If the body does not have adequate fuel from your food, it will pull it from all tissues, including lean muscle mass. This process is so efficient that morbidly obese people have been put on long, medically supervised fasts with no ill effects as far back as the 1960s. Most famously, Angus Barbieri, a twenty-seven-year-old Scot who tipped the scales at more than 450 pounds, spent 382 days on a medically supervised fast. Yes, you read that right, no food for over a year. His body just broke down all the extra fat and protein, utilizing his own nutrient stores for survival. His body metabolized not only all of his excess fat but also the protein in his excess skin to remodel the svelte young man who was emerging. The result: he lost 276 pounds.

This is not just some overly restrictive, zero-tolerance measure I’m advocating here so you avoid sugar at all costs. I’m into living optimally, I’m not a crazy, unreasonable zealot. There is a time and place for sugar—it’s just never going to be at breakfast. While the classic breakfast options are perhaps the worst of any meal, the advantage is that it is probably the easiest meal to skip while complying with a principle called intermittent fasting (IF). The basic structure of intermittent fasting is that you do all your eating in an eight-hour period (for most people, noon to 8:00 p.m.) and effectively fast the other sixteen hours of the day, some of which you’re sleeping through. The idea is that when the body doesn’t have food, it starts to metabolize excess tissue (fat and protein) to burn as fuel, which is a good thing.

Contrary to the shitty advice that became popular over the last decade, you don’t want to be eating small snacks throughout the day. That is only good for athletes training at extremely high intensity. For us mere mortals, you want turnover in your fuel supply, just like you want your body to burn off that belly fat before bikini season. Interestingly, to get this effect you don’t need to fast for long periods. Even better, by simply compressing your feeding window to eight hours per day, you can get the benefits of fasting and still have lunch with your friends and dinner with your family. Every day.

Caveat: IF and only if …

The structure of Own the Day is built to accommodate intermittent fasting, and the best way to do it is to skip breakfast. But intermittent fasting isn’t for everyone. If you are struggling with hormone issues, or already have trouble keeping on weight, then intermittent fasting can do more harm than good. But for a lot of us who are interested in weight management and overall health and longevity, it is worth trying for a few weeks at a time.

WEIGHT LOSS

When it comes to health and fitness, the one thing people want most is to lose some fat and keep their muscle mass. Intermittent fasting is one of the few protocols that seems to do both, and it’s probably the simplest. You lose fat because fasting works on both sides of the metabolic (energy burning) equation. It increases your metabolic rate, which helps you burn even more fuel. Then on the other side, by compressing the available window for eating, it typically restricts the amount of fuel you are putting in your body. Studies have seen intermittent fasting produce weight loss of 3 to 8 percent (a huge amount) and waist circumference reduction of 4 to 7 percent over periods that range from three to twenty-four weeks. That means a 200-pound man might drop to 184 pounds, just with intermittent fasting! And for those worried about losing muscle or performance, other studies have found less muscle loss from fasting than from long-term calorie restriction. And as a bonus, growth hormone levels can increase dramatically during fasting, which helps the body repair, recover, and rebuild muscle, aiding in peak performance.

HEALTH AND LONGEVITY

Obviously being overweight is antithetical to a long life. But beyond just the weight loss advantage, when you aren’t eating, the body takes the opportunity to jump-start cellular repair processes, such as removing waste material from cells. Just as having an oil change extends the life of your car, cleaning out your cells can help extend your own lifetime warranty. Intermittent fasting also reduces oxidative stress and inflammation, which, as we learned in chapter 2, are some of the leading causes of disease.

Prescription

The biggest mind-set shift that we need to make is away from the idea of “breakfast foods” and more toward the philosophy of breakfast as a foundation for a set of nutritional habits. Think of your breakfast choice as an act of love toward yourself for the rest of the day. It was the Buddha who said, wisely, “To keep the body in good health is a duty, otherwise we shall not be able to keep our mind strong and clear.”

