Own the Day, Own Your Life: Optimised practices for waking, working, learning, eating, training, playing, sleeping and sex. Aubrey Marcus

out of balance before we’ve even had a chance to set ourselves upon the day. Blood sugar is supposed to rise slowly after you eat a balanced meal full of fats, complex carbohydrates like fiber (the best kind of carbs), and protein, allowing time for the body to release just the right amount of a hormone called insulin to drop the blood sugar and help store the sugar as fuel. But when refined sugar or other simple carbohydrates push blood sugar up quickly, it is toxic to the cells and the body hurriedly floods the bloodstream with insulin, which craters our blood sugar levels, leaving us tired and irritable in the short term and at risk for a variety of health conditions in the long term.

      This is not just some pesky personal problem we have to deal with on an individual basis. It can also have serious real-world ramifications. In a 2011 study of parole judges in Israel, researchers discovered that judges were significantly more likely to grant parole in the period immediately after breakfast and lunch, when blood sugar levels were rising, whereas a couple hours after a meal break, when those same levels were crashing, they almost never granted parole. It was like a real-world experiment where the hypothesis being tested was the tagline of that Snickers commercial: “You’re not you when you’re hungry.” The irritability and discomfort of the blood sugar drop, combined of course with the mental fatigue of the work itself, led judges to be far less compassionate. For better or worse, the scales of justice were balanced only so well as the blood sugar levels of the people holding them.

      But I’m the last one to blame the judges, because I’ve been there. Before I found my way to the Jedi side of the nutritional force, I treated my digestive system like the Death Star trash compactor. In the morning I would reach for one of my favorite “breakfast” foods: cinnamon Pop-Tarts. POP-TARTS! Sugar filling, injected between two layers of refined starch (basically another form of sugar), and coated with frosting made from whipped powdered sugar. Where did I think the nutrition was coming from—the bready part? It wasn’t even bread! I would have been better off just eating the cardboard box the Pop-Tarts came in. At least that has fiber.

      An hour after I popped the tart, the high from the blood sugar spike would reliably give way to the irritability, fogginess, twiredness (tired and wired), and hunger that comes with blood sugar collapse. And when that happens, what do we normally do? We step back into sugar’s BDSM dungeon with a ball gag full of carbs and pay to become its bitch for yet another day.

      It is this inherently imbalanced relationship that has made sugar probably the worst thing to happen to human health in the last two hundred years. As consumption of our favorite sweet thang has increased over the decades, public health has deteriorated. Obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and even cancer have been linked to sugar and the associated blood sugar swings. The numbers speak for themselves. Thirty million Americans have diabetes. Cardiovascular disease is our leading cause of death. Childhood obesity is at epidemic levels, with one out of every five children clinically obese. Only 16 percent of women and 32 percent of men don’t ever worry about their weight. The great irony of all these statistics, of course, is that we have more gyms, diet coaches, juice bars, and “health food” restaurants than any place on the planet. By far. Yet despite constant worry and myriad options, we’re getting owned by our diet choices.

      It’s hard to call it our fault, however. The fast, sugary foods making us fat and sick are perfectly engineered to trigger biological responses that are incredibly hard to resist. High-sugar foods release a massive hit of dopamine. Dopamine is a chemical reward for the brain, and as the pleasure monkeys we are, we are wired to seek it. Whether you want to call it an addiction or not, when you figure out how to release dopamine into your brain, you are going to have a hard time stopping. The same is true for sugar.

      So let me stand up first. My name is Aubrey Marcus, and I’m a sugar addict. Everyone say, “Hi, Aubrey!” Even with everything I know now, living an existence dedicated to cultivating discipline and a balanced ethos, if you put a cinnamon Pop-Tart in front of me, I’d still want to eat the fuck out of it. I’d almost certainly take a few bites. The appeal is just that strong. Combine it with brands like Coca-Cola and McDonald’s implanting themselves as pillars of our culture, along with really bad—I mean really bad—nutrition information, and it feels like we never had a chance.

