17 Lessons Learnt from 8 Months of Getting In The Best Shape Of My Life

There’s a lot you learn about yourself and how you show up when you choose to embark on a path of transforming your mind and body to push it to levels of excellence it has never reached before. Many look at the pursuit of physical transformation and judge it as superficial and vapid. But there is something extraordinarily transformative about discovering the limits to your mental capacity through the gateway of the physical. We all have the opportunity to tap into higher capacities of potential for our mind and body and discover excellence in our own way. This is my experience embarking on that journey listing everything I have learnt and what I’d tell someone if they were wanting to embark on a similar psycho-physical transformation.

To clarify ‘controlled starvation’ = caloric deficit.

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1. You’re Not Supposed To Enjoy The Process

The process is gruelling and painstaking. So if you enjoy voluntary suffering and pain then you will enjoy the process. But if you value a balanced lifestyle where your family, social, work and personal life are in harmony then be warned: drastic change to this extent will throw that all into disarray. You will often feel you don’t want to do half the things you’re doing at. It doesn’t feel good,  isn’t enjoyable – or convenient – but it’s not supposed to be. Transforming oneself is an exercise of discipline, willpower and working smart to create effective systems and habits. But once you come out of the extreme process of maximum imbalance you a born a new human who has a new sharpened their sword and forged a new shield. You are better equipped for all the future trials and tribulations that life will throw at you and able to hold your head high with newfound integrity and confidence within yourself. To some, that is worth it.

2. Perfection Is Not Needed – Consistency & Adherence Is

I got to a point where I realised I didn’t need to be perfectly adherent with every single meal for 8 months straight. One single meal was not going to sabotage a week of caloric budgeting and months of 95% consistent adherence. A good plan done consistently is better than a great plan done inconsistently. Once I acknowledged that my aim wasn’t to shoot 100/100 from the free-throw line I was mentally liberated and realised that I can deviate from my specific meal plan every now and again when needed and still get amazing results. As a result, I shot even better from the line because I wasn’t as distracted by the need for perfection.

This became especially valuable in times where I had planned to see friends and family. What usually comes with connecting with those I care about is sharing a meal together. I wasn’t willing to sacrifice all social interactions with family and friends that occur around food because I deeply value the psychological and emotional connection I receive from those experiences. They had a dramatic benefit on my mental health which likely facilitated my ability to be even more adherent to my diet, habits and reduce the severity of disordered food behaviour (which I did feel I experienced as I discuss below).

The Exception: If you’re trying to be in the top percentile of your field, step on stage and win or be one of the best in your state, nation or world then this mentality may not work for you. You may need to step it up and opt for 100% savage adherence with no deviation from the plan IF you want to be the best. I didn’t care about being the best or competing against anyone but myself. Hence this framework worked best for me.

3. Be Aggressively Patient

It took me ~8 months to lose ~12 kg and get to 36mm skinfold (9-site) from an estimated 80-90mm of my comparison photo above. I averaged around 3-7mm and 250g per week. But very interestingly 5kg~ of weight loss and 20mm off my skinfolds was made in the last 8 weeks of the deficit after my last diet break. In those last 8 weeks I was very aggressive upping my total energy expenditure with strategies I will discuss later like walking, cycling and sauna in addition to sleeping more. This shows how effective the aggressive approach was for me from a body composition perspective (of course there were trade-offs to this which I felt and make note of below). In any case, now I have the blueprint and roadmap to significantly manipulate my body composition thanks to the lessons and skillset learnt through this process. The great thing is anyone can learn this for themselves and once you, you establish a valuable confidence and autonomy over your physiology that you didn’t have before.

There are many who can create this body recomposition more quickly and there are many who choose to take it even slower. As my coach and I didn’t have a specific end date in mind where we had to be at a certain body composition by a certain date we took a patient but assertive approach. As we finished the last months I upped the approach to aggressive doing more than he requested of me.

I suspect taking this overall slower patient approach enabled me to conserve more muscle mass over the long run and establish strong habits week by week that served me greatly in the most difficult parts of the phase. As a result, it wasn’t a huge shock to my system where I was trying to drop 10 kg in 12 weeks like some fitness challenges promote. In these cases, most people rarely establish the habits, systems and strategies to maintain the progress they originally made. Instead, we aimed for meaningful but patient progress every 1 to 2 weeks, established keystone habits and measured many important metrics accordingly to make accurate adjustments.