I’m not going to give you a set time you need to eat, or a set amount you need to eat. There is so much fuss about portion size, but if we ask ourselves honestly, we know about how much is the right amount for us, and how much is overeating. You don’t want to be hungry, but you don’t want to feel stuffed either. (We’ll learn in chapter 8 how using calories as a measure of anything is a problem.) As far as your macronutrient balance, just focus on substituting good fats for the sugar and simple carbs. Eat whatever protein and fiber you like; as long as you add fat and cut the sugar, you are going to be in good shape. It is also generally going to be better to reserve the more complex and hard-to-digest foods for later in the day, since the morning correlates to the lowest levels of digestive enzymes and gastric acid. Eggs are easier to digest than red meat, for example. This is also why I like smoothies for breakfast, as everything is already premasticated by the teeth of the blender.

If you decide to give intermittent fasting a shot beyond those days when you simply have no quality breakfast options available to you, the easiest way is simply to skip breakfast every day and wait until lunch to have your first meal. But there are other ways. One way is to eat normally for six days and fast completely for one day. During any fast period, it is fine to drink liquids that don’t have calories, and even an MCT (medium-chain triglyceride) oil or coconut oil is acceptable as a fuel source (see chapter 6 for more information on these valuable oils). Another way is to eat normally for five days, and then for two days eat a very restricted ketogenic diet. This could include bone broth, butter, MCT oil, half an avocado, some low-sugar green veggies, maybe a chia seed slurry, but not much more. Supplements are also fine to take on fast days, though some supplements can be harsh on an empty stomach. Whichever method works best for you is the one you should pursue. Just remember, it never hurts to give yourself a full break.

Below are four choices for your owned breakfast.

Classic Breakfast with Greens

SERVES 1

FOR THE EGGS

2–3 free-range eggs

1 teaspoon water

1–2 tablespoons grass-fed butter

FOR THE BACON

4 rashers of uncured bacon

FOR THE GREENS

75–150g of mixed greens

3 tablespoons Balsamic vinegar

1 tablespoon Dijon mustard

1 clove garlic, minced

120ml olive oil

Salt and pepper to taste

FOR THE EGGS

Crack the eggs into a bowl. Add water, and whisk until slightly frothy.

In a nonstick pan, melt butter over medium-low heat. Do not scorch the butter!

When butter is melted add the egg mixture. Cook until no liquid egg is visible.

Season with sea salt and pepper (black, white, or red), to taste.

FOR THE BACON

Place rashers in a cold pan and set over medium heat.

Cook until the fat in the bacon is translucent, turning once halfway through. Do not let the meat get too crispy. Keep it bendy, like Gumby, dammit. If you want to be a bacon baller, lay out the bacon on a foil-lined baking sheet. Heat the oven to 200°C/400°F/Gas Mark 6, and bake that belly for 10–12 minutes on the middle rack. Keep an eye on it since cook times will vary by oven and with bacon thickness.

FOR THE GREENS

Wash the greens, dry completely, and place in a large mixing bowl.

In a separate bowl, mix the vinegar, mustard, and garlic. Whisking constantly, add olive oil to the mixture. Pour slowly! Add salt and pepper to taste.

Drizzle over greens to desired coverage, and toss.

Save the remaining dressing in an airtight container and place in the refrigerator. This stuff will last a while.

Bone Broth and Avocado

FOR THE BONE BROTH

240–350ml bone broth

Ginger to taste

Cayenne to taste

Sea salt to taste

Pepper to taste

FOR THE AVOCADO

1 avocado

½ lime

Sea salt to taste

Chilli powder to taste

FOR THE BONE BROTH

Buy this at the store, don’t be a hero. Pork, chicken, turkey, buffalo, and beef are all equally great choices. Just make sure you get the best kind possible: one from pasture/naturally raised animals that has been simmered for 6–8 hours.

Follow the instructions on the packaging, and season with ginger, cayenne, sea salt, and black pepper.

FOR THE AVOCADO

Slice a ripe avocado in half lengthwise, being careful not to slice your hand in the process (blood is not a good garnish).

Squeeze the lime over the top, season with sea salt, dust with chilli powder, and dive in.

