11 Health Principles To Transform Your Body (and Mind)

I'm going to share the 11 health principles to transform your body and mind. They're what I use to go from soft 20% to a shredded 6% body fat in 90 days.
And keep it off while constantly traveling as a busy entrepreneur. Anyone can use these to get fit fast, even if you've tried every fad diet and workout routine out there.
Welcome to the Martell Method. I went from rehab at 17 to building a $100 million empire and being a Wall Street Journal

bestselling author. In this podcast, I'll show you exactly how to build a life and business you don't grow to hate.
And make sure you don't miss anything by subscribing to my newsletter at martellmethod.com. So here's how to transform your body.
Starting with principle number one, it's not how much you eat, it's what you eat. See, a lot of people talk about calories.
Let me tell you this, micronutrients is how you feel. Calories is how much you weigh, but macros is how you look.
See, most people think that it's about calories, but I'm telling you, you could eat the crappiest calories in the world. If you eat a bunch of Cinnabon or fricking Krispy Kreme donuts, you might hit your calorie goals and you might even lose weight, but you will feel like crap because you don't have the right micronutrients.
You need the vitamins, you need the minerals, you need that to control your energy, to maintain good immunity, your mood, even your recovery post-workout is all about your micronutrients. Macros is a completely different game.
Your macros are your protein, your carbs, and your fats. And what's unique is you need the right type of macros for your specific goals to actually sculpt your body.
If you don't understand how to do this, you can go into a cut, into a caloric deficit, lose the weight. You actually have the ability on your reverse diet up if you've dialed in your macros to actually use that and your insulin to put on lean muscle mass.
Most bodybuilders know it. Most people that are on a diet never get there.
But it's not just about what you eat to transform your body. Let's get serious when you eat.
Which brings us to principle number two, don't eat after 6 p.m. I first learned this concept from my coach, Alan, because I realized that I would make bad decisions after 6 p.m.
Honestly, most cravings, most cheats, most moments of weakness happened after 6. And Alan just said, you shut it down at six.
So what do you mean? He goes, you just shut it down at six. At six o'clock, you stop eating.
There's no discussion. There's no conversation.
You have to eat within that window. So shut it down.
It's funny because if you listen to Brian Johnson, the blueprint guy who wants to live to like 400 years old, he says the same thing. He said, old Brian used to make bad decisions after four or 5 p.m.
And I just decided to take that optionality off the table. You got to do the same thing.
Here's why it's so powerful. First off, if you look at your eating pattern, you probably follow the same thing.
You snack at night, you eat because you're hungry. Just take it off the table.
It's the easiest way to ensure there's no calorie slips. The other thing is your digestive system follows your circadian rhythm, and you need time to rest.
You need the ability for your body to relax and recover. If you're eating, you're literally kicking it back into high gear right when you're about to go to sleep.
The cool part is it also creates a natural 12 hour fast without effort. Some of you, if you don't eat until 8am, you can get a 14 hour fast.
The longer your body has time to actually feed off of its own energy source, the better you're going to feel mentally and your recovery. But stopping to eat late night meals and snacking can be really hard if you don't follow this principle.
Which brings us to principle number three. It's easier to avoid the dragon than to slay it.
When I was 17, I ended up getting a lot of trouble and found myself in rehab. And I dealt with addictions and demons, and it was a tough period in my life.
But I learned something in rehab that's applied to every aspect of my life since then, which is my environment dictates my choices. And one of the ideas that they shared with me is that it's easier to avoid the dragon, avoid the temptation than to slay it.
See, a lot of you guys try to focus on willpower and mental toughness. I would just take the option out of your house.
Most people sit there and they have family members that have pantries and cabinets and drawers full of junk food. For me, with food, I had to get rid of it.
I had to make it the option that it's not even in the house. Why would I keep things in my house to tempt me that in a moment of weakness, I would make a bad decision.
So literally, I'm asking you

go in there, grab all the crap food, all the bad decisions, all the leftovers. I know some of you guys, but I don't want to waste food.
Great. Put it in a bag, bring it to the homeless shelter.
I don't know what you want to do with it. It just can't end up in your mouth.
Your environment will beat your intentions every day. So here's how to avoid the dragon.
Number one, don't keep trigger foods in your

house. The other day, my beautiful friend Ellie brought over homemade peanut butter chocolate

chip cookies. It was the most beautiful cookie in the world.
I had one bite and I knew immediately

had to be removed from my home. Couldn't keep it around me, had to go.
At least I know avoid the

