How to Get Fit and Stay Fit – Mindset

Consistent Evolving Action

How do I get in better shape?

I want to get healthy but where do I start?

I need to lose some weight.  How did you do it?

What kinds of exercise do you do?

What do you eat?

These are just some of the questions I get when people find out I used to weigh over 300 pounds when I was 17 years old.  These questions also come when people find out I used to be a personal trainer. 

Over the years I’ve realized that while strategy is very important in terms of the actions a person is taking every day, mindset is even more critical.  Before we talk specifically about things to do in terms of exercise and diet, I want to go over some mindset things that need to be practiced daily in order to see real long term positive results in our bodies.  In my opinion, if you don’t understand these things, it doesn’t mean a damn thing for me to tell you about a specific exercise to do or specific dietary plan to follow.

The things that I say in this article will rotate around one specific idea:

Consistent evolving action.  

I am a firm believer that achieving anything significant involves putting consistent pressure on the process of achieving that goal.  That may sound simple but think about how many people have trouble starting an exercise routine and then staying on it.  The routine doesn’t have to always be walking, or running, or weights, or yoga, or anything, but you must do something consistently to see the results you’re looking for and likely that consistency must take place over months, years, and for life.  That’s consistency.  

The evolving part refers to getting more intelligent about what you’re doing.  You can be consistent with running but what if you get injured?  

• Will you analyze your training to see what led to the injury?  
• Will you read books about running form and consider strengthening and mobility exercises to improve your stride technique and make your legs more resilient against injury?  
• Will you look at your diet, sleep patterns, and general recovery efforts and seek opportunities for improvement?  
• Will you shift the demands of your program as your responsibilities change in life (being single to in a relationship, no kids to being a parent, etc.)?  

These questions and much more represent the starting points for expressing the effort to get smarter about what we are doing when it comes to our health.  The same goes for diet and any other pattern of behavior in our lives we are trying to alter.  We must be champions of the change we want to see.  We must take ownership of the process.  

A lot of what I will tell you here on my website is based on my own experiences implementing different exercise, dietary, and lifestyle strategies.  Some of these strategies are my own creation and others are from reading/research I’ve done from other health and fitness professionals.  I am not one to read scientific articles and say that what I do is backed by ‘research’.  For me the reality is what you feel in your everyday life.  I’m not against science but I think some of us desire scientific evidence before we begin doing anything different in our health.  So does that mean that what you are currently doing is scientifically backed?  The point is that I believe the best posture is to have an open mind and be willing to experiment.  Be careful not to let the unknown cause you to stagnate.  

You don’t need a research project to start getting healthier.  Just begin and adjust along the way!

Being able to adjust well and move your health in a positive direction will be predicated on three primary factors, in my opinion:  Understanding Your Environment, Learning and Experimenting, and Managing Stress.

Be Aware of Your Environment and How it’s Working Against Healthy Habits

I’ve lived in relatively large cities my whole life:

• Houston, Texas
• Birmingham, Alabama
• Tacoma, Washington
• Little Rock, Arkansas

They aren’t necessarily set up to make you move your body more.  When I first met my wife’s grandfather (He’s in his 80’s) he would sometimes tell stories about growing up in rural Arkansas in the summer.  They raised animals on a farm.  Some they slaughtered for food.  In the summer everyone went in the fields and picked different crops to earn income (berries and cotton were two that he mentioned often).  They walked places, worked outside, ate food from the land, and ate meat that they grew and slaughtered themselves.  This is in the late 30’s and 40’s when he was growing up.  The nature of the environment and the availability of convenience required that he use his body and eat food that was fairly unprocessed.

