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Last week, I got the greatest message ever. Do you want to play in the Sidemen charity football match? My favorite sport to play in the largest stadium in the country with the biggest online audience of any charity sports event ever and millions raised for great causes. Oh my god, yes. The only issue is I look like this. This is my current body. No alterations, no clenching. This is about how good I am at football. But you know the motto, say yes, then learn how to do it later. I would love to play right now. I just need to completely transform my weight, my health, and my football skills before April 18th, the day of the match. So, because we're trying to make such a massive change in not a massive amount
of time, we need to address every single key health metric all at once. The first being, I'm overweight. I just got a full body DEXA scan done, which is pretty crazy cuz it shows you in crystal clear detail how much of you is lean muscle in red. And then how much is fat? And I'm not in love with the report that came with that cuz it confirms the obvious that I do have slightly too much fat. It's saying over here that I'm 64th out of an average 100 people. But it's also made me realize that I have way too much visceral fat. The hidden fat around your organs, which is particularly nasty. I'm 79th out of 100. I hate health checks. The good news, though, is losing extra weight is pretty much as simple as this equation. Calories taken in through food
and drink. So for me right now, this is 2,500 a day minus the calories I burn. So that's both what my body burns naturally just by being alive, 1,800, and any extra that I'm able to shed by moving around and exercising, a meager 400 right now. So that leaves us with a 300 calorie surplus. I'm eating more than I'm using. So my body is storing that excess mostly as fat. So how can I actually change this in a way that isn't just spend half my life in the gym? I think I've realized I've made it an involuntary habit to consistently clench to try and hide the belly. So, to up the number of calories burned, my desk chat is gone. It's replaced by two things. This wellness ball that I bought from Techno Gym, which is pretty great for me cuz I'm a born fiddler. And this lets me
fiddle, but in a way that's keeping my body moving and my core active. Then the best under desk elliptical that I've ever used, the QB go, which I love because it basically feels like a footrest, but one that I naturally end up pedaling anyway without even thinking about it. Now, I got to stress this kind of stuff is far from a full solution to my problem. Even if I use both of these for a few hours every day, it's only going to burn an extra roughly 200 calories. So, none of this is better than going to the gym. But the goal of this is just to burn enough calories while I work so that by the time I finish work, the amount that I need to tackle in the gym is actually achievable. Essentially, the plan is to burn an additional 400 calories from
focused exercise per day compared to what I used to. And that extra will be a combination of football practice, which as you've seen, I'm going to need plenty of, some strength training in between to make sure I don't waste away. But the most important tool in my entire arsenal is the incline walk. Walking at an incline on a treadmill honestly feels like a hack. It burns calories shockingly fast while being low intensity enough that you can also just do something while it's happening like play a game on your phone or watch a bit of TV. And it's actually relaxing. And you need that. You have to build in some things that you look forward to. Then finally, but most importantly, I also got to reduce how
many calories I take in from 2,500 to 2,100, leaving us with a total calorie deficit of 700 every day. I want to do this so badly because if I can keep this up, my entire body composition will completely change by the time it comes to my follow-up DEX appointment, which I'll have done just before the big game itself. But I'll keep you updated on Instagram in the meantime with progress. And then to keep track of everything, I'm using the creatively named calorie counter. I just love the fact that it lays out that exact equation I've been talking about, factoring in how many calories you're consuming, what your body burns by itself, and then what you're burning with exercise and movement, leaving you with the bottom figure, which is exactly
how much of a deficit you're in. and that the app updates the calories burned as you're doing things using the tracking on the Apple Watch. I would say Apple slightly overestimates, but you can just factor that in. Time for sleep. Not like that. It's like 11:00 a.m. I feel like the most incredible, but also terrifying part of this health journey is that every single section of health that I'm trying to tackle, they're all linked, which means if I can get them all right, they will compound each other for an even better result. But if one starts to go wrong, it will drag the others. Last year was the first time that I started consistently snoring in my sleep pretty badly. And weight gain is one of the
most common explanations for that. It makes my sleep less restful. It wakes Disher up who then wakes me up. All leading to an average sleep score last month of 76 out of 100, which is not good, especially considering that a lot of these apps inflate that figure to just make you feel better. So, here's the game plan to get that number up. First, three gadgets. And to be honest, each one of these is a bit of a wild card. First is the wood mat, which you place onto your bed and it's meant to use vibration in a way that stimulates circulation and relaxation. They say this is absolutely transformational to how restful your sleep is. We'll see about that. The Ellommind headband,
which is the first to be clinically shown to fix the other side of the sleep equation, helping people fall asleep faster using precise acoustic stimulation. People are raving about this thing online. The only thing I can say right now is just it's very squishy. I can see it being very comfy in bed. And then the final one is a gadget that sounds really counterintuitive, but this is actually the thing that I am most intrigued by. So, I found these glasses online by a company called Luminette. And they blast you with light. Like the literal opposite of sunglasses. Ooh. It's surprisingly out of your way. Like I very much feel like I can carry on doing what I'm doing while it's on. It's actually a pretty
well established thing that one way to fix your sleep cycle is to focus on exposing yourself to lots of light early in the morning. That way, your body fully wakes up at the start of the day so that when you're starting to wind down and getting ready to sleep, it's completely tired. Now, most people, myself included, don't do this. We spend the first few hours of our day in fairly dim indoor conditions, which means we don't hit our peak level of alertness till later, and therefore, we don't tire till later. So the whole idea of these glasses is really just to bring forward these timings so that when it comes to bedtime, you are less alert and more ready for sleep. So that's the tech. But one thing I recommend,
it's just a drop test. So one thing, if you're not getting completely optimal sleep, I would recommend you do is just see a doctor. I found one who's a specialist in everything I suffer with. He stuck his big long camera up my nose and immediately found inflammation cuz I have like 17 allergies. So he's given me a spray to take that down. And then also from a blood test, he found that I have a pretty significant iron deficiency, which he's saying is the most likely cause for all the restlessness that I get. It's just really good to fix these fundamentals before you start worrying about your fancy Tron style monobrow glasses. Tronob.
