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About a year ago I talked about how I adopted the Carb Nite diet. The results were bittersweet. The good news is that by using Carb Nite, I was able to drop down to the lowest weight I’ve ever been in my adult life outside of high school. I still have not hit my weight goal, but I can happily report the Carb Nite diet was very effective in helping me lose body fat without making me too hungry.
The bad news is, as is often the case with me, I fell off the wagon more than once, including recently, and I gained back some of the weight that I lost. My net loss is still decent, but I’m still quite a ways away from where I would like to be.
I have officially been fighting my body fat for five years now, since I was 39 years old (I’m now 44). I’ve decided that I’m tired of doing this and need a radical readjustment. Losing body fat and keeping it off has been the single most difficult thing I’ve ever done in my entire life. Getting from zero to six figures in less than 3.5 years was easier. Going from divorced, inexperienced beta male to extremely good with women in less than two years was easier. Never losing money in an investment in my entire life has been easier. Developing an Alpha Male 2.0 lifestyle, which is not easy, was easier than losing body fat and keeping it off. At least for me, and that’s the key point.
In my book, I talk about how every man has one area of his life out of the Seven Life Areas (financial, women, physical, social, family, spiritual, and recreational) that he’s going to be bad at and that will be a struggle for him. My weak area is clearly physical. All the other areas have come pretty easy for me, and I’m a successful man outside of my weight.
For some reason, and I think I know why, losing a large amount of body fat and keeping it off has been extremely difficult for me while literally everything else in my life has been quite achievable. My usual success formula of:
1. Researching the least bad, most effective way to accomplish a particular goal, while being very careful to avoid false Societal Programming.
2. Make a battle plan and do it, working very hard and staying very focused and consistent.
3. Carefully track my progress and make corrections as I go.
4. Achieve big success after 1-3 years.
…has worked fantastically for every area of my life, but has not worked for my weight problem. This means something unusual is going on.
When it comes to losing body fat, I have done everything right and nothing has stuck, including:
- Weight lifting
- 5×5 weight lifting
- hi rep weight lifting
- supersets
- minimal rest time between reps
- HIIT weight lifting
- TRT
- HIIT cardio
- Interval cardio (sprinting)
- Long duration cardio
- Working with personal trainer(s)
- Vegan diet
- Paleo diet
- Keto diet
- Zero sugar diet(s)
- Weekly cheat meals
- Zero cheat meals
- Intermittent fasting
- High protein diet
- Cleansing fasts
- Carb Nite
- Carefully tracking calories via kitchen scales and apps like Lose It!
- Getting enough sleep
- Drinking lots of water
- Various supplements
- Blood tests and adjusting all of my numbers to optimal levels (including thyroid, vitamin D, DHEA, testosterone, estrogen, etc)
- Daily tracking (of everything, activity, calories, sleep, you name it)
- About 20 other things I don’t have time to list.
You name it, I’ve tried it. Seriously, if you say, “Hey Caleb, have you tried…?” the answer is yes, I’ve tried it, and likely stuck with it for 6-12 months or more.
To be fair everything has worked…somewhat. I’ve lost a lot of weight and look great compared to several years ago. The problem is I’m still overweight because nothing has stuck. Eventually I fall off the wagon, eat more calories than I should, and gain at least some of the weight back.
Never have I experienced an area of my life where I have failed repeatedly over such a long period of time. During the last five years, I’ve personally known people who have lost 70 pounds or more, quite easily, with just a few months of work, and have kept it off, doing the exact same things I was doing. I was shocked at how easily these people would pull off something in just six months that I’ve been busting my ass for years and years to accomplish with spotty results.
Again, this means something deeper is going on here.
Thus, with all of this data, I’ve come to the conclusion that my problem is not physical at all, but mental. My problem has nothing to do with exercise, weight lifting, cardio, diet, calories, macros, portion sizes, testosterone, toxicity, or any of that stuff. If it was, I would have lost all the weight I wanted several years ago.
Instead, the problem is in my brain. Either I have some kind of mental block about proper weight, or I have some kind of food addiction. Or maybe both.
A few days ago I did something I have never done before. I have suspended all of my other goals in life (of which I have many) to focus 100% on this one goal: to get my body fat down to 17% or less, and keep it there for the rest of my life.
Because my problem is mental and not based on any fitness technique, I have begun a 100% all-out attack on my conscious and subconscious minds to get them reprogrammed for health and fitness instead of eating large quantities whatever high-carb, high-fat, high-calorie, or high-salt foods I currently want to eat from time to time. I’m treating this not as a fitness problem, but more as a mental or overcoming addiction problem.
I’ll be documenting the things I’m doing and the results I get here at this blog. It’s going to be painful and I’m not looking forward to it, but it must be done. My body fat is literally the last problem I have in my near perfect life. It needs to be eliminated once and for all.
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