Why? Because I'm going to tell you that it's not fat people's fault they are fat.

And you're going to scream and cry about how I am surrendering to the SJW narrative of fat acceptance, and giving lazy and gluttonous people an excuse to be lazy and gluttonous. You're going to scream and cry about how I am going against the culture of personal responsibility and self-empowerment.

Of course, the real reasons you will be upset about this is that you want to take credit for not being fat, a trait with increasing value in the current multi-decade obesity epidemic. And you want to believe you live in a just universe where virtue is rewarded, and lack of character is punished.

This, of course, is all nonsense and has nothing to do with the red pill. Life isn't fair, a strong will cannot conquer all obstacles and the red pill, if you pop open the capsule, isn't full of testosterone, grit, and manly virtue... it's full of knowledge, insight, and wisdom.

People who win at life are not the people with the best character, but the people with the greatest command of relevant knowledge.

• Fat people are not fat because they are lazy and gluttonous. Instead, they are lazy and gluttonous because they are fat.
• Fat people are not sick because they are fat. They are fat because they are sick.
• Fat people did not get sick by lacking manly virtue. They got sick because they believed, and then acted on, false information.

In other words, there is a blue pill about food and eating. And, since we are in the midst of an obesity epidemic, it's pretty obvious that there must be great overlap between this blue pill, and what most people believe.

So what are the myths about eating that are making people fat and sick?

• A calorie is a calorie, and eating 100 calories has the same effect whether it is 100 calories of sugar, of cheese, of rice, or of foie gras.
• Losing fat is simple in principle: eat less, and move more.
• Losing fat requires strong willpower and motivation to stick to this simple program.
• The body is a box that follows the Law of Conservation of Energy: if you eat it, you have to burn it, or you're going to store it.
• If you want to lose weight, reduce your daily caloric intake by X and/or increase your daily activity by Y.
• This is difficult because your gene lines evolved under conditions of perpetual food scarcity, and your body is designed to store as much fat as possible at any opportunity.

Now, some of you already know that this is 100% bullshit, but others of you still believe it's just common sense, or something "everyone knows".

So what is the truth?

• Food is not made of a mysterious substance called "calories". It is made of specific organic compounds, all of which the body responds to differently. Some of them are healthful, and others are toxic and will damage your body's ability to regulate its own fat content.
• How much you burn is not only a function of how much you move, and if you simply and only eat less, your body will respond by burning less, and it will also change your brain chemistry so you will move less.
• Storing fat and burning fat are both natural processes, and the body has programs for both, which are comfortable and easy if you are not sick.
• Your body is not a passive box that has things put into it or taken out. In order to gain fat, your body must actively do things to synthesize and store it. In order to lose fat, your body must actively do something to unpack it from storage. Both of these are modes of function which can be invoked.
• You cannot successfully and permanently lose weight by eating less. You can only do so by eating nothing.
• Your body did not evolve under perpetual scarcity. It evolved under conditions of alternating scarcity and abundance. It is designed to store a moderate amount of fat, and then live off the stored fat, then store fat again.

If losing weight is part of the body's natural process, then it's not supposed to hurt. Your nervous system uses pain to motivate you to avoid unhealthy things, not to torture you for no reason.

But how does this all work?

There's two parts to this. First, there is how a healthy metabolism works. Secondly, there is how this system can be sabotaged, and make someone fat and sick.

How does a healthy metabolism work?

The two major signalling hormones that the body uses to regulate energy balance are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glucagon. It uses these two hormones to control the movement of energy-storing chemical compounds, such as glucose ("blood sugar") and fats.

Insulin stimulates cells to absorb glucose out of the blood. Cells then store it as glycogen (a polymer of glucose) or by converting it to fat (which they know how to do fairly easily).

Glucagon reverses his process, stimulating cells to unpack what they have stored and release it into the bloodstream.

These two hormones exist in balance. When you eat, and digest food, and it hits the bloodstream, your insulin goes high and your glucagon goes low, and your cells absorb and store what you have eaten. When your blood glucose is low, and you have not eaten, your insulin goes low and your glucagon goes high, and your cells unpack the stored fat and sugar and release them into the bloodstream, where other cells pick them up and burn them.

