Getting Fit Pt. 2 - Raising Our Floor
By Victor Wong | 26 Jun, 2026

Victor (00:00)

Okay, so this is going to be a follow-up to the previous episode about our first principles approach to getting fit. So I know I was speaking a lot in concepts, so this time I want to start laying out a more detailed plan on how to go about achieving your goals.

Victor (00:27)

So before we even consider a new workout regimen or new diet plan, I think the most important thing that we can do is an audit, an audit of our behaviors and the results that it yields. If you're listening to this, chances are that you probably are not pleased with the way you look or the way you feel. So before we even start prescribing things, right, we have to start

Taking a look at our daily habits. And the important thing when doing an audit is you should not be approaching it with a judgmental lens. Because when you start coming at this from a place of self-loathing, that is not a good place for self-improvement.

Victor (01:25)

Before we even begin to start making changes, I think it is important to take inventory of our current situation. Yes, I know it is tempting to start on a journey of transformation as soon as possible, but the name of the game is sustainability, right? We don't want to change ourselves overnight.

We want to change ourselves over a long period of time because that is what is going to allow us to keep whatever progress we've made. It's not about how fast you get to your destination, but it is about whether or not that it is something you can maintain. Think about borrowing versus owning an asset, right? Chances are if you're listening to this, you're interested in improving your body composition.

So, what is the point of speed running and rushing your way into 10% body fat if you won't be able to keep it for an extended period of time? You might look good for a couple weeks, but if you slowly regress back into your old habits, you're going to lose it. So before we do anything, I think it is important to take some time to audit your daily habits and what they are leading to.

And when we conduct an audit, we should not be conducting it through a lens of judgment, right? We should be coming at this in as objective and as clinical of a way as possible. Because when we start attaching moral judgments to our own actions and our supposed failures to live up to what we believe we should be, that just builds resentment and we don't want that, right?

We want to be happy ultimately, because what is the point of embarking on a journey if you're going to just hate it the entire time? The more that you hate the work, the less likely you are going to do it. And especially in our modern media landscape with figures like David Goggins, Andrew Tate, et al. They are going to tell you to hate yourself, but if you hate yourself.

then nothing is really going to make you happy.

Victor (03:54)

So the first thing that we need to do in our audit is have metrics. We need to start gathering data and measuring things. And again, it is important at this stage that we do not change a single thing. We are simply being curious about ourselves and our daily habits and what they are leading to. So, off the get-go, I highly recommend that you start tracking.

Your daily step count, the hours of sleep you get per night, and the amount of calories that you are consuming, along with your weight, day to day, at least for a week. And once we gather these baseline numbers, that is when we can start to think about ways we can modify our behavior that will put us more in line with the person that we want to become.

Victor (04:55)

Something that I want to emphasize here is to not overthink what peripherals you're using to track this data. Personally, when it came to finding a smartwatch, I did not have a specific brand in mind. I just went onto Facebook Marketplace and bought a smartwatch secondhand that looked decent and fit within my budget. And then I also used the free version of MyFitnessPal on my phone.

When you go on Instagram or you go on social media, there will be a flood of ads telling you the best wearable devices. Do not use any brain power for any of this. Just buy a device, slap it on your wrist, and start tracking. The most important thing is that you become attuned to your daily activity. Do not get into the weeds as to what the best wearables are. Again.

This data has to be actionable. If this data does not modify your behavior, it is useless. And I'm saying this as a statistician and somebody that works in data. Nowadays everybody thinks that they need more information to act, but the reality is you can act with incomplete information. And most of the time, life is about finding heuristics.

aka measurements that are good enough. And let me reiterate, we are looking to track our weight day by day, our calories consumed day by day, and our activity level day by day. And our activity level can be approximated by our daily step count, which is the classic.

