And barely any of it actually works.

Well, I’ve solved this problem. Doing it my way will cost you around $88, with $50 of that being a one-time cost.

I used to keep wild hours that fluctuated weekly, if not daily. I could never seem to get to sleep at the same time every night, so I’d stay up later… which would screw me up for the next day and I’d feel horrible… then I’d go to bed too early (or too late) again… which would mess me up for the NEXT day, and on and on and on…

It was a vicious cycle that saw no end in sight. I couldn’t get any meaningful work done and never seemed to have enough time in the day to do the things that really mattered.

Until about 3 months ago, when I stumbled across some experiments that have literally changed my life.

Here’s your New Plan, all laid out nice and neat for ya:

Step 1. California Poppy Extract – Cost: $8.95/oz

Go to Vitacost.com and get a 1 oz bottle of California poppy extract. Before bed each night, put 20 drops in a cup and then put a little water in the cup. Just a LITTLE water – enough to swallow in one gulp. Swig it down and continue on to step 2. (California poppy extract will increase your deep wave sleep on average by around 20%)

Step 2. Almond Butter (I prefer Barney Butter – smooth – $7.72/jar) and Flax Oil – $16.89/bottle

Eating two tablespoons of organic almond butter on celery sticks before bed eliminated MOST of the mornings where I woke up feeling like shit. Ever wonder how you can sleep 8–10 hours and STILL feel tired? The likely culprit: low blood sugar. Make a pre-bed snack part of your nutritional program. One to two tablespoons of flaxseed oil (120–240 calories) can be used in combination with the celery-and-almond-butter to further increase cell repair during sleep and thus decrease fatigue.

Go see BarneyButter.com for the almond butter (12 pounds of the stuff just arrived at my doorstep the other day) and Vitacost.com for the flax oil (I get the 32 oz because I like bulk and it saves precious money)

Step 3. Cholesterol! (yay!) – Cost: depends

Eat at least 800 milligrams of cholesterol (about 4 or 5 large whole eggs) and 40 grams of protein within 3 hours of going to bed. This will allow you to go to sleep FASTER, and combined with the other steps basically knocking you out cold when it’s time to sleep.

Personally I do not eat eggs every night because good eggs are expensive when you eat that many all the time, so I’ve engineered my evening meal to contain the necessary protein (via chicken breast) and cholesterol to see me through the night.

Oh, and if you’re one of those fossils who still think cholesterol is bad, you need to do some reading up on HDL versus LDL cholesterol.

Step 4. Cold bath or shower – Cost: Free

Take a cold bath or shower 1 hour before bed. I didn’t believe this at first and resisted it… but after I actually started DOING it, the results are amazing.

Don’t fight me on this, just TRY it and you’ll see. Freeze yourself and prosper.

Step 5. Use a WakeMate – Cost: $50 one time

When it was first released to the public, I was among the first people to get a WakeMate. Basically the WakeMate is a little wristband you charge up during the day and wear during the night while you sleep. It monitors my movements while I sleep and then communicates via Bluetooth to my iPod Touch to wake me up at a time when I’m in a lighter phase of sleep and thus will be more likely FEEL BETTER the second I wake up.

I’ve been using it for about 45 days now, and I can say that IT WORKS. Get one. Despite some recent software bugs they’ve had lately (all of which have been fixed), the device and concept WORKS.

What you do is set an alarm for a time you want to wake up – then the WakeMate will use that time as a target to wake you up sometime within a 20 minute window, no later than that target time. You can also add tags to your night’s sleep so you can look back on your sleep history and see what sorts of variables affected your sleep positively or negatively.

The online “analytics” feature allows you to upload your sleep stats to your own account on the WakeMate website every morning so you can graph and analyze your sleep data over time. This has been VERY helpful for me to nail down exactly what is helping me and what isn’t.

Step 6. Sleep in a cool room – Cost: Free

Use a single bedsheet with room temp of 67 to 70 F – as low as 65 but test different socks to keep your feet warm. Lately I’ve been profiting from this colder winter by turning my central heat OFF and just letting the temperature do whatever it wants.

The results have been good, I’m saving heating bill money and I realize that I sleep better in a cold room as long as my feet and hands are warm and my blood is circulating well.

Side note: Taking cayenne pepper every day (40,000 BTU) lately has allowed me to let temperatures in my home reach what would normally be extremely uncomfortable levels. In fact it’s so cold in here right now, no one else can stand it! No one but me of course. With all the things I’m doing and experiments I’m running, my body is generating so much excess heat that I actually feel like I need ICE PACKS on my neck in 65 degree rooms! This is awesome and combining this with what I’m doing to make my testosterone levels skyrocket makes me feel like some kind of superhuman who can melt stuff with his eyes… or… something like that

Step 7. Wake up with (natural) UV light shining in your face – Cost: Free

We are evolutionarily programmed to respond to and feel AWAKE and ALERT when the sun comes up and hits our face in the morning. But so many people (me included) live in houses and apartments that are shut off from natural sources of light by curtains, shades, etc.

