It's fucking common sense

Why most of what works was obvious all along.

I lost about twenty pounds (9 kg) in eleven weeks and held the muscle. People want to know the secret. There isn’t one. I ate enough protein, I stayed in a deficit, I walked a lot, I wrote it all down. That’s it. That was the shape of it. If that sounds underwhelming, good, because the underwhelming bit is the point.

The fitness industry can’t sell you that. There’s no margin in telling a worn-out man the truth, which is that he already knows roughly what to do. So it dresses it up. Hormone optimisation. Metabolic confusion. A supplement stack with eleven bottles in it. Some bloke with a jawline telling you your problem is that you haven’t suffered enough yet. None of it is knowledge. It’s theatre, sold to people who are tired and want to believe the answer is complicated, because if it’s complicated then it isn’t their fault they haven’t cracked it.

But it’s not complicated. It’s fucking common sense. Eat protein. Don’t eat more than you burn. Move. Sleep more if you can. Don’t drink your dinner. You knew all of that before you read a single word I’ve written. I knew it too. Knowing it was never the problem.

The problem is that common sense evaporates the second real life turns up. You know you should eat well, then it’s half nine, you’ve had a day, nothing’s prepped and there’s a takeaway with your name on it. You know the sensible thing. You just don’t do it, because the sensible thing has to compete with being knackered and it loses. Every time.

So the industry sells you motivation instead. That might be the worst product of the lot, because it works for about a fortnight and then leaves you feeling weak for being human. I spent years thinking I lacked discipline. I didn’t. I had plenty of discipline at work. What I lacked was anything to hold the obvious thing in place when I wasn’t feeling strong.

That’s all I actually built. Not knowledge, I already had that. Not willpower, I’ve run out of that. I built something that takes the common-sense answer and makes it the default, so that on the bad nights I don’t have to be a better man, I just have to do the next obvious thing the setup is already pointing me at.

And here’s the bit that annoys me, looking back. None of what worked was new. It was all stuff I’d have told you was true at twenty-five. The deficit. The protein. The walking. I didn’t discover anything. I just stopped pretending the obvious thing needed improving, and started building something that made me actually do it.

If you’re waiting for me to reveal the clever part, there isn’t one, and that’s exactly why it works. The clever part was always the trap. The common-sense part was always the answer. The only real trick is building something that holds the common sense in place when you can’t be bothered, which is most of the time, for all of us. That’s not a secret. It’s just nobody can charge you forty quid a month for it.

That thing I built to hold the common sense in place is a spreadsheet. The exact one I use, and it’s free. It comes already filled with a few weeks of example data so you can see it working before you touch it. Subscribe and I’ll send it over, plus the honest version of all this every week or two.

If something here landed, or you reckon I’ve got it wrong, hit reply and tell me. I read every one.