You’re here because you’ve come to terms with one fact: you’re lazier than you wish you were. You wanted to use the Coronavirus downtime to reinvent yourself. Try as you might, you’ve repeatedly failed at mustering an effective sense of discipline. Your not-so-admirable quarantine habits are landing you with a body that you’re not stoked with. That’s ok. Here is a very simple method for losing weight so you can come out of quarantine with a body you’re not ashamed of.
Any effective fat loss strategy begins and ends with one thing – the food you eat. The way you look is almost entirely attributable to your food habits, and virtually 100% of your attention should be focused here. You won’t even need to work out to lose weight. In fact, believing that you can work something off is probably keeping stubborn fat stuck in areas you don’t want it. There is no amount of activity that you can do to offset your eating habits.
Also, recall that you’re lazy and you’re here reading this precisely because you’re not part of the high-activity/high-metabolism exception group worth mentioning. You want a method to lose weight with as little effort as possible? This is it.
What to eat
Here is the rank order of diets I’ve seen among people I’ve known in real life:
- Keto/Atkins/No Carb (“holy shit, what did you do!” level reactions)
- Slow Carb (middling/decent)
- Veganism/Eating More Salads/Plant Based diets (poor)
The common denominator among the methods with the best success is that they try to eliminate sugar and carbohydrates as much as possible. I suspect this is also largely the reason why people who I’ve known who have gone vegan or plant based have either not lost weight, nor achieved a noticeably better physique – it still allows for a lot of sugar. People on those diets can live under the illusion of health while indulging in every single carb craving that comes their way.
You want to lose body fat while being lazy? Stick to eating only these:
– Meat (steak, chicken, fish, beef, pork, etc)
– Vegetables (broccoli, broccoli rabe, kale, spinach, peas, cauliflower, cabbage, etc.)
– Eggs
– Nuts
– Cheese (cheddar, pepperjack, mozzarella, etc)
How much to eat? Eat till you’re not hungry anymore. How about that.
Want to eat this way and put on muscle? General rule of thumb is 1.25-1.5 grams of protein per pound of bodyweight.
This isn’t as limiting as you might worry. A lot of things you eat already look like this. Think salad bowl options at your favorite quick food place, sashimi at your favorite sushi place, or BBQ at your favorite BBQ place.
Word to the wise – the stricter you are with no carb, the more important it is to get salt and electrolytes into your system. There are plenty of great electrolyte supplement products out there. Use them. You’ll start to feel exhausted (it’s called the keto ‘flu’ for a reason) until you start making sure your body is getting the salt & electrolytes it desperately needs. Nuun tablets come highly recommended.
DO NOT TOUCH these:
– Alcohol (mimosas, beer, whiskey, vodka, white wine….)
– Smoothies/Fruit juice – you’re getting a giant sugar bomb while under the illusion you’re doing something good for yourself
– Popular snack foods (chips, candy)
– Chocolate
– Bread
– Rice
– Basically every dessert you can think of
– Pasta or Pizza (b/c carbs in the noodles & crust)
– Try not to eat fruit – the smallest of all evils listed, but a deceptive way to get more sugar than you’ll bargain for
Here’s what a few sample days can look like:
Monday:
Breakfast: 3-6 scrambled eggs with salt and pepper
Lunch: Chipotle salad chicken bowl minus the rice and beans
Dinner: A steak cooked in the pan with a side of steamed broccoli
Tuesday:
Breakfast: Greek omelette, salt and pepper, with some tabasco
Lunch: Zucchini spiral noodles with meat bolognese sauce
Dinner: Rotisserie Chicken with a side of mixed greens and olive oil/vinegar dressing
.
.
.
Friday:
Cheat day (which brings us to….)
But remember, it’s your nature to be lazy – indulge your cravings once per week
While you’re better off avoiding cheating, be honest with yourself. When did you last have the willpower to last you years without succumbing to your food vices? Without meeting you, my guess is ‘never’. Even The Rock has cheat days. We’ll simply build in a cheat day once a week to keep you from losing your mind and reverting right back to bad habits.