You must make certain you do NOT wake up each morning in a DARK room! That is very bad for your brain, because you’re essentially “tricking” your mind into still thinking it’s night time, thus your mind will keep you groggy and sleepy.

But when you start waking up to real UV light, you will train your body back into its natural habit of revving your engines to start the day. Combined with all the other stuff on this list, you’ll feel ready to go INSTANTLY when you wake up. Gone will be the “yawn, stretch, think about going back to bed, slog outta bed, etc” phase and you’ll hop out of the sheets and get moving right away. Also, this will help you go to sleep much faster the following night.

The source of your UV light doesn’t have to be natural sunlight but it helps. A good alternative are those little lights they use to treat SAD (seasonal affective disorder.) They are high-end blue light emitters and work just as good.

And there you have it; 7 real life steps I personally follow every day that have changed how I sleep and how I feel every day, thus truly changing my life and allowing me to get more done and feel better about it.

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Seriously.

Not even a sniffle.

It was at least 12 years ago since I had a cold and even longer since I came down with the flu. And except for a couple checkups, I haven’t been to the doctor in a decade.

Normally I don’t think about stuff like this, but looking over my notes today I was reminded of an old blog post written by my friend Jason where he talked about how a lot of people have commented to me that I’m “lucky” or that “nothing bad ever happens” to me. Sickness and disease are often among those “bad things” they mention.

Well, I need to set the record straight: bad things happen to me all the time. The only reason most people don’t notice is because I’m often fairly well prepared when Lady Fate drops by to sprinkle some shit on my parade.

Like a hitman silently slitting the President’s throat, it is preparation and prevention that lets me deal with my problems quickly, quietly and without fuss.

Since nature trapped us in these damn bodies of ours, we’d better take good care of them for as long as possible. Even if you’re a worshiped genius who uses $100-dollar-bills as toilet paper, life’s no fun when you’re fat, sick, and ugly.

So here are 3 things that slimmed me up, sculpted my body, and beefed my immune system into a cigar-chomping badass motherfucker.

#1.General Eating Habits

I eat two low-calorie meals per day. In rare cases when I’m especially hungry, the third meal is always very small. And since they’re usually the same, I never have to worry about portion sizes, fat, cholesterol, or any of that other nonsense. Template the meals once and never worry about them again.

My main food mostly consists of 90% lean beef (with the remaining 10% almost entirely cooked out by my Flavorwave infrared oven), sometimes Alaskan salmon, sided with vegetables like corn, green beans and spinach. Sometimes I swap out the meat with a small helping of Stouffer’s Meat Lasagna. I never snack in between meals or in front of the TV.

You might think I’d get tired of this after awhile. But in 4 years, that has never happened. Why? Well, I discovered that if you eat only when you’re absolutely starving, you train your body to a Pavlov’s dog-like response to the welcome relief the meal inevitably brings. That way, you’re always satisfied.

When I eat alone, I usually do not drink while eating. Doing that weakens the stomach acids and makes it more difficult for your body to digest the food. So I do my “heavy drinking” after the meal and throughout the day. I’ve found green tea (with lemon juice added to increase absorption), MateVana, and Samurai Chai to be the best drinks. They’re all either low-calorie or no-calorie and the latter two jumpstart your brain similar to coffee, but without the jitters and unhealthy side effects. I never put additives in my drinks.

After eating in the morning, I then mix up a glass of whole milk (yes, whole) into a chocolate whey protein shake, which gives me an added boost of about 26 grams of protein and a few more calories. This is also the drink I use to wash down my buckshot load of nutritional supplements that we’ll talk about here in a minute.

Then I pour a mug of tea and get to work.

By the way, have you ever looked at the whole milk label? It’s not that much different than 2%. One of my friends thought for years “whole milk” meant something like “100%” or some other obscenely high number. No no no… whole milk is about “3 1/2%” – only 3 more grams of fat and 20 more calories per serving. Hardly the heart-stopper many believe. Still, why whole milk? Because that’s how it comes out of the cow. In other words, it hasn’t been messed with as much as the other milks. Skim milk is “ok” but I find it too watery for my liking. Surprisingly, Sam’s Club sells good milk guaranteed to have no hormones or any other crap in it… for about $2.20 per gallon. (Aside: Funny how right next door at Walmart, the milk DOES have hormones, costs more, and tastes worse… incredible how screwed people are when they don’t want to pay the $45 annual membership fee.)

