Fitness Design Lab

215 pounds.

That was me during COVID. Not lazy. I was living the way most people live. Eating whatever was convenient, working out when I felt like it, getting worse without noticing. Then one day I noticed.

I tried the usual stuff. Calorie counting. Meal plans. Programs I found online. Some worked for a few weeks. None of them stuck. Every one felt like a grind. You white-knuckle your way through, lose some weight, get tired of being miserable, end up right back where you started.

I did that cycle enough times to realize something uncomfortable: the approach wasn't the problem. The approach was the problem.

The programs weren't making me better. They were making me hate my body and my routine. Then I'd quit. The only rational response to that setup.

So I stopped looking for the right program and started building my own.

The question isn't "how do I get in shape." It's "what kind of body do I actually want to live in when I'm 75, and how do I get there without hating every day between now and then."

That's a design question, not a fitness question. I'm good at design questions.

I worked backwards from the outcome I wanted. Strong enough to do anything I'd actually need to do. Mobile enough to still move well in my 70s and 80s. Looking good as a side effect, not a goal. And above all, a thing I actually wanted to show up for. If I wasn't going to show up, nothing else mattered.

That eliminated most of the fitness industry in one pass. Bodybuilding gets you big and wrecks you getting there. Powerlifting is about maximum lift, once. Endurance programs eat your legs alive and ignore the upper body I wanted. All legitimate. None of them answering the question I was asking.

So I designed my own system from scratch. Three pieces: the diet, the training, and the test.

The diet is the easy one. The problem isn't willpower — processed food wrecks your taste buds. An apple tastes like nothing when you've been eating Doritos all day.

I ran myself through a palate reset. Cut the processed stuff. Cut the sugar. Eat bland whole foods for a few weeks. Do some short fasts. A month in, fruit tasted like candy. Meat tasted rich. Plain yogurt tasted good. Nothing had changed about the food. Everything had changed about me.

After the reset, the diet is simple. Whole foods, nothing processed, no sugar except honey. Mostly meat and fruit with some vegetables, eggs, dairy. Eat until you're full. That's the whole plan. No counting, no tracking, no measuring. I call it the Candy Apple Diet because after the reset, that's what an apple actually tastes like.

My dad has been obese his entire adult life. He's tried every diet you can name and fallen off every single one. I walked him through this. He went from 275 to 185 in less than a year and has kept it off for over two years. His word for it is "effortless." That's not my word. I don't even like that word. But it's his, and I believe him because he said it.

The training runs six days a week. Morning strength, afternoon cardio. Every strength session is full body: one push, one pull, one lower body, one mobility exercise. Short. In and out. I leave the gym feeling better than when I walked in, not destroyed.

Gym culture says you destroy a muscle group once a week and let it recover for six days. That works if you're a bodybuilder. I'm not. What works for me is moderate stimulus applied frequently. Shorter sessions, more often, across more movements. You get strong without getting beaten up. And because each session is short, you actually show up. I haven't missed a day in months. Not because I'm disciplined. Because I enjoy it.

Cardio runs three types. Long slow distance for the aerobic base. Sprints for power. Intervals for mixed intensity. VO2 max is one of the strongest predictors of how long you're going to live. It beats blood pressure and cholesterol as a mortality marker. That's worth showing up for.

Every Sunday I run a battery of eight tests. Dead hang. Pull-ups. Push-ups. Single leg squat. Farmer's walk. Full bridge. Twelve-minute run. Two-hundred-meter sprint. Each one hits a specific longevity marker. Grip strength predicts cardiovascular mortality. Single leg strength predicts fall risk. The bridge tells me whether my spine is aging faster than the rest of me.

I write the numbers down every week. The goal is to beat last week. That's the whole game.

No coach. No app. No subscription. Just me against the version of myself from seven days ago. The competition is always perfectly matched because my opponent is me. And I'm honest about it. If the numbers drop, they drop. That's data, not failure.

I went from 215 and no pull-ups to 165 and ten of them. I train every day and look forward to it. My dad lost 90 pounds and kept it off for the first time in his life. Neither of us white-knuckled through anything.

The system works because each piece makes the other pieces easier. Reset your palate and healthy food actually tastes good. You stop fighting yourself at every meal. Short sessions mean you show up every day. Not because you're disciplined. Because nothing's wrecking you. And the weekly test turns it into a game you can't help playing. You're not enduring. You're racing last Sunday's version of yourself.

I got fat during COVID and decided to treat my body like a product I was designing from scratch. This is what came out of it. I'm running it on myself every day. It works. That's as far as I'll take it for now.

If you're thinking about your own version of this, the door's open.