During the week, write down every single carb craving that you have. Cheesecake, apple cobbler, Reese’s Pieces, blueberry muffins. Write it all down. Then, one day a week, and on one day only (counting from waking up to falling asleep), eat it all. Buy every single thing that you wrote down, and eat it. Eat all of it – eat the whole pack. Leave nothing left in your fridge/pantry to tempt you the rest of the week.
Cheat eating like this serves two purposes. One, it makes you no longer beholden to your psycho mind, thinking about carbs nonstop. And two, like any good parent that makes their child smoke the whole pack of cigarettes when they catch them smoking just the once – it will make you so sick of everything you thought you loved. You will have no problem making it through the next week without eating a dessert.
The reason why diets typically fail is not because they don’t cause weight loss (most of them do). An unfortunate fact is that peoples’ discipline levels tend toward average, not admirable. This means that somewhere down the line, the dieter will crack and start to eat the bad delicious things. Because you’ve sworn these foods off, they’ve been the sole focus of your monkey mind. Eating just one of the forbidden foods can open the floodgate. This snowballs, and suddenly you’re back where you started. Unshakeable discipline can only be held by a lucky few. You’re not among them. Build in that pressure release valve of having a cheat once a week and you’ll be fine. (I mean it – only just the once. You cheat on a non-cheat day, reset that clock to a week later for when you can cheat again)
The Lazy Workout
Suppose you came here wanting to get stronger and want some quarantine workout ideas as well. This will not substitute the diet portion if you’re looking to lose fat. If you think you’ll only do this part, not change what you eat, and still lose body fat while being lazy, there’s not a miracle out there that can help you. But don’t worry, there’s a lazy way to get a workout in for the day. Remember, you’re here because you’re lazy and want an alternative, not because you’re already doing CrossFit every single day.
Think of structuring your workout days separately by grouping them into Pushing/Pulling/Legs. For example, Monday will be pushups day, Tuesday will be pullups/horizontal row day, and Wednesday will be squat day. Cycle through those, and allow yourself one day a week of doing bo-diddley. This last do-nothing day can also double as your cheat day (talked about above).
If you have little to no experience working out, or you simply aren’t that strong, start these exercises with the lightest body weight variation.
Here’s how you can increase the difficulty once bodyweight becomes too simple:
Pushups > Incline pushups > Handstand Pushups
Pull-ups > Hollow position Pull-ups > Weighted Pull-ups (if you don’t have the strength for pull-ups, then start with a heavy object row [dumbbell if you have one], then try negative pull-ups)
Bodyweight squats > Squats while holding something heavy > Lunges while holding something heavy > Hindu squats > One legged Pistol squats
Group your workouts in round numbers to simplify your life. 5 or 10 sets of 10 (20, 30) reps. For the pushups, start with sets of 20 reps in each set (totaling 200 in a day). Pull-ups, 10 reps apiece (totaling 100). Squats, 30 reps (totaling 300). This is very doable if you’re taking massive breaks in-between for your normal job tasks.
I’d recommend writing your daily workouts in a notebook (rep, set, and weight numbers). This way it’ll be easier to keep track of progress and provide a log of accountability for yourself.
This is how you incorporate laziness into your workout routine. Rather than setting aside a dedicated chunk of time, pound out a single set in between your other tasks, like when you would otherwise be procrastinating on social media. Here’s a sample schedule for what a workout would look like stretched over a few hours:
Monday:
9:30 am – Incline pushups – 20
(15 minutes of emails)
9:45 am – Incline pushups – 20
(30 min conference call)
10:15 am – Incline pushups – 20
(10 min of an Excel report)
10:25 am – Incline pushups – 20
(30 min of having to trace something down for a salesperson)
10:55 am – Incline pushups – 20
(15 min of nonsense)
.
.
.
You pound out 10 sets, you’ll be done by noon. Repeat this structure on your pullup days, and on your leg/squat days, but with as many reps as it takes for it to still be a challenge towards the end of your sets.
That’s it. You can add whatever else seems nice as you progress using this as a foundation.
I am no doctor, just a fellow person trying to get through this life. You do this at your own risk. I wish you the best.
Thanks to Tim Ferriss @tferriss, whose ideas in 2010 started me on a journey to think more about my approach to health & fitness and looking less like a pathetic chump.
The Aging Savage 