How to lose weight as fast as humanly possible (healthily and safetly).

To burn as much fat as possible, you need to keep your insulin and blood sugar rock-bottom for as most of the day as you can.

Snacking is often the death of people. In the morning, you get a slight hunger groan so you quickly make a slice of toast. Maybe you’re conditioned to thinking that breakfast is the most important meal of the day.

Then at 10 am, you have tea with sugar and a biscuit. At 12, you have another sugary tea and biscuit. At 2, you’re a bit hungry so you grab a quick supermarket salad. At 3, someone brings round doughnuts at work. At 5, you have some crisps and a sugary drink. At 6 you pick on nuts as soon as you get home. At 7 you have a light dinner (well you’re not hungry after all that snacking). At 8 you have a couple of scoops of ice cream. At 9 you have tea and biscuits before bed. Well, it’s not bedtime yet so at 11 you have yet another one (a healthy bedtime tea this time).

You’ve spiked your insulin well into the night. If you add all that up, your blood sugar is never at a fasted state for more than a few hours between when you went to bed and when you have that slice of toast.

When your insulin in raised above your fasted level, it's harder to have access to stored fat. If you snack all day, then you might only be getting in a few hours of fat burning. And only while sleeping!

You know what that means from Chapter 3. Your body is never going to burn fat!

So yes. If you can associate with the scenario above, then you’re a snackaholic.

Having a few biscuits and nuts here and there doesn’t sound like a lot. But when you’re doing it day-in-day-out, your blood sugar is going to stay elevated.

But it gets worse.

Try the following exercise. Count all the little snacks that you would eat during a typical day. Now, put them on a plate. Do you want to eat that? Does that look like a plate of food that looks like the meat and two-veg that you know is healthy? Of course it doesn’t. It’s a brown mass of sludge.

Now, snacks like nuts and biscuits are extremely calorific. Your total daily calories from all your snacks are going to dwarf your main meals. The result? The majority of the food you’re eating isn’t “whole”. It’s empty!

Would you sit down to dinner to eat a plate of food like this?

The truth is this. Snacking is a relatively new phenomenon. Food is all around us. It’s on every street corner. It’s at a click of a finger or phone call. It might even arrive at your door without you even thinking about it (or needing more).

What’s more, it’s being shouted at us from the TV to the radio. It follows us around why we browse how to get skinny. It’s at every birthday, wedding, festival and funeral. Life’s a feast.

But it wasn’t always like this. Until very recently, food was a luxury. Or at least it wasn’t in surplus. You ate 2-3 meals per day and that was it.

Not now. It could be as many as 6 or 7 if you add up all the times your insulin spikes because of something you ate.

The number is going up and up, proportionally with our waistlines [1]. Food companies try to sell us more. They convince us we need to consume more stuff. They simultaneously tell us we need more “health food”. More veggies. More fruit. More smoothies.

But they also tell us we need to eat more biscuits. More ice cream. More take away. More KFC. More home deliveries.

Buy buy buy. Eat eat eat. More more more.

Credit: Nathália Rosa, Unsplash

Food is everywhere!

The longest time anyone has gone without eating is 382 days [2]. My clients and I routinely go for 3 or more. I personally have gone more than 10 days without food. And guess what. I am still here to tell the tale.

That’s when you normally eat. Your body works in cycles. It's called your circadian rhythm.

When it’s normally chow-time, (e.g. as soon as you wake up), your body releases a load of the hunger hormone (ghrelin) to kickstart your digestive system. Digestion starts way before you’ve even consciously thought about food. Your body needs to be in a receptive state to absorb all the food you eat and ghrelin kicks this all off.

But again, this is just preparation. You can easily just say no. Drink a coffee. Have a tea (a splash of milk but no sugars please). Drink some water (often a cry for food is a cry for water). Once you say no just a few times, your body will adapt. It won’t bother with this ghrelin funny business anymore.

For most people, this is dinner. Let’s say between 6 - 9 pm. Replace all that mindless snacking with real food that you love with the people you love. Sit down and eat it. Prepare it yourself. You’re only eating once a day now so you’ve just saved yourself a ridiculous amount of time.

For the rest of the day, you can consume stuff that doesn’t spike your insulin. That means no sugar or carbohydrates and no protein.

However, there is one thing you can eat!

Pure fat in smallish quantities is allowed. That's because fat doesn’t spike insulin. Fat has gotten a lot of unfair rap over the years. But fat is not necessarily bad. It is calorific. But it’s also filling and satisfying. If everyone carries around some amount of fat with them everywhere they go, how can all fat be bad?

Think of this fast as a metabolic fast. We’re not detoxing here. It’s not a water fast. Sometimes, to sustain yourself, you need a little pick me up. There are a number of things you can enjoy. Put some double cream in your tea. Put some butter in your coffee. Make some keto ice cream.

