WIP: need to add some links. Nothing in this is medical or other advice - talk to your doctor.
Skip to ‘The Dadprint’ section if you just want exactly what I did.
I was a meagre, thin boy - short enough that I would put socks in my shoes. So I always wanted to be big and strong (but not fat). As I grew up, I tried very hard to achieve this, and never did. Somehow, becoming a middle aged dad got me the body I'd always wanted. Here's how I did it, and how you can get your dream dadbod too (no kid necessary).
Hard work doesn't pay off.
In the 20 years since I first tippy toed to impress girls, I became the world’s least fit OCD fitness professional, all in pursuit of big and strong (but not fat). I’ve competed in Thai Boxing fights, kicking people in the head until I broke my knee, and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu tournaments, securing a podium finish by way of lack of competition. I’ve paid a personal trainer to help me in powerlifting. To be fair, they dragged me through a 175kg / 385lb deadlift and a 150kg / 330lb squat. Unfortunately this required engorging my naturally ghostly 65kg / 145lb frame into an embodied stench of dairy, somehow weighing almost 90kg / 200lb. I’ve tried every plausible diet - from calorie tracking to keto to vegan, and some implausible ones too - the GOMAD (Gallon Of Milk A Day) being my favourite and my wife’s least favourite. I’ve worn five finger shoes on purpose, frolicked through GMB animal movements, and learned the underhand sneak in rope flow. I’ve bulked and cut and bulked and cut. I’ve tried all the supplements, optimising blood tests for over a decade, hoping to find the secret to big and strong (but not fat).
My most dedicated effort was in 2018. Ahead of a grappling tournament, under the supervision of paid fitness and dietary professionals and with meticulous adherence - every calorie counted and every workout supervised - I did a bulk and a cut. This means you get as big and strong as you can, putting on muscle and fat, then lose weight and keep the muscle but not the fat. The end result is big and strong (but not fat). I did DEXA scans, the most accurate measure of body composition, near the start, middle, and end of this process. Big and strong (but not fat) incoming.
Here’s what happened:
A year of work to gain some visceral fat?
Spot the difference before and after.
What the fuck? I was identical practically to the gram at the beginning and the end of the process. To boot, I moved some fat from my limbs to my organs. That’s not a good thing!
It turns out, nothing works. My body knows what it wants to be, and that’s not big and strong (but not fat). I have the physique of computer code, looking like a 1 or a 0. All those jacked guys are on steroids and or won some genetic lottery I didn’t.
Shook by this realisation, during COVID I leant in, isolating in Amsterdam with nothing but cheese, bread, my wife, and peanut butter to comfort me. I reached my heaviest ever, my only exercise flopping around doing ‘mobility work’ in the park whenever I dared to go outside and respire.
Being fat is not without downsides. I am also hairy, and there is not much less sexy than a bald spot where your fat has ground your belly into your jeans. It also turns out, getting as fat as I did makes you fatter forever - if you gain enough fat, your fat cells run out of room and multiply more or less permanently. Something needed to change.
Bryan Johnson’s Blueprint doesn't work either.
In 2021, COVID free, I decided I’d get to a healthy weight by eating less and then just stay there. No more losing weight, no more gaining it. I gave up on big and strong (but not fat), and just wanted to sustain a healthy weight.
My weight from 2015 to 2025, stable since 2021.
As I was losing the unhealthy weight, I discovered Bryan Johnson's Blueprint and, by 2022, I was experimenting on myself. Bryan claimed extraordinary results, turning back his biological age - whatever that means, and the hope of living forever. Perhaps Blueprint would be the panacea I had been searching for.
It was not. Blueprint had lots of ideas, but just as many problems. At first, Blueprint’s issues felt benign: the recipes were disgusting and a pain to make. Following even half Bryan's ‘protocols’ was a full time job. Worse still there were no explanations, let alone citations, so who knows what anything was supposed to do and why. When I looked into things, I found that potential health benefits were often speculative, proven only in mice, or there was no long term safety data in humans.
Should you trust Bryan? On this point there is a un bouquet de fleurs. Some of his actions were more marketing and aesthetics than health, like getting fat injections in his face. There was some sort of paid opt in ‘trial’ which allegedly got swept under the rug after results didn’t go well. Bryan was on testosterone (aka steroids) at various points. The biomarkers and blood tests were from unspecified labs and potentially mixed and matched from different dates. Rejuvenation Olympics leaderboards appeared to shuffle at convenient times. The meaning of these ‘biological age’ tests is disputed. When Bryan released his own supplements and foods, there were allegedly quality control issues. Blueprint employees allegedly had weird confidentiality agreements. Bryan has some claims against his character.
