Man 2.0 Engineering the Alpha (12 page)

Have More Sexy Time

In most books, the typical start to this section would say something along the lines of, “If we have to convince you to have more sex, then you're not much of a man (har har har).”

But this isn't your typical book.

You can have as much or as little sex as you want. The real problem is that you don't
desire
sex as much as you used to or as much as you should. Low sex drive is a very common problem, and just as disturbing is the fact that it's infecting men at a younger and younger age.

Low sex drive is primarily the result of low testosterone, but it's also impacted by other hormonal factors. Fortunately, all your sex drive problems can be turned around with a concentrated approach that increases your testosterone.

Lest we lead you to believe that we are just a couple of oversexed meatheads who spent a few too many years as the go-to resource for the information in
Men's Health,
here's what you need to realize: sex is very important. And not just because it's awesome and feels great. Your sex drive is linked to self-worth and self-confidence. It's a psychological and sociological fact that virility and masculinity are tied together, and those factors are closely linked to your confidence. And as we've already established, your confidence is deeply tied to your success. You'll learn in chapter 5 just how much these foundational elements are the catalyst for creating and living an unreal life.

Wanting sex is not just important as an individual. Sure, if you're a single guy and you don't want sex, you should be worried. Your sex drive is what will make it possible to meet the one (or, hell, many partners) that you're looking for in your life. But when you're in a relationship, sex is important to your overall well-being and the strength of your relationship too.

A lack of intimacy can lead to a metric fuck-ton
^*
of problems that—please believe us—you do
not
want in your life.

 

ALPHAS WANT SEX

Not just frequent sex, but
good
sex. Alphas want sex to be meaningful to them in a number of ways. Whether you quantify that by performance or connecting with your partner, great sex is something that Alphas are great at. Put somewhat less delicately, Alphas are fucking
great
at fucking.

 

 

Before you get the wrong idea: we're not telling you that you need to fuck a lot of girls. That's not for us to decide; remember, part of being an Alpha is setting your own expectations for your ideal.

We don't really care whether you want to have a new partner every week or the same one for life. Your sex life is
your
sex life. What we care about is helping you make sure that it's a
good
sex life, because no matter how you slice it, sex is an essential part of life and something you can't ignore. And we think that this is a large issue that needs to be addressed.

So how do you solve it? First you need to acknowledge the problem. Stop living in denial and start taking action. Then, realize that you don't need to visit your doctor or take shots or use creams. You can fix everything with some dietary tweaks and lifestyle changes that will optimize your hormones and boost your sex drive to where it should be.

Increase Confidence

As you learned in the Alpha Traits, there is a marked difference between confidence and cockiness, and it's important to realize that optimizing your hormones sets you up to be more confident. Whether you become cocky is up to you.

Confidence is an honest appraisal of what can and can't be achieved. Confident people don't have a sense of entitlement or an ego that pushes people away. Instead, they have a mind-set that creates opportunities and inspires other people to become better.

Case in point, in business, confident people don't think that they can run a business without training for it. Instead, they know when they deserve a promotion because they've worked hard and can point to their contributions with full conviction and resolution.

In social situations, confident people know they can talk to others—whether it's a complete stranger at a party or the most beautiful woman at the bar. That doesn't mean you walk around thinking you're the greatest thing in the world and should be banging models.
^*
Instead, confidence is about thinking you're interesting and using that opinion to hold a conversation and engage with others. Confidence is a trait that opens up a world that you want.

Optimizing your hormones is the gateway that can make this confidence a reality—rather than a dream.

Sleep Better

We probably don't need to tell you that lack of sleep can screw up your life. You know that it makes it harder to concentrate and work, but you may not know that it also messes with your body on levels that directly impact your ability to lose fat. When your sleep quality is poor, your metabolic rate decreases, making it easier for you to pack on pounds faster than you can say, “McDonald's.” A bad night of rest also limits your ability to recover from your workouts, meaning it becomes harder to become stronger and build more muscle.

But the biggest problem is tied to your hormonal production. You see, there is an implied catch-22 when it comes to sleep quality and hormones—particularly cortisol. If you have high levels of cortisol, you have trouble sleeping. And when you don't get enough sleep, your cortisol levels rise. Cortisol increases during times of stress, and one way stress creates itself is insomnia.

You don't have to be a sleep expert to see how it's a perfect storm to ruining your rest on a nightly basis. It's a vicious cycle that can be hard to break, and for many people it is the underlying reason for why they don't have the body they want.

But all hope is not lost. If you can take the steps needed to balance your hormones, you can offset even the most ejaculatory production of cortisol. (Yeah, we said
ejaculatory
.) What's more, we're going to teach you some simple strategies that you thought were bad—such as late-night eating—that will not only help you sleep better and longer but will also make you leaner.

Need more convincing that sleep is essential? Researchers at the University of Warwick and the University of Naples Medical Schools found that people who sleep fewer than six hours per night have a shorter life expectancy. If living longer isn't a good enough reason to focus on your sleep, then we don't know what is.

Improve Your Skin

Listen, it's fine to want to be a pretty boy. We'll admit that we have an array of skin products that we use to look good. But that's not the first step to improving your skin; instead that's the final line of defense. If you have a bad diet, you produce toxins that ruin your appearance.

Sure, you could take products, but that will only address the symptoms of bad skin. Having great skin starts from the inside; it's a by-product of increasing GH, optimizing insulin sensitivity, and reducing your cortisol. These changes will not only reduce pimples; they will also improve elasticity, which helps you look younger as you age.

