• The best diet is the one you can follow. This is why a flexible approach to dieting is the only one that works in the long run.
• Doing a bunch of cardio isn’t enough to get lean. You simply can’t out-exercise a poor diet.
• If you eat too little protein while restricting calories for weight loss, you’ll lose more muscle than you would if you had eaten an adequate amount.9 If you eat too few carbohydrates while in a calorie deficit, your training will suffer, your muscle repair will be impaired, and your hormone profile will become more catabolic.
• They found that higher protein intake led to greater feelings of fullness and that eating six meals resulted in lower daily fullness than three meals.
• A study performed by researchers at Vanderbilt University demonstrated interesting results: subjects who normally ate breakfast lost more weight by skipping it and eating the majority of calories at dinner, whereas subjects who normally skipped breakfast lost more weight by eating breakfast every day.19Researchers chalked this up to greater levels of satiety and thus better dietary compliance.
• While we’re on the subject of late eating, I recommend that you eat a slow-digesting protein like egg or casein (either from a powder or from a whole-food source like low-fat cottage cheese) 30 minutes before going to bed, as research has shown that this improves muscle recovery due to the increased availability of amino acids for repair while you sleep.
• Here’s how my daily protein intake generally looks: Pre-workout: 30 grams of protein Post-workout: 50 to 60 grams of protein. Lunch: 40 grams of protein. Afternoon snack: 30 to 40 grams of protein. Dinner: 30 to 40 grams of protein. Before bed: 30 grams of protein.
• If you exercise regularly and aren’t overweight, your body can deal with simple carbohydrates just fine. You’re not going to get diabetes or ruin your heart by having a bit of sucrose every day.
• If you don’t eat enough protein when dieting to lose weight, you can lose quite a bit of muscle,70 and this, in turn, hampers your weight loss in several ways:

1. It causes your basal metabolic rate to drop.

2. It reduces the number of calories you burn in your workouts.

• So long as you maintain a proper calorie deficit and keep your protein intake high, you’re going to maximize fat loss while preserving as much lean mass as possible. Going low-carb as well won’t help you lose more weight.
• Several studies conclusively show that high-carbohydrate diets are superior to low-carbohydrate varieties for building muscle and strength.

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• A good way to measure stress levels in your body is by looking at something called heart rate variability, which is how much your heartbeat speeds up and slows down as you breathe. The more stressed you are, the less variability there is in your heartbeat—the more it gets “stuck” at a faster rate. Research shows that people who are less stressed—whose heart rate has a desirable amount of variability—display remarkably better self-control than those with less variability.
• Remember that the goal isn’t a good workout or day of proper eating: it’s a radically transformed physique. There are bigger reasons why you’re doing all of this, including fitness, health, happiness, confidence, and all the rest. And doing things like bingeing on pizza and skipping workouts aren’t little “oopsies” that you can erase with justifications. They are threats to those overarching goals.
• Whenever you’re struggling with a willpower challenge, review your whys. What will you get in the end by staying strong? What’s the big payoff? Who else will benefit from it? What will your life be like when these things are a reality? Are you willing to delay gratification to get there? To experience some discomfort in the present to have that future?
• Pride is another effective weapon that we can use to overcome our willpower challenges. Research shows that imagining how proud you will be once you’ve accomplished your goals, who you’ll tell, and what their reactions will be can increase your willpower and make you more likely to do what it takes to make those goals a reality.
• You can also use a couple of mental exercises to build your future self-continuity. Research shows that just thinking about the future—not even the rewards, per se—can strengthen willpower. Thus, by imagining the future, doing what you need to do, or refraining from doing what you shouldn’t do, you can increase the likelihood of your following through.
• Researchers from the University of Washington called this “surfing the urge” and found that it helped smokers cut back on daily cigarette smoking.59 It helped them learn how to handle their feelings internally instead of turning to something external for support.
• We can increase our overall willpower by performing regular, small acts of self-control like eating fewer sweets, tracking spending, correcting our posture, refraining from swearing, squeezing a handgrip every day, and using our non-dominant hand for various tasks.
• Anything that causes stress, whether mental or physical, drains our “reserve” of willpower and reduces our capacity for self-control. Thus, as a corollary, anything we can do to reduce stress in our lives and improve mood—both acutely and chronically—improves our self-control.
• An effective way to recover from the stresses of the “daily grind” is to simply relax. If you want to see this in action, the next time you face a willpower challenge, deliberately slow your breathing down to about 10 to 15 seconds per breath, or four to six breaths per minute.

RESEARCH

• Research has shown that exposing yourself to a constant barrage of bad news, scare tactics, and morbid reminders of our mortality increases the likelihood of overeating, overspending, and other willpower failures.
• Research shows that reflecting on your goals and how you might be tempted to go astray will strengthen your will and help you turn away from immediate gratification when necessary.
• Research shows that imagining how proud you will be once you’ve accomplished your goals, who you’ll tell, and what their reactions will be can increase your willpower and make you more likely to do what it takes to make those goals a reality.
• Research shows that just thinking about the future—not even the rewards, per se—can strengthen willpower. For example, if you’re struggling with starting a diet, just imagining shopping and eating differently is enough to make it more “real” and appealing.
• Research shows that a willingness to think thoughts and feel feelings without having to act on them is an effective method of dealing with a wide variety of challenges, such as mood disorders, food cravings, and addiction.
• Research shows that people who simply don’t believe that using self-control results in mental fatigue or a weakening of the “willpower muscle” don’t experience the same gradual deterioration in the strength of their willpower seen in those who do.
• Research has shown that some people use progress toward a goal as an excuse to let off the gas and indulge in some self-sabotage.

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• We can increase our overall willpower by performing regular, small acts of self-control like eating fewer sweets, tracking spending, correcting our posture, refraining from swearing, squeezing a handgrip every day, and using our non-dominant hand for various tasks.
• Instead of patting ourselves on the back and pondering all the progress we’ve made, which increases the likelihood that we will act contrary to it, we should view our successes as evidence of how important our goals are to us, or of how committed we are to seeing the process through to the end.
• You need to find pictures of exactly what you want to look like and save them for motivation.
• Anyone who has the type of body that you aspire to has specific, realistic health and fitness goals and is driven by them, progressing slowly but surely every day.
• The first step of establishing your goals is to determine what your ideal body would look like. Find pictures of exactly what you want to look like and save them for future reference.
• Work out a health goal that you find motivating as well.
• In a study published in 2011, researchers at Peking University found that when men with the equol-producing bacteria ate high amounts of soy food for three days, their testosterone levels dropped while their estrogen levels rose.

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