How I Became Lean (Simplified)

Summary

In the video, Wanhee shares his journey to becoming lean and offers practical tips for anyone looking to achieve similar results. He emphasizes the importance of wanting it bad enough, tracking progress, and having fallback meal options. Wanhee advocates for intermittent fasting, minimalist workouts, and walking for effective weight loss. He highlights the importance of understanding hunger hormones like cortisol, insulin, and dopamine, and advises on maintaining a positive mindset through gratitude. Overall, Wanhee encourages a holistic and sustainable approach to getting lean.

Highlights

• Being lean boosts confidence and overall well-being. 😎
• A burning desire to change is crucial for success. 🔥
• Intermittent fasting helps save calories for meals you love. 🍗
• Tracking calories and weight reveals valuable insights. 📝
• Fallback meals prevent diet derails during stressful times. 🚀
• Walking can be more beneficial than intense cardio for weight loss. 🌿
• Minimalist workouts prevent burnout while building muscle. 🏋️‍♂️
• Knowledge of hormones helps control dietary habits. 🍬
• Practicing gratitude aids in maintaining a positive outlook. 🌟

Key Takeaways

• Wanting it bad enough is the first step to getting lean. 💪
• Intermittent fasting helps manage calorie intake effectively. ⏳
• Measure and track your progress for tangible results. 📊
• Have back-up meal options to stay on track. 🍲
• Walking and minimalist workouts can yield great results. 🚶‍♂️
• Understanding hunger hormones is key to managing cravings. 🧠
• Stay positive and grateful for a healthier mindset. 🙏

Overview

Becoming lean is not just about shedding pounds; it's about transforming your mindset and daily habits. According to Wanhee, the journey begins with a deep desire to change and a commitment to practice restraint and sacrifice. It's this burning desire that fuels the journey to leanness, where you're willing to forego temptations like ice creams and burgers for a healthier lifestyle.

Wanhee emphasizes the effectiveness of intermittent fasting and minimalist workouts. Instead of high-intensity cardio, he suggests regular walks and lifting weights, which can surprisingly lead to better results. Tracking your progress through calorie counting and weight measurement can provide insights into what boosts or hinders your progress; plus, knowing your fallback meal options saves you from diet disasters.