As for alcohol, I seldom drink. When I do, it’s usually wine which has about 12-18% alcohol. At that level, the worst case scenario is you get a little loopy after downing a bottle. It’s the easy-going, fun kind of loopy. No big deal. The hard stuff leaves a dry-as-dust trail of fire down the throat, makes you look and feel like shit, and wrecks your body over time – not fun. The only mixed drink I really like is the White Russian or Irish Cream.

#2. Nutritional Supplements

Our bodies are just one big chemical cocktail. A chemistry experiment that doesn’t function properly without the right molecules floating around in the right places.

That’s why I’m big on supplements. You can’t get all the weird mix of stuff your body needs just by eating the food you find at the store. Even if you’re rich and buy all the best stuff, it’s still damn near impossible. There’s a lot of reasons for that, but it has a lot to do with how our food is grown and processed these days and also because you can’t possibly scarf enough of all the stuff you’d have to eat to get every single nutrient.

That’s why it’s good to supplement. Here’s a complete list of what I take every day:

500 mcg B12 (in liquid spray form) – This is AWESOME for energy. If you’re a slug in the morning, start taking this and you won’t even have to “wake up” – you’ll hop right out of bed, ready to do whatever.

5,000 to 10,000 IU Vitamin D3 – This makes depressed people happy, boosts the immune system and helps with tons of diseases, including all kinds of cancer and many virii. Your body makes a certain amount of vitamin D whenever you’re exposed to the sun, but many of the soaps people use when bathing cause it to leave the skin before it has time to be carried away by the bloodstream. Also since most people work indoors, they’re never exposed to the right amount of sunlight for it to do them any good. Certain people (me included) get depressed in the winter time for lack of sunlight. Supplementing with D3 solves these problems.

2,000 mg Vitamin C - I shouldn’t have to tell you about vitamin C. You should already know how much ass it kicks, but you probably aren’t getting enough of it. I’ve found 2,000 mg (that’s 2 grams) per day to be the ideal for me. I used to have a problem with bleeding gums whenever I brushed my teeth, but since I started doin’ C, I have healthy strong gums. This one alone is also a major factor into never catching cold or getting the flu. Hell, I can even hang around sick people and not get anything. You betcha.

Misc assortment of B1, B2, B6 - The additional B vitamins link up the nervous system with the rest of your body and helps it all communicate with one another. This solves a bunch of muscle issues and boosts your energy even more.

1 standard multi vitamin with everything - There are a lot of trace minerals that are hard to get in food and expensive to buy separate supplements for, so a good gel-cap multi-vitamin is a one-stop-shop to cover all the miscellaneous B.S.

800 IU Vitamin E - Actually this is the only supplement I take where I’ve not noticed any sort of tangible benefit. There was some study published awhile back where they said vitamin E made people slightly more likely to die sooner, but then some doctors called bullshit on the study citing bias, incomplete facts, and an inherent flaw in the study itself. So who knows? The only reason I still take it is because the bottle isn’t empty.

Calcium, Magnesium and Zinc combo - Now THIS one is awesome. Taking these 3 separately won’t do you nearly as good as taking them all at the same time. That’s because they all rely on and enhance each other in various ways. The calcium is great for bone-strength, the magnesium keeps the calcium from turning into arthritis (and a lot of other good benefits) and the zinc… well, let’s just say the zinc helps certain parts of a man’s body perform with absolute reliability and precision

2,600 mg Flaxseed oil - Flax seed is a great source of omega-3 fatty acids, which help your brain perform at its best and antioxidants help slow down the oxidation process that slowly damages your cells over time and eventually kills you… literally. The more we can slow down this oxidation process, the longer we’ll live and the better we’ll feel while doing it.

3,000 mg Fish oil - More antioxidants and omega-3′s. Actually now I’ve replaced my traditional fish oil with a mixture of several oils (including fish oil) that provide omega-3, 6, and 9 all in one.

1,200 mg Sun Chlorella - These are weird little green crumbly bits of a type of single-cell plant organism grown from freshwater green algae. It contains tons of amino acids, vitamins, and minerals. Awesome little plant. Helped improve my mood and clean out my digestive system when I first started taking it.

26 extra grams of protein via shake - I already talked about this one in the food section above. The extra protein from whey builds muscle much faster when combined with a good workout. Actually this 26 grams is pretty small compared to what I should be taking if I were more serious about bodybuilding. I’ve heard some meatheads say to inhale the same number of grams of protein as your body weight per day. So if you weigh 150 pounds, you take 150 grams of protein.

All that may sound like a lot to you, but this is real life and most people don’t even get a fraction of what they need. A lot of young people (up to age 34) eat junk and don’t notice many side effects, so they think it’s fine… but the only reason their body can handle the malnutrition is because they’re so young. Soon enough the body will cough, wheeze, and choke they’ll end up like everyone else on death row who thought prevention was for saps.

