RPF0692-Fat_Loss__Money-70_Pounds_and

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00:00:30.360 | Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight,

00:00:34.800 | and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now,

00:00:38.200 | while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

00:00:41.540 | My name is Joshua, I am your host, and today we're going to talk about two themes,

00:00:45.240 | about food and fat loss as it relates to money.

00:00:48.820 | Specifically, I'm going to share with you how some of the lessons that I'm learning from losing fat,

00:00:55.080 | how they apply to also building wealth.

00:00:58.360 | I'm also going to share with you how to spend less money on food by just simply stopping eating.

00:01:05.560 | And as weird as that sounds, and then I'm going to share a little bit of my personal experience

00:01:10.560 | with continued successful fat loss, in hopes that it might be helpful to you if you also desire to lose fat.

00:01:18.240 | I've been on a project here to get skinny and making good progress.

00:01:22.080 | This morning, just for context, I weighed in at 235 pounds,

00:01:26.020 | which is probably something like 70 to somewhere between 70 to 85 or 90 pounds of total weight loss in the last few months.

00:01:35.320 | And that's been really great, it's been extremely encouraging.

00:01:38.220 | What I find shocking is how much more weight, how fat I still am, how much more fat I have to lose,

00:01:42.660 | which it's pretty shocking.

00:01:44.860 | You know, it's remarkable, the psychological changes,

00:01:48.640 | and I have a lot of things to apply that to finance as well.

00:01:53.800 | Quick bit of preamble.

00:01:55.640 | This show, I'm going to share quite a bit about just a little bit of my personal journey.

00:01:59.540 | I do want to drive home those two lessons that relate to money,

00:02:03.540 | but this is one of those shows that's more tangentially related to personal finance.

00:02:07.940 | If you want hardcore personal finance, check back another day.

00:02:10.640 | But if you're interested in a little bit of my journey,

00:02:12.280 | or if you're interested in some of the things that I've learned that are working for me to lose fat,

00:02:15.740 | and maybe that might be helpful to you, I'll share that with you.

00:02:18.500 | And then I'll share those lessons as they relate to personal finance.

00:02:22.740 | I'm not coming from the place of any kind of stated expertise,

00:02:26.940 | not a doctor, not a nutritionist.

00:02:29.140 | I'm widely read in those areas,

00:02:31.340 | but basically wide reading has produced nothing but confusion and poor results.

00:02:36.040 | So it's one of the most dissatisfying areas of learning that I've ever tried to do.

00:02:40.040 | Now I feel like I'm still making more progress,

00:02:41.940 | I'm still trying to dig in and understand more of the medical side,

00:02:46.240 | but I still, if you want to get hopelessly confused,

00:02:49.180 | just start reading your way through dietary advice and nutrition and health.

00:02:53.080 | So ignore all of that.

00:02:54.380 | I'm just one, you know, formerly really fat dude,

00:02:57.380 | now slightly less fat guy who's just telling you some of the things that I have learned,

00:03:02.080 | and don't ascribe any kind of expertise to me beyond that.

00:03:05.980 | But this fits my philosophy that,

00:03:08.680 | I have two bits of philosophy that I think are not frequently heard.

00:03:11.640 | But number one, I feel like sometimes the best people to learn from are not experts.

00:03:15.540 | There's a place for experts, right?

00:03:17.280 | You really want experts in many things.

00:03:19.880 | But when it comes to actually accomplishing change,

00:03:22.780 | sometimes experts aren't as valuable.

00:03:24.580 | Sometimes the experiences of a next door neighbor who you can relate to are more valuable.

00:03:28.980 | And so although I'm not an expert in coaching tons of people to fat loss,

00:03:33.940 | I'll just share with you my experiences.

00:03:36.040 | And what I heard when I did a couple episodes on this a couple months ago,

00:03:40.040 | was I had a lot of feedback.

00:03:40.940 | People said thank you, and they were trying to do some things and getting some good results.

00:03:43.940 | Lots of feedback from that.

00:03:45.040 | So I figured it's worth my imposing on your time here with some more ideas to hopefully help more people.

00:03:51.540 | Because being less fat has been great.

00:03:53.740 | It's been really great.

00:03:54.980 | I'm looking forward to being truly skinny in the future.

00:03:58.640 | The second bit of philosophy is I think there's value in hearing people when they're in the middle of a process.

00:04:04.240 | What often happens is that after you've done something,

00:04:07.940 | your brain seems to have the ability to disassociate you from the things that are hard,

00:04:13.740 | and you only remember the good times.

00:04:15.540 | I, my wife and I tease my mom mercilessly when we're with our children,

00:04:20.040 | and my children are doing something ridiculous.

00:04:22.440 | They're misbehaving or something.

00:04:23.640 | And we talk to her about, well, how did you handle this when you had little young children?

00:04:28.240 | And it's been, of course, 30 years since she had young children.

00:04:32.040 | And she just, she's like, well, I don't remember that.

00:04:35.140 | And we tease her mercilessly because she just somehow, her brain has sorted through all these experiences.

00:04:42.340 | And a lot of the hard experiences, the bad experiences are just gone from her memory.

00:04:47.240 | She just doesn't remember them.

00:04:48.240 | All she has is the glowing good experiences.

00:04:51.640 | And so I think that's just my personal joke with her.

00:04:55.940 | But I think the same thing happens to most of us, is that when you go through something,

00:05:00.040 | as the time goes by, your memories change, and your brain has the ability to block out the things that are hard.

00:05:07.140 | And you kind of end up with this almost rosy, unrealistic picture of what actually happened.

00:05:13.040 | And so I think there's real value in hearing from people while they're in the middle of something,

00:05:17.440 | while they're in the middle of paying off their debt, or while they're in the middle of a job search,

00:05:20.940 | or when they're in the middle of being unemployed, and they're sharing what that's like.

00:05:24.340 | Because those experiences are more raw, and they're truer to life, because they're more current, they're more recent.

00:05:32.440 | And so that's what I'm doing here, is that I'm purposely not waiting until five years after I've been skinny for five years,

00:05:39.140 | no one would believe it.

00:05:39.740 | I'm in the middle of something, and that's hard, because it takes a bit of courage.

00:05:43.740 | Because one of the things that you know, if you, like I, have lost weight, gained weight, lost weight, gained weight,

00:05:50.040 | as most people, most Americans, at least most fat Americans have done, you're always a little bit uncertain.

00:05:55.840 | Like, is this the time that I can actually keep these results?

00:06:00.540 | Is this the time that I can actually follow through?

00:06:03.840 | Is this the time that the behavior change and the habit change will stick?

00:06:08.640 | Well, there's no way to be certain of that, and there are some lessons,

00:06:11.340 | even if you find out that, "Hey, this isn't the time," and you mess it up.

00:06:14.540 | Well, you can go back sometimes and listen to your conversation when you were recorded on a podcast in the middle of it,

00:06:21.140 | and say, "All right, well, now I can identify what I didn't see at that time."

00:06:24.640 | But that's not going to happen.

00:06:25.840 | I'm not going to let it happen. I'm determined, you know, that ship has sailed, no matter what.

00:06:30.740 | I threw away my fattest clothes and bought a bunch of smaller ones, and so I'm done.

00:06:35.840 | I'm not going to take those results.

00:06:38.240 | But that's why I'm sharing this in process, and I hope you'll apply those two ideas to other things as well.

00:06:44.940 | Is don't be scared to share with somebody what you're learning.

00:06:47.740 | Even if you're just a little bit ahead of somebody else, teaching it to somebody else will solidify your own knowledge of it.

00:06:54.040 | And don't be scared to listen to people who are getting some better results while recognizing,

00:06:58.340 | hopefully they're honest enough to say, "You know, I don't have the experience of coaching thousands of people to this success."

00:07:04.240 | So you should listen to experts, but also listen to people who are more modest in their experience,

00:07:09.540 | because you can learn from both.

00:07:11.040 | At the end of the day, filter other people's ideas through your own critical thinking and analysis and personal experience and knowledge.

00:07:19.240 | So I'm going to cover first a little bit of the story on fat loss, and then we'll come back to those financial lessons at the end.

00:07:26.440 | By way of very brief backstory, I have been fat all my life since I was a kid.

00:07:32.540 | There's only a very brief time that I remember not being fat, and I've been significantly fat for a long time.

00:07:39.040 | My average weight basically has always fluctuated between somewhere between 285 and 320 pounds.

00:07:44.540 | The heaviest I ever was was 320, but basically around 300 pounds. 300, 305 pounds was kind of a standard weigh-in for me.

00:07:51.340 | Now, I have the blessing of being large and tall, and so although I would have always been characterized as obese,

00:07:57.740 | many people have said, "Oh, Josh, you're not so fat."

00:08:00.240 | And in fact, but this morning I weighed in at 235 pounds.

00:08:04.140 | I don't know exactly where I started, but I would say it was certainly at least 300 pounds.

00:08:08.740 | So I've lost at this point something approaching 65, perhaps 70, 75 pounds.

00:08:14.640 | I don't know for certain because it didn't have a scale. Lesson in there.

00:08:21.840 | Along that process though, and what astounds me though, is still how fat I am.

00:08:25.740 | One of the things that as I've tried to do more research and studying what's working for me, what's not working for me,

00:08:30.840 | I've just been astounded by how fat the average American really is compared to probably how fat we should be.

00:08:40.640 | Now, I'm not talking about those of us who've just been obviously obese.

00:08:44.240 | Big fat stomachs, big fat hips, whatever, wherever you carry your fat.

00:08:47.540 | I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about just the average person.

00:08:51.440 | I watched a documentary, don't have the title in front of me, but it was one of these documentaries,

00:08:56.040 | but it was done at least a decade ago by a British model, a British fitness model and personal trainer,

00:09:03.240 | who did a basically fit to fat to fit documentary.

00:09:08.240 | This is not one of the modern ones. There have been a couple recently by Americans.

00:09:11.640 | This is one of the older ones. And so here's this guy who's a fitness model, an underwear model,

00:09:16.340 | and he decides that he's going to gain a lot of weight. Forget exactly how much he gained,

00:09:19.740 | but something in excess of 50 pounds, maybe 70 pounds, don't remember exactly.

00:09:24.640 | And he filmed the process through. And so he stopped all of his good habits.

00:09:29.240 | He stopped exercising and he just started eating junk food, just forcing junk food in his mouth.

00:09:34.540 | It was a really remarkable documentary because he did such a good job of being honest

00:09:41.340 | and you could see how the junk food and how the increased weight was affecting his personal life,

00:09:46.840 | how it was affecting his energy, how it was affecting his health, how it was affecting his motivation, etc.

00:09:53.340 | But he went through his process of getting fat over the course of basically six months.

00:09:57.940 | Took him a while to get fat. Then once he was fat, then he reversed course to try to lose weight and get fit.

00:10:04.940 | It was remarkable to see how much he struggled with the junk food addictions,

00:10:09.240 | where although he had had this lifetime of eating in a way that kept him very lean

00:10:13.940 | and he'd had this just tremendous physique all his life, all these healthy habits,

00:10:20.640 | but he wasn't able to just flip the switch and go right back to it.

00:10:25.040 | It took him several weeks, almost a month, I think, to kind of get back on the wagon

00:10:31.040 | as he dealt with probably the physical addiction, the chemical addictions to the sugar

00:10:37.940 | and the carbohydrates and everything that all the junk food that he had stuffed his mouth with.

00:10:41.940 | But what I found most shocking was that at his fattest point, after he'd done all this work to get really fat,

00:10:50.640 | if you or I looked at him, we would not say that he was all that fat.

00:10:55.640 | And yet here he was with a massive level of weight gain.

00:10:59.040 | We would have looked at him and said, "Eh, he's a little tubby, you know, got a dad bod.

00:11:02.740 | Basically, he's got a dad bod." And it really just shocked me when I started looking around at the United States.

00:11:10.640 | You talk about the obesity epidemic, but I've always just associated that with really fat people.

00:11:15.940 | But seeing him go and seeing what that amount of excess weight on his frame looked like,

00:11:22.140 | how he just looked like a normal, not very fat, but not shredded, not really athletic American,

00:11:29.140 | was really sobering to me. And I have that same experience.

00:11:32.940 | And I weighed in this morning at 235 pounds. I look in the mirror and I think,

00:11:36.140 | "Wow, it would not be shocking to me if I have to lose another 50 pounds."

00:11:41.640 | And it just, I don't have a point other than to say it's sobering. It's really sobering to see.

00:11:49.640 | Now, here I want to share a little bit more of my story,

00:11:52.640 | and I'll tie in some lessons that I've thought about as it relates to finance with fat loss.

00:11:58.140 | I do believe that there is a lot to gain from using finances as a way of improving your life,

00:12:05.140 | and as a way of losing fat loss or fitness as a way to improve your life.

00:12:11.640 | Years ago, I read Tim Ferris' book called The 4-Hour Body.

00:12:20.140 | I read all his books and really liked him. He's a very smart guy.

00:12:23.140 | But he made a comment somewhere in The 4-Hour Body where he was talking about,

00:12:26.140 | why are you, he was asking or answering the question,

00:12:29.140 | why are you focusing on fat loss and fitness? And his argument was that if you can make a change

00:12:37.140 | and help somebody with their fitness and their fat loss,

00:12:41.140 | that that's a decision that will ripple over to other areas of their life.

00:12:46.140 | And I think the same thing can be applied to finances.

00:12:50.140 | And I'm sure there are other areas as well, but it seems as though there's a whole set of good decisions

00:12:55.640 | that when you start making good decisions and start realizing change,

00:12:59.140 | it builds your self-confidence to accomplish change in other areas.

00:13:03.140 | I can't cite any data on this, but it would not be surprising to me

00:13:07.640 | if I went looking for some kind of validation at this point to find that when people start to get out of debt,

00:13:14.140 | save money, that often they also start to lose weight.

00:13:17.640 | And it also wouldn't surprise me to find out if there's some study out there that would show that

00:13:23.140 | when people start to lose weight, that they start to make improvements in their finances.

00:13:28.140 | And the same thing can apply to relationships or to their performance at work, etc.

00:13:32.140 | That it seems as that when you get on a positive growth trajectory,

00:13:36.140 | it almost inevitably filters over to other areas because there are certain basic techniques

00:13:41.140 | that can be applied in different places.

00:13:44.140 | So I've been acutely conscious of the experiences that I've had along this recent journey.

00:13:50.640 | And one of the things that I can affirm is that I underestimated the impact that fat loss would have

00:13:57.140 | on my own sense of personal productivity, personal self-confidence, willingness to do certain things.

