The 8% Experiment
Eight Rules for Living Sustainably Lean and Strong
It’s been a while Highlander. Since my last post in 2023, I’ve been engaged in a multi-year experiment: Can I live comfortably at single digit body fat?
The answer is yes. This post explains what I’ve learned living at 8% body fat, but it might also be a while before I post again. The Highlander is a space for sharing my random learnings and experiments from the frontier of strength x longevity x performance drugs. If I forced myself to write regularly, it would get boring for you and me. So I’ll keep it exciting and surprise you with another post sometime randomly in the future.
Until then, Happy New Year, and thanks for reading.
8 Rules for Living at 8% Body Fat
I’ve spent two years living at 8% body fat, and it changed my body, my bloodwork, and my mindset about health.
The 8% Experiment happened by accident. I did my first bodybuilding show in 2023, got down to 6% body fat, then just decided to stay lean. Almost two years later, I’m 8%, and I’ve never been heavier those two years than I am now.
Yes, I still look like a bodybuilder. Delt veins. Leg veins. Proof of work:
My 8% Experiment taught me eight lessons about diet and health, and they’re not the same tired “don’t eat processed foods” or “get daily sunlight” or “sleep more” recommendations repackaged endlessly on X. If you don’t already know not to eat crappy foods and to get better sleep, go read one of those lists. It won’t be hard to find one.
If you want some new ideas about diet and health, here are my 8% rules:
1. Sustainable > Optimal
The biggest trap of the modern health movement is the search for “optimal” protocols. The optimal program. The optimal diet. The thing guaranteed to get the most results in the least amount of time. All backed by science.
Optimal as a function of maximum results in minimum time doesn’t work because whatever is “optimal” is almost certainly not sustainable. That’s why we call it a crash diet. If you can’t maintain a health practice forever, how can it be optimal?
Let’s redefine optimal for health: Optimal is something health positive that you will do regularly and forever.
That means optimal lives somewhere in the space between effective and enjoyable. If you force yourself to do something super effective, but you find it miserable, you’ll stop doing it. That’s not optimal. If you only do things that are super enjoyable but unhealthy, you destroy health. You die earlier, whether functionally or literally. That’s not optimal either.
Sustainable > Optimal is the golden rule. If you want to be uncomfortably lean like 8% body fat, or uncomfortably fit, or uncomfortably strong, you need to find ways to be sustainably uncomfortable. That’s the greatest trick, and that makes finding the right space between effective and enjoyable the basis for many of my other rules.
2. The 80/20/20/80 Rule
For exercise, spend 80% of your time doing things you like and 20% things you need to do but don’t like. For diet, spend 20% of your intake eating foods you like whether healthy or not and 80% eating things you know are healthy.
The 80/20/20/80 rule builds enjoyment into the prescription for exercise and diet. We all have healthy things we like doing, and building enjoyment into our fitness makes it sustainable.
I like lifting and playing sports. I don’t enjoy endurance cardio. So my exercise generally looks like this:
Lift 5-6x per week.
Basketball for 15-30 minutes 3-5x a week.
Box for 15 minutes 2-3x a week.
Run/swim for 30-45 minutes 1x a week.
Zone 2 cardio for 45 minutes 1-2x a week.
Zone 5 cardio (sprints or intervals) for 5-10 minutes 1x a week.
I used to be obsessed about hitting my three zone 2 workouts a week and an interval for zone 5, so I did those at the expense of basketball and boxing and learning to swim. Now I spend more time on fun cardio, and I’m doing more of it in total. Even if I’m not getting the full benefits of zone 2, I’m getting some benefit. If more fun cardio is 80% as good as forcing myself to do something I loathe, that’s a great trade.
Same is true with diet. The trick in staying lean forever is staying sane. Conventional wisdom thinks dieting means you never eat a piece of cake ever again in your whole life. I actually eat cheesecake and ice cream every night (see rule #5). That keeps me sane enough to maintain low body fat.
Don’t look for someone else’s “optimal” exercise or diet program. Find your own 80/20 and 20/80, and build from there.
3. All Successful Dieting Ends with Math
Diet creates some of the strongest religions in health and fitness. The “calories are all that matter” vs “calories don’t matter at all” debate is one of the strongest.
