It’s a very rare Your Daily Lex episode, and you’ll know why right after this theme song.

Your Daily Lex.

It’s very rare that I have a guest on Your Daily Lex, but this is one of those times.

And my guest today, you’ve heard about him a lot on the show, but you’ve never heard from him.

And now you will.

It’s Urslaan Ali.

Hi, Urslaan.

How are you?

Hey, what’s up, Lex?

Thank you for having me.

It’s an honor.

Tell the people who you are.

Yeah, so my name is Urslaan.

I’m the creator of the Fit Body program.

I’d love to just share a bit about myself, just because I know you’ve talked a bit about me, but maybe people don’t know my background.

So funny enough, I actually have a finance and accounting background.

And so straight out of school, I began to work as a financial advisor.

But growing up, I was not very healthy.

As you know, Lex, at my heaviest, I got up to 219.

Average for an hour.

Exactly.

I got to 239.

That’s all I’m saying.

Yeah, exactly.

That’s right.

That’s right.

That’s way behind us now.

But my mom, unfortunately, she was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer.

And because of that, I began to learn a lot about health and nutrition.

And just seeing the impact that a changed lifestyle then began to have on my mom, that really motivated me to take control of my own health.

And so that’s when I hired my first coach.

Growing up, one thing that I really appreciated was I was always really fearful of cancer and all these different things.

And you don’t think they’ll happen to you or to anybody you know.

But then when it does, it’s like a huge wake up call.

And just seeing my mom go through that whole process with so much grace, where she would just wake up and be giving gratitude for the fact that she can hear and see and just really changed my perspective as a young man.

And it carried through even now as an adult.

So that’s when I hired my first coach.

And that’s when it was somebody my older brother was working with at the time.

And with his help, I got into the best shape of my life.

At some point, I went from 219 down to 195, 185, and now down to 165 and maintain that over 10 years.

And then just long story short, after my mom passed away, I decided to leave my job.

I like to say I left my work and I stepped into my calling.

And I became a personal trainer working at Equinox, became a nutritionist.

And then with COVID, this is over 10 years ago.

And then with COVID over the last five and a half years, I’ve transitioned entirely online.

We have a team.

We work alongside with the members with.

And that’s where you and I connected a couple years, a year back actually now.

Yeah, just over a year now.

And so when people are signing up with you to get more fit in whatever way is the right way for them, how can you know if it’s going to work for them?

How can you tell which people are going to be open and receptive to actually heeding the advice that you’re giving and working with you in a productive way?

That’s a great question, man.

I think it’s very simple.

I just asked him, like, how coachable are you?

That’s it.

Because everything is a learnable skill, right?

And I didn’t know how to drive for a long time growing up in New York City.

And I learned how to drive.

And I like to think of it just like driving and just like any other skill set.

But when we think about driving, we don’t think, wait a minute, I got to check my rearview mirror.

I got to make sure my seatbelt’s on.

We don’t say that.

We say, hey, it’s just driving.

And so similarly, there’s all these micro steps that encompass the skill of being fit.

And so it’s just a matter of being coachable enough to learn those skill sets and transferring those skill sets.

And I think that’s the key is if someone’s open-minded enough to take the coaching and the feedback and not let what their preconceived conceptions might be and some of the bad learning and bad habits we fall into get in the way, that’s really what it takes, just being open and coachable.

Are people pretty good at self-assessment on knowing whether they’re coachable?

I would say most people are because most people that say they’re, when I ask that question, I can tell by one of two responses if somebody’s actually coachable is one, they’ll say yes right away.

And they’ll be self-aware enough to say that.

Or two, even better, is they’ll be like, yeah, but I ask questions and I want to make sure I understand things.

And that for me is an even greater indication that someone is coachable.

So, I mean, when I first was talking to you, I was very motivated and I think that I tend to think of myself as being very good at self-discipline, which I told you at the time.

And so I felt confident that it could work.

Certainly it worked even better than my expectations because I thought that I would lose X amount of weight.

I thought I was going to get up to 195 or so.

I think that was my initial goal.

Now I’m today like 177, whatever, it’s fine.

But I didn’t expect all the transformation that I was having.

But as you well know, I’ve sent a few referrals your way, including my buddy Scott, who keeps telling me about his new calorie allotments and he’s eating essentially double my current calorie allotment.

And I want to know, do you think I can get there?

Do you think I can get to Scott’s caloric intake?

Well, yeah, I mean, for sure.

So just so everyone’s aware of what Lex is referring to here, we have a few different phases of our program.

We call it the weight management cycle.

Phase one is, of course, the fat loss phase.

Phase two, which you’ve navigated through now, we’re currently navigating through is the metabolic reverse.

And all that means is a big mistake a lot of us make is we think the way we lose weight is the way we keep it off.

And unfortunately, our body doesn’t work that way in the sense we need to repair our metabolic burn rate back to baseline, which is the purpose of what you and I are doing now.

But then eventually you get to what’s known as the building phase.

And that’s where it gets a lot of fun because that’s where you can eat 3,000 calories a day if you want to and maintain the lowest weight you’ve ever been at.

And it just opens up a whole new level of flexibility and it really makes it sustainable, right?

A big trap we fall into is we begin to believe that the fat loss phase is the lifestyle change.

And it’s not.

It’s just, as the name implies, a phase towards the lifestyle change.

And so the answer is yes, we can all get there.

We can all get to a point where we’re eating more calories and maintaining the lowest weight we’ve ever been at.

But more than the lowest weight, the healthiest weight and physique and the feel also amazing at the same time.

All right, my last question for you, as I’ve been talking to you about for a while and my listeners, I’m in this play.

It’s almost exactly a month from today, a month and two days from today.

Act one, scene one, I start this show shirtless.

So what add-ons should I do, if anything, to ensure that I look as good as possible with my shirt off in scene one?

I love that.

That’s a great question.

And I want to make it also as relevant as possible for the listeners.

Let’s say you want to drop weight quick or you just want to make sure you’re in the best shape.

I like to almost think of it like you’re preparing for a photo shoot.

And so I don’t like to do anything incredibly extreme, but a couple of really practical tips and takeaways for everybody that you can apply and the listeners can apply is, number one is track your steps and see if you can average higher.

It doesn’t have to be 10,000, but for you specifically, Lex, it better be up there minimum.

The second part, so that’s the first part is the movement, getting in at least three workouts a week.

I think actually a big thing that, a big misconception is people think they need to work out like four or five, six days a week.

You would think I would tell you, oh, if you want to get abs, I keep thinking you will.

Yeah.

And I would say, no, you’re not allowed to work out more than three days a week with strength training.

And then on the alternate days, getting as many steps as you can reasonably.

The next portion is going to be the nutrition, right?

Making sure that you’re being meticulous about staying within your calories and hitting your specific protein targets.

And for everybody listening, that can be as simple as just beginning to track what you’re eating high level.

It doesn’t have to be this crazy thing, just becoming aware of what your caloric intake is, your protein intake is, and then striving to increase your protein intake while keeping your calories where they are.

And then finally is checking progress.

I think this is another place we get stuck because we might weigh in on Monday and then weigh in again on Wednesday.

Like you did maybe 175 on Friday, 177 on Monday.

If you don’t know that we need to take a weekly average to see where you’re at with your weight, with your photos, your measurements.

If we’re not tracking those things, it’s very easy to get discouraged and derailed unnecessarily.

But if we have these multiple indicators of progress, then we’re going to stay motivated because we’re always making progress.