 

WHY AM I ALWAYS HUNGRY?

Now is not the time to get sensitive, but we're about to point the finger at you.

If you're like most guys who struggle with their weight or simply have difficulty looking the way you want, odds are, you have an eating problem. And it's not necessarily that you eat the wrong foods—it's that you eat too much. And why do you eat too much? Well, it's because you're always too damn hungry. Whether you wake up needing food, scavenge for snacks at work, or come home famished, your stomach seems to be in perpetual starvation mode.

And that's because it is.

Recent research has found out one of the main reasons why you're always hungry, and it has nothing to do with what you're eating. The problem is how you're sleeping. Research published in the
Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism
found that a lack of sleep impacts your brain in a way that pushes you toward a “see food” diet, which explains why you always want to eat.

Just how bad is it? Only one night of insufficient sleep (fewer than six hours) triggers an area in your brain that is involved with your need to eat. Unfortunately, this is just the tip of the iceberg. A lack of sleep also increases ghrelin, a hormone that increases appetite, while decreasing leptin, the hormone that keeps you feeling full. This is what allows you to keep on eating . . . and eating . . . and eating . . . even as you put more energy (food) into your body.

It's mind control, and you have no solution other than to get more rest. Or you'll be forced into a world where you desire more food when you don't need it. Focus on getting at least six hours of sleep. Make it a priority as part of your program, and you'll quickly find that your hunger pangs will subside after each meal.

 

 

As you might know, many people consider GH to be the fountain of youth. But the benefits aren't limited to less fat and more muscle; it literally makes you look younger. So if you improve your hormonal environment to produce even more GH, then you can slow the visual effects of the aging process. This is the reason most men look younger than women as they age—they naturally produce more GH.

And the benefits don't just directly influence how you look. As we mentioned before, proper hormone balance facilitates better sleep quality. And when you sleep better, your skin also improves. And that's what we call a win-win situation.

Fight Diabetes, Cancer, and Heart Disease

As you're sitting reading this book, you might be increasing your risk of diabetes. No need to read this book standing, but it is a good reminder that seemingly everything we do these days increases our risk of disease or shortens our life.

Which is why you need to do everything you can to combat a lifestyle that is literally killing you. Before you head to the doctor and file for your hypochondriac's license, how about you try something a little cheaper and research-supported to build armor against the world's most dangerous diseases?

You see, researchers at Harvard found that combining weight training and cardio in the right doses—which we followed for the programs in this book—can reduce your risk of type 2 diabetes by more than 59 percent. The reason is insulin sensitivity—which we've already mentioned as one of the most important hormonal factors you need to control. Insulin sensitivity reduces insulin resistance. And reduced insulin resistance has been strongly linked to avoiding disease. We're not talking about the common cold. Insulin resistance may be the key to preventing prostate and pancreatic cancers—two of the most common forms in men—and warding off diabetes and heart disease.

Anyone can claim that exercise fights off disease or that they are combining cardio and weights in the right doses. But we've gone a step farther to create a synergistic environment that is scientifically proven to keep you healthy. That's because we'll also be combining variations of intermittent fasting. Don't let that word scare you. This simple eating strategy has been shown to help prevent diabetes, according to research published in the
American Journal of Cardiology
.

As we discussed in chapter 1, we'll help your body spend more time in an autophagic state, where your body is constantly healing and cleaning out the garbage. Autophagy is a by-product of intermittent fasting, which protects your cells from the oxidative stress that is typically the cause of cancer, diabetes, and heart disease.

Not to mention, the latest research from Harvard has identified a new hormone called irisin. This hormone promotes insulin sensitivity, which speeds up your metabolism. But more importantly, irisin transforms white fat into brown fat. Even though you might not even realize that your body has two forms of fat, you do. The white stuff gives you love handles and the brown gives you a six-pack. Simple, right?

But here's the best part about brown fat—you can control its presence. A study published in the journal
Nature
found that contracting your muscles—like you do in any exercise from squats to sprints—produces a substance called PGC1. Do you care what PGC1 is? Probably not—unless you're trying to impress a hot scientist—but PGC1 is the secret to stripping away your gut. PGC1 produces a protein called FNDC, which then breaks down into several components, including irisin. And irisin is exactly what will turn your white fat into brown fat, transforming you from a man with a belly to a man with flat abs and bigger biceps.

Brown fat isn't just about looking good naked, although we fully endorse that motivation. When scientists were able to create more irisin in rats, it prevented diabetes even when the scientists were
purposely
trying to create the disease, according to a study performed at Harvard Medical School and published in the journal
Nature
.

The effect was so powerful that the men and women in lab coats are trying to find a way to bottle irisin and turn it into a weight-loss medication, but there's no timetable on how long that might take. In the meantime, the easiest way to produce more irisin is to increase activity and hit the weights hard and heavy. That's what the eggheads at Harvard have concluded—that your muscle cells communicate to your body fat via irisin. Strength training can generate more irisin, and it will literally transform your bad fat (white) into the good stuff (brown).

This is where we come in to play. We've read the studies and talked with the researchers, and we designed this program that will prime your hormones to make you healthier and help you fight disease—while simultaneously making sure we're taking advantage of their abilities to aid in weight loss and have you look fucking amazing. Our program is the result of more than ten years of testing these strategies on clients. And for the last four years, we've fine-tuned the hormonal-based approach and seen consistent results with hundreds of clients. Now it's your turn.