You'll Never Get Lean Thinking That Way

Progress. It doesn’t happen in egoism. When people hit rock bottom, or are confronted with the palpable consequences of their faulty philosophy, only then do we see the hockey stick growth pattern.

The number one objective for all coaches is to help their students think in a different manner. The thought-pattern which got you here will not get you there.

Thus it is with leanness. People come to me, putting in incredible time cost efforts, slaving away, pushing so hard, for... ? I don’t know actually. The first questions I ask are about sleep and stress management. They want to “get down to business” and break a sweat. Ok. And how well has that thinking worked so far? It absolutely hasn’t yielded a single desired outcome.

They want to “get down to business” and diet hard. Ok. And how well has that thinking worked so far?

It’s not the amount of effort. You don’t need to put in any more effort at your incredibly faulty thinking. You have to think in a different manner.

It isn’t the toolkit, the privilege, the luck, the willpower, the steps on your Fitbit, the calories low enough. It’s that you have a thought defect. You have a belief system which is errant. There are massive lines of viral code in your brain, on which you have to run the antivirus software.

I have peers who are incredibly fit with less than 3,000 steps per day. I have obtained outrageous leanness before while doing zero minutes of cardio per week. In research, weight training reigns supreme: https://news.wfu.edu/…/lose-fat-preserve-muscle-weight-tra…/

People don’t want to change their thinking. So they spend even more hours walking, jogging, running, cycling, starving, to absolutely no outcome at all. They spend decades slaving away at efforts which will never gift to them the outcome they desire.
It isn’t the work. It isn’t the effort. It’s the belief.

People yearn to think in the exact same faulty manner which hasn't improved their lives. A perfect example I saw recently was an article making the argument that you shouldn't tell people who struggle with depression about the benefits of exercise. One-hundred and fifty years of talk therapy and pharmaceutical intervention for depression has yielded ZERO reduction in societal incidence rates of depression. The rates are going up. Should we stop telling people who struggle with depression about the benefits of therapy and drug interventions? The fact of the matter is that a light morning walk has as good or better mean outcomes with regard to depression than talk therapy combined with pharmaceutical therapy every single time they're stacked against one another. The popular voices of medical authority have been moving their tunes toward exercise for over a decade now: https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/exercise-is-an-all-natural-treatment-to-fight-depression

But, in clinging to the faulty thinking, a blatant error stuck out within that article which was trying to make a validation for not even trying to help people with depression. It focused on how people with depression lack the motivation to exercise. So, they argue, we're painting depressed people into a corner. If your definition of starting exercise is 90 minutes of hardcore effort, yes, I would agree. But if your definition of a depression-addressing exercise practice is a 5 minute morning walk, then I disagree strongly. In fact, when we examine the concept of "motivation" we find it totally vacuous anyway. Motivation is circular and non-explanatory. I reject it entirely in philosophical axiom. Either people decide to affect change or they assume a role of dishonest enabler.

You’ll never get fit thinking the way you’ve been thinking that’s made you unfit.