Getting Lean After 40 Is F*cking Simple

0:00 Getting lean under 15% body fat is really simple and every man especially over 40 when you got kids should be under 15%. But most are not and the reason is subconsciously you have accepted that it's not for you. You can't do it genetically it's not possible. And I'm telling you 11 years doing this that is your biggest roadblock. It's not the external, it's the internal. Now, Brad Pitt in this photograph in Fight Club was 35 years old. He's only 5'11 and here he's about from my research 155 pounds. So, he's not a big fell.

0:43 This is below 10%. It might be 5 to 8%. Which is extreme, but that's Hollywood, isn't it? The reason why this is so desired around 10% to 15%. Is because we recognize as animals that someone with low body fat, high muscle is metabolically healthy. That's it. And we live in 2026 where we have all the technology in the world, but yet most people still desire two things, health and wealth. The difference is you can fake wealth. You can have your car on higher purchase. You can't fake a good body. It takes hard work and consistency.

1:29 But it can and should be done. It's not in your genetics to be more than 15% body fat as a man. If you look back to n before 1970s, look at pictures of people on the beach. There's no overweight people. None at all. Because after 1970, we started eating for convenience. right, with the whole housewife revolution. So, let's get into this. Now, before you do anything, you're watching this because you have too much body fat, more than likely, but you're not sure how you got there, and you've probably tried things to fix it that haven't worked. So, what you need to do first and foremost is figure out where you are right now. So, below this video is a link to take the scorecard. It's going to tell you in less than three minutes what your issue is, the one thing that holding you back and how to fix it. And you'll get a result immediately once you submit it.

2:29 All right, let's crack on. The unique challenge that dads face, right, especially looking at the media is most fitness content is designed for young fellas and they've got nothing else to do but go to the gym and try and find a bird, which is why they're going to the gym mostly. But as dads, we're trying to keep our bird, our lady, our wife, our partner, and we're trying to be healthy and energetic for our kids. But we think, all right, I have to uproot my life completely. I have to follow exactly what these lads are doing, not realizing that it's a trap, right? The the six five six% body fat you see there with Brad Pitt is not sustainable. That's done for a film. And because you think that is the goal, you don't try at all.

3:18 What the goal is is to be below 15%. All right? So let let's go through that. When you're a dad, energy is the most important thing. Energy comes first. The physique you get afterwards is the byproduct. Because if you want energy, you have to do energetic things, i.e. work out. If you want energy, you have to fuel your body like a Ferrari. Don't be eating like a child, like the convenience foods.

3:49 And all you need is a minimal effective dose. You've probably heard of that term before. No supplements to buy. You can't buy your way into a fit, healthy, strong body. You don't need any like exotic protocols. biohacking, red light therapy, sauners, like go to a gym and look at the lads in the sauna. They're normally not the fittest lads, but they think, "All right, if I do 45 minutes on the stair master and then sit in the sauna and sweat the fat out, that's how I'm going to lose weight."

4:24 And they do that because it's not hard, right? They're addicted to comfort. And this is this is a symptom of modern society. We are watching Netflix, getting our stuff on Amazon Prime, using Deliveroo for our food, and we want things instantly. But the one thing you cannot get instantly is fat loss. Although people try and make it seem like you can do this juice cleanse, do keto for a couple of weeks. I had a conversation with someone the other day.

5:00 They said, "So, how long do I have to eat like this? Forever." You can stop, but if you stop, you'll get fat again. But by the end of this video, you're going to see the whole minimal effective dose, right? The calories, the protein, the training, and the five things that will quietly decide whether it works or not. And for most, it doesn't. And that's not because the system is wrong. It's because they don't apply it. So train firstly train for longevity.

5:31 Aesthetics are the byproduct. But we find it hard to visualize ourselves in 20 years. Like I went to jiu-jitsu this morning. A couple of lads there that were in their 50s. They started in their 40s. If they could see themselves now as 50 odd year old men, how fit, strong, mobile they are, they would have started sooner. But we can't visualize that far ahead. We want instant. You're not training to look good for holiday. That's a bonus. You You're training to be healthy, to be capable as a dad.

6:10 The body wants health. It wants that result, but psychologically, we're not willing to go through the discomfort because we're addicted to comfort. And for men our age, it the hits the fan when they get those blood markers, the visceral fat, the blood pressure, the resting heart rate, the blood sugar, and they think, "Oh I better take care of this now."