00:14:05.140 | It's just given me a basic confidence and what I'll call mental energy.

00:14:10.140 | I've had good physical energy, but I'm not trying to describe this as some kind of magical physical energy pill,

00:14:16.140 | but more of just a clarity of mind.

00:14:18.140 | Again, not saying physical. I've never suffered in recent days from cloudy,

00:14:24.140 | you know, from fogged thinking and from difficulty with reasoning, etc.

00:14:29.140 | Even when I was very fat, my brain was sharp.

00:14:32.140 | You've heard it here on the show. You've judged for yourself if it was sharp.

00:14:35.140 | But I've experienced just kind of a boost of clarity and confidence, not even in my appearance,

00:14:42.140 | although I'm certain that that has some reflection. But I had arrived at a point in my maturity as a man

00:14:49.140 | where I'm not gaining self-personal confidence from my appearance.

00:14:54.140 | I don't have that same adolescent or young adult need for external approval.

00:15:01.140 | I gain self-confidence from who I am, from my confidence in my character, in my upright life,

00:15:08.140 | from the love of my wife, from the respect and love of my children.

00:15:12.140 | And so it's not that adolescent idea, although again, I'm sure that that does play a role.

00:15:20.140 | What I'm trying to describe is how the confidence that comes from getting results parlays over into other areas.

00:15:29.140 | And that's been really impressive to me to experience and to be aware of as the situation has continued.

00:15:35.140 | I didn't expect it to be quite so significant.

00:15:38.140 | And so if you're struggling with money and you're fat, well, of course, work on your money,

00:15:43.140 | but also consider working on your fatness and see if there's some reflection over.

00:15:48.140 | And if you're getting out of debt and you're starting to feel or you're building money

00:15:51.140 | and you're building more confidence from there, then I encourage you,

00:15:54.140 | then use some of that confidence that comes from making financial improvements over to other areas.

00:16:00.140 | Now, I'm going to walk you through some psychology that I've experienced and continue to draw money lessons for them.

00:16:07.140 | But when I recently started to lose weight, I don't even know the exact date.

00:16:15.140 | I didn't write it down.

00:16:16.140 | I just came to a firm inner conviction that I could not accept things the way that they were.

00:16:25.140 | And I came to a firm inner conviction that I had to change and I had to change for life no matter what.

00:16:34.140 | I don't know the day.

00:16:35.140 | I don't know even the month at this point.

00:16:37.140 | It was something like -- I don't even know at this point.

00:16:42.140 | It was something like July-ish of 2019.

00:16:47.140 | But I just simply came.

00:16:49.140 | I was sitting.

00:16:50.140 | I know where I was, and I know it was in the middle of the day.

00:16:53.140 | Children were having their sleep, and I was sitting on the couch in my living room.

00:16:57.140 | I think it was probably a Saturday.

00:16:59.140 | I was sitting in my living room thinking, probably was reading, and I just came to this firm conviction that it could not continue.

00:17:08.140 | And for me, part of it was probably just frustration at what on earth?

00:17:16.140 | How is it that somebody who's -- I'm not a stupid person.

00:17:20.140 | How is it that I can't beat this?

00:17:22.140 | I'm not an undisciplined person.

00:17:23.140 | Why is it that I can't beat this?

00:17:25.140 | Part of it was related to my future where I was planning a live event, and I just couldn't see myself standing on stage as a fat man.

00:17:35.140 | That's not how I see myself.

00:17:38.140 | I couldn't imagine sitting back and watching a video of me speaking at a live event and being annoyed with how fat I was.

00:17:46.140 | And I didn't think it was honoring to God.

00:17:49.140 | I didn't think it was anything that was attracted to people, and I just came to the conviction.

00:17:53.140 | I said, "That's it.

00:17:54.140 | No matter what it takes, then I'm going to change."

00:17:58.140 | And the lesson that I'll draw from there over to money is I've observed that same thing in other people, and I've heard about that same thing in other people.

00:18:07.140 | And I think that's probably not universal, but many people have to come to an epiphany like that where they realize that what I've been doing isn't working.

00:18:16.140 | Why is it that I'm broke?

00:18:18.140 | Why am I not rich?

00:18:19.140 | Why can't I figure this out?

00:18:22.140 | And it seems like there often has to come that moment where you say, "That's it.

00:18:27.140 | I've had it.

00:18:28.140 | I'm not going to take it anymore, and I don't care what the cost is.

00:18:31.140 | I don't care what I have to do, but I'm going to learn what I have to do.

00:18:36.140 | I don't care.

00:18:37.140 | I'm not living this way anymore."

00:18:40.140 | And part of that that I would say, the lesson that I've drawn from that is if that relates between fatness, health, and money, if it relates over, I think that you can nurture that yourself by reflecting on the future.

00:18:56.140 | When I reflect on the future that I want financially, it's a big, bright future.

00:19:04.140 | And one of the things that I've tried to do, the games I've tried to play in my head is I've tried to map out different futures.

00:19:09.140 | So in my head, I look forward, and I see what that ideal future would look like if I do everything really well, if I do what I intend to do and I do it well.

00:19:20.140 | And I really amp up the emotion of that positive future.

00:19:23.140 | I see myself in the circumstances that I dream of, and I imagine that.

00:19:28.140 | And then I go to the opposite, and I say, "Okay, what if I don't do that?

00:19:31.140 | What if I don't take the courageous step?

00:19:33.140 | Or what if I don't sit down and work?

00:19:34.140 | What if I don't do the things I need to do?"

00:19:36.140 | And I amplify the terror of that situation.

00:19:39.140 | I try to use that emotion to energize me when I don't feel like working.

00:19:42.140 | And I think the same thing can be done with regard to weight loss.

00:19:46.140 | I try to see, and I've used these visualization techniques, and I try to see what my life would look like if I'm fat and the ways that that limits me and how things work out over time.

00:19:56.140 | And then I've gone the other direction as well, and to try to see what do things look like if I'm not fat and to go with the very best or the very worst.

00:20:04.140 | I got mixed up.

00:20:06.140 | The best and the worst, and really get those pictures clearly in my head.

00:20:10.140 | So that's the lesson that I drew from that.

00:20:14.140 | Now, the next thing that in my own weight loss journey that I did was I didn't go out and read more books.

00:20:20.140 | I've read books.

00:20:22.140 | I've read articles.

00:20:24.140 | I've listened to people talk about successful weight loss.

00:20:28.140 | I've tried different things in the past.

00:20:31.140 | I've eaten in different ways.

00:20:33.140 | I've gotten certain amounts of experience.

00:20:35.140 | But in the totality of those experiences, I came to the -- I came to just my personal journey.

00:20:41.140 | I came to a couple of opinions and convictions.

00:20:46.140 | Number one, I genuinely wondered if there was something wrong with me, with my body.

00:20:52.140 | I genuinely wondered if I've got some kind of weird -- maybe my hormones are messed up or maybe there's something medically wrong with me.

00:21:00.140 | Because when I've done honest analyses of my diet, it didn't make sense to me why I was as fat as I was.

00:21:10.140 | I didn't eat a lot of junk food.

00:21:12.140 | On occasion, we'd have a treat, but I didn't eat a lot of junk food.

00:21:15.140 | In our house, we never -- we just -- we don't eat packaged food.

00:21:19.140 | We cook every single meal from scratch.

00:21:22.140 | We eat meat and vegetables, and then we would eat some rice sometimes.

00:21:27.140 | If the -- not all the time, but basically, like we didn't eat junk.

00:21:31.140 | And I don't eat junk, and I don't eat that much.

00:21:34.140 | And I would do the analyses, and I would take -- you know, at times I would take food logs and take pictures of all my food and write down everything I ate.

00:21:40.140 | I'm intensely aware of it.

00:21:42.140 | And I just grew frustrated, like why on earth am I fat?

00:21:45.140 | Maybe there's something I haven't done.

00:21:47.140 | So maybe I need to go and consult a doctor and do blood tests and things like that.

00:21:51.140 | And when I came to the conviction that something was going to -- that, no, this has got to change, and I'll do it no matter what, that was part of my plan.

00:21:59.140 | And as I said, all right, if I need to go and talk to a doctor and I need to do blood tests, I'll do it.

00:22:03.140 | Whatever it is, I've got to figure this out.

00:22:06.140 | I'm not going to go any longer with this -- with being fat.

00:22:11.140 | It's got to change no matter what it takes.

00:22:14.140 | But I didn't start with calling the doctor.

00:22:17.140 | What I started was doing what I figured had the highest probability of working for me.

00:22:24.140 | Now, from my experience, observation, and listening, I was convinced that probably the best solution was for me to go on a ketogenic diet.

00:22:37.140 | I don't know if that's right or not, but that was what I had concluded, that probably the best solution was to go on a ketogenic diet.

00:22:43.140 | And I had that opinion because I saw it working for a lot of people.

00:22:47.140 | I wasn't competent to describe the differences between a low-carb diet and a ketogenic diet, but I knew that I'd lost weight on a low-carb diet.

00:22:55.140 | I knew that I'd lost weight in the past on a ketogenic diet, so I figured a ketogenic diet would probably work for me.

00:23:02.140 | And so I just started.

00:23:03.140 | It was whatever day it was, probably a Saturday, probably sometime around the summer, probably sometime around July.

00:23:10.140 | I just started, and I started on Saturday at 2 o'clock, and I said, "That's it. I'm not going to eat carbs.

00:23:16.140 | I'm not going to eat carbs. I'm exclusively going to eat protein and fat, and that's it.

00:23:24.140 | Vegetables, meat, and fat, that's it."

00:23:27.140 | And I started.

00:23:30.140 | And the lesson that I want to draw from that over to finances is that if you've been struggling with your finances,

00:23:38.140 | you probably don't necessarily need to read another book.

00:23:41.140 | I think books are great, but you've probably read a bunch of books.

00:23:44.140 | You've probably had a bunch of ideas.

00:23:46.140 | You've probably considered a lot of ways that you can improve things, and yet there's probably a behavioral change that you haven't done.

00:23:54.140 | Now, I personally think that there's good reason to believe that almost any diet can work.

00:23:59.140 | You read diet books, and you find that almost any diet can work.

00:24:03.140 | Now, does that mean that all diets are equal?

00:24:05.140 | No, it doesn't.

00:24:06.140 | Because the basic thing about a diet, one of the factors of success that has to be included is, will people stick to this diet?

00:24:14.140 | But the reality is almost any diet can result in short-term weight loss at the very least for those who stick to it.

00:24:22.140 | And so when you try to analyze what diet is superior, it's hard just because almost any diet results in weight loss.

00:24:28.140 | Now, does the diet actually result in long-term weight loss?

00:24:32.140 | Does it result in a lifelong weight loss?

00:24:35.140 | That's a bigger question.

00:24:36.140 | What percentage of people who start the diet stick to the diet?

00:24:39.140 | That's a very big question.

00:24:41.140 | But almost any diet can work.

00:24:43.140 | And then the same thing I would say, that almost any financial improvement can work.

00:24:48.140 | There's so many individual pieces of financial advice, and so many of them can work.

00:24:53.140 | So what I'd recommend to you, if you're struggling with money and finances, don't necessarily start by going out and reading a book.

00:25:01.140 | Just simply think, based upon my past experiences, based upon my successes, based upon my failures, what do I think is likely to work for me?

00:25:12.140 | What do I think I need to change?

00:25:14.140 | And do that.

00:25:15.140 | And just start it.

00:25:17.140 | What do I think I need to do?

00:25:19.140 | Coach yourself and do that.

00:25:21.140 | For me, that was simply starting a ketogenic diet.

00:25:25.140 | And I didn't read any books on keto.

00:25:27.140 | I was broadly aware of it because, again, of being extensively read in diet books.

00:25:33.140 | I understood the basics.

00:25:34.140 | But I didn't go and read books on keto.

00:25:36.140 | I just started.

00:25:37.140 | And so the same thing.

00:25:38.140 | If you're trying to lose weight, just do whatever you think is the starting point.

00:25:41.140 | I'm sharing my journey.

00:25:43.140 | Hopefully, you might pick up some tidbits.

00:25:45.140 | But do whatever you think is the most important for you.

00:25:48.140 | And just start.

00:25:49.140 | Because the key is to start.

00:25:51.140 | You don't have to be great to start.

00:25:53.140 | But you've got to start to be great.

00:25:54.140 | Love that quote.

00:25:55.140 | You don't have to be great to start.

00:25:57.140 | But you've got to start to be great.

00:25:59.140 | Now, the next thing that I did was I knew from past experience, again, diets on/off,

00:26:07.140 | lost weight, gained weight, lost weight, gained weight, the typical story of most fat people.

00:26:11.140 | I knew that the most difficult part of getting into a new diet was the transition period.

00:26:18.140 | And especially there can be a change when going on to a low-carbohydrate diet.

00:26:23.140 | Now, I did not do a good job of preparing for everything.

00:26:26.140 | Looking back, do I wish I had weighed myself?

00:26:29.140 | I wish I had because then I could tell you exactly how much weight I've lost.

00:26:32.140 | Do I wish I'd taken pictures of myself?

00:26:34.140 | I wish I had because then I could have really great before and after pictures.

00:26:38.140 | But the problem is I'd done that.

00:26:39.140 | I've done that a lot of times.

00:26:41.140 | I've done that at least a half a dozen times where you, as a dieter and a fat person,

00:26:45.140 | you screw up your ideas and you say, "You know what?

00:26:47.140 | This is the time I'm going to lose weight."

00:26:49.140 | And you take a before picture and you take measurements and you take weights and all that stuff.

00:26:52.140 | And then you start and then something happens and you stop.

00:26:55.140 | And so because of that, I developed a distinctive version to that.

00:26:59.140 | I don't like failing.

00:27:00.140 | And this is a common thing that many people don't like failing.

00:27:03.140 | And so one of the things that you do to avoid failure is you stop setting goals.

00:27:06.140 | And you get burned enough times and it starts to wear you out.

00:27:09.140 | Been there, done that.

00:27:11.140 | So if you have any respect for me, recognize that your experience with that,

00:27:15.140 | whether it's with money or with being fat or anything else in life that you care about,

00:27:19.140 | recognize that your experience is not--you're not alone.

00:27:21.140 | I've experienced that.

00:27:23.140 | We've all experienced that.

00:27:24.140 | That's common.

00:27:25.140 | And so you start setting low goals or you start not setting goals because you just simply recognize

00:27:30.140 | that I might not do it this time and I'm scared to commit because I don't want to fail again.

00:27:35.140 | So looking back, do I wish I'd done that?

00:27:37.140 | Yeah, I do.