Contrast that with how I grew up in the 80’s and 90’s.  I lived in an apartment and/or house with a television in every room.  I took the school bus or drove myself to school once I was old enough.  All of our food came from the grocery store and a fair amount of that was processed stuff like cereals with high amounts of sugar.  My mom cooked a lot but at least once a week we ate fast food like burgers, pizza, or fried chicken.  During the summers, I often stayed at home while my mother worked.  By the time I was a teenager, I was cutting the grass once every week or so but other than that there wasn’t much relatively intense physical labor I had to do around the house.  I began working out on my own when I was 10 years old.  If it weren’t for that, I wouldn’t have been getting much physical activity on a daily basis growing up in the summer.  It was nothing like my wife’s grandfather’s experience.  

Now, there’s Uber to bring us anything our heart desires in terms of food.  There’s remote work and remote school.  Even if you have a physical job, the challenge is eating quality food on a regular basis.  There isn’t much in the way of environmental pressure to make us move our bodies vigorously on a regular basis and then fuel our bodies with unprocessed nutrient dense foods.  In many ways modern life in a city can work against this process.  This means that when we’re trying to get healthier we have to develop an awareness of ourselves and our environment and establish ways in which we can make our environment work for us.  We also will have to deconstruct patterns that we may have learned as children or from media narratives.  I’m extremely grateful that I saw my mother cooking when I was a kid.  True, we ate lots of processed food but my mother made lots of home cooked meals as well, which let me know I could do the same.  I just had to figure out what ingredients were better than others.  Cooking is one of those basic life skills that not everyone sees growing up, which is unfortunate because it’s essential for understanding what’s in the food we eat.  

When I left the Army in 2012, I stopped eating cereal for breakfast and started cooking eggs pretty regularly.  It was a huge change as morning cereal was hardwired into my brain.  The idea that highly sweetened, highly processed, dense carbohydrates from a package was somehow essential to the start of my day is ridiculous to think about now.  However, for the first 30 years of my life it was sort of like food gospel that breakfast was the most important meal of the day and highly processed sugary cereal should be that meal.  Advertising is powerful and it took some time to unwind the idea of cereal being the first meal I ate everyday but I got there.  The only time I eat cereal now is when I’m intentionally having a cheat meal and I want dessert for that meal.

When I talk about exercise and food I will mention ways in which we can set up our environment to work with our goals.  I think it’s fair to point out here that ‘exercise’ is actually a weird thing.  

I’m fortunate in that I believe I have a natural proclivity to train my body rigorously which means I do it no matter what my circumstances are.  It’s been my experience that most people don’t have that natural inclination. If you’re trying to get in shape you’re going to have to cultivate a thirst and hunger to move your body.  This is a part of making exercise a lifelong habit and staying fit until we die.

Learning and Experimenting are Lifelong Tasks in Our Health Journey

Let’s say you want to engage in a specific exercise protocol and you want to begin a particular dietary strategy.  Maybe you found a website like Gold Medal Bodies, read a book like Knee Ability Zero, or The Primal Blueprint and you want to begin implementing one of these protocols into your life (I highly recommend all of the resources I just linked).  You must first acknowledge the constraints of time that you have:  

• What is your work schedule?
• How much preparation time and commute time do you need before/after work?
• What are your responsibilities at home with chores and family and what kind of time do you need for them?
• What hobbies and other leisure activities are you engaged in and how much time do they take?
• If you’re making diet changes and you have a family, will they be going on this journey with you?  How can they support you?

Write out your weekly schedule and ask yourself when you’re going to implement these programs and how much time in between exercise sessions you’ll need to recover.  You’ll have to play with this and you may not be able to do things exactly as prescribed by the program you choose to follow.  Remember, if a routine takes an hour and you don’t have an hour, the routine has to be cut in half, you have to find an hour, or you have to find a routine that’s half an hour.  Whatever you do, do something and begin the process of figuring out how to modify specific protocols to fit your own life.  This is learning and experimenting within the constraints of your life.

