I came to Thailand in December to focus on making YouTube videos.

The idea was that I would give myself a year to get to 10k subscribers and then move back to America to start shooting more professional videos in one of the YouTube Space locations - a fully-equipped TV studio where Creators could collaborate, plan, and shoot high quality videos with one another with the aid of professional equipment instead of their iPhones.

Four months later we're sitting at 632 subscribers (170 for my digital marketing channel) and one very burnt out @yallapapi.

Yeah I know, things take time and blah blah blah. But fuck all that shit. I don't feel like waiting anymore.

If only I was this good at everything

I'm not going to say that the time was wasted as I definitely expanded my skillset and learned a ton of useful stuff that I wouldn't have learned otherwise.

But with the goal being only 0.6% complete and taking up much of my time and mental energy, it's time to try a different strategy.

It's not that I even really give that much of a shit about fitness. It's been such an integral part of my life since I was a teenager that I don't even think about it so much. It just is.

Fitness is just so EASY for me. It can be done completely alone without the involvement of other human beings and the only limiting factor is your time and physical energy.

I guess for some people that's a problem. But for someone who strives to structure his life to have as much free time as possible, not so much.

That said, since I started putting myself out there as a "fitness authority," I've been getting a lot of the same questions over and over, leading me to believe that people are approaching health and fitness with the wrong mental framework.

I think that one of the reasons why I find being fit so simple isn't that I've spent years researching obscure facts about nutrients and training methods, but that I have 3-4 simple rules that I follow which allows the decision making process to run on autopilot.

And in my usual @yallapapi style, I'm going to convey those concepts to you in a no-nonsense bullshit-free way so you can take action on them ASAP... if you want.

The Rules

This is not your standard mainstream media nonsense that is designed to give you simple-stupid advice backed up SOLELY by science and modern medicine, but also include my personal structural concepts for fitness and ample anecdotal evidence that I've gathered after 20 years (!) as a fitness enthusiast.

Anyway, here they are:

1. Training style (exercise)
2. The foods you eat (nutrition)
3. Eating frequency (fasting)
4. Supplements (covered in the next article - apparently this post was too long for Steemit)

I'll go over each of these in detail in the sections below, but before we get into that, one thing you need to start doing if you haven't already is to start thinking for yourself and take the advice of "experts" with a grain of salt.

People who have been in the fitness game for a while can easily spot the difference between a "doctor" that appears on daytime TV and recommends a certain health protocol because it aligns with the public perception of what "should" work vs an actual fitness veteran who, just by the very nature of having participated in literally thousands of physical training sessions, has experimented with different training modalities and can give recommendations based on his experiences with them.

But people who haven't done any sort of exercise since high school are not so savvy. With all the different advice out there for health and fitness, things can get very confusing very fast.

Everyone seems to be contradicting each other. Every question has multiple answers, and things get so confusing that you end up "learning" most of your information from infographics that recommend 3 sets of 10 for 6-7 exercises to "build a perkier butt" or "get toned arms in time for summer."

Meanwhile, questions like these remain unanswered or are answered with so much variety that people don't know what to believe.

• Are carbs good or bad?
• Can you eat fruit if you're trying to lose weight?
• How do you lose belly fat?
• What's the best type of cardio to do?

Most beginners are justifiably lost when it comes to what they actually should do. But like with any other new activity that pushes your comfort zone, the important thing is to get started and figure things out along the way.

Yes, this is a new activity that is going to demand 5-6 hours a week for the rest of your life.

Is it worth the time? I think the benefits in body composition, the involuntary admiration (jealousy?) of your fellow humans, and the overall improved quality of life make that an easy decision. But ultimately that's for you to decide.

Anyway, my point is that you should think for yourself. Except for this article. You should take everything I say as gospel and not question any of it.

How your training methodology affects your body composition

In the fitness world, there is a concept called "form follows function."

Unpacked, this means that the shape of your body will reflect what it's capable of. Granted, there is some leeway here as bigger muscles do not always equal more strength [(see: neural adaptation), but for the most part you can accept this to be true.

The simplest way to visualize this is to look at professional arm wrestlers. They generally prefer one arm over the other in competitions and will train accordingly. This inevitably leads to muscular imbalances where one of their arms is 2x the size of the other.

So if form follows function, it's safe to assume that the increase in muscle mass (and all the other non-visible changes that occur "under the hood") corresponds to an increase in athletic ability for their particular sport.

Okay great, but what does that do for your average person who just wants to get more fit? You obviously don't want one Popeye arm and one noodle arm, so how does that help you?

Let's take a more subtle example: if we look at the bodies of [an Olympic sprinter, [a marathon runner, and a professional boxer, we'll see three distinct body types.

