Olek’s guide to fitness and diet

This is a guide for people who want to feel good, have a hot bod, but not make fitness their whole thing.

I have been active for my whole life and gone to the gym consistently for >13 years. It’s not my whole thing or anything, but I am strong and visibly fit, in that I’ll get an occasional “daamn daddy” by the pool. I still like to drink, eat ice cream, a lot of red meat, fried foods. So, here are the things I’ve learned through that time.

Diet

The most important thing was drilled into me with my undergrad chemical/bio engineering degree. It’s the law of conservation of energy.

In – Out = Consumption - Generation + Accumulation

This formula is used to solve all sorts of complicated problems. It is only broken in nuclear reactions; so what is it?

Energy is neither created nor destroyed, it’s only converted. This is what a calorie is, it’s a unit of energy. If you care, it’s the amount of energy it takes to heat up 1 gram of water 1 degree Celsius. When you eat food, there is energy in the chemical bonds of the carbohydrates, fats, proteins. Your body breaks those down and uses them to fuel movement, keeping your heart pumping, body at 98.6 F, brain imagining, eyes perceiving.

For our formula:

·        In: The calories you eat

·        Out: The calories you excrete (undigested food, lets call this 0, it’s not but we can treat it as 0)

·        Generation: None (we’re folding it into In)

·        Consumption: The calories you burn

·        Accumulation: The key thing

So we are left with

In – Consumption = Accumulation

This means: if you eat more calories than you burn then accumulation will be a + value, aka, you gain weight. If you burn more calories than you eat, it will be a – value, aka you will lose weight. It’s that simple and it’s an unbreakable law of the universe. There is some variability in the amount of calories people burn without exercise, but it’s not that much and mostly scales with weight.

It doesn’t really matter what you eat, provided you eat the right total amount of food, and get enough protein (which I’ll come back to). You can have a diet composed entirely of McDoubles. It’s difficult to lose weight with exercise alone. An intense 30 minute workout will burn like 300 calories, or two cans of coke.

My general secrets.

1.      Most important is losing liquid calories. Soda, juice, milk, all are more calorie dense than you think and don’t fill you up. The easiest way to lose weight is by replacing them with water, black coffee, tea, diet soda. Diet soda is not bad for you, that’s a myth. This is the easiest thing to do and alone will make a big difference.

2.      Drink lots of water. I probably drink too much, but it makes you feel good. I drink 2 gallons a day. It helps suppress appetite, but also helps burn a few more calories.

3.      Alcohol has a lot of calories. I like to drink, but I keep it limited to Friday/Saturday. If you’re having a drink or two after work regularly, stop that and you’ll lose weight. The lowest calorie option is liquor, lime, and seltzer, but alcohol itself is calorie dense. Beer tends to have a lot of calories, so I try to stick to cocktails without too much sugar if I’m trying to shed lbs.

4.      If you can’t lose weight, try fasting. During the week I don’t eat after 7PM, and have my first meal of the day at 11AM. I work out in the morning before work. You get used to it pretty quickly, I’m not hungry until 11. Some people say you burn more fat this way, I’m not sure, mostly it’s just easier to not overeat. I’ve been doing this for ~9 years, but loosely such that when I want breakfast on a weekend I’ll go get breakfast.

5.      Learn to cook, and cook more. I am shocked when restaurants have caloric information on their menu. I’ll see a burger and fries at a restaurant be ~2000 calories. If you made that at home it’d be hard to get it above 1000 calories, I imagine they’re dumping butter and fat everywhere they can fit it.

6.      Shoot for at least 0.5 grams protein / lb bodyweight. I weigh ~155 lb, so I aim for ~75 g protein per day. That’s about 2.5 chicken thighs total protein per day. The classic wisdom here is 1g/lb bodyweight, that was made up out of nothing as far as I can tell. You’ll be fine getting away with less, but a protein shake here and there can help.

7.      Try not to keep snacks around, the easiest way to overeat is just by snacking between meals, especially at a desk at work.

8.      If you’ve never counted calories it’s worth doing just for a few days so you can get a better idea of your diet.

One lb of bodyfat holds about 3500 calories. So if you want to lose a pound of weight, you need to eat a deficit of ~300 calories for 10 days. Easier said than done. But if you want to lose fat, this is what you have to do.