I am not criticising Bryan. He has done many amazing things and I hope - thought doubt - he will turn out to be completely legit. But, a Blueprint customer I am not.
So what is good about Blueprint? For me, Bryan and his Blueprint was new inspiration, new hope, and a new starting point.
From 2022-2024, my approach was to try to do everything indiscriminately. I tried to copy Bryan in various ways. I’d take blood tests and dozens of new supplements. I’d eat some variation of the Blueprint ‘Super Veggie’ and ‘Nutty Pudding’ most days. I’d go to the gym a few times a week, do some stomach vacuums while brushing my teeth, use laser beams on my hair, and hop in an ice bath I made out of a freezer. I tried everything and more. It was very hard work.
Below are the measurements from my impedance scales over these three years. The absolute kilogram numbers are generally not very accurate, but the relative numbers are directionally correct.
I had tried every possible supplement, every workout routine, every quack therapy I could think of and afford. Once more, nothing changed, nothing worked.
It's not a me thing. I looked at my now dad school friends and realised over 20 years the wellness industry has failed us all. The skinny guys were still skinny, the fat guys still fat.
Enter Fatherhood
In December, I had a child. My wonderful son detonated every aspect of my life. I no longer had time to be indiscriminate. If I wanted to be healthy, I needed to get my shit together. I needed a plan. If I didn’t, I was going to lose every aspect of my wellbeing.
So I pared back the learnings from my journey, and formed a concrete plan I could trust and stick to. I called it 'Dadprint'.
I wanted Dadprint to be:
explainable. I want to know why I’m doing what I’m doing.
flexible. I want to be able to do things I love, not feel constantly restricted.
safe. I don’t want to consume or do things that might hurt me long term.
sustainable. It has to be easy and affordable enough to maintain as a lifestyle.
I planned out Dadprint, stuck to it since my son was born, and… it worked. Not worked like ‘I didn’t lose every aspect of my wellbeing’. Worked like ‘I transformed my body.’
Here’s what happened according to a DEXA, with my professionally monitored bulk and cut - my previous physical peak - as a reference:
TLDR: I dropped to almost 10% body fat, about as low as is sustainable year round.
My body fat plunged to 10% - about as low as one can sustain year round without bordering on unhealthy. I lost a bunch of visceral fat. And, comparing to other DEXA users (much fitter than the general population), I became exceptionally lean and disproportionately muscular:
That reads: less fat per kg / m2 (mass controlling for height) than 95% of DEXA using males my age; less visceral fat 86% of DEXA using males my age; while having more muscle than 56% of DEXA using males my age; and more muscle in my arms and legs than 65% of DEXA using males my age. I would expect fat and muscle mass to correlate. But, basically, I am very lean and somewhat muscular.
I changed aesthetically, too. Here’s a side by side, first thing in the morning in every photo, from 2017 around my current weight (before I put a lot of weight on), 2018 (after my professional bulk and cut), and then now (after six months of fatherhood).
While the X kilo numbers aren’t precise, directionally they are useful.
I wish I’d collected more data, photos, and blood work. I just didn’t expect this to happen… What are the odds I would be in my best ever shape six months after I became a father? Not likely. But, somehow, true.
My impedance scales agree on the timeline. Though these are notoriously inaccurate in absolute kg terms, they are typically directionally correct and they suggest the birth of my son in December was indeed the turning point.
A gym bro and a scientist might, for different reasons, scoff at these results. Being leaner doesn’t mean I am healthier, at least not by definition. You might say I just lost body weight and composition is related to that - though I think the before and after photos at the samme weight say otherwise. You might say that, compared to a ‘good’ cut, I lost much too much muscle compared to how much fat I lost. But, my baseline is nothing changes my physique at all. I have never been this lean in my life even when I spent vast amounts of money, effort, and time on it.
This is N of 1 and, as with anything biological, I can’t be sure what worked for me will work for you. But, it worked for me. And what I’m doing now is more sustainable than any of the diets and the exercise programs I’ve done before. I share my plan with you hoping you can take what suits you and make N of 2.
The Dadprint
The Most Important Thing
The dominant variable in any health or fitness plan is time: the longer you do something for in _years_, the more impressive your results will be. This means whatever you choose to do should be something that’s sustainable for you. I have tried to cut out as much marginal effort as possible in a way that suits me. This leaves some gains on the table, but is what is sustainable for me. You should take Dadprint as a set of ideas rather than a plan to follow precisely.
My Minimal Viable Dadprint
For a precise, step by step guide with explanations, skip this section. Here I share the absolute fundamentals for those of you who don’t want the details. It’s also what I aim for when I’m on holiday.
Sleep:
Sleep 8 hours in a 24 hour period, any way you can.