The sprinter is jacked and symmetrical, the marathon runner is full-on Auschwitz-mode, and the boxer is lean with clearly defined and dense muscles.

Ignoring for a second the fact that people with certain body types have a tendency to gravitate towards sports where their own body type lends them a natural advantage, we can look at these people and attribute their different body types to the way they train.

The Olympic sprinter likely does a lot of sprints. His sport requires short bursts of energy at max effort, so he probably does some explosive training as well like plyometrics, maybe with a little Olympic lifting thrown in as well.

The marathon runner probably does a lot of jogging. Extra muscle would just weigh him down and make it much harder for him to compete, so as a response to the type of training he does, his body gets rid of the additional muscle.

The boxer is somewhat of a hybrid of the two - his sport requires both extreme endurance and hundreds of short bursts of energy at max effort in the form of punches, feints, blocks, etc.

With the potential for a fight to last 12 rounds, the sprinter's training protocol would leave him gassed by the third round, whereas the marathon runner's training would sap him of all of his punching power.

These are extremely simplified explanations, but take the point: the way these athletes train affects their physical capabilties and overall body composition.

So if you want to look like a sprinter, train like a sprinter.

If you want to look like a marathon runner for some reason, train like a marathon runner.

And if you want to look like a boxer... you get the idea.

A word about bodybuilding

Notice that I left out bodybuilding.

Despite the fact that most gyms cater almost exclusively to "athletes" performing bodybuilding-style workouts (thanks Arnold), I believe that this type of training is one of the most inefficient wastes of time and biggest mistakes that intermediate lifters make.

We'll get into why in a second, but let's clarify something: I'm not saying you shouldn't do it.

In fact, any time someone with no exercise experience asks me how they should start working out, I always give them the standard full body 3x15 lightweight bodybuilding routine.

The reason for this is that after being untrained for so long, you need to slowly ease yourself into lifting heavy loads. Getting so sore that you need to take a week off from the gym (or going to the hospital after getting rhabdo) is a great way to make sure you lose motivation to follow through on your desire to get sexy in time for summer.

That said, there are a few problems with bodybuilding:

1. All pro bodybuilders and nearly all fitness YouTubers (who almost exclusively teach bodybuilding routines) are on steroids, which sets unrealistic expectations of what's possible with "natty" lifting
2. Intermediate lifters rarely change their routine because the sheer number of exercise variations and body part combinations make it difficult to track
3. Bodybuilding workouts are generally 3-4 sets of 8-12 reps which rarely (if ever) causes an increase in strength beyond the ~3 month mark, causing intermediate lifters to plateau for years

Before we talk any more shit about bodybuilding, let me just say that I have yyyyyuge respect for pro bodybuilders who have done amazing things with their bodies.

Yes they use steroids, but the amount of work that goes involved into counting calories, creating a varied training protocol, working out for 5+ hours a day, and eating buckets of chicken and rice is commendable.

And sure, you COULD say that bodybuilders are athletes. But their sport is executing a posing routine on stage for 3-4 minutes. Or posing for pictures on Instagram. Or just posing at the pool.

Anyway, the three issues with bodybuilding I listed above make it less than optimal once you're past the 3 month mark in your training. At that point, it's better to pick up a sport OR do a type of training that doesn't require steroids to build an aesthetically-pleasing balanced body.

If you are dead set on staying in a gym and lifting weights, find a gym with a clean and jerk station and learn the Olympic lifts. Or at least a place that has a set of kettlebells.

If neither of those are possible, work on powerlifting. More on those in the next article.

Here are some alternatives to bodybuilding that will help you build a nice looking, functionally athletic body:

1. Boxing/Kickboxing/Muay Thai
2. Soccer
3. Crossfit
4. Olympic lifting
5. Powerlifting (keep your diet in check)
6. Breakdancing
7. Gymnastics (probably the best)
8. Basketball
9. Pilates/Yoga (advanced level classes)

The foods you eat

"One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.” ― Virginia Woolf

I don't think anyone would argue that nutrition is NOT a major part of being fit. In fact, ever since becoming a fitness celebrity with triple digit YouTube subs, most of the questions I get from people have to do with what types of foods they can and can't eat.

I would hope that most of you know that processed junk like pic-related are not good for you and will make you fat.

But it's the less obvious food choices that tend to trip people up. What about things like:

• Coffee
• Wine
• Peanut butter
• Fruit
• Meat
• Milk

Before we get into those, I'll give you the one simple guideline that you can use to determine whether or not you should eat something.

When you want to eat something, ask yourself these questions:

1. Is it natural?
2. Did it grow out of the ground, off of a tree, or come from an animal?
3. Is it unprocessed?
4. If there was a nuclear apocalypse and all technology was wiped out, would we be able to recreate it in its exact form?

