Mindset is incredibly powerful. It can be THE difference between a multi-millionaire fitness model, and a broke, overweight alcoholic, earning less than $30k a year.

Everything begins in the mind.

The Mindset Of Most Men

The thing that prevents most men in the modern era from reaching extreme levels of health and wealth, is the sheer level of comfort they have. Technology, safe environments, easy work, the ability to order everything online, simply leads to a ‘lazy lifestyle’.

And when men get too comfortable, they gain weight, lose testosterone, become less attractive, and stop increasing their incomes. These three ALL make fat loss more difficult, and exacerbate the issue. It’s a real problem.

Being comfortable makes you think you’re okay, when you’re really not. It lulls you into a false sense of security in terms of health and fitness (holy shit get a DEXA scan, that’ll wake you up), in terms of job security, and in terms of romantic relationships. Let me tell you something:

Nothing, and I mean NOTHING, is truly ‘secure’. Be it your job, your business, your gf/wife, your family & kids, your overall lifestyle and your posessions.

None of it. Because:

The moment you start to believe it’s all ‘secure’, is the moment you start getting comfortable and declining, and it’s also the moment you start undermining any level of security you actually had.

Comfort = Defense, and over time, decline.

Discomfort = Offense, and fuel for growth, over time.

And fuelling your offensive action is the best hope you have of maintaining high levels of security (although it will never be 100%).

So how do you ensure an offensive approach to life, so that you lose weight faster, and enjoy greater security of health, wealth and relationships?

You MUST Find That In Life Which Angers You

Anything that angers/bothers/frustrates you, or simply leaves you feeling a little uneasy, is what you need to find and USE to your advantage.

It’s this DISCOMFORT that leads to so many long-term benefits.

This stuff is the FUEL for growth, security, freedom, abundance, and maximum fat loss. Without it, fat loss becomes 5X more difficult, because the alluring ‘comfort’ temptations will always feel much stronger than your own drive.

This includes things like alcohol, parties, meals with clients, meals out on trips etc. I’m not joking:

ALL of these obstacles become MILES easier, once you’ve got the correct fuel powering your fat loss journey.

So what kinds of things anger you? I’ll give you some potential examples:

• Does your family have a history of diabetes? Could YOU get diabetes in the next 10 years if something doesn’t change? Could you DIE?! Use it as fuel for RAPID fat loss.
• Does one of your friends look better than you and get more female attention/admiration? Use it as fuel to lose weight faster, gain muscle, and take your style to a 10/10. Check out my training programs for maximum muscle gain.
• Did you grow up poor? Did you feel hard done by as a kid? Use it as fuel for hard work and discipline.
• Does your boss infuriate you on a regular basis and try to ‘put you down’ all the time? Use it as fuel for a side hustle.
• Does your gf/wife do stuff occasionally that annoys you? Does she flirt with (or text) other guys? Use it as fuel for looking like a fitness model, and then dump her.
• Does it annoy you that THAT guy gets to live in a mansion and drive a lambo? Use it as fuel for income growth.
• Did you get your BMI measured and have the result come out as ‘officially obese?’ Use it as fuel for long-term, sustainable weight loss (and get a personalised meal plan).

If you really dig down and find YOUR personal pain point – that which angers you and you cannot accept living your life as it currently is, knowing that this is your reality…THAT is when you’re about to change your life drastically, and you’ll start to see some forward momentum very soon.

However, you must also maintain your offensive position at all times. Because if you don’t, it’s all too easy to slip back into ‘comfort mode’ (read: get fat and ruin your health).

Offense, to at least some degree, is the only acceptable position in life. Anything less than this will cause problems, long-term.

I can guarantee it.

If you’re serious about IF and you want to take your fasting game to the next level, make sure you get into the Intermittent Fasting Fast-Track members group, where you can access over $725 of content. Make sure you get in before the last day of the month, so you can access the exclusive newsletter.

The post Lose Weight Faster (5X), With This Psychological Hack appeared first on Forever Alpha Blog.

Granted, you can see that he already has a very strong muscular base in place already. But how exactly did he achieve his fat loss success?

Intermittent Fasting Schedule: Like A Pro

As you know by now, there are ways to make fat loss really difficult, and there are ways to make fat loss rather effortless.

The typical dieter will go on a super-restrictive, low calorie diet with absolutely no flexibility whatsoever. They’ll sit there at the dinner table, feeling deprived and ‘fed up’ with dieting with only 500 calories left to spare, whilst their friends will be eating, drinking and having a great time.

Whereas the guy who does Intermittent Fasting? It looks very different. In fact, most people will never even know he’s ‘on a diet’, because he has so much food left to spare (especially if he’s doing OMAD which seems to be working very well for a lot of Men Over 40).

But how exactly did @StraightHand pull off this amazing fat loss transformation?

If you do the math, you can see that he averaged out at about six pounds of weight loss per month, or about 1.5 pounds per week. Now, that’s not the slowest weight loss I’ve ever seen, but it’s perfectly reasonable, and I think this shows how good Intermittent Fasting is for regulating your appetite.

