My Name is Matthew Barnett.

My story is probably much like your story. I was a dad in his late 30’s. I was about 175lbs at 5’8” with almost no muscle tone. I did not have much energy and frankly, I felt horrible about myself.

Sound familiar?

I had spend the last 15 years doing all of the fad diets that came along the pike. I tried most of them. I was always an evangelist and a zealot for whatever diet I was a part of at the time. The irony is at no point did I have any lasting success with any of them. Here are some of the paths I went down:

Eating Clean

In my early 20’s I was told fat was the enemy. So I ate “clean” as much as possible. I avoided fatty foods and red meat. I drank skim milk and ate low-fat yogurt like it was going out of style. Besides hating this type of eating because let’s be honest, fat tastes really good, I had little to no success.

Atkins

Now I had success with this. I was a low carb nazi! Only sausage chicken and steak for me. I dropped like 20 pounds in 4 months and was feeling really good about myself. I was mainly doing cardio and light weights at the time so I had little to no muscle tone, but hey I was skinny. At least for about 6 months I was. I quickly discovered that cutting out all forms of carbohydrates was not something I was prepared to do for the rest of my life. As soon as I started adding carbohydrates back into my diet, I ballooned back up to my pervious weight. Since I had very little resistance training all the weight I gained back was fat and now I was at a higher body fat percentage than I was before.

Paleo/Whole 30

Ahhhhh this must be it. Grains and dairy are bad for you! I was now 33 years old. I cut out all grains, dairy and legumes. I even started super hardcore with Whole 30 which cuts out oils and sugar of all kinds. What do you know? I lost some weight! Like at least 15 lbs. (spoiler alert: eating this way put me in a caloric deficit ;-) I proceeded to eat “mostly” paleo for the next 5 to 6 years. I never got lean, I never gained any meaningful amount of muscle, and every holiday season I gave up the carb-phobia and told myself I’d get back at it in January.

In all of these diet phases I was convinced that it was the type of food I was eating that was making me fat. The truth was that it was how much I was eating that was making me fat. It was NOT what I was eating but how much. It wasn’t until age 38 that I made the most important discovery for my future health and strength.

The point of giving up.

I reached out to a friend of mine who was super lean and super jacked. I wanted to look like him! I asked “Man What do I have to do to look like you?” He told me that I needed to lift 6 days a week for 2 hours/day, do 30 minutes of cardio/day, eat broiled chicken, baked potatoes and bananas everyday. No oils. No eating after 8pm, no cheating. I was defeated. This sounded pretty miserable. I couldn’t keep that up. I have a wife, a job, 2 kids and so much else going on in my life. This is simply not sustainable!! There had to be a better way. There was…

Flexible Dieting/Liftng Heavy

Thanks to some influencers that I came across, I suddenly realized I had been so blind my whole life. What if carbs weren’t bad? What if fat wasn’t bad? What if dairy wasn’t bad? What if I had just been eating too much food? What if the energy I was getting from food was more energy than I was burning?

It was then I discovered I.F. (intermittent fasting), flexible dieting, and a simple weight training strategy.

I discovered if I simply paid attention to my caloric intake and ate at a deficit I would lose weight. Also if I would start lifting heavy weights, virtually 100% of the weight I lost would be fat. Four months later I had gone from 175lbs to 150 and I had already gained a meaningful amount of strength. I was eating all my favorite foods again. I was eating pizza, ice cream, pasta, rice, steak, French fries, ugh—the list goes on. I found that fasting breakfast in the morning gave me so much more room to eat the rest of the day and my hunger was almost nonexistent. Now this was a way I could eat for the rest of my life!

I have never felt so alive, so strong and filled with energy in my life. I have found a way to stay lean, muscular and healthy from now on!