Right now I’m considering adding a few more things to my list because recently I read this:

The biggest breakthrough in anti-aging medicine in our lifetime involves telomere biology.

Each time your cells divide, they copy your DNA to make the new cell. But the telomeres – the sections of DNA at both ends of a chromosome – get shorter with every copy. And the shorter your telomeres are, the “older” the cell acts.

Once the telomeres get to their shortest length, your cells can no longer divide, and damaged or diseased cells aren’t replaced. This causes a chain reaction that weakens your tissues and organs. And that can only lead to disease… and, ultimately, death.

Fortunately, there are some ways to start to slow down the rate at which your telomeres are shortening right now…

1. Lower your homocysteine levels. According to a report in the journal Atherosclerosis, high levels of this amino acid can shorten your telomeres as much as 3 times faster.

I help my patients lower their homocysteine levels by having them supplement daily with the following:

Vitamin B12 – 500 mcg
Folic acid – 800 mcg
Vitamin B6 – 25 mg
Riboflavin (B2) – 25 mg
TMG (trimethylglycine) – 500 mg

You can find these supplements at your local health food store. If you don’t want to take them all separately, you can use the same formula I give my patients.

2. Take vitamin C. This inexpensive supplement is a powerful antioxidant. And recent studies – including one reported in the journal Life Sciences – show it can slow telomere shortening by over 50 percent. I recommend 2,000 mg per day to my patients.

3. Take SOD. Besides protecting your cells from the damage of toxins and stress, SOD (superoxide dismutase) has been shown to slow the rate of telomere shortening. I recommend 500 mg a day. You can find it at your local health food store. Or you can check out my formula, which contains SOD as well as other potent cell protectors.

All men should be taking 200 mcg of selenium and at least 200 IU of vitamin E daily.

Hmm, so I guess vitamin E isn’t so worthless after all.

#3. Workouts

The building I live in right now has a full-blown gym in the basement, so I like to sneak down there late at night when sane people are asleep to do cardio and pump iron.

What I’ve learned is if you’re going to do cardio, do HARD cardio for shorter periods of time instead of lighter cardio for longer periods of time. In other words, it’s MUCH better for your body to bust your butt for 15 minutes than it is to walk long distances. Walking or running long distances when its easy will actually do more wear and tear on your body over time with less health benefit.

So what I do is a quick mile to a mile and a half on an incline while carrying weights and swinging my arms back and forth naturally. This SUCKS when you first start out, but after about a week it gets a lot easier.

Then I do leg and arm curls, bench press, sit-ups, pullups, and several other kinds of weights to top everything off. Recently I also got the P90X workout DVDs to help me with a good stretching routine, some Yoga, and more hardcore ways of strengthening my body. The whole goal of that system is to vary the workout enough where the muscle development never plateaus, leaving you with a straight line of growth.

Overall, I’m sure there are a few tweaks I could make to my system. But after 4 years of testing… everything I’ve described here really does work wonders for me. It keeps me in shape, healthy, and of course… I never get sick.

If you have any sort of weight or health problem, maybe it would help you too. Give it a try and find out.

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Let’s try “accept” instead. There. That’s better.

You see, I grew up in a strict household of cleanliness when I was little. That meant to always wash, always keep everything neat and tidy, and never mess with anyone else’s things when you’re over at their house. Always respect other people’s personal rules and belongings.

Those are a fine set for a little kid to live by most of the time and mom had only the best of intentions, but the problem with me was I always took everything so exact and literal, often to unhealthy extremes. This created a cycle of weird ups and downs throughout my life that I’m only just now beginning to balance out.

Like there was this one period I went though when I was little where I felt like I just HAD to take 2 showers a day. Then later on it got worse, to where even something silly like going #2 in the bathroom was sufficient grounds for yet another bath or another shower.

Eventually it got to the point where I washed my hands so often, I had to get a prescription cream (called Elocon cream or something like that) from the doctor to treat the weird cluster of bumps that formed just underneath my right hand’s middle knuckle from all the hot water hitting it each day.

Then, somehow… slowly, surely, I came out of it and stopped washing so damn often…

…and in realizing the error of my ways… swung in the complete opposite direction.

This time I was not bathing twice a day, but more like once every two or three days. And if I was depressed, maybe a little longer. One time I remember my uncle saying something like “I just don’t get you, Greg. For a guy who’s so organized with everything to let himself go so long without a bath… it just doesn’t make any sense!”

Well, he was right. It didn’t make any sense.

I say this not to gross you out, but to demonstate to all the compulsives out there that yours truly has indeed been there. I know how it feels to be on both ends of the extreme. I have seen the belly of the beast, and have returned triumphant.

