The oldest text in Joe's teaching is not a video. In December 2013, six months into his own weight loss and nearly two years before the channel existed, he wrote out a list of nine principles of weight management. When he recited them on camera in 9 Cardinal Principles of Successful Weight Management (March 2016), he introduced them as settled law: "I find these principles to be immutable," true for everyone, particularly today. The claim of permanence held up unusually well. Menus, windows, splurge rules, and the channel's whole philosophical idiom were revised across the decade; the list was not. It is the channel's original intellectual skeleton—the document later videos cite from memory rather than restate.
Because the later catalog mostly assumes the list, this page restores it in the order and wording of the 2016 recitation. Every principle is Joe's formulation and Joe's argument.
The arithmetic pair
Principle one is "it costs calories to be and to stay big." Joe's target is fatalism—what he mockingly names "stone gut theory," the feeling that excess weight is inert stone that will never come off. In his account weight persists only because it is continuously fed, and the set points that seem to trap people (his own were 345 and then 360 pounds) yield when calorie control becomes stringent enough to "speak to it in the language of evolution." Plateaus, on this reading, are set points relaxing in stages rather than proof of a broken body.
Principle two is "a calorie is a calorie is a calorie." As energy, 3,000 calories of broccoli and 3,000 calories of chocolate are the same—a ton of bricks and a ton of feathers both weigh a ton. Nutrients differ as "blueprints," information that tells the body how to perform, but without a sustained deficit no amount of healthy eating produces lasting loss. That distinction—information versus energy—lets Joe respect food quality while refusing to let it replace the arithmetic.
Food, environment, and the terms of the deal
Principle three, "you will eat what is around you," carries his warning against anyone who bans food groups (allergies excepted). Foods, he says, are relationships—like neighbors, you have to live together—so the goal is making peace with every food in your society, trigger foods included: "you can never allow something you eat to own you, otherwise it's really eating you."
Principle four declares that losing weight is "a lesser of evils business." The road back involves compromises—artificial sweeteners, giving up casual alcohol (111 calories per shot, by his count), offending someone who baked for you—and, universally, some hunger: "if you are never a little hungry, you're not going to lose weight." The principle rejects purity twice, in the foods allowed and in the experience promised.
The transaction and the empty stomach
Principle five is "pay your hunger debt and you will never owe your body anything." Eating is a transaction, and only a fool overpays. Joe uses the principle to demote willpower itself: success, he says, is "setting clear and concise rules and then enforcing them without flex"—an idea that later becomes the entire daily protocol.
Principle six holds that "you are more productive empty as opposed to full." Predators in the wild "work on commission"; society teaches people to tank up before working, and the afternoon slump is his evidence of what that costs. Being comfortable and functional on an empty stomach is, in his telling, a core fasting skill rather than a hardship.
A system always, small steps, and no arrival
Principle seven is the only one Joe says is new to our era: "it's never okay to not have a system in place whereby your weight is kept in check"—for life, not just during a loss phase. A hunter-gatherer had a built-in checks-and-balances system; a society of restaurants and gas stations does not, so the control must be recreated deliberately. This is also where the channel's founding image appears inside the founding list: "the bears have winter and they have hibernation—what do you have? You have to recreate hibernation," which he says intermittent fasting does.
Principle eight, "every little step is a step forward," culminates in the line Joe highlights in red: "you never arrive." Citing Seth Godin, he denies the breakthrough moment and the mountaintop; there is only a lifelong series of small improvements, and expecting an arrival means having the wrong idea about goals altogether.
The mind's last defense
Principle nine is "your mind will play tricks on you." Even after his transformation, Joe reports days of body-image distortion and felt failure regardless of the scale—"a form of temporary insanity" whose only answer is to keep moving forward. It is the one principle he gave a dedicated sequel: in Your Mind Will Play Tricks on You, Principle #9 Explained (October 2016), he warns new fasters about "ghost problems"—sympathy pains and imagined ailments the mind manufactures during adjustment, like a coworker who felt sick on day two only after being told fasting would wreck him. Joe reads early shakiness and dread as withdrawal, comparing it to his own 2006 withdrawal from prescription painkillers, and he attaches a physiological claim—that hunger raises growth hormone and mental energy to push you toward food—which, like his other mechanisms, remains his assertion rather than an established finding.
A list cited from memory
After 2016 the list mostly goes underground, surfacing as citations. In a late-2017 talk on overcompensation, Joe reminds viewers that "cardinal principle number three is dieting is a lesser of evils business"—a small slip, since both full recitations place it fourth, and a sign he was quoting a remembered document rather than a script. Two Slogans of Defeat (2018) points back to "the cardinal principles video" for the same line. In a November 2019 Q&A the principle absorbs new content: conceding that significant fasting costs some muscle, Joe says "that's why I said dieting is a lesser evils business in my cardinal principles video." By mid-2020 it is "one of my cardinal rules and one of the earliest videos I did on this channel."
The one full restatement came a decade after the writing. In the revised and expanded 2023 version, Joe keeps all nine, swaps the order of the first two, and modernizes the glosses—the pantry as a mirror of food relationships, a single cupcake placed on the plate rather than a pantry purge, "empty has to be your new full," progress defined as normalizing a behavior you began by resisting. The skeleton is recognizably the 2013 list.
What grew from which principle
Much of the channel's later doctrine reads as elaboration of a numbered entry. "You never arrive" becomes the late era's endgame teaching: the 2016 promise that OMAD "destroys completely and forever your psychological cravings" (Hunger Levels) was corrected into lifelong vigilance, and in a 2022 livestream Joe restates the principle in nearly Buddhist terms—the insecurities you carry are how you will always experience life, and understanding their cyclical return is, "for lack of a better term," enlightenment. "A calorie is a calorie" underwrites every anti-fad campaign, from keto and Jason Fung to carnivore. "Your mind will play tricks on you" grows into the mind-training half of the channel—ghost problems, mind viruses, self-sabotage talks. Principle seven's permanent system becomes the engineered maintenance of the livestream years, and principle five's transaction becomes the fixed meal itself. The list did not predict the channel's revisions; it survived them, which is close to what Joe meant by immutable.
This page is an independent editorial synthesis of the views Joe expresses in the linked videos. The videos remain the primary sources for his full remarks and context.