We had a little back-and-forth over DM on Twitter, and he talked about his Intermittent Fasting schedule, and what he found to work best. Apparently, it narrowed over time.

When he started out in the picture on the left, he was doing 16:8, then over time he gradually shifted into 18:6 (what I currently do), and then towards the end it became 20:4.

Condensing your eating window works.

He also mentioned that high protein works very well. And frankly, it will do for you too, as protein is the most important macro for body composition. On paper, you don’t need insane amounts of protein in order to maintain your muscle mass (like supplement companies imply). But in reality, it’s crucial for keeping your appetite down, and metabolism up.

How much protein did he consume per day?

200+ grams. And his bodyweight was 205 pounds at the start, and it came down to 160. Note how his protein intake never came down – the leaner you get, the more at risk your muscle mass becomes, and the more protein you need.

What else did he say?

“Black coffee was key in AM as you suggest” – there is no greater appetite suppressant in the immediate sense, than black coffee. The narrower your eating window is, the more important this becomes in your Intermittent Fasting schedule.

What about the training he did to maintain his solid muscular base whilst losing so much fat?

He trained three times per week, no cardio, with a strong emphasis on the main compound lifts (bench, squat, deadlift etc.) Nothing too complicated by the sounds of it.

It’s Your Turn

Now, if you’re ready to make a transformation like his, then the quickest option would be to buy this Intermittent Fasting meal plan, condense your eating window, and eat all of the foods it suggests in there.

If you’re looking for a long-term, almost guaranteed solution, then check out my one-to-one coaching services. They include personalised meal plans and training programs, coaching calls and direct contact with me whenever you need. Plus you get access to the IFFT website – where all my premium IF content is available.

The post How To Lose 44 Pounds In 7 Months, And Get Ripped With Intermittent Fasting appeared first on Forever Alpha Blog.

In part one, in my pre-Intermittent Fasting days, I had started lifting weights, gaining size (and a lot of body fat), and discovered the evil of sugar.

Here’s part two:

So I continued along my merry way, focusing on muscle-gaining, but this time I had learned my lesson from sugar in 2010, and it’s coke-like effect on my brain and hunger signalling.

This time I removed sugar, and ‘cleaned up’ my lean-bulking diet a little. Losing a few pounds of fat first, I continued to focus on size for a while.

Fast-forward to the summer 2013, and I switched focus a little. With ‘beach season’ approaching, including:

• A three week holiday in Crete
• A one week ‘lads holiday’ in Malia, the ‘party central’ part of Crete
• A festival up in Scotland

I wanted to be lean, and I wanted to reveal the hard work that I’d put in over the past few years.

So I got to work on dieting…

Beginning at about 178 pounds (roughly, I can’t remember exactly), I started cutting the calories and the carbs. Problem is, I was still eating cereal every day (and cereal was very much my trigger food – even without sugar).

Asking for trouble.

But I knew that energy balance was the key variable with all this stuff, so I continued to focus on reducing the calories. And it worked. For a while.

But I ran into trouble with diet adherence and consistency, largely because of hunger, cravings, and a lack of satiation, which was largely down to:

Continuing to eat my ‘trigger food.’

Lesson:

When fat loss is your primary goal, you must make sure that any potential ‘trigger foods’ (that could lead to excess consumption or a binge) are OUT of your cupboards and immediate environment. DO NOT let yourself indulge, otherwise you’re making it 10 times harder to get ripped.

Energy balance is the number one factor that you must get right, whether your goal is to gain muscle or lose fat. But there are several things that will throw you off and make it far more difficult to sustain the correct energy balance for very long, not to mention the risk of muscle loss.

You want life to be easy, not unnecessarily difficult.

My journey looked like the following:

Week 1 – 178 pounds

Week 3 – 173 pounds

Week 5 – 175 pounds

Week 7 – 167 pounds

Week 9 – 168 pounds

Week 11 – 160 pounds

Week 13 – 157 pounds

And finally, I was officially ‘ripped’. But it wasn’t exactly a healthy, nor sustainable way to lose weight. I was hungry all the time, irritable, pissed off, and permanently weak. My workouts sucked. My stress levels were sky-high.

I was yet to discover the solution to all of this (Intermittent Fasting), as this would serve to make fat loss effortless, hunger minimal, and stress levels rock-bottom.

But for now, I had made it to 10% body fat, finally. It was a brutal journey, but I was happy to finally reveal my progress, have abs for the first time in my life, and actually look really good on the beach.

Could I sustain it for more than a few weeks while on holiday in Crete, eating Gyros, Moussaka, and drinking beer?

Find out in part three…

If you want to get to 10% body fat with minimal hunger, stress and strength loss in the gym, check out the Intermittent Fasting meal plans I offer, and also the one-to-one coaching packages available to you – Silver is only $97 per month, and you get a tailored meal plan + training program, on an on-going basis.

Enjoy!

The post My History With Fitness: Part Two appeared first on Forever Alpha Blog.