Eat:
Pick a healthy target weight range. This should be between your [Devine formula weight](https://www.evidencio.com/models/show/430) and your weight assuming a normalised [FFMI](https://ffmicalculator.org/) of 22 and a body fat of 10%, ± 1.5kg / 3.5lb.
Weigh yourself after using the loo in the morning. If you're above your target weight by 1.5kg, eat 2 normal sized meals each day. If you're below by 1.5kg, eat a third or fourth meal. Eat a third meal on tough exercise days.
Your two base meals should primarily combine red and blue berries, nuts and seeds, cruciferous vegetables (think broccoli and cauliflower), mushrooms, something fermented, and olive oil, plus a big source of protein. For an every day protein source, prioritise vegetarian protein sources (ideally tofu), over fish (ideally salmon), over lean meat, over fatty meat.
Your third meal can be whatever, within reason. Reason is self regulating - if you need to lose weight and you aren’t, your third meal should reduce in either frequency or quantity.
Exercise:
Do strength training with compound movements twice a week. Do four exercises total, two exercises per session. For example: Session A is some form of squat and deadlift; Session B is some form of push and pull. For each exercise do 3 sets of 5-10 reps, with a 2 minute break in-between, and add a tiny bit of weight every time you go.
Do Tabata style HIIT cardio after strength training. That’s 20 seconds max effort / 10 seconds low effort for 4 minutes on something like an air bike or sprints.
Do lower intensity cardio, eg your favourite cardio oriented sport like tennis, once or twice a week.
Supplement:
Vitamin D 2000iu daily.
Omega 3s combined 1500-3000mg daily, depending on whether you regularly eat fish.
My Full Dadprint
Here we are. The nitty gritty. This is, down to the tupperware, as much detail as I can write about what I’ve been doing and why. If something needs an explanation, let me know and I’ll add it.
It should go without saying that it’s impossible to stick to every bit of the plan all the time. That’s fine. The goal is to build good habits, and then over time it’ll get easier.
Sleep
Sleep quality and quantity come before anything else. Getting these right will make you physically and mentally better off on practically every dimension. When you don’t get good sleep, your mental health will suffer, it will be harder to adhere to a diet, and your exercise performance and recovery will suffer.
Our main goal is to get at least 8 hours sleep in a 24 hour period. A tiny fraction of the population can get away with less, and you’re probably not one of them.
Some other things that might make you sleep better, in rough order of importance to me.
Avoid alcohol.
Your bedroom should be quiet. Create a quiet environment and / or use white noise to make disturbances minimal.
Your bedroom should be dark. Use black out blinds or curtains, or an eye mask.
Your bedroom should be cold enough that you need a proper duvet, probably under 19c / 66f.
Go to bed and wake up at roughly the same time.
Avoid high caffeine drinks like coffee in the 8 hours before bed.
Avoid drinking lots after your last meal, if you’re not, otherwise you’ll be peeing a lot.
Try to have a wind down period before sleep of, say, 30 minutes without major stimulation. I like to do some stretches while watching Nomad Push.
Of course, it won’t always be possible to sleep well. With a newborn it wasn’t for me a lot of the time. If you have the ability to change your situation (my wife and I slept in shifts for months), or somehow squeeze a nap in by trading off something else, it’s probably worth it.
Food and weight principles
We want a baseline diet which is:
easy to prepare and transport,
tastes good,
is in aggregate nutritionally complete,
supports long term health and fitness,
and has flexibility baked (!) in.
But before we get to my recipes, I want to give some principles.
Picking a target weight
Our diet is the key way we can manage our weight. Relative to our diet, exercise will have no effect. Massive fluctuations in weight can be harmful long term, and so we want to pick a healthy and desirable weight range and stay there.
Unfortunately, people have gotten much heavier in recent decades, even controlling for height. Widespread obesity in the general population and steroids in the influencer population have contributed to unhealthy expectations regarding bodyweight and muscularity. Picking a healthy range by intuition is therefore hard. You should probably be lighter than you think.
To anchor our bodyweight expectations, try the Devine bodyweight formula, which roughly predicts your weight based on your height, assuming you are 20-29 and entering college in the US in 1950. It is therefore a reasonable anchor of an average pre obesity epidemic weight. It’s likely much lower than you would think your weight should be by modern intuition. You may think that if you’re older than 29, as I am, you get a free pass on being heavier. Unfortunately, there’s good evidence that metabolic rates don’t change much at least until around 60, and weight inflation throughout mid life is largely lifestyle choices.
The second anchor we have is normalised FFMI of 22 at 10% body fat. This is going to be heavier than the Devine formula, and represents your target weight if you were in peak shape. You can calculate your target weight at 22 normalised FFMI and 10% body fat here. Why these numbers? A normalised FFMI of 22 is about as muscular as a non professional bodybuilder with average genetics can expect to get and maintain in a reasonable time. 10% body fat is about as lean as is healthy to be year round. You may want to be slightly less lean than this, and thus slightly heavier, but you may also want to be slightly less muscular, so this is a good anchor.
