A few months ago I made a couple of videos talking about the diet and exercise routine that I would use to get myself back into top shape after spending the previous 6 months recovering from 2 knee surgeries.

It’s been 2 months since then and I’ve had quite a few setbacks.

The goal was to jump back into the extremely active, high cardio lifestyle that I lived before the surgeries.

That meant lifting 3x a week, boxing 2x a week, and soccer 2x a week.

This is the life I like to live. I’m active. I love soccer, I love exercise, and punching stuff is obviously fun.

But a couple of weeks in I realized this wasn’t going to be possible.

My surgeries fixed a symptom, not the root problem, so now it’s time to adjust for that.

I have a chance now to do things right and set myself up to actually have functional knees when I’m older. It doesn’t make sense to just destroy them again.

It is what it is. I’m going to adjust but I’m still going to lose the weight I gained at the same time. I’ve always been in great shape, so adding on 20 pounds over 8 months doesn’t feel great.

So I’m going to go over how I’m going to lose the weight, keep the muscle and strength that I have, and bullet proof my body without doing tons of high intensity cardio. If you’re an ex athlete or someone with lingering issues from lifting this is for you.

Exercise

So unfortunately I can’t rely on cardio, which sucks. Being able to do tons of high intensity cardio is the best way to lose weight quickly, but we’re going to have to go without it.

Instead I’ll do some boxing here and there and work my way back into running over the next few months as I get stronger.

The exercise plan is going to be a mix of bodybuilding and functional strength work. The idea is to keep the gains I’ve made and lose fat while strengthening the areas that are lacking that we avoid with traditional weight training.

For this I built a 4 day program. Each day is full body with a specific focus.

Day 1 - Back focused

Day 2 - Quad focused

Day 3 - Chest focused

Day 4 - Hamstring focused

So each day is a full body workout with a specific focus, with functional strength movements added in to work on the specific areas that I need plus some bullet proofing for the whole body.

It sounds like a lot and it sort of is, but it only ends up taking me about an hour to do these workouts, which is good for me.

If you want the current program as it is, just reply and let me know and I'll send it to you.

Diet

This is where things have to be strict.

If you’ve seen some of my other videos on diet you know that I don’t like to think about my diet too much. I like to get into a habit of eating the right things and then go with that. I like to have cheat days and cheat meals when I feel like it, but that’s something that’s going to have to change.

But the best advice I can give on diet is to start by just cleaning it up.

The foods we eat these days are meant to make us addicted and crave more.

The way I like to think about it, there was a time when humans didn’t eat for pleasure at all. We used to just eat to survive. That would be the ultimate goal, but it’s tough these days, so instead just get into the habit of eating the right stuff.

For me, that’s a mostly animal diet.

The animal diet is just meat, fish, eggs, fruits, dairy, and honey. The thing is though that it excludes basically all other carbs like bread and rice, which I don’t want to do.

So just start to clean it up to make it look more natural, then start working on the portions a couple weeks later. Work on one thing at a time.

But since I won’t be doing cardio this has to be strict. Some things you can do to help with hunger:

• Intermittent fasting. Do this for a few weeks and you’ll get used to not eating in the morning.
• Coffee and nicotine. Suppresses hunger.

I’m purposefully not being specific on how to eat because you have to figure out what works for you. Intermittent fasting where I didn’t eat until around noon and only had two meals worked for a while for me.

Now I eat fruit for until noon and then just have one or two meals and some dairy. That’s working well.

Find what works in terms of what to eat and when/how to eat it so that you stick to it and don’t go off the rails on certain days.

A tip is that if it isn’t in the house you can’t eat it. So get through the grocery trip and make your life easier for yourself.

I understand that this one is pretty specific, but if you’re like me and can’t do much cardio but want to lose weight and fix your body at the same time, this is what works.

A lot of people will try to make being fit and healthy easy but I’m not one of those people. I think getting in shape is as much of an exercise for your mind as it is for your body.

Sometimes you have circumstances that are hard. You might have injuries. You might be really our of shape and just need to start. Whatever it is I believe that it’s helpful to just accept the circumstances for what they are and do what you can to still get the results that you want.

Doing that will help you in much more than just your health but in life as a whole.

So in these circumstances, when you can’t do cardio, the diet has to be strict to get to where you want to go. That’s just what it has to be, so make it happen.

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