I've lost 22 lbs doing a 20-minute workout every morning and eating this way. This is the eating half, written out. It's free and there's nothing to sign up for.
I'm eating clean alongside the daily workout. Mostly meat, fruit and veg. Nothing processed.
I got it from a book called Way of the Peaceful Warrior by Dan Millman, and it's the only way of eating that's ever really worked for me - both in terms of getting results, and in terms of actually being able to stay consistent with it.
The reason it's so easy is that you make one decision up front, and then there's no thinking. Is it meat, fruit, or veg? If not, I don't eat it. That's the whole system. Something about removing the decision works really well for me.
Quick disclaimer: I'm not a doctor and I'm not a nutritionist. This is what I eat. It's not advice and results aren't guaranteed. Talk to your doctor before you change anything significant.
Intermittent fasting. Low carb. Low sugar. Calorie restriction. Cutting out sweets. At one point I tracked every single meal in an app for 18 months straight.
None of it stuck. Not because I'm lazy - because all of it required so much thinking. Tracking, weighing, calculating, resisting. Sooner or later life gets busy, or you don't see results for a few months, and you give up.
This is the one way of eating I've actually been able to stay consistent with, and the reason is that it takes all of the thinking out of it.
I first read about this in Way of the Peaceful Warrior by Dan Millman, years ago in my early twenties. In it there's a mentor character who teaches a young athlete a way of eating based not on calories or macros, but on "life force" and "light."
Stay with me. I don't take that literally. I use it as a metaphor and as an easy framework for deciding what to eat and what to skip, and historically eating this way has always done well for my body.
Don't get hung up on the woo-woo sounding parts. Someone asked me straight out whether the life-force stuff is pseudoscience, and my honest answer is: probably, and it doesn't matter. It's a mental model, and the only question that matters for a mental model is whether it works. This one has me eating vegetables, fruit and clean protein and walking past the chips without using any willpower. If a slightly woo-woo metaphor gets you eating the exact foods every nutritionist already agrees on, who cares what it's called.
The book also warns against being dogmatic about it, and I'm not.
All the energy in food originally comes from the sun. Plants capture it directly. Animals eat the plants, so their meat has it secondhand. Eat an animal that ate another animal and you're three steps out. Process it in a factory and there's basically nothing left.
Every food can be ranked by how many steps from the sun it is, and the goal is to eat as few steps out as you can. That's the whole model.
Most of what you eat. It's almost impossible to overeat fruit and veg; you get full way before that happens.
Nothing here is bad and I eat from this list every single day. It's just heavier and takes more work to digest.
You decided this once, up front. So when you see it there's nothing to decide. It's just “I don't eat that.”
Not sure about a food? Ask how many steps from the sun it is. More than one or two, skip it. Made in a factory, skip it.
Water is the default. Coffee and tea are fine and I'm not giving them up - black or with a splash of milk. What breaks them is what gets added: syrup, whipped cream, three pumps of vanilla. That's a milkshake with an espresso in it.
The one hard rule: don't drink your calories. Soda, lemonade, sweet tea, energy drinks, sugary lattes - all sugar water.
Fruit juice too, even though fruit is on the green list. Juicing strips out everything good. Eat an orange and you get the fibre, you chew it, you get full. Drink a glass of OJ and you get the sugar of three oranges with none of that. Eat the fruit, skip the juice.
Alcohol is a no for me.
Four things, and the first one matters more than it sounds.
And the one thing I'd actually tell you to copy: the big epic salad. On the weekend I make a massive one that lasts me the whole week. Greens, cucumber, peppers, carrots, tomato, red onion, olive oil and balsamic or apple cider vinegar. Then whatever meat I've got goes on top. I have it for lunch and dinner.
I stopped doing it for a week back in February. I still ate healthy - mostly meat, hard boiled eggs, fermented foods, some veg - and I wasn't even eating much. But my energy dropped, I felt off, and the weight stopped moving. A couple of days after I started the salad again, everything was back on track.
I have no idea what it is about the salad. But it seems to be a key part of this for me. If you know what's going on there, tell me.
It was my 7-year-old's birthday last week and I had pizza - the first processed food I'd eaten in seven months. I ate it, I enjoyed it, and then I went back to normal at the next meal.
A better example: back in June we were out at an event and ended up having pasta for dinner. I hadn't eaten pasta or any refined carb since January. I woke up the next morning in a complete fog. It was genuinely startling how stark it was - like I'd been hit by a truck. That's the real argument for eating this way, and you only get to run that experiment by breaking the rules occasionally.
Here's the thing that actually does the damage, and it isn't the pizza. It's the guilt. You eat something off-plan, the guilt shows up, and guilt comes with its own bad logic: the day's already ruined, so why not keep going. One slice becomes a cheat day, the cheat day becomes "I'll restart Monday," and Monday never comes.
So: no guilt, ever. If you're going to eat it, eat it happily. Then eat normally at the very next meal. Not Monday - the next meal. Nothing is ruined and nothing needs restarting.
I don't do scheduled cheat days either, for the opposite reason - a planned cheat day keeps junk food on your mind all week. You spend six days waiting for the seventh. When treats are occasional and unplanned, they lose their grip.
Never. The lists control what you eat, and when it's mostly vegetables, fruit and decent protein it's hard to overeat - those foods fill you up long before the calories pile up. Eat slowly, chew properly, stop before you're full, and the portions handle themselves.
Eggs or yogurt in the morning, a solid portion of meat on the lunch salad, meat or fish at dinner, nuts in between. That's protein at every meal without tracking a gram. It's been plenty for me while doing the routine daily. Training harder than that? Bigger meat portions. Nothing else changes.
One order works basically everywhere: meat plus vegetables. Steak and a side salad, grilled chicken and veg, fish and greens. Skip the bread basket and the soda and you're on plan without saying anything weird to the waiter.
I can only tell you what happened to me: about 12 lbs in the first 25 days, 22 lbs over about three months - eating this way and doing the 20-minute workout together. Then it stalled, and it's been stuck at 228 for a while. Weight loss isn't linear. Give it two weeks before you judge anything and 30 days before you judge the trend. Your body isn't my body.
Probably. I don't care, because the mental model gets me eating the right things without willpower. Judge it by your results, not its vocabulary.
The eating is half of it. The other half is 20 minutes a morning - all 17 movements with a video for each, and both follow-along workouts.
Free · Instant access · Unsubscribe anytime