It’s NOT What You Eat That Matters
What Matters Is HOW YOU EAT!
But for sixteen years of my life I religiously believed in the eternal twin lies of the diet industry: that what you ate and how much you exercised were the keys to losing fat. And I was wrong.
I also believed in everything I was told about the magical promises of “secret” pills, “super” supplements, “exotic” diets, and “fat burning” foods. I was wrong about everything and I paid a terrible price for my ignorance – I “lost” sixteen years of my life.
My life only changed when I finally learned the truth – that fat loss is fundamentally the result of “how” you eat and not “what” you eat or how much you exercise.
So, what does “HOW YOU EAT” mean?”
It means eating according to a few simple rules based upon your bodies physiology which, when followed consistently, places it in a continuous fat burning and healing state. But the rules are not arbitrary. They are based upon the physiology of how your body is designed – not how you want it to work. These rules tell you exactly how much and when to eat the foods you love that, if adhered to, send a miraculous signal to your body instructing it to burn fat and heal itself independent of what you eat or whether or not you exercise.
I codified these rules into a simple-to-use program I call The Fat Loss Blueprint.
This page describes my intellectual journey of discovery which saved my life and has helped thousands of my students lose fat and improve their health.
But I NEVER intended to share my creation. It’s not that I was selfish; it’s just that I didn’t think anyone would care or be interested in what I had discovered.
My program was created from the ashes of my personal struggle that nearly cost me my life. But once I learned “HOW TO EAT”, I lost almost 200 pounds in a little less than two years and have remained lean and healthy since 1990.
But now I believe it’s time to share what I have learned with the rest of the world. Millions of good, decent, hardworking people are suffering from the ravages of obesity and the chronic diseases that accompany it. And the situation is only getting worse.
I believe the world is ready for something new, something different.
“There is one thing stronger than all the armies of the world; and that is an idea whose time has come.” – Victor Hugo
Not everyone will agree with my ideas and that’s okay. I can only help those who wish to be helped.
My website is not a forum for debate; it is a place of hope.
I call my program The Fat Loss Blueprint. And everything about it is unique.
First, it begins with the following radical idea: “You are not broken; you come complete for success. You were created to be lean and healthy.” I believe your body is designed to burn fat and heal itself regardless of your current circumstances. The problem is that you’ve been misled about what it takes to achieve a lean and healthy body. My program changes all of that. It shows you how to work with your body, not against it, to unleash the fat burning miracle that resides within you right now.
Second, it’s the only program available that teaches you “how to eat” the foods you love that places your body in its natural fat burning and healthy state. The key to sustainable fat loss and health is in learning “how to eat.” Worrying about what to eat and what not to eat, what pills or supplements to take, or what exercises and routines to do, will only end in fat loss failure and frustration. I know because I lost sixteen years of my life believing those lies. Learning “how to eat” is the key to your physical transformation success.
Third, it’s personalized. The program is based on the present physical state of your body. Although principles are universal, prescriptions are personal. You are unique thus your program must be unique to ensure maximum fat burning effectiveness. The Fat Loss Blueprint is built and designed specifically to meet the needs of your body. There are no “recipe-like” fixes here.
And finally, it’s guaranteed to work for everyone who follows it unconditionally. My program is based on principles rather than expediency. Principles are universal, timeless, and not subject to the vagaries of human nature. Principles don’t discriminate. Like gravity, physiological principles exist and function without regard to race, class, social status, age, or health. If you “play” by my program’s rules, you win every time. If you ignore them, you fail.
My program saved my life and gave me a second chance at living a life filled with health, hope, and happiness. I promise it can do the same for you.
If you’re interested in learning more about my program, please visit my Fat Loss Blueprint page or contact me here.
Learning HOW TO EAT is the key to losing fat, improving your health, and enjoying a better quality of life.
Now, let’s begin our intellectual journey together.
Ideas Have Consequences
I helped Ann lose over 100 pounds. She was immensely grateful for her success but was worried about her daughter. She told me that her daughter, Deborah, had been battling her weight without success ever since grade school but that she now feared things had taken a turn for the worse for her daughter.