00:27:38.140 | But the reality is it doesn't matter because I don't have to have the most impressive,

00:27:42.140 | perfect saying of how much weight I've lost.

00:27:44.140 | All that matters is results.

00:27:46.140 | But I knew the transition point would be hard.

00:27:48.140 | And so I said, and what I've learned from that experience is that I've got to solve the transition period.

00:27:54.140 | Now what I have found to be effective when transitioning onto a diet is to focus on the luxury of a diet.

00:28:02.140 | And so this I think is one of the reasons why a ketogenic/low carb diet,

00:28:09.140 | that type of thing where it really shines.

00:28:11.140 | Because unlike calorie restriction diets where you're counting calories very,

00:28:15.140 | very carefully and you're eating small meals, et cetera,

00:28:18.140 | where you constantly feel deprived and pinched, ketogenic and low carb diets don't make you commit to that in the beginning.

00:28:25.140 | Now I don't know whether you lose fat because of eating low carb or whether you lose fat because you ultimately eat low calories.

00:28:34.140 | It's a big debate.

00:28:35.140 | I don't know.

00:28:36.140 | I don't know.

00:28:37.140 | All I know is that I've gotten results.

00:28:39.140 | But what I have learned is that if you're going to stick to a diet, it's good to focus on the luxury of the diet.

00:28:44.140 | So with that experience, what I have done, what I did at the time, was I went and I focused on getting really good food.

00:28:52.140 | For me, that's steak.

00:28:53.140 | And so I said I'm going to spend money on meat.

00:28:56.140 | And so I started buying lots of meat and cooking just awesome meat, cooking big steaks, big beef roasts, roast pork, pulled pork, all the lovely barbecue stuff is.

00:29:09.140 | Because if you're eating barbecue, it's hard to say that you're suffering.

00:29:13.140 | Who sits down to -- when your rules are you can eat as much steak as you want, who sits down to a steak and eats and says that I'm suffering?

00:29:22.140 | I also made sure that I got lots of fat.

00:29:24.140 | Fat, of course, leads to -- helps you dramatically with satiety, with just not feeling hungry, with feeling satiated.

00:29:30.140 | And so I made sure that I had lots of fat.

00:29:33.140 | So I would have -- I bought avocados and I made sure to eat lots of oil.

00:29:39.140 | I love salads.

00:29:40.140 | And so I'd make big, really great salads with all kinds of fun ingredients and lettuce and tomatoes and strawberries and blueberries and nuts and just load them up with oil.

00:29:51.140 | So I was getting lots of fat.

00:29:53.140 | And then I would stuff myself.

00:29:54.140 | I intentionally stuffed myself with that food.

00:29:58.140 | And that helped me to not feel deprived because I was focusing not on what I couldn't eat but on what I could eat.

00:30:04.140 | And by constantly feeling satiated in that way, then I was able to not feel deprived.

00:30:10.140 | And I think the same thing happens with money.

00:30:13.140 | What I've observed with money over the years is that when people focus on what they're missing out on instead of what they're getting, it totally changes their perspective.

00:30:23.140 | One of the best ways to assure yourself of getting good results in your money is to focus on what you're getting by making a financial change rather than what you're giving up.

00:30:34.140 | So, for example, let's say that you don't track your spending.

00:30:37.140 | Well, look at where that's gotten you.

00:30:40.140 | If you're happy with the results, fine, don't change.

00:30:42.140 | But if you're unhappy with the results, recognize the fact that my not tracking my spending in some way is causing me to not get a result that I want.

00:30:53.140 | So if I want to get a result that I want, I've got to change.

00:30:57.140 | So don't focus on how, "I just hate tracking my spending.

00:30:59.140 | I hate writing down my money."

00:31:00.140 | Focus on figuring out how to set up a system for yourself where you see that a change in behavior is leading to a change in outcome.

00:31:08.140 | People who are naturally frugal or people who are frugal are often frugal.

00:31:12.140 | They often have just as much of a desire to buy things as other people.

00:31:16.140 | But what they often have is they have a higher thing that they appreciate more than the desire to spend.

00:31:21.140 | It could be that they see frugality as a virtue.

00:31:24.140 | I do.

00:31:25.140 | That's one of my things.

00:31:26.140 | I see frugality as a virtue, and I want to be a virtuous man.

00:31:29.140 | And so for me, part of that exercise is frugality.

00:31:33.140 | Or they could see that choosing not to spend is a way to enhance self-discipline.

00:31:37.140 | These are some of my motivators.

00:31:39.140 | And so for me, I want to be a disciplined person.

00:31:42.140 | I want to be disciplined in all aspects of my life.

00:31:44.140 | And so one way that I can prove to myself for my own self-confidence that I'm a disciplined person is by being careful with spending.

00:31:50.140 | But perhaps more importantly would be that if I don't spend now, then I get to have something better later on.

00:31:56.140 | And so a big one for me is financial independence, financial freedom.

00:32:00.140 | I want to have the freedom to buy whatever I want, to go wherever I want, to not be accountable from my days to a boss, to be able to do anything I want in the world.

00:32:09.140 | And financial independence, financial freedom is one path to get there.

00:32:13.140 | So if I will choose to be frugal, if I'll be thoughtful, if I'll be careful, if I'll delay impulse spending, if I'll not purchase those certain things, then I get this freedom.

00:32:21.140 | As I record this podcast, I'm looking out the window at my cheap minivan that cost me $3,000 and I've driven it forever.

00:32:28.140 | I don't have any car lust because I see that minivan as a ticket to freedom.

00:32:33.140 | It's adequate for my needs.

00:32:35.140 | I don't suffer, right?

00:32:36.140 | It's got leather seats.

00:32:37.140 | It's got air conditioning.

00:32:38.140 | It drives along the highway at 70 miles an hour.

00:32:40.140 | It's fuel efficient.

00:32:41.140 | It's comfortable.

00:32:42.140 | It's safe for my children.

00:32:43.140 | It provides us a really great way.

00:32:44.140 | We can carry lots of stuff.

00:32:45.140 | It's a great vehicle.

00:32:46.140 | But it's not flashy.

00:32:47.140 | But what it means to me is freedom.

00:32:49.140 | It doesn't mean deprivation.

00:32:50.140 | It means freedom.

00:32:51.140 | Now, to somebody else, it would mean deprivation because they care about having a fancy car.

00:32:56.140 | Fine.

00:32:57.140 | No problem.

00:32:58.140 | But I don't care about that.

00:32:59.140 | I care about freedom.

00:33:00.140 | So you can achieve these behavioral changes if you focus on what you're getting rather than on what you're giving up.

00:33:07.140 | So back to, for me, with the ketogenic diet.

00:33:10.140 | I said, "Okay, I'm getting this really great food, so I'm going to make awesome food that I really enjoy eating."

00:33:16.140 | And so it's very simple.

00:33:18.140 | Meat and vegetables and then more fat.

00:33:20.140 | I didn't sit down and try to track everything because I knew from experience that that was annoying to me.

00:33:26.140 | It was overwhelming.

00:33:27.140 | Been there, done that, tracked every macro, figured I'm going to make this -- if I'm going to make this a behavioral change,

00:33:33.140 | if I'm going to make this a lifelong behavioral change, I've got to make this transition as easy as possible.

00:33:40.140 | And so I just said, "I don't need to track it or anything right now.

00:33:45.140 | I'm going to impose a new way of living.

00:33:48.140 | I think there's sufficient evidence out there to think that in general a ketogenic way of eating, a lifestyle,

00:33:55.140 | will in the fullness of time lead me to success of my goals.

00:33:59.140 | I don't know how long it will take.

00:34:01.140 | I don't know if it will take six months or six years.

00:34:03.140 | I'm not sure this is the best way, but I think it's a good way, and I have what I need to make these changes,

00:34:09.140 | and I think this is a change that I can commit to for life.

00:34:11.140 | I don't see why I wouldn't be able to."

00:34:13.140 | And so I started.

00:34:14.140 | And so the same thing could be applied to finances, and I hope you'll enhance those lessons.

00:34:20.140 | Now, in the beginning, there was a tough change, and the specific thing that I experienced was what's called the keto flu.

00:34:31.140 | It's known about as keto flu.

00:34:33.140 | Now, I didn't plan for this because it had been quite a long time since I had gone into a significant --

00:34:40.140 | onto a keto diet or a low-carb diet, and so I hadn't experienced this.

00:34:43.140 | And previously, when I had made those transitions, it was never as bad as I experienced this time, again, six months ago-ish.

00:34:52.140 | But it was rough.

00:34:54.140 | It was rough.

00:34:55.140 | I was unprepared for it.

00:34:56.140 | I didn't have any supplements.

00:34:57.140 | I didn't have any salts.

00:34:59.140 | I wasn't planning for it because I'd never experienced it before, but it was rough.

00:35:03.140 | But I did have the good -- I did know that, you know what, this does happen, and I had been aware of it.

00:35:08.140 | In the past, I was skeptical of it.

00:35:10.140 | It seems like every time anybody gets sick, they're always saying, "Oh, I'm detoxing," right?

00:35:14.140 | And you always wonder, well, is it actually true?

00:35:17.140 | Is your new diet making you sick, or is it somehow that you're detoxing?

00:35:20.140 | Right, you wonder.

00:35:22.140 | So I didn't know, but I figured, well, probably.

00:35:24.140 | And so I looked up keto flu symptoms, and okay, well, my symptoms match what everyone else has -- what other people have experienced.

00:35:31.140 | I didn't plan ahead to have all the things needed to make sure I didn't experience this so bad, so I'll just gut it out.

00:35:36.140 | So I gutted it out for a few days until the keto flu went away.

00:35:39.140 | But it was rough.

00:35:41.140 | And the same thing happens for people when you have to make some drastic change with money.

00:35:46.140 | It's often rough.

00:35:47.140 | But if you'll stay focused on the fact that this is temporary pain for a good long-term outcome, then it can go through.

00:35:54.140 | And if you'll talk to other people and get other people's experiences and recognize that, hey, other people have gone through this.

00:36:01.140 | Other people have gone through this sense of deprivation.

00:36:03.140 | Other people have gone through this, and they've gotten through it, and they've changed as a result of it.

00:36:08.140 | Then it might make your transition a little bit better.

00:36:11.140 | So I did the keto diet for a while.

00:36:13.140 | I didn't tell anybody.

00:36:14.140 | I just -- well, I told my wife, obviously, but I didn't tell anybody outside my family.

00:36:17.140 | I just did it.

00:36:18.140 | And I started to get some results, although I wasn't tracking it.

00:36:23.140 | I just knew that in time I would get results, and I figured this will work over time.

00:36:28.140 | Logically, this probably has to work.

00:36:31.140 | Now, I might have to make some modifications.

00:36:33.140 | Maybe it's not carbohydrates that matter.

00:36:35.140 | Maybe it's really the calories.

00:36:36.140 | So I might need to lower my calories in the future, but right now I'm not going to do that.

00:36:40.140 | I'm just going to have lots of satiating food.

00:36:43.140 | I'm going to eat lots of fat.

00:36:44.140 | I'm going to eat -- you know, I'm going to drink lots of cream.

00:36:47.140 | I'm going to change my habits, and I'm going to make my diet up.

00:36:50.140 | And so I'm going to have eggs.

00:36:51.140 | I'm going to have bacon.

00:36:52.140 | I'm going to have steak.

00:36:53.140 | I'm going to have lots of vegetables.

00:36:54.140 | I'm going to have big salads with lots of fat.

00:36:56.140 | I'm going to have cream with blueberries, my favorite treat for years.

00:36:59.140 | And I'm just going to feel really happy all the time.

00:37:03.140 | Well, what happened is, if you've ever made this transition, there's a major change.

00:37:07.140 | Once you get off of the sugar addiction, once you get off of the carb addiction,

00:37:11.140 | once your body starts to have lower insulin levels, you go through a major change in your appetite,

00:37:16.140 | and your whole -- like, and your appetite changes.

00:37:20.140 | And for me, that led kind of naturally to not being hungry, especially in the morning.

00:37:26.140 | Now we go to the next big thing that I had to change, and this was part of the mental thing.

00:37:31.140 | I didn't intend to do it.

00:37:32.140 | I intended to eat three meals a day, fat, as much fat as possible, satiety, et cetera, lots of protein, lots of fat.

00:37:38.140 | So I intended to eat three meals a day.

00:37:40.140 | But what happened is I started to become more satiated where I didn't need three meals a day.

00:37:45.140 | And for me, this was a major breakthrough in my weight loss because it comes down to social eating.

00:37:50.140 | Now I don't -- I've never -- I'm not talking about, you know, going out to eat.

00:37:54.140 | We don't go out to eat much.

00:37:55.140 | Young children, we mainly eat at home.

00:37:57.140 | We eat at our friends' houses.

00:37:58.140 | They come here.

00:37:59.140 | I'm talking about the social eating within my family.

00:38:01.140 | From the time I was -- for as far back as I can remember, up until current day, my entire family schedule has run on three meals a day.

00:38:11.140 | Not -- and all the time growing up, I had breakfast together with my family every single day, and we had dinner together as a family every single day.

00:38:20.140 | If we -- if something -- if there was an event, yes, sometimes it would be pushed earlier or later, but it was just a consistent point in our family structure.

00:38:29.140 | And I deeply value that structure when -- from when I was a child because I saw the good that that made in family relationships.

00:38:38.140 | And it was all -- it has always been important to me to instill that into my own family, to have that same structure.

00:38:46.140 | So my family, we have breakfast and dinner together every single day.

00:38:50.140 | I usually work through lunch.

00:38:51.140 | I don't stop for lunch with the children, but my wife has lunch with the children every day.

00:38:55.140 | Breakfast, lunch, dinner as a family every single day.

00:38:58.140 | And the hardest thing in the world for me was ever to be at a point where I would have to sit there and not eat when everyone else was eating.

00:39:06.140 | I just couldn't really imagine that.

00:39:08.140 | And over the years, as I've read about different things of dieting and whatnot, I've wondered, okay, should I stop eating breakfast?

00:39:16.140 | Well, maybe, maybe not.

00:39:18.140 | But I just couldn't get past that.

00:39:20.140 | But once I started to experience the satiety, I just started to stop eating breakfast.

00:39:24.140 | Now, that was, of course, a change because one of the things that I've come to realize is how thin the vast majority of real legitimate science is behind nutrition advice.

00:39:37.140 | You've heard that breakfast is the most important meal of the day.

00:39:40.140 | Well, that idea is being pretty well debunked at this point in time.

00:39:45.140 | I've been a lifelong breakfast eater, but I've always been fat.

