What are the healthiest ways to get and stay lean?
Getting lean isn’t a weekend project; it demands permanent changes in lifestyle and diet. It’s a significant commitment. Fortunately, there are habits that won’t merely get you lean but will also significantly extend your life, making them more than worth the effort.
In this article, I’ll show you five life-changing habits that can cut your risk of premature death by up to 67% while slashing hundreds of calories daily. Plus, I’ll give you practical tips to integrate these habits into your daily life. Everyone should be doing them, but unfortunately, as you’ll see, the average American doesn’t do any of them. Let’s change that.
1) Walk More
Most people don’t give walking the respect it deserves. It's not just about burning calories; walking enhances your strength, endurance, and cardiorespiratory fitness, significantly reducing the risk of chronic diseases.
Why It Matters:
Let's look at the average American male — about 5'10'', weighing nearly 200 lbs, and taking around 4,000 steps daily. Increasing his step count to 12,000 steps can burn an extra 400 calories per day. That translates to shedding about 3 pounds of fat per month, or 36 pounds a year.
But that’s not all. According to a 2023 study, this increase can slash his risk of premature death by a staggering 67%. That’s a 67% lower chance of dying prematurely compared to those who stick with 4,000 steps.
The leap from 4,000 to 12,000 steps might seem daunting, but don’t worry! Gradual increases are still beneficial. The same study revealed that even an additional 1,000 steps can bring a 15% decrease in mortality risk. And for our typical American, adding about 2,500 steps can lead to losing roughly a pound of fat per month.
To see how many calories you can burn by walking, you can use an online calculator or a fitness watch.
How to Put It into Practice, Today!
Walking is not only incredibly beneficial; it's also one of the easiest habits to incorporate into your daily routine. You don't need to carve out extra time or head to the gym. Here are 10 simple ways to start boosting your step count today:
Walk during phone calls.
Choose the farther parking spots.
Opt for stairs over elevators.
Enjoy post-lunch strolls.
Conduct walking meetings.
Pace while waiting – airports, appointments, etc.
Take your dog on longer walks.
Walk while listening to audiobooks or podcasts.
Have family walks after dinner.
Schedule brief walk breaks at work.
Aiming for around 10,000 steps per day is a well-recommended fitness goal, achievable for most people. Start by tracking your current steps using a smartwatch, smartphone, or fitness tracker. If you're like many leading a sedentary lifestyle, you're likely averaging 3-4k steps a day.
The key is to build up gradually – try adding about 1,000 steps to your daily average every couple of weeks. Remember, it's not about drastic changes overnight but consistent, manageable increases. Listen to your body, and don't push too hard too fast – the goal is to make walking a sustainable part of your life.
2) Eat Veggies
If excess fat and disease risk are the problem, it should come as no surprise that broccoli and carrots are the solution. Sorry, but such is life. If you want to live a long, lean life, veggies are instrumental.
Why It Matters:
Your sense of fullness is largely controlled by the volume of food you eat. A tiny meal isn’t very satisfying, while a massive meal leaves you bursting at the seams. It’s simple: the more food you eat the fuller you feel. But food varies enormously in its caloric density. For instance, a Hershey’s Kiss has 23 calories. A strawberry has 4. You can eat 5 strawberries for fewer calories than one Hershey’s Kiss. Extrapolate that out to an entire meal, or better yet an entire diet, and you can imagine why it’s such a powerful weight loss hack.
The trick then is to lower the average caloric density of your diet, so you can eat the same exact quantity of food but with far fewer calories. This will decrease your appetite and allow you to get leaner without going hungry. And of course veggies are one of the single best ways to do this.
Not only that, but eating loads of veggies is also absurdly healthy. For example, 2017 systematic review and dose-response meta-analysis of prospective studies looked at the accumulative data of 95 studies and found that eating 800 grams of fruits and veggies daily was associated with a 31% reduction in all-cause mortality. In other words, you’re 31% less likely to die than your peers who don’t eat fruits and veggies.
