Updated: 30 November 2017
After training over 100 skinny-fat clients, I’ve realized that the number one reason people fail at transforming their bodies is their mindset.
It’s the way you think that’s holding you back.
Now, the big question is: do YOU have the right mindset to transform your body from skinny-fat to aesthetic?
Do you rely on motivation to get to the gym?
…constantly talk about your fitness goals?
…get confused when you hear experts give different advice on the same topic?
If you’re doing any of the abovementioned things, this article is a must-read for you.
1. Don’t Rely On Motivation Because It Comes And Goes.
I often see people at the gym that come for a few weeks, and then they’re gone for months. Suddenly you see them motivated at the gym again… until they lose motivation.
Let me tell you this: sometimes I’m motivated, sometimes I’m not. Motivation comes and goes.
If I relied on motivation to make my transformation happen, I would never have done all the consistent work that lead to me losing 60 pounds of fat and gaining 40 pounds of muscle mass.
Instead, I would have gained a bit when motivation was there, then lost my gains when motivation disappeared. Gained a bit, then lost a bit. Gained a bit, then lost a bit…
The end result? No progress.
This is why you can’t rely on motivation to make a lasting change in your life.
Nobody is motivated every single day to train and prepare food. If you want results, you need to make this lifestyle a habit, rather than rely on motivation.
In my experience, a habit takes about 3 weeks to develop.
That’s why you want to be consistent with this lifestyle for at least 3 weeks.
In the first 3 weeks of training and dieting, you want to make training and dieting the #1 goal in your life and get obsessed with them.
During this time you want do anything you can to make it easier for you to change your lifestyle.
Here are some examples:
- Reduce your workload and reduce the time you spend on other leisure activities.
- Prepare food every night to have it ready for the next day.
- Prepare your training clothes, water and small pre-workout meal before going to bed.
- As soon as you wake up, do your training first thing in the morning to minimise the chance of missing a training session.
If you can stick with your training and diet for 3 weeks, they will both become a habit.
The goal is to make the process feel like brushing your teeth in the morning.
It just happens automatically every single day.
After 3 weeks you will feel bad about breaking your new habits:
Ohh I didn’t get enough sleep today, maybe I should just skip my workout.
changes to
I didn’t get enough sleep today, but I have worked out every day the past 21 days, so I must also do it today.
2. Don’t Talk About Your Goals.
In early 2010 I announced to my family that I will transform my physique. They replied:
“But you’ve never been athletic.”
“Be reasonable and focus on school.”
“Just take it easy and exercise once in a while to be healthy.”
They tried to impose limiting beliefs on me, which is normal for people that have known you for a long time.
If they’ve always known you as the skinny-fat guy, there’s no reason for them to believe that you can suddenly transform.
I ignored their limiting beliefs, but I made the mistake of constantly talking about my goals to get validation.
When you talk about your goals, you trick your mind into thinking that you’ve already accomplished them.
Think about the fat girl that orders a diet soda, and then proceeds to talk about her diet every single time you happen to see her. When you meet her 1 year later she’s still fat.
She’s still fat because excessive talking about your goals results in less incentive to accomplish them.
Therefore, instead of talking a lot, you want to be a man of action and focus your efforts on achieving your goal.
Once your goal is achieved, feel free to talk about your achievement.
It feels much better to just do your thing, and then surprise people with your ripped physique.
3. Follow ONE Coach and Trust Your Plan.
As a beginner, I would obsessively search google and bodybuilding forums for search queries such as:
- How much protein should I eat per day to gain muscle mass?
- Do skinny-fat guys need a lot of protein?
- Should skinny-fat guys lift heavy weights?
The end goal was to educate myself and learn about the best training and diet methods for myself.
Instead, I confused myself with information overload.
For example, one day I would read John’s bodybuilding website where he said I need to eat 1 gram of protein per pound of bodyweight to gain muscle mass.
The next day I would watch Dan’s YouTube channel where he said I need to eat less protein and focus more on my carb and fat intake.