dragon, don't keep it because those trigger foods are going to cause me to make even worse decisions. Number two, don't go down the candy aisle.
If you're at a grocery store and you're shopping, there is an aisle called the candy aisle. It's the sugar aisle.
It's the processed sugar aisle. It's the place where all the bad decisions are made.
I know you got to go get gum, but ask somebody else to go pick it up for you. Don't go down that aisle.
It is a bad decision. Avoid the dragon.
Don't try to slay it. Number three, 20-minute rule.
Eat and wait. If I feel inclined to make a bad decision, instead of just a hard no, sometimes I'll just set a timer.
I set that timer for 20 minutes, and I look at my phone, and I said, look, I'm gonna wait. When this thing goes off, I'm gonna then make a decision.
Most of the time, I also eat an apple, because I figure maybe my blood sugar is a little low, and I need to bring it up. So I have an apple.
It's low in calories. I wait those 20 minutes.
I would say nine times out of 10, I decide not to make a bad decision. Using that 20 minute rule creates space between the emotion to want to eat and the decision to actually put something in your mouth.
And most of the time you will make a better decision. Number four, replace don't remove.
So if you have a sweet tooth, find something like protein, chocolate, peanut butter cups. I do that with the Quest bars.
They have incredible options. Don't have a whole bunch because you might find the whole bunch gone.
Just replace them with healthy alternatives. I saw this incredible recipe the other day for cottage cheese chips.
That's awesome. So if you're kind of a chip person, make some cottage cheese chips and all of a sudden it's high protein snacking all night long, just don't eat after six.
But it's not just about what you eat. Before we get back to this episode, if you prefer to watch your content, then go find me on YouTube.
I have this episode on YouTube. I'm Dan Martell on YouTube.
Just subscribe to the channel, turn on the notification bell because then you'll get notified in real time. It'll tell YouTube to tell you.
We got got a new episode, so you'll never miss anything. Now let's get back to the episode.
Which brings us to principle number four, measure what matters. It's kind of funny because I always weighed myself.
Wake up in the morning, jump on the scale, report into my coach. But the previous coach I worked with never asked me to weigh my food, to measure my food, to measure my macros, which seems obvious looking back because I was measuring other areas of my life, just not my food.
I love this Peter Drucker quote that is, if you can't measure it, you can't manage it. So measure your food.
There's a few things that I do to keep me on track. Number one, ensure that I get the right macros and calories.
Like I said, caloric deficit is what I weigh, but macros is how I look. And I'm always trying to OD on protein.
So you got to make sure you hit your macros, your proteins, your fats, and your carbs appropriate to where you're at. So measure those things.
Second thing is I always travel with both scales. I travel with a food scale and I travel with a weight scale.
First thing in the morning, I report in what I weigh right after that I eat, but I measure all the food so that I know exactly what to enter and track my macros. Number three, removes decision-making.
The cool part is by doing it this way, I don't want to create decision fatigue. I wanna set it and forget it.
Every time I go to eat, I already know what I'm supposed to eat because I have meal planning. I don't wanna think about it.
I don't wanna sit there and look at a menu and go like, I should eat this, but maybe I'll order that. That's where you get yourself in trouble.
But to transform your body, it isn't just about eating right. Which brings us to principle number five, aim for hypertrophy.
This one evaded me for a long time because I always thought that to look good, I just had to lose fat. But what I've learned since then is that the whole point is to build muscle.
Why? There's this thing called sarcopenia, which is the body's process of eating muscle. The older you get, have you ever touched an old person and their muscle feels like a bag of milk, just the skin and there's nothing in there.
That's what it is. And usually around the age of 35 to 40, you start to have your body do this.
So if you don't put on lean muscle, then it's not there later in life. And the crazy part is, is most old age injuries are directly correlated to a lack of muscle.
They trip and they can't brace themselves on the small fall. And all of a sudden they go down and they twist their knee, hurt their ankle.
Then it's a game of operation to operation. All of a sudden they haven't been moving for six months.
And I've seen it over and over and over again. If you don't put lean muscle mass on when you can, the older you get, the quality of life goes down.
The cool part is muscle also increases your metabolism, meaning, fun part, you can eat more without gaining fat. That's just a fact.
Your muscles burn more calories than lack of muscle. So the more muscle you put on, the more space you have in your macros to be able to have some fun throughout your week.
And I gotta tell you, it's just a great place to get

where you've got the stability, the strength

to be able to feel good about yourself

and also show up and put out some power.

Like if you gotta defend yourself,

you don't wanna be easy to kill.

The whole point is to be hard to kill.

H to K means you need lean muscle mass.

But now, how do you build that muscle?