6:42 And sometimes it's too late. Muscle is not vanity at 45. Muscle is a longevity organ because when you strengthen your muscles and they grow because if they're not growing they're shrinking. There's no in between. People like I want to maintain. No, they're going to shrink. Everything is always changing. But it's up to you to decide how it changes. This tissue in your body i.e. muscle, sceal muscle is going to help you hormonally for the rest of your life. So if you're wondering why do I feel fed up midlife crisis, I'll buy myself a Porsche.

7:26 Again, you can fake wealth or I'll hire a Porsche, but the investment needs to be done in yourself, not done externally. We'll come back to that. Okay. And the six back, if it ever shows up, is the side effect of all the boring things. It's not the target. Now, people don't want to be bored, including me. We want to constantly fill our life with distractions. And if you look at the news, it's all bad. It's a distraction. If you look at half naked birds on social media, it's a distraction.

8:07 What you need to be doing is looking at yourself. Look at yourself in the mirror and ask yourself, right, I'm 40, 40, whatever age you are. Let's take stock of how I am right now, right? And where is this headed? Because it's not going to get better if nothing changes. You can't train like a single lad who's got no commitments because they live in the gym.

8:40 You can't have perfect diet. When people work with me, they always ask, "All right, this is what I'm I'm going to eat roughly. I have an idea." And by the way, steak meat and potatoes. If most of your diet was meat and potatoes, the fat would fall off of you. But people want variety. They want the snacks. They want to eat a bit of cake here and there. They get bored. So you have to decide, am I willing to eat meat and potatoes twice a day every day. And if you do it right with the seasoning, like I just had baby potatoes chopped up. had a couple of burgers. They're they're like homemade burgers for my wife and I put some paprika on them. I put some rosemary on them and it's delicious. Took 10 12 minutes to make.

9:38 Done. But this is your staple. It's 80% of your diet. Meat and potatoes. And then when it comes to family time, you know, okay, I can enjoy a little bit of variety. That's my 20%. Ideally 10%. Because otherwise if you think all right I need to eat perfectly all the time. It's like a bottle of Coke that's being shaken right every day. I must really really strict strict strict and then the weekend comes you open it and goes everywhere.

10:13 You need to on the dinners with your kids and your wife let a bit of air out of the bottle. release a little bit of the pressure valve because if you don't do that, it's all going to come undone because psychologically you're seeing this as temporary. Now, although a small portion of your diet can be liberal, you have to remember that this is not a diet. This is nutrition.

10:47 You are what you eat and more importantly, you are what you digest. So, are you eating food that agrees with your body? Because if you're going to the toilet more than three times a day, i.e. a poo, you're eating the wrong stuff. If you're going less than once a day, you're eating the wrong stuff. If your dog was sick, one of the signs would be what their poo what's their poo like. So, you are what you eat, but more importantly, you are what you digest and what you defecate.

11:20 The minimal minimal effective dose is a medical idea and anything past it is just side effects for your body. It means training enough to create a stimulus to create a response. Simple nutrition, meat and potatoes, and a small set of habits that are going to move the needle. For example, when you wake up in the morning, you either have a high protein breakfast or you don't have a breakfast. Your first meal of the day should be high protein or you don't eat until it until until it is.

11:58 When you do, so the best ideal way to eat is wake up, have 30 grams of protein within 30 minutes of waking followed by 30 minutes of walking. And you combine that with three strength training sessions a week and the fat will fall off. Fat loss is not a mystery. You know what to do. You actually know, but you're not doing it.

12:30 You have to eat fewer calories than you burn. It's basic. No food, no supplement, no biohacking protocol is is gets around that fact. And a modest deficit because extremes don't work and temporary are 300 to 500 calories below your maintenance is the range. Small enough to keep the energy and the small enough, right? So you still got energy and you're still going to build that muscle.

13:03 You don't need to weigh every gram either. at the start because that's not sustainable either. Now, if you find you're eating meat and potatoes a 30% of the time, you're doing your strength training sessions, you're getting your walks in, and your weight is plateauing, then the scales need to come out. And people will say, "Oh, I've got this stubborn fat." There's no such thing as stubborn fat. Just stubborn habits. Things you do that you don't even realize you do. And we lie to ourselves all the time. We say like, "Oh yeah, I ate this, that, and the other to our trainer." When really, we don't count the birthday cake we had at work.