So, why does stored fat need to be sent back through the blood? Why can't cells just burn it where it is? Because you have different types of cells. Muscle cells don't store lots of fat... adipose cells do. And because these cells have different roles, they have different levels of sensitivity to these two hormones. Adipose cells need to be sensitive to both insulin and glucagon, because they need to store food, and to release food. Muscle cells don't need to be very sensitive to glucagon at all, because it's not their job to release stored energy... but they do need to be sensitive to insulin, in fact, more so than adipose cells, because they need to be absorbing sugar at the very time when other cells are releasing it.

So this is how a healthy metabolism works... you eat food, your absorb it, your cells get fat. That's okay. That's supposed to happen. Because then you don't eat food, your cells get thin again.

You're supposed to be gaining and losing a moderate amount of body fat, over time, as food availability changes. This is healthy.

So now we move on to what's NOT healthy. The key thing to understand here is that we have two processes... your cells are either getting fatter (insulin) or thinner (glucagon) at any given time. But only one of these processes can happen at once. Your cells are either releasing sugar or storing it... never both. That wouldn't even make any sense.

That means that if your insulin is high... you cannot burn stored fat. Period. Because you can't get it out of storage. Doesn't matter how much you have, it's locked away and you can't use it. So if your blood sugar gets low, and your insulin is still high, you're going to eat more, and move less. And, what's more, your basal metabolic rate is going to drop... and that, and not exercise, is what burns most of the "calories" you eat.

So why would your insulin be high when your blood sugar is low? Because you ate something. Especially something that has lots of sugar or processed starch, and doesn't have a lot of fat or protein (which tend to trigger other processes that signal, hey, you're full, stop eating).

Does that kind of food sound familiar? Yeah, that's right, it's anything that comes wrapped in plastic. It's processed food. It's fruit juice. It's soda. It's stuff you can heat in a microwave and stuff into your face. It's convenience food. It's the modern western diet, since about 1970. And it's eaten, not in two or three stonking great meals, but in little bites and nibbles throughout the day, so that insulin stays elevated forever.

And now it doesn't matter how much stored fat you have, because you can't burn it. Calorie restricting is just going to make you hungry and slow, because your fat may be fat, but your blood is starving.

"Eat less, move more" == "Undereat steadily, lower your metabolic rate, be constantly hungry, and still get fat".

That fat guy isn't fat because he has less character than you. If you had his same insulin and blood sugar levels, you'd be eating half a cheesecake, too. Willpower has nothing to do with it. Fatso is fat because he was given the wrong guidance about what to eat and when.

It is absolutely not his fault, and I don't care if that offends your macho-man sensibilities, because it's the truth. Defeat your ego and take the red pill.

So how did fat people get this way?

• They ate too often, just like their culture, and their doctor, told them to do. Because breakfast, it turns out, is NOT the most important meal of the day.
• They ate what the food industry gave them to eat... high fructose corn syrup, modified tapioca starch, maltodextrose, and lots of bread. Because their doctor told them that a calorie was a calorie was a calorie.
• Once they got fat, they did what their doctor told them to do. Count calories, cut calories, eat six small meals a day, do lots of low-intensity cardio for long periods of time.
• That is a recipe for constant tiredness and ravenous hunger. So they fell off their exercise program and diet, and then the rest of us blamed them for it, instead of the diet and exercise program.
• Then, when they got so fat they developed type 2 diabetes, what did the doctor give them? Insulin, that's what. You know, the hormone that makes you fat.

Fat people are not fat because they are weak, they are fat because they took advice that couldn't have been any worse if it was actually designed to kill them.

Does that remind you of anything? Perhaps it reminds you a bit of how your society told you to act to attract women... not only wrong, but the exact opposite of right.

"So what should fat people do?"

Don't eat less, eat nothing. It's called intermittent fasting. It's what humans evolved to do.

"But if I fast, won't my metabolism slow down?"

No. When your insulin goes low, and glucagon goes high, all those fat cells will unpack the fat, and release it into your blood. If your blood is full of triglycerides, which are full of energy, why would your basal metabolic rate slow down?

"But won't I be hungry if I don't shove bagels into my face every two hours?"

At first you will. And that might tempt you to eat, if you think it's just going to keep getting worse.

But it won't. Your insulin falls, and you start unpacking fat, and your blood is full of caloric stuff again. Then you actually have eaten. You just ate something you already had stored in your body. And if your blood effectively ate something, why would you be hungry?

Try it.

"But won't I lose muscle if I don't shove bagels into my face every two hours?"

Do you burn your furniture before you run out of firewood? No? Well, why would your body?

If you have a lot of muscle, eat some protein every so often... the body doesn't have nearly as much capacity to store protein. (Although it can reuse some of it.)