Ann said that she hardly hears from Deborah any more and she’s concerned. She asked if I could help. I told Ann to have Deborah contact me right away. A few weeks later I received the following email.
“It’s not easy for me to watch everyone else go to the gym and get smaller while I continue to gain weight. Who I am inside is not who I see in the mirror by any means and I can’t take it anymore.”
“When I lose the weight I can be free to perhaps take a job at the Rock Island Arsenal or maybe find something closer to home. I’m too ashamed to come home right now. I didn’t even have a wedding because of my weight. No one wants to see a fat bride waddle down the aisle.”
Your Friend,
Deborah
It was post-marked Anchorage, Alaska. Deborah was so ashamed of how she looked that she banished herself to Alaska to avoid family and friends.
Giving people like Deborah hope for a better life is sole reason I teach.
I know how Deborah feels. I lost sixteen years of my own life to continuous fat loss failure, frustration, and depression. Neither Deborah nor I lacked the commitment to change; we only lacked the truth about how to do it.
Ideas have consequences and bad ideas produce bad outcomes. The current fat loss paradigm is built upon a series of flawed ideas. And the biggest lie out there is that our bodies are somehow “broken”, incomplete, and in need of “fixing”. And so we’re told that the only way to fix our bodies is through using some “magical” food, diet, pill, or “secret” exercise routine or gadget.
And we innocently accept this lie and NEVER question its underlying assumption that our bodies are “broken”.
But I categorically reject this idea.
My program begins with entirely different idea. I believe that:
“You are not broken; you come complete for success. You were created to be lean and healthy.”
In other words, I believe we have a mental “software” problem and not a physical “hardware” problem. And the miraculous thing about a software or thinking problem is that it’s an easy fix – all that’s required to fix our “mental software” problem is to rewrite a couple of lines of “code” and we can achieve a new outcome with the same hardware!
How do we do this? We begin by replacing our bad ideas with better ones. Ideas that are based on truth and science rather than magic and mysticism.
This is why your mental transformation must precede your physical transformation.
The success of my students, including Deborah’s mom Ann, NEVER has anything to do with adding special foods, pills, supplements, or exercise to their lives.
Your body is NOT broken and in need of repair; it’s your thinking that needs an overhaul.
In all my years of teaching, I’ve NEVER once told a student what to eat. I’ve NEVER recommended or sold supplements or pills, or designed an exercise program.
Instead, I simply changed how my students think about fat loss and health – I helped them rewrite their “mental software” to produce an entirely new set of actions, habits, behaviors, and beliefs that resulted in the outcome they desired.
As the economist George Gilder writes, “In the information age, economies can change as quickly as minds can change.”
And if economies can change that quickly, just imagine what you can accomplish once you understand the truth about how your body works.
You don’t lack the commitment or the desire to change; you lack the truth about how to do it.
Here is a link to Tom’s story. It dramatically illustrates the power of mind over matter. Tom didn’t have a “hardware” problem; like all my students, he had a “software” problem. Together we changed his thinking and in the process changed his life.
The Gift of Principles
I never lacked the commitment to change; I simply lacked the truth.
I began dieting in 1972 at the age of ten. And for the next sixteen years my weight increased as my dreams for a happy life faded away. The exact opposite of what I expected to happen.
Sometime in the early summer of 1989 and weighing close to 350 pounds, I had a revelation that changed my thinking and saved my life:
“Maybe I didn’t fail the diets, maybe they failed me.”
These ten words shook the very foundation of my beliefs and ideas about fat loss. They helped me transcend the flawed thinking of my past.
For sixteen years I had believed that I was somehow “broken” and never meant to be lean and happy. But my revelation changed all of that. It helped me understand that maybe I wasn’t to blame for my past failures losing weight. Perhaps, I thought, maybe the diets were to blame.
This revelation gave my life meaning and the strength to try again. I vowed from that moment on to do whatever it took to discover the truth about how my body stores and burns fat.
But I had a problem. Where would I begin my search for the truth?
At the time of my revelation, I was in graduate school at the University of Illinois. I was studying Agricultural Economics and working as a research assistant for a number of professors in that department. It was a world far removed from the world of physiology I was about to enter.