Which brings us to principle number six, lift the same, look the same. I also heard my trainer Alan say this all the time, lift the same, look the same.
If you're lifting the same week over week, don't be surprised if you don't look any different. And it's funny because you go to the gym, you see all these people working out, sweating, doing the thing week over week over.
I've seen people years in the gym and they haven't changed their body composition or their physique at all. See the same effort, same outcome.
So how do we change everything? We need to understand this concept called progressive overload training, which is essentially you want to increase your volume and you switch body parts. So you may be in a six week block and you'll focus on certain types of movements to hit different body parts.
And you want to max out every time you go to the gym, you want to figure out, are you in the rep range of 12 to 15? If you're easily getting 15, increase the weight, log it. Next time you go back, are you able to get 12 to 15? No, you can only get 10.
Cool. Stay there, but lift harder.
Last few reps, try to go 11, 12. Once you get back up to that 15, increase the weight.
That is progressive overload. And the cool part is you safely increase weight week over week.
You don't just go in there and go like a cowboy and put a bunch of plates on the bench press and then try to push something and impress all your friends and pull a muscle. And then you can't work out for three months.
That's literally the thing that takes people out from making progress is injury. So the whole idea for me and how I train my clients is to avoid movements that could cause injury.
If you do that, you stay in the game to get the gain. And your body adapts to stress.
You need to increase it. If you don't increase the level and volume of stress you put on it, the weight, the strength, the effort, then you're not gonna increase your ability to lift more and change your body.
But to gain muscle and strength, you need the right fuel. Before we get back to the episode, if you actually wanna know what my real life looks like and see the people and the businesses and the companies I buy and my family and just like how I make it all work, go follow me on Instagram, Dan Martell, 2Ls and Martell on Instagram.
It's where I show the behind the scenes, the real deal, real time. I'd love to see you there.
Have an amazing day. Which brings us to principle number seven, travel with your food.
See, most people give up their gains when they travel. I've seen client after client, go on vacation, come back, put on three, five pounds.
And I'm like, why? Have you ever considered that you could go on vacation and actually come back leaner, come back healthier? It's actually not hard. I'm gonna tell you how to do it because most people don't believe me, but I just did it.
I got back from Australia and Bali with the family, came back leaner. Well, I learned this the hard way when I did this thing called Project Visible Labs.
And the whole time I was doing this for 90 days, essentially cutting my whole body and changing my composition, I traveled. I did like six trips, vacations, family stuff, the holidays, because I didn't want anybody to go like, oh, it was easy for you.
You just hibernated in your basement and did your thing. No, I went and lived and still got fitter.
How did I do that? I got good about my meal prep. So how do you find food when you're out there traveling? First off, contact the local gym on where you're going that's meant for bodybuilders.
My tip is ask them if they have a hip thrust machine. If they have a hip thrust machine, they probably are the place that the bodybuilders go.
Most of those gyms have a relationship with a meal prep company. Number two, order the food before you get there.
The cool part is, is those meal prep companies, most of them, you can give them your macros and they'll literally deliver you food made specifically for your macros or at least close enough to it. I always like to do lunch and dinner.
Number three, get a hotel with a fridge. Then I call the hotel and I ask them for a fridge.
I ask them for a microwave and I make sure I have a plate and my cutlery. And essentially I do my breakfast in my hotel room and I do my lunch and my dinner.
Even if I have to go out to eat, I'll eat before I go out and then just order a protein side to hit my macros, which I'll talk about more later. The key is, is to be prepared and order your meal prep on the go in the city you're traveling to so you don't have to make those decisions at restaurants.
And if you want my help with that, find me on Instagram and DM me YouTube Fitness and we'll see if you'd be a fit. But I only wanna work with people that are serious.
But there's one thing you consume that you need to watch out for, which brings us to principle number eight, don't drink your calories. When I was in my 20s and 30s, I was one of those late night entrepreneurs.
I would stay up till two or three in the morning because that's when I felt that did my best work and then I would sleep in. The energy drinks with a bunch of sugar or soft drinks or any other kind of vice that just had a bunch of sugars that I didn't need.
I was drinking my calories. You don't even realize it, but for some people, half their calories on a daily basis comes from liquids, from the things they drink, that if they just got rid of that, it would change the game for them.
The truth is most calories are invisible. It's not just what's on your plate, but what happens in between meals.
Right off the bat, it's just not balanced nutrition. You don't wanna be drinking calories and trying to track those macros.
The other issue is liquid calories don't make you feel full. So you could drink a bunch of stuff, have a sugar high, and then just absolutely crash and then feel hungry right after.
And the crazy part is there's hidden sugars and fake sugars. I mean, all over the place.
It's just the way they report it. They know that they're doing low-cal options or diet options.
That stuff will mess with your gut. Stick to water, black coffee, or tea only.
But it's not just about removing bad drinks from your diet, which brings us to principle number nine, drown yourself in water. Most people are chronically dehydrated.
I can't tell you the amount of people that come up to me and they're yawning and they're tired. And I'm like, have you drank enough water today? They're like, what does that have to do with anything? The truth is, is your body needs water, especially if you're working out, you're moving around, you're walking a lot and you're not drinking a glass of water all the time.
When I'm on meetings, I'll literally ask people, everybody show me your glass of water. They show me their glass of water.
I go, good, let's chug it. Boom.
I now know I'm getting the best version of them on the other side of chugging that water. Most people just drown themselves in other stuff and they don't get enough water and that makes them feel hungry all the time, which then leads to making bad decisions.
Dehydration causes more cravings, poor recovery, bad decision. It makes your heart work way harder than anything else.
And what you want to do instead is drink one liter within one hour of waking up. As soon as I wake up, I literally pour myself a filter glass of water, put a little bit of lemon, a little bit of salt, and I drink that because I want to rehydrate and provide some electrolytes to my body.
Most people don't know this, but you actually burn calories by breathing at night. That's actually where the calorie burn comes from is your breath.
That's a crazy idea. So you're probably massively dehydrated as soon as you wake up.
So I walk around with a liter of water and I just fill it up and I make sure I try to get three or four of those a day to make sure that I know I'm hydrated. And here's a fun little way to do it.
Do you get a clear piss before noon? Try to get enough water to get a bathroom break with some clear pee. Then you know you're well hydrated.
But the truth is you will end up going out for food once in a while. So here's the right way to do it.
Before we get back to the episode, if you want to jumpstart your week with my top stories and tactics, be sure to subscribe to the Martell Method newsletter. It's where you'll elevate your mindset, fitness, and business in less than five minutes a week.
Find it at martellmethod.com, which brings us to principle number 10, load up on protein. I mean, one of the games I play with myself is to overdose on protein.
When I say that, I mean like I'm always trying to find lean protein sources. When I go to a restaurant, my favorite thing to do is go straight to the add-on section and see what protein options they have because you can find chicken, you can find tuna, you can find eggs, and it's for like seven bucks, 10 bucks.
And what you don't realize is most restaurants will allow you to order just the sides without the whole plate. So for 30 bucks, oftentimes I can get a hundred grams of protein lean without making bad decisions with a saucy salad or some bad decision like nachos and pizza.
Now I know that sounds crazy and most people will look at you like you're weird, but my rule is you have to be willing to be misunderstood for a long period of time to get any results in this world.