With those high and low anchors in place, pick a target weight. This weight ±1.5kg / 3.5lb is your weight range for the foreseeable future. If you’re lucky enough to be genetically gifted, push up the range when you find you can maintain the high anchor while being close to 10% body fat.
For body fat measurements, if you want to be precise, once a year or so you will want to do a DEXA. Impedance scales just aren’t that accurate, especially as your body fat percentages get low. Otherwise visual guides are fine, and over time - especially if benchmarked against a DEXA - you’ll find what it looks like for your fat distribution. For me, when I am close to 10% veins start to appear all over my body.
Regulating our weight
The system I will now describe evolved from just trying to maintain a constant bodyweight. It is quite trivial once you've set it up.
Every morning, after using the loo, weigh yourself. This is important information in deciding how you will regulate your weight. We will not emphasise regularly counting calories or restricting ourselves to specific foods.
I suggest that you craft two base meals which are your baseline diet every day. You can use mine, recipes below. Together they should be nutritionally complete - hitting your RDAs on most things. They should put you in a (500ish calorie) caloric deficit if you are overweight. If you are in your target weight range for long enough this will become caloric restriction. Caloric restriction implies you're not losing weight, even though you're eating less than you would expect to maintain your weight, because your body is adjusting various processes to maintain the weight it ‘wants’ to be. This is only possible if the caloric restriction is small enough that the body can compensate. Caloric restriction seems to increase lifespan in animals, and it doesn't seem to be bad for humans. You can estimate your calorie needs here.
The algorithm is this: we eat our two base meals when we are above our target weight range; and we eat more than our two base meals when we are below it or doing intense exercise that day. In aggregate this may offset some of our baseline caloric restriction, though hopefully not entirely. If we are not moving towards our target weight range then we reduce or increase the size or frequency of our extra meals accordingly.
We don’t care too much what our extra meals are made of - it’s important to be able to eat food we like and not stress out about it. Over time I’ve found that I more often want to eat healthier extra meals because my body is used to it. I also want to exercise more to justify cravings. If you must snack beyond your meals, try fruit or homemade popcorn.
Of course, some days things don’t go as planned, or you will want to eat an extra meal even if you shouldn’t according to the algorithm. No worries! Tomorrow the algorithm will compensate for today.
Over time our body learns what weight and body composition it ‘wants’ to be. It reduces or increases our energy use to maintain this weight. Big weight fluctuations throw off this natural regulation. This is why picking a weight we can and want to sustain, getting there, and then slowly tweaking is a better long term strategy. Once you have stablised for a year or so, you could try fluctuating between the bottom and the top of your target weight range as a form of bulking and cutting, but you’ll find it’s remarkably hard to shift your weight around once your body has gotten used to where it ‘wants’ to be.
The point of this system is threefold: we get great baseline nutrition; we regulate our weight; and we get to eat other foods we love without guilt.
Protein
There is a lot of nonsense about how much protein you need to eat. This is a good analysis. The gist is, 1.6g / kg or 0.725g / lb of bodyweight per day seems to be roughly the point at which eating more protein makes no difference. To be clear, that’s not the ‘minimum you should eat’, that’s the maximum you _can_ eat before eating more has no effect.
There are good reasons not to eat more protein than you need to. Protein sources tend to have their own issues: meat has epidemiologically associated with all sorts of health issues and dirty and unethical supply chains; fish have contaminants and heavy metals risks and dirty and unethical supply chains; and isolated vegetable sources can be comparably high in heavy metals. A diverse source of ‘enough’ clean protein is where you would like to be. I think tofu and single ingredient whey are your cleanest daily sources.
Food and supplement sources and quality
Generally we want to compose our base meals with foods related to those eaten by our distant ancestors. This is a kind of historical safety heuristic which prevents us from eating too much food that our bodies aren’t evolved to handle. It also implies we should eat organic and avoid unusually processed foods and supplements when there is a reasonable dietary alternative.
If we’re going to consume something every day, we need to source the best ingredients possible, and be paranoid about heavy metals and contaminants. This can be tricky - remember Bryan Johnson messed it up. Ideally high risk products we consume regularly are third party tested by a certified lab for ingredient purity, heavy metals, and other contaminants. Where possible I have checked this. It is painful to check CoAs for every batch of every item, so I encourage you to check yourself and wish this were easier. If you find verifiable cleaner sources than me, let me know!