13:41 We don't count the monster drink we had or the empty calories that we're drinking. And even we think like, "Oh, we'll add an orange juice. That's healthy." Orange juice, apple juice, you might as well be drinking Coke. It doesn't have any fiber in it. So your body treats it the same way. Massive glucose spike, then a crash, then you want more sugary stuff. And people say like, "Oh, I oh, I I got I don't eat any sweets, but I love chocolate." You know, you don't love chocolate. You love sugar.

14:15 Because if you were to eat chocolate that had no sugar in it, it tastes like tar, like chalk, right? Go and find a 99% or even a 70% dark chocolate bar, and most people won't even eat that. So, it's not You do have a sweet tooth. We're hardwired for that energy. But unfortunately, it's everywhere. I mean, I had just come back from London and I'm in the airport and I'm looking at I was there for three hours before the flight and I'm looking around me cuz I'm bored and it's okay to be bored. And I just noticed, all right, I'm going to play a game here, look for the healthiest looking people. It was a struggle. And then I was like, right, I'm now play another game. Look around, see the healthiest restaurants here. It was a struggle because carbohydrates carbohydrates are cheap to produce. They have a long shelf life. So everywhere you go is full of crappy carbs that make us fat.

15:12 And we even like getting on the flight right before I I I sat down and managed to find a burrito place that was decent. And the guy getting on the flight get on the same flight as me. I could see so he was like eating eating loads and he desserts and he's having coke and stuff and then I realized that actually cuz we got talking he was from London and he was flying out wherever. So basically he had left his house gone to the airport and then eaten all that crappy food and then get on a flight and he's fighting his head off next sitting near me. Right.

15:52 Right. So it for for me it was different. I had to eat there because I didn't have anywhere to cook food, right? So people don't people are just he he couldn't wait, you know, he wanted to get to the airport to eat that crappy food, right? So anyway, longevity, as I mentioned, muscle is tissue. It is an organ. And once you nail one nutrient, one macronutrient for muscle, it's so simple protein. I don't mean protein bars.

16:32 Again, in this in the in the airport, went into WH Smith cuz I was like, "Oh, I do feel like I've got a bit of a sweet tooth now." And after having the burrito and I went to the what do you call it the like convenience place where they have the snacks in W Smith and loads of protein bars. Waterall protein bars. Listen, if it looks like a chocolate bar, it tastes like a chocolate bar. It's a chocolate bar.

17:07 Look at the ingredients. When especially if anything says protein on it, it's normally crap. I ended up getting a trail mix which high fiber, high protein. but there was sugar. You know, sugar was a key ingredient, but that's the trade-off. You know, I couldn't find anything didn't have sugar in it. But with protein, we should be eating one gram per pound of body weight. And we need even more. I say 7.8 8 g per pound of body weight, but as we get older, we need more protein, not less.

17:41 protein is the is the most filling macro, too. So, before I got on that flight, I made sure that I had extra beef in my burrito. I actually had two burritos, two large ones, but I had as much protein as possible so that when I got on the flight and then off the flight on another train, another taxi, I wasn't craving junk food because I've had so much protein. That's going to an give you an anchor.

18:10 So, here is a repeatable meal you can eat, right? I mentioned the meat and potatoes. This is going to massively reduce your decision fatigue because look at Mark Wahberg. Wberg, Mark Zuckerberg. He supposedly he wears like just black or just a hoodie and Steve Jo. You see the successful people that like this thing as in what I wear doesn't matter that much. How can I reduce unnecessary decision- making in my life? And it it should be same for you and food because again, if you're watching this, you're overweight, right? It's it's hard to hear, but it's simply because you're addicted to food and the comfort of food, highly palatable food. And you're not alone. I mean, most of us are. Like we I I'm work from home. I eat from out of boredom, too. The difference is I'm very lean. So, because I do so much strength training, I have so much muscle.

19:08 when I eat that muscle absorbs the calories, the energy. But if you don't have a lot of muscle and you eat what I eat, which is sometimes I'm can be quite liberal with my food, you're going to get fat. You need to have a very regular strength training regime with progressive overload and be eating walking a lot and staying hydrated. But eat with the family, right? Don't be taking out the again like a single dad some Tupperware and I'm going to sit in a separate room and you know I I eat my broccoli and chicken while my wife and kids eat something else. That's going to cause division cause division in your family, right? When your MS makes your grub or you make your grub, go right, where my meat potatoes, as in don't say that to her, but like say, you know, to yourself, that's what has to be the staple. And when you look at your plate, half of it should be protein, a good quality protein, not like vegan protein or black beans or that nonsense from an animal. ideally an animal.