But the skills I had acquired as an economic researcher would prove invaluable to me in my search for the truth of fat loss.
The first step in my journey was perhaps the most difficult one. I had to admit to myself that I knew nothing about fat loss. I had to “cleanse my intellectual palate”, so to speak, of all the bad ideas I previously held about how to lose fat.
I know it sounds crazy but even though I weighed almost 350 pounds at the time, I truly believed I was an expert in nutrition and fat loss. After all, I had been obsessed with losing fat and dieting since I was ten – how could anyone know more than me!
But I now understood that my pride was holding me back. It was time to practice a little humility. I knew that if I didn’t let go of my past, I would lose my future.
And so I “cleansed” my mind of all my old ideas and beliefs about how to lose fat.
But now I had another set of problems to contend with. I had to find new sources of information and a way to make sure that what I was learning was the truth. I couldn’t bear another sixteen years of failure.
I unexpectedly found the answer to both problems in my current capacity as a research assistant.
As a research assistant in the Agricultural Economics department of the University of Illinois, the tools of my trade consisted of the scientific method and the college’s wonderful library system.
I suddenly realized that I could use those same tools in my search for the truth of fat loss.
My information filter would become the scientific method, something I was very familiar with. I would only accept ideas and information on fat loss that had been vetted by the scientific method.
And my new sources of information would become the physiological texts and medical journals housed in the University of Illinois’s Medical Library – a place that would become my home for the next three years.
Since I had no formal education in physiology, my plan was to think and act like a new student.
So I grabbed a copy of Guyton’s Textbook of Medical Physiology off the shelf along with a copy of Stedman’s Medical Dictionary to help with the vocabulary and I began my journey.
It wasn’t long before I realized I LOVED physiology. Learning how the body worked became my passion.
After finishing Guyton’s medical physiology textbook, I figured I was ready to tackle the medical journals. And that’s when I came across an article that changed my life forever.
While paging through an April 1968 edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), I came across an article by Dr. Walter Bortz entitled, “Predictability of Weight loss.”
The title immediately grabbed my attention. I had never before considered the possibility that weight loss was predictable. I remained somewhat intellectually stunted from sixteen years of worshiping numerous fat loss prophets and their mysterious methods based on “secret” foods, supplements, and exercises. I had lived so long in a world of fat loss chaos that I didn’t think order and predictability was possible. And then I read the following paragraph from Dr. Bortz’s article and my world changed.
“Weight loss is a process that is susceptible to logical and reasonably precise explanation. Consideration of caloric need and caloric supply indicates the weight balance. Any caloric deficit implies weight loss which will occur at the rate decreed by the caloric value (3,500 calories) of a pound of body fat. Whenever this caloric deficit is reached, the body will be one pound lighter, with respect to body fat. When these concepts (principles) are used, weight loss becomes predictable.”
The insights contained within this seminal paper provided me with both clarity of thought and clarity of action. For the first time in my life I realized that fat loss was governed by rules rather than chaos.
Dr. Bortz demonstrated in his paper that eating in a daily caloric deficit was all that was necessary to lose fat – period. After finishing the article, I felt as if the weight of the world had been lifted from my shoulders. After years of trying countless diets, pills, supplements, starvation, and punishing exercise sessions, I could now focus on just one thing – eating in a daily sustainable caloric deficit.
But old ways of thinking die hard and so I wondered how Dr. Bortz could be so sure of his conclusions. And that’s when I was introduced to the elegance and rigor of metabolic ward studies.
To arrive at his conclusions, Dr. Bortz utilized metabolic ward protocols to remove human nature from corrupting the results of his experiments.
Why are metabolic ward studies so useful and definitive in their outcomes? Because they are able to control every single variable that determines weight loss. Below is a wonderfully succinct summation of metabolic ward studies by Anthony Colpo from his book, “The Fat loss Bible.”
“When caloric restriction is administered in properly conducted scientific trails, it always produces weight loss. By properly conducted scientific trials, I am talking about strict metabolic ward studies in which, for the duration of the study, the participants are confined to a research facility where they can only eat the foods supplied by researchers.”