The answer to the calorie question is simple. Pascal figured it out years ago with his wager on God. You should believe calories work until you have strongly compelling evidence they don’t.
For most people, consuming fewer calories than you burn over a sustained period of time will result in weight loss. Fat is stored energy. When your body needs more energy than you provide it through caloric intake, it burns fat. That’s thermodynamics.
There are edge cases where someone may have metabolic issues or hormonal issues or something else that prevents the body from efficiently using fat even in a caloric deficit. You’re probably not one of them, nor should you ever hope to be.
Math means measurement, and you can only be sure that you’re actually eating fewer calories than you expend if you track what you eat. You don’t have to do it forever, but you should track for at least a few months for two reasons:
You build a sense of what portion sizes look like. Most people have no idea what a serving is. The greatest example is peanut butter. People often eat a giant spoonful of peanut butter and think it’s only 190 calories because that’s what the jar says. Wrong. The spoonful is probably 2.5 servings and 475 calories. Do that every day, that’s a half a pound of weight a week. If you know how big a serving is, then you understand how much you’re actually eating whether you like it or not.
Tracking lets you figure out your maintenance calories. Track a couple weeks and track your weight. If your weight doesn’t change, whatever your average daily calorie intake was for those two weeks is probably how much energy you burn in a typical day.
Then put math into action. If you want to lose weight, take your maintenance calories, calculate your bodyweight in protein and eat that daily, then subtract 250-500 calories from maintenance carbs and/or fats. That should lose you 0.5-1 lbs per week.
Math is the path to diet freedom.
4. Be a Diet Ninja, Not a Diet Disciple
The religious wars of diet merely begin with whether calories work or not. Then the wars extend out to carnivore, keto, vegan, seed oils, and even eggs. Eggs always seem to be controversial.
A diet disciple grabs on to diet as an identity. He accepts the dogma of the religion that certain foods are unquestionably good and certain foods are unquestionably evil.
Diet ninjas know there are no “bad” foods. All diet religions have merits worth considering. Eating meat is probably good, and avoiding seed oils is probably smart, but food is ultimately a tool to fuel your body. Every food can be useful at times for the fit person building a sustainable 80/20/20/80 framework. I eat some seed oils now and then, and plenty of eggs. None of it has kept me from healthy blood markers and low body fat.
Unlike a diet disciple who has to rigidly adhere to religious dogma of their chosen diet, the diet ninja is flexible. The ninja can comfortably break diet rules from time to time because they understand the fundamental principles of energy. Disciples can’t because they only understand the dogma of good and bad.
5. Good Enough is the Virtue of Leanness
I make a 220 calorie pint of ice cream in my Ninja Creami every night and I eat it with a slice of 125 calorie cheesecake. The ice cream is milk, collagen powder, colostrum, and pudding mix. The cheesecake is cottage cheese, eggs, greek yogurt, and raw stevia.
Are they as good as real ice cream and cheesecake? No, but they’re good enough. Good enough is the mindset of all lean people because it saves you calories at every meal.
Protein pancake with bananas and no syrup. Good enough. Eggs with non-fat cheese and salt. Good enough. 93% lean ground beef burger with a half serving of ketchup (you better count). Good enough.
A relative of mine doesn’t understand the diet ice cream and cheesecake. She always tells me, “I’d rather just spend the calories on the real thing.” The problem with that mindset is that if you ate the real thing, you’d be in for about 850 calories of fat and sugar instead of 345 calories of mostly protein. Oh, and it’s an extra 150 calories of syrup and butter with your pancakes, 100 calories of fatty cheese, and 100 calories of ketchup with your burger. That’s what happens when you just spend the calories on the real thing. It’s all more expensive than you realize.
There’s no free lunch in dieting. Unless it’s my dessert, and that’s good enough.
6. Diets are Temporary, Lifestyle is Permanent
The longevity community touts caloric restriction as the diet key to a longer life. When I’m dieting, my blood markers often improve from already healthy levels, so there’s probably something to caloric deficits. Unfortunately many confuse the ideas of restriction and deficit. They’re not the same thing.
A deficit means you burn more than you eat. That’s the point of a diet. You’ll lose weight provided you don’t have some other health issue (see rule #3). If you try to diet in a caloric deficit forever, your body adapts. Either your deficit is no longer a deficit or you die.