Likewise, if you eat 300 calories over your metabolism a day for 10 days you’ll gain an lb. If you’re rail thin and trying to put on muscle, the easiest way to add calories is add liquid calories.  When I was in high school I drank a gallon of milk a day for a while, it’s 2400 calories and 128 grams of protein. You might gain fat too, but if you’re working out hard, getting enough protein, you’ll put on a lot of muscle.

To figure out how much to eat a day you can calculate it by weight, age, and height here, plus exercise and you can know pretty well how many calories you burn a day. Thyroid/metabolic disorders are rare, and if you had one you would know, so these calculations will apply to you.

There’s a myth that if you eat less your metabolism will slow down. It’s true only in that when you weigh less it takes your body less energy to move and stay alive. But it’s highly misleading and makes people feel like they don’t have control.

The most frustrating meme I see about diet online is that somehow the American food system is broken. I see stories like this often: “when I go to Europe I eat and drink wine all day and lose weight, but in the US I exercise and eat healthy and gain weight, something is seriously wrong with American food.” It’s not, though. They’re eating less than they think and burning more calories by walking.

People really obsess about minutiae which makes diet seem overwhelming, complicated, and esoteric. Are seed oils bad? Is fast food poison? Do I need to activate my almonds? I’m pretty confident that nothing really matters other than getting the correct amount of calories, sufficient protein, and nutrients such that you aren’t deficient (which is hard to do unless you are vegan, but women are often iron deficient). The scientific “studies” on how doing X adds years to your life etc. are all garbage. Just ignore them.

Exercise

On to exercise. What I’ve learned about exercise is it also doesn’t really matter what you do, as long as it’s hard and you do it consistently. High reps, low weight, low weight, high reps, plyometrics, bodyweight, whatever, I’ve never noticed a big difference in my strength or aesthetic. I started w/ starting strength, a well-known and time tested program that emphasizes big lifts, squat, deadlift, bench, military press, rows. It’s a great program if you’re lifting for the first time. Watch youtube videos to learn good form.

I prefer dumbbells for most upper body exercises. It’s a more natural motion, you build up stabilizing muscles, and don’t need a spotter. I lift heavy one day a week just to keep it up. My numbers are stuck around here, fluctuating slightly.

·        Dumbbell press: 120 lb, 3x sets 5x reps

·        Standing dumbbell push press: 70 lb, 3x sets 5x reps

·        Squat: 315 lb, 3x sets 5x reps

·        Weighted lunges: 50 lb, 3x sets to fail

·        Weighted pull ups: 90 lb 2x sets 5x reps, 45 lb 2x sets 10x reps

·        Weighted dips: 90 lb 2x sets 5x reps, 45 lb 2x sets 10x reps

·        Explosiveness exercise to failure: Split snatch, dumbbell swings, one arm split snatch, etc.

Once you get past the very initial stages of building up a little strength and remembering what it feels like to move your body, the most important is figuring out what works for you and what you’re training for. I prefer short, intense workouts, and I mostly care about being athletic and feeling good. I do HIIT workouts, a lot of burpees, explosive lifts, etc. A good workout takes 20 minutes and I’m taking a few minutes to collect myself after its over. I got a lot of the workouts from a program called “Infinite Intensity” by Ross Enamit, who trains boxers and MMA fighters. You can find sketchy but free .pdfs online, it’s a great program.

My favorite 10 minute workout:

·        5x dumbbell swings each arm

·        5x dumbbell snatch each arm

·        10x burpess

Do that on a 2 minute timer and repeat 5x. I use a 55 lb dumbbell.

My favorite 20 minute workout

·        5x pull ups

·        10x medicine ball slams

·        10x burpees

·        20x jumping jacks

2 minute timer, repeat 10x.

You will make the most progress in what you train, lifting heavy, being explosive, running fast, running far, whatever, but your base fitness will increase no matter what you do. No matter what, I would recommend adding some lifting because it’s good to be strong, and putting a little muscle on a low body fat frame will make you look good. Going to the gym is fun, and you are part of a little scene whether you’re social or not (I am not). Working on core strength is also key, a strong core will prevent you from getting back pain, injuries, etc.