Remember, time equals money.  Just like when we spend outside the constraints of our financial resources, we then experience financial chaos, when we  plan exercise and dietary changes outside the bounds of our time constraints, we create a scenario where compliance becomes harder.  I have watched people time and time again, try to make huge adjustments in exercise and eating habits only to last 2-4 weeks and then completely fall off the wagon.  They try to do too much, too soon and end up not doing anything at all.  In the Army we had a motto when I was going through training, ‘Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.’  Understand, this is a lifelong journey of learning and understanding that you are going on.  You’ll have to learn, experiment, and adjust and then you’ll have seasons of steady state.  Then life will happen and you’ll have to improvise.  Keep applying pressure.  Stay consistent and keep evolving your health habits into more intelligent variations based on your goals.  Take small steps and achieve small victories.  It feels slow, but in the long run, you’ll move towards your health goals faster.

Managing Stress is a Critical Part of Getting Healthy

As much as I love exercise, I understand that my ability to recover from what I do physically plays a huge part in the enjoyability and longevity of my participation in exercise.  Pushing myself to workout and working hard to eat cleaner when I was growing up was a good character development tool.  Being in my teenage years for the most part, I really learned about self discipline and determination.  Going to school year after year taught me about courage as I had to face the embarrassment of bullying, teasing, and losing often in athletic endeavors.  However, it wasn’t until my life fell apart after college that I really began to understand how chronic stress wears the body down.  Age brings about both real and imagined pressures:

• The pressure to pay bills is very real and can cause quite a bit of stress
• The pressure to have the latest clothes and car and look like a model is imagined but giving in to it can cause lots of stress (Societal narratives are stories that we can chose to adopt or ignore)

When I quit the high-paying job I had as an engineer the main driver for that decision was stress.  Stress that came from a general lack of interest in the work that led to a debilitating depression.  When I was a personal trainer I would hear clients who were struggling with similar issues in their own lives at home or at work.  Something that I would try to get people to understand is that if you are miserable with your job, your finances are on shaky ground, and you haven’t had a good conversation with your significant other in months, it’s going to be tough to sustain a new workout program or dietary strategy.  Why?  There’s too much stress competing for the mental and emotional resources needed to change your habits.  Your physical health happens in context with the rest of your life.  Your health, finances, relationships, and work are like a personal orchestra that you are conducting and trying to get to be synergistic.  Too often we think of these different areas in separate compartments but each area requires time and energy to manage.  Changing health habits requires time and energy.  This is a ‘getting smarter’ thing.  Whether working on improving the quality of a broken marriage or accepting that a divorce is the next step, either one could free up time and energy to work on health that was once consumed by unresolved relationship issues.  

When I left engineering I wasn’t miserable anymore and I started working out again and eating better.  I lost about 30 lbs that I had gained during my time working as an engineer.  Solving your biggest problems in life undoubtedly has downstream effects.  The challenge is the fact that solving your biggest problems will probably force you to make big changes that maybe you’ve been avoiding.  Remember, change is the hardest thing we do in life.  I was terrified of quitting engineering because I knew the ridicule I would get and I knew the financial chaos that was coming but it was killing my health… My health is the most important thing to me because it facilitates everything else.  So I took ownership and exercised the courage and resolve to navigate the change.  It was completely worth it.  

Conclusion

Our mental approach to health is just as important as the practical steps we take.  Understanding our environment, being willing to learn/experiment, and managing stress are important mental frameworks to keep in mind as I make some practical recommendations over the next two posts on exercise and diet respectively.  These three ideas really work with any habit change we’re trying to make so keep them in mind when considering personal finances, relationships, and work as well.

Words of Encouragement

In the modern world, the pursuit of a healthy body is challenging because we have so much comfort built into modern life.  As I’ve mentioned, physicality and real unprocessed food are seemingly becoming less and less prominent in our world.  This may sound like a sad situation but in reality it represents a huge opportunity to develop self awareness and self discipline.  If you can manage to stay in shape when your environment and the people around you aren’t encouraging it… If you can manage to create healthy patterns of eating when the temptation to eat junk is all around you… Then you’ve managed to develop mental skills that can be applied to any other important process in your life.  Get excited for the challenge because it has the potential to produce big rewards in terms of character and mental toughness.  Remember, Pain is a Good Thing.