How to get a sixpack: 6 brutal reality checks

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

00:07 1: Why are you fatter than you would like?

02:12 2: Fat loss will never last without sustainable lifestyle change

04:20 3: You cannot improve your self-control

06:11 My Online PT Course

06:35 4: F*ck your goals and your long term plans

08:43 5: The most popular diet advice is what people want to hear, not what they need to hear

10:57 6: Being shredded feels like shit

13:16 Outro

Transcript:

If you want to get six pack lean there are six brutal realities you have to face.

To start with: why are you fatter than you would like? It’s not the chemicals in your food. Food processing and the addition of chemicals have a marginal effect on the macronutrient composition of food, meaning the energy density stays the same. It’s also not your hormones. Even the most metabolically active hormone, thyroid hormone, has at best a 5 to 10% on your total daily energy expenditure, even when you take someone from the lower to the upper end of the range. It’s also not because you are metabolically damaged, or because you have some set point inside you that is forcing you back to the same body fat percentage no matter what you do. We have extensively researched this in one of our publications on metabolic damage, and we found even in malnourished populations, people literally being starved to death, women with anorexia and people living in absolute poverty, there are no signs of metabolic damage.

There is metabolic adaptation. And it is a brutal reality that the leaner you get, the more hunger you will face and the lower your energy expenditure will become. However, these adaptations are transient. If you regain the fat your metabolism bounces back up. These adaptations are also not so large that they make it impossible to get lean. It’s a little bit more difficult for some people than others, but everyone can get lean. And ultimately, the only true reason that you are not yet as lean as you would like is – you. You are the reason that you are fatter than you would like. The sooner you accept this, the sooner you can start taking the actions that will get you the results that you want, instead of finding reasons not to take these actions.

Psychological research strongly supports that people with a so-called internal locus of control are more successful at basically everything in life, including getting lean. Accepting that you are the master of your own fate should give you a sense of empowerment that will help you take the actions you need to achieve your goals. By the way, you’ll see fewer references than usual in this video because we’re looking at a more big picture of you, and we touch on a lot of topics without going into major detail on any one of them. You can find all the references for the claims that I make in this video in my book: “The Science of Self-control”. There are over 500 scientific references in there.

Reality check number two. Fat loss will never last without sustainable lifestyle change. Most people do not manage to keep off the fat that they lost. Most people yoyo diet getting back to the same body fat percentage within a matter of months or a best years. The reason for that is not because there’s some evil set point inside you that is preventing you from staying lean. The reason is much simpler: Most people go back to the lifestyle that got them to that body fat percentage to begin with. Any changes you make to your diet, your physical activity level, your food choices, if they don’t last and you go back to the old food choices and the old activity level that you had then nature will mercilessly put you back at the same body fat percentage. Because thermodynamics, the laws of physics, are so predictable that we can calculate quite exactly, based on someone’s energy intake and someone’s energy expenditure, what body fat percentage they will long term gravitate to.

And yes, this also goes for Ozempic and GLP-1 agonists. People that stop taking these medications just to revert back to the same body fat percentage, if they haven’t made sustainable lifestyle changes. The drug makes them less hungry, so they eat less of the same foods when the hunger returns and in fact goes up as they get leaner, they start eating more again, they go back to the energy intake that got them to the body fat percentage that they used to be at, and guess what? They go back to the same body fat percentage. Long term, all that matters is calories in versus calories out. This means that you shouldn’t be asking yourself – what can I do this cut or right now to get leaner? What you should be asking yourself is – how can I make long term changes to my food choices and activity level that increase my energy expenditure and decrease my energy intake? So find lean foods that you like and activities that you like, and incorporate more of those into your life.

I’d note that research finds that adding good things in your life has a much stronger positive effect than trying to subtract negatives. So typically, it’s much easier for people to eat more broccoli with a meal than to eat less pizza. When you add more broccoli to the meal and you force them to first have their filler, their broccoli, then they will intuitively end up eating less pizza. But if you tell them eat less pizza, then this costs self-control and it makes it a lot harder to stick with the diet, people feel deprived.

