Cian Foley from Fat to Fittness

I am not a health freak. I like good food and partying hard. I sit at an office desk all day coding for a company in tramore called NearForm. I’m a nerd at heart. I love 80s action movies and retro video games, but my passion these days is not for TV or wasting my time on video games. These days I am passionate about getting the word out there about how I beat the horrible, preventable, affliction that held me back for years. Obesity.
I keep reading statistics about the crisis getting worse and worse globally with adults my age and kids suffering terribly… people dying directly from obesity waiting for bariatric surgery. I see experts arguing and people confused by mixed messages. I see snake oil sales of junk foods, preying on people’s weakness, and heavily marketed crash diet antidotes taking advantage of the inevitable results. I also the valiant but futile attempts many people are making, working hard but getting limited results from their efforts. This all stems from a basic misunderstanding of diet that has trickled down from scandalous science.
In my opinion, which I can back-up with data, scientific reports and first hand accounts, the answer to the obesity crisis is beyond simple, and the results to date have been incredible.
The problem is simple: we are eating autumnally in every single meal and snack, which means we are constantly priming our bodies for a winter that never comes.
Appetites out of control because natural fat storage processes and gorge instincts are being triggered all day every day. A squirrel cannot out-run the short autumn it experiences so we can never out-train the infinite autumn that is the western diet. Squirrels have the luxury of experiencing winter and so emerge in spring in great shape, we never experience winter anymore and so we pile weight on year after year until obesity sets in.
The solution is even simpler: stop eating an autumnal diet all the time.

In my book ‘Don’t Eat for Winter – The Anti-Autumnal Diet’, I tease out how simultaneous carbs+fat are the problem and a recent study backs this up (without providing the fundamental why). Carbs+fat are the signature of autumn as carbs do not exist in abundance until summer is out. Photosynthesis is required to create them i.e. long sunny summer days. Combined with staple fats and fats in nuts etc., autumn has this signature, which incidentally matches the signature of human breast milk. In fact, the motif of autumn itself, the acorn, has the exact same macro-nutrient ratio as human milk and it is no co-incidence that a plethora of junk foods match this signature. I believe this is because they appeal to our autumnal instincts, which can be explained with fancy terminology describing the hormonal and chemical processes that they trigger but the core reason is that simple.
When I cut out this formula, I shed all my weight and revealed abs in my 40s, but it hasn’t stopped with me. 4 readers have recently reported colossal combined loss of over 350lbs without ever meeting me, and there have been so many other reports of weight losses from the original batch of books launched I’ve lost count of the total weight loss.
These individuals are heroes in their own stories with an external problem they had to face but did not have the tools to deal with them. Don’t Eat for Winter helped them become the heroes they were meant to be. A man who was obese from 16, now 24 years later, entering his 40s 70lbs down, changed. A father who was 19.5 stone or more, now down to 14 stone, healthier with a thrilled wife, A father and daughter team down 10 stone between them and many other amazing stories of people who have beaten the external monster they faced everyday: the western diet and the gauntlet of junk we must endure daily, everywhere from supermarkets, to petrol stations, to fast food eateries, to airplane cuisine.

Here are the three most important tenets I live by and covered in Don’t Eat for Winter:
1. Avoid simultaneous carbs+fat where possible
2. Exercise daily (in nature if possible)
3. Eat a whole food, nutritious diet containing healthy fats, adequate protein and precise carbs for your energy needs.
The secret to my rock hard abs are as above combined with 5 minutes of ab exercises daily after exercise:
1. Lower ab exercises like leg raises, most people focus on upper abs, but the lower are almost always neglected.
2. A twist exercise for obliques such as russian twist with a band, I don’t load with weight to avoid injury.
3. An upper ab exercise sit ups sliding hands up knees
4. Maintaining tight core while walking and sitting, improving posture and keeping the area toned
5. Discipline with diet through avoiding the autumnal combo of carbs+fat and separating as far from each other as possible in my daily diet.
Get your copy of Don’t Eat for Winter HERE.
Cian Foley, BSc, Pg. Dip, QQI Sports Nutrition Level 6, is a former world and european kettlebell champion and currently NBFI Men’s Physique Bronze medalist. Formerly 18.5 stone, Cian is now a <12 stone lean exercise enthusiast.