Choco-Maca Magic Shake

SERVES 1

Time to prep: 5 minutes

20g chocolate protein powder (no sugar added)

180ml unsweetened organic almond milk

180ml spring water

1 tablespoon almond butter (or your favorite nut butter)

1 teaspoon chia seeds

75g organic blackberries

1 tablespoon MCT oil

Ice as desired

In a large blender, combine the protein powder, almond milk, and spring water. Pulse quickly to incorporate—this will help reduce clumping and pasting of the protein powder up the sides of the blender.

Add the almond butter, chia seeds, blackberries, and MCT oil. Top with ice to the fill line.

Blend and serve.

Açaí Breakfast Blast

SERVES 1

Time to prep: 5 minutes

300ml sprouted rice milk

1 heaped tablespoon unsweetened coconut or grass-fed, full-fat dairy yogurt

20g vanilla protein powder (no sugar added)

1 packet açaí berries, frozen

1 handful spinach, frozen

1 heaped tablespoon raw peanut butter (or your favorite nut butter)

1 teaspoon flax seed

Ice as desired

Blueberries, for garnish

Psyllium husk, for garnish

In a large blender, combine the rice milk, yogurt, and protein powder. Pulse quickly to incorporate—this will help reduce clumping and pasting of the protein powder up the sides of the blender.

Add the açaí berry packet, spinach, peanut butter, and flax seed. Top with ice and blend until smooth and of desired consistency.

Pour into a glass, then sprinkle fresh organic blueberries and psyllium husk on top for a healthy garnish and fancy flavor.

Now Do It

Ideas are like a backhoe that we drag across the brain. The longer we carry an idea, and the more times we access it, the deeper that idea becomes grooved in our psyche. When I talk to people in my father’s generation, getting them to understand that dietary fat isn’t going to make them fat is an incredibly challenging task. They have heard—and believed—the contrary for decades. I can show them the science, I can walk them through the metabolic mechanisms, I can pull up my shirt and pose down like a shredded manimal, but somehow, some way, they will still leave the conversation unconvinced, and they don’t know why.

You may be feeling something similar right now. How could this be? How could the nutritionists have been this wrong about a core tenet of nutrition like this? Well, it happens all the time, because scientists are people just like you and me. Except sometimes it’s worse, because when being right about something is your career, you have even more reason not to admit you might have been wrong.

Physicist Max Planck famously said, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” This theory was confirmed by the National Bureau of Economic Research when they did a meta-analysis of 452 scientists who died at the peak of their prowess. When the old guard died, there was a flood of new papers from unrelated newcomers that became more referenced (a sign of successful peer review and acceptance) than the papers of their predecessors or living associates. Sometimes it takes mighty death itself to advance the field past the gatekeepers of the accepted paradigm.

I don’t want to wait that long. Flexibility of thought is one of the greatest attributes any human being can have, scientist or otherwise. It’s the ability to take those deeply engraved opinions, and overwrite them with new and better information. Our brains are malleable enough for that task; you just have to bring the goal into awareness.

So you may just have to rewrite everything you know about breakfast. Wheaties as the breakfast of champions? Maybe champion of falling asleep at your desk at ten thirty in the morning. No champion I know is eating Wheaties for breakfast, or anything close.

The peak performers I know eat a breakfast that aligns with the universal nutrition principles we’ve discussed in this chapter—more good fats, less sugar, compressed feeding windows—adapted specifically to the needs of their training or their personal goals.

Make this change in your mind first, and then your plate second. It doesn’t have to feel like a sacrifice, not even for your taste buds. After all, I’m still telling you to eat butter and bacon, right?

THREE POINTERS

The abundance of sugar in our diet is arguably the worst thing ever to happen to human health. Being aware of the many forms of sugar and minimizing sugar ingestion is key to managing the blood sugar swings that will throw off your day.

Dietary fat and cholesterol have been unfairly villainized. To restore metabolic health and optimize weight management, adding dietary fat back into the diet, starting with breakfast, is essential.

Breakfast is not the most important meal of the day. If you don’t have good fats and protein available to you, rather than eat a bunch of sugary or starchy foods, you can skip breakfast and reap the benefits of intermittent fasting for weight loss and longevity.

ESSENTIAL SUPPLEMENTS

To all my little Hulkamaniacs, say your prayers, take your vitamins and you will never go wrong.

