Abs for Life Part 2

An Australian sent me a picture a few years ago that I still use in presentations. No, it wasn’t a photo of a newborn child, and it wasn’t a shot of him wrestling a crocodile; it showed a week’s worth of food prepped, cooked, weighed and labeled meal by meal in a grid of storage containers on his kitchen island. It was a work of organizational art—symmetrical, efficient, colorful and, more important, objective.

I’m the kind of guy who can spend an afternoon reorganizing a closet with a radial arm saw, a rotary laser level and a 48-inch T-square—and like it. This client was immediately elevated to premium-member status. I even tried to adopt him, but he got a little creeped out and fired me.

Perfect is perfect, but not being perfect doesn’t mean that you have to slide all the way into the gutter of self-loathing gluttony.

I hope it doesn’t surprise you that he achieved a condition that most would deem impossible. He was a machine, and he reaped machine-like results.

As a bit of a contrast, I just prepared a talk for physicians—pediatricians specifically—and I’m using that slide. Imagine the look on their faces when they see it—they still haven’t figured out how to help parents keep little Johnny from spending his allowance on milkshakes at the dollar menu. My goal, however, isn’t to convince them that food militancy is the way to improve their patients’ health. It’s to explain that such a thing is possible. Real people do this. Effort and results are linear. After the shock value, I hope the slide elicits curiosity along the lines of, "Well, if that’s the gold standard, what do I have to do to get the silver or bronze?"

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