What he did wrong 👇

Last Friday's email — Upset Reader Quiz — Can you spot what he's doing wrong? — was the most popular I have written to in a while.

As I said in my email to him:

"Donate $200 to the charity of your choice. Send me a screenshot of the receipt. I’ll tell you in one sentence exactly where you’ve gone wrong and are continuing to."

Here's the sentence:

👉 Stop trying to gauge your progress based on estimations of body fat percentage.

As one reader called Raymond said, "He’s panicking over something that could just be variance in the measurement of his body-fat percentage."

BINGO! This is what I warned him about when he emailed me back in February 2020 with the following:

"I want to acknowledge what a GodSend you are to us fitness fanatics. I am re-reading the Nutrition Pyramid as we speak. My first time reading it, I incorporated a few of your suggested changes, and at my recent quarterly hydrostatic body-fat test, I went from 13.9% to 13.7%."

This was my reply:

"This may come as a surprise or frustrating, but please ignore the bf% measures you have been taking.

All body-fat measurement methods have accuracy and consistency issues. They can be useful when assessing group averages. But this makes them worthless for any individual trying to assess progress or base nutrition and training decisions on them. And they can be devastating to motivation.

I strongly recommend that no one tries to measure body fat percentage because of this.

We're either as lean as we like or we're not.

Physique changes can be tracked with the scale and body measurements. When paired with training data, these things give far more reliable measures of progress, just not a clean, single number like a bf% figure (which is their appeal).

I've written on this here, here, and even invited one of the world's best stats geeks on my podcast to talk about the subject (listen here).

My complete guide to tracking progress is here.

Even the best bf% estimation devices are only accurate within 3% points. So, if you get a reading of 16%, your actual bf% could be anywhere between 13% and 19%. Bloody useless!

Another reader said, "Our boy is putting all of his eggs in one basket in terms of the metrics he is using to judge his progress (or lack thereof), and of all the baskets he could be using, it may be the one with the shoddiest craftsmanship!"

Indeed.

Don't do this.

👉 Here's how we get clients to track progress.

Anyway, this guy has many problems. But this is the one making him neurotic. And with this out of the way, he will see things more clearly.

So What Is He Doing Right?

Dedication — This is unquestionable. There’s a drive here I can’t imagine is going away soon. (Remember, he’s been emailing me for years.)
Training at 60 — He’s strong. This is important. Muscle mass and strength are critical to maintaining physical independence as we age. Whether you can get up off the toilet unassisted at 80 depends on this.
Leanness — He’s un-fattened himself and maintained it. This is critical to reducing the disease risk that compounds as we age.

Sixty-eight of you kindly replied with your suggestions on where he's going wrong:

Training too much,
Cutting calories too fast,
Drinking too much alcohol,
Needing to wait longer to gauge changes,
Not allowing himself to settle into a bulk or cut phase,
Needing to relax a bit.

I agree with most of them. You can read them all here.

Thank you for reading! 👨🏻‍💻

RippedBody.com

What he did wrong 👇

So What Is He Doing Right?

RippedBody.com

Skinny-fat and struggling 👇

Q) Do insulin spikes prevent fat loss? 🤔

Two conferences I'll be at — Come say hi! 👋🍻