It all has to do with your thinking and how you personally perceive what being “clean” and being “dirty” really mean.

This nation has become obsessed with cleanliness to the point of absurdity. Today there seems to be no resting place, no point at which we can feel comfortable in our own skins for more than a few hours after our last shower. This whole concept of “clean” is a moving target, always receding into the distance.

Like most things social, interest in home and body hygiene has waxed and waned through the ages. Early Egyptians played around in pools, ancient Greeks and Romans had their bath houses. Enlightenment Europeans never bathed a day in their lives, believing water spread diseases like the Plague. Literally.

But ever since deodorant and mouthwash entered the American marketplace in the 20th century, standards of cleanliness have steadily racheted up. And now nearly a decade into the 21st century, we are consumed by a full-blown germophobia and personal hygiene mania.

Office supply stores sell germ-resistant highlighters and scissors. Ten years ago, hand-sanitizing gels could be found ONLY in hospitals. Now they’re flying off the shelves of every grocery and drug store. One time I remember going into a Kroger to help my mom look for some food and being greeted at the door by a free box of sanitizing wipes (to use on the shopping cart handle, naturally.) In 2005, more than $67,300,000 (that’s MILLION, buckwheat) in hand sanitizers were sold… that’s a 54% increase over the year before! And it keeps rising every year!

Why the massive panic over invisible threats?

On the surface, it seems like an earnest effort to promote health… but a closer look suggests we feel a deep mistrust of our bodies and profound pessimism about human nature: The backyard is a hotbed of creepy-crawlies, my body is brimming with toxins, and the germs in my kitchen are just waiting for Independence Day…the day to rise up out of their desperate lives of oppression and raid the palace of my immune system!

We scour and scrub in an attempt to allieviate our anxieties and exercise some degree of control over an environment we perceive as hostile – an act of pathetic futility, as I will soon show you.

We wage war against what is by far the largest population of living things on earth – because the weight of all microbes is…

25 times heavier than all other life… COMBINED!

And consider this: without bugs, we wouldn’t even BE here. We wouldn’t draw a single breath!

Just as overprotecting children can keep them from developing social skills, scrutinizing ourselves undermines our immune system, which actually REQUIRES a constant flow of germs to keep it in good shape. What’s more is overuse of cleaning products exposes us to toxic chemicals often more dangerous than the germs we’re supposed to be protecting ourselves from. And then of course there’s the so-called “superbugs” – germs that have developed a resistance to the drugs found in cleaning products.

“They’re lying in wait for you at the ATM machine and on your computer keyboard at work. Secretly, they attach themselves to your hands when you push a shopping cart at the store. The little pests will even attach themselves to your children’s hands when they romp on playground equipment.”

Almost sounds convincingly icky, doesn’t it? Well, what you just read is the exact text of a promo piece sent to the press by a maker of hand-sanitizing gels called “99 Places Where You Need to Watch Out For Germs.”

From a marketing point of view (keep in mind here, I am a copywriter) that’s a pretty good title and a halfway decent intro. But you gotta remember WHY they’re sending it out; to get press… to get attention for their product in hopes they’ll get reported on and (they hope) sell more blue goop.

And that’s ALL it is; selling. Nothing more. Just someone else’s way of trying to convince you that life on it’s own is not safe enough, not good enough, or somehow otherwise flawed… and therefore you need their product to make yourself whole again.

Don’t be taken in by all the fear-mongering. Your body contains an estimated 100 TRILLION cells… and only 10 measily percent of those one-hundred trillion actually belong to YOU! The rest? Yup, GERMS. All germs. Most of which help you survive and live a normal life.

In fact, if you were 100% germ-free this very moment – you’d be dead in 2 weeks. That’s it. No more life for you. All because you need germs as much as they need you.

Germs help us digest our food, keep our immune system in shape, cure diseases, and some even manufacture vitamins for us. Hell, even the very oxygen we BREATHE is a byproduct of blue-green algae (that’s actual SCUM in case you didn’t know) that evolved millions of years ago.

Ok, ok… so it’s good to become more “at one” with germs and nature in general. But don’t take it too far like I did. You still need to bathe, still need to wash the dirt off our hands, and for chrissakes don’t suck on your fingers after you cut open a chicken.

You need to learn, as I did, to… just… let go. Slowly at first, with little things.

Let that kitchen counter get a little crummy, a little greasy. Just a bit. Let that coffee table get a little dusty… until it bothers you. Let it push you a little longer. Do several things in a row without washing your hands… THEN seek sweet relief. THEN finally dust the furniture.