00:39:49.140 | And one of the things that I did along the way was I stopped eating breakfast and I started to become less fat.

00:39:54.140 | So I'm not so sure that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, but I always thought it was, right, because people said it.

00:39:59.140 | And that always made me feel good, confirmation bias, because I like breakfast.

00:40:02.140 | Breakfast is my favorite meal of the day.

00:40:04.140 | My wife and I joke on our honeymoon, I always wake her up and say, "We've got to get down to the buffet before breakfast closes."

00:40:09.140 | I love breakfast.

00:40:10.140 | I would rather meet someone for a breakfast meeting over there than a dinner meeting any day.

00:40:14.140 | You give me, Joshua, the choice between breakfast food and any other food, I'll choose breakfast food every day.

00:40:18.140 | But I also was fat.

00:40:20.140 | But with the satiety, I just started to skip breakfast.

00:40:23.140 | Now, I don't know whether, again, I don't know whether the reason for fat loss is fewer calories coming from skipping breakfast, having fewer calories, or whether it's due to low carb.

00:40:33.140 | I'll let the other people fight that out.

00:40:35.140 | All I know is I started to get more results.

00:40:37.140 | And skipping breakfast wasn't a hardship because of the approach.

00:40:40.140 | Now, dietarily, that was my dietary experience.

00:40:46.140 | Now, back to money.

00:40:48.140 | Once you start to focus on what you want and you start to think about different ways to change, there might be some change that you can make that's relatively minor.

00:40:58.140 | But for you, it's major.

00:40:59.140 | But once you do, it starts to break through.

00:41:01.140 | And once I broke that social eating thing where I felt where I was able to, for the first time, just sit with my family and watch them eat.

00:41:09.140 | I cook almost all the breakfasts in our household, and I cook probably a lot of the dinners depends on the season.

00:41:16.140 | Sometimes I cook all the dinners for weeks at a time.

00:41:18.140 | Sometimes my wife does.

00:41:19.140 | But I probably cook 65% of the food in our family.

00:41:22.140 | And so I just came to the point where I could cook breakfast for them, serve it to them, then sit down and not eat myself until later when I was hungry.

00:41:32.140 | It was a breakthrough.

00:41:33.140 | And the same thing with money.

00:41:34.140 | There might be something like that for you where you always thought that this was the important thing, and then you stop doing that, and all of a sudden, it changes.

00:41:42.140 | I don't know exactly what that is, but be open to learning along the way.

00:41:45.140 | Be open to challenging the preconceived norms.

00:41:47.140 | Here would be a good example.

00:41:49.140 | Maybe you've always heard that you should put money in your Roth IRA or put money in your 401(k).

00:41:54.140 | Well, I'm not convinced that's always good advice.

00:41:58.140 | And over the years, I've probably had a similar change in really testing a lot of financial advice that I used to be taught and that I used to think was right.

00:42:06.140 | And then wondering, wait a second, is this really right?

00:42:08.140 | Because I've seen a lot of people who've done this advice who've gotten bad results, and I've seen a lot of people who don't do this advice who got good results.

00:42:14.140 | So how good is this advice actually?

00:42:17.140 | And the same thing has happened with diet advice.

00:42:20.140 | Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.

00:42:21.140 | Well, when I stopped eating breakfast, I started to lose more weight.

00:42:26.140 | And I've heard from a lot of people who've done exactly the same thing.

00:42:30.140 | Now, moving on.

00:42:31.140 | I did the ketogenic diet for, I don't know, something like a month and a half, two months, something, I don't know.

00:42:38.140 | But I started to lose some weight.

00:42:39.140 | I didn't have a scale.

00:42:40.140 | I didn't measure my stomach.

00:42:43.140 | I didn't take any measurements, didn't take a scale, didn't take any pictures.

00:42:46.140 | All I did is I knew that I started to lose some weight.

00:42:48.140 | And then one day, I buckled my pants a belt loop tighter.

00:42:52.140 | And that was encouraging because I knew it was working.

00:42:54.140 | And I was focused not on tracking all the details.

00:42:57.140 | For me, right or wrong, I wish I had probably, but, hey, this worked.

00:43:00.140 | I was focused on saying I'm going to implement a lifelong lifestyle change.

00:43:04.140 | And I know that in time, this will lead to it.

00:43:07.140 | So I'm going to intentionally not track this stuff because I'm going to focus on how can I change for the rest of my life.

00:43:12.140 | I think the data is pretty good that ketogenic diet is probably a good thing.

00:43:20.140 | Then I started to get results.

00:43:21.140 | And that was encouraging.

00:43:23.140 | And the same thing happens with finances.

00:43:25.140 | Maybe something happens.

00:43:26.140 | You say I'm going to start setting aside some money.

00:43:27.140 | And you figure out a way.

00:43:28.140 | Maybe it's a jar in your house where every day you put your $5 in there.

00:43:32.140 | Or you set an automatic savings account.

00:43:34.140 | At the beginning, it's not much.

00:43:35.140 | But then all of a sudden, something happens and you have money.

00:43:38.140 | Or something happens and you realize, no, I'm getting better at this budgeting thing.

00:43:42.140 | I was bad for the first five months, but I'm getting better at budgeting my money, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

00:43:46.140 | We often just discount how long it takes us to learn things and how long it takes to get results.

00:43:51.140 | And we shouldn't do that.

00:43:53.140 | If you've got a good plan that you think reasonably could work, stick with it.

00:43:58.140 | Now, what I did do for weight loss along the way that did help me was I started to surround myself with more inspiring content.

00:44:06.140 | With more inspiring -- sorry, people in my camp.

00:44:08.140 | I didn't want to talk to people.

00:44:09.140 | I don't like to be that kind of guy who's always just talking about his own stuff.

00:44:12.140 | I didn't talk about it here on the show.

00:44:13.140 | But what I did do is I just started following keto diet inspiration people on Instagram.

00:44:18.140 | I started following people who were losing fat.

00:44:21.140 | And I didn't do much on YouTube, but basically Instagram.

00:44:26.140 | I curated my Instagram feed to be really motivating and encouraging, just filled with people losing weight.

00:44:32.140 | And I'm like, yeah, this can work.

00:44:33.140 | These people are getting these results.

00:44:34.140 | I'm probably no different.

00:44:36.140 | Maybe there is something wrong with me.

00:44:37.140 | Maybe there's something wrong with my hormones.

00:44:39.140 | Maybe I'm stupid.

00:44:40.140 | I don't know, but this will probably work.

00:44:42.140 | And then started getting results.

00:44:43.140 | And that's encouraging.

00:44:45.140 | And what happens is, especially these days, when I was in high school, I lost a bunch of weight on a low-carb diet.

00:44:50.140 | But that community was nonexistent.

00:44:54.140 | There was no way to connect with people.

00:44:56.140 | I read Dr. Atkins' book, and I started doing the Atkins diet.

00:44:59.140 | But the Atkins diet was pilloried in the public press.

00:45:02.140 | And so, of course, you never told anyone you were doing the Atkins diet because everyone would say, oh, you're so stupid.

00:45:07.140 | You have to eat the low-fat diet.

00:45:08.140 | That's what you have to do.

00:45:09.140 | Meanwhile, you're over here losing weight, but you just don't tell anybody because it's Atkins and this terrible thing.

00:45:14.140 | But there was no community.

00:45:15.140 | There were no recipes.

00:45:16.140 | The food was boring and bland, and I didn't know how to do it better.

00:45:19.140 | But now, the ideas are so inspiring.

00:45:24.140 | And so the same thing with money.

00:45:26.140 | If you start to change the inputs into your life and you start to find new communities of people,

00:45:31.140 | and you discover that these communities are filled with people who are getting good things.

00:45:35.140 | So with finances, people show off.

00:45:37.140 | Look, hey, I can take this trip because I saved the money.

00:45:39.140 | Or I can retire early because I saved the money.

00:45:42.140 | Or I got out of debt, and here's what we can do because we got out of debt.

00:45:44.140 | It's inspiring.

00:45:46.140 | And over the years, even in my various financial transformations and improvements, the same thing has applied.

00:45:51.140 | And so I encourage you, if you want to make financial progress, fill yourself, surround yourself with people who are going to encourage you in your goals.

00:45:58.140 | Don't surround yourself with people who are drunk and who are broke and who are fat.

00:46:02.140 | Surround yourself with people who are sober and who are wealthy and who are skinny.

00:46:08.140 | And then they start to rub off on you.

00:46:10.140 | And you can do that now digitally in a way that was never possible in the past,

00:46:14.140 | because you're not dealing with a Photoshopped person in a magazine or a carefully curated story.

00:46:19.140 | Now you have access to real people step by step.

00:46:23.140 | And they're just sharing their daily life, which is really, really encouraging.

00:46:28.140 | And I love that.

00:46:29.140 | So surround yourself with that.

00:46:31.140 | Listen to my podcast.

00:46:32.140 | Listen to tons of other podcasts.

00:46:34.140 | Listen to -- if you're getting out of debt, listen to Dave Ramsey every day.

00:46:37.140 | Join the forums.

00:46:38.140 | Join the groups.

00:46:39.140 | Go to the conferences.

00:46:40.140 | But surround yourself with people who are your people, who are moving you in the direction of your goals.

00:46:44.140 | Do that in every area of goal setting that you have.

00:46:46.140 | And it changes your psychology over time.

00:46:48.140 | It can't help but change it.

00:46:50.140 | We are all affected by the people that we spend time with.

00:46:52.140 | Which is why one of the most important decisions that you can ever make is by weeding out people who are bad influences on you

00:47:00.140 | and replacing them with people who are good influences on you.

00:47:03.140 | So start to lose weight.

00:47:05.140 | Now, along the way, I finally told my brother what I was doing.

00:47:12.140 | And he said, "Yeah, that's interesting.

00:47:14.140 | Good for you."

00:47:15.140 | And then he said, "By the way, have you ever heard of the carnivore diet?"

00:47:17.140 | And I'd never heard of the carnivore diet.

00:47:19.140 | And he told me, he said, "Well, check it out."

00:47:24.140 | So of course, me being the internet researcher, I went and researched what the carnivore diet was.

00:47:30.140 | And I was so fascinated by what I started reading.

00:47:33.140 | Because number one, I was fascinated by how countercultural the advice was.

00:47:37.140 | How basically the carnivore diet is some variation of you eat exclusively meat.

00:47:42.140 | Some people say you eat exclusively beef, especially people who have physical problems and ailments they're trying to recover from.

00:47:49.140 | But they eat exclusively meat.

00:47:51.140 | Some people eat exclusively meat and eggs and dairy, varying variations.

00:47:56.140 | But I was so fascinated when I started reading the success stories of people who had lost lots of weight.

00:48:01.140 | That's one thing.

00:48:02.140 | But then people who cured themselves of all kinds of things.

00:48:04.140 | One of the most fascinating was people who had experienced major improvements in their depression and their psychological conditions.

00:48:11.140 | Major improvements of all kinds of diseases.

00:48:13.140 | And I was fascinated by that.

00:48:15.140 | Now, I think that almost any diet can point to a long list of testimonials.

00:48:19.140 | Years ago, I went through a program put on by a local physician in West Palm Beach.

00:48:25.140 | And I was part of a pilot program where they were collecting the data for a study of people's results with their weight loss on their exercise and diet regimen.

00:48:36.140 | And I went through that program.

00:48:38.140 | And it was really interesting to me because it taught me something firsthand that I'd never experienced before.

00:48:43.140 | I went in.

00:48:44.140 | They took lots of professional fat pictures.

00:48:47.140 | They weigh you.

00:48:48.140 | They measure you.

00:48:49.140 | Do all kinds of--do the whole health checkup.

00:48:51.140 | I had to have a complete physical.

00:48:52.140 | And then we enrolled in the program.

00:48:53.140 | And they teach you the exercise program.

00:48:55.140 | Look, you do these exercises.

00:48:56.140 | Here's the DVDs that you do at home.

00:48:57.140 | You eat this diet, etc.

00:48:59.140 | And they were tracking the results of people who went from the beginning all the way through.

00:49:05.140 | So, I went.

00:49:07.140 | I started.

00:49:08.140 | But I couldn't maintain going to the classes.

00:49:10.140 | And so, I flaked out of the program after--I don't remember--after some period of time, I flaked out.

00:49:15.140 | But one of my good friends stayed in the program.

00:49:17.140 | And he stayed with it.

00:49:18.140 | And he went from being chubby to getting a six-pack.

00:49:21.140 | And he was actually the cover model for this particular physician's weight loss DVD, like the exercise DVD that they produced.

00:49:31.140 | The physician wrote the book.

00:49:32.140 | And they had the exercise DVD.

00:49:33.140 | And so, they spray-tanned him.

00:49:35.140 | And they got the six-pack picture.

00:49:37.140 | And they had his before picture and his after picture.

00:49:39.140 | And he looked great.

00:49:40.140 | Well, of course, I was friends with him.

00:49:42.140 | And then later on down the road, he stopped doing the exercises, stopped doing the thing, and became fat.

00:49:47.140 | Not obese, but chubby again, just modestly chubby.

00:49:51.140 | And it was just such an interesting experiment to me because I had been part of the program, and then I flaked out.

00:49:56.140 | And that's what I've observed with diets is that's what's often not tracked is who are the people who flake out.

00:50:02.140 | Similar thing, this is the biggest problem with college.

00:50:04.140 | You can look and say college tuition, if you have a college degree, then you wind up earning more money.

00:50:10.140 | Well, that's true.

00:50:11.140 | But the problem is the vast -- I'm not sure what to say, vast majority, majority, or a lot.

00:50:18.140 | So, I'll just say a lot.

00:50:19.140 | A lot of people, and a really, really lot of people who start college with the intention of graduating college and getting all those results don't ever finish college.

00:50:27.140 | And many of them wind up in very difficult circumstances where they've done some classes, borrowed some money, but they don't have the degree and they don't get the results.

00:50:34.140 | Now, it's not to say there's anything wrong with the process, just to be aware of the survivor bias that can always come in with diets.

00:50:40.140 | So, I think almost any diet can have certain effects.

00:50:43.140 | And especially from dietary perspective, I've become convinced that any diet has certain effects because people go from being mindlessly on the standard American diet of junk food to making better decisions.

00:50:54.140 | So, you see that if someone goes eating from eating the standard American diet to eating a vegan diet, they're probably going to have some personal improvements in their health.

00:51:04.140 | But that doesn't necessarily mean that the vegan diet is the most healthy.

00:51:08.140 | That remains to be seen.