Both of them had personal trainer credential, tons of client success stories and plenty of scientific studies to back up their claims.
But they had completely different opinions on protein intake.
This is just one example out of many.
Every single piece of training and diet knowledge that I wanted to learn about had contradicting opinions from high level coaches.
So how do you know who is right?
The truth is that unless you have years of experience transforming your own body and training dozens of clients, you won’t be able to know who is right.
There are scientific studies that support nearly any type of training and diet.
There are studies that support high protein intake and studies that support low protein intake.
There are studies that support heavy weight, high intensity training and studies that support high volume pump training.
Therefore, stop looking for contradicting information from different people, because I can already tell you that you will find plenty of that in fitness.
Constantly looking for more information is only going to hurt your progress because you will lose trust in your plan.
Instead, choose ONE coach that you trust and put all your trust in their advice.
Even if their advice isn’t the most optimal, you will still get your best results by believing it’s the best shit out there.
Believing that a plan works is a very powerful thing and now I’ll explain why.
4. Your Mind Is Extremely Powerful. If You Believe It, You Can Get It.
When I take on clients for my Online Transformation Program, I have my clients fill out a comprehensive 6-page Client Assessment Form with a variety of questions about their unique body-structure, training history and diet history.
One important section in my assessment form is related to mental health.
To be specific, I ask my clients if they have any issues with anxiety, stress or depression.
And nearly half of them have anxiety, stress and depression.
The truth is that being skinny-fat is linked with mental health issues.
And it all makes sense: When you have below average genetics, it makes sense that you are pre-disposed to have naturally higher stress and anxiety levels and that you have an easier time falling into depression.
Having a skinny-fat body that you aren’t proud of doesn’t help here either.
Now, when it comes to transforming the body, a lot of skinny-fat guys want to isolate the mind from the body.
We focus obsessively on dietary factors such as protein intake while neglecting a powerful mind.
The truth is that a powerful mind can make all the difference in your body-transformation.
For example, we know from scientific studies that:
- Changing from a bent over desk-job posture to an open and dominant posture results in an immediate increase in testosterone levels and testosterone is the main muscle building hormone in your body.
- Controlling stress levels, anxiety and breathing properly, you will lower cortisol and thereby increase testosterone further.
- Being around beautiful women will increase your sex drive and natural testosterone production.
- The amount of high quality social relationships you have is linked with your mortality rate. People with a lot of high quality relationships live longer.
- Chronic stress leads to a lot of disease formation and pre-mature deaths. (I.e. you can kill yourself with worry).
- Believing that something works can make it work even more than it’s supposed to.
In other words, your mind and body work together and you can’t isolate the two.
For example, when Arnold Schwarzenegger trained his biceps, he imagined that his biceps were the size of the whole room.
This made his biceps more powerful and over time this surely made them grow more as well.
You will also see his videos that Arnold always kept an open and dominant posture, had a lot of friends, spent time relaxing on the beach and doing fun stuff and had an unbreakable belief in himself.
He didn’t get any of these things from a high protein diet.
He got them from focusing on building up his mind and body at the same time.
I can tell you from personal experience that the mind is an extremely powerful thing.
When you live a fun, healthy and low stress lifestyle with fun activities and good friendships and you combine that with a strong belief in your fitness plan, you will get far superior results compared to someone who is on the same plan yet feels depressed, anxious and lives a lonely life.
This is why it’s so important that you work on the health of your mind while working on your body.
5. Transmute Your Sexual Energy Into Fitness and Life.
Another important secret of achieving success and having a strong mind is to cultivate your sexual energy and then direct it into your training and diet.
Sexual energy is extremely powerful because it’s most often the #1 driver behind a man’s success.
Now I’ll explain how this works.
First, think about the way you feel when you’re sexually aroused.
You feel driven, motivated and unbreakable.
You feel like you want more out of life.
When you go into a workout while being sexually aroused, you will do more repetitions and train harder.
Now think about the way you feel after having sex or reaching orgasm.
You feel relaxed, tired and low on energy.
You have no drive to work hard or go to the gym.