Now here’s a key point: eating healthy and walking improve different aspects of health, so it’s likely the longevity benefits are in some measure accumulative. In terms of weight loss, they are most definitely accumulative.
How to Put It into Practice, Today!
A good goal to work up to is to consume 800 grams of fruits and veggies every day. It’s enough to fill about half of a dinner plate with fruits and veggies 3 meals a day and only adds up to around 500 calories of energy on average. 800 grams is also the point where the health benefits seem to top out.
Just like walking, eating veggies is dose-responsive, meaning every little bit helps. You don’t need to skip straight to 800 grams. You can try adding some veggies at lunch and go from there.
To really accelerate your fat loss it’s best to focus on non-starchy veggies and low calorie fruit. Here are some examples to help get you started:
Veggies under 25 kcal per 100 grams: pickles, cucumber, cabbage, lettuce, asparagus, turnip, spinach, summer squash, celery, radishes, cauliflower, swiss chard, raw pumpkin, arugula
Fruit under 45 kcal per 100 grams: peaches, strawberries, cantaloupe, honeydew melon, blackberries, papaya, grapefruit
Veggies under 50 kcal per 100 grams: broccoli, collard greens, onions, mushrooms, okra, carrots, beet greens, kale, sweet bell peppers, fennel, leeks, eggplants, jalapenos, Brussel sprouts, artichokes
If you’d like to learn more about eating fruits and veggies, check out my guide, Fruits and Veggies: Live Longer, Get Leaner, Perform Better
3) Optimize Sleep
Have you ever noticed how your appetite and food cravings go berserk after a terrible night of sleep? If you have, you’re not alone. It’s a real thing. One bad night of sleep can increase your hunger, increase your cravings and erode your self-discipline. Yet that’s not even the worst of it. Chronic bad sleep also destroys your fuel partitioning and increases your risk of premature death.
Why It Matters:
When the body has too many or too few calories, it has to decide what it will do. When there are extra calories, will it build muscle or add fat? When there’s a shortage of calories, will it lose muscle or lose fat? The body has to decide, and you won’t always like its answer.
This process is called fuel partitioning, and sleep is one of the factors that can have a huge effect. For example, one study of dieters found that with good sleep, 80% of weight loss was fat. But missing just 40 minutes of sleep per night, caused 80% of weight loss to be muscle.
Imagine losing 10 pounds only to realize that 8 of those pounds were muscle. Consistently getting enough sleep can mean the difference between losing 80% muscle or losing 80% fat.
Sleep is also absurdly healthy and crucial for long term mental and physical performance. In fact, a 2010 systematic review and meta-analysis of prospective studies (another study that combined the data from a whole bunch of other studies) found that chronic short sleepers increased their risk of death by 12%. Depending on the study, short sleep was defined as less than 7 hours or less than 5 hours. 7-8 hours was typically the sweet spot for optimal health.
How to Put It into Practice, Today!
If you want to dramatically improve your sleep, try putting away the phone before bedtime. You’re probably familiar with staying up way too late scrolling Instagram, X or watching YouTube. The programs behind the supercomputer that is your phone are brilliantly engineered to keep you up all night. Willpower is rarely adequate for the fight. So, I highly recommend you try ditching the phone as an experiment. If only for two weeks.
Broadly speaking there are three factors that control our sleep.
Sleep drive. This is the feeling of sleepiness that occurs at the end of the day and often in the early afternoon. Most adults need to be awake about 16 hours for sufficient sleep drive to enable sleep.
Circadian alerting signals. Throughout the day your body sends alerting signals to keep you awake. The strength of these signals peak shortly before bedtime and then fall rapidly.
Flight or fight response. It’s hard to fall asleep when you’re stressed and anxious. If the body believes it’s in danger, it’s too hyped to fall asleep.
