The 80/20 guide to getting healthy

This post will hopefully get updated regularly with before and after pictures. I wanted to post it before it was ready to help motivate me to get after it.

To help my performance in life, getting healthier was a priority for me. That said, I don’t have tons of time I want to dedicate towards it so I’ve been working on figuring out how to get 80% of the results with only 20% of the effort.

Diet. This is the biggest variable to being healthy so this is the most important place to start. I want to lose some fat and build some muscle. To burn fat, you need a calorie deficit. Every time you burn 3500 calories more than you consume, you’ll burn about 1 lb of fat. To lose 1 lb of fat per week, you need to have a 500 calorie deficit per day. The key here is to change what you eat. Anything green pretty much has near zero calories so finding ways to replace rice/pasta/bread with vegetables or dressingless salad makes a huge difference.

Just losing fat wasn’t the goal, but doing that while adding muscle so watching my protein intake was also critical along with calories. The rule of thumb is you want to eat about 1 gram of protein for ever pound you want to weigh. If I want to 160 lbs, I need 160g of protein per day.

Exercise. Lift heavy weights, many many sets of 5. The cool part here is this really doesn’t take too long. Two muscle groups per day, around 20 seconds to do 5 slow reps + 1 minute of rest between sets with 10 sets for two muscle groups is a little under 27 minutes. The key is to stay on pace, so I just set a recurring reminder for every 80 seconds. As soon as it goes off, start the next set.

Supplements. Getting 160g of protein per day is really tough unless you have protein shakes. Whey protein + creatine will help you build muscle and it has been around long enough that there are numerous studies showing that it works and most importantly is safe.

In short, you can 80/20 your health but the results are slow. It doesn’t take hours and hours in the gym, but a consistent effort over an extended period of time.