Man 2.0 Engineering the Alpha

isn’t much better than tedious disease.”
    — ALEXANDER POPE
    I f you’re like us, then you probably love the title of this chapter. Well, that’s good, because it might be the most powerful, controversial, and accurate title in the book. We are going to put an end to dieting.
    Sound far-fetched? Don’t worry, we like it when people doubt us. But before we get into why not dieting is going to lead to the fastest fat loss you’ve ever had, let’s create context. Here’s how most fitness and nutrition experts like to handle the subject of what you eat:

    It’s not a diet, it’s a lifestyle.
    Diet is a four-letter word.
    Organic diets are the only healthy diets.
    Shop the perimeter and eat more real food.
    If it’s Paleo, it’s not good.

    Okay, maybe we made that last one up.
    Let’s clear something up fast: everyone has a diet. A diet, by definition, is what you eat. So unless you’re starving and never eating, then you have a diet. What people are really talking about is diet ing —the idea of altering what you eat to follow a few simple, or not-so-simple, rules designed to help you be healthier, lose weight, or just not have terrible allergic reactions to some dangerous foods.
    The problem with dieting—well, one of the many problems—is that men don’t respond to food like women do. After training thousands of clients, a few things are exceedingly clear to us: men aren’t successful when they subsist solely on frozen entrees; they don’t adapt to vague recommendations like “eat low carbs.” Instead they want specific guidelines; and they most certainly don’t avoid pleasures like pizza, beer, and burgers. Once you acknowledge these things, it’s pretty hard to imagine a “diet” on which men can be successful—unless you look at the science.
    Conventional dieting wisdom posits that you need to change your lifestyle, that you need to eat prepackaged meals to fit your busy lifestyle, and that you need to avoid pizza and burgers. Conventional dieting wisdom says that you’re not supposed to be able to eat those unhealthy foods and still lose fat each week.
    But the science of dieting has made the concept of food restriction almost obsolete—only few people have paid attention enough to realize how much flexibility actually exists.
    Forget about good foods versus bad foods; that argument no longer matters. Read that again: from a body composition standpoint, * it doesn’t matter if you eat dry grilled chicken or a juicy burger; it doesn’t matter if you choke down cottage cheese or pound some Ben & Jerry’s. Whatever you’re thinking, it doesn’t matter.
    All that matters . . . is timing and calories.
    The nature of your endocrine system is incredibly complicated—but once you understand it, eating becomes easier than ever. Manipulate the times that you eat and you can eat and drink whatever you want and still look like a Greek god.
    How? It’s all locked in the secrets of the hormones leptin and ghrelin (see chapter 5 for a reminder) and the anabolic nature of the foods you eat.
    Normally, when people go on a diet, they don’t eat as much bad stuff . . . but they still eat it pretty consistently. They’re making progress, but they’re not there yet. It’s an undergraduate approach to eating: one foot in, one foot out. While this approach can work, as you’re (hopefully) reducing calories, it’s incredibly limited. In fact, it’s one of the least effective approaches for fat loss (trumped only in inefficacy by nonsense like cabbage soup and cayenne pepper).
    Here’s why: when you diet hard and drop calories significantly for a few days, leptin begins to drop. Again, leptin is a master hormone, and it’s partly responsible for regulating your thyroid. And your thyroid is integral to your ability to lose weight. So when your leptin levels drop, so too do thyroid hormones T3 and T4. When this happens, your metabolism slows down dramatically, and you lose less weight.
    Think about that for a minute—you eat less and your weight loss slows down. That hardly seems fair. But that’s what happens when your hormones work against you. Thankfully, there’s a way to make them work for you.
    Remember, leptin levels have a direct relationship with caloric intake. This means that just as leptin levels fall when you take in fewer calories, they rise when you take in more calories—and they rise a lot when you take in a ton of calories all at once. And, with very few exceptions, it