HULK HOGAN

With the stress of modern life, even the best diet can use some help—and no, an adult gummy vitamin doesn’t count. Not all supplements come as a capsule, and they are certainly not all created equal. You need to have a guide. The supplements you’ll learn about here supercharge your energy and health, and come with undeniable scientiﬁc research to back them up. They represent the minimum effective dose of kicking ass. Follow these prescriptions, and you’ll have greater control of your human machine.

Getting Owned

Imagine yourself living ten thousand years ago. You’re sitting around a campfire with your clan. Your skin kissed from the sun. The kill from that day’s hunt is roasting on a spit, above a roaring fire. You will eat the whole animal, organs and all. In the meantime you’re gnawing on a collection of foraged roots, tart berries, and leafy vegetation you found, grown in pristine mineral-rich soil on which you and your clan cohabitate. Your water came from a nearby stream or from captured rain in a clay pot. You’re squatting on your haunches or sitting on the ground, but so is everyone else around you. You’re outside, fresh soil under your fingernails from the day’s gathering. Everyone is barefoot. The day is over, and there is nothing left to do but enjoy the company, eat your food, and gaze at the stars. You will sleep with the darkness just as you woke with the dawn, in rhythm with nature.

Fast-forward ten thousand years. If you’re lucky, you cut up pesticide-aided vegetables and throw them into some factory-farmed eggs that are frying in butter and cheese made from cows fed a steady diet of nutrient-stripped corn. Once the food is done, you have to eat quickly, because work beckons. You’ve got to dash from your climate-controlled home to your climate-controlled office, where you’ll be hunched over a screen all day, or maybe standing in one place for eight hours answering inane questions. You check your phone to make sure you’re not already late, and a fresh set of attention-stealing alerts greet you. You finish eating and wash your hands with antibacterial soap before heading out the door.

Whenever I bring up the topic of supplements, I ask people to imagine these two scenes—because they point to two of the biggest arguments in favor of supplementation.

First: our stresses are more in number and different in kind from what our ancestors faced. We’ve talked about it earlier, but it’s worth repeating: we deal with more chronic stressors than our ancestors did, most of which our bodies are not designed to thwart—and it shows. Our ancestors weren’t stressed about staying up all night answering emails. They didn’t have cinnamon Pop-Tarts. They didn’t take metal-laden pharmaceuticals or put toxic chemicals under their armpits to deflorate that pesky human smell.

Second: our environment is robbing us of a lot of the nutrients, minerals, and microbial defenses that used to come into our diets by default. Again, think about that first scene. You were eating animals that fed on wild vegetation full of nutrients. Your own plants were grown in fertile soil, packed with minerals without the need for artificial fertilizer. You ate organs and fats, and fish caught from streams. Your hands were dirty from the soil, full of probiotic bacteria and hormetic immune challenges.

And the way we live now? We’re sterile. We’re clean. We have fruit-washing spray. It’s not bad enough that we’ve swapped out fats for sugar in the modern diet; a disturbing percentage of the food we’re eating is so processed that even insects won’t eat it. All that artificiality and hypersterility have robbed our bodies of the natural conditioning and the necessary bacteria that come from being outdoors and eating food that grew in the earth or ran, swam, or flew on it. Instead we become prey to the bacteria—ever sicker, ever more vulnerable. Add to that the problems of soil that’s been overfarmed, and animals that are undernourished, and you’ve got a recipe for a food supply and an environment that leaves our bodies wanting more. Put simply, it leaves us at a disadvantage.

The final reason to take supplements is that even if you have a perfect diet, there are nutrients available that you can’t find in the produce section of your grocery store. Herbs, exotic vegetables, vitamins and minerals from every corner of the globe, all shown to optimize performance in clinical trial research. Why not give your body the advantage?

Correcting Disadvantage

Thanks to an absence of fermented foods in our diet, germophobia, and an overreliance on antibiotics in our medicine to treat mild infection, our gut biomes are a mess. This is no small matter, because the gut is our “second brain,” and it is where 80 percent of our immune system lives, controlling neurotransmitter and hormone balance and acting as the gatekeeper to inflammation response. In a way, our gut is more us than anything else, since the 100 trillion bacterial organisms in our guts far outweigh the amount of “human” cells we have in our body. When you think about the gut that way, a suboptimal gut biome is the essence of deficiency.