When you go into a workout, you do the minimum and try to cut corners.
This is the difference between high sexual energy and low sexual energy.
So how do you maintain high sexual energy?
First and foremost, you need to cultivate a high sex drive by eating a healthy testosterone boosting diet.
Testosterone is the male sex hormone and high testosterone levels will lead to a high sex drive. (This is why teenagers have such high sex drives. It’s because testosterone levels are at their highest during teenage years).
I have covered the basics of a testosterone boosting diet in my guide the 2 Phases of a Skinny-Fat Transformation.
In addition to eating a testosterone boosting diet, being around beautiful women, getting regular sunlight and controlling stress levels will help massively with sex drive.
The goal is to wake up with morning wood at least 5-6 days per week and to get random wood once in a while throughout the day.
This will maximise your motivation and energy levels.
Second, you need to protect your sexual energy by avoiding excessive sex or masturbation.
I’m not saying you should stop having sex or masturbating, because stopping completely has diminishing returns (whey you don’t use it, you lose it).
However you want to find a balance where you’re having sex at a rate that allows you to have high sexual energy everyday.
In my case for example, I have a desire to have sex 4-6 times a day but I will only have it once every day or once every 2 days depending on my energy levels.
By controlling my urges, I’m more motivated to train hard, develop my skills and work on my business.
Find your balance and you will be surprised at the amount of things you achieve.
6. Accept That It’s Going To Take A Long Time
The last lesson I want to give you is that you should embrace that it’s going to take a long time to transform.
A lot of skinny-fat guys try to cut corners on their transformation by looking for the next quick fix diet or supplement, but the truth is that there’s no substitute for putting in the time.
It takes a lot of time and effort to change your physique.
When you’re skinny-fat with below average genetics, there’s no quick fix diet or training or 12 week program that will get you there.
2 years into training I didn’t even look like I had ever lifted a weight. The third year, I would barely make any progress.
I was on the verge to give up, but then things started changing.
I started doing the opposite of what I had done before and got my best results.
Now I’m not saying that it will take years for you to transform.
I’ve had clients who did it in 12 weeks, but they’re the exception.
Most of us need longer than that, therefore you’re better off just accepting that it’s going to take a long time.
This way you won’t quit early and get disappointed with your results.
If something is easy to get, you won’t value it and you won’t get all the character building traits such as confidence and persistence that come from achieving something that is hard.
Therefore, it doesn’t matter if it takes 1, 2 or 3 years to transform your physique. In the end the whole process is all worth it.
Embrace every part of the journey and celebrate everytime you hit a new milestone in your training or fat loss.
Be proud but stay hungry!
Oskar Faarkrog, ISSA Certified Trainer
[FAQ] 8 Week Maximum Size Program
Hey Oskar,
Your points are “on point”. Especially the trusting the process one. Many people hop from one thing to another (be it workout program, college, life goals) and in the end result, they don’t accomplish anything valuable. It seems like the majority of people want to experience everything in the short them, while being blind to long term. Once I started doing simple things consistently (pull-ups, not being focused on zillion exercises), thing started to come together and I saw great progress.
-Oskar Faarkrog
Hell yea man. This isn’t a hobby, Its a lifestyle.
Well, training is my hobby now, I love doing it after a long day of studying, but you’re right. To make training worthwhile, you gotta change your lifestyle.
Hi Oskar,
Great post. I highly agree that you can’t rely on motivation or willpower when wanting to obtain, say, the physique you want. The whole idea of ego depletion testifies this. You have to the automate the action so it doesn’t zap your daily “ego hit points” so to say.
I experienced this first hand in the most palpable of ways; I was in New York for modelling and I was in decent shape. After a job shooting with one of the most prolific stylists in the industry he told me that they wanted to use me for a story in one the biggest fashion magazines alongside Victorias Secret angels. I was so pumped up and motivated about this that sustained a diet of pushups, pull ups, squats and protein shakes for desserts. And I have never seen anybody achieve results this fast.
