There are a lot of great goals out there which are mutually exclusive. To get to any single one, we have to imbalance the scale of life. But often people find out that they simply pit two forces against one another to merely end up at homeostatic balance, gaining no real progress in any direction. Be wary of taking on mutually exclusive goals at the same time.
Gain muscle while you lose fat sounds good. It is possible for the beginner or even for the intermediate who lifts intensely six days per week with 1.5 grams of protein per pound of body weight. But for everyone else, it is folly, because it is biologically impossible. Gaining athletic capacity WHILE you focus on losing weight doesn't make any sense at all. You must feed athletic capability. You must starve fat cells to shrink them. I understand. I have a tendency to put items on my plate which can cancel each other out. In a dash for productivity, the exact opposite comes about. It used to be with record-setting. I'd think that I would improve my happiness if I could prove that I could do more than anybody else AND with less advantage. I'm not saying it wasn't nice to excel at test-out examinations of advanced college courses, or to be acknowledged as Director of the Year or top in the country, or even just selling more than anybody else while I took fewer leads than them. It was nice, for a moment. But the time cost to do those things was very high. There was a moment a few years ago wherein I took a nap with my two-year-old daughter. She cuddled me so tight; and all I could think was how much better this was than any "accomplishment," any "record," any series of "productive" tasks. Am I going to complain when I'm not as far in my business or personal fitness or educational goals? Yeah. But I shouldn't, because I picked a direction which excludes or puts on hold some of those things. Likewise, sometimes you need to recover instead of logging a four hour run or seven days of hours-ling bouts of cardio. Sometimes you need to attend to responsibilities and not rapid fat loss. Sometimes you need to purposely eat in a surplus while training athletic capacity. Sometimes you need to purposely eat in a deficit to incur body mass decrease. Beware mutually exclusive goals.
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Most aches and pains are in part underlying imbalances. Look at this through whatever lens you like: chiropractic alignment; MAT activation; RPR sequencing; OPT cross syndromes; FMS analysis; the list goes on. The point is that modern life has an adducted and flexed knee, a plantar flexed and pronated foot, and everted ankle. Sitting, sitting, sitting. And then, even when people are standing, forget about the foot, ankle, knee and hip aligning. They’re a mess, and fibrotically fixed in those high torsion positions as well. Thus, at some point, you should probably do the OPPOSITE. Well, here is the opposite: fixed knee extension with variant quad lengths/forces. Video here: https://www.instagram.com/p/B58WVe3D49r/
Especially for people with tissue deformities or overt knee injuries, it’s critical that you begin in a corrective/endurance loading and rep range (no or very light ankle weight at 15-25 reps). Maintaining knee extension and slightly inverted ankle dorsiflexion, flex at the hip. If you watch closely I’m showcasing how you can rotate at the hip in order to change quad emphasis (along with reduce possible psoas irritation). With a cable or ankle weights, even advanced athletes can use this as sufficient stimulus, although a layperson without joint irregularities and high level athletes will ultimately require vertical loading, compressive forces, compound exercise, and even impact. Rotation inward calls upon more vastus lateralis. External rotation call upon more medialis. This particular exercise also capitalizes on constant reciprocal inhibition, such that it makes for good mobilizing and retraining of the knee flexors, gastroc and soleus concurrently. Everything about us (even our education level) changes the predictability of our metabolism: https://nutritionandmetabolism.biomedcentral.com/…/s12986-0…
Fat cells appear to have an attenuating effect on metabolism. Skeletal muscle amplifies it. Demographics affect it. And perhaps most importantly there is AT BEST a 10% variance between predicted metabolism and measured real metabolic rate. Think about that. If you track exercise and calories to perfect precision, you’ll still have a 10% or greater difference in outcomes than expected. Pause. Dwell on this. If you have been Nazi-level 100% compliant on nutrition and activity for three full weeks, you could easily see not a single pound lighter on the scale. Even if the deficit number was "correct" to begin with, your body adjusts within 72 hours and caloric prescription already changed. These are averages, mind you. In extreme weight loss patients, real metabolism is 20-25% lower than expected EVEN when accounting for changes: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/27136388/. Quantify that in your brain. That's slaving for four weeks and MAYBE getting three weeks worth of expected outcome. The photo above is not an estimate. It is my MEASURED caloric burn (with a respiratory exchange mask on my face) after 6 total days of fasting from food. The extrapolation off of that direct measurement put my maintenance food intake at 4,590 calories per day. The Harris formula at the time estimated my need at 2,056. So there was a 2,534 calorie discrepancy between the best estimates on earth and an actual scientific and