Unstoppable: 4 Steps to Transform Your Life

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Copyright © 2019 David Hauser

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-5445-0326-4

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Disclaimer

This publication contains the opinions and ideas of its authors. It is intended to provide helpful and informative material on the subjects addressed in it. It is sold with the understanding that the authors and publisher are not engaged in rendering medical, health, or any other kind of personal professional services in the book. The reader should consult his or her medical, health, or other competent professional before starting any diet or exercise plan or adopting any of the suggestions in this book.

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Contents

Introduction

Part I: My Story

1. The Journey

2. Recurring Frustrations

3. The Turning Point

4. Obsession

Part II: Foundation

5. Optimization Mindset

6. The Four Steps to Transform Your Life: The Framework

7. Myths, Misconceptions, and Money

8. The Role of Evolution

9. How Did We Get Here?

Part III: Experiments

10. Fuel Yourself: The Unstoppable Lifestyle I

11. The Unstoppable Lifestyle II

12. Supplementation and Vitamins

13. Sleep

14. Exercise, Movement, and Alignment

15. Micro-optimizations That Make a Difference

16. Mindfulness Practices

17. Life

Conclusion

About the Author

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Introduction

It was never my dream to write a self-help book about health and wellness. But after almost fifteen years of struggling with my weight and nutrition, it became my imperative.

You see, much like millions of people around the world, I’ve tried dozens of diets in my lifetime. I’ve exercised myself to the brink of insanity at the gym. I’ve even endured five years of relentless endurance sports competitions, which nearly destroyed my knees, yet left me restless inside. All in the name of having control over my weight, how I looked, but most importantly, how I felt.

But none of those things ever delivered the satisfaction and peace of mind I sought. Instead of making me stronger—making me unstoppable—they left me more confused than ever before. I wondered if I was doomed to spend the rest of my life searching for the best diet, the best workout, or the best version of myself. Little did I know the information I was looking for wasn’t something that I’d find in popular media about health and wellness. It was something that I’d literally have to find in myself and after years of experimentation, testing, and tracking.

I learned a lot of things from this process. But no lesson was more important than this one: I needed to share this framework with the people out there who are as confused as I was about what it takes to get and stay healthy. For the people who want to make the most of their time with family and friends, and optimize their health at the same time.

Believe me, no one’s more surprised than I am to have authored a book that openly acknowledges the shame and guilt I felt when I was overweight in my twenties, as well as my love of yoga. If you’d told me I’d be doing any of this in my early days as an entrepreneur, I would’ve said you were insane. But the greatest challenges of our lives have the potential to throw open the door to learning. And, although my journey to health and wellness was born of anger and frustration, it has culminated in making me more knowledgeable, more understanding and accepting, and most importantly, more joyful. To me, this is what it means to be unstoppable.

As you may have figured out by now, this isn’t your typical book on the topic of health, wellness, or nutrition. Honestly, I couldn’t have ever written anything typical—after all, I’m a nerd with OCD who grew up programming for fun. But that’s what makes this book ideal for the millions of people who have tried the diets and quick fixes and are ready for an actual solution. All that’s required on your part is ownership and commitment. You’ll have to become your biggest advocate. You’ll have to get curious about your own body, conduct experiments, learn from those experiments, and evolve in a way that’s unique to you. I’ll go deeper into what all of this means in the book. And don’t worry, it might sound foreign now, but the framework is actually quite simple, and I’ll be there to help with the right information along the way. Once you take ownership, the ironic thing is that the Unstoppable Lifestyle will be easier than anything you’ve ever tried. As was the case in my journey, with the right tools and practices, the path seems to light up in front of you.

And that’s not to say you won’t face challenges—one of the most significant challenges is from our own culture’s entrenched beliefs about health and wellness. But by becoming curious and doing your own research, you’ll learn the origin of these beliefs and train a critical lens on the interplay between big business and nutrition. And by using that information to guide experiments, gather data, and interpret results, you’ll learn what it means to become truly unstoppable.

Let your journey truly begin now!

