Achieve your Health Goals Painlessly

​Fast and Low introduces an experimentation- and metric-based scientific approach to finding and adhering to the lifestyle changes that forge the best path toward your goals.

Is this book for me?

Glad you asked.

This book may be useful to you if you’re looking to make meaningful lifestyle changes for better health and are finding it too difficult to tackle those changes. In this book I provide step-by-step methods and some broad guidelines to an easier path forward.

Fast and Low may also be useful to you if you have delved into understanding healthy living but are daunted by the choices of different methodologies and practices, such as specialized diets and complex workouts.

Specifically, this book may help you if you are looking to shed some weight, gain muscle, improve your blood work numbers, feel energized, or in general get more out of your day, and do all this by starting small and slowly working your wa y up, following a step-by-step, scientific approach.

Checkout this ~2 min video to learn more about this approach.

Interested? Read a free preview from Amazon below

What’s in the Book?

I am an engineer and all my life have been driven by scientific approaches to everything, be it in work or life in general. In this book you will find a set of scientific principles that will help you make meaningful and permanent lifestyle changes.

Whenever you embark on a journey to achieve something new or make any change in your life, you start with a goal, a purpose. As an engineer, I like to define my goals in numbers. A numerical goal gives you the ability to measure and know exactly how far away you are from your end objective at any time. It enables you to know whether you’re making any progress toward your goal and whether the healthy actions you’re taking are working for you.

For example, if your goal is to lose weight, saying “I want to lose weight” and saying “I want to lose 30 pounds in three months” are two very different goal definitions toward a similar objective. The former is certainly a goal, but the latter, while keeping the same objective, makes it measurable.

While this is an extreme example, in the book I will explain how you can draft almost all your goals in numeric terms. Then I’ll give you tools to measure and monitor them with minimal effort. Goal definition is just the first step. You must take concrete actions to achieve your goals. Again, I would like all my actions to be measurable. In the book I will also provide a simple way to define and measure your actions toward your goals.

“Is that it?” you may ask. “Define measurable goals and measurable actions and you’re done?”

Not quite.

Another big theme of this book is that every human being is unique and different from every other.

In nature, almost no two things are exactly alike. No two trees in a large forest are identical in all their branches and leaves. Even a simple snowflake, one among the countless snowflakes in nature, is unique in its form. Just reflect for a second that with the unimaginable complexity of human life forms, how uniquely different you may be from any other person who ever existed (or ever will exist).

It’s not just your fingerprints, your retinal structure, or your dental imprint. Every single cell in your body is distinct and different from those of any other person in all of human history! This difference, encoded in your DNA, makes you a unique individual in the known universe.

This realization is important, because when it comes to health decisions and choices, it is vital to understand that what works for one person may or may not work for others.

More specifically, what works for some people may or may not work for you.

After you’ve set your measurable goals and measurable actions, I’ll describe a process of self- experimentation by which you can measure the effects of your chosen actions in a scientific manner. This will enable you to focus on the actions that advance you toward your goals and not pursue the ones that do not have any major impact.
The guidance and techniques in this book work especially well if you are willing to experiment and, in the process, learn what health improvement strategies are the most suitable for you.

Starting points

After prolonged self-experimentation and extensive study, I have learned that for most health and fitness goals there are just a handful of simple and commonsense things that one must be aware of and try out.

The Pareto principle, named after the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, states that for many events, roughly 80 percent of the effects come from 20 percent of the causes.

In this book I’ll share the roughly 20 percent of strategies that can potentially have profound positive effects on your health.

If the title of the book wasn’t a giveaway, I am going to focus on diet and diet-related habits, specifically intermittent Fasting and a Low-carb diet, though I’ll also touch on other cornerstones of health, including exercise, meditation, and sleep. However, all these will come together in a measurable metric-based framework based on easy self-experimentation.

Chances are that you either already know about and are practicing a low-carb diet or have at least heard about it. You may also have heard of or even practiced intermittent fasting. And you very likely know at least some of the benefits of exercise, good sleep, and mental relaxation.

In this book I’m sharing a step-by-step methodology that can make it easier for you to incorporate these lifestyle changes and to stick to your health plans, once you’ve figured out what is working for you.

Given any problem, there may be many ways to solve it. However, not all solutions are optimal or effective. As a general rule in life, if you’re facing something challenging and the solution seems either too hard or too time consuming, take a step back and have another look at the problem. There may be a simpler solution available, or if you take another step back, you may even be able to redefine or reframe the problem.

Before committing to an arduous challenge, I often say this to myself: Are you picking up a sledgehammer to break down the wall in front of you? Look around—there may be a door somewhere.

Finding an optimal solution to a problem or a better way forward may not be as easy as it sounds. In his celebrated book Principles, Ray Dalio writes, “If you work hard and creatively, you can have anything you want but not everything you want. Maturity is the ability to reject good alternatives in order to pursue even better ones.”

This principle and the benefit of finding the right solution works in all aspects of human life but can be life altering when it comes to choosing the right health strategies.

The methods explained in this book may help you pursue better alternatives when it comes to healthy choices. I’m hoping to lead you to that door in the wall following a step-by-step, scientific methodology.

What’s not in this book?

I am not a medical professional, and this book has no medical advice in it. I am an engineer, and I have approached solving my health problems following an engineering approach.
While I do talk about a lot of common ailments related to lifestyle and metabolic disorders, I focus only on lifestyle changes to address these problems. There are no magic potions or secret herbal remedies suggested here.

Wherever I suggest any lifestyle change, like altering your diet, fasting, exercising, or taking a nutritional supplement, please make sure you understand the possible ramifications of that change for your health.

If you are seeing a doctor for any health problem or suspect that you may have an ailment, please speak with your health-care provider before making any changes.

Are you ready to start the journey towards better health?