Do You Still Want Results Later?

This is a biological law. Only two nights of sleep disruption makes the majority of replacement cells turn into fat cells. Please share this post with the calorie-priests and all the assholes who keep telling people to just workout harder and diet harder.

I like toughness. But sadly, even really good takeaways from tough guys and gals on social media are tainted by the fact that MATH doesn’t give an F about them. People are dumb. They don’t know that we are constantly replacing cells. If 51% of new cells are fat cells, PLEASE share how more exercise and diet will make someone leaner. PLEASE.

I am genuinely curious how “push harder” scales for people who are already pushed too hard. Don’t get me wrong. I like the David Goggins types of the world. Jesse Itzler reached out to me directly years ago to send me his book. The mental toughness message resonates.

BUT then there’s science. Look at the IG post and swipe to the third panel. Optimal heart rate variability is 100. Optimal recovery is 100. This client was at 13 HRV and 1% recovery. Please tell her how she just has to push harder. Go ahead. Really. Tell us all how that makes sense.

Yes. Weakness is a problem. In America, softness is a serious problem. I agree. That doesn’t mean that virtue-signaling of chronic exhaustion is the answer. That doesn’t mean the cult of imbalanced life is the bearer-of-truth.

There is no negative caloric equation which can make an overstressed system better. Fight the science and math all you like. We have to be kind to our bodies. The biggest badge of toughness is taking a break and caring for self when the only thing you know is work harder.

"Weight-Loss Is A Marathon, Not A Sprint"

This was to be the title of a book written by one of my clients who passed away exactly three years ago this morning. Her health and fitness journey was one of the most difficult troubleshooting paths I’ve encountered. And I specialize in the difficult troubleshooting cases. She understood the lifelong fight to be better by some physical measure. Though her efforts were thwarted by a vast metastatic cancer, she was on to something which everyone needs to understand.

There are almost zero long term success stories from rapid fat loss: https://www.elev8wellness.com/.../rapid-transformations.... I see million-follower-influencers talk about 4 or 8 week programs, and it’s obvious to me as a fitness-industry professional of two decades that they’re inexperienced. The average follower doesn’t know it. But rapid transformations are statistically destined to be long term failures.

The most successful medically-supervised weight-loss clinics boast a 0% success rate as you track forward to 5, 10, 15 years: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5764193/. The reason, of course, is that every pop-fad fitness regimen focuses on immediate “results” during the beginning, rather than equipping people with tools for a life time. Anyone can lose weight when they’re in a forced labor camp on television, a supervised clinic, or with a surgically-altered body. But then what? What happens when you attempt to interface with real life?

The top commercial weight loss programs and weight loss medical clinics and retreats are included in that statistic. These are BEST case scenarios. There are really solid ideas within some of these programs, wherein they focus on moving patients out of the guilt-shame spiral. In the end, however, NONE center on how to stop/reverse lean tissue loss; and so you won’t find their 10-15 year followup statistics published anywhere.

Frankly, that weight-loss itself is the goal makes people miss the health and fitness big picture. Simply running down the body to achieve a lighter scale number incurs organ damage. I know. Those people whose health has been destroyed by all the popular programs become my clients. People who’ve gained autoimmune conditions, thyroid disrepair, chronic fatigue/stress and adrenal scarring - they don’t have it so easy anymore. I’ve worked with clients whose teenage eating disorder was still metabolically crushing their bodies decades later. Balancing fitness goals with the health downsides is like balancing two knives upright on each others’ blade edges.
Becoming more healthy and fit has much more to it than simply losing a few pounds. Especially as we think about growing as an individual and creating a more healthy future, we have to have foresight. That’s a marathon, not a sprint.

Personally, I don’t have seasonal allergies anymore, since focusing on anti-inflammatory nutrition. There’s data on how ketogenic diets reduce asthma: https://www.uni-bonn.de/news/083-2020. This has had a far more profound effect on my life than any cutdown experiment I’ve run. It’s taught me that resilience/recovery and aiming to quell systemic inflammation ought to be the centerpiece of a health and fitness effort. That is far more important and continually rewarding than a once-achieved 40lbs body weight drop. In fact, once you communicate to your body that it isn’t under constant threat, it can effortlessly lose 40lbs of unnecessary body mass. If chronic stress keeps signaling your brain and body that they’re under constant threat, why would they want to become a smaller animal? There is no overt survival advantage to being a smaller animal. Smaller animals are prey. Smaller animals are lunch.

Recover. Become resilient. Always work at improving strength and physical capability. When you do these, you get leaner. You stay leaner.

Or...

Stress out. Run yourself down. Get weaker and reduce physical capability. When you do these, you get fatter. You stay fatter.

Only two days of impaired sleep means 51% or more of the new replacement cells become fat cells. There is no math equation to make caloric restriction and caloric burn work here. That’s not Jonathan’s opinion. That’s physical LAW. That’s biology. That’s math. That’s incontrovertible science.

Watch influencers closely. The ones who preach “push harder” don’t have any evidence as the timeline extends into the future. They give themselves autoimmune diseases. They put their health on a high interest credit card. Keep watching. The bill comes due. The bill always comes due. And they never manage the APR. They didn’t “get away” with anything as a youth; they just placed the payment on their physiological credit card; and now the bill collector is leaving eviction notices. Even people I respect, people who did teach us something about mental toughness or the human spirit, end up being hollow shadows of their former selves, taking acute organ damage so they can look back on a couple of photos where they were shredded. This doesn’t scale for the public. This doesn’t work.

I know life-balance doesn’t sell. I understand. And maybe, for some, the 15 seconds of spotlight is worth it. Set a record. Write a book. Do the publishing tour. And pay the price later. By the time onlookers notice the trend, your broken body, your accelerating arthritis, your chronic pain, your LOSS of ability, it won’t matter. You made your name. You built your empire. The myth that people should just run themselves down persists. Your former self is the poster child, despite your present self being a testament to flawed methodology.
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Improvement doesn’t have a 3 or 6 or even 12 month time limit. But that isn’t sexy. That isn’t exciting. That takes incredible patience. That takes a marathon mentality. Weight-loss isn’t a sprint.