I got a wedge pillow. My dad, who's almost definitely at this point where I inherit my snoring jeans from, he swears by this. He carries one of these everywhere he goes because it lifts the entire upper half of your body, which reduces the pressure on your airways. So, it's likely to be a good short-term fix to stop the snoring until I've lost the weight. And then the last thing, which is by far the least fun, I need to stop snacking late from the cupboard of doom that we have in our cinema room. I can have the snack. It's just better to have the snack during the day and then just cold turkey quit eating at 7:00 p.m. because anything after that will mean my body is actively digesting while I sleep instead of
maximizing restfulness. So, let's see how close to 100 out of 100 I can get on my sleep score if I stick to all this. So, that's the weight. That's the sleep under control. But I do also need to get fit. In my entire life, I have never been able to sprint more than about 30 seconds. I am out of breath walking up the stairs. So, to say that I am not prepared for Wembley Stadium would be about the understatement of the century. Now, the best way to measure fitness is something called a V2 max test, which essentially quantifies how much oxygen that your body can use while exercising. That might sound niche. It's not. V2 max is actually pretty widely considered to be one of the best indicators for how long you're going to
live. So, you can imagine I wasn't ecstatic to find myself firmly in the fair category, just above poor. There's two things that can specifically help to address this, though. One is interval training. So, bursts of sprinting with quick breaks in between. I say as I've just taken a seat. It's not just a way to get more calories because interval training, it trains your heart to actually get more oxygen to your muscles and it trains your muscles to be able to use that oxygen better. Now, I'm also not made of time. So, I think the best way for me to get these sprints in is just the last 8 minutes of my nice, easy, fun incline walks. The second thing, though, is this guy, the Aeropit Elite. This is something you
keep around your mouth and it basically makes it harder to breathe. It forces you to be able to work with less so that when you have a normal amount, you feel like a superhuman. And it's a clever little thing. You can see it measuring the air going in and out of your lungs in real time and then using it to track your progress. So, just like the DEXA scan, I'm going to retest my V2 at the end of this transformation. And I pray to God that it's better than fair. But it's the lifestyle changes that I think will add rocket fuel to this journey. Stuff like this, the spottle. I have searched for years for the perfect water bottle and I think I found it. It's a glass bottle which makes it feel cleaner than plastic but
then with silicon on the outside so it doesn't thud when you put it down. To drink you can either sip with the straw or chug with the nozzle. And in case you hadn't noticed the thing is 2 L with the measurements actually marked out on it. So it gives me a sort of real life progress bar. If I can top this up each morning and just have it finished by the time I sleep alongside the water that I'll naturally end up having and other things. I know that I've had all the water I need to have to keep my body performing optimally and it should also help keep me a little fuller so I eat less. Just realized I am killing it today. Every few days I've also been treating myself by emptying one of these electrolyte sachets in there.
These ones from Element are the best that I found. They make the taste much less boring and they're quite clean. The only sweetener is a bit of stevia. The hardest thing though that I'm going to need to address is stress. Stress is such a significant factor in health that if I don't get it under control, it could single-handedly just kill this entire run. Stress leads to bad sleep, whether you have a wedge pillow or not. Stress triggers the fight orflight response, which makes you crave energy dense, unhealthy things like candy. And it can stop you losing weight or gaining muscle, even if you're eating everything right, because it's reallocating your body's resources towards short-term survival. And that's scary because I get stressed a
lot. I'm someone who really likes things to go to plan. And filming YouTube videos is a complex, messy process that, let's just say, very rarely does. Are you all right? Yeah. So, there's three things I'm going to try. A is just a complete rework of my calendar. Just giving myself more time to get the same things done so that I'm not constantly rushing to finish the next thing fast and getting worked up when that doesn't happen. B is kind of the flip side of this, gratitudes. I'll give three things that I'm grateful for to Disha, my wife.
She'll give three things to me. And this is something that currently we're only doing when we get particularly stressed. And it really helps because it refocuses your brain on all the amazing things that no doubt are happening in your life. But I'm curious to see how much difference this will make if we just do it every day. And then finally for stress, of course, it's me. There's a gadget for that. I've only just started using this Thera mask, but I think I'm going to absolutely love it because you just stick it on your face and turn it on and it treats you with red light, which is deaging, blue light, which is good for skin clarity, and then while that's happening, it does a light massage. And that combination of feeling good because of the massage
while also feeling like you're doing good for yourself with all the lights all in this really comfy package that's USBC rechargeable and keeps your eyes out of it so you can carry on watching TV is I think a potential game changer for the evening windown routine. The only thing left to do then is to gain some ball knowledge. Here are my current stats. I have never in my life watched a football game from start to finish and out of 30 shots at goal I managed to score 18. If that sounds impressive, bear in mind there was no goalkeeper. I was only 8 m away and I nearly debted myself in the process. So I booked a coach. Three times a week I'm going to train football, which should
also help a little with the fitness equation. And then I should also start watching some games for strategy. But thankfully that fits very neatly into my time incline walking on the treadmill. So, I'm filming this video on January 18th, 3 months before the match, which is on April 18th, which means by the time you're seeing this video, I'm well into the transformation and I have basically one month to go. I'm scared. I'm very scared. I've never done anything like this, but what an opportunity. Let's get to work.