20:13 So, the three levers that we can pull, sleep, that's the first one. Very hard. I have a 5-year-old, a four-year-old, and a 2-year-old. I was up four or five times last night just with a 2-year-old. So, get to bed early. Once the kids go down, go to bed. Oh, but I got to watch Netflix. Got have time to unwind. Chat to your misses for a bit. She will probably appreciate it. Ask her how her day was.

20:43 And I know what it's like when you you feel like you're living in the tunnel of young kids. You want that escapism, but then you start thinking, "Right, I want to next thing, next thing, next thing, and then you end up going to bed at 10:00, 11:00." If you're going to bed past 10:00, just turn this off now. you're never going to get lean because most people wake up at 7:00. So, let's say you're going to bed at 11 or 12, right? You can wake up, especially if you're a high achiever, you probably get up at 5 or 6, right? If you're not getting seven, eight hours sleep, you're going to it's not going to happen because you'll be so tired that you'll need energy from somewhere and that will come from junk food.

21:27 So, yeah. Anyway, get your sleep in. You can have a coffee in the morning, right? That's I have a coffee myself, but make sure that you have time to recover. I.e. don't be drinking coffee in the afternoon because that's has a stays in your body at caffeine for about what they call it not an afterlife a anyway for about eight hours. That's going to affect your sleep if you keep drinking your coffee.

21:58 So the split should be training wise your six essential movements is a horizontal pull, horizontal push, a squat, a hinge or a deadlift, a vertical pull, and a vertical press. Simple as that. Three days a week, you do that and you'll develop a very strong balanced body that's hard to injure. Think patterns instead of body parts. Like this whole thing of oh your chest and back. That's a young man's game. All right. We want good posture, no back pain, balanced body.

22:36 You have to apply progressive overload because I have this conversation with lads that I work with and they say like these are ones that not work for onetoone but they're in the community. There's a free community but you need to do the scorecard before you get access to that community. and they'll say, "Oh yeah, I lift weights at home. I've got like dumbbells and I do whatever." And they do the same thing every week, same amount of weights, same amount of repetitions, same amount of sets, and they're not progressing. They're skinny fat and they're wondering why. Because you need to be adding either a rep or reps can stay the same, adding weight.

23:14 That has to happen. You know the parable of the the fable of the wrestler? I forgot what his name is, but he carries the the bull and he'd been doing this since he's a child, right? And there was a baby bull and as he's gotten older, the bull has gotten bit larger and heavier and therefore he's become stronger. But we often like to stick with what we know and we don't want to increase the weight because we're comfortable. We don't be too uncomfortable. If you're not shaking like a dog at the end of your workout, you're spinning your wheels.

23:51 Muscle live is longevity insurance. So, you might have life insurance or is it assurance? And that's fine. Well, I think most insurance is a bit of a scam, but the best insurance you can do for yourself is to start lifting weights. Forget, you're not going to look like a bodybuilder unless you want to take steroids. More muscle means better blood flow, better blood control of your sugar levels, stronger heart, denser bones as well. So, we talk about osteoarthritis, osteoporosis, weakening of the bones.

24:32 But if you don't expose them to load, things that are heavy, they're going to get weak. They get strengthened the same way muscles do. The five S's, sleep is first, stress is second. So protect your sleep. Get to bed early. You might set an alarm to wake up, but do you set a notification to go to bed? And when you're sleeping better, you can manage stress.

25:05 I'm not saying get rid of stress because stress is good. It gives us a kick up the hole to get things done. But if it we we're not sleeping enough, we become overwhelmed. After sle steps after sleep and stress, you got steps. And look at bodybuilders. Their job is to become as lean as possible. They get paid for that. >> >> Notice when you go to a gym, they do the weights first and the treadmill second.

25:39 On the treadmill, they're walking at a conversational pace around 30 minutes. So, they use most of the energy for the weight lifting because they want to build that muscle. And then once they've done that, they go on the treadmill, walk, and that helps to move the fat, get it out of their body. Obviously not immediately but that process begins. This fourth S which is a bit of a tenuous or a stretch is sips drinking water. And I don't mean regular old tap water. I mean water with electrolytes or just simply sea salt. Because if you're not adding sea salt to your water, you're just going to piss it out.