empirical measure. In the biggest loser participants, their MEASURED metabolisms were as much as 1,300 calories LOWER than the best formulae out there. Think about this, folks. THREE-THOUSAND EIGHT-HUNDRED calorie variance between expected and actual metabolisms. That's a much wider range than what people are thinking constitutes significant food variance. This is why you hear a chuckle out of great trainers and coaches when people say, "I ate pretty well" or "I don't eat that much" or "I've been really active" or "I don't know why I'm not losing weight." These are meaningless, imprecise, flimsy statements. A teensy tiny little palmful of food can be forgotten even though it's 300-1000 calories. Meanwhile, metabolic rate is up or down 1,500 to 2,500 from individual to individual and from day to day. Takeaway: the number is moving. So too must our strategy. Someone wants to lose 15lbs in 3 months. How about we lose 20? And the three months AFTER the loss is where we ensure intensity and athleticism increase. How about the 6 months after that we plot out a progression model? The program has to keep moving, because metabolism keeps shifting. Metabolism is on the move. Your plan must be as well. A common trait for long-term success is staying positive: https://calpolynews.calpoly.edu/news_…/…/january/weight_loss
Researchers discovered that some form of food tracking, measurement, focusing on past successes, and staying positive correlated with long-term success. It’s worth taking note, since the percent of success is declining. When I first started reading about health and fitness nigh 30 years ago, “obese” in America described less than 25% of the populace, while “overweight” described about a third. When I became a fitness professional nigh 16 years ago, the numbers had moved up already to about a third in the obesity category, and about half in the overweight one. Add to it that our rates of bone mass and lean tissue loss are accelerating, and this trend is extremely concerning. Moreover, the stats are now 40% and 2/3 respectively. Isn’t it interesting that we expect a minimum of 4 years in college for academic proficiency, 2 years of technical training for vocational proficiency, but less than 3 or 6 months for health and wellness life development? Rapid transformation isn’t doing it. 30 day bursts aren’t doing it. Long-term thinking does. Tracking will. Recalling past successes will. Staying positive will. Over 20 years ago, I noticed that certain people would repeat behaviors that weren’t even enjoyable simply because the behavior is familiar. Caving to mental illness and eating an entire bowl of candy in a professional workplace isn’t exactly “joy-producing” after all. The act of disrupting or angering loved ones isn’t exactly fulfilling. But people do this and more all the time. I began to formulate a theory that people are actually addicted to “being off.” That is, ironically, people crave being unhealthy. They’re drama addicts, self-destruction addicts, dishonesty-addicts. Willpower doesn’t fail. They don’t fail. Instead, they get high from needlessly being reckless or unreliable.
Dr. John Grey has spoken about this at length, and detailed it in his book, Staying Focused in A Hyper World. In some cases, people will even become addicted to grief, a counter-intuitive and painful dopamine trigger. We all have familiarity with attention deficit and hyperactivity disorders, but think less about other hyper disorders. This study (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/isj.12253) I find to be a bit more pertinent. People will become irritated on social media, only to spend more time on it. Interesting implications. Also, be careful. What I had to learn in order to effectively coach was extreme empathy, especially in the face of adversarial attacks. That is, to really communicate with people, you must listen with intentional compassion past the front they've contrived. People say a lot of words; but there's so much pain and hurt behind those words if you listen more deeply.
At the most superficial level, we see people inimical, indignant, angry, passive-aggressive or downright aggressive. And sometimes they aim it outward at other people, namely the very people trying to help them. Really, people are broken. They need mercy. They are carrying pain and trauma from long ago or recently; and their attempts at aggression are frustration at themselves and others where they've been ineffective or unrealistic: https://www.npr.org/…/if-youre-often-angry-or-irritable-you… I used to take people's emotional immaturity personally. It was a heavy burden to carry. I now understand that the angriest and most irritated people are just as-of-yet unwilling to face themselves honestly. And that's most people most of the time. Don't debate. Don't argue. Show compassion. Show mercy. You were once there too and likely will be from time to time again, lashing out needlessly at all the wrong people. The world doesn't need one more combative face-off. But it sure could use some more listening. I had an employee about 14 years ago who presented to our staff the history of a clinic at which she’d begun working. If I remember correctly, the founder had been a full quadriplegic who believed that he could restore function via passive movements with the help of others. Over the course of 20+ years he developed a lengthy routine (4-6 hours) for every morning of his day which ultimately resulted in restoring a fair amount of active function; but he had to repeat this every single day in order to maintain movement.
