Are you fit for duty?

Virtually every manospher writer agrees on one thing: if you are a man, an important part of your action plan should be improving your fitness. Being fat is not acceptable.

How far should you go? How fit is "fit enough?"

One organization that has very definite standards for fitness is the United States Marine Corps. If you are fit enough for duty in the USMC, then you are fit enough.

Today we're going to look at one aspect of fitness: body fat. A later post will look at the other part of the Marines' fitness test, which involves performance.

Are you too fat to be a Marine? To find out, you are going to need a few data points. The first test, which most American men will fail, only requires knowing your height and weight. Look at this table, find your height in the left column. Is your weight in between the numbers in the middle and right columns?

Height	Maximum Weight	Minimum Weight
58	132	91
59	136	94
60	141	97
61	146	100
62	150	104
63	155	107
64	160	110
65	165	114
66	170	117
67	176	121
68	181	125
69	186	128
70	192	132
71	197	136
72	203	140
73	208	144
74	214	148
75	220	152
76	226	156
77	232	160
78	238	164
79	244	168
80	250	173

If you weigh less than the smaller number, you're too skinny and need to bulk up. If, as is more likely, you weigh more than the higher number, you might need to lose some weight. Or you might just be very muscular. To find out, you need a more sophisticated measurement.

For this next step, you need some additional information. You need to measure the circumference of your waist, measured at your belly button with the tape measure level and flat against your skin. And you need to measure the circumference of your neck.

Once you have those measurements, go plug them in to this calculator:
Body Fat Calculator

This will give you an estimate of your body fat percentage. While it's only an estimate, it's better than most other methods of estimating your body fat, it's a lot cheaper than a DexaScan, and it's the method the Marines use.

How fat is too fat? That depends on your age. According to the Marine Corps, you are fit for duty if your body fat is below the listed number for your age range (these are all for men, women are allowed a higher number):
Age 17-26: 18%
Age 27-39: 19%
Age 40-45: 20%
Age 46+: 21%

If you are a member of the USMC and you are above those numbers, you will be placed into a program designed to reduce your body fat. If you don't meet the standards within six months, you'll be discharged. If you aren't a Marine, you might be able to get away with being a bit fatter. But if you reach this goal, you will probably live longer. And you'll be more attractive to women.

I'll fess up here: I need to lose about three inches off my waist to meet the body fat standard for my age. I'm working on it.

Alpha body language: chicks dig jerks

You don't need to read a lot of the manosphere before you become aware of the importance of body language. In the photo above, the guy on the left is signalling his Alpha status and the guy on the right looks like a needy loser.

But the guy on the left may be signalling something else. A paper soon to be published in the academic journal Psychological Science, titled "The Ergonomics of Dishonesty," says that people who take on "expansive" poses are more likely to deceive others than people who take more "restrictive" poses.

"...individuals who engaged in expansive postures were more likely to steal money, cheat on a test, and commit traffic violations in a driving simulation."

For the academically minded, here is the Abstract from that paper:

Research in environmental sciences has found that the ergonomic design of human-made environments influences thought, feeling and action. Here, we examine the impact of physical environments on dishonest behavior. Four studies tested whether certain bodily configurations—or postures—incidentally imposed by our environment lead to increases in dishonest behavior. The first three experiments found that individuals who engaged in expansive postures (either explicitly or inadvertently) were more likely to steal money, cheat on a test, and commit traffic violations in a driving simulation. Results suggested that participants’ self-reported sense of power mediated the link between postural expansiveness and dishonesty. Study 4 revealed that automobiles with more expansive driver’s seats were more likely to be illegally parked on New York City streets. Taken together, results suggest that: (1) environments that expand the body can inadvertently lead us to feel more powerful, and (2) these feelings of power can cause dishonest behavior.

Of course, the real key to alpha is point (1) in the last sentence: expanding the body leads to feeling powerful, and feeling powerful makes you more attractive to women.

If you want all the details, here's a link to the full paper (in .pdf format).