Understanding the science of hunger hormones and practicing gratitude are two pivotal aspects that Wanhee highlights. By managing hormones like cortisol, insulin, and leptin, you can better control cravings and maintain motivation. Gratitude, according to Wanhee, not only enhances your mental well-being but also reduces stress and increases happiness, making the fitness journey not just effective but also enjoyable.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Why Being Lean is Better The chapter emphasizes the benefits of being lean, both in terms of physical appearance and overall well-being. The speaker compares their personal experiences at different weights, asserting that life is better when lean. They feel more confident, lighter, and look better in clothing. This motivation sets the stage for the discussion of eight methods to achieve a lean body. The speaker suggests that a strong desire to be lean, often more than the desire for unhealthy foods, is essential for success.
• 00:30 - 01:00: Desire and Sacrifice The chapter "Desire and Sacrifice" discusses the importance of having a strong desire and the willingness to make sacrifices to achieve personal goals, such as building a desired physique. While promoting sustainable and holistic change, it emphasizes that achieving goals requires restraint and making tough decisions. The key takeaway is that cognitive and physical restraint are crucial characteristics for success, particularly in maintaining a lean body.
• 01:30 - 02:00: Fasting Benefits This chapter emphasizes the importance of desire and discipline in achieving weight loss goals. It contrasts having a small group of motivated individuals versus a large group lacking inner motivation, suggesting that motivation plays a crucial role in success. The analogy of a computer running multiple programs is used to illustrate how constantly bombarding the body with food without allowing it to process or 'cool down' can lead to issues, much like how a computer can overheat and break down.
• 02:30 - 03:00: Tracking Progress The chapter titled 'Tracking Progress' focuses on the importance of incorporating fasting into one's routine. It begins with a description of the cycle of eating meals and the lack of time for relaxation and cleaning. The chapter highlights the benefits of fasting, such as providing rest to the body and activating human growth hormone. Fasting is especially beneficial for those aiming to get lean, as it helps save calories for later in the day, allowing for more flexibility in meal choices, whether at lunch or dinner.
• 03:30 - 04:00: Avoiding Binge Eating The chapter "Avoiding Binge Eating" discusses the benefits of fasting as a method to maintain a lean body while enjoying different types of food like Korean Fried Chicken and Sushi. The speaker emphasizes the importance of trying fasting for more than two weeks to truly understand its effectiveness. A key principle highlighted is 'what gets measured gets accomplished,' stressing the importance of tracking various aspects of life, such as sleep, exam scores, or athletic performance, in order to create benchmarks for improvement.
• 04:30 - 05:00: Walking vs. Running The chapter discusses the importance of tracking your weight and calories to understand how your behaviors impact your weight. It emphasizes that monitoring these metrics over time helps distinguish between real changes in weight and misleading fluctuations. By developing this awareness, you can better identify which habits lead to weight gain or loss, and recognize false signals in weight changes.
• 05:30 - 06:00: Minimalist Workouts In this chapter titled 'Minimalist Workouts,' the discussion revolves around the importance of tracking calories, especially for beginners. It is emphasized that even though some people might dismiss calorie tracking as unnecessary, it is a fundamental step for gaining the knowledge needed to understand and manage one's diet effectively. Tracking calories allows individuals to differentiate between real hunger signals and other indicators, which is crucial when embarking on a weight loss journey.
• 06:30 - 07:00: Understanding Hunger Hormones The chapter titled 'Understanding Hunger Hormones' explores the challenges people face when trying to maintain healthy eating habits. It highlights a common pattern where individuals start strong, eating well and seeing progress in their health goals for the first few weeks. However, as stress accumulates from various life responsibilities such as school assignments or relationship issues, people often find themselves with reduced mental energy and decision-making capacity. This stress can provoke hormonal changes, including increased cortisol levels, which in turn raise blood sugar levels, ultimately impacting one’s ability to stick to healthy eating behaviors.
• 07:30 - 08:00: The Role of Dopamine The chapter titled 'The Role of Dopamine' discusses how dopamine impacts eating behavior, particularly in how it affects insulin levels and portion control. The transcript explains that increased dopamine can lead to stress-induced eating, causing overeating when individuals don't have fallback meals that are healthy and satisfying. Without these options, individuals may tell themselves they've failed, leading them to binge eat as a result.
• 08:30 - 09:00: Practicing Gratitude The chapter "Practicing Gratitude" explores the narrator's appreciation for the routines and staples in their daily life related to food and meals. They highlight various dining options they enjoy, like a particular chicken and rice dish, sushi, and salads from specific places, but emphasize that most of their meals are home-cooked. They have a system in place for food staples, like buying beef on sale or keeping a supply of frozen chicken, which helps them manage life's unpredictabilities. This routine and the ability to rely on these food staples is presented as a source of stability and gratitude in their life.