I think about that. And I see stories about people like the man pictured above: https://www.facebook.com/greatbigstory/videos/1595047100797717/?vh=e&d=n And I think about that. What’s probably most important to keep in mind is these two guys didn’t have any prior evidence that their efforts would be met with results. The layperson may not know this, but not all that long ago the medical opinion was that physical training for certain health issues was totally futile. Thanks to stubborn and hopeful individuals, we now know different. But what if it were really going to take 20+ years of 4-6 hours of physical activity every morning? That’s fewer hours than most people spend at work. But what if that’s what it took to guarantee you had physical function through the rest of the day? What if that’s what it took to ensure you achieved dreams in your life, ones concerning health, ones concerning wealth, ones concerning social impact, ones concerning relationships. And what if all you had to go on was a silly hope while every expert told you that you were crazy? Thank God for the crazies, or else we all might believe the “experts” who try to convince us that what we want to do is impossible. What we want to do isn’t impossible. But it does take a lot of time. What if it takes 4-6 hours every single morning for the next 20+ years? What if it doesn’t? There’s only one way to find out. What if weight-loss doesn’t make you feel good, but having peace makes you lose weight?
Biologists at the Scripps Research Institute uncovered exactly this a few years ago: https://www.scripps.edu/…/pres…/2017/20170127srinivasan.html Calories-in/calories-out does not account for this finding. Metabolic rate is too variable and adaptable. Currently I’m running an experiment which has discovered that one subject can achieve zero additional weight gain at an intake of over 6,000kcal per day; but the same subject has not lost any body mass with an intake as low as 3,800kcal per day even though physical activity went up. What else could explain the outcome? Serotonin certainly could. Other neurotransmitter balance or imbalance could. Hormonal cascades could. Calories CANNOT. On rare occasion people in my network ask me why I focus so much on the psychological aspect of training, the mental health component of wellness, the emotional piece of fitness. Welp, here you go. Seeking ways to reduce hyper emotional responses doesn’t just make life better, it makes fat burn, literally. I was pretty clueless up until 4 years ago about exactly how low the average person’s emotional IQ is. Since being on social media in these past four years, I woke up. And I realize now more than ever how calories is never going to solve the problems of a persistently angry, agitated, or depressed mind. If you’re letting total strangers take up free rent in your head all day every day, getting fit is going to be harder. Yesterday, I wrote about checking the ego whenever you’re feeling a reaction to someone or something. I have to double down today, because right after doing so I saw people in my network rile themselves up over a story which in no way impacts them. But they imagined that it does. They created a fantasy of drama and each further agitated the others, opining (incorrectly) on fundamentals of linguistics when it was clear no one in the group has studied a language, let alone how languages and sounds within them are fluid. And to what end? They wanted to get high from being angry at something. They achieved it. Good trade. Now all of their lives are needlessly shortened by a totally useless sentiment of indignation toward a complete stranger they’ll never know. Johns Hopkins, the Mayo, and many other bodies of medical expertise have determined that forgiveness improves life, lengthens life, creates peace in your mind. There are so many papers on it, I‘d be here all day just posting the top ones, many of which I’ve shared before. Here’s one I haven’t: https://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi… With this well-known scientific fact in hand, you might expect people to clear their mental baggage and walk through the discordant people in their lives one by one, making peace with each. I’m reminded of Louis Zamperini, who spent years forgiving people WHO TORTURED HIM during war. You think you have trauma? Try being tortured. Do you think his forgiveness might’ve played a role in how a traumatized man lived healthily to the age of 97? Nah. Coincidence, right? Make sure you get back to your internet grudges against total strangers. Let me know how that works out for you. The anger/rage addiction is a strong one. We have to break it. We have to help one another break it. We have to support one another in breaking it. You’re doing no one favors by feeding nonstop indignation and irritation, especially new grudges against unknown people. And if the concept of peace in your heart isn’t motivational enough, just think how much easier fat loss is when you can let go of your addiction to anger. Former Navy Seal officer, Jocko Willink, makes a very succinct assessment of our misleading emotions: https://www.instagram.com/tv/B7JLR1OF-Ou/…