26:28 And the last one is sunlight. I do not wear sun cream. I haven't worn sun cream since I mean 18 that my like first lad's holiday 17 because when you get sun cream in your eyes you realize what the what is in this stuff your body especially if you live in Ireland or north hemisphere countries or it's just like yeah very northern could be also very southern but anyway you need that exposure to the And vitamin D, lack of it is a huge problem because vitamin D gets converted into hormone D.

27:11 And we need that for a healthy hormone profile. But when the sun comes out, we're hiding in shadows in the shade. We're laughing ourselves in sun cream. If you want to protect yourself from the sun, cover up or get into the shade. But you need your sunlight and ideally about 10 minutes in the morning and you still get it through the clouds. It's not as strong. And people will talk about skin cancer. There's a huge correlation between skin cancer, what you eat and smoking as well.

27:46 Anyway, by the way, should I leave it on the sun sun lotion thing? Part of the reason why sun lotion can cause or contribute towards the likelihood of cancer is that people put sun cream on and then they stay in the sun longer than they should. Right? So little and often with the sun, like anything, make sure you have a cycle or a time period that's easily measurable. So if you say, "Right, I'm going to just start working out.

28:22 I'm going to start on Monday. Well, so when Okay. And then when you going to stop? No. No. This is what I'm going to do now. No. like I said earlier, okay, you're going to do it forever. But that forever needs to be broken up into micro cycles. The 12 weeks is a good arc, right? For consistent three months habits. You use week one to week four as your foundation. And you're not chasing fat loss. Then this is simply I was saying to my sister today, go to the gym, get in the habit of doing it, learn the movement patterns that I mentioned earlier, the six of them.

28:58 When your nervous system is used to that after four weeks, it then wants to go because you built that habit of just going. Then weeks five to eight is this is when things can start to accelerate a little bit, right? your lifts, your weights start to go up and the fat will start to shift a little bit and you might need to nudge your calories down a touch or do and that's that's a good sign. And then finally the third phase, weeks 9 to 12, you start to dial it in. So by now it's less of a program and it's just how you eat, how you train, how you live and that's the whole point. And a pound or two a week of fat loss adds up incremental changes.

29:44 And because it's simple, you just keep going because it doesn't require much cognitive effort. You're like, "Oh, this is something I do now." Like brushing. Like when you brush your teeth, you don't think about up, down, left, right, lower teeth, upper teeth. You just do it. You can be chatting while you're doing it because you've done it for so long. Knowing versus doing. If more knowledge was the answer, we'd all be billionaires with six packs because we got Google, now we got AI. We can find anything we need to.

30:21 But we have that knowledge, but we don't take the action. So, this is the final point I'm going to make. So, I gave you the entire entire system, the calories, the protein, three days of training, progressive overloads, and the five S's. But most fellas watching this, and hopefully not you, but maybe including you, you're not along. You'll feel good. Oh, yeah. I I've done something now. I've watched the video. But it's a bit like buying the workout gear.

30:52 You do nothing. You've done nothing really. You've thought about the thing. You've read about the thing. You've heard about the thing, but you haven't done the thing. And 12 weeks from now, you'll be exactly where you are right now. The gap is never more information. The gap is doing it on the bad weeks, the bad days when you were up rolling last night like I was. Your standards are the decision, right?

31:24 Not a feeling. You don't need motivation. You need a few non-negotiables. You don't need a ceiling. You need a floor. Wake up in the morning. If I can't if I don't have time for breakfast, right? If there's only option of like cereal or granola or porridge, I don't eat that. 30 grams of protein within 30 minutes of walking followed by 30 minutes sorry 30 grams of protein, 30 minutes within waking followed by 30 minutes of walking.

32:01 You get to the gym in the first one to four weeks. You do the movement patterns. You slowly progress after that adding weight to the bar to the dumbbells. You dial down the calories a little bit and then the final stretch it starts to become a habit. You look forward to going to the gym. If you don't go, you don't feel like yourself. Something feels off. So don't get overwhelmed.

32:34 Start at the beginning. If you don't take this fat loss scorecard, you're flying blind. Like you need to know where you are to get where you want to go. That's it.