Longer fasts have taught me one thing I didn't expect: I couldn't tell the difference between being hungry and being stressed. Not until I had no choice but to sit with it long enough to find out which was which. I didn't used to question hunger if I’m being honest. My approach was something along the lines of: I feel hungry → I eat. Waiting felt… unnecessary. If food was there, if the feeling was there, done. The realization came during my very first 3-day fast back in 2022. At the time it felt like I was embarking on some really bizarre niche experiment. Who doesn’t eat for 3 full days?! My culture (Lebanese) is so food-focused I didn’t dare mention the experiment to any of my friends for fear of being subjected to an intervention (flatbread included). Back to that first fast: by day three a significant portion of what I had been registering as hunger in the days before had just gone quiet. Not suppressed, just registered. Noted. Moving on. When that happened I didn't know what to make of it. If I was genuinely hungry on day one, how was I less hungry on day three? And then gradually it started to make sense, because what dropped away wasn't actual physical hunger. It was everything else I had been calling hunger that wasn't. The expectation of eating at a certain time. The habit and association between a particular hour and food appearing. The reach for a snack when I was stressed, tired, or when some task felt harder than I wanted it to feel. All of that had been arriving in the same package as real hunger, with the same feeling (kind of) and the same urgency. And I had been treating all of it as the same signal requiring the same response. Fasting forced me to sit with the sensation long enough to actually tell them apart because then there was no other option. The discomfort was there but the food wasn't, and eventually the discomfort started to reveal itself for what it truly was. The bastard. On most normal eating days now I can notice the difference. Reaching for something because I'm genuinely hungry feels different from reaching for something because I'm bored, or avoiding something I don't want to think about.

Most of us in our 30s and 40s don't usually have a motivation problem. It’s the fucking 5962954 competing priorities in a 24-hour day that’s the problem. The gym is there. The intention is there. The program is there. What's missing is an honest look at where the hard sessions actually live in the day, and whether that slot can support them. Here's what usually happens instead. Training gets wedged into whatever gap exists. Before work if you can manage it. Lunchtime if you're near a gym. Somewhere in the middle of the day if you work for yourself. And for a while that maybe works, until the day gets full enough that the gap closes, and the session either gets skipped or downgraded to iOS 18.4. Herein lies the problem (the downgrade, that is), because it happens without an intentional decision. You don't choose an easier session. You drift into one. And over weeks, the drift compounds. So, we have three questions worth asking ourselves honestly: 1. What does my energy actually look like at the point I'm training? (Not what it should look like. What it actually looks like, consistently, across a normal week) 2. What's happening after the session? Does the training slot sit in the middle of a demanding day and do I still have shit to get done? 3. What would have to shift for the hard sessions to land at the right moment? For some people that's morning before anything else. For others it's evening, after the day's demands are done except for sleep. The answers are individual. For me right now, the answer is probably evening. I’m done with coaching by 1pm max, I get 2-3 hours of business work done after, then train, dinner, sleep. So the hardest physical output happens when there's nothing left to DO (at least when I forcefully stop myself from doing). It's a simple adjustment. But it only becomes available once you find a spot for training that cannot be negotiated out of. So this week, pick a slot, put it in the calendar like a client appointment, and don't move it. And don't forget to share your wins here. Accountability is what will take you a step further.

Not skipping them entirely, just finding myself choosing a lighter version on certain days. One that doesn't leave me wrecked for the next four hours. I only fully noticed it last week. I was planning my day: clients in the morning, business work in the afternoon with training sandwiched somewhere in between. And I caught myself looking at the program, seeing what was scheduled, and thinking: not that one today. Lemme replace it with something I can recover from faster. But I didn't frame it that way in that moment. I framed it as me being smart about energy management. Listening to my body. Training sustainably. All of which sounds reasonable. All of which is also partly a story I was telling myself to avoid discomfort. Here's the actual situation. I coach clients every morning. It’s physical work. I'm switched on, I'm present, I'm moving barbells, weights, and sometimes the clients themselves around if the session's hard enough. By the time I get back and sit down to work on my business, my battery’s already at 53% (mentally and physically). And what I've learned recently is that if I go and do a genuinely hard training session in that window, the afternoon just doesn't happen the way I need it to. What usually happens then is I sit down to work and the quality of my focus is garbage. And I’ve been in this long enough to tell the difference between a body that's been pushed to its limit and a body that's been worked hard but has something left. So I started making adjustments. Sensible ones like being flexible with the program or “managing output” across the day. And somewhere in those adjustments, I started avoiding the sessions I actually need. The hard ones. The movement that made my knee squeaky two weeks ago. The sled push whose whole purpose is to kick my ass at the end of the workout. The kind of things that hurt now but pay dividends later. This is a thing that happens to those who have more than one demanding thing going on. And I'd argue that's most of us in our 30s and 40s. You're not a full-time athlete training for a competition where performance is the only variable. You have a job, or a business, or both. A relationship. Maybe kids (in my case expecting in about six weeks!).

Fellas - tomorrow I'm starting a planned 3-day fast (4 if I'm grooving). This will be for the second week in a row as part of a consecutive 5-week series of 3-day fasts. My goal is to cut weight from body fat from 91kg to 86 kg (roughly 11lbs or 0.8 stone for my American and UK friends) while still training 4x week and retaining as much muscle mass as possible. I'll be posting progress photos and my weight along the way to keep myself accountable and so you guys can see the results. If you have any questions in the meantime, leave a comment below. Cheers, /George

Hey just wondering if there is a YouTube channel to this group?