Eventually you’ll notice that things don’t seem to bother you as much as they once did; the world did not end when you let the house slide a little. In fact, maybe it got a little messier… a little more organic… more natural… you know, more like a HOME and a little less like a museum. (Thank you, Courtney & Christine, for helping me realize that.)

And you know what? Stop using all the hand-sanitizers and especially anti-bacterial soap, except for the most demanding of situations.

Why? Well, take a look at the photos below and you’ll see what took me so long to realize for myself… keeping yourself clean doesn’t have to be a “medical thing” – no, plain old water does a shockingly good job all by itself!

Here is the bacteria imprint left by a “normal” unwashed hand that’s just been doing some random work around the house. No big deal, just a hand. Maybe even YOUR hand right now:

Ewww. Gross.

Ok, now let’s look at the SAME HAND, this time after washing for 30 seconds with WATER ONLY:

Wow. Surprisingly better, don’t you think? I thought so. I had no idea water alone could get rid of most of the nasty on our skin. Amazing.

Now look at this one, after 30 seconds of PLAIN, ORDINARY SOAP:

Note that wasn’t “anti-bacterial” soap… just plain soap. You know, like a bar of Zest or Irish Spring, for example. With soap you get almost everything!

And if you extend the wash time to a full minute, here’s what you get, again using plain soap:

Practically everything. So do you see? You DON’T need anti-bacterial soap. In fact most of the time you don’t need anti-bacterial ANYTHING at all! It’s all a big bluff, a big show to sell more products to more people.

It’s simple salesmanship, really… if you’re just selling “soap” there’s only so far you can take your pitch. Maybe it smells nice. Maybe it feels good or cleans better.

Ah, but anti-bacterial soap? Clean isn’t enough anymore. Merely “washing away” germs down the drain will no longer suffice. No, now we need to “kill” all the bad germs living on our hands and lurking in our crevases. Now our pitch can take on a whole new tone altogether.

Now our pitch can offer up the lofty concepts of “protection against disease” or better yet… the idea of “healthier, happier children.”

In the end, balance is the key. Don’t do stupid things like rubbing your open wounds into raw chicken breast, but also don’t walk through life in saran wrap and tin foil, protecting yourself unnecessarily against an unseen force that will get you (and in reality has already gotten you) anyway.

Like it or not, we’re every bit a part of this world as germs are. And when we’re gone, we’re worm food anyway. Better make peace with the lil buggers now before it’s too late.

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I came from a family with little money, and when I wasn’t eating better quality stuff from the farm, most of the time we could only afford what I now call “poor people food” – which is the crappy, high-calorie, low-nutrition stuff nobody else wants. It’s the kind of stuff Aldi’s sells… or some of the REALLY cheap crap you could find at Wal-Mart… or no-name private label brands independent grocery stores used to carry.

Those very few years of bad eating created excess blubber that followed me around for years afterward; all the way up until 8th and 9th grade in school, where I finally buckled down and went from 240 pounds all the way down to an all-time low of 162 or so.

I kept it off for a long time, but eventually some of it started to come back. A few years after high school, I was back up to around 230 pounds. The worst part was I didn’t even realize it when it was happening… it all just sortof snuck up on me slowly and without warning. Then one day you just wake up and wonder how you gained it all back.

But right now, as I write this, I am thinner, more muscular, fit, trim, and in better overall health than I’ve ever been in my entire life. And with each passing week, I continue to get better and more improved.

How do I do it? Does it involve back-breaking hours in the gym, coked up on a daily diet of power bars, super-smoothies, and radioactive crystal energy rods?

No.

How about a strict daily intake of veggie salad with a side of diet seaweed?

Never.

Actually, I discovered the solution to my weight problem completely by accident. It’s a little weird, and requires some discipline… but it works wonders quickly and without too much effort.

Here’s the story:

Shortly after my mom got married, her new husband’s father died, and both of them flew off out west to Washington and California to tend to what they THOUGHT were some simple funeral arrangements and matters of estate.

But it wasn’t long before “simple” became ultra-complicated, as my mom and her husband navigated the tricky unwinding labrynth of his father’s estate, lack of a will, untold lawyer problems, and brutal real estate market.

This left their house back home in Missouri utterly vacant, and in need of a trustworthy house-sitter.

Enter yours truly.

What started out as a simple few months of house-sitting actually became nearly 2 years of me watching over things and running affairs back at home.

During these 2 years, I had to make do on VERY little money, yet eat healthy and make progress on my own life at the same time.

So I went to the local grocery stores, and spent some time… SOME REALLY SERIOUS TIME… studying everything offered on the shelves, their costs, their nutritional values, calories, fat, fiber… everything.