I recognise that a bunch of the ingredients in the shot / smoothie are powders. This isn’t ideal, but I think freeze drying fruit, which is how powders are often made, seems fairly innocuous. In the spreadsheet of ingredients I annotate which ones are ‘high risk’ for metals or contaminants or toxicity, based on my research. I also give a simpler more whole food approach to the smoothie based on what I deem to be only the important powders.
Pill Form Supplements
In addition to the quality risks outlined earlier, pill form supplements generally have very weak evidence. There is usually no evidence that supplements have an effect in humans, admittedly because these things are hard to study, and good reason to think that things taken in pill form may in fact act differently in the body than when they are ‘packaged’ in food. For most supplements we have no good evidence about the right dose in humans, or the right time frame for which to take them. Bryan Johnson takes, from what I can tell, everything that _might_ work whether it is demonstrated to be safe or effective in humans. Bryan took Rapmyacin for example, a popular ‘off label’ longevity drug, and now thinks that this made him older rather than younger. Spending lots of money to take probably useless, maybe beneficial, and potentially harmful supplements is not the right risk reward trade off for me.
Because of this risk reward, quality control issues, and the general depressing experience of taking lots of pills, I want to minimise the amount of pill form supplements I take.
From my calculations, the baseline diet I have is good enough to get my RDA of most essential vitamins and minerals. So we don’t need to supplement much. I do take, however:
Vitamin D3 - 2000iu. Almost everyone is deficient, but it is possible to take too much. This is a good low maintenance dose.
EPA / DHA - 1500mg to 3000mg combined, dependent on whether you eat oily fish a lot.
There are some well researched and safe extras you can try if you want to get exotic:
Kyolic Garlic - 1200mg. Good for you but hard to find in your diet without being stinky.
Ubiquinol (CoQ10) - 100mg. Good data that this is safe long term and helps with cardiovascular risk.
Blood help. If you give blood regularly or are vegan, something like this might be a good idea.
Recipes
As above, I eat these 2.5 meals a day as a baseline. The start to finish cooking time per day is <15 minutes with no microwave.
The 2.5 meals are:
Morning shot
Smoothie
Veg Bowl
Here is a spreadsheet with all the ingredients listed for all recipes. It includes links to the brand I bought last, basic nutritional info, the ‘health logic’ behind each item in the recipe, and you can scale the recipe by number of portions (the yellow F1 cell) to see how much to buy in total.
Bonus: if you follow these recipes, you will poop like a champ.
How to make preparation easy
Easy preparation is really important to making a good diet sustainable. If it takes you 1 minute to make a smoothie, that’s easier than getting take out, and you will consume a lot of smoothies. Therefore, while it sounds ridiculous, it’s worth getting your set up right so you can ‘set and forget’ your diet.
In all my recipes, therefore, you should adjust the number of portions you buy and make at once, and the gram amounts of each item in the recipe, so that it’s easy to buy and dump into storage containers without extra work.
For example, let’s say the recipe says 6g of husk per serving, and 10 grams of cacao, and your particular brand of husk comes in a 300g pack and your source of cacao in a 600g pack. You could make 50 servings at 6g of husk and 12g of cacao, or 60 servings at 5g of husk and 10g of cacao. This kind of variation is not going to make or break your health or fitness. The only time it would make a difference is if you’re significantly increasing the amounts of a high risk item, eg Brazil nuts (selenium risk) or cacao (metals risk).
Get some relevantly sized containers for each recipe (details below). Then, when you are buying ingredients you can scale the recipe to, say, 45 portions and just dump everything you buy in the relevant container. You also know roughly the gram amount per portion of, say, all the nuts in the smoothie. So you can then just stick the right size measuring spoon for the nuts in the container. This way it takes almost no time to mix the ingredients in advance - you just dump them into the container, and no time to prepare the meal on the day - you just take one scoop out.
While it sounds slightly absurd to go to this level of detail, making your baseline diet easy and time efficient is the best way to make sure you actually eat it.
Morning shot
This is essentially stuff that’s good for you but tastes gross so we don’t want to put it anywhere we have to chew on it. Amazingly, it somehow works as a firebrand ‘ginger shot’ type experience. Best to take it first thing in the morning since it has caffeine in it and some of the ingredients work best on an empty stomach.
If you are conservative, skip or change this without reservation. Chlorella is probably the most speculative ingredient I consume, primarily out of hope that it chelates metals, but that is very speculative.
Here’s a full recipe:
Chlorella 2g
Spirulina 2g
Matcha 1g
Beetroot 2g
Moringa 1g
Apple cider vinegar 15ml
Meal prep
Dump all the powders in a container, find the right spoon for the serving weight. You can prep months worth of servings in one go.
On the day
30 seconds to make: A glug of apple cider vinegar into a glass, a scoop of the powders, and top up with a tiny bit of water to taste. Whizz with one of those milk brothers. Down it.