If this is new to you, I want to teach you a few things.

First off, you have to increase the amount of protein you're having and fill up on it.

Well, I don't want to look too bulky and I think protein is not good for my indigestion.

I'm telling you, most people are not eating enough protein.

Check with your doctor, but definitely increase. Chicken breast, steak, fish, eggs on the go.
I mean, I will do beef jerky, but it's high in sodium, so I don't love to do that. I'm just looking for high protein options with low calories, and I try to make sure I front load those before I make any other food decisions.
Ask for no seasoning, oil, or salt. Just put it on the side.
But if you want to transform your body and your mind, none of this matters if you burn yourself out. Which brings us to principle number 11, prioritize your sleep.
Sleep isn't rest, it's reconstruction. I need you to understand this mental model.
It's not about getting enough rest. It's literally allowing yourself to recover.
Now I get it. Most people think I'm crazy because I get up at 4am most mornings, but most people don't realize I'm going to bed at 8.30, 9 o'clock.
I'm getting seven to eight hours and I have incredible sleep. Now what I do is I set an alarm for when I go to bed.
See, most people, their problems in life would be sorted and solved if they just went to bed on time. Think about it.
My dad used to say nothing productive happens after 11 p.m. Why are you up so late? Go to bed.
And the crazy part is your recovery happens during sleep. If you want to get the results of all that heavy lifting, of all that effort with your nutrition, and you don't sleep right, you don't get the results.
The crazy part is people see me and they go, oh, he must be on TRT or some kind of growth hormones. The truth is whole foods, hard work.
I call it testosterone E and C for effort and consistency. But the truth is, is growth hormones peak during your deep sleep.
That's why sleep's so important to me. The people that need you to be around, that need your energy, that need you to show up with focus and have the capacity to be able to protect them, to serve them, to play with them, need you.
You know, most people would die for their kids, die for their family. Could you live for them? Could this be the moment you make your health a priority? That's my question to you.
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