Yes, you will get weaker, because your muscles aren't packed with carbs. But when you refeed, you will very quickly be strong again, because the muscle structure was still there all along.

"But I ate the standard American post-70s diet and I'm not fat, because I didn't eat too much, and I did a fuckton of exercise, so there! You're wrong!"

You could be in worse trouble still. Fructose can only be processed by your liver, and it dumps right into making more fat. Where? In the liver. What does fat in the liver cause? Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, steatohepatitis, diabetes type 2, metabolic syndrome, heart disease, kidney disease, and basically being fucked.

And your liver weighs about 4-8 pounds, so guess how much fat you need to have in your liver to make it fatty? Not much more than one and a half to three. No visible symptoms because you're burning off the visible, subcutaneous fat (which is healthy, although not attractive) and leaving you with only the bad stuff that kills you.

Decades later. Suddenly.

Just because fat people are sick doesn't mean thin people are healthy. You could be sick with the same things and not know it. One of the biggest high-risk groups for diabetes type 2 is ex-college athletes when they hit 30 or 40.

If you have been eating steady-state, or like your sugary treats, or both, get your bloodwork done *now*, even if you are jacked. Check for high fasting glucose, and/or high fasting insulin.

And if you're one of those bodybuilders that dosed insulin and hgh to grow big, then ate constantly, and you have "bubble gut" with a sixpack on top, guess where all that fat is? That's right, it's under the muscle. Visceral. Right around your liver, and in it, too.

Ever wonder why big-time steroid users drop dead of heart disease a lot? Well, guess what else they were doing.

"You mean to say that everyone our culture decided, in the 60s and 70s, about eating, is just as wrong as what it decided in the 60s and 70s about sex and love?"

Yes. And lots of other things as well.

"What the fuck went wrong in the 60s and 70s?"

Boomers.

"So you mean to say that whether people win or lose at life doesn't reflect on their character at all, but whether they've been acting on good or bad information?"

That's exactly what I mean to say. It's almost as if I were writing these questions myself.

A healthy life doesn't involve vast portions of pain and struggle. If you are working reasonably hard, and not getting ahead, then you are probably guiding that work with bad advice... bad health advice, bad sexual strategy advice, bad financial advice, whatever.

The red pill isn't struggle. It's insight.

• "There is nothing I can say to you that will magically make you not a bitch."
• "Don't talk to me like a bitch."
• "I don't have time to waste on people who don't have the courage to try."
• "Just because someone has the hardware doesn't mean they aren't a coward."

For years, I've been saying that the difference between success and failure isn't character, but appropriate knowledge. Tends to make dudes mad if they didn't understand the whole "red pill" metaphor... because there's a lot of dudes out there who think the difference between success and failure is some sort of white-knuckled macho.

But for a long time, there was a question I simply couldn't answer.

What's "courage"?

What is the difference between the guys who find their anger, start lifting, and stop being so nice, and the ones who spend the rest of their lives bathing in online self-pity about how their jawbone isn't ideal?

The only answer we ever had for that question was "no courage", "no willpower", "not resilient enough"... as if life were a Japanese video game with quirky characters dressed as schoolgirls, defined by a series of health bars. You could label them "Courage", "Willpower", and "Resilience", or you could label them "Money", 'Bounciness", and "String Cheese". Doesn't matter. You've just created a theoretical construct that can't be observed or measured, and tried to explain something you can observe in terms of it.

That's dumb.

But I did it myself. We all did. We talked about "building willpower", and having "courage", and "giving less fucks". We wrote any number of drill instructor rants. I wrote one called "Don't talk to me like a bitch", and while it was well-received, I thought it was... stupid.

I was telling you to be brave. But I wasn't telling you how to be brave. I didn't know how to teach courage, because you can't "teach" a health bar. You can only teach knowledge.

We were trying to "motivate" you like a mediocre high school football coach, yelling at a 16 year old boy to "try harder" and "show more hustle", because he doesn't know how to spot what the kid is doing wrong with his elbow position when he throws.

So I finally managed to ask the question, how can we describe courage, not as an emotional "health bar", but in terms of what the actual brain does... store information?

So I talked with winners and with losers. I talked to incels. I talked to commies who want "society" to become an incubator that caters to their every infantile need. I re-read Seligman, and Rogers, and Maslow, and even some Thiel. And something dawned on me.

Courage is a cognitive skill and it can be taught and learned.

It has nothing to do with "Willpower", which is just another health bar. It is instead made of things that you know.