How I Became Lean (Simplified) Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 everyone looks better when they are lean look at me at 85 kg and me at 70 kg it's not just the body and the belly it's also the face and just everything about you you become more confident in yourself you feel lighter on your feet you look better in clothes dare I say life is just better when you're lean so in this video I'm going to go into the eight things that help me get lean let's get into it you got to want it bad enough I'm sorry to say this but most people that actually become lean they just wanted it bad enough they wanted it more than the ice cream than the burger than the feasting there's something
• 00:30 - 01:00 inside them like this burning desire to build a body that they want they're willing to exercise restraint and some form of sacrifice I know in this channel I talk a lot about sustainability and holistic change which I still stand by but it doesn't mean that you get to have your cake and eat it too at all times there is an element of you literally going right this is an important part of my life I'm going to get handled and that means I'm going to exercise some form of cognitive and physical restraint this is the number one characteristics that every everyone that gets lean
• 01:00 - 01:30 shares and you bring me one two three however many guys with enough desire I can get them lean but you bring me 2,000 people with all the knowledge but not enough of that just inner desire it's really really going to be difficult to get that guy lean because every chance he has to deviate from the plan he's going to take it next Imagine a computer that is constantly executing programs downloading data it just gets hot it gets stuffy cloggy it breaks down same with your body if you keep throwing it
• 01:30 - 02:00 food breakfast lunch dinner sleep breakfast lunch dinner sleep breakfast it's just never has time to chill out never has time to clean so what you want to do is give your body a bit of rest through fasting and this is actually really really healthy it's going to activate your human growth hormone and most importantly for those that want to get lean it's going to allow you to save up those precious calories to later in the day whether it's for you lunch whether it's for you dinner so that you can eat what you want this is why you
• 02:00 - 02:30 can see me eating Korean Fried Chicken sometimes Sushi Pattie what have you and I can still maintain a relatively lean body throughout the entire year because I take advantage of fasting if you haven't done it try it and you got to try it for more than two weeks to know if it's for you next I've said this many times and I'm going to say it again what gets measured gets accomplished same with sleep same with your exam scores with your lap times if you're a track and field athlete if you measure each time what you do then you have a benchmark to improve improve upon and
• 02:30 - 03:00 it's the same thing when you track your calories when you track your weight but only do you see exactly where you stand and what the next step is you will actually understand which behaviors in your life lead to increased weight gain you're going to also identify false signals you're going to develop this sense to know okay my weight's gone up but this is a fake signal okay my weight's gone down but it's a fake signal this comes from weeks and weeks of tracking your calories and your weight so you're banking in in this
• 03:00 - 03:30 internal knowledge and data and intelligence and your ability to decipher [ __ ] signals from real signals and by the way all the people that say oh my God tracking calories is so lame don't track calories guess what they did to lose weight they track calories and then now they have that base knowledge so they can guess or they can feel things this is a huge difference so if you're a noob if you're a beginner take my word for it and try it next whenever somebody goes on a diet what they start to do is they go oh my God I'm going to get lean for some they get super excited right and then for the
• 03:30 - 04:00 first week maybe two maybe even three rarely three but maybe even three weeks you're actually really good you start eating really well you start eating really healthy you follow your rules that you set for yourself you start to see some progress everything's going well well guess what happens after 2 weeks when stress builds up when life builds up when your University assignment gets a D minus and when your girlfriend starts to give you [ __ ] when stuff starts to build up you have less mental energy less ability to make good decisions plus extra cortisol actually hormonally raises your blood sugar
• 04:00 - 04:30 raises your insulin and makes you just not stop eating it it inhibits your portion control you start reaching for food because you're stressed and what winds up happening is in one of the days two of the days you start overing then what do you do you tell yourself oh my god I've screwed it up again then you go on and binge eat the rest of the fridge guess how many times I've done that so this happens because you don't have Staples you don't have fullback option meals that you already love that are already healthy high in calories and not too caloric dense that you can fall back
• 04:30 - 05:00 upon now I have my tie place that's got this chicken and rice dish my sushi place where it's plate by plate and every little mouth full has protein I've got my salad place that I've been going to for years there's all these little systematic things that I have in my life not to mention the home-cooked meals that by the way are 80% of what I eat that have the same kind of setup I have the frozen chicken breast I have the beef that I get 50% on sale every time at 5:00 p.m. do you see I have these staples that I can fall back on and when [ __ ] comes and hits the fan this is
• 05:00 - 05:30 what's going to get you lean don't underestimate this next there are many of you that are trying to get lean and you're doing like all this running you're doing all this CrossFit cardio whatever the hell you're into I'm going to go out on a limb and say if you quit all of that and just lifted heavy weights and went on walks you would see much better results in fact I am currently trying to help this girl who's told me literally she's been running for 3 years and she hasn't seen much change in her weight and I'm just I'm just face palming myself live and thinking Jesus
• 05:30 - 06:00 Christ if only you just did some minimalist workouts and just prioritized walking you would see so much more gains in the muscle building department and leanness everybody that's done this swears by it the problem with walking is that you're in this mindset that walking is not really exercise because you never really try to hit 10K steps consistently so you don't think walking is proper exercise so you like to run because you get the feeling of having exercise cuz you sweat running is just going to burn x amount of calories and you're going to