My favorite core exercise is ab wheel rollouts. Nothing else has made as big of a difference in my core strength. Start with kneeling work up to standing. It took me a year to get up to standing, and you’ll get props at the gym from the real ones. A full core workout I do about 2x a week:

·        5x standing ab wheel rollout

·        15x V-ups

·        10x side crunches each side

·        10x Russian twist with a med ball

·        Bicycles to failure

Repeat 2x total.

For non-explosiveness cardio I do a couple things regularly. One is the stairmaster, and I do intervals on that too. 1 minute hard work, level 17/20, 1 min recover, level 5/20. Repeat for ~24 minutes. I’ve started doing running intervals more often too, since I’m feeling the pain at beach soccer. This was from my college rugby coach.

·        30 sec jog 40% max

·        20 sec run 70% max

·        10 sec sprint 90% max

Repeat 12x.

Above all, find a routine which you can keep up. Working out doesn’t take very long if you do it right.

Supplements, medications, legal and illegal

The last part of this is about supplements, legal and illegal. Everyone wants a shortcut. Many shortcuts for fitness are effective, and there’s a lot you can’t achieve without them. Nearly every fitness influencer is on some form of steroids. Hollywood actors who get jacked in 6-7 months to be in a marvel movie, steroids.

If someone is really shredded to the point you’re like goddamn I could probably never look like that, you’re probably right, unless you want to do steroids. I would recommend against roiding, I personally have never used steroids. I thought about it before and did the research. The knob you’re turning is your hormone balance which governs a lot of processes, and if you react badly you need to take more drugs to cancel it out. There’s a slim possibility you never get back to your natural hormonal balance. If you’re going to do it, do a lot of research, and lift seriously for at least a year or two before your first cycle. I’ll note that fitness influencers, actors, and athletes are absolutely shameless in lying about steroids, though. Can’t blame em, their money depends on it.

I’m at the point with fitness where I can’t really make much progress without major changes. I can put on a little more muscle if I train hard and eat a lot, but I’ll gain fat too, and when I try to lose that I’ll lose most of the muscle. You get here eventually, and that’s ok, there’s really no reason to roid up. Cardio can always use some work, and you can try to get low bodyfat which is hard to maintain but makes you look great.

Ozempic is the new craze. It works by tricking your body into thinking it’s full. It doesn’t seem to mess directly with metabolism or hormones. Remember our formula? Less In. That’s it. From the clinical trials and anecdotal reports it looks spectacularly effective and with few side effects. There’s a possibility that there are side effects we don’t appreciate yet, there always are. I’m optimistic about it for people who are overweight. If I struggled more with diet I’d definitely give it a go. It’s more optimal to not need it, obviously, but if you’re not achieving your goals it is likely much better to be temporarily on Ozempic and thin than overweight and not. Once you shed the lbs though, get off it and keep your diet at the right amount of calories.

Other than that pretty big tweak, there’s not really much you can do. One drug is really good at making you lose weight without eating less, it’s called DNP. It tricks your body into burning a lot of extra calories. Unfortunately, that comes with a very dangerous side effect of making your cells produce heat, which can kill you easily. This demonstrates how diet is easier to tweak than metabolism. The other drug which is much safer, at the expense of effectiveness, is ephedrine. You can get it at a pharmacy OTC if you show ID, sold as bronkaid. Take it with caffeine and you’ll burn an extra ~70 cal/day which adds up to about a lb a month.

Creatine is the last one. It helps your muscles hold more water, it helps a little with strength and it’s very safe. Worth taking I guess.

Overall

Staying fit is simple but not easy. But there’s really nothing you can do that improves your life more than being fit. No matter how much money you have, how happy you are with your circumstances, having a hot bod will make it a bit better. There’s a real dignity in it, I think. It’s an equalizer, the words of Arnold.

“A well built physique is a status symbol. It reflects you worked hard for it, no money can buy it, you cannot borrow it, you cannot inherit it, you cannot steal it. You cannot hold onto it without constant work. It shows discipline, it shows self-respect, it shows patience, work ethic & passion.”

One of the most important skills you develop when you start caring about your fitness is discipline. You train yourself not to overthink how badly you don’t want to do something, you just do it. You also find that you have more energy for everything else, a few flights of stairs in a walk up apartment, no problem, energetic mosh pit and dancing at the club, no problem, carrying an 80 lb piece of plywood 5 blocks, no problem, and so on.

If anyone has questions or wants some advice on finding a program I’m happy to help.