4. What Get’s Measured Get’s Managed

Many want to be wealthy, fulfilled and healthy but aren’t willing to adopt habits that the wealthy, fulfilled and healthy are doing. I’ve received many types of reactions when people discover I measure all my food intake and bring my kitchen scales to restaurants. It’s understandable how this can turn people off because the habit seems rigid and inflexible. The irony is the act of measuring actually gives you freedom because you receive information to make assertive thoughtful decisions. You don’t have to deliberate whether you should or shouldn’t eat x food because you’ve already decided your guidelines and monitor how well you stick within them.

If you want to save $100k for a home loan deposit what’s one way to get there? Figure out how much $ is coming in/out; then you can see your profit margin which you can allocate to a savings account. You’ll see that x profit p/m will get you to your goal in x timeframe just like you can see that intaking x amount of food will get you to your body composition goals in x time. The act of measuring what’s coming in/out exposes you to the reality of your habits/situation. Thus you’re unburdened because you have the right information that gives you clarity and confidence over your decisions.

Those who know me know I am a huge proponent of this philosophy. The main metrics I was measuring that helped the most were:

• Food intake (daily)
• Bodyweight (daily)
• Sleep (daily)
• Body composition photos (weekly)
• 9-Site skinfolds (fortnightly)

Each datapoint we gained helped form a trend. Those trends through the weeks and months enabled my coach and I to make accurate informed decisions on what would be the best course of action to adjust and keep progressing. The single two most important metrics that I have never used in conjunction together was weekly body composition photos and skinfolds. In my experience it’s sub-optimal to just do one ideally you want both because you end up combining the subjective with the objective data that coalesce in a very harmonious way to enable the most accurate effective decision-making possible.

5. Work Hard & Work Smart

Working hard and pushing further – another set – another rep – another minute is already very familiar territory to me and may be for you. When I was getting into the extreme end of my deficit in the last months I didn’t want to do at least half of my training sessions. But I never missed a single day, not because I’m special, but because I developed a routine and set of habits that were part of my identity. I didn’t give myself a choice to turn up. I just turned up. While that was paramount to my progress not everything was an uphill battle of effort. There are ways to get momentum on your side and start running downhill when it gets gruelling.

The further you go into an energy deficit the more your body will try and conserve energy. There’s little evolutionary advantage to being ripped and having a six-pack. The body wants to survive and procreate and you’re sending it signals to essentially do the opposite via controlled starvation. So things like your NEAT (non-exercise activity thermogenesis), thyroid function and BMR will all lower to various extents to conserve energy. So I needed to work smarter not just harder. Here are some key strategies I developed to work smarter:

• Sleep as much as you can and your body will allow
• Perform fasted morning walks and stack other habits while you’re walking such as audiobooks, note-taking, self-study, podcasts, email, messaging and phone calls.
• If you have to take a phone call – do it while walking.
• Use zone 1-3 low-intensity steady-state cardio to manage CNS fatigue while facilitating further energy expenditure. My echo bike was a saviour to me and I was able to multitask while doing it to double my efficiency, but any stationary bike will do.
• Speaking of bikes, if you have access to a bicycle. Start riding to places you frequent within 5-15km of you. We drive to places so close to us out of habit and convenience and don’t realise that cycling only takes an extra 5-15min and can even be just as quick as a car depending on traffic. You can get an extra 150-300 calories per day of energy expenditure just by doing that alone.
• The sauna can be a great tool to expend a couple hundred calories without any direct physical exertion thus you can minimise CNS and psychological fatigue. Sauna has also been shown to slow muscular atrophy which is very useful during the state of a caloric deficit. “Heat acclimation, which can be achieved through sauna use, may reduce the amount of protein degradation that occurs during disuse by increasing heat shock proteins, reducing oxidative damage, promoting release of growth hormone, and improving insulin sensitivity.” ^{[Study 1] [Study 2][Study 3] [Study 4]}
• Take 10-15g EAAs intra-session especially if training fasted to maximise net protein balance and muscle protein synthesis to minimise muscle atrophy.
• Keep fat intake ≤1g/kg of bodyweight.

6. This Is Not Suppose To Be Sustainable

Often when deciding on healthy behaviours to change ourselves we ask ourselves ‘is this sustainable?’ I don’t believe this is an effective place to begin establishing transformative change. If being sustainable is doing a set of behaviours for a long time or an entire a lifetime, then much of the behaviours you may adopt to say lose 10kg, or run your first marathon will likely not be sustainable.

But it’s not supposed to be. When making massive changes as I did in transforming my mental-physical health I established many behaviours which were NOT sustainable long term but were effective in creating dramatic short term change. This is commonplace when producing a dramatic change.