In other words, metabolic wards make it impossible for people to cheat! Subjects are literally locked away and can only eat the food that is provided for them. For me, this was pure research gold. The moment I understood what metabolic ward studies were all about, I combed through the literature to find and read every metabolic ward study I could find. And guess what? They all came to the same conclusions: if you eat in a daily sustainable caloric deficit, you lose fat – period!
From my growing collection of metabolic ward studies, I was able to formulate what I call “Bryan’s First Principles of Fat Loss.” They form the intellectual foundation of my fat loss program, “The Fat Loss Blueprint”, and helped me lose over 180 pounds 30 + years ago and have allowed me to remain lean and healthy ever since. Below are my “First Principles of Fat Loss”.
1. Human physiology complies with the first law of thermodynamics, which states that energy can be transformed from one form to another but cannot be created or destroyed. Therefore, if you’re carrying excess fat on your body, you ate it, you didn’t create it.
2. Body fat will be lost when the body is in a caloric deficit regardless of the macronutrient composition of the diet. Therefore, there are no “good” foods or “bad” foods except quantity makes them so.
3. Exercise is not necessary to lose large amounts of body fat.
In 1998 I reached out to Dr. Bortz , shared with him my story, and thanked him for his seminal efforts in uncovering the truth of fat loss. We struck up a friendship and he sent me a manuscript he was working on at the time to edit for him. I still have a copy of that manuscript and it remains one of my most treasured possessions.
It’s not a stretch to say that Dr. Bortz’s work saved my life. But the true gift I received from him was the gift of principles. Principles brought a sense of order into my otherwise chaotic life. His work provided me with the clarity of thought and clarity of action I needed to change my life. But more importantly, his work gave me a second chance at living a life filled with health, hope, and happiness. I owe all that I am to Dr. Bortz and his work and shall remain forever grateful.
What the “Experts” Missed Part 1: The “How” Must Precede the “What”.
“It is not to see something first, but to establish solid connections between the previously known and the hither to unknown that constitutes the essence of scientific discovery. It is this process of tying together which can best promote true understanding and real progress.”
– Hans Seyle
I possess two gifts. The first is that I can suffer well. As demonstrated by my sixteen years of suffering through countless diets, years of torturous exercise, and sporadic bouts of semi-starvation in pursuit of an elusive goal.
My second gift is my ability to connect the dots between seemingly disparate intellectual ideas. It is this second gift, subsumed by the first, that has allowed me to see and understand the “Original Sin” of the weight loss industry.
The discovery of my “First Principles of Fat Loss” was an intellectual watershed event for me. It resulted in my realization that my sixteen years of failure and frustration were not my fault. It was the moment when the heavy burden self-blame and self-hatred was lifted from my shoulders and placed squarely where it deserved to be: on the shoulders of the weight loss industry.
No longer would my fat loss journey be guided by the lies and misconceptions of that deceitful industry. Scientific principles would now serve as my proverbial North Star guiding my daily actions, habits, behaviors, and beliefs in a physiologically true direction. But my journey was hardly finished.
What remained for me to accomplish was to create a coherent, principle-based action plan that would show me how to eat to get lean and stay lean for life. I had achieved clarity of thought, but I still lacked clarity of action. And it would be my second gift, the gift for making unseen connections, that would open the door to understanding the solution to my problem.
“Science,” says physicists Richard Feynman, “is the belief in the ignorance of experts,” and never has this statement been proven more true than among the legions of so-called “nutrition experts” and their fundamentally flawed model for fat loss.
Why is their model corrupt? Because they missed, or over-looked, the most important step in the entire fat loss process – they missed the first step. It’s a mistake I call the Teacher/Librarian Fallacy, and it’s a mistake that the “experts” continue to make to this very day.
Here is an example of the thought experiment I formulated years ago that helped me realize the fundamental flaw in the model I had been using to unsuccessfully lose fat for sixteen years.
A reading teacher’s primary job is to teach her students “how to read.” The job of a good librarian is to give informed advice on “what to read.” But the order of the process is sacrosanct and can never be reversed. One must first be taught “how to read” before one can be told “what to read.” The suggestions by even the best librarian are completely meaningless to someone who doesn’t yet understand or know “how to read”.