Smoothie
This is basically an antioxidant, fibre, and protein bomb. Some of the fruit I stick in there now are a little exotic, because I’ve having the same thing almost every day for years, but the foundation is very simple:
Blue and red coloured berries. Antioxidants and polyphenols.
Nuts. Fiber and good fats.
Protein. Make sure your protein sources are as high quality and clean as possible!
Creatine. This is one of the few supplements that you should almost certainly take. There is good evidence will make you better at a long list of things.
Here’s a full recipe:
Collagen 12.5g
Pomegranate powder 10g
Cacao 7.5g
Ginger powder 5.0g
Açai powder 5.0g
Psyllium husk 5.0
Resistant starch (green banana powder) 5.0g
Inulin 5.0g
Creatine 5.0g
Aronia powder 2.5g
Maqui powder 2.5g
Amla powder 2.5g
Sunflower Lecithin 2.5g
Ceylon Cinnamon 1.3g
Macadamia nuts 30g
Chia seeds 25g
Hemp seeds 10g
Walnuts 5g
Flax seeds 2.5g
Brazil nuts 1g
Mixed berries 150g
Protein powder (whey) 20g
Vanilla bean powder 0.3g
Water 150-200ml
Meal prep
Get four containers: protein; other powders; nuts; and frozen berries. Dump all the relevant ingredients in each container, find the right spoon for each serving weight per category. You can prep months worth of servings in one go.
On the day
1 minute to make: Scoop a spoon from each container into a [blender](https://tornadoblender.com/) with approximately 150-200ml or 1/3 pint of water. Blend for 30 seconds. Done!
This smoothie gets pretty gloopy if you leave it for a while so either make sure your container is airtight or make it and eat it.
Veggie Bowl
This is your main meal. You’ve got to find the flavours that work for you, but this is verified tasty if you’re into Asian food. In case you’re not, here’re the important parts:
Cruciferous vegetables. Antioxidants and fibre again.
Mushrooms. Good for your gut, immune system, inflammation.
Protein source. Good for your muscles.
Something fermented. Good for your gut.
Olive oil. Good fats, anti inflammatory.
Bonus ingredient: you can at a pulse or bean like lentils or chickpeas. I find it to be a faff to cook these from scratch, so I often don’t bother, but they make the dish more delicious.
Here’s a full recipe:
Tofu 284g
Broccoli 250g
Cauliflower 150g
Cooked black lentils / chickpeas (if you can be bothered) 150g
Kimchi 60g
Shiitake / Maiitake mushrooms 50g
Evoo 45g
Dashi Miso 40g
Onions and garlic flakes 20g
Nori (2 sheets) 5g
Cayenne powder 2g
Meal prep
Buy however many containers will fit in your freezer. Buy however much veg you can fit in your containers. Chop them all up and put them in containers. I keep my protein source separate, but you can keep it together if you buy bigger containers. My freezer only fits about a week’s worth sadly.
On the day
10 minutes to make. Empty a container into a steamer. I go with 9 minutes in the steamer since I have tofu. Make the ‘sauce’ in a bowl / tupperware (olive oil, kimchi, miso cayenne etc). Put everything in the bowl / tupperware.
This tastes good (enough) cold, so often I’ll steam it in the morning or evening and then take it to work.
Exercise
Exercise is your biggest active lever in your long term after sleep and diet. Strength training improves your muscle mass and bone density. Cardio training improves your cardio vascular endurance and your VO2 max. Exercise makes you happier. All these strongly correlate with a higher quality, longer life.
If you’re reading this, I assume I needn’t convince you to do exercise. But don’t put it off! It’s important to start early, too it’s much harder to get strong and fit later in life, especially if you’ve never been strong or fit before, because of factors like ‘muscle memory’.
So what exercises matter? We want to pick exercises which:
have low injury risk and are relatively easy to execute, because getting injured is much more costly than missing out on marginal muscle gains.
train lots of things at once, or are very efficient, and in combination cover our entire body, because we want to get the best returns on our time.
can be scaled to our desired difficulty via progressive overload, because this is how we get stronger and fitter.
If you’re new to strength training, I recommend getting a good coach for at least one session, and ideally one session every few months, until you’re comfortable with any new movements. Alternatively you can use r/formcheck.
Key Strength exercises
I landed on four core strength exercises. Between these four exercises, we can develop a generally strong body in under an hour per week of strength training.
Romanian Deadlifts (RDL)
Regular Deadlifts are amazing, but hard to execute technically and have scary associated injuries. I spent my entire life doing them, and never really got my form to a place that felt good. If you can, great. But, hear me out, Romanian Deadlifts are simpler with lots of the same benefits. There are no mobility constraints and the cus are easy: soft knees, push your butt backwards until you can’t anymore, keeping your back straight, then come back up. As you reach your grip limits, it’s fine to use straps.