Your body senses danger when you get too lean, so it makes you preserve energy through slower metabolism and less physical movement. When you prep for a bodybuilding show, your body adjusts its energy expenditure as you get lower and lower in body fat. I call the depths of low body fat “sloth mode.” When I was close to stepping on stage, there were nights when it would take 10 minutes to muster the energy to stand up off the couch. Then another 10 minutes to convince myself to walk upstairs. No exaggeration. That’s not a sustainable state.
Caloric restriction doesn’t mean a deficit. A research paper from the Journal of Cardiopulmonary Rehabilitation and Prevention defines caloric restriction best:
“A reduction in energy intake well below the amount of calories that would be consumed ad libitum (≥ 10% in humans).”
Ad libitum is the key word, and it means as much as desired. I live in caloric restriction now, but I’m not losing weight. I’m in balance. Even after eating a meal, I could usually eat another meal of the same size without trouble. My body doesn’t want to be as lean as it is. It wants more food, but I don’t want to gain weight, so I have to restrict what my body wants.
When I got to single digit body fat, stopping myself from eating more and dealing with energy lulls was hard. Now that I’ve been single digit for two years, it’s easy. Leanness is my lifestyle. Hunger is the consequent background noise. Movement is easy when it’s fun (rule #2). My family knows I might not eat certain foods with them, and sometimes I cook my own food on vacation.
If you want to be healthy and lean, get lean, then make it a lifestyle. Chasing diet to diet isn’t sustainable, nor is it enjoyable. The lifestyle of leanness requires you to be extreme, but if you want extreme results, you have to be willing to do extreme things.
7. Performance Enhancing Drugs are Overrated and Underused
Life is not a drug tested sport. I take testosterone (180mg/wk), but test does less to get me to 8% than conventional wisdom would believe.
I estimate drugs are 5% of the overall picture of living at 8% body fat. Diet is 35% and exercise is 20%. Mindset is the most important of all. That’s 40%.
Performance enhancing drugs enhance performance. They don’t replace it. If I didn’t take testosterone, maybe I’d have been 9% or 10% body fat because I’d still dial in diet and training and mindset. Maybe I’d still be 8%.
An unfortunate number of people think if they get on testosterone, they’ll wake up bodybuilder jacked. Nope. Test might give you more motivation to go to the gym, but it won’t magically make you lose 25 lbs and add 20 lb of muscle.
Even if you take pro bodybuilder level doses of steroids which are 10x my dose, you won’t look like a bodybuilder. You’ll just feel like shit. And probably look it too.
The common perception that if “I took testosterone I’d look jacked” ignores that everyone who’s jacked works really hard, whether they take testosterone or not. That makes PEDs overrated, but if the misperceived power of drugs creates a gateway to starting a consistent health program, then more people should take them.
When GLP-1s became popular earlier in 2024, I was a hater. I thought that people taking GLPs were lazy. They should do the hard work of learning to diet and suffer to get in shape. Then I heard Dr. Craig Koniver’s interview on Huberman’s podcast.
Koniver said that his patients would start GLPs, get some quick momentum from success with the drug, then change their lives by adopting healthy lifestyles. Being a diet ninja (rule #4) means having an open mind, and that extends beyond just diets. As a tool for getting early wins to establish a better lifestyle, drugs are underrated and underused.
8. Nothing Works Until You Believe
I believe in the “nullcebo” effect: Even if something should work to help you, if you believe it won’t, it won’t. No drug, no diet, no workout, nothing will really impact your health and wellbeing until you believe it will.
No, the nullcebo isn’t science backed. I made it up, although there’s evidence of both placebo and nocebo (that if you believe something will harm you, it does). Placebo and nocebo prove your mind has a strong power over your body, so it stands to reason that if you believe something merely won’t work, even if it should, that it won’t.
Henry Ford realized this years ago:
“Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t, you’re right”
Too many people claim they can’t lose weight, and that belief sabotages them from the beginning. Even if they try, their mind won’t let them succeed.
Everything important starts with belief. Use my diet tools, use someone else’s tools, use any tools as long as you believe they’ll work. Soon enough, it will.