Our actual fat loss plan is below in PDF format.

As you get started with this plan, do not get too worked up over anything you perceive as a failure. The reason why is your daily actions will compound overshadowing any perceived failure and you'll make a great deal of progress.

Let's get started!

This is a short video from behind the scenes of Pumping Iron with Arnold Schwarzenegger. It's kind of cool to see how much fun they were having. We should be having fun with our fat loss challenge, too.

You can see Arnold's mindset throughout this video. It's awesome.

I'm including this for a short scene where they were all eating at a restaurant which starts around the 3:00 minute mark. If you're short on time just fast forward to this point and listen to what Arnold says about the "ordinary" people.

After seeing this I started thinking of people who ate breakfast and lunch as "ordinary" people. LOL.

These screenshots were taken from the Life Fasting Tracker App, which I love. You can see how long my daily fasts were since I started using this App. You can also measure how many  hours your body was in ketosis, which is kind of cool.

For me, the daily fast IS the important metric. This is what I want to make the priority. Not what the scale reads. This App will easily help you do this and it will give you the ability to see how we'll you're doing as compared to your fasting goals.

However, the best part of this App is that there are six others in our Cashflownaire Challenge group. We can see who is fasting and how long their fasts are each day. This is extremely helpful because you know others are fasting with you. You also become inspired by seeing how well everyone is doing. This little crew is kicking ass - and you should join us!

Get the free App and join our Cashflownaire Challenge group!

The screenshot above is from the Life Fasting Tracker App and I'm including it to show the compounding impact of daily fasts. Since starting this challenge, I've put myself into a fat burning mode for 110 hours (time in ketosis). Based on these numbers, we can see that my average daily fast was 19.85 hours long. All of this in only two weeks. Think about the impact after a month, or three months.

I'm sharing this for a few reasons:

1. I haven't hit my daily fasting goals over the last week. In fact, one day I didn't even fast at all because were touring college apartments with our daughter. We went out to breakfast and I just ate with everyone.

2. I have pretty much eaten whatever I've wanted during my eating window. This includes food that would typically be off limits when in "fat loss" mode.

3. Regardless of my lack in of strict control over my fasting time and food intake, I've still made progress. This progress is due to mainly to compounding small wins. The same thing is happening for you.

When we work towards a goal on a daily basis, our small wins turn into big wins as time passes. Mistakes or setbacks really don't have that much impact because of the overwhelming power of layering small wins on top of each other.

This is why we must stay focused on the small daily win without allowing ourselves to get distracted. We only pay attention to what's working and we ignore anything we perceive as a failure.

TIP: For me, I've found that early dinners make the next fasting day a little easier. This is because your eating window opens earlier in the afternoon.

Example: Dinner at 5 pm today means you can eat at 1pm tomorrow.

As you can probably tell, I'm a little behind with my weekly updates. It's been a crazy month for me. I had a challenging website problem impacting several websites. I ended up devoting many hours to fix this situation, which has delayed these updates. 🙁

On top of this, we've celebrated my wife's birthday, my daughter's birthday and St. Patrick's Day. Yep,  we went to the big St. Patty's Day parade here in Cleveland, which happened into include a few adult beverages! I've enjoyed all of these celebrations without worrying too much about fat loss.

I haven't weighed myself since starting and I probably won't do it again. I'm down an inch around my waist, which means I've shed some fat. I'm just trying to make slow and steady progress towards my ideal body (David).

Check out this picture I found a while back on Twitter:

Notice how the process of sculpting is really all about "subtraction" - removing what's unnecessary. This same idea applies to other areas of our lives, including fat loss.

When most people want to lose fat, they tend to start by adding things they think are missing. This usually includes adding exercise, fat-burning supplements and new diet plans.

We started with "subtraction" through our daily fasting.

This is extremely important for you to consider and possibly apply in other areas. Start by removing what's unnecessary. You may find that you accelerate our results. If you're not happy with your fasting results, you can subtract something else - like how many carbs you're eating.

After working through the "subtraction" side, you can then start adding things such as more protein, exercise and cold exposure. And you can even be very strategic and layer many of these strategies on top of each other: fasting + low-carb + exercise + cold exposure... all at the same time.

Finally, I thought I would share my highlights from a great book I just read which follows our fat loss plan. The title is "The Power of Appetite Correction" and it's written by Bert Herring. By this stage in our fat loss plan, you've probably experienced this reduction in your appetite!

PDF - Book Highlights

Well, we made it through 30-days in our fat loss challenge! I've included my before and after pictures above. As you can tell, I've made some progress during our challenge.

This isn't a massive transformation; however, I didn't count one calorie. I didn't track any food and ate whatever I wanted including ice cream, cake, wine, beer and lots of peanut butter. 🙂

I also wasn't super tight on my fasting. There were many days were I only fasted for 16 hours. I did exercise five or six days a week during the challenge. This wasn't new for me, as I need exercise for my mental well-being. My exercise included 3 full-body weight training  workouts and 2 or 3 cardio days each week. I stopped weighing myself and took pictures to track my progress. As the old saying goes, "a picture is worth a thousand words."