Even worse, many of us may have started at a disadvantage. Thirty-two percent of kids these days are born via cesarean section. It is now commonly held that the immune-system challenge from commingling of intestinal (fecal) bacteria in the birth canal is an important initial hormetic stressor to build a healthy gut biome and kick-start infant immunity, and we’ve removed that first gut gauntlet for nearly half our children, to their detriment.

Additionally, studies show that almost half the people living in the United States are magnesium-deficient. That’s right, half! And what’s the problem? Oh, nothing … except that low magnesium has been linked to diabetes, hypertension, sudden cardiac death, headaches, asthma, and a lot of other ailments. But you know what happens before any of those more serious situations? You just feel like crap. Your body slows down, and it sends up warning signs in the form of irritability, fatigue, loss of appetite, weakness, and muscle twitches. Our ancestors wouldn’t have had to worry about the amount of magnesium in their blood—but we do.

What happens when an entire species that was accustomed to living outdoors and hunting and gathering suddenly decides that indoor living is the way to go? We all become deficient in vitamin D. That’s right: over a billion people are deficient in vitamin D. The list of consequences for vitamin D deficiency feels like a roll call at the sick ward: depression, fibromyalgia, Alzheimer’s disease. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Vitamin D is so closely tied to immune response and hormone function that those billion people are sicker and weaker than they need to be—just because they don’t get enough sunlight. It’s a free supplement—and yet not only are we not taking it, we’re actively avoiding and defending ourselves against it. Think about that the next time you go slathering on sunblock with SPF Geisha Face.

Vitamin D and magnesium are involved in hundreds of chemical processes and are thus a couple of the more standard vitamins and minerals people know to look to supplement. Does that mean that supplementing with magnesium and vitamin D will prevent you from getting every disease ever? Of course not, but your risk profile increases with deficiency.

There are other crucial supplements. Our diets are chronically deficient in fish oil and omega-3 fatty acid. We aren’t getting enough B vitamins, nor are some of us able to process what we do get. And then there are all the tiny micronutrients from plants too tedious, too bitter, and too exotic to harvest for a meal.

Supplements can help you because good supplements work. But there isn’t a single pill that’s going to fix everything that ails you. Anytime you see someone promise you that, let them know you think they are Number 1 by raising your middle finger right in their grill. What supplements do is upgrade the places in your body that aren’t easily optimized by food and exercise alone. Done right, these supplements can bring you better health, clearer thinking, and energy that your ancestors would have envied.

Owning It

We are entering the golden age of nutrition and supplementation. Yes, our stressors are many, and yes, we have traveled far from the ancestral blueprint. But we can do things that no hunter-gatherer could imagine. We can research every clinical trial ever performed, and every active form of a vitamin … on our phones. We can walk into Whole Foods or, even easier, shop online and get delivered to us the most exotic nutrients the world has ever produced. The hidden secrets of Amazonian plant doctors, now available on Amazon Prime. In a single formula you might have traditional herbs from Europe, India, Japan, Siberia, North America, and South America … conveniently blended in a plant-based capsule. All of them studied together for efficacy against placebo by accredited American research institutions. We may have dug ourselves into a hole, but we have a helicopter full of solutions to pull us out of it.

But let me be as clear as Crystal Pepsi on one important point before we go any further: to supplement, according to the dictionary and to science and to common sense, is to add an extra element or amount to something. What it does not mean is to replace that something completely.

A supplement is something that enhances or completes something else. It is anything that you do to intentionally boost your nutritional profile or increase performance. I would argue that getting twenty minutes of sun is a supplement (it increases vitamin D). That eating pumpkin seeds before you have sex is a supplement (it increases nitric oxide, which increases blood flow). That dark chocolate is a supplement when you feel the blues (it has four psychoactive mood-boosting chemicals). None of these supplements, however, are substitutes.