But as soon as I got sick of the industry, I slowly started getting out of shape. Turns out I was relying on motivation all along. The motivation was strong only enough in the beginning to sustain that physique.
The whole idea of finding out what works for you, regardless of area, and then sticking to it, is something I have to work on a lot.
Btw, looking forward to meeting up with you, Thomas and Ludvig. As a fellow Copenhagener I need to know where you got your T levels measured.
All the best, Nicklas Kingo
Thanks for the comment Nicklas.
Just read through the article by Dan Ariely, and found this quote to be great:
I agree with that. I never followed a strict diet 100 % of the time, because I knew I wouldn’t be able to stick to it in the long term. My rule is that I eat well 80-90 % of the time to leave room for occasional indulgence. I do this because the last 10-20 % that consist of indulgence are gonna help me stick to my regime in the long term (keep in mind that pretty much any diet and workout routine will give results as long as you can stick to it).
It’s good that you know what to work on. Perhaps it’s time to mix it up a bit? I found that combining strength training with some kind of sport is a great way to keep things interesting. I used to compete as a male cheerleader and currently I combine my strength training with 2-3 yoga sessions a week.
Make an appointment with your doctor, and tell them about your low testosterone symptoms. Then ask them to check your testosterone level. Keep in mind that they will most likely not test you if you don’t have the symptoms. Once you get the result, make sure that they print it out and give it to you. Most doctors will tell you that your levels are good, even if your levels are the same as an 84 year old mans (that happened to me)! You want to have a level that is in the high end of the range, since the range goes from something like 10-30 nmol/l, where 10 is something an old man usually has, and 20-30 is what YOU should be at.
Wow, I look forward to hearing about that when we meet up. That sounds like a cool experience!
See you soon,
Oskar
Oskar, I just read the post…
“2. Stop Talking About Your Goals”
Funny how we both wrote about this. But you were first. So you’ll get the credit when we both die as historic men.
Best,
Ludvig
LOL, almost fell off my chair reading that.
See you soon,
Oskar
Thanks a ton! I’m meeting with my doctor next week!
Oskar
I too suffer from very low testosterone. My last physical showed 124 total test – off the charts, low. I know fats are important for improving testosterone. What is your feeling on drinking whole milk as a 37 year old male?
Thanks,
Joel
That’s very low testosterone, you need to make it your first priority to take care of that.
How much uninterrupted sleep do you get each night? Have you tried to increase it naturally by sleeping as much as possible and eating more fat?
I personally can’t drink milk, since I get bad stomach and a lot of acne from all dairy products, but if your body digests it well, I can’t see why it would be a problem.
I’m working on getting more sleep – taking your advice on the ZMA – it’s helping me get about 6 hours of sleep, now. I’ve tried to increase fat intake, and I was on Androgel for about 8 months back in 2012, but got worried about all of the side effects and stopped it. My doctor said that as long as I feel ok without the medication, he doesn’t see any reason to keep taking it. But, then again, I think long-term it may be more important to have higher test. levels than worry about the side effects??
Everyone is different when it comes to sleep, but I usually get 9 hours a day.
My endocrinologist told me that once you start testosterone therapy, there’s no way back since your natural production get’s shut down, so taking androgel for 8 months, then quitting it, might have shut down your natural production.
Are you under the care of an endocrinologist, or just a regular doctor?
I’m under the care of both . . Before starting andogel, my total testosterone was down to 88!!!!! I literally had a tough time getting out of bed! The reason it got so bad was I started running a whole lot, ate like a rabit, and was basically in a pattern of severe weight loss and probably some symptoms of anorexia. Now that I’m back on track and eating more protein and fat again. I guess we thought that that alone might help it rise again without androgel. Now I’m thinking I’m better off with the medication.
I’m no expert, but when I had low T I did a lot of all nighters that consisted of reading about fixing it. The best place I found was this forum: http://tnation.t-nation.com/free_online_forum/sports_training_performance_bodybuilding_trt;jsessionid=1331249C36E6D6E7EF754193658E639B-mcd02.hydra?pageNo=1&s=forumsNavTop , and especially the posts by the guy called KSMan are useful. Read all the stickies there, and educate yourself on the topic.