00:51:10.140 | Similarly, somebody can go from the standard American diet to a carnivore diet and probably have some improvements in their health.

00:51:16.140 | But that doesn't mean that the carnivore diet is the most healthy.

00:51:19.140 | That remains to be seen.

00:51:20.140 | But I was fascinated by the results.

00:51:23.140 | And what interested me was how people were getting results with things that I thought were crazy of just eating only meat.

00:51:32.140 | And I'm a vegetable lover, a salad lover, always have been, and yet they're getting results of eating only meat.

00:51:37.140 | So, I decided to try it.

00:51:38.140 | And I decided to set aside what other people said.

00:51:42.140 | And I didn't admit to it publicly, but I just decided to try it.

00:51:44.140 | And so, I started on September 1st, I started eating an exclusively carnivore diet.

00:51:48.140 | And I ate that way from September 1st through Thanksgiving.

00:51:52.140 | I stopped eating that way on Thanksgiving to eat Thanksgiving food and to intentionally go back and cheat and see what that felt like.

00:52:00.140 | We'll see if we cover that in a minute.

00:52:02.140 | But I started to get good results.

00:52:04.140 | I started to get lots of weight loss, faster weight loss than on the keto diet for reasons I don't know.

00:52:09.140 | Probably lower calorie consumption, but started to get good results and experience good satiety.

00:52:13.140 | And what I found was this is exceedingly simple.

00:52:16.140 | What I found that I love the most about the carnivore diet was it's far simpler than the keto diet.

00:52:21.140 | The keto diet requires you to study a whole lot of your -- to track your macros, to do it effectively, requires you to learn all the macros that different foods have,

00:52:31.140 | and then to calculate them and make sure you fit your numbers.

00:52:34.140 | The carnivore diet for me was exceedingly simple.

00:52:37.140 | The rules are you eat meat and you eat eggs and sometimes you have dairy.

00:52:42.140 | And what I found, because I tracked my weight every day, I found that if I had more dairy, I lost less weight, so I stopped having so much dairy.

00:52:48.140 | But I did have it on occasion.

00:52:50.140 | But meat and eggs, meat and eggs.

00:52:52.140 | If it's meat and eggs, you eat it.

00:52:53.140 | If it's not meat and eggs, you don't eat it.

00:52:54.140 | It's exceedingly simple.

00:52:55.140 | Now, with finances, let's draw the lesson over to money.

00:52:59.140 | What I have observed with money is that sometimes these extreme diets are -- well, extreme forms of financial management are actually really effective.

00:53:10.140 | Now, when you read diets, and I read diet analyses, the basic prevailing wisdom among the learned, you know, dietary gurus is that extreme diets are a bad idea.

00:53:22.140 | Right?

00:53:23.140 | Extreme diets are a bad idea.

00:53:24.140 | Extreme diets of, you know, carnivore diet or extreme -- any extreme diet is a bad diet.

00:53:32.140 | The grapefruit diet or whatever it is, because they don't last for the long term.

00:53:36.140 | Well, maybe they're right, right?

00:53:38.140 | Maybe they're right.

00:53:40.140 | Certainly, most of us have a history of yo-yo dieting.

00:53:43.140 | And there always remains the chance that anybody who goes on a carnivore diet goes back to yo-yo dieting.

00:53:47.140 | So maybe they're right.

00:53:48.140 | But what I've found, in my own opinion, that extreme diets actually do work because they get such fast results that they keep you motivated.

00:53:57.140 | Some people have the personality where they can say, "You know what?

00:54:00.140 | If I eat a 300-calorie-per-day deficit, then I know that in two weeks I'll lose a pound, and that'll be motivating to me."

00:54:07.140 | That's not motivating to me, to Joshua.

00:54:10.140 | Maybe it is to someone else, in which case they're probably already skinny.

00:54:13.140 | But that's not motivating to Joshua.

00:54:15.140 | Joshua likes to see results.

00:54:17.140 | And I know that I can do anything for a time.

00:54:20.140 | Now, with dieting, you have to be careful, because if you eat in a way that causes you to become fat, and then you stop eating that way, and you eat in a way that causes you to become nonfat,

00:54:30.140 | but then you go back to the way of eating that caused you to become fat in the first place, you're going to get fat again.

00:54:36.140 | Just like if you live in a way that causes you to become broke, and then you start living in a way that causes you to not become broke,

00:54:43.140 | but then you go back to living in the way that caused you to become broke in the first place, you're going to be broke again.

00:54:48.140 | It's guaranteed.

00:54:49.140 | And so the same thing happens with diets.

00:54:51.140 | So that's why almost all any diet has lots of stories that you can point to that are successful,

00:54:55.140 | but then also lots of people who bounce back to the other way of eating.

00:54:59.140 | But the point of extremism is you start to get results.

00:55:01.140 | And anybody can do anything hard for a short period of time.

00:55:06.140 | And anybody can do anything hard for a medium period of time if they're getting results.

00:55:11.140 | Now, back to money.

00:55:12.140 | Over the years, I generally didn't used to -- I used to follow the mainstream advice.

00:55:17.140 | I used to think the mainstream advice.

00:55:19.140 | Work hard, put 10% of your money aside for retirement, and over time you'll get wealthy.

00:55:24.140 | But the problem is that you've got to do that for a really long time for you to get advice.

00:55:28.140 | And over the years, I became more and more extreme in my own opinions and my own practice in order to get more results.

00:55:34.140 | One example of extremism with money would be things like getting out of debt.

00:55:38.140 | One of the most powerful communities of change in getting out of debt are Dave Ramsey's communities.

00:55:43.140 | Why?

00:55:44.140 | Well, because the behavior modification that he encourages is so extreme for a short period of time

00:55:49.140 | that people go all in and they make massive differences in their life.

00:55:53.140 | Now, does everybody stay out of debt?

00:55:54.140 | Of course not.

00:55:55.140 | Of course not.

00:55:56.140 | Lots of people go back into debt again.

00:55:58.140 | But at least they know I can make this change, and they've done it.

00:56:01.140 | I've been in debt, out of debt, in debt, out of debt lots of times,

00:56:04.140 | and I know that I have the power of knowing how to be extreme.

00:56:07.140 | And that extremism is in some ways oddly fun and oddly satisfying, especially when you get results.

00:56:14.140 | And so if it's extremely, "Hey, I'm going to get out of debt," and that's where, you know, back to the diet parallel.

00:56:20.140 | Dave, yesterday I was working with a consulting client, and we were talking about getting out of debt.

00:56:25.140 | This client needs to get out of debt.

00:56:26.140 | And I was wrestling with, "Do I tell this client to stop contributing to their retirement accounts in order to get out of debt?"

00:56:33.140 | And this is a hard question to answer because from a financial perspective, it has to be acknowledged that with the tax reduction

00:56:40.140 | and with the employer match and with the investment return, which is probably higher than the debt payoff,

00:56:46.140 | that probably financially speaking, it's better to contribute to the retirement account

00:56:51.140 | and then just have the debt payoff plan take a little bit longer.

00:56:54.140 | But on the other side, you look at it and say, "But the key here is behavior change and to be all in focus."

00:57:01.140 | And what's always worked for me and what's always been the most powerful is to be all in focus, to do nothing except get out of debt.

00:57:07.140 | And that causes a change and work like crazy and just get out of debt fast.

00:57:12.140 | And so I talked it through, but I came to the point where I said, "If I were in your shoes, based upon the need for behavior change,

00:57:17.140 | I would stop putting my 401(k) even though I know that technically I can't defend that.

00:57:22.140 | All I know is that motivates me, and I believe that motivation is powerful.

00:57:26.140 | I would focus all in on getting out of debt just fast and then go back and put more money in the retirement account."

00:57:32.140 | So I feel like the same parallel is almost there with food.

00:57:34.140 | An extreme diet is – like for example, carnivore diet.

00:57:38.140 | So carnivore diet is weird because you don't eat vegetables.

00:57:41.140 | Now, there are people who have been proven that they have become sick from eating vegetables.

00:57:47.140 | But then there's lots of people who are in this perspective who are like, "Oh, okay, vegetables are bad for you."

00:57:51.140 | I find that a very hard case to support, that vegetables are bad for you.

00:57:56.140 | But I come from a lifelong vegetable background, so maybe I'm wrong, right?

00:58:00.140 | Maybe the reason I'm fat is because I've eaten too many vegetables, too many salads.

00:58:04.140 | We'll see.

00:58:06.140 | But all I know is that when I dropped/stopped eating vegetables, I started to get great results.

00:58:11.140 | Now, I didn't have any major health changes like some people do because I was already healthy.

00:58:16.140 | But I knew that I started to get great results.

00:58:19.140 | And so I recommend to you, especially if you're interested in fat loss, try something extreme.

00:58:24.140 | I have spoken as my weight loss has become more obvious.

00:58:27.140 | People started asking me questions, and I've been able to hear other people's stories.

00:58:31.140 | And one story from a friend of mine, she talked about, "I've been eating a ketogenic diet for years, and I haven't lost any weight."

00:58:38.140 | Well, my answer is try something else.

00:58:40.140 | If it's not working, try something else.

00:58:42.140 | Go stop eating vegetables.

00:58:44.140 | Just eat meat.

00:58:45.140 | Or stop eating meat.

00:58:47.140 | Go eat just vegetables.

00:58:48.140 | I don't know.

00:58:49.140 | Try anything.

00:58:50.140 | If what you're doing isn't working, stop and go try something else until you figure out if something is working, and then modify from there.

00:58:56.140 | Don't keep doing the same thing again and again that's just not working.

00:59:00.140 | And so with extreme finances, I've become convinced that there's a real value in extreme finances.

00:59:05.140 | Same thing with savings rates.

00:59:07.140 | I wish that I had been more extreme with savings rates.

00:59:10.140 | I've come to the perspective where I routinely recommend 50% savings rates, even higher if possible.

00:59:16.140 | Because is it extreme?

00:59:18.140 | Yes.

00:59:19.140 | Is it sustainable forever?

00:59:21.140 | In some situations, yes, but not in all.

00:59:24.140 | It's certainly not sustainable in all.

00:59:26.140 | But will you get a lot of results really quickly?

00:59:29.140 | And will you learn something from that change?

00:59:32.140 | Absolutely.

00:59:34.140 | And here's where there's value in extreme action, in extreme dieting.

00:59:37.140 | I'll go on to some of the more extreme dieting that I've done that is also getting results.

00:59:42.140 | When you go extreme for a while, and then you go back, the slight switch back feels like such an indulgence.

00:59:52.140 | So for example, I was sitting with my family last night, and I made a big salad.

00:59:57.140 | My wife made a big salad for them.

00:59:59.140 | And it's the kind of salad that I love.

01:00:02.140 | I was fasting last night.

01:00:03.140 | We'll get to fasting in a moment.

01:00:04.140 | But I was sitting there, I was fasting, and I'm just watching that, and my mouth is just drooling over this salad.

01:00:10.140 | It was awesome.

01:00:12.140 | Lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, carrots, strawberries, walnuts, had a nice oil and vinegar dressing on top.

01:00:21.140 | And I was sitting there looking at it, just salivating at this salad.

01:00:25.140 | Now, many people don't salivate at salad.

01:00:30.140 | Many people salivate at Oreos or milkshakes, but not salad.

01:00:34.140 | But when you go to an extreme diet where you don't even eat salad, you don't eat anything.

01:00:38.140 | You don't eat Oreos.

01:00:39.140 | You don't eat salad.

01:00:40.140 | You don't eat milkshakes.

01:00:41.140 | All you eat is meat.

01:00:42.140 | All of a sudden now that salad looks really great.

01:00:44.140 | And it changes you.

01:00:46.140 | I'll share another story on that in a moment of how just your perspectives change.

01:00:50.140 | So extreme financial management, even if it's for a short term, will change you.

01:00:55.140 | And that's where I've come to love drastic changes in financial living situations.

01:01:00.140 | I know that it's not normal.

01:01:02.140 | I know that it's not -- it's radical.

01:01:05.140 | But what I've found in my life is that when I make a drastic change, it resets my set point, my thermostat.

01:01:13.140 | When you move into an RV with three small children and two big dogs, and then you move back into a house, the smallest of houses feel big.

01:01:24.140 | And what happens so often is since people never make a radical change, an extreme change,

01:01:28.140 | they just always have these built-in psychological self-imposed constraints that they're never willing to go over.

01:01:35.140 | Like, "Oh, I can't be uncomfortable.

01:01:37.140 | My children can't be in the same room.

01:01:39.140 | We can't rent a two-bedroom apartment while we're getting out of debt.

01:01:41.140 | We just can't do that.

01:01:42.140 | It's too hard for us."

01:01:44.140 | But I've experienced that if you'll force yourself continually into hard situations, you're used to going to the luxury hotel.

01:01:53.140 | Well, go volunteer on a mission trip and stay and sleep on the ground instead.

01:02:00.140 | You're used to traveling in a giant RV.

01:02:03.140 | Go tent camping.

01:02:05.140 | You're used to living in a big house.

01:02:06.140 | Well, go and change something and go temporarily put yourself into hardship, et cetera.

01:02:10.140 | And then it changes you and you become a flexible person, a person who can do lots of things and who can handle lots of things.

01:02:16.140 | So with your food, you're used to this.

01:02:18.140 | Go to some extreme for a time and prove to yourself that you have the discipline to do that.

01:02:23.140 | And then all of a sudden, now salads become the greatest thing you can imagine.

01:02:26.140 | It's like, "Wow, I just want to eat a salad.

01:02:28.140 | This would be great."

01:02:30.140 | Yes, I understand that those of many of you say, "Joshua, your body is crying for nutrients."

01:02:34.140 | No, it wasn't.

01:02:35.140 | It was just psychologically like, "I enjoy that salad.

01:02:37.140 | It's so delicious."

01:02:40.140 | So back to the weight loss saga.

01:02:42.140 | So I started doing the carnivore diet.

01:02:44.140 | And the weight continued to go off, continued to go off, continued to go off, continued to go off.

01:02:48.140 | So I did the carnivore diet.

01:02:49.140 | I wanted to do it for three months.

01:02:50.140 | I did it for three months up until Thanksgiving, which I guess wasn't quite three months.

01:02:56.140 | So almost three months.

01:02:59.140 | So at Thanksgiving, then of course I decided to change.

01:03:02.140 | I didn't cheat.

01:03:04.140 | I didn't have a bite of food that wasn't on my first ketogenic diet and then carnivore diet for however long it was from the time I started up through Thanksgiving.

01:03:13.140 | So then I went to Thanksgiving and I planned ahead that on Thanksgiving Day I was going to intentionally eat all those indulgent foods.