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Part I

Part I: My Story

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Chapter 1

1. The Journey

Whether you realize it or not, you embark on a health and wellness journey with each new day. From the moment you open your eyes in the morning until you go to sleep at night, you’re making decisions that have the potential to positively or negatively impact your quality of life. That’s why what you eat, drink, and think, as well as how you move your body (or not) plays a pivotal role in your journey to health and wellness. Make the right decisions about these things consistently, and more than likely, you’ll lead a healthy life. Make the wrong ones and you could suffer serious setbacks on your journey.

Now, I’m not saying all of this to scare you.

On the contrary, actually: I say this to empower you. That’s because the right decisions have the potential to serve as entry points into the lives we want to lead, the way we want our bodies to look, and how we want to feel.

But here’s the thing: being healthy is hard work. It means making the right decisions from the time we wake up until we go to sleep at night. Being sick, on the other hand—well, that’s easy. It requires no change in behavior and eliminates the need to make the right decisions all the time about the food you eat or how you treat your body. You can do as you please and take advantage of all that life has to offer.

That is, until you physically can’t.

As someone who has struggled with diet, exercise, and health for most of my life, I can attest: being sick was incredibly easy—at first. But over time, being sick held me back from truly taking advantage of all that life has to offer. The decisions I made about what I put in my body and how I moved it started to have massively negative consequences. When my body started to shut down, that’s when I started to view decision-making differently.

Instead of obstacles to my happiness, I started to view decisions as small units of potential change—units that, when broken down, could be optimized.

Here’s a quick, if oversimplified, example: when confronted with the right food or the wrong food for my body, I could make the decision to go with the food that would give me energy and clear my mind, or I could go with the lesser option. When I changed the way I viewed decision-making, I started to look at scenarios like this one as moments to optimize life starting on a much smaller scale. But when added up, I discovered that all those smaller optimizations translated into tremendous gains in health and wellness.

Makes sense, right? I think so.

But, strangely, our performance-driven and success-obsessed culture tends to overlook this approach to health and wellness. Few people have considered what it means to optimize their time, energy, and resources to lead richer, fuller, healthier lives simply by optimizing their decision-making process. Though every individual is on their own health journey simply by being alive, many haven’t been intentional about choosing their destination. As an entrepreneur over the last fifteen years, I’ve seen very ambitious, professionally-minded individuals go about making optimizations in their businesses, in their schedules, and for their employees, but completely overlook making optimizations to body and mind. This has always surprised me, but it also makes clear how even the most driven among us don’t think about optimizing things like sleep, exercise, and diet the way we do many other things in our lives.

Instead, I’ve found that most people who are interested in embarking on their own health and wellness journey are guided by myths that emerge from the pseudoscientific information popularized in the media. As a result, many people think health revolves around counting calories and steps, doing daily cardio exercise, lowering cholesterol, eating low-fat foods, and the like. Though common, accepting this information as truth is dangerous in many ways. That’s because much of this information is rooted in faulty science, or shared by brands or spokespeople that have been paid to endorse products. When these products and methodologies don’t work as promised, they’re understandably frustrated and disappointed.

This reflects my journey to health and wellness, too.

Throughout my twenties and early thirties, I believed in the popular health narratives that seemed to come and go with each passing year:

Burn more calories than you take in and you’ll lose weight.

Avoid high-fat foods and you’ll keep cholesterol in a healthy range.

Do cardio every day.

These are just some of the health mantras I repeated to myself while I struggled with my weight, and they dictated my approach to fitness and health. If I felt low on energy, I vowed to do more cardio. When my doctor said my cholesterol was high, I eliminated fatty foods from my diet. But none of it worked. The symptoms always continued, no matter how strict I was with myself. Frustratingly, during this time, popular pseudoscience provided zero answers for why I felt the way I did.

And that’s why I decided to write this book—to give people who are searching for answers some place to start. To give people a no-bullshit alternative to the empty health information that’s everywhere these days. I also wrote this book because when I set out on my own journey, I wish I’d had a resource like this to parse fact from fiction when it comes to health and wellness, and to help me reach my personal goals.