Most doctors and even specialists are clueless when it comes to this, so it’s crucial that you have some knowledge.
To be honest, I doubt you can get a decent testosterone level naturally, when it’s already that low. Mine was about 300, and I got it to 600 or so. Check the recommended testosterone levels in the table posted in my article: https://skinnyfattransformation.com/how-to-naturally-raise-your-testosterone-levels/
You would need to increase your levels by something like 400 % to get a decent level. I have never heard about someone doing that naturally.
Hope you find this useful.
Great advice man! I’m loving your site! I love the followers that you have man!
Thanks Sebastian, glad you like it!
Great article, Oskar. Point #3 hits home most with me. I don’t feel like I’m making progress, so I’m constantly “searching” for the magic bullet, i.e. new advice, more books, different websites, etc. I’m trying so hard to make strength gains that I’m getting in my own way and I obviously don’t have the confidence in what I’m doing. I definitely need to change my mindset and commit.
Thanks
Joel
Thanks Joel,
Definitely commit to whatever approach you’re following. If it turns out that it doesn’t work, you can always look for something new. But to know that, you need to give it time, and your best effort.
Great post Oskar!
I’m starting to believe more and more that in order to develop a fabulous physique, one has to first get to know how his body works/become one with your physique. By getting really in tune with your body you’ll really get to know how certain foods affect your energy levels, you’ll be able to lift more weights due to an improved mind-muscle connection, you’ll be able to know how much food you need to eat in order to gain muscle mass without the use of a scale, etc.
I believe that this is the only way you’ll ever be able to reach your true genetic potential.
And this is not some new age voodoo bs. Becoming one with your body is a SKILL and it takes time, effort and experience to achieve mastery. If you’re not willing to pay the price of admission then I’m sorry to say it, but you’re never really going to get any noticeable amount of muscle mass (this is true for most people).
Great article Oskar, it really made me think! :)
Cheers,
Dejan
Thanks Dejan, your comment is spot on as usual.
It’s those kind of “small things” that come with experience. They make a tremendous difference in the end. There’s no book that can teach you all of that.
That’s a great and very useful article Oskar! It hits at the heart of really improving and gives a great reality on what it takes. Keep up the great work! During the holidays the 3 articles you did were terrific and on reading the feedback one reader contradicted your info and just quoted the “experts” – But in the real world very few people can get results with their canned advice and the promise of “quick results” has a person thinking that they failed.
Thanks for the comment Ron.
Great point. If it was as simple as following some canned advice, then less people would end up disappointed.
Hi Oskar,
What did you change up in the end to get the results you always wanted? It does seem a little bit odd that 2 years worth of work didn’t change your physique as you claim…
Hi Patrick,
I followed the advice of eating high protein and lifting heavy on the compound lifts. I got stronger, but my physique didn’t change much.
Then I did something completely different. I started training everyday with bodyweight (high reps instead of low reps), and I was eating a diet that was higher in fat, with less protein.
Finally, I started gaining muscle. Partly because the higher fat intake increased my low testosterone levels, but also because my body responds better to training everyday, with lighter resistance, but more reps.
Right, if you dont mind me asking what was your main fat source? I’m struggling to get more of it in my diet. Did you exhibit all the regular hallmarks of low testosterone as well?
My main fat sources have been eggs, meat and peanutbutter.
Yes, I had a testosterone level that is the equivalent of an old mans, and the symptoms were certainly present. I was always fatigued, despressed, had bad memory, low libido, poor recovery from training, shaved like once a month and my body didn’t exactly look like it had enough testosterone.
I still don’t grow any visible facial hair, but everything else has improved a lot. I believe the improvements were a result of increased fat intake and sleeping without an alarm.
Oh boy! I have a deal for you Oskar!
You can have half of my facial hair growth rate for free.
Haha….Mine grows so fast and i shave once every week at the least. Apart from it, I have all other symptoms of low testosterone, but it’s better now.