01:03:21.140 | And I was going to cook them.

01:03:22.140 | I made a list of the things that I wanted to do.

01:03:24.140 | Now, was this a good idea or not?

01:03:25.140 | I don't know.

01:03:26.140 | It's just something that of course a lot of people do or a lot of people think about.

01:03:29.140 | But I didn't want to be on such a strict diet all the way through Thanksgiving.

01:03:34.140 | So on Thanksgiving Eve, I made wassail for my family and we had a nice -- I can't remember, but we had started to have some nice food.

01:03:40.140 | Thanksgiving Day, I made a special breakfast.

01:03:43.140 | I ate pancakes and carbohydrates and all that stuff.

01:03:47.140 | I gained 10 pounds in one day.

01:03:49.140 | My weigh-in the day after Thanksgiving was 10 pounds.

01:03:52.140 | And then what happened was it was hard for me to get back in the groove.

01:03:58.140 | And I was scared of that happening because after years of being a yo-yo dieter, I knew I could be strict.

01:04:03.140 | But I also knew that I -- I knew I could be strict.

01:04:07.140 | But I knew that if I -- that first bite syndrome, if you have the first bite, oh, I'll just have some more.

01:04:13.140 | And I knew it would probably be hard for me to get back into dieting.

01:04:18.140 | And I was scared.

01:04:19.140 | For months after I was having such success, I was scared of Thanksgiving and of Christmas.

01:04:23.140 | I was scared because I said I don't want to have the problem of going ahead and getting back into -- I don't want to go back to the other way.

01:04:31.140 | I don't want to do it.

01:04:33.140 | I don't want to do it.

01:04:35.140 | And -- but I said I can't do -- it's not right to do extreme dieting forever.

01:04:40.140 | So I've got to be a man and I've got to face it and I've got to do my best.

01:04:44.140 | Well, did it on Thanksgiving.

01:04:46.140 | It was difficult for me, but I managed to get back into the swing of things, back into the low-carb carnivore diet after Thanksgiving.

01:04:52.140 | I did find out that I felt disgusting.

01:04:54.140 | I didn't like it at all.

01:04:55.140 | And I actually -- by the time I got to Thanksgiving dinner, I had eaten so much other junk -- not junk.

01:05:01.140 | It wasn't Oreos.

01:05:04.140 | I hadn't eaten so much -- so much any other carbohydrates that I just didn't really want even Thanksgiving dinner, which was disappointing.

01:05:10.140 | Again, good question of moderation.

01:05:12.140 | Moderation is key when possible.

01:05:15.140 | So then I -- so I went back into Thanksgiving and it took me a little while to get back on, but I got back into it until a little bit before Christmas.

01:05:24.140 | And then, all right, started to eat some other stuff and change it and weight started to creep up.

01:05:28.140 | Weight started to creep up.

01:05:29.140 | Took my family away for Christmas.

01:05:31.140 | Went to an all-inclusive resort and I ate -- you know, and I gave myself the permission.

01:05:37.140 | It was a direct decision, but ate the other food and just started to get fatter again, started to gain weight, right, which is normal, right?

01:05:42.140 | If you're eating the food that makes you fat and then you go back to -- and you're not, you're going to go back to eating that food, you're going to get fat again.

01:05:47.140 | But I wanted to do that.

01:05:49.140 | And then after Christmas, I came back and said, "Okay, going back on."

01:05:51.140 | Well, I struggled.

01:05:52.140 | Struggled to get back going for the first couple -- for the first week.

01:05:57.140 | And the lesson in that is just simply that there's always a struggle -- or sorry, there's often a struggle, but don't be scared of it.

01:06:04.140 | So the same thing with spending.

01:06:05.140 | When people go through a drastic decision, they learn how to be really frugal or learn how to make big money and whatnot, a lot of times it's easy to go back to those old habits.

01:06:13.140 | But you don't have to be scared of it.

01:06:15.140 | What you do have to do is be determined that no matter how long it takes, I'm going to get it back.

01:06:19.140 | I'm going to build it back.

01:06:20.140 | I'm going to be able to develop this new person, this new persona.

01:06:25.140 | And I think it's good and healthy to not be extreme all the time.

01:06:29.140 | There are people who believe, for example, dietarily -- I don't know if they're right.

01:06:34.140 | Again, not making any claims to correctness here.

01:06:36.140 | Just I don't know if they're right.

01:06:37.140 | But there are people who claim that the best thing is to go back and forth.

01:06:40.140 | For example, you shouldn't be in ketosis all the time.

01:06:43.140 | You shouldn't be super strict all the time.

01:06:45.140 | There should be times where you take other things on.

01:06:49.140 | So maybe they're right.

01:06:50.140 | I hope they are.

01:06:51.140 | Maybe they're right.

01:06:52.140 | I do know that I won't eat as much as I did at Thanksgiving, as much as I did at Christmas in the future,

01:07:01.140 | just because you don't feel great.

01:07:03.140 | But that's just part of maturing.

01:07:05.140 | And so the same thing happens with spending.

01:07:06.140 | Maybe you learn that you don't want to be so extreme all the time because you miss out on some good things.

01:07:10.140 | To me, it seems dumb to sit there on Thanksgiving Day and not eat the delicious food.

01:07:18.140 | It's my favorite holiday or Christmas or whatever it is you think.

01:07:21.140 | But you have to, of course, have moderation.

01:07:23.140 | One meal, one day, a week.

01:07:25.140 | It's not going to be a big deal in the grand scheme of things.

01:07:27.140 | And so keeping that detached perspective.

01:07:29.140 | Same thing with spending.

01:07:30.140 | So you go for you have one big unexpected bill.

01:07:32.140 | Well, it's not the end of the world.

01:07:34.140 | It's going to just focus on the long term.

01:07:36.140 | So then getting back into it, I was able to get back into it.

01:07:38.140 | But I had to use the same techniques that I used at the beginning to get back into it.

01:07:42.140 | I had to go and say, all right, to get back in, I'm going to focus on luxurious food, lots of food, luxurious food.

01:07:50.140 | And that worked to get me back on track.

01:07:54.140 | Now the other thing that I then added in towards the end of December during that middle period between Thanksgiving and Christmas and a lot over the last few weeks is I started doing more fasting.

01:08:03.140 | Now let me talk about fasting for a moment because I think also this is uniquely applicable to financial lessons.

01:08:09.140 | First, again, common advice.

01:08:12.140 | When I was younger, I heard and read time and time again, fasting from food is bad for you.

01:08:17.140 | Fasting was told puts your body into starvation mode.

01:08:21.140 | And then because your body is in starvation mode, when you eat more food, you get fatter.

01:08:25.140 | So I was told and read by the learned experts of the day that if you fast, you'll get fatter.

01:08:31.140 | Basically what I came away from.

01:08:33.140 | Now, along the way, somebody I think online, somebody sent me and said, Josh, or I stumbled into, I stumbled into Cole Robinson and his YouTube channel called the Snake Diet.

01:08:44.140 | Warning, Cole is utterly obscene in his language, but he's an incredibly motivating and fascinating guy.

01:08:51.140 | And so he's developed something he calls the Snake Diet, which, spoiler alert, is just simply fasting.

01:08:56.140 | That's it.

01:08:57.140 | The Snake Diet thing was a joke.

01:08:59.140 | And then it just became a thing that he applied.

01:09:02.140 | But I started to look at his results and to study his results that he was getting with people and just look at all the results people in his community were getting with extended fasting.

01:09:10.140 | Now, prior to December, I was doing more, I guess I was doing more what's called intermittent fasting, basically eating two meals a day, sometimes one meal a day during anywhere from eight hours of eating to four hours of eating, just one hour of eating, just eating one meal a day.

01:09:27.140 | And that was fairly natural based upon the appetite suppression of a carnivore slash ketogenic diet where you just you can comfortably eat one meal a day.

01:09:36.140 | You just don't need anything more than that.

01:09:38.140 | But Cole Robinson, he of the Snake Diet fame, is an advocate of more extended fasting.

01:09:46.140 | And he's played around with all kinds of fasting and experimented all kinds of things on himself.

01:09:51.140 | But I started to read stories and I started to read these extreme examples of fasting.

01:09:55.140 | First, tons and tons of people eating once every other day, tons and tons of people eating twice a week, tons of people eating once a week.

01:10:03.140 | I found one, I started studying or finding stories of people doing extended fast.

01:10:07.140 | There's this great guy on YouTube called the Fasting Fat Man who lost 300 pounds in 2019 through fasting.

01:10:14.140 | He fasted for I think it was 159 days, something in excess of 150 days.

01:10:19.140 | He was super fat, but he obviously lost 300 pounds in 2019 through fasting.

01:10:24.140 | And then I started digging into all of the research and started to find that, wait a second, everything I was taught in the '90s is now coming under suspicion.

01:10:33.140 | Now it's all being argued about and people are arguing this and arguing that and whatnot.

01:10:37.140 | But I've come to discount the argument and say, "Well, let me test it."

01:10:40.140 | So I started testing longer fasting.

01:10:43.140 | And I failed hard.

01:10:46.140 | Now I've done a little bit of fasting here and there.

01:10:50.140 | I did a seven-day fast, a religious fast a number of years ago.

01:10:53.140 | It wasn't particularly focused, I just drank water.

01:10:56.140 | But that was a religious motivated fast, not a health-focused fast.

01:11:02.140 | I've done some cleanses, you know, three-day fasts with various powdered tonic things, colon cleanse and such in the past.

01:11:10.140 | So I was not a new novice to fasting, but it's not necessarily been regularly part of my lifestyle.

01:11:16.140 | Fasting has a very long tradition in most religions of various forms.

01:11:22.140 | But the Christian tradition that I come from doesn't emphasize it as heavily as some other Christian traditions do.

01:11:28.140 | Of course, everyone knows about Ramadan with the Muslims, fast from food and water from sun up to sun down.

01:11:34.140 | But it has bad effects because there's more food and alcohol and water, not alcohol, food sold during Ramadan than any other month, which I don't know that's a very good thing.

01:11:46.140 | But then there's Christian traditions, the Catholic tradition, fasting, the Orthodox tradition, much more of a significant fasting schedule.

01:11:54.140 | But it just wasn't a big part of my life earlier.

01:11:57.140 | So I've not done a ton of fasting.

01:11:58.140 | So I thought, "Okay, I can do this."

01:12:00.140 | So I started wanting to weight in and I tried to fast.

01:12:02.140 | I just said, "Okay, I'll do a 72-hour fast."

01:12:04.140 | Failed.

01:12:05.140 | "All right, I'll try again, a 72-hour fast."

01:12:07.140 | Failed.

01:12:08.140 | "All right, I'll try again, 72-hour fast."

01:12:10.140 | Failed.

01:12:11.140 | Failed always on day two.

01:12:12.140 | And what was funny is that what kept throwing me off right before Christmas was I kept being just triggered and like binging on the dumbest food.

01:12:23.140 | For me, it was pears.

01:12:25.140 | I bought my wife for Christmas.

01:12:27.140 | I'm the most romantic husband in the world.

01:12:29.140 | Just get ready for this.

01:12:30.140 | I bought my wife for Christmas a big 40-pound box of apples and a big 40-pound box of pears and a big box of grapes because where we live, we don't have apples and pears.

01:12:38.140 | They're expensive.

01:12:40.140 | And so we live in the tropics in case you can't figure that out.

01:12:44.140 | So I bought all these pears and apples and I had this big box of apples.

01:12:47.140 | And all of a sudden, I would -- everything was fine -- or in pears, everything was fine.

01:12:51.140 | And then I was like, "Oh, I just want pears."

01:12:53.140 | And so I would eat a pear or make a pear dessert, make pears with cinnamon and cream or once I made a pear crumble, then I made an apple crumble, like these just dumbest things.

01:13:04.140 | And it shows again how your set point changes, how if you do something extreme -- I didn't eat Oreos.

01:13:10.140 | I didn't eat chips.

01:13:11.140 | We don't have that stuff even in our house.

01:13:12.140 | But here I am being knocked off my diet by pears.

01:13:15.140 | I felt ridiculous but that's where it was.

01:13:18.140 | So I was just -- I failed again and again.

01:13:21.140 | So then I came back to the first principles.

01:13:25.140 | All right, carnivore first, steady, steady carnivore.

01:13:28.140 | Then I started doing 48-hour fasts, back to back, 48, 48, 48.

01:13:33.140 | Then back to back, 72, 72, 72.

01:13:36.140 | And that's what I've been doing up till recently which I've been measuring the weight loss and measuring the effects and trying to just judge the results of the fasting and testing results.

01:13:48.140 | So back to money.

01:13:49.140 | These different things that -- in the dietary sense, these different things that I have been talking about, ketogenic diets, carnivore diet, fasting lifestyle, intermittent fasting, right?

01:14:02.140 | Who knows what the weight loss is from?

01:14:04.140 | I don't.

01:14:05.140 | I don't know whether it's due to lower carbohydrates.

01:14:08.140 | I don't know whether it's due to lower calories.

01:14:10.140 | I don't know whether the lower calories are due to carnivore.

01:14:12.140 | I don't know and I don't care.

01:14:14.140 | All I care about is results.

01:14:15.140 | And so the same thing can apply with money is that try different things and see where you get results.

01:14:20.140 | Now, if I weren't getting results, I would stop.

01:14:23.140 | And now what I'm in the process of doing is testing those different things, trying to identify where do I get the most results.

01:14:27.140 | Last week I lost 13.5 pounds.

01:14:29.140 | This week I've so far lost 11 pounds.

01:14:32.140 | So getting -- those are really fast weight loss results and it's legit fat loss.

01:14:38.140 | And I've been fascinated to see how these extreme forms of dieting are benefiting me in other ways.

01:14:44.140 | So, for example, let's talk for a moment just about fasting.

01:14:47.140 | If you study what the people who claim to know stuff say about fasting, there are a lot of benefits of fasting that go far beyond fat loss.

01:14:54.140 | They claim benefits and health benefits, the ability to improve various conditions.

01:14:58.140 | If you look around some of the fasting communities, you find people who have improved all kinds of conditions, everything from the extreme.

01:15:04.140 | Some people have successfully treated various forms of cancer with fasting, both water fasting and dry fasting.

01:15:11.140 | Once again, pointing out to things everyone always believed.

01:15:14.140 | Everyone always says you die if you don't drink water for three days, you die.

01:15:19.140 | Well, that ain't true.

01:15:20.140 | I've learned that that's not true.

01:15:22.140 | There are lots of people who've done extended water -- no water fasts, it's called dry fasting.