Bulgarian Split Squats (BSS)
Back Squats and Front Squats suffer the same challenges as Regular Deadlifts. They’re fantastic, but very few people will get them right even with a lot of help and no-one likes the thought of failing a rep under a bar. BSS, on the other hand, are hard to get wrong: drop your back knee almost to the ground and come back up. If you fail a rep, no problem. You can load a BSS with dumbbells and weighted vests. And if you doubt their muscle stimulus, you’ve never tried them.
Pull Ups and Dips
I put these two together because they are two sides of the same coin. Between them they work out more or less your entire upper body in just two movements, in wonderful proportions. They reward hardcore form - for maximum stretch induced gains start your pull ups in a dead hang and end at least chest to bar, and take your dips as deep as you can. They have the added benefit of scaling up and down nicely - a simple dip belt can make them infinitely hard. And they can be done on park equipment or even with cheap gymnastic rings at home.
Accessory exercises
I like to do a single set of Seated Good Mornings, for mobility and back robustness, or some form of hanging L sit / leg raise, for nice abs, at the end of my workouts. I have hamstring mobility issues, and I am vain. YMMV.
Cardiovascular training
We have two cardiovascular objectives, VO2 max and cardiovascular endurance. I have always hated cardio. The good news is, for VO2 max we can train it very fast, and for cardiovascular endurance we can substitute something we find fun.
VO2 max - Tabata
Even short sessions of max effort cardio can have dramatic effects on your cardio vascular system. Tabata, where you alternate 20 seconds of max effort with 10 seconds of rest for 4 total minutes, will kick your VO2 max into a new dimension. I like doing it on an air bike, and the 20/10 4 minute program is built in, but any kind of sprint works.
It’s safest to do Tabata at the end of your strength session, but you might experiment with doing it up front to save time if you are well trained. If you want to invest more time in your VO2 max, you can try the Norwegian Protocol, but I (happily) don’t want to.
Cardiovascular endurance - Sport
Cardiovascular endurance is generally trained in heart rate Zone 2, Zone 3 at a push. This is very light effort. If you play some other sport once or twice a week, that should cover your cardio vascular endurance. Best to just pick whatever you enjoy and can stick to, for me it’s been bjj.
Programming frequency, intensity, sets, reps, and rest
If we’re strength training twice a week, we can either do two long hard sessions, or two short sessions. The marginal gain from training a muscle group twice a week might be around 1.5x vs training once a week. It does also seem like more training volume is basically better, but again, the gains become fairly marginal fairly quickly.
For me, I don’t think the fatigue of training muscles twice per week, or with high volume, is worth the injury risk or time. I have a tendency to get overuse injuries like golfer’s elbow, and become physically run down faster than most. Increasing my time in the gym also makes me less likely to go because it’s less convenient. If I do have extra time going for exercise, I would rather enjoy an extra session of sport.
And in the end, slow or fast you will get to a similar place if you can be consistent over a long period. Whether you are adding a little weight every week, or a little weight twice a week, you’ll push your limits soon enough. I think it’s better to optimise for going consistently without getting injured or sick. Of course, if you recover fast and are well trained, ignore this.
As for intensity within a session, if you are new to training you may want to just stick to a basic program of 3 sets of 5-8 reps per key exercise. Your main mechanism for growth is progressive overload - if you can successfully complete your sets and reps for a given exercise with good form, next session just add the smallest amount of weight possible. Eventually you will be training mainly within 5 ‘reps in reserve’ which are the reps that drive growth.
As we are going for a small number of exercises at high intensity, we rest for a full 2 minutes in between sets.
If you are well trained, here is some more controversial advice which I follow. If we are working each muscle group roughly once per week, we can afford to train very intensely. We have time to recover. RDLs and BSS are very intense and regular progressive overload works well. Going to failure or similar encourages poor form which, especially in RDLs, we should avoid. For Pull Ups and Dips, which have a lower intensity and injury risk once you are comfortable with them, I recommend trying a high intensity approach.
High intensity Pull Ups and Dips is three sets: AMRAP; weighted; then negatives. This approach tests your muscular endurance, power generation, and strength at every point of the movement.
Our first set is As Many Reps As Possible (AMRAP). This is what it sounds like. Only after your first session, you now have a Personal Best (PB). In future sessions you will do your AMRAP set and, if you fall short of your PB, take 5 breaths and go again until your total reps matches your PB. These are bastardised Myo Reps. Our second set is 5 weighted reps, as explosive on the upwards (concentric) part of the rep as possible. We want to launch ourselves and put our hands into our pockets. Our third set is 5 negative reps. Here we don’t care how we get to the top of the rep, we just try to go as slowly on the down (eccentric) part of the rep as possible. Do these reps weighted if you can resist for long periods. It can help to count your way down from a high number, or consciously try to get back up every time your upper arms hit a number on the clock.
