3-A-Day
- Creatine
- Taurine
- Melatonin
- GABA
- Sleep Capsules
- Chlorophyll
- Super GREENS
- Cissus Quadrangularis

Anything else you want my thoughts on?  Anything you’ve used with success?  Comment below!