01:15:27.140 | And they claim -- and they don't -- not only do they not die, but they experience significant improvements in their health.

01:15:38.140 | And so people are successfully treating various skin conditions.

01:15:41.140 | People are successfully treating, of course, obesity.

01:15:44.140 | People are successfully treating cancer and other things with dry fasting.

01:15:52.140 | It's fascinating to me.

01:15:54.140 | I've not yet done a full three-day dry fast.

01:15:57.140 | I've done some dry fasting, but I've not yet done a full three-day dry fast.

01:16:00.140 | But I'm going to experiment with it just to see.

01:16:04.140 | And so, once again, those things that you always thought were right -- eat breakfast,

01:16:07.140 | most important meal of the day, or eat eight meals a day, you know, back to '90s dieting advice.

01:16:12.140 | Eat small meals regularly throughout the day, six to seven of them.

01:16:16.140 | And, you know, if you don't drink water for three days, you'll die.

01:16:20.140 | Well, there are questions.

01:16:22.140 | Now, obviously, there's danger with the water thing.

01:16:24.140 | You've got to be careful.

01:16:25.140 | You've got to hydrate properly before, after, et cetera.

01:16:28.140 | Don't be foolish.

01:16:30.140 | Be cautious.

01:16:31.140 | But test on yourself.

01:16:33.140 | And so the same thing with money, that in this process of these different things, you find different things that work.

01:16:40.140 | And so in my lifetime, I've had to go through and break a lot of these things with financial things I was told.

01:16:47.140 | People said, "Okay, always do a retirement account."

01:16:50.140 | Well, I still have retirement accounts.

01:16:52.140 | I use retirement accounts.

01:16:53.140 | But I've come to discount the value of retirement accounts, change against the conventional advice,

01:16:57.140 | want to understand why retirement accounts can be useful, but then look at my situation and see if they're not.

01:17:02.140 | Similar things.

01:17:03.140 | I was always told when I was younger, "Don't buy gold."

01:17:06.140 | And I remember how hard it was for me to buy my first gold coin.

01:17:10.140 | Well, I've come to really value buying gold and investing in gold.

01:17:13.140 | I think it's a very important component of an overall financial plan.

01:17:18.140 | But I had to go against the conventional advice.

01:17:21.140 | Similar things with, "Don't buy whole life insurance."

01:17:23.140 | Well, I really love my whole life insurance policies that I own, that my children own, that I own on my children.

01:17:29.140 | I own all the -- I love them.

01:17:30.140 | They're really, really important.

01:17:32.140 | And so what I've just learned is don't take advice from other people without being willing to first listen to why they say what they say.

01:17:41.140 | And can they do an effective job of saying, "This is why I think this is advice."

01:17:45.140 | Same thing, credit cards, right?

01:17:46.140 | Paying cash.

01:17:47.140 | Well, I've tested it.

01:17:48.140 | I've lived on credit cards.

01:17:49.140 | I've lived on cash.

01:17:50.140 | I've tested all these things.

01:17:52.140 | And I like it.

01:17:53.140 | I think it's fun to try those things.

01:17:55.140 | But listen to -- can someone tell you why their advice is appropriate and for whom it's appropriate and then test it for yourself.

01:18:02.140 | Test is small, but test it for yourself.

01:18:04.140 | For example, on fasting.

01:18:05.140 | People say, "Oh, fasting is bad."

01:18:07.140 | Well, try it out.

01:18:08.140 | See what you learn.

01:18:09.140 | You're not going to die if you don't eat for three days.

01:18:12.140 | You're not going to die if you don't eat for one day.

01:18:14.140 | But what you will do is you will learn something about yourself.

01:18:17.140 | I remember back when I was -- 10 years ago, I read -- I read I think Ori Hoffmeichler's book called "The Warrior Diet."

01:18:28.140 | And I read it because Jacob Lundfisker references it in his book "Early Retirement Extreme" about eating one time per day.

01:18:34.140 | And I said, "Oh, that sounds interesting.

01:18:35.140 | I'll try it."

01:18:36.140 | And at the time, I was single and I was working a lot.

01:18:40.140 | And I found that it was a really convenient way to eat, that I just didn't eat breakfast, didn't eat lunch, and only ate dinner.

01:18:44.140 | And then I found that I started to lose weight on it.

01:18:46.140 | But what I learned from it, I did it for a period of time, but I didn't continue it.

01:18:50.140 | So I didn't get any long-term results.

01:18:52.140 | I wasn't convinced that it was the greatest thing forever.

01:18:54.140 | But I did -- but what I learned from it, I learned how much of my eating was just due to habit.

01:18:59.140 | And all those little things that sneak in there.

01:19:01.140 | You walk past the chocolate on the desk and you grab it from your co-worker's desk.

01:19:05.140 | Or you walk past the refrigerator and you open it up and do it.

01:19:07.140 | And so even though I didn't continue something for the long term in that situation, I learned from the experience.

01:19:13.140 | And the same thing applies with finances.

01:19:15.140 | So when you hear about weird things or things that you think are appealing to you, try them.

01:19:19.140 | As long as you don't put yourself in danger of bankruptcy, give it a try.

01:19:23.140 | Nobody -- you know, my first -- I told a story on a recent episode.

01:19:26.140 | My first gold coin was a 1/10th ounce gold American Eagle.

01:19:29.140 | I was scared silly going and buying it.

01:19:32.140 | I went -- you know, walking into the coin shop, I felt like I was trying to buy drugs for the first time.

01:19:37.140 | I felt like I was just betraying all of my forebear's wisdom by buying a gold coin.

01:19:43.140 | And then I bought it and I'm sitting in my car and I'm like, "That wasn't so bad.

01:19:46.140 | Okay, here's this thing. Are you kidding me? This thing cost me 250 bucks?

01:19:49.140 | It's lighter than a dime."

01:19:51.140 | And all of a sudden it starts to change over time.

01:19:53.140 | You start to learn something from that experience.

01:19:56.140 | So try things.

01:19:57.140 | With finances, try different kinds of investing.

01:20:00.140 | Tip your toe in the water.

01:20:01.140 | Be thoughtful and careful about how you do it.

01:20:04.140 | So with dietary stuff, what I've described to you is extreme weight loss and extreme dietary -- and extreme results.

01:20:10.140 | I'm getting extreme results.

01:20:14.140 | My weight goes down every single day.

01:20:16.140 | I'll get to one more little tip that I've tried in just a minute.

01:20:20.140 | But I'm getting extreme results.

01:20:23.140 | But nothing that I've done is undoable, right?

01:20:27.140 | There's nothing about fasting or about just eating meat that's undoable.

01:20:30.140 | Now, we could argue whether what you should do for long-term.

01:20:33.140 | We're the argument.

01:20:34.140 | I don't think -- I think that -- I'll get to it in a moment for my long-term plans.

01:20:39.140 | But nothing is undoable.

01:20:40.140 | So the same thing with finances.

01:20:41.140 | Test your toes in the water but make an exit plan.

01:20:44.140 | Let's say that you say, "I'm going to buy a house.

01:20:46.140 | 2020 is the year that I'm going to buy a house."

01:20:48.140 | Well, buy a house.

01:20:50.140 | Think about it.

01:20:51.140 | Do your best to get a good house but buy a house.

01:20:53.140 | People buy houses all the time.

01:20:54.140 | You know what they also do?

01:20:56.140 | They sell them.

01:20:57.140 | So if you buy a house and you find out, "This stinks.

01:20:59.140 | I don't want to do this," sell the house.

01:21:01.140 | Even if something is gargantuan with significant transaction costs as a house,

01:21:06.140 | it is not an unrecoverable decision.

01:21:09.140 | Just try it.

01:21:11.140 | Do it.

01:21:12.140 | Take action.

01:21:16.140 | You start to get results and then things start to be exciting to you.

01:21:20.140 | I guess the last thing I would add because I'm actually trying to give you some experience

01:21:24.140 | and give you some things to try if you're fat.

01:21:27.140 | The last thing that I have changed over the last few weeks is I've been testing eating

01:21:33.140 | when I do eat in the morning instead of at night.

01:21:37.140 | So there are people who argue about what's the best time to eat.

01:21:39.140 | They make all these evolutionary arguments.

01:21:41.140 | "When did our ancestors eat?"

01:21:44.140 | Some people make biological arguments.

01:21:46.140 | But I just figured, "Just test it.

01:21:47.140 | What's the big deal?

01:21:48.140 | Try eating in the morning.

01:21:49.140 | Try eating at night."

01:21:50.140 | So I've been eating when I've been eating.

01:21:52.140 | I've been eating breakfast.

01:21:56.140 | Now I'm getting ready to test starting tomorrow.

01:22:00.140 | I'm going to test eating dinner.

01:22:02.140 | So with the one meal being at dinner time versus in the morning and test the results.

01:22:06.140 | Things like this are not that big of a deal to test on yourself.

01:22:09.140 | And so those are some things that you might try is that instead of doing your intermittent fasting

01:22:16.140 | where you skip breakfast, which is socially a little easier.

01:22:19.140 | I recommend trying that first.

01:22:20.140 | If you're going to do it, skip breakfast, then just eat lunch and dinner or just skip breakfast and lunch

01:22:23.140 | and eat dinner, but then you can flip it around.

01:22:26.140 | And let's say that you solve the social problem.

01:22:28.140 | Now go try and eat breakfast and then skip lunch and dinner and see what your results are for your fat loss.

01:22:37.140 | Trying things is useful.

01:22:41.140 | And you don't have to tell anybody, really, except, of course, your immediate family when you're trying things.

01:22:45.140 | So think about it and give something a shot.

01:22:49.140 | Now in summary of just some suggestions for you of fat loss.

01:22:53.140 | First thing is that am I sure that any of all of these things are the best things?

01:22:59.140 | I'm not.

01:23:01.140 | But I don't think anybody else knows what they're talking about either.

01:23:03.140 | I think there are people who have opinions and you can read them and listen to them

01:23:06.140 | and you pick what makes the most sense for you.

01:23:08.140 | But I'm not sure these days that almost anybody has a clue what they're talking about.

01:23:13.140 | And so I think that you should just focus on you, on your own results,

01:23:16.140 | and you should try what you think would work for you.

01:23:18.140 | Measure your results and then see from there.

01:23:20.140 | I do think that we should all be humble, right?

01:23:23.140 | And probably this is you if you're fat.

01:23:25.140 | Be humble and recognize that I'm going to need to try some things

01:23:29.140 | and there may be things that are effective for losing fat

01:23:32.140 | that are not necessarily effective for keeping the fat off.

01:23:35.140 | And so along the way, the key is we all need to be teachable.

01:23:39.140 | Just like with money.

01:23:40.140 | Is that if we do something, let's say that we go to a hyper extreme,

01:23:43.140 | I'm going to save 90% of my salary.

01:23:45.140 | But then you find that something else that's important to you is suffering,

01:23:48.140 | well, stop doing that and start spending more money.

01:23:52.140 | If you find that your family is suffering or you recognize that there's no need

01:23:56.140 | for this extremism, then stop it and adjust.

01:24:00.140 | But you can do something that gets you results and measure those results

01:24:07.140 | and then change in the future.

01:24:09.140 | So I've gotten some pretty good results.

01:24:12.140 | Not there all the way yet, but I'm going all the way.

01:24:14.140 | I'm not saying it publicly to even add more emotional fuel to the fire for myself,

01:24:19.140 | but I'm going all the way and I'm going to become skinny

01:24:21.140 | and I will be skinny for the rest of my life.

01:24:23.140 | I will never be fat again, period, no matter what.

01:24:27.140 | I've gone from a XXL shirt to size large.

01:24:30.140 | I got rid of all the fat shirts.

01:24:31.140 | I don't even care if they're around to take pictures.

01:24:33.140 | I don't want them.

01:24:34.140 | Not going to do it.

01:24:36.140 | I've lost--I don't have waist measurements.

01:24:40.140 | I don't have stomach measurements the whole time,

01:24:42.140 | so I didn't measure all the fat loss all over my body,

01:24:45.140 | but I've gone down 8 inches on my waist.

01:24:48.140 | The only fat thing that I have is the one belt that I wore all the way through

01:24:52.140 | where I can see where it started and I can see about the five new holes

01:24:55.140 | that I've added, so I've lost 8 inches on my waist.

01:24:58.140 | I've gone from size 38 or size 40 pants to size 33.

01:25:07.140 | So those are some good results, and I've got a lot of fat still to lose.

01:25:10.140 | I don't know how much.

01:25:11.140 | We'll see.

01:25:12.140 | I'm just going to keep going, and I'll keep you in the loop.

01:25:14.140 | But that's all happened in a relatively short amount of time,

01:25:18.140 | something like six months.

01:25:21.140 | Now, again, hear me.

01:25:24.140 | There will be new challenges along the way, but those are fast results.

01:25:27.140 | So if you've been fat and it's the middle of January and you said,

01:25:30.140 | "I don't want to be fat," I've shared with you what I've done,

01:25:34.140 | and I would commend to you trying any or all of the above.

01:25:38.140 | If one of the simplest things--and, frankly,

01:25:42.140 | here's the financial lesson that I teased at the beginning.

01:25:44.140 | One of the simplest things that I've come to believe that you could do

01:25:47.140 | is just stop eating.

01:25:49.140 | Cole is a hilarious guy, but he starts every video with, "Hey, fatty,"

01:25:54.140 | and then he ends every video with, "Stop eating, fatty,"

01:25:57.140 | and there's something true about that.

01:25:59.140 | Like, hey, okay, if you're fat, stop eating.

01:26:01.140 | Stop eating.

01:26:02.140 | And what I've come to appreciate is how much you can stop eating

01:26:05.140 | while still getting good results.

01:26:07.140 | Cole's standard recommendation--people want to lose weight--

01:26:10.140 | is he, of course, he's sympathetic to low carb,

01:26:13.140 | but here's a guy who's coached thousands of people,

01:26:15.140 | has 50,000 people in his diet,

01:26:17.140 | and has a lot of experience with fasting that he figured out himself,

01:26:20.140 | is eat twice a week.

01:26:22.140 | And here's your financial tip.

01:26:23.140 | If you're struggling with the time involved with eating food

01:26:26.140 | and you're struggling with the money of,

01:26:27.140 | "How am I going to spend lots of extra money on food,"

01:26:29.140 | and you care about fat loss, stop eating.

01:26:33.140 | Just stop eating.

01:26:34.140 | And all of a sudden, you get your time back,

01:26:37.140 | you get your money back, et cetera.

01:26:39.140 | That actually worked out.