The Ergonomics of Dishonesty: The Effect of Incidental Posture on Stealing, Cheating, and Traffic Violations


It appears that people who take up a lot of room without apologizing for their presence are, well, jerks. And we all know that chicks dig jerks. Therefore, taking up a lot of room is attractive to women. Go, therefore, and do likewise.

Don't be a bully

I was having a snack in the break room at work this week when my friend, Frank, sat at my table. He had a worried look on his face, so I asked him what was up. He proceeded to tell me a story about a girl he’s known since high school, Yvette. (I should note here that while this is a true story, all identifying information has been changed.) Frank was worried about her because even though she’s been married for more than 20 years, he saw her profile on a dating website. 

“Are you sure it was her?” I asked. He was. He said he had lunch with her a few days ago and she admitted it. She said that she no longer had any feelings for her husband, Jim, and hadn’t for quite some time. But she was determined to stay married to him, in part because of her religious upbringing.  She also thought it was important for her kids to have two parents at home, at least until the youngest graduated from high school, and that was a few years away.

Yvette told Frank that she’d been sleeping on the couch for the last five years. She didn’t want to blow up her marriage but she felt the need to be touched, and was looking for someone with whom she could have a discreet affair. 

Sensing the opportunity for a Red Pill lesson, I asked Frank to tell me about the husband. He took out his phone and pulled up Jim’s Facebook profile. The picture was worse than I expected. I saw a morbidly obese man, wearing a casual short-sleeve shirt and blue jeans. The shirt was a size too small, the buttons obviously straining to hold it closed, and his belly hung several inches over his belt. His hair looked like he had tried to cut it himself.  He had thick brushy hair growing out of his ears. 

My red-pill savvy readers have probably already jumped to the same conclusion that I did. “I bet he’s always trying to please his wife, let’s her run everything, and does whatever she says.” Frank quickly disabused me of that notion. “No, he’s quite the opposite. Everything has to be done exactly his way. When it’s not, he blows up. When they go out, if she makes eye contact with a man he accuses her of wanting to have sex with him. She has a very successful career and makes more money than he does, but he’s always telling her that she’s stupid and can’t do anything right.”

I had to mull this over for a while. The picture looked like an average Beta chump. But he didn’t exhibit the puppy-dog people-pleasing Beta behavior profile. Was this a case of excess Alpha, proving Athol’s point about needing a balance of Alpha and Beta for a successful long-term relationship?

But no, it’s not Alpha to seriously try to tear someone else down.  Jim is, as I had guessed from the picture, low Beta.  But rather than being the meek people-pleaser, Jim had taken the opposite tack: he’s a bully. 

At first glance, a bully may appear to have some Alpha traits. But what he actually has are badly overblown caricatures of Alpha traits. And while a true Alpha comes from a place of supreme inner confidence, the bully is the opposite.  The bully is motivated primarily by fear, and a complete lack of confidence.

Consider Jim’s behavior when he takes Yvette out in public. If she smiles at the waiter and engages in friendly conversation, Jim gets angry. He accuses her of wanting to have sex with the waiter.  This, my friends, is not the behavior of an Alpha male. A real Alpha male would just smile, knowing that the waiter was admiring the beauty of his woman, and confident that the waiter was not an actual threat.

And of course, an Alpha male would not allow himself to become morbidly obese. He’d hit the gym, find a good hair stylist, and get his ears waxed. He would either enjoy the fruits of his high-earning wife’s labor, or he’d improve himself until he could out-earn her. But a real Alpha would never belittle her accomplishments in an attempt to feel better about himself.

I imagine that twenty years ago, Jim might have been more Alpha. He did, after all, manage to marry a woman who bore him children and was apparently faithful for many years. But somewhere along the way, he quit. He let his health and his appearance deteriorate, he gave up on advancing his career. He either lost, or never had, those good Beta traits that build comfort and trust in a long-term relationship. And he certainly lost whatever  Alpha traits attracted his wife in the first place. 

Don’t be that guy. Don’t be a bully.