The Setpoint Diet

INTRODUCTION

Your Weight Is Not Your Fault

Inside that beautiful body of yours is a naturally thin person struggling to come out—someone who can eat as much as he or she wants, does not need to spend hours exercising, and can still stay slim. You know people like that. Maybe you’ve envied them. Maybe you’ve wished your body worked like theirs.

Until now, you’ve been forever fighting against your body and your mind. You’ve determined your worth by a number on the scale. You’ve held yourself to impossibly high standards that do nothing but fester inside you and make you feel hopeless.

Get ready for a different approach.

With the Setpoint Diet, there will be no more exhausting fights with yourself. I’m offering you a new approach that works with your body and mind to help you become naturally thin.

Can you imagine what that would be like? Just think: Never dieting. Never feeling like you must make up for nutritional sins. Instead, your body effortlessly burns calories all day long, rather than stores them as fat. You stop losing and regaining the same 20, 50, or more pounds over and over again throughout your life. You maintain a healthy, empowering weight—and even enjoy some cheesecake or French fries every now and then without worrying about putting on any pounds.

I’m here to tell you that you can be a member of that exclusive “club” of naturally thin people. In fact, I’m handing you your membership card right now. I realize that it sounds too good to be true. But it is the truth—and scores of scientific studies, plus tens of thousands of success stories prove it… and you will have proven it for yourself less than 30 days from now.

You see, there’s an invisible force inside you that is conspiring to cling to extra pounds, and it has nothing to do with calories, points, mail-order meals, cardiovascular exercise, or any of the conventional diet nonsense you’ve been fed—and that has failed you over and over for most of your life.

What’s truly holding you back—and what can permanently set you free—can be summed up in a word: setpoint. And it’s something you can control. When you control it, you stay naturally thin.

WHAT IS A SETPOINT?

In a nutshell, setpoint refers to the level of stored fat the body works to maintain by regulating your appetite and metabolism through your hormones, genes, and brain, regardless of the quantity of calories you take in or exercise off.

Setpoint also explains why you have such a tough time keeping fat off through traditional diet and exercise programs. Think of it as a clogged sink. What if your plumber came in and said the cure for the clog was to stop using your sink? Sure, this fixes the symptom (the sink’s not going to overflow) but not the cause (what’s causing the clog?). And who wants dirty hands for the rest of their life?! The cause of that clog is eating poor-quality foods and establishing habits that throw your fat-burning, appetite-taming hormones out of whack.

This plan is about lowering your setpoint in order to keep your body in a fat-burning mode 24/7. When this happens, you also KEEP those pounds off. Every day of your life, you will wake up in the type of body that you deserve and that has previously seemed impossible to achieve.

I know this is a lot to take in. But understand that we all have a setpoint—and that’s what determines how thin or overweight we are LONG-TERM. Not calorie-counting or traditional forms of exercising. When you increase the quality of your eating, exercise, and habits, you lower your setpoint—and get your body to burn fat rather than store it.

That’s what The Setpoint Diet is all about. It removes the willpower, shame, and guilt from the weight and diabetes equation. It ends the frustration and the yo-yo dieting. It stops the painful and expensive health consequences of diabesity, and does it with a proven system that will set the naturally thin person inside you free once and for all.

You are going to learn science and strategies—and apply them to your life—that are going to be radically counter to what you’ve heard before but are guaranteed to be absolutely life-changing. You will have to try some things you’ve never done before. You will have to let go of old beliefs about eating and self-incrimination over failed dieting and make the decision to create the body and the health you desire like your life depends on it.

And honestly, your life does depend on it. And you are worth it. Really, you are.

MY SETPOINT STORY

One of my earliest and most painful memories is watching my grandfather endure heartbreaking and completely avoidable suffering. He was a superhero to me—a second-generation American with parents who spoke no English. He never graduated from high school, yet instilled in his four children the power of education. All four went on to get master’s degrees or higher.

For all he achieved in his life—from earning respect in the community to raising a beautiful, brilliant family—his superpowers could not help him overcome a supervillain that threatens more than one out of every four of us: diabetes.

When my grandfather’s leg became septic due to complications of diabetes, he was rushed to the hospital. Surgeons advised that his leg be amputated to save his life. But he would not agree to this surgery.

From outside his hospital room, I heard him calling to my mother, who was at his bedside. “Please don’t let them take my leg… please don’t!”

My family decided to honor my grandfather’s wishes and steadfastly refused the lifesaving operation. He kept both legs, but within 48 hours, he was gone.

Diabetes took him from us just as diabetes is taking so many more of us and so many of our loved ones. To this day, every year, the dual epidemics of obesity and diabetes—“diabesity”—kill more people than smoking, alcohol, and drugs combined.

When people ask me why I got into the business of teaching others how to lose weight and get healthier permanently, I tell them the story of my grandfather—and how I pledged to make sure that the superheroes in our lives don’t fall victim to lifestyle diseases the same way he did.

