The Ladder System. Jason Wall
Halal, Kosher - if your diet doesn’t restrict macronutrients, it will fit within The Ladder System. And those who enjoy intermittent fasting can also combine this practice with The Ladder System. Everyone is welcome if they don’t discriminate against macros.
Sorry, Keto.
All Right, I’m Sold. How Do We Do This?
I’m gonna tell you. But first, a little bit about me...
Chapter 2 - Hi! My Name Is…
Jay Wall.
I was born and raised in Ontario, Canada between two different suburban cities, Ajax and Whitby. When I think back on my childhood and teen years and the way I ate, I know it wasn’t very good and got progressively worse. My parents worked hard and didn’t have much control over the food we ate during the day, but dinners were generally nutritious and well-balanced.
Typically, it was a piece of fish/chicken/lamb/beef with various veggies and a serving of potato or rice or pasta. The problem was the food I ate during the day. It was generally atrocious. I often ate at friend’s houses out of their pantries and freezers. I remember lots of French fries and hot dogs and Kraft dinner and fish sticks and processed meat on white bread and pop by the gallons.
Pop was a luxury only friends could afford me since my fridge at home only stocked milk and water and occasionally orange juice, but I guzzled it when I wasn’t at home. Breakfasts were sugary cereal with milk or greasy bacon/eggs/home fries, or pancakes and French toast slathered in butter and drenched in sugary maple syrup. Besides the nutritious dinners my parents made, my diet was basically a primer for adult obesity and obesity-related disease.
My mother recognized the family was putting on weight when I was quite young, and I remember going to Weight Watchers meetings with her and my sister when I was in grade 4. I did lose weight, which was great, but then we stopped going and I put the weight back on. I went through most of elementary school as a chubby kid with terrible eating habits. Thankfully I was still a pretty active kid so I never got morbidly obese in elementary school, but I was always chubby and didn’t particularly feel good inside.
Those terrible eating habits compounded in high school when I and my friends began to get driver’s licenses and smoke pot and so began the fast food runs. Burgers, fries, pizza and soda. By 11th grade, I had ballooned to morbid obesity numbers. When I finally confronted this fact, I did what a lot of teen males do - I starved myself and exercised and lost a ton of weight. This would last for a while before I would go back to old eating habits and put the weight back on setting off an endless cycle of yo-yo crash dieting.
I went off to post-secondary school yo-yoing. Left school with no degree and ended up in an uptown apartment with my high school sweetheart-turned-wife as I bounced between temp jobs and further schooling and I was yo-yoing allllllll the way.
And she stayed with me. What can I say, true love does exist.
I had been dieting hard for a year and a half when I ended up in a court reporting (stenography) school. I had lost a significant amount of weight - both fat and muscle. I was skinny fat. The thing that bothered me the most was my neck; it was terribly scrawny-looking and made my body and head look cartoonish in proportion. I finished court reporting school and began a freelance career that stressed me out to the max - and so began the weight rebound. After two years of this, I had put back on all the weight and then some, and then decided I could not be a court reporter for the rest of my life. My wife and I ended up moving in with her parents so we could afford to send me back to school and start a family… and start one we did.
In my first year of an electro-mechanical engineering technology program (That’s the condensed title), my first son was born. And I was fat. The stress of having your first kid and all that. Did I mention I’m a stress eater? Fast forward two years past school into a satisfying career in building HVAC automation and our second son was born.
At this point, I’m at my all-time heaviest. I hadn’t weighed myself in a while, but I knew it was bad because I had to order XXXXL work shirts for the first time. I’m waking up with sore ribs every morning and I can’t get down on the ground to play with my kids without a massive physical effort and shortness of breath. It was at this point that I decided I needed to lose weight for my sake and the sake of my sons. I successfully lost 30 pounds in three months with the newest fad diet, the ketogenic diet, aka keto. I had begun to work out again, and at this point I was noticing loss of strength and poor muscle composition. I suspected I was losing muscle.
But the keto gurus say too much protein will turn into chocolate cake!
I found a sensible keto group whose approach introduced me to macronutrient tracking, and this was a game changer for me. Tracking my food was incredibly eye-opening. At this point, I decided to focus on body re-composition rather than strictly weight loss and moved away from keto to increase my carbohydrate and protein intake for better gym performance and muscle gain. My muscle mass and strength increased considerably.
Shortly after this, we moved into our first home and so began the stress of home ownership. My eating habits degenerated, and the weight gain slowly commenced. Thankfully I’d become something of a gym addict and was able to keep my weight in check by working out and keeping my protein intake high, but all fat loss had stalled and my body fat percentage was still in the mid-30s. I felt like crap, too. Energy was low, joints and back constantly sprained or sore.
I was frustrated with myself. I knew how to lose weight because I’d done it countless times before, but each time it was just never sustainable enough to get me to my goal. I would always quit because I either got too unhealthy (constant colds, low energy, loss of muscle mass) or I just couldn’t stick to "diet" food.
Even if I did, I had no idea how to eat to maintain a lower body fat percentage.
At times I thought of just giving in to my inner fat boy; just accepting that I’ll never be lean or feel all that healthy. I would just forget about that goal of a lean, healthy lifestyle and fall back on all the comfort foods that anesthetize and sooth.
But it's not in my DNA to give up. My mind just refuses to quit rethinking problems. I look at it from every angle and I just can’t let it go until I figure out a solution. That tenacity keeps leading me back to meta-analyses of health research and seeking the most accurate interpretations of all this weight loss data we have collected over the last decade.
And one day, a new piece of research made everything click. Using this key piece of knowledge, I combined everything I’ve learned throughout the years of personal struggle and created a system that would allow me to lose a large amount of body fat without wrecking my body and without the constant self-sabotage. With this method, I'm finally achieving my fat loss goals without any adverse health effects, muscle loss or metabolic damage. And best of all, it is laying the groundwork for easily maintaining a healthier, leaner, muscular me.
Now let me show you how.
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