Speaking of self-control, reality check number three is that you cannot improve your self-control. Many studies have looked at whether it’s possible with training to improve your self-control. Any improvements that we see are completely domain specific. So you can get better at doing one thing, but in general, your innate general sense of self-control does not improve. And this has major implications for how you should structure your diet. What most people do in a diet is they try to white knuckle it and try to do better. “Just do better.” It doesn’t work because your self-control does not improve simply with experience, and self-control is in fact not like a muscle that you just exercise and it gets stronger over time. What happens is that you keep falling for the same mistakes.

For example, if you live in a household where there is a lot of junk food readily visible, then you can tell yourself, I’m just not going to eat the junk food. However, what works a lot better is not having the junk food visible. For example, one simple tip that has worked super well for my clients that have families in which some people eat less healthy than they do, is to use separates cupboards. It’s much easier to just have a cupboard where you have all the food that you don’t want to eat, and then a cupboard where you have the food that you are personally eating, rather than that every time you open the fridge or a cupboard you see a lot of food that you don’t want to eat, that doesn’t fit within your diets, and you have to use self-control not to eat it.

We consistently see in studies that one of the easiest ways not to eat certain foods is just not having it within reach and not having it be visible. Rather than try to improve your self-control, what you should do is try to rely on your self-control less. Instead of coming home hungry after work and thinking of what you should eat, and just trying to grind through it and making the right choice, what you should have done is have prepared a meal that you can just put in the microwave and eat, so that you don’t have to make these choices when you are hungry, and you are likely to succumb to a bad choice. Even better is not having bought anything that you don’t want to eat to begin with. And one thing that really helps with this is not doing groceries while you’re hungry.

4: F*ck your goals and your long term plans. In research we see no effects and no correlations between goals and weight loss success. People that set loftier goals, in fact in some research, have worse outcomes because their goals are typically unrealistic and they’re not happy when they don’t achieve these unrealistic goals. Rather, what works much better in research than setting these so-called performance goals of a 300 pound bench press, or losing 8 pounds of fat in eight weeks, it works a lot better to adopt a growth mindset. A growth mindset means that you only focus on the direction that you want to improve in.

Now, what you are focused on is not what you want to achieve, but what you should do. Focus on your actions, not your desires. A long term goal, a performance goal, I want to be 10% body fat, I want to be 100 kilos, these things are just an expression of desire. They are not actionable and therefore mostly useless because they don’t tell you what to do. What you should be focused on is your actions today and for the coming week. Meal prep your food so that when you come home from work and you are tired, you already have a meal prepared. Don’t worry about what weight you ultimately want to end up at, instead worry about weighing yourself daily to get reliable data on your progression. And in that sense, it helps very well to put your scale somewhere in the morning where you cannot miss it, rather than again having to remind yourself in the morning, oh, I have to weigh myself, get the scale out of the cupboard and then weigh myself. No, take the thinking out of it, put the scale somewhere, like in the bathroom, in the shower, wherever you cannot miss it with a notepad or your phone right next to it, so that you can immediately log the weight.

These actionable, concrete steps are the things that make people successful. Not some abstract goal for the long term. Another bad question to ask yourself is how long will the diet last? Well, it will last a lot longer if today you’re not eating your macros. So focus on going to the gym today, hitting your macros today, and doing the things that make it easier long term to stick to your diet and your training program. When you ask how long the diet will last, you are by definition not thinking about this in terms of a lifestyle change perspective. The word diet in fact comes from Greek “Dietea”, and it meant way of life, not six week periods of suffering to get abs for the summer.

Reality check number five. The diet advice that gets the most popular is the advice that people want to hear, not the advice that they need to hear. People want to hear that they should have a cheat meal or, in even more euphemistic terms, a “refeed”, because now it has a physiological mechanism behind it, because it sounds good and people just want to have a cheat meal. In reality, we see the people that have cheat meals and in general that have a more irregular lifestyle are significantly less successful in the long term at maintaining low body fat levels.