Growing up, I idolized two more superheroes. The first was the Man of Steel himself: Superman. In fact, my mother can tell you stories about my refusal to wear anything other than this outfit:

The second superhero was my big brother, a strong, muscular football player. Every night, I’d sit at the dinner table with him and my brainy college professor parents, dreaming of the day when I would be as strong as he was. But as birthdays came and went, the opposite happened—I grew lankier, not bigger and stronger.

So I did what any professors’ kid would do: I studied, devouring every health and fitness magazine and book under the sun, and listening to big, strong men like my brother talk about how to get big and strong. I thought I had finally discovered the secret to becoming Superman. After I went to college, I decided to put some of this hard-earned knowledge to work and help other people change their bodies as a personal trainer.

Every day, I counted calories, all the way up to 6,000 daily because I wanted to bulk up. I asked my clients to count calories, too, but so they could lose weight. Those clients were some of the most amazing, health-savvy women and men I have ever met: CEOs, doctors, and teachers. At first, I advised them to eat 1,600 calories daily and exercise for half an hour each day. But they couldn’t lose a pound, despite their successes in business and in life. So I cut their food intake down to 1,400 calories and increased their workouts to an hour a day. That didn’t work either. I slashed their diets down to 1,200 calories a day and upped their exercising to 90 minutes daily. Their weight still didn’t budge. As for me, I didn’t gain a single ounce of muscle.

I wasn’t gaining weight eating 6,000 calories per day, and my clients, even on such restricted diets, weren’t losing weight—we were all just getting sick and depressed.

What was the problem? I assumed it was that we just needed to try harder. I guess I should eat 8,000 calories per day and my clients should eat 800.

One day, while I knocked back a shot of calorie-packed olive oil, it suddenly occurred to me: What if some big strong man out there was thinking the exact same thing about me? “If that skinny, geeky kid could just eat more, he would gain weight—what’s his problem? He just needs to try harder.”

In a flash, I realized that even though all I’d ever wanted to do was to help people feel healthier and better about themselves, what I was doing was making everyone—including myself—sicker and sadder. By urging them to try harder, I was making them feel more guilt and shame.

I stopped training clients because I realized that advising them to count calories and overexercise was hurting them.

After making so many mistakes, I was hell-bent on making things right, so I asked my college professor parents for advice. I told them about the countless hours I’d spent reading and studying and applying what I’d learned—and the results I wasn’t seeing. They said, “You and your clients are not suffering from an effort problem. You’re all trying really hard. What you have is an information problem. Consider the sources.”

They were absolutely correct. So I discarded everything I thought I knew and started fresh, beginning a new journey that took me deep into the foreign lands of jargon-packed scientific studies and mind-bending academic journal articles. In the process, I discovered that everything I’d ever been taught as a trainer was disproven in the scientific literature. What I thought I knew about fitness and weight loss was wrong.

As I learned more, I was no longer interested in fighting against the body; I wanted to learn how to transform the body. I wanted to find out how to improve the system itself rather than use barbaric starvation or obsessive exercise to torture people with a system that wasn’t working correctly in the first place. Fifteen years, 10,000 pages of research, 1,300 scientific studies, and countless conversations with scientists later, I emerged from my research journey reborn.

For the first time, I realized a powerful truth: I would never be “strong enough” to leap tall buildings in a single bound. My genes simply wouldn’t allow it. But I also realized a truth that freed me and changed my life forever: While I might never become Superman, I could become, through modern nutrition and exercise science, the very best version of the person I was born to be.

And that is exactly what will happen to you: You’ll become the healthiest, happiest, most energetic super-version of you.

Once I realized how the body really works—through the proven new science of slim—I couldn’t wait to share the information with the world. I recommitted my life to helping people achieve their weight-loss and health goals with data and facts, rather than hurting them with fairy tales of starvation dieting and extreme exercise.

Since the beginning of my research journey more than 15 years ago, I went on to lead multiple development teams at Microsoft, registered 25 patents, and had wonderful opportunities to work with some of the most well-known products in the fitness industry, including the Nike+ Kinect Training platform and Xbox Fitness. I merged my learning in the realm of biology and exercise physiology with my engineering background, to literally engineer solutions for fitness and nutrition. And so with this book, I share tools with you that will save your life if you take action and put them into use. You can literally re-engineer your body into the body of a naturally thin person, and I’ll show you how.

The bottom line is, you can transform your body. And it’s easier than you think. You can eat more, not less—and you will get leaner and healthier in the process. You can enjoy an astounding level of energy, vibrancy, love, and satisfaction in your life—without spending most of it in a gym. You don’t have to suffer. You just need the correct information and the right guidance. And good news: You will get all of that here.

I want to help you realize how wonderful you are, to understand the strength, courage, and capability that have been gifted to you but have yet to be taken out of the box. It’s a choice, and you can make it. You can decide: This is my time to live the very best life possible. No longer will I wait. No longer will I sit on the bench watching other people fulfill their dreams. This is the time when I will live the life I was meant to live! This is my time to transform! This is when I will go SANE (Satiety, Aggression, Nutrition, and Efficiency).

That life is here for you right now. Thank you for the privilege and honor of sharing it with you.

SANEly,

Jonathan Bailor

Seattle, Washington