My Visceral Fat Blueprint
$22$35
This is the fat you can't pinch, sitting deep inside your abdomen and wrapped around your liver, your pancreas and your intestines. I first met it properly in my surgical rotations, where it changes how difficult an operation is to perform, and I've spent the years since watching where it leads. It's the single most reversible risk factor I know of, it produces no symptoms until it's caused real damage, and almost nobody is ever taught how to measure it or what to do about it. So I've written down everything I think is important, in 122 pages.
What you get
122 pages, structured as a week of teaching followed by a month of practice, so you work through it gradually rather than reading it once and forgetting it
One new habit introduced each day, with the biology behind it, something specific to do, and something specific to record
Around twenty pages explaining exactly how this fat damages your arteries, your pancreas, your liver and your long term cancer risk, taken step by step rather than asserted
Five ways to measure the fat you can't see, four of which need nothing more than a tape measure and a hardback book
A liver risk score you can work out yourself from blood results you may already have, along with the wording to use when you take it to your GP
UK and US numbers side by side for the blood tests, so you can read your results wherever you are
Four weeks of tracker pages, a Sunday review page and a one page summary for the fridge
Clear warnings placed exactly where they're needed, for insulin and sulfonylureas, kidney disease, pregnancy, blood thinners, gut conditions and anybody with a history of disordered eating
Full workout plans, including home bodyweight, gym, calisthenics, walking, cardio and two HIIT protocols
A reference list with a plain English description of what every study actually found
The part that changes how you see your own body
Two people can weigh exactly the same and have completely different health, and the explanation is a limit you were born with rather than anything you've done. There's a rare condition that proves it beyond argument, involving people who are strikingly lean and severely ill, and once you understand why that happens, the whole subject falls into place. There's also a reason your waist can expand while the scales refuse to move, and it isn't the one you've been told.
Five things you can measure this afternoon
The tape measure is the obvious one, and it isn't the most revealing. There's a two minute test you do lying flat on the floor with a hardback book that tracks the deep fat more closely than your waist does, for reasons to do with gravity that make complete sense once explained. There's another that tells you which of the two kinds of belly fat you're actually carrying. And there's the smart scale in your bathroom that claims to measure visceral fat, which I explain is not doing what it says it is.
The day of the week nobody expects
One full day is given to a subject that gets almost no attention anywhere, and I'd argue it's the largest difference between two people eating identical diets. It runs to several hundred calories a day. It falls automatically the moment you start eating less, which explains a plateau a lot of people blame on themselves. And it has almost nothing to do with going to the gym.
Why nobody is going to explain this to you
I've spent a decade in emergency medicine, and a great deal of that time has been spent trying to explain something like this to a patient in a corridor with four minutes available. That's the reality of British medicine, and it's why so many people leave an appointment with an instruction and no understanding of it. People who understand why a habit works are still doing it two years later. People handed a list drift away within a month. So this goes into the detail properly, and you can come back to any part of it as often as you need.
It's honest about what it can't do
There are places in here where I tell you the evidence is strong, and places where I tell you experts who've read the same papers disagree. There's a whole page teaching you to weigh a study yourself, because relative risk without absolute risk is how a small effect gets made to sound like a crisis. And there are several points where the right answer is to stop reading and book an appointment, which I say plainly.
Who this is for
Anybody who wants to understand what's happening inside them rather than be handed a set of rules. It suits you if you can see the problem in the mirror, and it suits you just as much if you can't, because you can sit at a perfectly normal weight, look entirely healthy, and still be accumulating this. If you sit down most of the day, don't exercise and eat fairly badly, this Blueprint is aimed squarely at you.
This is education rather than personal medical advice, and if you have a specific condition there'll be things you should be discussing with your own doctor that aren't in here.