So what is this skill?

To answer that question, mentally separate all the obstacles you face into three types...

• The trivial... that which you can solve by applying the resources you already have in a way you already understand.
  
• The tractable... that which you can solve, but must act in new ways, acquire new knowledge, and expend significant effort to overcome.
• The intractable ... that which is literally impossible, or which you cannot acquire the skills and resources to solve with any reasonable effort.

You can also think of them as the easy, the hard, and the impossible.

"Courage" is the cognitive ability to accurately sort problems into one of these three categories.

When you believe something to be trivial, you apply what you already know and can do, and expect to succeed quickly. When you believe something to be intractable, you do not apply any effort at all to it, but find other problems to solve instead. When you believe something to be tractable but hard, you work at it over time, seek to gain new knowledge about it, and tolerate setbacks while still expecting to eventually succeed.

When someone experiences a "failure of courage" that prevents them from doing something they could otherwise do, it is because they mistake the tractable for the intractable. Habitual cowards are those who make this mistake so often that they don't believe in the existence of tractable problems... they assume that anything which isn't easy is impossible.

This is why we tell you to lift heavy weights. Not because it increases your "willpower", because willpower cannot be measured, and therefore doesn't exist. Not because it gets you used to suffering or doing something that hurts... people with self-harm scars do plenty of that and it hasn't made them courageous.

No, lifting helps you because it teaches you to believe in the existence of hard, but tractable, problems, and shows you what one looks like. When you start to lift, assuming you do it correctly, you see a small amount of progress very soon, which has a clear numerical measurement. But it takes many months and years of sustained effort to produce dramatic results. Thus you are clearly shown, right away, that the task is neither easy, nor impossible. The only thing that remains for it to be is "hard".

When we believe in the existence of tractable problems, and we believe that a particular problem is tractable, we will work on it. No special character, or motivation, or discipline, or other nebulously defined thing, is needed. We will simply work because we believe our work will be rewarded. Some people call this subjective experience "hope".

Now that we understand what courage is, I can systematically teach you to be brave.

• First, you must seek out experiences that convince you of the existence of all three categories.
• Second, you must learn to recognize the distinguishing features of a tractable problem.
• Third, you must find tractable problems that you want to invest your effort in solving, work on them, and observe the results, then continue to do this over and over again until you die of old age.

This is fairly obvious in hindsight. You learn to believe that some things are hard, but doable. You learn what those things look like so you don't waste time trying the impossible, or miss opportunities by not trying. And you increase your own belief in your ability to do this by doing it over and over until you die.

When you find yourself unmotivated, undisciplined, afraid, unwilling to proceed, trapped by despair... recognize that this is just belief that something is intractable. Then act to break that belief.

• Break the task into smaller subtasks, and think about those instead.
• Set a more modest goal, and achieve that first.
• Find and solve other tractable problems
• Watch others succeed at the task.
• Spend time around those who are much worse at the task than you. Then around those who are much better. Keep going back and forth between the two.
• Learn about the task from those who are good at it.
• Surround yourself with others who believe in the tractable and work on tractable problems.
• Surround yourself with those who believe in your abilities, and encourage you.

What's important is not to achieve great victories, but to move the needle. Belief in your ability to achieve the hard is like the strength you gain from lifting... you get it a little at a time.

You don't have to go to a wedding, meet two bridesmaids, and pull a same-night threesome, like HumanSockPuppet did. Talk to that cute cashier at the university bookstore. Then see if you can get her to smile. You don't have to deadlift 550 to have permission to be in the gym. Just go and lift something.

The space between you and what you want is always composed, not of willpower or character or special personality traits, but knowing what to do. And if you can read, and listen, and observe, you can learn what to do.

Lack of courage is not a failure of character, it is simply a lack of belief, and of hope. It is a lack of the experiences what would give you those things. You can seek out and have those experiences. And feeling afraid or unmotivated or stuck is not the absence of some essential "character trait" that condemns you to be stuck forever. It is instead a sign that you need to train more confidence before you will be able to believe that the problem is not impossible, only hard. When you reach that point, you will try. And you will work.

Belief in the tractable, like strength, can be trained by doing. And you do not train strength by straining at things you cannot lift... you do it by lifting the heaviest thing you can until you can lift a heavier thing.

Becoming brave means believing in tractable problems. And acquiring that skill is, in itself, a tractable problem. Approach it like you would a barbell.... you load the appropriate amount of weight for you, and you keep going.