For workouts?
Use a “low stress”/ “low tech” one that’s simple and designed to strip off body fat - especially dangerous visceral (stomach) fat - without intensive dieting, like this one.
And for food - eating healthy - to give you energy throughout the day so you don’t dig a bigger hole for yourself?
Use this.
If you’re struggling to lose weight - or “get lean” as I call it, there’s a very good reason why.
Of course, this is assuming you’re actually “trying” and doing the “right things” - like working out and eating relatively healthy foods instead of a death row inmate at a buffet.
First, a story for illustration purposes.
Gayle, a nurse at Duke University, was a client at my personal training studio in North Carolina about 20 years ago.
Her trainer, Sandi, had her monitoring her food, eating healthy, “tracking her macros” (before it was a thing), and doing cardio on her “off” days for extra calorie burning.
Problem was, the scale wouldn’t budge.
Gayle, poor thing, was still as wide as she was tall.
And the rest of the training staff, myself included, thought she was “cheating” - binge eating or binge drinking and not telling anybody.
But because Gayle was a nurse at Duke, she had access to cutting edge medical technology.
One of those “technologies” was a sleep study - where they hooked her up to electrodes and monitored her brainwaves and her vitals.
Turns out her O2 saturation levels dropped from the high 90s (where they’re supposed to be) to the high 70s - and she woke up multiple times per night.
We didn’t see Gayle for about 2 months or so.
And when we did - we literally didn’t recognize her - she’d dropped about 75 pounds practically overnight and was a “normal” size and weight!
What happened?
Well, it turned out as a result of that sleep study, the docs found the reason why Gayle’s O2 stats were so low: She had abnormal growth/thickness on the back of her tongue that fell into her throat and practically choked her to death every night.
She had that “extra” surgically removed and she could actually breathe at night and her body no longer lived in a chronic “flight or fight” state.
As a result, it was happy to give up that extra body fat that it perceived that it needed for an emergency situation.
The point?
SLEEP.
Make sure you’re getting yours.
7+ hours a night. 8 is better.
And if you’re having trouble sleeping?
Get a sleep study done.
I had one done about 7 years ago.
Turns out I had interrupted sleep due to my tongue falling into the back of my throat too.
So I got a “sleep appliance” that prevents that from happening.
Stay Strong,
Geoff
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