Performance tracking and progressive overload
As our program is very simple, you only need to track your best (should be your most recent) weight for each strength exercise. Four numbers! For cardio, we just track our max calories on the bike for Tabata.
Every time we go we aim to beat our previous numbers slightly. If you can sustain this over a period of months and years, you will approach the limits of your strength and cardiovascular fitness.
My Exact Program
Workout A - vo2 max and power strength
Tabata 20/10 x 8, ±5 min
Sciatic glide / Warmup RDL, ± 5 min
Romanian Deadlifts, 3 x 8, 120s rest. ±10 min
Bulgarian Split Squats, 3 x 8, 60s rest between sides, ±15min
Seated good mornings / Back hyperextensions 1 set, ±1 min.
Total ±40m
Workout B - vo2 max and aesthetic strength
Tabata 20/10 x 8. ±5 minutes.
Pull Ups AMRAP / myo into PB, 5 reps weighted explosive, 5 weighted negatives, 120s rest, ±10m
Deep Dips AMRAP / myo into PB, 5 weighted explosive, 5 weighted negatives, 120s rest, ±10m.
Toes to bar / L sit scapula retraction hang 1 set 5 rep negatives or 1 minute.
Total ±30m.
Other things
Tests
DEXAs
If you get a DEXA scan, try to go to the same place next time. There can be variation caused by different equipment so you want to keep things as consistent as possible.
Blood markers
I regularly get a blood test to test a variety of my biomarkers. I have had at various points high cholesterol. I have always had high SHBG. If anyone knows root causes of high SHBG in particular, let me know!
Two things on blood tests. Try to get your tests done at the same lab, since results and equipment can vary lab to lab. Try to understand what the ‘normal’ ranges represent if you get any abnormal results, since being outside normal can be anything from a potential measurement error (what time of day did you get your T tested?), to a ‘the green on the chart just represents one standard deviation of people rather than something that correlates with wellbeing’, to a real problem.
Interventions
Water fasts
A 72h water fast (with electrolytes) seems to be enough to get most of the speculated health (eg autophagy) benefits from fasting. There are obviously risks so it's a good idea to be careful. I do this once every six months.
NB: blood donations and water fasts take it out of you, so I would spread them apart from each other (eg if you do a blood donation in January, do a water fast in April).
Blood donations
There’s evidence that donating blood is one of the few ways to actively reduce PFAS. I do this once every six months. I would recommend you supplement as explained earlier to recover from this.
NB: blood donations and water fasts take it out of you, so I would spread them apart from each other (eg if you do a blood donation in January, do a water fast in April).
Cold plunge
Maybe the only benefit to a cold plunge is that it feels great. That's a good thing! You can make one cheaply for your home out of a freezer. Cold showers don't feel great, so don’t bother with those.
Recommended for off days.
Barefoot shoes
Not a recent thing for me but, while I have your attention, get barefoot shoes. It's so obvious once you've worn them for a while that regular shoes are hurting you. My favour are the Tyr / Squat University shoes.
Drugs
Finasteride
I used to be big on finasteride, and I took it for a long time. Unfortunately, I recommended it to a friend and they had some life altering side effects. If you look online you will find a lot of anecdata about this. I think new evidence is emerging which suggests mechanisms for how DHT inhibitors can affect the body long term, and it is intuitive that nuking a very powerful hormone would have some side effects. This may be true in an extreme way for a subset of the population, but you have now way of knowing if you are in that subset. I suspect there are disincentives to discover what is really going on here and strongly discourage anyone from taking it. This experience was also formative of my reluctance to take supplements in general as often safety data is very limited and in some cases biased.
Alcohol and smoking
For a long time I drank and smoked in varying quantities, sometimes too much. I can’t profess to know how to stop for everyone. But, what made me quit both almost entirely was getting hobbies that are way harder if you drink and smoke. Competitive BJJ and chess did it for me, although ironically BJJ has historically had a weed habit and chess an alcohol habit. What’s the point in entering a chess competition if I’m hungover and can’t think straight? Or training BJJ if I can’t breathe?
Sparkling water
If you’re addicted to soft drinks then sparkling water, and to a lesser degree kombucha, is a great hack. I used to have a fridge specifically for red bulls and Coke Zero. Get into Topo Chico, friends.
Helpful links
This sheet contains everything you need to start: calorie estimates and protein guides, recipes, exercise tracking, and some Dr LLM generated risk profiles.