Victor (06:42)

When it comes to our health and appearance, we have to think about it as the average of all of our activities and inputs put together. And when we think about bringing up our average, right, on the bell curve, we have two levers that we can manipulate. We can think about our upper bound and our lower bound. Our upper bound is

Who we are at our best when we've gotten a full night of sleep, when we are just full of energy and willing to crush every single workout and tackle everything on our to-do lists. That's us at our best. And now the thing that people and most self-improvement content fail to acknowledge is a lot of times we don't live up to that idealized version of ourselves. There are days where we are going to be

On the left side of that bell curve, our lower bound is we're going to be tired, we're going to be lazy, and we're not necessarily going to make the most disciplined choices. So when approaching our behavior modification and our self-improvement journey, we have these two levers to manipulate manipulate. We can either push what we do at our best, or we could look to simply

Raise our floor. And this is the unsexy part of self-improvement is thinking about what we do on a day-to-day and looking to make slight improvements to ourselves at our worst. And I think we oftentimes don't want to face ourselves at our worst, right?

The version of ourselves that put off chores, that wants to order takeout instead of cooking, and that wants to skip workouts. We don't want to acknowledge that that is a part of us, but when it comes to changing ourselves, we have to.

Victor (08:51)

Now when we take an unfiltered look at our daily habits, this is when we can start bringing up our lower bound. If you are unsatisfied with your current body composition, one of the easiest things that we can start modifying is our daily activity level.

Chances are if it's sedentary around 4,000 steps per day, we can start by bringing it up. The ideal standard is between 8 to 10,000 steps per day. I personally clock in between 10 to 12,000 steps a day. And seeing a number that large is daunting for most people, and we want to make this as easy as possible. So

We don't necessarily want to jump into 10 to 12,000 steps per day. If that is too much, then just look to increase it by two to maybe three thousand. So if you're walking only four thousand steps per day, try to see if you could slowly bring that up to six or seven thousand steps.

And soon in this process you'll find that it'll be much easier to bring it up. All it takes is just a few sessions of intentional movement per day, you know, maybe a small walk before or after a meal, maybe a taking a longer route to go to the restroom, maybe instead of scrolling on your phone.

You just simply take a quick leisurely lap around your apartment, your house, what have you.

Victor (10:41)

And now that I'm mentioning screen time, right? Now would be a good time to also take a look at your screen time. There are many free apps out there that allow you to check how much screen time you have on your phone. And secondly, I believe that most phones nowadays have native ⁓ features that will log your screen time. And

Chances are, if you're listening to this, you probably are a little bit ashamed of how much screen time you have on your phone, especially with forms of social media like Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, etc., etc. And again, we do not want to come at this from a place of shame. We want to come at this from a genuine desire to improve.

And chances are your screen time is exceeding five, eight, ten hours per day, there is definitely time in there which we can carve out to get just a little bit more activity in. Again, it doesn't have to be much. We just need to sneak in a little walk here and there. And before you know it, we you can achieve 10,000 steps per day.

Victor (12:00)

Now the next thing on our list of items to audit is our daily calorie intake. So using an app such as MyFitnessPal, you can simply input the amount of food that you're eating per day by item. You can kind of guesstimate the weights. Personally, I weigh out all my food. Some people would consider this a form of disordered eating, but

That is something that I personally do. I weigh out almost every single unit of food that I eat every day. You don't have to do this, but I would recommend at least trying this for one to two weeks as an exercise so you can better understand how much food you're eating per day. Now, once you have this list of food that you're eating.

Victor (12:59)

Now, the next order of business is tracking our daily caloric intake. Using an app like MyFitnessPal, you can take a running log of whatever you have eaten throughout the day. And again, we are not coming at this from a place of judgment. We are simply coming at this from a place of curiosity. Because how much thought do you put into what you're eating every day?

Day. A lot of us simply don't. And I don't think that we live in a culture that tells us to intentionally eat. A lot of times we just eat out of boredom, we eat out of enjoyment, but we don't really eat with a purpose. And I do have to acknowledge that food is one of the fundamental joys of life.

Victor (13:54)

Now, once we have a gauge as to how much we're consuming on a daily basis, now we can start thinking about things to change. And again, we don't want to change too many things at once. The first thing that I recommend is ensuring that you are eating enough protein, which is about 0.8 grams per pound of lean body mass.