Then I went home and compared my lists, trying to create what to me would be the MOST IDEAL MEAL POSSIBLE… which at that time meant these five things:

1. Extremely inexpensive. (I wanted to get my cost-per-meal (CPM) to somewhere between one and two dollars at the most)
2. Low-calorie.
3. Makes me feel full when I’m done eating and stays with me throughout the day.
4. Healthy, with the proper fiber, fat content, and nutrients.
5. Tasted good. Wasn’t something I had to “stomach” down… it had to be something I could eat with pleasure.
6. Wasn’t hard, or time-consuming to fix… because I have far better things to be doing with my time than sweating it out in a hot kitchen, day after day, week after week.

Oddly enough, what I discovered wasn’t some hippie-induced orgy of lettuce and vegetables… No, what I discovered was the magic of what I now call “Greg Thompson’s Stouffers Lasagna Diet.”

Here’s how it works:

Step #1. Stock your freezer with the largest trays of Stouffers Lasagna you can possibly find. Mine shown below are the huge 96 oz (6 pound!) trays sold at Sam’s Club for around $9.60 – now THAT’S cheap! On my plan, the lasagna is the best way I found to provide the necessary fat, carbs, protein, and calories you need to keep on living, without giving you TOO much of ‘em. Plus, it tastes quite good… and since the other stuff in my plan doesn’t taste like much, this lasagna will feel like heaven hitting your tongue after a couple weeks.

Step #2. Stock your pantry with the largest quantities of corn and green beans as you can find in one place. I prefer the 6 pound cans of Del Monte sweet corn and Del Monte green beans. They’re the good stuff without the additives – and cost about $2.60 and $3.50 each. Ultra cheap. The green beans are a healthy weight loss tool in and of themselves, and they make a great ultra-low-calorie filler for the whole meal. And the corn is a pretty sweet way to get your fiber.

Step #3. Unpack one of the Stouffers Lasagnas from the freezer and pop it into the oven @ 400 degrees F – and leave it there for the next 2 hours. After the 2 hours are up, take the foil cover off the top and leave it in there for another 10 minutes.

Step #4. After the last 10 minutes are up, turn off the heat and remove the pan from the oven. I usually let mine cool as it rests on the unused stove burners, so I don’t risk burning my countertop or something else I’d like to keep looking nice.

Step #5. Cut the lasagna up into EIGHT (8) equal pieces. This is very important, because 8 pieces out of a 96 oz lasagna gives you just enough of a portion each meal to fill you up and provide necessary calories and fat, but not so much that it’s TOO much. This size is juuuuust right!

IMPORTANT UPDATE: Since I originally wrote this post, I experimented with some changes to how I divide the pan. I discovered that by cutting each of the 8 pieces in half (for a total of 16 pieces), I not only doubled the amount of time a single pan lasts, but also cut my daily lasagna calories in HALF, without affecting my hunger at all. Less money, less calories, and more weight loss without going hungry = awesome.

Step #6. Now scoop out some green beans and corn – enough to fill in the gaps in your plate. For what it’s worth, I’ve also found that Popeye’s spinach or southern style turnip greens will work well as extras if you need something more than just the green beans and corn. However, a warning: don’t mess with this recipe by adding or removing foods… believe me, I’ve tried just about everything and have found ONLY THIS EXACT COMBINATION of stuff to produce the incredibly effective weight loss results. Every time I tried to “mess with the system” I got burned and my weight either gained or stagnated. I’ll say it again: if you’re going to do this, DON’T MESS WITH THE SYSTEM Just let it work for you, and the weight will begin to melt off.

Eat this 2 times per day; one meal right after you get up in the morning, and another meal a few hours before you go to bed. Eventually, your body will train itself to only be hungry at these times and the food you get with each meal with fill you up until the next.

Supplement the meal with a nice cold glass of green tea, like I have in the picture below, and occasionally alternate it with some milk. (It must be WHOLE MILK, and the good kind that doesn’t have all that antibiotic crap in it… Pet brand from Sam’s Club fills this requirement just fine.) Personally, I drink the milk with the morning meal and the green tea with the evening meal. Also, I take a multi-vitamin with my morning meal and more recently, some Sun Chlorella, which seems to work wonders for my focus and energy.

I realize that might look like a helluva lotta corn, but don’t worry; it only looks like that because my plate is so big. Like I said before, for more variety, I’ve found you can add Popeye’s spinach or turnip greens to the mix without affecting the weight loss properties of the diet.

Now supplement this diet with some small 5 to 10 minute sets of push-ups, situps, and oblique twists while you watch TV every time, and you’ll notice dramatic results very soon!

For me, it all happened my accident; in my efforts to find the perfect low-maintainence meal, I noticed I started to shed a few pounds, so I kept it up. After a couple more weeks, even more was lost. So I just kept going and going and going… the weight drop seemed to NEVER end, until fnally I reached my first plateau after going from 230 to about 185 or so.

