Nutrition. Fucking nutrition.

If you check my post history you'll see I've been at this for more than two years. I lifted, I read, I MAP'ed, I mastered the material, and I applied it in my life and marriage. And it worked - I found self-respect, and earned the respect of the people around me. It completely changed the trajectory of my life and transformed me into a different person. I sometimes shudder to think where I might be if random luck hadn't led me to this site.

And yet, for all that personal success, the original problem that brought me here - sex with my wife - didn't change all that much. Some improvement, and a change in my own perspective that took away the mental pain, but no true transformation. In my own mind, I guess I just figured that I had taken it as far as it would go.

A few months ago, for reasons completely unrelated to MRP, I stopped eating out and started eating a clean, high-protein diet. Each meal is 8 ounces of chicken (or some other meat), 100 grams of rice (or some other carb), and a bunch of broccoli (or some other vegetable). I prep the meals for the week on Sunday and weigh them into plastic trays - the whole nine yards. I wasn't expecting any big changes because I believed that I was already eating a healthy diet. The meal prepping was mostly a financial thing.

Big there were big changes. I've never been overweight, but - I now realize - I've never really been lean. After a few weeks, my body fat dropped and the muscles I had been developing popped into view like they never had before. I discovered that the phrase "hard body" isn't just an expression. I solidified. All of the lifting started to finally get traction.

And now the wife initiates sex, something she's never done before. She drops hints during the day. She finds reasons to grab me. She defers to me, tries to keep me happy. This from a woman who I would have sworn was not capable of enjoying sex. Or life.

So, yeah, nutrition. So fucking stupid, so obvious. It wasn't just nutrition that did it, of course. If there are a dozen things you have to get in line to make it all work, I put in the time and effort to get them all together - except that I somehow blinded myself that I wasn't eating properly. Once that finally clicked into place, it's like the lock just tumbled open without even trying.

So learn from my mistake. Everyone wants to skip ahead and obsess over shit tests and comfort tests and main events and all the rest. But it's obvious to me now that stuff is secondary.

The very first lesson I learned here was that if your wife doesn't want to have sex with you, the reason is because she doesn't want to have sex with you. But the opposite is also true. When she wants to have sex with you, she will.

So if you're not getting the results you're hoping for, go back to very first principles. Track what you eat. Don't guess or assume. Track it and lock it down.