After some time, you’ll find that you won’t really need it. But it’s an option to help you get started.

In the long run, you do still want to avoid this.

I’ve seen some people slip right into this. I’ve seen it take 3 weeks. I’ve seen all sorts of symptoms of the body saying “I don’t like it”.

But eventually, everyone adjusts to some sort of eating window. The human body is genetically adapted to going a few hours without food. You don’t need to be fed all day long. You’re not going to die.

Efficiency is found in times of scarcity. I went to Cuba once. They still have working cars from the 50s. They’ve figured it out with extremely limited resources. Your body will too.

And the reality is that you won’t be without resources. You’re training your body to burn the resources it already has instead of lazily using the quick energy from the food you were constantly eating. That’s efficiency!

It’s pretty hard to eat 2,000 calories in one sitting. It can be done. We’ve all done it I’m sure. But you probably felt rather sick afterwards. You’re definitely not going to do that every day.

To eat that many calories involves eating a significant amount of processed food. This is the only food really to avoid (we’ll get to that in the next part).

As long as you don’t absolutely stuff yourself, you’re not going to eat your daily calorie allowance in one meal. You don’t need so much exhausting willpower. You just go all out, make your lovely dinner. Have a wholesome dessert if you really want and that’s it (but still no processed food). You’re satisfied because you had tasty, quality food. Not tasteless, soulless biscuits from a packet.

Food like this is making everyone fat.

As I said, there’s food everywhere. All the time you have to say no, no, no. Until finally, you say yes, yes, yes! Then regret.

It's hard to constantly make decisions about what to eat and what not to eat. This is called decision fatigue. This is why Steve Jobs always wore the same outfit.

When fasting, you just look at the time. Can I eat? There’s always an excuse for chocolates, biscuits and cake. But if it’s not between 7-9 pm, then there is no excuse right now.

Picture this. You’ve got no external fuel in the system. For a moment your body tries to slow things down as normal as it tries to conserve energy. But when you push it far enough, a switch turns on. Your body’s metabolism goes up!

It finds out that it has all that stored fat. It reboots the system and digs in. That’s the secret.

Every time you have an insulin spike, your brain function is impaired. You only need to have a big breakfast if you’re working the fields. But if you’re at a desk all day, you need your brain to be working well.

When your body is using fat and not sugar, your daily energy levels will be steady. That means no crashes. Only highs. Your brain functions more efficiently on fat. High-fat diets (keto) are even treatments of neurological disorders such as epilepsy and concussion [3] [4] .

Now, this is the secret. Once you get used to eating just one meal a day, it’s easy to progress. Get comfortable with it first. It could take a couple of days. It could take a couple of weeks. But once you’re in, you’ll know it.

Now you can extend.

You can start by skipping just Monday’s dinner. So that’s 6 dinners a week. Then you can skip Monday and Wednesday. Then try skipping Monday, Wednesday and Saturday. Go out to eat on all the other days. Who cares.

I routinely have clients fast Sunday to Wednesday. They can eat what they want on the weekend. The more consecutive days of fasting you do, amazing things happen.

You’ll learn to burn fat like never before. It will become your only source of fuel!

Find a hobby. Be with your partner. Go for wonderful walks. Explore the world through the lens of someone who isn’t burdened by the constant search for external satisfaction.

It will change how you view food for good!

Beyond this, you can even read this article I wrote about fasting. It goes deep!

Blog post: Fasting from first hand experience

Our earlier attempt at mathematics was fatally flawed. But try to argue with this.

Let’s say you typically burn 2,000 calories per day. Let’s say that you’re just maintaining your current weight with your normal lifestyle. Now, skip dinner for a day. You have 6 meals left this week. For you not to lose weight, you’d have to eat 2,000 calories extra over those 6 meals. Tough, but not impossible. It’s certainly possible if you tried to do that. But you’re trying to do the opposite.

Now, imagine you skipped 2 dinners. You’d have to eat an incredible 4,000 calories over the other 5 meals (not even 6) not to lose weight! It’s just not going to happen.

Combining that with the fact that your metabolism actually goes up when you’re in a fat-adapted fasted state. You tell me the outcome? Ridiculous weight loss.

Fasting has been a natural part of every major religion in the world. It has been around for generations.

But fasting is not convenient for big corporations. How do you sell fasting? It’s easier to sell health foods and breakfast cereals, gluten-free "this" and low-fat "that".

Believe it or not, people actually save money when signing up to our coaching plans. We don’t make you buy expensive health foods or supplements. We teach you to use what you have in the most efficient way possible.

You could continue in the same way. Waiting for the next fad diet to fix you. Waiting another year, hoping the weight will magically fall off. Wondering if it’s too much bread. If it’s too many biscuits. “Is fruit good or bad?” “Maybe I need to go vegan?”

But the likely scenario is:

Print this out and stick it on your fridge!

Cycle through these two fasting schedules on alternate weeks.