Essentially, most of the time we get upset it is our ego reacting to an inarticulate person. “Take a step back,” he says. And try to understand what they’re trying to say, if even they’re doing a terrible job at it. This is definitely a quick and poignant piece of wisdom, since the vast majority of what I observe people doing is skipping right over each step of this effort. That is, I don’t even know if people reflect on why they get upset, let alone have the clarity to check their egos and take a step back. It seems like most people’s reactions to news and disagreements is a jump AHEAD to assume the worst in that story or in that other person. Rather than say, “hmm, my ego is getting infuriated - maybe I need to check myself and/or allow that person to thoroughly explain where I’m unclear,” there is definitely a popular effort to summarize your opponent in the most demeaning way, and invent a dystopian future based on your summary. And likewise, hear me: I’m not saying you’re wrong to do that every time. You may be absolutely accurate. But is it profitable for your enjoyment of life and productive for influencing your opposition? Your mental health is at stake. The capacity to corral opponents is at stake. Seeking first to misunderstand may be quick and seem tidy. But, if we understand, life can be grand. Dopamine and serotonin run our lives. In large part, we eat food to get high. That’s right. The same reason junkies can’t kick physical dependency on drugs (ie - neurotransmitter mismanagement) is why people struggle with food. Dopamine plays a very strong role in weight gain: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/…/S0960-9822(19)31468-X
We might think wealth, access to food abundance, and over-abundance play a pivotal role in people getting fat. But the reality is that, though the developed world has higher incidence of obesity than the third world, within the developed world the highest rated areas are impoverished: https://diabetes.diabetesjournals.org/content/60/11/2667 People in poverty are at the highest risk of obesity and the related health risks. Yet again, this is why I scoff at the arguments against saturated fat intake and meat in the diet. Poor people aren’t eating duck fat and grass fed steaks. But they are getting high with vegetable oils and lots of vegan foods, namely grains. Most importantly, people need to understand that changing dietary behaviors is the same brain chemistry alteration required to get off of hard drugs. At first, you will enjoy all of life less, because you are in withdrawal and making all-time lows of dopamine. Expect to grind through a period of acute depression. More than half of the reason stimulants work for fat loss is that they trigger a dopamine response to make up for your food withdrawal. This is also why I work with clients on fasts. If you take your drugs away long enough, low healthy doses of them can be integrated positively back into your life. And when I say “drugs” here, I mean food, social media, screens, sex, or whatever your dopamine addiction is. For some people it’s drama. For some people it’s anger. For some people it’s outrage. For some people it’s grief. For some people it’s victimhood. For some people it’s actually tobacco, alcohol, and drugs. You will notice, upon reflection, that your dopamine high now comes from increasingly depraved versions of whatever it was that got you high previously. A tiny bite of cake used to do it. No longer. Now, it better be the whole cake. And even that doesn’t get you quite as high. A small friendly debate used to do it. No longer. Now, it better be nonstop berating and pejoratives toward your enemies. And even that doesn’t get you high like it used to. Whatever it is that gets you high, you have receptors in the body for the adrenaline, cortisol, and dopamine that you dump out when you engage in these unhealthy and counterproductive behaviors. They need a reset. They need a period of abstinence. They need a fast. Afterward, you may find you can reintegrate small amounts back into your life in a positive manner; or you may find you still can’t handle it. Why did people ever create offices? Why did people ever invent walkabout, wilderness retreat, and strategic solitude? Because without the noise of your addictions and distractions, your brain might return to a healthier state with greater clarity. Why do cults create retreats, getaways, and gathering places? So they can rob you of your clarity you’d get in solitude. So they can steal the reward we are to retrieve from thinking straight. So they can bombard you with ideology in the very moment you ought to be thinking for yourself and shaking off the controls of other people’s expectations. And this is where food addiction has at least one component that is more difficult than illicit drug addiction. The societal norm doesn’t discourage it. Our obsession with identity politics (ie - this is WHO I AM) reigns supreme over our behaviors. Rather than viewing actions as things we sometimes do, we have developed some really erroneous beliefs that those actions are WHO I AM. And people ought to be ashamed of implying that I should change WHO I AM. If you can break free from the cults, if you can view behaviors as behaviors, if you can view desires as desires, you don’t need to change WHO YOU ARE. You can remain every awesome thing you are while kicking your habit. You can fast from getting high for a little bit; and you’ll find that the best parts of who you are not only stay, but improve. |
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