Once I decided to take matters into my own hands, I started to question everything I’d been led to believe was true about diet, health, medicine, and more. I spent ridiculous amounts of time, money, and energy exploring those areas in an effort to optimize my own life, body, and mind.

The end result?

This book.

Not only will it save you time, money, and energy, as well as help you to jumpstart your journey, but it’ll serve as a shortcut for finding the right strategies for optimizing your life and becoming unstoppable. It’ll also help you to achieve your own magic moments—the name I gave to those times when you really start to see the sum of good decision-making in everyday life. For me, those magical moments were things like losing and keeping weight off, finally feeling comfortable taking my shirt off in yoga, and not feeling hungry all the time.

Before we go any further, one thing I want you to know: I understand how hard this is. Over the years, I’ve felt insecure, self-conscious, and ashamed of my own shortcomings. I’ve felt like I wasn’t doing enough, not limiting myself enough, and it put me in a bad place. I know it can be tough to imagine how to get from where you are today to where you want to be tomorrow. But I’m here to tell you that change is possible if you enter into this journey with your eyes wide open, and with real intention. After all, you only have one life, one body, and one mind. Imagine what it would look like to make the most of them?

Computer scientist Alan Keys probably said it best: Our ability to open the future will depend not on how well we learn but how well we are able to unlearn. I invite you on this journey with the caveat that it’ll require a lot of unlearning of thinking and behaviors that feel familiar and right. It’ll be hard. But, in the end, the framework, the practices, and the commitment will make you truly unstoppable.

Let’s go.

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Chapter 2

2. Recurring Frustrations

There are two dark clouds that have always hovered over me: one, I’ve always felt fat; and two, I’ve always felt hungry.

These two deep-seated notions have often made me feel as if I was scrambling aimlessly as I tested different diets and exercise fads. No matter how strict I was in following a new diet or exercise, those two dark clouds remained. Over time, I struggled to manage these feelings. Because I always felt fat, I didn’t feel like I should eat. But if I didn’t eat, I never had any energy. It was a terrible cycle.

Maybe your struggles are similar, maybe not. Maybe you, like me, have judged yourself as you look in the mirror or work out next to someone at the gym. And maybe this judgment has led you to try all kinds of different diets or dedicate yourself to new workouts. No matter your struggle, the truth is that just about everyone I know is self-conscious about something. Most have aching insecurities. Most people are way too hard on themselves. Most judge themselves harshly for their lives, bodies, and the choices they make that involve them. But right now, let’s transform these areas into opportunities for optimization instead of judgment.

The Crux of the Problem

My own journey, like many, began with trying to get my weight under control. This began in college. In high school, though I was aware of being overweight, I didn’t care so much about it. I ate until I felt full. Actually, because I ate so quickly, the truth is that I often ate beyond being full. But this didn’t take a serious toll on me since I was growing taller with each passing month. I actually thought I was quite healthy in high school because I was cooking my own meals—unlike many high school students—and playing sports. Plus, I could hide my body fat in the mandatory suit coats that we had to wear each day at prep school, or beneath my football uniform on the field. If I didn’t see it, I thought, it wasn’t there.

When I got to college, I could no longer hide in a uniform. I struggled because, for the first time, I had to actually think about what I wore each day. In freshman year, I had an unlimited meal plan and a cafeteria a few steps from my dorm, which didn’t help matters. I quickly gained the freshman fifteen at the very same time I was navigating the experience of living in a co-ed dorm on campus. For the first time in my life, I felt shame when I looked at myself in the mirror.

Naturally, I wanted to fix this problem. So I did my research, absorbed the advice of friends, and so-called experts in the media, and decided I needed to do cardio—every single day. One thing to know about me: I’m a man of commitment and routine. So I dedicated myself to going to the gym every morning, and never missed a day. I remember at one point I ran regularly on the elliptical at the university gym each day for six weeks straight.

One big problem, though.

I didn’t lose any weight.