If the answer to these is yes, then you can eat it.

If the answer is no, then you can still eat it. But you should feel bad because you're a terrible fat loser and nobody will ever love you.

This is commonly known as the paleo diet, i.e. foods that were available in the paleolithic era. Rebranded as the "Primal Diet" by soap opera TV star Aajonus Vonderplanitz, it seems to have been getting some love lately (and rightfully so).

Meat, fish, and poultry

The latest craze these days is the Carnivore Diet. As far as fad diets go, this one is actually not too terrible.

Popularized by Jordan Peterson, author of "12 Rules For Life: An Antidote to Chaos," (great book by the way), the Carnivore Diet is pretty straightforward: eat almost nothing but meat every single day. If you MUST have non-meat foods, they should ideally be other animal products.

Think of it like the anti-vegan diet.

The common wisdom is that red meat is bad, causes something called "heart disease" (whatever that is), and will make you fat and die an early death.

This misconception is the result of a discredited theory against cholesterol. Here's an excerpt that explains it well:

As with many other fears, fear of dietary fat originated in alarm over a supposed epidemic — in this case, of coronary heart disease. The best known advocate of this theory was Ancel Keys, a physiologist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. After the Second World War, Keys became curious about something that kept cropping up in local newspapers. Many local business executives were being struck down with sudden heart attacks.

The most likely cause of the attacks was smoking, but Keys wasn’t looking for that. He tested 286 middle-aged businessmen and found high levels of cholesterol in their blood. He soon concluded that this buildup of cholesterol was the main culprit in the businessmen’s heart attacks.

A few years later, in 1952, Keys found support for his theory on a visit to Naples, Italy. There, he was told that practically the only coronary patients in the city’s hospitals were rich men in private hospitals. (No one seems to have told him that poorer Italians, especially in the south, clung — often with good reason — to the old notion that few patients emerged from hospitals alive and avoided them at all costs.)

Later that year, in Madrid, Keys took blood samples from some men in one of the city’s working-class quarters, where heart disease was also said to be rare. Then he did the same with 50 well-off patients of a prominent Spanish doctor who had told him that heart disease was rife among them.

Lo and behold, the Naples firemen and poor people in Madrid had significantly lower levels of cholesterol in their blood than the wealthy madrileños, whose serum cholesterol levels were as high as those of the Minnesota ­businessmen.

To Keys, this seemed conclusive proof that high-fat diets caused high cholesterol in the blood, which in turn caused heart disease. Keys’s theory did have a sort of commonsensical appeal. It also made eminent sense to Dr. Paul Dudley White, America’s most prominent cardiologist. White, like Keyes, became convinced that the simple diets of Italians held the key to their immunity from the epidemic of heart attacks.

Source: Cholesterol: How a now discredited diet theory became a national mania

And so began a multi-decade crusade against anything that had to do with cholesterol and dietary fat. Whole milk, eggs, red meat, butter.. all of it demonized because of this one misleading study.

I hope my uncle doesn't read this

Remember earlier in when I mentioned that you should think for yourself? Here's where we start to see why.

The nutritional science industry is notoriously biased, misleading, and full of bad information designed to sell products to consumers or regulate a single metric of health EVEN AT THE EXPENSE OF the overall health of the organism (i.e. statins may lower cholesterol, but they cause Alzheimers).

In fact, the medical profession as a whole is so fucked up that unless I suffered a crushed pelvis from falling off the roof of my building, I would never go to a doctor for any sort of treatment. And even then I'd probably do a Google search on how to fix it on my own.

Doctors' main concern is not necessarily providing the most effective cure, but prescribing legal-friendly treatment that won't get them sued. If they help someone along the way, great. But if not, then they have nothing to worry about as long as they did everything by the book.

Not to say all doctors are heartless bastards who will just write prescriptions to get you out of their office (especially my uncle - I appreciate all the times you helped me, even if you didn't write me an off-label Rx for Modafinil).

In fact, I'm sure most of them probably enjoy helping people. But unless your doctor is visibly fit by modern standards, maybe you should get your health advice from another source.

But that's a rant for another time...

Back to the point, the short version is that high-fat foods are not bad for you and should be consumed freely. Really what you want to eat is a lot of protein, but if you get your protein from liver and eggs (two nutrient-dense high-fat foods), then that's fine.

Speaking of liver, it's easily [the most nutrient dense food on the planet.](https://i1.wp.com/1.bp.blogspot.com/-7oxm_9Giecs/VgahoTdRIzI/AAAAAAAAAPY/cfqG4BX4BJk/s1600/Liver%2BComparison%2BChart.png?resize=700%2C51