Now this is the crucial point. Smartphones are likely to interrupt all three factors. They trigger both reward circuits (getting a notification) and fight or flight circuits (the news). They are engaging enough to diminish sleep drive and amplify alerting signals. Whether it’s social media, the news, YouTube or something else, smart phone use is probably disturbing your sleep.
Thus a good goal is to stop using your phone 10-30 minutes before bedtime. Put it away. If you use your smartphone as an alarm clock, you can keep it in the bedroom, but make sure it’s out of reach. If you don’t use it as an alarm clock, put it in another room. The goal is to avoid reaching for it to check email, the time, Instagram, etc.
4) Consume Fiber
There’s nothing sexy about eating a high fiber diet. But if you’re looking to adopt a lifelong habit that will help you get lean and help you live longer, fiber makes the short list. Here’s why.
Why It Matters:
Fiber is the part of plants that humans can’t digest. Consequently, fiber takes a long time to leave your stomach. This delay leaves you feeling fuller for longer with fewer calories.
Again, let’s apply a bit of recent research. The typical American male eats around 15 grams of fiber and maybe 2,800 calories per day. A 2001 review of the relevant published data found that adding just 10 grams of fiber per day reduces your appetite enough to cause a 10% reduction in energy intake.
In other words, moving from 15 grams to 25 grams of fiber is enough to enable our typical American male to eat 280 fewer calories from a lack of hunger.
Would you like to learn more hunger management techniques? Check out my blog, 10 ways to manage your hunger for year-round visible abs.
A higher fiber diet can also lower your LDL cholesterol and blood pressure, improves insulin sensitivity and blood sugar control, and can help you live longer.
In fact, a 2024 systematic review collected the data from 64 studies and found that a high fiber diet lowers your risk of all-cause mortality by 23%.
How to Put It into Practice, Today!
Industrial food processing tends to remove fiber from food. This is one of the reasons whole foods tend to be healthier and more physique friendly than ultra-processed junk food. It also partly explains the health and physique benefits of fruits and veggies.
Like everything else in this article, there is no mini-effective dose. Every little bit helps and accumulates. To increase your fiber intake, you can eat more plants: berries, beans, lentils, avocado, whole grains, nuts and seeds. If you follow my veggie recommendation, 800 grams of fruits and veggies will give you roughly 30 grams of fiber.
5) Strength Train
Strength training packs a 3 for 1 punch. First, it burns loads of calories. Second, it dramatically improves your fuel partitioning. And finally it is absurdly healthy. If the goal is to be lean and healthy, strength training is a must.
Why It Matters:
First, strength training improves fuel partitioning. As you learned above, when you restrict calories, your body tends to burn both muscle and fat. So if a sedentary individual goes on a diet, he will likely lose a mix of muscle and fat. Even with plenty of sleep, he’s likely to lose at least some muscle.
However, if you add strength training, the same individual is now losing mostly or even exclusively fat. This is because strength training forces your muscles to grow, thereby dramatically improving fuel partitioning.
Second, strength training burns calories, about 140 calories per hour. Train 3x per week, and it starts adding up.
Finally, research shows that older adults who lift weights 2x per week are 46% less likely to die than those who don’t. And adults of any age, who do any amount of weekly strength training, enjoy a 21% lower all-cause mortality.
How to Put It into Practice, Today!
Strength training isn’t something you can explain in a few short paragraphs. Fortunately, I have a series of guides, to help you strength train at home. Here are the links.
Losing fat and getting down to a healthy body weight is incredibly healthy. Not only does it reduce your risks for a wide variety of chronic diseases, but it just feels great. You feel lighter on your feet, and you have more energy.
You’re probably familiar with all of that. But you rarely hear about just how healthy the habits that cause leanness can be. Even someone at a healthy body weight would dramatically improve their health by adopting these habits.
Ultimately, it’s a no brainer. Everyone should be doing them. If you aren’t already, I hope you can take some of the tips in this article and get started. It’s most definitely worth it!
Thanks for reading!