01:26:40.140 | I was thinking about eating twice a week, which I've done this,

01:26:42.140 | and tested it and see if it was doable.

01:26:44.140 | So even though I'm not as fat as I was, if you're very fat,

01:26:47.140 | one thing to do is just eat twice a week.

01:26:49.140 | Cole doesn't--he used to recommend longer-term fast, 15-day fast, 20-day fast.

01:26:53.140 | Now he doesn't recommend it anymore.

01:26:54.140 | He changed the recommendations based upon experiences,

01:26:56.140 | and he says you can fast anywhere from three to seven days.

01:26:59.140 | So if you want to eat once a week or you want to eat twice a week,

01:27:02.140 | that's fine, but if you could fast anywhere from three to seven days,

01:27:05.140 | continually, repetitively, you want to build the discipline in which I've found

01:27:09.140 | to be a major benefit of fasting is the discipline.

01:27:12.140 | But his recommendation and the financial recommendation is just eat twice a week.

01:27:16.140 | And you do the math.

01:27:18.140 | In the United States, there's this incredible restaurant called Golden Corral

01:27:21.140 | where you can actually eat healthily.

01:27:23.140 | But if you want to eat out all your meals and yet you want to save money,

01:27:27.140 | one of the things you could just simply do is stop eating so frequently.

01:27:31.140 | And now all of a sudden you could do it.

01:27:33.140 | And I wish that somebody had given me the permission to not eat when I was younger.

01:27:38.140 | I always thought I was being healthy by eating continually.

01:27:41.140 | I always thought I should eat regularly.

01:27:43.140 | I need to eat breakfast, so I would eat regularly.

01:27:45.140 | These days I wish somebody had told me because if I had known that I wasn't going to kill myself

01:27:50.140 | because I only ate one meal a day, I'd probably have been less fat back in the day.

01:27:54.140 | If I'd known I could go a day, multiple days, without eating,

01:27:56.140 | I probably would have been less fat, and that would have been awesome.

01:27:59.140 | I probably wouldn't have needed to eat in order to be healthy.

01:28:01.140 | So consider it.

01:28:03.140 | You can have the Texas Day Brazil diet, and your financial advisor will give you permission.

01:28:10.140 | If you eat once a week, eat once a week at Texas Day Brazil or Fogo de Chão or some other,

01:28:15.140 | all you can eat Brazilian steakhouse.

01:28:17.140 | I love Brazilian steakhouses.

01:28:19.140 | When you only eat meat, Brazilian steakhouse is your friend.

01:28:22.140 | It's a real thing.

01:28:23.140 | But you eat once a week.

01:28:25.140 | You pay $50 once a week.

01:28:27.140 | Well, your grand total of food cost is $200 in a month.

01:28:30.140 | You eat out all your meals, and you have all the time left the rest of the time,

01:28:33.140 | and you lose weight like crazy.

01:28:35.140 | Or if you don't want to spend the money there and you want to eat twice a week,

01:28:38.140 | then go to Golden Corral.

01:28:39.140 | Let's say it's $15 twice a week.

01:28:41.140 | There's $30 a week, four weeks, $120, and you can get great food at Golden Corral.

01:28:47.140 | The thing is, if you're fat, don't worry about my opinion.

01:28:50.140 | Again, not a nutritionist, not a doctor, blah, blah, blah.

01:28:52.140 | Don't worry about the nutrient stuff.

01:28:54.140 | You got fat, and so let your body eat up the fat, and then go back to the healthy eating.

01:28:58.140 | One thing you can do is consider trying fasting.

01:29:00.140 | Now, the biggest benefit that I'm getting from fasting, yes, the weight loss,

01:29:03.140 | but I'm not committed to fasting forever.

01:29:05.140 | But what I'm loving is I'm loving how much stronger I'm becoming as a person,

01:29:09.140 | is that it is building my self-discipline, and it's building my mental fortitude,

01:29:14.140 | and it's building my mental muscles.

01:29:16.140 | That's something that I really appreciate.

01:29:19.140 | I've gotten some of those benefits in the past from past fasting,

01:29:21.140 | but I wish I'd done more of it.

01:29:23.140 | I'm excited to be doing a lot of it now because I'm becoming so much stronger.

01:29:28.140 | My mindset, my self-discipline, and my self-confidence,

01:29:31.140 | because of proving that I can do hard things, is becoming so much stronger.

01:29:37.140 | So here are some strategies for you to consider if you're interested in losing fat.

01:29:41.140 | Number one, consider I found the ketogenic diet to be effective,

01:29:45.140 | and there are lots of people who are finding that to be effective.

01:29:48.140 | The thing that I think is most helpful about a ketogenic diet is simply that,

01:29:53.140 | especially for men--I don't know if it's the same for men and women.

01:29:56.140 | I think it is because there's lots of women who get results as well.

01:29:59.140 | But the food is satiating, and whether you lose weight because of the lower carb nature of it,

01:30:04.140 | whether you lose weight because of the lower calorie nature of it, I don't know.

01:30:08.140 | All I do know is that the change, when you're not feeding your body with sugar over time,

01:30:13.140 | your appetite changes dramatically, and you're not hungry all the time.

01:30:17.140 | And because of the fact that you're not hungry all the time,

01:30:19.140 | you can stop thinking about food all the time, which is what I always did when I did low-calorie diets,

01:30:23.140 | where you're just eating these tiny meals all the time, and you're never satisfied.

01:30:26.140 | You're always hungry, and what I would say now, your blood sugar is always high,

01:30:30.140 | and you never feel good.

01:30:33.140 | And so on a ketogenic diet, you're not hungry all the time.

01:30:36.140 | When you eat, you feel really satiated because of the high amounts of fat, and you lose weight.

01:30:41.140 | Works. There's people online I follow that lost hundreds of pounds on that.

01:30:45.140 | So ketogenic diets I think are effective. Are they the best? I don't know.

01:30:48.140 | You try them all for yourself if you want to.

01:30:50.140 | I just know that they have worked and started me on losing weight.

01:30:54.140 | Number two, carnivore diet. Try that. I love it.

01:30:58.140 | I find it's far simpler to just eat meat and eggs.

01:31:02.140 | And it's so simple, that makes it easy to stick to, and the stick-to-itiveness is really good.

01:31:06.140 | It's also extremely satisfying.

01:31:08.140 | Is it the healthiest long-term? I don't know.

01:31:13.140 | Vegetables haven't made me sick that I know of, and so I will probably go back to eating vegetables,

01:31:19.140 | but I don't feel the need to, and I have felt great on a carnivore diet.

01:31:23.140 | And I see again and again people getting all kinds of experiences.

01:31:27.140 | Right now it's World Carnivore Month here in January,

01:31:30.140 | and I'm convinced that there are lots of people in the world who can live very healthy

01:31:35.140 | and get all the nutrients that they need exclusively from meat.

01:31:38.140 | So you can consider that if you're interested in that. Check that out.

01:31:41.140 | There are big communities in that space, but that's also something that's worked for me.

01:31:45.140 | Number three is fasting.

01:31:47.140 | And so you can do fasting in a number of different ways,

01:31:49.140 | just what is usually referred to as intermittent fasting,

01:31:52.140 | where you compress your eating. Instead of eating three meals a day,

01:31:55.140 | you have breakfast when you wake up, six o'clock before you leave the house,

01:31:58.140 | and you have your dinner at 730 at night.

01:32:00.140 | Just simply skipping some of those meals and moving your eating window to a smaller amount of time.

01:32:04.140 | Some people find that just weight loss from eating eight hours a day, 16/8 schedule.

01:32:10.140 | Some people find weight loss on 18/6, 24, 20 hours of fasting, four hours of eating.

01:32:16.140 | Some people think that you should do intermittent fasting every other day.

01:32:18.140 | I have no idea. Try it for yourself and see. Just try different things.

01:32:22.140 | But if you've always eaten breakfast, stop eating breakfast.

01:32:24.140 | If you've always eaten dinner, stop eating dinner and see what happens.

01:32:28.140 | Then you can do longer-term fasting.

01:32:30.140 | So some people do one meal a day. I think that's a good solution.

01:32:33.140 | There are people who lose weight just eating every other day.

01:32:36.140 | And so that's one simple thing that you can do.

01:32:38.140 | If you don't want to do longer-term fasting, you want to keep eating the standard diet you're eating now,

01:32:41.140 | but just try eating one meal--or sorry, try eating every other day.

01:32:45.140 | Maybe you eat your standard schedule, and then the next day you fast all day.

01:32:48.140 | Anybody can do that.

01:32:50.140 | Now what I found with fasting is that the easiest way of fasting is, I think,

01:32:55.140 | if you combine low-carbohydrate eating and fasting,

01:32:59.140 | because then you don't get hungry the way that a lot of people do.

01:33:02.140 | But try it out. Try eating one meal every other day.

01:33:05.140 | If you want to do more extended fasting, try that. Try eating one--sorry.

01:33:09.140 | First I said try it out. Try eating every other day.

01:33:11.140 | If you want to do more extended fasting, try eating one meal every other day.

01:33:15.140 | Or try eating one meal every three days.

01:33:17.140 | Or try eating one meal every week and see.

01:33:21.140 | And you're going to lose weight if you eat one meal every week,

01:33:25.140 | especially if you're super fat.

01:33:28.140 | And I've come to appreciate extreme diets in a way that I never did before.

01:33:33.140 | And when I look around at some of my really fat friends,

01:33:36.140 | and I look at a lot of really fat people,

01:33:38.140 | and I see just the emotional encouragement comes from getting quick results.

01:33:43.140 | I mean, just think about that guy, the Fasting Fat Man on YouTube.

01:33:46.140 | Go look at his story. He lost 300 pounds in a year.

01:33:50.140 | That's transformative.

01:33:52.140 | Now back to money. Try things.

01:33:54.140 | I'm not going to try to give you this long list of things to try,

01:33:57.140 | but try different things and see what works.

01:34:01.140 | But don't be scared of an extreme approach to money.

01:34:04.140 | Make this the year that you get out of debt and set yourself an aggressive,

01:34:06.140 | hardcore goal and work like a crazy man to make it happen.

01:34:09.140 | Make this the year that you save a huge amount of income.

01:34:11.140 | Make this the year that you quadruple your income.

01:34:13.140 | Do some crazy stuff sometimes.

01:34:16.140 | And the cool thing about crazy stuff is that even when you don't get the results you want to get,

01:34:21.140 | you probably still get results.

01:34:24.140 | I've lost on December, I'll tell you just as of right now,

01:34:29.140 | this is my weight loss chart.

01:34:31.140 | Good lesson there about tracking money and tracking weight.

01:34:35.140 | I was wrong to not track my weight every day in the past.

01:34:38.140 | I didn't want to face it.

01:34:40.140 | The same thing happens with money.

01:34:42.140 | On January the 6th, I weighed 251.4 pounds.

01:34:50.140 | This morning I weighed 235 pounds.

01:34:53.140 | Ten days, excess of 15 pounds, 16 something pounds gone in ten days.

01:35:03.140 | When you have that tool in your arsenal, I've been doing fasting, 48s and 72s, and carnivore.

01:35:09.140 | So carnivore, I'll tell you what I've done in the last ten days.

01:35:12.140 | I've done exclusively carnivore.

01:35:15.140 | I've eaten one meal either every two or three days,

01:35:19.140 | and I've eaten that meal in the morning, and I've lost weight every single day.

01:35:23.140 | Felt great, tons of energy, no health issues whatsoever, just feel great the whole time.

01:35:28.140 | And have to impose some self-discipline when I feel like eating, but not really excessively hungry.

01:35:33.140 | It's the thing about fasting.

01:35:34.140 | You're only hungry about 16 hours after your first meal,

01:35:37.140 | but beyond that your hunger just simply goes away.

01:35:41.140 | You can dig into the science of it, but get great results.

01:35:44.140 | Now when you have that arsenal, that tool in your back pocket,

01:35:47.140 | and you know, "Hey, I can lose 15 pounds in ten days,"

01:35:50.140 | then it feels really great, and you can feel better about,

01:35:53.140 | "Hey, if in the future--I don't want to be up and down.

01:35:56.140 | I don't want to weigh it up and down, but I know that since I know I can do that,

01:36:00.140 | then if I go to a big party and eat something, or if I gain two pounds,

01:36:04.140 | I'm not going to freak out about it.

01:36:06.140 | Two pounds, that's gone in one day.

01:36:07.140 | I just won't eat for a day."

01:36:09.140 | And so the same thing with money.

01:36:10.140 | When you do something extreme and you know you can get out of debt,

01:36:13.140 | you know you can pay off $50,000 of debt in a year,

01:36:15.140 | you know you can make a ton of money.

01:36:17.140 | It changes your perspective and opens up the door of what's possible for you.

01:36:22.140 | Those are my experiences.

01:36:23.140 | I hope that there was something interesting in there for you.

01:36:26.140 | I wanted to share some of the lessons learned as they relate to finances from food.

01:36:31.140 | If you're making progress with your money, keep up the great work.

01:36:34.140 | And then if you're fat or you want to make some other physical change--

01:36:37.140 | lots of people want to make changes, but they're not fat--

01:36:39.140 | then let the emotion of making progress with your money

01:36:42.140 | transfer over to your food.

01:36:46.140 | And simultaneously, if you're fat, start losing fat

01:36:48.140 | and then see if that translates over to your money.

01:36:50.140 | There's a lot of parallels between that and other areas of life as well.

01:36:54.140 | And hey, if you want to eat at Texas De Brazil and you want to save money,

01:36:58.140 | just eat there once a week.

01:36:59.140 | You might lose huge amounts of weight at the same time.

01:37:02.140 | Thank you for listening to today's show.

01:37:03.140 | I really appreciate your being here.

01:37:05.140 | While I'm going today, let me just tell you about

01:37:07.140 | radicalpersonalplanets.com/store.

01:37:09.140 | There are three courses for sale there right now.

01:37:11.140 | They're coming soon.

01:37:12.140 | First course is How to Borrow Money Safely and Never Pay Interest Using Credit Cards.

01:37:16.140 | Back to kind of breaking things, I've come to be convinced that credit cards

01:37:19.140 | are one of the best tools in your portfolio for safety and cheap interest.

01:37:24.140 | Find that at radicalpersonalplanets.com/store.

01:37:26.140 | There's a course there on career and income planning

01:37:28.140 | and also a course on how to survive and thrive during the coming economic crisis.

01:37:33.140 | So if you're interested in that, I'll tell you what I've been doing.

01:37:36.140 | radicalpersonalplanets.com/store.

01:37:38.140 | Thank you for listening, and I will be back with you soon.

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