In fact, one of the strongest predictors of all predictors that tells you whether someone is going to be successful at long term maintaining a low body fat level is consistency. Consistency with their weigh ins, consistency with their diet, consistency with their training. And that means – no, you don’t need a super varied, innovative diet. You just need to stick to the basics, you need to find foods that you like, And many people, In fact, eat basically the same stuff every single day. They found foods that they like and they just eat that. Then there’s no more thinking involved, there’s no more temptation, and success essentially runs on autopilot. People like the idea of diets like a ketogenic diet without restriction on fats, because what they hear is – “I can eat all the fat I want.” And these diets typically only give short term results because they make unsustainable changes in terms of food restriction, and the long term it’s still very easy to overconsume high fat foods in terms of calories. Again, what you should be thinking about is your long term energy balance, energy intake versus energy expenditure.

A ketogenic diet only helps people insofar as it helps people increase their protein intake and decrease their energy intake. People also love the idea of “if it fits your macros”. They know that calories in versus calories out is all that matters, and “if it fits your macros”, tells them they can eat whatever the hell they want. Well, in theory, you can indeed eat whatever the hell you want. But for every famous YouTuber you see eating ice cream with a six pack there are thousands still fatter than they would like people eating ice cream and wondering why they can’t get lean because they’re always so hungry, and they filled in 800 of their 2000 calories with ice cream. In the end, there has to be change to your food choices to get you to a sustainably lower energy intake without being hungry every day. I’ve never met a person that’s been hungry for ten years and said: “Look at these abs, bro! Totally worth being hungry for for a decade!”

Reality check number six. Being shredded feels like shit. You might look your best on stage, in the gym and during photoshoots, but you will feel your worst. Below approximately 10% body fat for men and 20% body fat for women, further fat loss results in a gradual reduction in anabolic hormone production. In fact, many natural physique athletes at the time of their competition have basically castrate level testosterone levels. At that point, libido is typically down in the gutters, along with stress tolerance and daily energy levels. Of the few competitors I know that actually still have somewhat regular sex during their competitions some of them don’t even ejaculate anymore. The body is just like: “Nah, we’re keeping that protein.”

So is it worth it? In my mind, for most people, at least once in their lives, yes, they should get unsustainably lean for two reasons: One, it’s a journey of self-discovery, which you essentially experience when you get to near starvation levels of body fat is that of all the things you like in your life it gradually all titrates down to just food. If you go into it with the right mindset this can result in profound realizations about how to deal with food, how you deal with stress, and who you are as a person. Secondly, when you’ve been unsustainably lean it’s like you’ve played the game on God mode, and thereafter normal dieting is easier for life. But for most people the long term goal should be to get to the leanest level they can sustain. And dieting in this sense is really a lifelong skill that you develop to get that sustainable body fat percentage lower and lower, at least up to around 10% for men or 20% for women.

Women in this sense have the natural advantage that if they had a regular menstrual cycle to begin with, that menstrual cycle becomes more irregular and eventually stops. This is essentially the body ringing the alarm that you are unsustainably lean, so you want to stay above this body fat level. For men, if you want to get below six pack level leanness, so sub 10% body fat, you have to strike the balance between what is really worth it and what is sustainable. Ideally, you want to get to the point in life where you can sustain a body fat percentage of, say, 7% long term, but you realize that the trade offs are simply not worth it, and you actively choose to stay at, say, 10% body fat. The exact percentages will vary per person, but what really matters is that you’ve made a conscious choice, not out of necessity or out of incompetence. This individual body fat level, in my mind, constitutes the real, optimal body fat level for you as an individual.

If you’re interested in 53 more actionable, concrete, evidence based tips to upgrade your lifestyle, check out my book: “The Science of Self-control”. For ten bucks the value is honestly off the charts. If you’re interested in more of my free content, I’d be honored if you like and subscribe.