It’s supposed to be extreme, imbalanced, make people look at you funny, cause stress and push you mentally physically to your limits. If you are going to embark on a similar transformation as I did it may be useful to understand that this is just a phase and not a way of living permanently. Any diet or training cycle will pass and it has an end date. Knowing this can give psychological respite as you realise that just like everything in life…this too will end.

7. I Don’t Actually Need To Have A Six-Pack When I’m ‘Relaxed‘

Before I started this I had in my head that the ultimate physical outcome achievement would be to basically have the physique I have now when I’m flexed, but have that when I’m fully relaxed as well. What I didn’t realise is that because of my relatively low amount of muscle mass this would prove even more exceptionally difficult and arduous to achieve.

Some bodybuilders and strongmen walk around with body fat percentages around 15% with skin folds ~50-60mm and still see visible when they’re relaxed. I got < 10% body fat and 36 mm skinfold and still only had minor visible ‘6 pack-Esque abs’ when fully relaxed. Many bodybuilders compete around the 30mm range so what on earth would I have to do to my body to get so lean were I have a six-pack without flexing.

This taught me an important lesson about modulating my expectations for my body composition relative to the amount of muscle mass I have on my frame. It shows that body fat percentage is really quite a meaningless number in the scheme of things as an individual data point and that the context of the ratio of muscle to fat is a much more important nuance to put into perspective from person to person.

Instead of forcing my body into the hell of 20mm skinfolds to achieve this arbitrary ‘look’ I thought I wanted. I’m confident I can create an even more powerful physical presence similar to what I was originally seeking with another 5 to 15 kg of muscle mass on my frame to make that muscular definition much more obvious. That is the next beast of a challenge and transformation we will be embarking on.

8. Thinking & Obsessing About Food Constantly

Earlier on in the deficit, this was nowhere near as present for me, but once I was in the territory where I was consuming <20-40% of my maintenance calories than my relationship with food started to become borderline orthorexic and quite unhealthy. This became quite noticeable when I started consuming around <2100 calories per day. Most noticeably when I had social-family gatherings where I would be eating food that wasn’t prepared by myself.

On one hand, it was exciting knowing I was going to allow myself a brief period of reprieve. But in anticipation for eating out at a restaurant or enjoying a home-cooked meal at a family gathering, I would think about the event and the food often weeks in advance almost on a daily basis. I would visualise the food I’m gonna eat pre-emptively replaying in my mind how much I was going to eat, how enjoyable it was going to be, etc. Imagine planning a dinner with friends or family and you think about the food you’re going to eat almost every day 1-3 weeks in advance?! That is by no means normal, healthy or ideal to be thinking and obsessing about food that much.

There would be times people would be eating around me and I would get visibility and internally irritated and bothered by the fact they were enjoying the pleasures of food freely without restriction while I sat there deploying willpower and discipline to not engage. On one hand, it’s completely irrational because this is all my/your choice to live this lifestyle and I had to learn to make peace with that. But on the other hand, my chimp brain was mad I was around temptation and was jealous I couldn’t enjoy what they were enjoying. One key to managing this is to make temptation invisible. Don’t bring x foods in the house. Don’t enter the room the doughnuts are in. Don’t go out to the social gathering where people will be eating. But there will be times though where this isn’t possible and if you’re far along down the path you may feel the chimp brain inside you start to get anxious and irritated. Be warned, this is normal, breath through it…it will pass.

9. Eating Clean & Being Rigid Is & Isn’t The Answer

Adhering to strict rigid eating patterns is sometimes needed and effective in various phases in order to improve one’s state of health or create a certain body composition change that you desire. However, there is a cost associated with rigid strict 100% “clean eating”. There is a cost to the entire elimination of certain palatable processed foods that you love and bring you joy. For some people food is merely a tool for sustenance – this lesson applies much less to those types of people. But the more you love food and the experience associated with it, the more likely a rigid eating pattern will affect you. I was in this camp so I had to be intelligent about my approach to mitigate some of the harmful psychological effects it had on me.

Understand a rigid control for long periods of time can contribute to disordered eating patterns like orthorexia and dichotomous thinking (implying a moral value to food – foods are ‘good’ or ‘bad’) which can send you down spirals of obsession and heightened neuroticism. Your adherence to your diet plan and general mental health will very likely be much healthier if you find ways to incorporate “luxury” foods you enjoy into your caloric budget on occasion instead of the opting for the complete cessation of them for months at a time. For me, this was implemented around social occasions with family and friends where I could enjoy the full experience of our time together.