Breaking through the 185 barrier required me to do more exercise and activity, and eventually I dropped down to a low of 170, where I am right at this very moment.

Will I reach my all-time low? Will I surpass it? Yes, and yes.

Strangely, I can now wear a much smaller pants size at 170 than I could in 9th grade at 162. I don’t really understand that, but oh well.

Anyway, this particular method has served me VERY well and continues to do so to this day. It might be the thing that begins to turn your life around too.

Go on, give it a shot. All you have to lose is a couple weeks and about $20 bucks of your money. Hell, you’d spend more than that on the next crazy diet book at the store…

…and you can’t even eat a diet book.

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I’ve done a lot of thinking about how to best begin the day, so this sort of thing never happens again. Or, at least, to minimize the problem as much as possible.

And combining several sources together and throwing in some of my own observations about myself, I’ve put together a sort of “ideal template” with which to start every day.

12 Daily Steps That Can Vastly Improve Your Life and Extend It For As Long As Possible

1.  Set your alarm to go off 10 minutes earlier than usual. By getting at least a 10-minute earlier start, you tend to remove the “urgency” many of us experience as soon as we wake up. You’ll feel less harried, less hurried and a bit more peaceful.

2.  The first thing, after you get up, is to immediately remake your bed. If you don’t do this, you will be starting your day… instantly… creating an “undone chore” which will nag at the back of your mind for the rest of the day. If you do do this, you will start the day without having added a single, niggling little thing to your “to do” list.

3. Take out your “Success Reminder Book” and take a couple minutes to look through it. A “success book” is a compilation of words, sentences, and pictures that motivate and inspire you. They are the things that are most important to you and the things that you want in life. They also represent the kind of person you want to be and remind you of key ideas you want to burn into your being.

4.  Go to the kitchen, pour yourself a glass of water and drink it all. You do NOT drink enough water. Nobody in America does. Water is the elixir of elixirs. It flushes toxins out of your body, provides an environment which lets your electrolytes and all other aspects of your biochemistry function at maximum efficiency.

5.  Go to the bathroom, take care of “business,” brush your teeth, wash the sleep out of your face and eyes, fix your hair, and weigh yourself. You’re getting ready for battle: The battle to have a good day. Doing all the above will wake you up a little, freshen you up a bit and “set-you-up” to get going. Weighing yourself will give you a mental reminder of where you are on a daily basis so that extra poundage never “sneaks up” on you. Also, if you’re wanting to lose weight, you’ll make more progress in shorter time if you make a mental note of your weight every day. Successes will be easier to keep going and gains will be easier to fix.

6.  Next, put on some exercise clothes like sweatpants, a sweatshirt and sneakers. Make this a ritual. You are dressing for battle: An assault on the forces of negativism.

7.  Leave the house immediately and take a 20-minute walk. You’re outside, you’re breathing fresh air, you’re getting your circulation going, you’re becoming more mentally alert. Some of the fog begins to lift from your mind. You begin to notice your environment, see the colors of the fall foliage, the bloom of a spring flower, the dew on the grass on a summer morning, the untrodden snow in mid-winter. Think about yourself. Think about your life and what you want out of it. Think about the kind of person you want to be. NOTE: This is NOT exercise. This is a loosening up; a “defogging” of your mind and allowing your body to gently warm up for its daily tasks.

8.  As soon as you get back, woof down a nutritionally-dense protein drink with eight ounces of fat-free milk and a banana. This will infuse your body with nearly all the vitamins, minerals, electrolytes, and other good stuff to help your body and mind function at peak throughout the day.

9.  Scarf down a packet of vitamins and minerals. More insurance you’re getting the minimum (at least) ingredients your body needs to run efficiently.

10. If you are the kind who works at home, wakes up early enough, or otherwise has enough time to do so, go work out. Work on whatever it is you need to work on. That may be cardio, strength training, or a little of both. This will improve your overall health over time and also give you a feel-good “rush” for some time afterward. If you’d like an excellent guide to follow, go get a book called “Burn the Fat, Feed The Muscle.” Also, in contrast of the “self time” your 20 minute walk provided, it is a good idea to listen to music or something motivational or educational while working out. Listen to something that is perfectly in line with your goals or something that opens you up to a new experience.

11.  Take a shower. Clean yourself up after all the stuff you just did. It’s part of the ritual of getting ready to battle the day.

12.  Dress in fresh, crisp clothes and go about your day. Ritual completed. You’re loosened up, oxygenated, clean, crisp, nourished, starting your day with no added baggage.

Make a list like this and post it where you will see it every day, at least until you memorize it all and get into a solid routine. It usually takes 21 days of something before it becomes habbit. So force yourself to make this a GOOD HABBIT.

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