One question I get asked often from clients is “when should I get ready?” This question is equivalent to “when should I start living a healthy lifestyle?” The answer as you may have already guessed is yesterday. There’s a guiding principle that I like to follow: Stay ready so you don’t have to get ready. I really want to dive into this a bit more.

A common approach to diagnose the root cause of a problem is to ask why 5 times. Let’s do a case study.

1. Question: Why do you want to “get ready?”

   Answer: “I want to be prepared .”

2. Question: Why do you think you need to be prepared?

   Answer: “I want to make the best of my time abroad.”

3. Question: Why do you want to make the best of your time abroad?

   Answer: “Because I want to be happier than I am now.”

4. Question: Why do you think you’ll be happier abroad than at home?

   Answer: “I’ll be exposed to more open minded people, I’ll go out more, and women will be more interested in me.”

5. Question: Why do you think you’ll meet more people and gain higher interests from women?”

   Answer: I’ll go out more and take care of myself more by working out, eating better, and dress better.”

Deep down, people know what they need to do, but we layer a lot of excuses and complications to give ourselves a reason to procrastinate. We are all guilty of this, we just get better at calling our own bullshit with experience and time. I convinced myself to eat an entire pack of Oreos last week, I wasn’t proud of it. Okay, let’s get back to it.

Stay ready so you don’t have to get ready. Do the work as soon as you realize you need to do the work. For a lot of people, being physically fit is a big part of being ready. Especially if you’re in the U.S., you simply can not afford to not live healthy. You can be dragging your feet at 60 and taking hella medications just to survive, or you can get their feeling good and living life. We are all different but I think most of us can benefit from the following:

Diet

Intermittent Fasting: I won’t go deep into it but there’s an abundance of data on the benefits of fasting. Assuming your goal is weight lost, it’s been proven that eating the same caloric deficit while undergoing a time restricted eating window (Intermittent fasting) will lead to even higher gains in weight loss over a long period of time (60+ days).

I personally do 16/8 where I break my fast at noon and stop eating at 8PM. If you'd like to explore this in more detail, look up Dr. Huberman’s podcast episode called “Effects of Fasting & Time Restricted Eating on Fat Loss & Health.” I’ve personally lost about 10-15 pounds earlier this year mainly from fasting while maintaining the same diet.

Protein: You want to consume about 1.1-1.3 grams of protein per pound of body weight. This can ensure that you are providing your body with the necessary building blocks to maintain and build muscle. Muscle has decreases at approximately 3-8% per decade after the age of 30.

Processed Foods: You really want to limit the amount of processed foods and sugar you take in. If there’s a bunch of chemicals that you can’t pronounce, then it’s probably not good for you. Drink that coffee, without sugar. We’re not robots, but you want to do this most of the time. 80/20 (The Pareto Principle) is a good way to think about this. Try to eat healthy at least 80% of the time. When you do so, you feel less guilt during the times when you splurge on a pack of Oreos.

^Exercise

We all age, but we have a lot of control around how we age. Do you want your wife’s boyfriend to play with little Hayden because you’re “too old” to teach your kid how to catch a football because your knees are too weak? Even if you don’t have any aspirations of living super long, most of us want to live better with what ever time we have.

You need to exercise, especially physical activity that has impact and is weight bearing. It can be your own weight like jumping rope, running, hiking with a backpack so your bones are being stimulated and pushed to increase its density. Ideally, you need to add physical stress to your body. Ideally, you should find something that you enjoy doing that you can sustain over a long period of time. This is one of those adult things that you need to do. Like brushing your teeth in the morning. It’s not super exciting, but it needs to be done.

Habit is everything, everything you do is either reinforcing or breaking a habit. Whenever I haven’t exercised for a while, I start small. Your mileage may vary but I’m usually able to commit to doing 100 pushups daily with one rest day as a starting point. I measure progress by the number of reps and sets I need to do to get there. Perhaps I need to do 25 reps x 4 sets and gradually work my way to 50 reps x 2 sets.

It’s about committing to a routine. I’m not really much of a runner but you can extrapolate this to running if that’s your thing. A solid gym exercise regimen that is great for beginners is the StrongLifts 5 x 5. It’s really important to start at low weights. Don’t worry about what other people think, you’re doing this for you not them. Don’t hurt yourself.

Conclusion

This is why a lot of true passport bros will tell you that being a passport bro is not about looking and lurking for women. A core part of it is being your best self and maximizing your options and opportunities. You want to feel like you don’t need to go abroad but you’re going because you want to. As Birdman the rapper says “I’m the Number 1 Stunna (I fly in any weather).” You, too, can be a number one stunna.