And once you figure out how however much that is, for me personally, it's about a hundred eighty to two hundred grams of protein or something, and even that may be a little bit too much, right? For me, after I figured that out, I just made it a goal to eat that much protein every single day. So that comes out to, I don't know,

Four three to four hundred grams of chicken breast per day. I don't eat that much chicken breast per day, but that's just to give you an idea. And from the protein is where I shape the rest of my diet. So

For me maintenance calories is around twenty nine hundred per day. So once I cross out that calorie amount of I don't know

However many calories 400 grams of chicken breast is. I don't know. I think that's about 500-ish calories. Anyway, once I have that established, then the rest of my diet is pretty flexible so long as I stay under that 2900 calorie mark. And

Whatever your maintenance calories are, if you want to gain weight, you'll have to eat above it. And if you want to lose weight, you'll want to eat below it. Now, with this in mind, we have to be careful as to how extreme of a deficit we want to be in.

Victor (16:04)

I also can't emphasize this enough. We want to take things slowly. Okay? In theory, if we want to speed run our way to a lean aesthetic physique, you could put yourself in an extreme deficit of about five hundred calories below your maintenance, but that is not sustainable at

five hundred calories below your maintenance, you will be hungry and your body will try to fight you. And the cravings will intense and you will relapse and you will undo all your progress. So I highly, highly recommend

You take only one, maybe two hundred calories worth of a deficit. If you try to rush this process, it is going to be very, very painful. And like I keep saying, it is not about whether or not you can achieve your end goal, it is about whether or not you can maintain it.

Victor (17:16)

have brought up this idea of timescale and sustainability, I am actually going to go against common wisdom when it comes to goal setting and actually discourage

The use of a deadline. I know to accomplish most goals, people recommend setting some kind of deadline so you work to achieve it. However, with certain long-term goals and lifestyle changes like weight management, I find that when you set a goal or time or yeah, or a deadline.

You end up putting undue psychological strain on yourself. Because if you have to achieve a 10% body fat or what have you in six to eight weeks, any setback will feel like the end of the world. And when you're psychologically distressed, that is when you start making poor decisions. You're no longer being active, you're being reactive.

I can tell you from personal experience that I did not set a deadline for my goals really. I just decided that I was going to track my calories and increase my step count and track my weight. And what I found was that as I tracked my weight day by day, week by week, and my caloric intake day by day, week by week, I just found that I became attuned with my own body and my own eating habits. And when I had that level of

Control, I found that I could isolate my own emotions from my process.

Because again, when we are acting emotionally, we make poor decisions. I know personally it was a little jarring sometimes to see that, I'm losing five, ten, fifteen pounds. And then all of a sudden when I see that progress reverse after maybe one or two days of enjoying life with my friends and trying trendy restaurants, that my weight would climb up.

Five, sometimes ten pounds. And it is very tempting when we see these setbacks to suddenly make sharp changes. Right? my god, we have overeaten our caloric limit by a thousand calories for two days. Now it's time to go five hundred under. And when we make these punitive actions towards ourselves.

That's when we relapse because when we start depriving ourselves, our bodies will send those hunger signals to force you into making bad food decisions. So what I have found personally is that I will not change make any changes to my behaviors for at least a week.

If I am behaving in a certain way, I will simply allow it to persist for a week while logging and see where I'm at at the end of the week. If I find that my current habits are leading me to stagnate, which I did notice over the past couple months, that is when I will make a very slight change. So, for example, when I saw that my weight was starting to climb up a bit, I waited a week, logged all my food, and then the following week I just simply adjusted my calories.

calories from twenty nine hundred per day to twenty eight hundred per day, just a deficit of one hundred more calories. And then I just waited a week. And during that week, obviously the scale did not really move much.

