Man 2.0 Engineering the Alpha (7 page)

CHAPTER 3

The Truth About the Truth

BREAKING BARRIERS, AVOIDING STAGNATION, AND THE FORCES ALLIED AGAINST YOU

“The most useful piece of learning for the uses of life is to unlearn what is untrue.”

—
ANTISTHENES, GREEK PHILOSOPHER OF ATHENS, DISCIPLE OF SOCRATES,
445–365
BC

H
ere's the question every guy should be asking right now:
When I try to change my body, why am I so often stuck with the same results no matter what I do?

The answer is that you have two powerful factors working against you: misinformation and a lack of focus. So we created this book to solve both problems. While you can certainly find some good information from other resources, there's also a lot of double-talk out there. Trust us—we've had to sift through it for the past decade.

But here's the thing: all of the best information is in here. And your ability to abandon all your previous frustration and confusion and leave it in the past can occur if you take one simple step—you leave the Ordinary World.

Your Ordinary World, like any that Campbell has written about, is not comfortable, but it is familiar. Stepping outside of it and rejecting what everyone else is doing is scary, but staying in it should be even scarier.

As with any hero who sees the promise of stepping beyond the Threshold, once you have seen the potential for something greater—what is captured by Campbell in mythic structure and known as the Special World—you should be unwilling to settle for something less than what is possible.

If you are tempted to read on and make changes—then this book, these words, and these pages will drive you to a life-changing experience. If you've learned anything, it's that you know your life could be better.

To paraphrase Campbell, we believe that all men were meant to be heroes of their own tale. To go a bit beyond him, we also believe that men should
look
and
act
like heroes: that they should look strong and be confident, look great and be great.

But in order to get there, you need to take the next step in the journey. And if you cannot bear the thought of
not
taking that step, then you have heard—as all heroes do—the most important sound a man can ever hear: the Call to Adventure.

 

RING . . . RING . . .

The hardest part about this entire book won't be the workouts, the diet, or finding a way to make time for all the sex you'll be having. It's going to be letting go of ideas that you “know” are facts. After all, in order to make room for what is right, you must first purge what is wrong.

Like a quarterback learning a new playbook, you have to forget your old coaches and dissociate yourself from much of what you have been led to believe is true. And therefore your assessment of any situation is filtered through the lens of those truths. But if those truths are not accurate, then every piece of information is being filtered through a fractured lens.

The problem is magnified when you consider the way information is shared and made viral. You know the headlines we're talking about: “The Truth About . . .” is one of the most powerful headlines possible because it incites the fear of deception. No one likes to be deceived, and fear is an extremely powerful motivator. But it's a power that is often misused and abused.

One nugget of mistruth can spread so fast that the sheer number of people who support the so-called truth strengthens the inaccuracy of claims. You see this happen at every level of life—from the playground in elementary school to the political debates in D.C. This is how myths are perpetuated, and it's a process that's difficult to overcome.

Health content is one of the worst offenders. Whether it's the same crap you read last year or the “secret” you already know, nothing is really new. Nothing feels like it's going to change your life. And most of the so-called adventures you take are circular, leading you right back to where you started—only you're now in a worse position because you're more pissed off than you were six weeks before. And you still don't have abs.

So we reviewed as much diet and fitness information as humanly possible. And through it all—the successes and the failures, the classes and the lectures, the books and journals, the clients and the mentors—we kept coming back to the same conclusion: hormones are the key to everything. And we know this because when we tested programs designed to optimize hormones, participants lost fat, built muscle, and became the heroes of their own lives.

But their success—and your success—isn't just about doing a workout or eating certain foods. It starts with something much harder: rejecting everything that the vast majority of people believe is true.

Why? Because that's what Alphas do.

This is the real secret that will allow you to follow the workouts confidently, eat with freedom, and optimize your hormones in a way that will make everything much easier. After all, that's the point of this book: to make looking great, feeling great, and living a better life easier than it has ever been.

 

ANSWER THE CALL

If you want to accept our information as your new reality, then you must reject your old approach.

We're telling you this because we know how you're going to react to the truths we share. Some may sound crazy. Some might not make sense. And some might sound so difficult that you'll be angry. Trust us—nothing is too hard. It's just different.

You're going to have a moment when you say, “This is bullshit.” So much of what you're going to read is going to sound antithetical to what you believe and counter to what everyone else is saying. One way to reconcile what you are reading and what you want to believe is to say that we're wrong.

In the context of mythic structure, this is known as Refusing the Call. One of the earliest stages of the Hero's Journey, this is the moment when the hero is approached with the idea of the adventure itself. After he has been called, he must decide whether he should embark on his journey. In many cases, the hero may refuse—or, at least, consider refusing—the Call to Adventure.

Refusing the call is normal and extremely common, but it doesn't get you out of the Ordinary World, which is why we want to make sure you recognize the signs that could easily sabotage your journey without you even realizing it.

With traditional heroes, the refusal of the call may happen because of a sense of obligation, fear, inadequacy, or duty to family or a loved one. In the case of modern man who is seeking to become the Alpha (that's you), refusal stems from the fear of inadequacy.

Within every man lives the anxiety that he may not be able to complete the journey. And as a result, he refuses to take the first step.

