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“Dude, I really feel sick.”

So I once again repeated:

“No, you just don’t want to eat. Take bigger bites. You’ll adapt.” Then, just to be safe, I inched out of vomit range.

Despite the bickering couple routine, I had complete faith: we were, after all, only 48 hours into the protocol.

Then things began to work as planned. Five days later, I received the following text message from Neil:

Gotta tell you: you’re turning me into a ravenous food-devouring machine. And, mentally and physically, between the healthy food, exercise, and Malibu air and surf, I feel frigging great.

The text was prompted by a turning point. He had demolished an entire plate of steak in half the time as his girlfriend’s entire family, proceeded to eat what remained of her food, and then continued to vacuum up the steak leftovers. Tapeworm? No, his digestive enzymes and other internal flora had just adapted to the increased food intake, and now he was primed for processing.

Ten days into the protocol, Neil’s sex drive was so high that it was almost a problem. His girlfriend had to push him away as if he were a single-minded 19-year-old. High sex drive is, of course, a quality problem, and it’s a by-product of vastly increased protein synthesis.

In just over four weeks, Neil, who’d never been able to gain weight, gained 10 pounds of muscle and grew from 125 to 135 pounds, a near 10% increase in total body mass.

The Bike-Shed Effect

The goal of this chapter is to reduce everything to the absolute minimum. Before we get started, we need to discuss the “bike-shed” effect, originally described by C. Northcote Parkinson.

To illustrate this phenomenon, let’s compare a conversation about building a nuclear power plant with building a bike shed. Most people rightly assume that they know nothing about something as complex as a nuclear power plant and so won’t voice an opinion. Most people wrongly assume, however, that they know something about building a bike shed and will argue until the cows come home about every detail down to paint color.

Everyone you meet (every male, at least) will have a strong opinion about how you should train and eat. For the next two to four weeks, cultivate selective ignorance and refuse to have bike-shed discussions with others. Friends, foes, colleagues, and well-intentioned folks of all stripes will offer distracting and counterproductive additions and alternatives.

Nod, thank them kindly, and step away to do what you’ve planned. Nothing more and nothing different.

Complicate to Profit, Minimize to Grow

To earn a fortune in the diet and exercise industries, there is a dictum: complicate to profit. To grow, however, you need to simplify.

The objective of the minimalist routine I’ll describe is:

1. Not to make you a professional athlete.

2. Not to make you as strong as possible, though strength will increase and the gains will surpass most protocols. Strength is the sole focus of “Effortless Superhuman.”

Here is our singular objective: to apply the MED necessary to trigger muscular growth mechanisms, and then channel food preferentially into muscle tissue during overfeeding. There is one condition: we must do both as safely as possible.

The safety issue is particularly important to understand when considering exercises. Don’t get me wrong; all movements are safe when performed properly.

This includes backflips on one leg, break-dancing headspins, and the much-vaunted snatch.16 The problem with such movements, and dozens of others, is that a minor mistake can cause serious, often permanent, injuries. These injuries are underreported because: (1) those affected don’t want to be ostracized from communities that view the moves as gospel, and (2) cognitive dissonance prevents them from condemning a move they’ve advocated for a long time. So what is used to explain the injury? “I/he/she just didn’t do it right.” There is underreporting of diet failures (raw food as one example) for similar reasons. In fairness, can you learn to do snatches safely?