      Thus, the first step in your nutrition plan is simple: no sugary stuff for breakfast. Period. Instead, we need to add fats back into our diet in sugar’s place. Yep, you heard me, fats. Fats fats fats fats. Get used to the word, because you are going to hear it a lot. Make this simple substitution—fat for sugar—and you will have the sustained, balanced energy to power you all the way up to lunch. And if you can’t find a way to make this happen, then skip breakfast entirely. Breakfast is not mandatory, and in fact you might just be better off without it altogether.

      Owning It

      Diets, diets everywhere, and not a bite to eat. That’s what it feels like when you look online at the landscape of diet plans and the commentary that surrounds them. Everyone, it seems, is promoting something different when it comes to nutrition: Paleo, keto, vegan, Atkins, fruitarian, Mediterranean, and countless others, each zealously claiming to be the “right diet” and the “one true way.” Well, let me clue you in on the best-kept secret in the health and nutrition industry: as far as diets go, all are a little bit right, and a little bit wrong, because a good diet depends entirely on the condition and purpose of the individual. If you have familial hypercholesterolemia, for example, you are genetically predisposed to need less fat. If you need fuel to survive in a postapocalyptic vampire world and come across some Skittles, then you need to unleash your inner Buffy the Vampire Slayer and taste that rainbow! So instead of arguing about which diet is superior, what we are going to do is focus on what I call universal nutrition principles, evidence-based guidelines that most people will flourish with. These will be spread throughout the other nutrition chapters (chapters 8 and 12), and together form a definitive dietary foundation for sustained energy, weight management, enhanced performance, and sexual appetite, regardless of where you are in the goal-setting process.

      The first of these principles involves shelving sugar for the foreseeable future and making friends with fat. And if you can’t find the resources to get that done, then skip breakfast entirely and reap the benefits of intermittent fasting.

      Universal Nutrition Principle #1: Sugar Will Fruc You Up

      In 1822, according to Dr. Stephan Guyenet, people consumed on average the amount of sugar currently found in a single can of Coke or Sprite every five days. Today, we consume that amount every seven hours, with young males leading the way, consuming up to one hundred pounds of sugar per year! Our diabolical addiction to this sweet stuff has not only been linked to obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer, as I mentioned before, but it has also been shown to degrade the skin and contribute to premature aging. There’s no need to sugarcoat it anymore: extreme sugar consumption is frucking us up.

      But if sugar is making us fat, wrinkly, sick, and dead, how come we can’t stop eating it? One of the main problems is that often we don’t realize we are eating it. Sugar hides in everything. Often it’s labeled in confusing ways with innocuous names like “evaporated cane juice,” “brown rice syrup,” and “fruit juice concentrates.” In many places, advertisers promote high-sugar foods as “healthy.” I remember when I lived in Australia watching a commercial for Nestlé Milo, a cross between Yoo-hoo and Ovaltine, and seeing this sweet, chocolatey treat being sold as a type of sports drink for athletes! It’s not too dissimilar from how sugar-laden beverages like Mountain Dew and Gatorade are sold in the United States, by extreme athletes crushing them in the midst of doing something totally awesome. The worst is how we market to kids. Cartoon characters and colorful boxes are like the Pied Pipers leading kids to a life-time of sugar-induced metabolic disease. But those are the easiest sugar issues to combat, and it’s already begun worldwide, with bans on television advertising of sugary junk food targeted to children in countries including the UK, Canada, Mexico, and Norway. The good ol’ US of A? Not so much. We tried to self-regulate advertising to kids starting in 2006, but cartoons and Cocoa Puffs are still as friendly as green eggs and ham.

      NOTHING IS SIMPLE WHEN IT COMES TO CARBS

      There are two types of carbohydrates: simple and complex. What we usually call sugar is a simple carbohydrate. What we typically