Supplements of any kind, but especially the supplements we are going to talk about in this chapter, are not a substitute for solid food and physical activity. Don’t have any illusions: you can’t just take a pill and own the day if you eat like a sloth and move like one too. The first move to give you every advantage should always be improvements to diet and lifestyle. (We’ll cover these in great depth in chapters 8, 10, and 12 specifically.) Eating more oily fish can boost omega-3 fatty acid levels. Eating Popeye levels of spinach and taking daily magnesium sulfate (Epsom salts) baths may help improve magnesium deficiency. But sometimes those aren’t options, or you’re doing those things and it just isn’t enough. Bridging that gap, between deficient and optimal, is a good reason to take a supplement when regular daily methods aren’t enough.

Even really successful, high-performing people are often handicapping their own potential just because they aren’t supplementing. Take mixed martial arts legends Donald Cerrone and Tyron Woodley. Donald has nearly set the record for the most wins in the UFC, and Tyron defended his UFC championship belt at the highly competitive welterweight division multiple times. They are at the top of their sport. They are in peak physical condition. They work with the best trainers in the world. They use the best gear. And they are people who need every edge they can get—because the guy in the cage with them is trying to take their money, their health, and their ranking, by pummeling them into submission. And even though Donald has a soft spot for Budweiser and Hot Tamales, these warriors prepare like the champions they are.

When I first started working with Donald and Tyron, they were as antisupplement as it gets. I wasn’t surprised: both of them had supplement sponsors in the past, but what they tried didn’t make them feel any better. With the combination of artificial ingredients, unhealthful binders, strange colors, and unnecessary fillers, most “sports” supplements are awful. So these two pros figured they were better off going without. And with stories all around them about companies spiking their products with illegal ingredients to boost effectiveness, they felt they were safer facing a drug test without any of those things in their system.

Those are all valid reasons not to take supplements—except that it meant they were leaving serious athletic potential on the table. When they agreed to try the protocol we designed for them, it was like a switch flipped. Donald went on a huge win streak, blazing through the 170-pound division and putting on some of the most impressive fights and finishes of his career. It included an incredible four-hit knockout combination straight out of a video game that went viral like chlamydia through a freshman dorm. Tyron started his supplementing right as he began training for a rematch with one of the most dangerous strikers ever to fight in the UFC, Stephen “Wonderboy” Thompson. He said he felt on fire, the best he’d ever felt in training camp. And it showed: his cardio was impeccable, and he defended his belt successfully. If I were a betting man, I’d say that when you’re reading this, he still has that strap around his waist.

Fundamentally, whether you’re an MMA fighter or an M&A attorney, supplementing is about taking control of what you need to own your day. And what you need—no matter your goals, your situation, or your drive—always comes down to two common threads: combating mineral and nutrient deficiencies and increasing performance.

Essential Supplements

Throughout this section we’re going to talk about the major areas that everyone should focus on, and then in the prescription we’ll get down to brass tacks on how to get it done.

GREENS BLEND

Everyone agrees that we need a balanced spectrum of vitamins and minerals in our diet, and the best way to do that is to eat a varied diet. Consume the bountiful diversity of earth-grown foods: shellfish like oysters, grass-fed beef, leafy greens like Swiss chard, and brassica vegetables like cauliflower, on top of a whole complement of spices and herbs.

Of course it isn’t always easy to eat this way, even with the best of intentions, which is why it should be no surprise that the lion’s share of our dietary deficiencies is precisely in the area of vitamins and minerals. As I see it, you have two supplement choices: you can take multivitamins, which traditionally are notoriously hard to absorb, or you can reach for a multinutrient “green food” mix, which will cover a lot of your nutrient bases.

A good greens blend is going to be nutrient-dense and should have a good mixture of freeze-dried foods containing small amounts of many vitamins and minerals, as well as enzymes, antioxidants, and other beneficial stuff you’d probably never put in a salad—herbs, fruits, grasses, leaves, and maybe even a flower or two. When at all possible, I always recommend going with a quality greens mix because you can be sure the vitamins are being delivered into your system in a way similar to how they arrive in your normal food. Which is to say, they aren’t synthetic, they’re natural.

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