I’ve learnt that maintaining reasonable flexible control within your caloric budget instead of exhausting your willpower abstaining from foods entirely is a more much more healthy and sustainable way to maintain long-term progress. This doesn’t mean use this as an excuse to cheat and justify poor eating habits. The idea is to still maintain your ‘clean eating’ of whole nutrient-dense foods the majority of the time, the reality is you can still making amazing progress without needing to adhere to 100% rigidity and robotic-like eating behaviours.

Some research demonstrates this too showing “rigid control is associated with higher scores of disinhibition [suppress an inappropriate or unwanted behavior], with higher BMI and more frequent and more severe binge eating episodes. Flexible control is associated with lower disinhibition, lower BMI, less frequent and less severe binge eating episodes, lower self-reported energy intake, and a higher probability of successful weight reduction during the 1-year weight reduction program.“

Another study showed the effects of ‘black and white’ thinking on eating behaviour and weight regain. “Results showed that eating-specific dichotomous thinking (dichotomous beliefs about food and eating) mediates the association between restraint eating and weight regain. We conclude that holding dichotomous beliefs about food and eating may be linked to a rigid dietary restraint, which in turn impedes people’s ability to maintain a healthy weight.“

This leads well into strategies I emplyed to manage this.

10. Managing ‘Eating Out’ & Flexibility On A Strict Caloric Budget

There were two main ways I approached this. In both scenarios ‘eating out’ would be my main meal of the day.

Strategy #1: Allow myself any macronutrient ratio food that I desire but stick within my caloric budget as best I can estimate. In this case, you may be able to have quite a bit of food in one sitting and really fill yourself up with a 1000-2000 calorie meal. But once you are done, you are done for the day.

Strategy #2: Allow yourself to eat as much as you desire with no mental restriction or guilt. Fully immerse yourself in the experience and joy of food around your favourite people. This one was quite valuable to me because the first strategy still requires an amount of willpower and discipline to restrict oneself (at least for me as I can eat a lot). Even if the restriction is objectively small, just by the fact you know you are restricting yourself can be enough to adversely affect your mental state. E.G. ‘I would really love to have that one last thing, but I can’t‘. This strategy circumvents this in exchange for going over your caloric budget for the day. So on special occasions I would go to town and eat everything I wanted and fill myself up as much as I desired. Some of the meals likely totalled over 2000 calories over a muli hour sitting which was frequently over my caloric budget. But I didn’t care because I had made a decision and plan to consciously indulge.

Important Note: This is NOT the same as a reactive food response where you caved to a craving. I don’t say this to say I’ve never given into cravings and I’m some machine of willpower. I say it because people lie to themselves and justify unhealthy behaviour when they have convenient causes like, ‘I’m not binge eating out of emotion, I’m consciously deciding to eat all of this food’. We’ve all played this trick to hide from our weakness and denial. Be present and aware if this could be you.

Fortunately, this rarely happens to me partly because the fire of my ‘why’ is so large and because I planned special eating out occasions. As a result, there was no guilt because my intention was to fully experience what was in front of me and I found a huge psychological benefit to allowing moments of reprieve not only for myself but the people around me also will sense and feel your liberated energy of joy, positive emotion and pleasure.

But with this come’s a risk of blowing out your weekly caloric budget and slowing down progress. I utilised these simple strategies to manage planned overfeeding and high energy influx:

1. My flexible meal would be my main single meal of the day
2. I would prioritise and force myself to expend more energy through strategies like walking, cycling, running and sauna on top of my weight training. This was a key strategy that sometimes helped expend an extra 500-1500 calories helping offset the higher energy influx.
3. As I was only having one main meal I wasn’t getting my usual 3 to 4 pulses of high quality protein. To minimise muscle protein breakdown throughout the day and mitigate negative nitrogen balance I would consume 15-30g of protein powder and/or 10-15g of essential amino acids 1-3x on these days.
4. If necessary, I would consume less calories over the following days to maintain my weekly caloric budget.

11. Being Full & Being Satiated Are Not The Same

Because you’re aware you’re consciously dramatically restricting yourself there can be a loss aversion-type-feeling associated with your food consumption. You might be able to fill yourself up and feel somewhat physically full on high quantities of fibrous low-calorie vegetables and lean meats, but at the end of the meal, you may not satisfied or satiated by what you eat.

This is a hard one to describe to people, it’s as if your brain does not feel satisfied. I suspect this is because you consciously know you’re restricting yourself and because you’re aware of the things you can’t eat you can’t help but feel like you’re missing out on the basic satisfactory psychological feelings that an ad libitum (eating freely) diet gives you.