Pictures cut all the bullshit away. They show real progress.

My hope is that this is really just the beginning for you. That you choose to continue this fasting approach going forward and make it part of your life.

I didn't mention this in the initial fat loss challenge guide or in the other weekly updates, but daily fasting gives us a very important gift. This gift is...

The Joy Of Food

Somewhere in the last few decades, we've really lost sight of the joy of food.

We were told to eat 6 small meals a day. We never really experienced hunger. Because we stopped experiencing hunger, we never really appreciate what we eat.

Next we were told to track our calories so that we wouldn't overeat. Then we were told that calories didn't matter and it was all about macros: protein, carbs and fat.

All of this led us to daily tracking and "MyFitnessPal." 🙁

Food becomes another problem for us to manage. It adds stress into our lives because we're always worried about what were eating or not eating. Even worse, we beat ourselves up over what we've eaten.

How do you live a good life when you're always stressed out about food?

Living a good life comes down to eliminating and minimizing UNimportant things. Most of the stuff we've been told to do to lose weight is bullshit. And worse, these things suck the joy out of life. "I ate too many calories today. I didn't get my steps in today. Sorry, I can't have your birthday cake because I'm trying to lose weight." 🙁

Fuck that.

In fact, check out this short video from Chef's Table on Netflix:

This episode is with Dario Cecchini (watch the entire episode on Netflix if you can) and I'm including it because it highlights something extremely important about living a good life.

Food should be a celebration.
"Every day is a day of celebration."

We should truly enjoy the foods we eat.

Fasting gives this gift back to us. You've probably experienced this during the challenge, especially on those days where you were really hungry dreaming of what you'd be having for dinner.

Think about it... when was the last time you were excited about food?

Daily fasting allows us to truly enjoy our food without worrying about all the other stupid bullshit.

No more calorie counting.
No more measuring.
No more daily tracking.
No more fad diets.
No more diet cookbooks.
No more "super foods" - like Kale?

Just fast daily and enjoy your dinner. Savor every bite. Make it a celebration.

Everything else is "noise."

Everything else sucks joy out of food.

And while you're enjoying  your food, you'll know that you had a "win" for the day regardless of what you eat. You never have to feel guilty because you've earned your meal through your fasting.

And over time, your small daily wins eventually turn into a BIG win.

Since starting this fat loss challenge, I've received a few emails that I thought I would share.

From Walt: I'm doing pretty good with the fasting part. Your Cashflownaire newsletter from September or October inspired me to lose some weight. I ended up experimenting with snake diet among other things and lost 23 lbs in 34 days. Unfortunately I gained about 10 lbs back over Christmas but I'm back down to 180lbs (started at 206lbs). My goal is to get a six pack.

The Snake Diet is hard core fasting. Our fat loss plan gets you to the same point at a slower pace and is designed to help you maintain this going forward. Some try hardcore fasting right off the bat and end up quitting.

From Bill: Thanks for info, Rob!  Question: I take 8-10 vitamin/mineral supplement capsules with morning light breakfast. Could/should they be taken without food on fast mornings? If not taken alone in morn, assume OK during 4-hr food time? Thanks for your thoughts, Bill

More than likely you can just wait and take everything in your eating window. You can Google the name of the "supplement & fasting" to see what research pops up. I take a few supplements in the morning without food. These haven't caused any stomach distress.

From David: Thanks for the fat-loss program. I used an almost identical one last year to lose my first 20#. When you listed exercises, you skipped the back. Kind of dangerous to work the chest and shoulders without the back. I love intermittent fasting as a tool but have a tendency to overeat during my window. So I overlap a caloric restriction with my window (maintenance - 500). This combo has been gold. 

Yikes, I forgot to include a back exercise in the plan! Good catch! Yes, include back exercises with your resistance training! Back rows, lat pull-downs, etc.

If you're fasting for 20 plus hours and not losing body fat, my suggestion would be to minimize processed foods instead of restricting calories. Basically avoid anything that comes in a box. Eat more protein (beef, chicken, fish, eggs, pork), fruit, salad and veggies.

From Matt: You mentioned in your plan that chin ups hurt your elbows.  For many years I struggled with elbow pain.  Really bad sometimes. During my most painful times I couldn’t do wide-grip chin ups, but I could do close grip pull ups (thumbs outward on the bar) without much pain. 

I suspect the one exercise causing all my trouble was dips.  Whether it was with the fixed parallel bars or ring dips my elbows always seemed to flare up after I do them.  So I cut dips out completely.  I also cut out meathead exercises like barbell bench presses and isolated movements (curls, tricep extensions, etc… ).  I don’t think David ever performed an isolated muscle movement.  Swinging a sword or slaying infidels requires compound movements.

Cool plan… Very pleased to see wine in there.

If you have any questions, you can post them in the comments below and I'll try and answer them for you! Also, please post any success you have with this plan! It will provide motivation for others who are going the challenge, too!