Our goal is to provide you with enough evidence to rid you of fear and give you the confidence to move forward on this journey. But be warned, heroes who refuse the call are often met with consequences. As you'll see, failure to step out of your Ordinary World can lead to catastrophic health changes that will lessen the value and enjoyment of your life.

By accepting the call, you spark a form of mental rebirth: it's the death of your former beliefs, your former self, and the first step into a larger world.

Sounds deep—but isn't this what you're looking for? Because what we're offering is a new body, a new life, and something better than what you've always had.

 

YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU DON'T KNOW

Guys aren't great when it comes to talking about emotions and feelings. Which is why we'll admit something important and vital to this program: change isn't easy. The act of change isn't some simple process of just shifting behaviors. There are psychological barriers that are connected to every change you ever make, which makes it harder for you to follow through with your intentions. And the more dramatic the changes, the more intense the psychological push to revert back to your previous tactics.

Consider this script; it'll probably sound familiar to you. Here's what happens when most guys start a new workout and diet. When they receive the new program, they start out excited. But after the initial excitement wears off, they inevitably make slight adjustments and only do the exercises they're good at. It can be something small, like doing a seated shoulder press instead of a standing barbell military press. That's just how men are programmed.

These
seem
like small, inconsequential decisions, but these changes are really just the first step toward failure.

So why does this happen? Because you haven't had the benefit of knowing the specific decisions that were separating you from Alpha status. In the best case, guys realize there's something preventing them from the pinnacle of their development. But in most cases, guys don't know that at all. They don't even realize that they have the potential to be something more than what they are. They don't realize that there is a way to get there. And they certainly don't know how to go about it.

Here's the funny thing: men's frustrations are almost universally the same. And that's because they are all still playing in the Ordinary World. It's time to leave for a new game.

 

LIES, MYTHS, AND WHY MEN ARE FAT

If we are to engineer the Alpha, we must take steps. And the first of those steps is to discard old beliefs. And the best way to do that is to find a consistent approach and to discard the fallacies. You need to drown out the noise.

We realize that it's not as easy as it sounds. You have half of the experts saying one thing and the other half saying something else. Case in point: You have the vegans saying that you shouldn't eat any animal product whatsoever. On the other hand, you have the paleo people saying that the key to a long and healthy life is feasting on the tasty flesh of dead creatures on a daily basis. The result: you're left really confused and inevitably trying a little bit of everything . . . and only getting fatter and more unhealthy each year.

All these disparate beliefs cause confusion. So to make it easier, we're going to outline the three steps you
need
to follow to make it realistic for you to stay on one plan and one track.

 

1. Cut through the noise so you can answer the call.
Remember, there's a strong psychological component involved in change, so you need to buy in.

2. Learn the truth.
Once you
know
that there are reasons for your prior failures (the mistruths), then we'll teach you how hormone optimization will turn you into the Alpha and transform your life.

3. Do the work.
We'll supply the workout and diet programs that will serve as your vehicle to take you to the life you want.

 

Now that you're ready to begin the process, it's time to address all the mistruths that previously made it much harder for you to get from point A to point B. Answer this call and you'll have taken the biggest and most important step toward the successful completion of your journey. Now let's dig in to all those mistruths.

 

REJECT THIS THOUGHT:

Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.

 

For years we've been told breakfast is the most important meal of the day. In fact, you've probably been instructed by your physician not to skip breakfast—especially if you want to lose weight.

The problem? Despite the fact that roughly 90 percent of Americans eat breakfast, according to a survey conducted by the NPD group, close to 35 percent of Americans are either overweight or obese, says the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. If eating breakfast is the solution to weight loss, then something is wrong or missing from the equation.

Before we go on, let's make sure we're on the same page. There is nothing wrong with eating breakfast. You can eat breakfast and be perfectly healthy and use it as part of an effective weight-loss plan. But breakfast is not the weight-loss elixir that it's promoted as. You see, eating first thing in the morning after you sleep actually shuts down the hormones that control your fat loss.

The problem with a traditional breakfast is that it creates a big eating window. That is, the number of hours during the day that you are consuming food. This is typically about a fifteen-hour period (between seven
A.M
. and ten
P.M
.). In a recent groundbreaking study by the scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, it was found that a larger eating window was associated with more fat storage and a higher likelihood of health problems such as diabetes and liver disease.

This study was done with mice, but the findings are too important to overlook. The mice were put on a high-fat diet that would typically cause obesity. One group of mice ate whenever they wanted, and the other could only eat for eight hours, starting in the afternoon and finishing at night. The mice that ate whenever they wanted gained fat, developed high cholesterol, high blood glucose, and liver damage. The mice with the eight-hour feeding period starting in the afternoon? They weighed 28 percent less and had no health problems, even though they ate the same amount of fatty foods.

The scientists believe that by cutting down how long you have to eat, your body does a better job of metabolizing your fat, glucose, and cholesterol. What's more, because you're eating for a smaller window of time
and
starting later in the day, your body is burning more fat. Why? Because you pushed back breakfast, extended your overnight fast (which occurs while you sleep), and became a fat-burning machine.
^*

What's more, by skipping breakfast (or just starting it later in the day), you also prime your body to feel hungrier less often. That's because the moment you start eating food, your body creates an expectation for calories. And for most people, that expectation means hunger pangs that are too hard to overcome, leaving you grabbing for snacks by ten
A.M
. and eating more calories than you should by the end of the day.