12. Eating Is A Skill To Refine

Eating is a task people do every day so it’s very easy to eat unconsciously on autopilot. Even those who are nutritionally adept and conscious of their food choices often haven’t developed a skill set of conscious adaptive eating behaviours to serve them through life’s unpredictability. There is great utility in developing contingency plans, systems and expectations around your lifestyle to maintain conscious productive eating behaviours and maintain a healthy psychological relationship with food.

You really only learn this if you decide to go off autopilot and engage in some type of consistent measurement of your food intake and/or set boundaries and guidelines to your eating habits so you can test yourself and hone this skill. After going through a period of this the way you interact with food, the confidence you have to control your decision making around food and the knowledge you have about the foods and how they impact you dramatically rises. The skills learnt from a short 3-6 month period of deliberate food monitoring and behaviour modification will serve you for a lifetime.

13. The Cure For A Sex Addict – Bye Bye Libido

This one is not surprising to most, but it’s one thing to logically understand and another thing to feel it. Largely due to the massive endocrine disruption that occurs from months of controlled starvation such as plummeting testosterone, the desire and urges for the opposite sex can dwindle to an alarming level where your bodies evolutionary urge to procreate and pass on genes disappears.

On one hand, this can be a great tool because I could operate on a level of focus and clearheadedness that was foreign to me. For some, this may help them be ultra-productive, but on the other hand, I don’t think it’s healthy and it certainly won’t help your romantic relationship.

If you want to dig into some of the science of it “the metabolic response to sustained caloric restriction can impact your thyroid, ghrelin, testosterone, sex hormones, growth hormone, resting energy expenditure, and more. This down-regulation of anabolic hormones, such as testosterone, creates an environment primarily focused on preservation rather than muscle anabolism.”

14. Who Turned The Gravity Up? Plummeting Energy Levels

Towards the last months it got to a point sometimes where I’d be laying or sitting down and to the usual effort to get up and walk to the next room felt like someone had just turned the gravity up in the room. Like I had a heavy weight vest on my brain and body that made even the most simplest of basic locomotive tasks considerably more taxing.

Many a time my body felt slow depleted and sluggish which made many training sessions are grind to get through. Mentally I generally had less enthusiasm for life – enough where the people around me could notice. This wasn’t always the case though, it wasn’t every day for me, but it became frequent enough in the last months to affect me at least a couple times a week.

This is why prioritising sleep was so important because the last thing you need on your plate to further worsen your energy levels is the stress of sleep deprivation whilst you’re undergoing the stress of controlled starvation and daily training.

15. The Dichotomy Of Diet Breaks

In these 8 months, I took three 1 week diet breaks…and I loved them. They were great for me psychologically and socially to allow guilt-free flexible eating in a maintenance/slight surplus. However, I tended to push my diet breaks where it could take me 5-14 days to get back to my original weight that I was on before diet break began. For some, this won’t bother them. For others like me, I got to the point where I realised I had to cease all future diet breaks regardless of the scientific or psychological benefit they may provide because it was delaying my progress beyond what was acceptable to me. Since I stopped doing my diet breaks and entering a steeper caloric deficit, I experienced the most rapid body recomposition throughout the entire phase. Note: it was not just because of the cessation of diet breaks that was just one strategy that helped.

16. The Path Towards Personal Excellence Is Not Free Or Easy

To clarify, I’m not talking about people who are simply maintaining their physique after already going through a deficit phase. I’m talking about the process of what it takes to get to that point. The extreme discipline, restriction and attention to detail required to maximise your progress is the opposite of easy and convenient. It requires constant arguably obsessive daily attention, adjustment and smart work and that means other components of your life will take a back seat for a period of time and you have to find a way to make peace with that.

17. The Path Of Personal Excellence Is Glorious & Transformative

When you do something you’ve never done before you become someone you’ve never become before. Not only do you transform your physical presence and body but more significantly you transform your psyche. You bolster its fortitude and build new armouring against future hardship that is certain to come knocking. For me, I took this path because I wanted to push the boundaries of my mind and body further than they’ve ever gone before. I wanted to represent excellence in the capacity I’ve never experienced and actualised.

“It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable”

Socrates

Through this process, killed an old part of me and entered the abyss in order to rebirth myself into a new stronger version of myself that represents excellence in a way I can stand tall, fully own and represent proudly. This is the experience of transformation that I will repeat time and time again throughout my life in order to push the boundaries of excellence to find further fulfilment, meaning and peace through the responsibility of voluntary hardship and transformation.