Forever-Fit in 3 Steps

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Hey Brothers,

Welcome back to the LenDentonThrive Letter! 

If you’re a guy who wants to lose 20 or more pounds (and keep it off for good), then I’ve got a simple, 3-step process to make you forever fit! And as always, there are no crazy diets or gruelling workouts. 

So, let’s jump in!

The Ultimate Weightloss Solution??

It seems like everywhere I look these days, I see someone promoting an “ultimate solution to your weight loss problem.”

The Muscle Industry (fitness companies, gyms, and personal trainers) are assuring you that the answer is another gym membership. Their big idea is that lifting hard 3-4 times a week can help you lose weight. 

And it can…eventually! If you don’t burn out first. Or injury yourself. 

It’s just not the fastest way to lose weight. Building muscle will cause your metabolism to burn more calories. But, building muscle takes time and a lot of hard work. Most guys who start down this path don’t end up seeing the desired results. Most New Year’s resolution gym memberships are essentially over by mid-March. I’ve personally experienced this…maybe you have, too. 

The Diet Industry has its own solution. Follow this influencer, or subscribe to that online community. Buy their frozen meals or protein bars or shake powders. 

And, you lose some weight. Until you stop the program! Then, the weight comes roaring back. Usually with a few extra pounds to make things worse than before you started. 

One of the reasons that diets don’t work for very long is that your brain is actually programmed to protect you from long-term calorie restrictions. Your brain interprets calorie restriction (like a diet program) as a starvation event! 

So, as calories become more scarce, your brain dials back your metabolic calorie burn to compensate - to protect you from a perceived starvation threat. So, in reality, your brain really is short-circuiting your diet!

The Pharma Industry has a solution, too. The new GLP-1 injections do curb your appetite, allowing you to lose weight quickly. But, these injections are a lifetime commitment. As soon as you stop the injections, the weight comes back. Usually with additional pounds. 

These injections don’t just reduce stored fat. They also reduce your muscle mass! That’s a problem, because the average male starts to lose 1% of their overall muscle mass every year after the age of 30. GLP-1s accelerate this loss. 

And finally, because GLP-1s are so new, we don’t have much understanding of the long-term impacts of this lifetime treatment approach.

ThriveLife Is The Alternative

The ThriveLife is a simpler, safer approach to permanent weight loss that doesn’t rely on crazy diets, exhausting workouts, or lifetime injections. It's a food-first, gym-optional lifestyle approach that will help you lose weight while becoming leaner, stronger and healthier. It's built on 6 Smart Daily Habits that you can do in as little as 30 minutes a day. 

Here’s a quick mini-tour of how you can use the ThriveLife approach to transform yourself from being perpetually overweight to being forever fit in 3 Simple Steps:

Step 1 - Stop Building Fat

American men are fatter today than they’ve ever been! And, it's not because we’ve gotten lazy. It’s because our everyday diets are trash!

The Standard American Diet (SAD) that we all grew up eating is a collection of industrially engineered and manufactured food products (not real food!) that most of our great-grandparents wouldn’t even recognize. Most of the items we eat today come with their own brands and marketing budgets! And these franken-foods are filled with industrial sweeteners and fillers that make them tasty, fattening and addictive! The result is the obesity explosion we are witnessing today!

The alternative is to learn to Eat Smarter. Replace the bad foods (with their bad calories) with better food choices. The ThriveLife groups all foods into three distinct food zones:

Green Zone: Healthy real foods like lean meats, eggs, fresh vegetables and healthy fats (like olive oil). Green signifies: Eat This!

Yellow Zone: Healthy, but more caloric foods like dairy and whole grains. Yellow signifies: Check This / Eat Sparingly.

Red Zone:  Unhealthy, highly caloric or synthetic foods like sugar, white flour, white rice, potatoes, corn and ultra-processed foods (UPFs). Red signifies: Avoid This!

The goal of the Eat Smarter approach isn’t calorie restriction. The goal is calorie replacement. Identify and replace unhealthy calories with healthy ones. 

The result is better caloric uptake and utilization through the metabolism, and less fat storage. Eating Smarter helps you to stop building fat!

Once we get our food right, everything else gets easier!

Step 2 - Start Burning Fat

Once you’ve stopped increasing your stored fat, it's time to begin reducing or burning off the fat you already have. The key to eliminate this stored fat is to move more. And more specifically, to move more using Zone 2 cardio.

Zone 2 cardio is the rate of exertion where your heart is pumping at 60-70% of your maximum heart rate. At this level of exertion, your body’s energy source is almost entirely fat, pulled from your stored fat reserves. For most guys, this is the level of exertion you reach during a brisk walk! 

At higher exertion rates above Zone 2, your body can’t meet the energy demand with fat alone, and therefore converts muscle to energy to meet the increased need. (This is why bodybuilders avoid doing cardio!)

I have two recommendations for you regarding Moving More:

1. Aim to get 7,000 steps every day. Studies have shown that this level of exercise can reduce the rate of all-cause mortality by 50%! (Lose fat AND live longer…what a bonus!)

2. Get up and move for 3-5 minutes every hour. This tiny amount of movement causes our body’s base metabolic rate (BMR) to increase, which allows us to burn more calories throughout the day. Even while resting!

Eat Smarter to stop building fat. Move More to start burning fat that you’ve previously accumulated.

Step-3 Build Strength and Muscle

In the ThriveLife, the gym is optional - but strength is not!

Functional strength is an essential element of overall fitness. And, building and maintaining muscle mass is important for overall health and fitness as well. 

The key is to create a strength-building strategy that works for your specific needs. To do that, you need a strength routine that works for you - specifically your preferences and schedule. 

I have 4 recommendations for you regarding building strength and muscle:

1. Figure out how much time you have and then build a plan that fits your schedule. Try to do strength training 3 times every week for best results.

2. Choose an exercise you like. The better you like it, the more likely you are to stay with it over time. (If you are a gym-guy, go to the gym. If you aren’t, you can build an effective home-based program.)

3. To build a sustainable lifestyle, choose exercises you can do for the rest of your life. 

4. Use the 4PM approach (Personal-Practical-Portable-Permanent-Measurable) to help you design your strength routine. Learn more about 4PM here.

The ThriveLife is my personal fitness system that helped me lose 70 pounds in 7 months! 

Steps 1 and 2 helped me lose weight. 

Steps 2 and 3 helped me become leaner, stronger and healthier. 

The ThriveLife process has helped me stay healthy and fit for more than 12 years.

The ThriveLife works for me everyday. It’s my proven formula for a healthy, sustainable lifestyle. It can work for you, too!

Let me help you build your own ThriveLife. Here’s two ways how I can help you:

1. Subscribe to the LDT Letter for weekly tips and strategies

2. Join the wait list for my upcoming new book ThriveLife Transformation, where I’ll show you how to build a healthier version of YOU with 6 Smart Daily Habits that you can do in 30 minutes a day. 

   To join the waitlist, just reply to this newsletter and say “Sign me up!” I’ll send you an email when the book is available.

Thanks for reading today.

And remember, God loves us. He wants us to thrive. So, let’s go!

All the best… Len

Thanks for reading this week.

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