In other words, the “how” must precede the “what”.
But the fundamental advice and prescriptions of the diet and fat loss industry continues to be premised on the “what” rather than the “how.”
It’s consumed with telling us “what” to eat, “what” diets to follow, “what” pills or supplements to take, and “what” exercises and routines to follow. And while all these suggestions may be well intentioned, they remain meaningless to someone who doesn’t yet know “how to eat” to place their body in a fat burning and healthy state.
The realization of this “sin of omission” committed by so-called “diet experts“, that I termed the “Teacher/Librarian Fallacy, initiated the second half of my quest to discover the truth of fat loss.
Along with my “First Principles of Fat Loss”, I now understood the fundamental flaw in the fat loss paradigm I had been unsuccessfully using for the past sixteen years.
But there was still something missing. I was continuing to struggle with how to put everything I had learned about the fat loss process into a principle-based practical method of eating. The solution to the final part of my problem would soon reveal itself to me through the words of the father of Western medicine himself, Hippocrates. Words that were first uttered over 2,500 years ago.
Ironically yet again, I found myself looking to the past to save my future.
What the “Experts” Missed Part 2: The Genesis of the Caloric Prescription (CalRx)
I was intellectually stuck in my search for the truth of fat loss.
I had my “First Principles of Fat Loss” and I understood the fundamental flaw in the current fat loss paradigm, but I was having difficultly creating a practical model of “how to eat” to burn fat and heal my body. I was losing weight by reducing my daily caloric intake to be sure, but I really didn’t know what I was doing. I still lacked a coherent and sustainable plan.
My problem went on for days, then weeks, and finally for months. I wasn’t so much discourage as frustrated. But because I have the “gift of grind”, I suffer well, I continued to read the journals and texts searching for an answer. And when my breakthrough came, it came not while I was actively reading the current research journals, but ironically, while I was taking a break from reading them.
During one of my periodic breaks from studying, I was casually wandering around the medical library admiring the collection of texts and journals. Occasionally, I would pause and thumb through a book that looked intriguing. Sometimes my “breaks” turned into hours of reading when I stumbled upon something interesting. My final breakthrough came during one of these serendipitous reading breaks.
While I was browsing among the voluminous texts that filled the shelves of the medical library, I spotted a small book that was a short biography on Hippocrates, the father of Western medicine. I grabbed the book and began reading. And when I came upon the following aphorism attributed to Hippocrates, suddenly everything made sense.
“Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.”
The idea embodied in those ten words allowed me to finally “connect all the dots“. I suddenly realized that I didn’t have to “reinvent the wheel” when it came to learning “how to eat” to lose fat and heal my body. Instead, I could turn to the science of pharmacotherapy and use its principles and methods to construct my eating “blueprint” embodying everything that I had learned about the fat loss process. My conception of food and eating was fundamentally changed from that moment on. I would now begin to use food as medicine and prescribe it as such.
After skimming through a few introductory texts on pharmacotherapy, I realized that the prescription for every drug had to abide by the following three principles:
1. It must be prescribed for the present physiological condition of the patient. This meant that it must be personalized.
2. It must contain the essential elements of all prescriptions: the proper dosage, dose, and frequency.
3. It must be periodically updated to reflect the changing state of the patient’s physiology and health.
Although this list may seem simple and straightforward in retrospect, it actually took me months to compile and make applicable to the fat loss process.
Those ten words spoken by Hippocrates over 2,500 years ago were the key to my insight and my eventual success. They allowed me to complete my journey and realize that when you begin to think about food as medicine and prescribe it as such, you achieve both clarity of thought and clarity of action.
My personal quest to discover the truth of how to get lean and stay lean for life was now nearing an end. The clarity of thought and action I had achieved during those almost three years of continuous research culminated with the creation of a “principle-based” method detailing “how to eat” the foods that I loved that placed my body in a continuous fat burning and healing state.
By following my program, I lost almost two hundred pounds in less than two years and have remained lean and healthy since 1990. I call my program “The Fat Loss Blueprint.”
It saved my life and it can do the same for you.
Yours in Truth and Commitment,
Bryan