• 06:00 - 06:30 eat X plus 200 calories so it's not that effective it's not that effective unless you're a proper athlete that has running in his schedule for most people watching this video right now if you walked 10,000 steps or at least just find time in the day to walk more like Sunset walks 5K 6K 7K steps you're going to see better results when it comes to getting me why don't you just trust me on this for like one month and then see what happens next most of these gym Bros and the fitness influencers they like to say
• 06:30 - 07:00 that you got to train until you can't anymore that you got to train until failure you got to go really hard because the harder you push the harder you train no pain no gain and this mentality is embedded into our society not just the gym but in studies right the more you study the smarter you're going to get the more money you have the more happiness you're going to get the more cars the more gos and what that results in is you constantly chasing stuff and then burning out and if you lift weights in a gym until the point of
• 07:00 - 07:30 exhaustion what that does like chemically speaking it's lactic acid in your muscles there's more cortisol more stress more insulin less ability to control your portions which means you're going to eat more calories which means you're not going to get lean instead you want to do minimalist workouts just do intense workouts that are short that don't leave you dead and then you can just leave the gym before all the gym Bros next you got to learn about hunger hormones the first one is cortisol that's the stress hormone cortisol is useful for when you wake up it makes makes you alert it makes you focus on
• 07:30 - 08:00 things so we need cortisol but when it comes to dieting cortisol ain't that helpful because a what do you do when you're stressed you open and reach for the brownie you don't reach for the salad you reach for the brownie when cortisol goes up blood sugar goes up when blood sugar goes up insulin goes up now insulin is actually a very very useful hormone that we need insulin's job is to keep our blood sugar levels reasonable so when our blood sugar rise insulin gets secreted and it tries to keep blood sugar under control insulin also turns excess calories into fat
• 08:00 - 08:30 insulin allows us to store fat so that when you're about to starve in the rainforest you don't starve so insulin's intentions are good but in modern society what happens is that food has too much sugar in general so your blood sugar is permanently High your insulin keeps getting pumped into the system and you develop insulin sensitivity and that leads on to the next hormone is leptin now leptin is a really good hormone that originates from the fat cells it travels from the fat cells to the brain and tells the brain broke you're full you've
• 08:30 - 09:00 eaten enough cookies you've eaten enough of that Korean buckwheat noodles time to go on a walk time to use that energy and people with healthy leptin signaling like kids right you give them a cookie they start running around spazzing around screaming because the leptin signaling is so healthy so they start now insulin actually inhibits leptin signaling it literally just tells like leptin's ability to tell the brain with full is inhibited by the insulin do you now see why when you have sugary foods that raises your blood sugar that ra raises your insulin you suddenly feel
• 09:00 - 09:30 like you can eat truckloads you suddenly feel like you can eat Cobs for days pasta for days Ramen for days rice for days and you just can keep eating it cuz your leptin doesn't tell your brain your bloody full so what you want is reduced insulin sensitivity increased leptin signaling and how do you do that for most of you right it's just going to lead to live a healthy life with higher muscle mass lower body fat exercise you know all the tips that you already know
• 09:30 - 10:00 this is what's going to help you and basically don't eat super high sugar foods so it's smart to go low car and low sugar and then last hormone is dopamine dopamine is not really related immediately with our dietary system but dopamine controls motivation how up for you are to work out to stay on your diet and things like this so dopamine is pretty important when you eat sugary disert when you eat sugar sugar activates the dopamine it acts on the same dopamine receptors in the brain so
• 10:00 - 10:30 what happens when you expect yourself to eat the ice cream on your way to the ice cream you feel really happy right when you have that bite you feel really happy that's dopamine and dopamine is super addictive so you keep going for it you keep going for it cocaine creates a lot of dopamine and rats will push a button that gives them cocaine until they die because that's how good dopamine feels if you are not aware of this cycle what you can get yourself into is a dopamine addiction through sugary food you want sugary Foods it raises your dopamine it
• 10:30 - 11:00 it makes you think that sugary Foods makes you happy and more dopamine so every time you feel a little bit down I want more dopamine let me go get sugar let me watch porn let me watch Netflix let me scroll Instagram you get the idea beware of these hunger hormones the three hunger hormones plus dopamine next the final thing is to practice gratitude on the way to becoming lead this is probably the most important point this is one of the things that I try to focus on the most in my community when I help my members a achieve the body of their
• 11:00 - 11:30 dreams it's like so much of what to do you guys know but why can't you do it because you're not able to control your mind and stay positive and grateful on the journey right now I'm so grateful for the body that I have because I went through so much pain back pain and and different kinds of health issues so I'm super happy and grateful and even as I was getting leaner and leaner I never hated my body I never felt like oh my God it's so [ __ ] like I'm such a fat lump of Todd like I lit appreciated each and every moment and
• 11:30 - 12:00 was like wow it's looking better oh my God look at this you see these people that are just positive and optimistic and grateful they're just going to attract more of that energy even if you don't believe in this like attracting energy stuff what it does is it reduces cortisol reduces stress and it's going to keep you more motivated try it right now literally right now think of one thing that you're actually grateful for in the moment of gratitude you cannot be negative your ctis all drops your serotonin your happiness hormone starts
• 12:00 - 12:30 to go up you're more motivated you're less stressed and everything starts to align this is super important if you want me to coach you to become lean to bulk up and build size to build muscle and lose fat at the same time check out my community below where I jump on weekly calls with you literally talking to you directly super personalized feedback if you're into that check out the link below minimalist training Club make sure you stay grateful on the way see you in the next video