I found that I was at the same weight. And again, if you place, if I had placed a deadline as to when I was supposed to achieve my goal weight, each day where my weight was not trending downwards would have felt like a psychological blow. It would have felt like I was losing time. And that

emotion would have caused me to maybe eat even less and less until finally I'm so hungry that I just go go to in and out and have a binge right disordered eating is not good

Victor (21:46)

What social media has really diluted a large number of people into thinking is that you can get results quick. Unfortunately, how real life works is that actions that we take today will likely not show their benefits until weeks, maybe even months later. And we have to be comfortable in that waiting chan. Like I said, when I cut my calories, I did not see

Any results until weeks later, and most people are very uncomfortable in that waiting, and through that discomfort, that's when people start spiraling. A number of people I've talked to about this in real life say that they're afraid of quote unquote wasting time and that they want the results to come quickly, but unfortunately, I find these same people will waste even more time by not.

Their behavior or by spiraling in the same place for months on end.

Victor (22:51)

Change takes time, which is why I highly, highly recommend against setting deadlines for your physique goals. Because when you set a deadline, you're not giving room for your changes to grow and for your changes to stick. While you're in the process of reorganizing yourself and becoming someone different.

A deadline can stifle that. A deadline can make every single setback feel like the end of the world. And again, when we act on emotion, we make bad decisions.

Victor (23:38)

Like I said in the previous podcast, our physique is a manifestation of our principles and our actions. If you're somebody that likes to watch TV all day and eat whatever they want, you're going to look like somebody that does those things. If you're somebody that is active and that eats intentionally, then you're going to look like somebody that is active and eats intentionally.

And those becoming somebody that looks active is what is a question of principle. And if you want to become that, then that will involve a modification in behavior, which will take time.

Victor (24:28)

Now, this cuts back to a fundamental question that I posed in the previous podcast. Why do you want to modify your behavior? Why do you want to change? Again, our bodies are just simply manifestations of us, our choices, our values. And our bodies will change its shape to match what our values are.

If you value the freedom to eat whatever indulgent foods that you want and to watch sports all day, then that is your imperative and your body will reflect that. If you are somebody that is intentional about their eating and likes to be active and go outside and engage in sports, then your body will change to fit that lifestyle.

Victor (25:24)

I believe most of the pain and discomfort with this comes from a mismatch between what your body is manifesting and your own core principles.

Victor (25:39)

And it is in this reconciliation of what your core principles are, is where we will find the will to set our goals. So before we do anything, we really need to identify the why. Why do we want to change our behaviors? And what will getting our dream physique do for our lives?

That is something that we have to answer before we embark on this. I mean, for me, right, I compete in jujitsu a lot, and having a fitter body will just make me better at jujitsu. And for me, jiu-jitsu is a form of artistic expression. So having greater capacity will allow me to engage in my art on a deeper level, which is something that I enjoy. I'm also

Very active. I love being outside. So for me, being fit is just how I interact with the world and how I derive joy from things. I personally don't like watching sports. So, and I personally get a lot of enjoyment playing sports and being outside. So my body is geared towards that end through my intentional eating habits and through how active I am just at a base level.

reflects that

Victor (27:06)

So I think I have yapped long enough. And I would like to conclude this podcast with a summary of things that we went over and some action items. So, at a high level, losing body fat is relatively simple, right? We just need to eat less and move more. Now.

How much we need to move more and how much less we need to eat, we need to figure that out via tracking. So for one week, all you need to do is just track your activity by way of counting your steps through an app such as your health app on your phone. And you need to track your calories. You can do so with a free app such as MyFitnessPal. I personally use the free version of MyFitnessPal because frankly I just

Need to track the nutrients and my tot total caloric intake. Once you have completed the audit, now you know what your baseline is. And again, plan for the worst version of yourself. Not the one that is full of energy and has a low workload. I'm talking about the one, the version of you that wants to order DoorDash and skip a workout.

The point of this is we need to first raise our floor because once we raise what we do at a bare minimum, then that raises our peak. And over time, this improvement of our bare minimum will yield in change. But again, you need to give this time. In a later episode, I will talk more on working out and other

Considerations. But for now, if you made it this far, just observe yourself and track your behaviors.