This confused me. After all, I was working out more than I’d ever worked out before and was burning lots of calories.

Amidst this frustration and wondering what else I needed to do, I started to more closely evaluate my food consumption. Since gaining the freshman fifteen, I’d moved off campus and had started eating less in the school cafeteria. But as a typical college kid, I was still eating all kinds of junk in my apartment—things like ramen noodles and macaroni and cheese. Anxious to see results, I cut back on those foods and tried meal replacement shakes from the then-popular SlimFast brand. Though they were expensive, I was determined to lose weight, so I fully committed to the SlimFast diet. I would eat a shake for breakfast, a shake for lunch, and then I would go to the cafeteria for dinner for my first real meal of the day, where I’d be sure to only consume low-fat foods (which, by the way, included low-fat desserts). Much to my surprise, this diet seemed to work. I lost about ten pounds in sixty days, chipping away at the weight I added my freshman year.

The problem was that the meal replacement approach was impossible to continue long-term. As a college kid, I couldn’t afford to keep buying a steady supply of SlimFast shakes to consume twice a day. My weight also plateaued after losing ten pounds. And, most importantly, it didn’t work physically because I was absolutely miserable on this routine. I was constantly hungry and spent each day thinking about food. This was especially problematic because, at the time, I not only was a full-time student, but I’d just launched a software-as-a-service company called Grasshopper. With a new company that was growing rapidly, not having energy just wasn’t an option. Hunger made me sleepy and caused brain fog. But I also had a short temper and no idea why. In short, I was incredibly unhealthy.

But I did learn something from the SlimFast experiment: food mattered. And, if I wanted to lose weight, I needed to do more than simply go to the gym and run on the elliptical seven days a week like a maniac. So, in deciding to eat more than one meal and two shakes a day, I focused on making sure that my meals aligned with the general consensus for nutrition at the time: low fat, high carb, and no red meat. I was still eating processed foods, but I figured if a bag of chips or popcorn said that it was low-fat, then it had to be healthy.

At that time, I also began calorie counting. So, even if I splurged one night and ordered a pizza because I needed the energy to pull an all-nighter, I then made up for it the next day at the gym and would run on the elliptical for 90 to 120 minutes to try and burn the calories I consumed the night before. In exchange for the occasional caloric splurge, I’d sometimes spend two hours on the elliptical burning off the late-night takeout. For a while, calorie counting was a security blanket: it allowed me to eat whatever I wanted to eat as long as I was willing to burn those calories at the gym.

I felt better for a while with this routine. I also had more energy calorie counting than when I was doing the SlimFast approach. But slowly, I began gaining all the weight back. When I gained back all the weight I’d lost, I immediately went back to the SlimFast. I was miserable, but it was a short-term solution to what was clearly a long-term problem for me.

At the time I couldn’t help but wonder: was this just the way it was going to be? Never losing more than ten pounds and being miserable while doing so?

No matter how hard I tried, it felt like I would always be both fat and hungry. And whenever I didn’t get the results I was looking for, I felt like it was all my fault for not succeeding—for breaking down and eating a pizza late, or not burning enough calories at the gym. My reaction every time I stepped onto the scale was, I’m not doing enough.

And so, the cycle continued as follows: I’d work out more, then feel hungrier. When I gave myself the food I craved, I’d feel guilty for eating. This cycle was incredibly maddening, but it continued for the next several years.

Health and Business

I’ve always been a hard worker. I’ve had to be. I was diagnosed with a learning disability at an early age and had to be tutored extensively throughout elementary and middle school just to get by academically. Reading was extremely difficult for me, and whenever we read passages from books aloud in English class, my heart would start to race because I was so nervous I’d get called on to read in front of my friends. These insecurities, however, never made me cave to feelings of inadequacy. Instead, they helped me to understand my unique learning style. What’s more, they fueled my drive to find other areas to excel in and prove people wrong. Today, I realize this experience made me successful in life. I now consider this disability to be my greatest gift in life because I learned how to learn.

One of the areas