I entered the kitchen this morning in a kind of triumph and prepared a celebratory feast.
There was homemade shakshuka with a few fried eggs on top. There was bread, Catalan “pa de vidre,” which I love but rarely eat any more. There was butter, delicious butter, which I also rarely eat any more, except on special occasions.
And all this was a bonus added to the usual horsefeed that I chew through almost every morning.
“Free at last,” I said as a kind of thanksgiving prayer. “Free at last… thank God almighty, I’m free at last to eat whatever I want.”
The reason for today’s triumphal breakfast was that yesterday was the fifth and final day of the fasting mimicking diet I was doing.
If you don’t know the fasting mimicking diet, it’s a special diet, designed by a USC professor of nutrionology/how-not-to-die science.
The fasting mimicking diet has you eat significantly reduced calories and eliminate almost all protein for 5 days. Basically, you eat a bunch of vegetables and some olive oil for 5 days.
Why??
The claim is that this gives you A) all the benefits of an extended water fast, without B) any of the downsides, such as ravening hunger, impractical weakness, and long-term muscle wasting.
The USC professor has all kinds of medical studies, on rats and cats and maybe even owners of cats, to prove that his fasting mimicking diet does as he says.
I don’t have any real way to verify what he’s saying. But I trust the man — because you gotta trust somebody sometime.
I can also tell you that is that this is the second 5-day FMD cycle I’ve done, the first being back in February.
Both times, I was not hungry at all (just bored with eating vegetables all day), I could still go to the gym, and I got the results I was looking for.
As for what those results are, I’ll keep that private. I’m a little shy, and I’m sure you don’t wanna know anyhow.
The point though:
If you come from the world of direct marketing, as I do, you might be jaded, as I am, and think that every new “mechanism” is just some scheming copywriter’s invention.
But on occasion there really are genuine hacks, breakthroughs, secrets, better mousetraps or micetrap, which give you all the benefits without any of the downsides. Or at least something close to it, something close enough.
Once you have a new mechanism like that, your thing sells itself.
I was pretty much sold after hearing the name “fasting mimicking diet.” I guess so were many other people. Celebs such as Jennifer Aniston, Kate Hudson, and Gwyneth Paltrow have done the fasting mimicking diet — and somehow, I doubt that they read the sales or scientific literature on it.
But let’s get to business.
My claim has long been that online courses have a real problem:
The good information inside them flies in one ear and flies right out the other.
It takes repeated reading/listening of a course to remember any of it. That’s bad.
What’s worse, it takes application of the ideas inside a course to actually get any bit of real value from the course.
But most people never do any of that.
I say this in spite of the fact that I myself sell online courses.
But I also sell something completely different:
My Copy Riddles program.
Copy Riddles is not a copywriting course in any traditional sense. It’s not good information. It’s something else.
For more info on this training program that’s unlike anything you’ve seen before, with a genuinely new mechanism that gets valuable copywriting skills into your head: