Top 3 Nutritional Mistakes – Why You Need A Food Journal

Top 3 Nutritional Mistakes (and how to fix them) by Michael Roussell of T-nation outlines 3 mistakes bodybuilders make when trying to build mass while keeping body fat levels down. I mention it because body builders are just extreme versions of the rest of us who are interested in getting or staying lean – their goals are the same, their practices are just a little more intense.

1) Focusing too much on Macronutrient Breakdowns

I’m a big believer that the type of calories (protein, carbohydrates, and fats) you eat does matter, but people can overlook the importance of total calories. Yes, it’s possible to manipulate macronutrients percentages so that you can eat more or less food with favorable advances toward your body composition goals, BUT total calories matter. I liken the total vs. type of calorie debate to the diet vs. exercise debate. They’re not exclusive and both matter!

2) Skipping Meals & Eating Unplanned Meals

Not getting the results you want is one thing, but to not know how well you’re following your plan means you’re blindly stumbling around the land of mediocrity with no chance of success.

Lack of proper compliance … is the number 1 reason people don’t reach their physique goals. If you aren’t reaching your goals, yet haven’t filled out a compliance sheet like the one below, I don’t want to hear about how the diet you’re on doesn’t work or that you need a personalized nutrition plan.

3) Not Giving Your Plan a Change – “The best diet is the one you’re not on.”

… today and there’s an overabundance of training programs accessible at your finger tips. In fact, there are so many programs there is a growing population of people who have become training whores, switching to whatever new program has been published that week.

Unfortunately, the same trend has been emerging with diets and nutrition. Internet forums are overwhelmed with people who are “cutting” one week, “bulking” the next, and “cutting” again the following week. If you’ve done the Velocity Diet, Massive Eating, Get Shredded Diet, and the Anabolic Diet in the span of 8 weeks then I’m talking to YOU.

I have gotten my best result when I write everything out to get a calorie estimate and stick to it for a couple of months. I think this is because it’s very easy to forget eating, not eating and what you eat. I’ll admit, it was a pain in the arm the first couple of days but then it got easier because you get better at it. A food journal is a skill, as is a different eating plan and remaining compliant to it, that gets easier the longer you do it.

What Is My Purpose And What To Expect From Me

What is my purpose?

I followed the instructions on How to discover your life purpose in about 20 minutes by Steve Pavlina and came up with “my purpose in life is to try and create beauty were only its potential exists”.

But what does that mean exactly?

For me beauty is many different things:

  • Energy
  • Happiness
  • Vitality
  • Satisfaction
  • Actualizing potential
  • Passion
  • Confidence
  • Efficiency
  • Symmetry and balance
  • Spontaneity
  • Fluidity of motion
  • Confidence
  • Love

Examples of things I think are beautiful:

  • Good posture
  • Teaching / learning a new task, refining the task and then successfully using the skill
  • The way new mothers look at and engage their children
  • Good scenery
  • Sunshine
  • Laughing
  • Gratitude
  • Creating something – art, pottery, music or writing
  • The prefect line through the trail / down the hill
  • The way people look when they’ve lost a lot of weight
  • The look when someone achieves a goal
  • Seeing two people who are in love
  • Observing two adults engaging each other in a conversation
  • Empathy
  • Synergy or serendipity
  • Open mindedness and non-judgment

Ways to create beauty in the real world:

  • Help someone lose weight
  • Help someone achieve something that they want or one of their goals
  • Help someone increase their energy
  • Make something out of nothing – art, music, and writing
  • Help facilitate a new experience
  • Confirm something that people want to be true
  • Help someone achieve a Zen or flow state
  • Introduce someone in their passion
  • Indulge someone’s passion
  • Have or help someone else have an epiphany
  • Help someone learn something
  • Get someone moving
  • Engage the mind of the willing
  • Make someone laugh
  • Make someone smile

From a practical stand point, everything I do should be facilitating one of these things. Otherwise, I’ll be deviating from my ideal life path and creating karma.

Now as interesting as this whole experience has been, now I am left to wonder and see what I do with this knowledge.

Update – like many articles, I’ve sat on this one of a few months because it didn’t feel finished. It was written in the middle of February 2007 so I’ve had the opportunity to integrate the new information into my world view and to make manifest this understanding. Well, how am I doing? It’s tough to say, but I think it’s going alright.

I’ve see the value of the classes I teach to the participants so I try to get them to have that “oh my God I CAN do this” experience. One person has related to me that they had it, that they “haven’t worked that hard since high school”. That’s delivering one to the gate and allowing them to take the steps in to improve their own life. I felt really good when they told me that it had impacted them so strongly.

I’ve engaged the mind of the willing and let mine be engaged. Rachel and Des have thrown a number of new ideas my way and they’ve changed the way I view the world. These interactions are mutually enlightening.

I’ve become a lot less judgmental, particularly of myself. Learning that I desire to try and help people framed a lot of my history in a different light, one that I have an easier time accepting as a reflection of my true nature vs. the seemingly randomness of my past decisions. There is continuity to my choices and I can understand why I found so many of them unfulfilling, I was hoping that people would be successful as opposed to being happy that I tried to help them achieve success or a new level of awareness.

I’ve had to learn to keep smiling during class so that has made me happier. I’ve also had to perfect and model body position on the bike which has improved my posture. A lot of my coaching to the participants has to do with “keeping proud posture” and being strong while driving power to the peddles.

There’s a lot less cognitive dissonance in my life now, so, if for nothing else, Steve’s exercise has been worthwhile because my life has less stress in it. But since I have taken a lot more out of it, his exercise was been one of the most valuable experiences facilitated by a web page I’ve ever had.

Trying Something New

Doing something new is one of the more challenging things that we do as we get older. It seems that our natural tendency to try and make things as unchanging as possible really hurts our motivation to try new things.

But isn’t this tendency just like most of our tendencies in that it exist only because we allow it to exist? There are people who have learned to do new things all the time so our initial fear is not something that cannot be overcome by direct effort to change.

Looking back, if you do find yourself rather unmotivated to try new things, isn’t it also a fact that you were apprehensive to try the thing you most like doing now? For me it is mountain bike riding and I thought about if for a while before I actually started to ride; my friend Chris hounded me for more than a year to buy a bike from him before I relented. Now I can’t imagine my life without it.

The strangest thing about trying mountain biking is where I am now. My life is completely different as a result of my decision to improve my health and fitness, a decision that was the outcome of me loving bike riding. I haven’t taken to anything else in my life like I have taken to cycling. While it is possible that the athlete in me would have come out some other way, I have not yet found or tried whatever activity that is. Regardless of its eventuality, most of my friends are different, most of my activities are different and most of my time is spend doing stuff that I didn’t do before.

It isn’t worth considering where my life would be now if I had not tried, but it’s safe to assume that it would be different.

At least once every couple of days you should try something new. The LuLuLemon people recommend once a day but I’m going to suggest every couple of days. These things really don’t have to matter all that much but they can be big things if you like. Try tanning, a different type of coffee, make a new meal, talk to someone you want to talk to, eat at a new restaurant, try a different type of squat, etc…. The goal of these small things is to keep your brain used to trying new things. You are facing your fear head on and very frequently.

At least once a week you should do something that you don’t really want to do. For many people this should be to complain about poor service or you not getting what you were entitled to. Don’t be a jerk about it, but stand up for yourself. It’s another conflict situation that many tend to avoid because they don’t like the idea of arguing with someone. It’s about tackling something that you know will make your life better once you complete it.

At least once a month you should try something very new. These things should be a little more significant than anything up until now and they should involve some sort of risk, preferably the risk of embarrassment or making a fool of yourself. Karaoke is a good example here, as would be entering an art show. You could take a pottery class, go to bingo or volunteer at the food bank. The thing is to get well outside your normal way of acting and your comfort zone. The goal here is to increase the range of things you feel okay doing. Again, you’re working to face the fear as you increase your exposure to different things.

At least twice a year you should try something that you’ve always been afraid of doing.

At least once a year you should make a list of things that you want to do before you die and make sure the list is disappearing and growing at the same time.

No matter what, your life should be in constant flux trying new things and exposing yourself to as much as you can. I believe this is the only way you are going to be able to determine whenever you have found true happiness and moved towards completion.

Getting Better Result By Giving Better Feedback

I am a compliance practitioner so it is important for me to be able to get people to do the things I ask them to do. This is not evil because I’m trying to get them to do the things they want to do but may lack the belief that they can do. The key things in achieving these results is to provide good feedback. Here are the 5 key elements to offering effective feedback. For clarity’s sake the two players in the feedback session are the giver and the target.

1) Know your goal and clearly define your expectations. Make sure you know how to clearly explain what you are looking for and be prepared to explain how the new behaviour differs from the old behavior, why it is more appropriate and and how it fits into the process.

When I’m instructing a cycling class, my primary goal is to get the target to work slightly harder or modify their position on the bike. If we use hip position on the saddle as an example, I’ll say “move your butt to the back of the seat to make it easier for the big leg muscles to work”. It isn’t much but I know that the legs are able to drive more power to the peddles when the hips are in the right position so I throw it out there. Anyone who grabs onto the advice will improve more quickly.

2) When it is possible, tell the target how their actions made you feel. We are an emotional species so most of us tend to feel stuff; always assume the target deals with emotions until you learn otherwise. If we realize that the tone of our voice make someone feel like we are angry, we’re able to draw the connection between the stimulus and the response.

Compare the following two statements, “why are you angry?” and “when you use that tone, it makes me feel like you are angry.” Which do you think will facilitate the quickest change?

Letting the target know how you feel also transfers a lot of the responsibility of the outcome over to you. This will help to keep them open to the suggested changes while giving them valuable information to help modify their behaviour.

3) Get them to project themselves into the future to try and feel what it will be like when they are more successful at the task. This will help to motivate the target to adopt the suggested chances because they will pair the changes to the desired outcome.

To go back to the hips on the saddle example, I’ll say something like “strong leg muscles make those hills easier this season” or “work hard like the quality of your life depends on it”. The goal is to try and help them see the value tomorrow of working hard today. When it’s done effectively, facilitating change is a piece of cake.

4) Let go of judgement. Always assume that the target is acting in their best interest and, when their behaviour goes against their best interests, assume it is because the target doesn’t have enough information to make the right decision. The role of the giver is to provide the target with the information they are lacking.

You can say things like:
Did you know that…, here is something that may help…, here is another option for that…, I have found that doing…, that’s the way I used to do it until…,

5) Be honest but caring. People know a line of BS when they hear it and will resent you for it. You need to be truthful with them but you need to be caring about it because the target may take the feedback as a statement that their actions were wrong. If this happens, it can start an unconscious defense reaction that will cause the target to close up. You will minimize the risk of this by telling them how their actions made you feel.

33 Rules to Boost Your Productivity X 2

This week Steve Pavlina posted 33 Rules to Boost Your Productivity and 33 Rules to Boost Your Productivity – Volume 2 and both are exceptional. 66 tips to help you get more out of your life.

My three favorites are:

Nuke it! The most efficient way to get through a task is to delete it. If it doesn’t need to be done, get it off your to do list.

Minuteman. Once you have the information you need to make a decision, start a timer and give yourself just 60 seconds to make the actual decision. Take a whole minute to vacillate and second-guess yourself all you want, but come out the other end with a clear choice. Once your decision is made, take some kind of action to set it in motion.

Troll hunt. Banish the negative trolls from your life, and associate only with positive, happy, and successful people. Mindsets are contagious. Show loyalty to your potential, not to your pity posse.

Imagine what 63 more of these could do?

NOTE: there are a lot of trackbacks to Steve’s site so be sure to follow a few of them to see how others are using his information.

Consequences Of The Brain Treating Reality And Thought As The Same

Brain scans can show us exactly which part of our brain is active. One thing that these test have uncovered is that the brain will be almost as active when someone thinks about doing a task as it is when they are doing the task. The motor cortex that controls movement is not active but the rest of the brain appears to be as engaged in the activity as it would be if you WERE engaged in the activity.

Now take a second to think about that. The brain doesn’t know the difference between what is real and what is thought. What is the difference between doing something and thinking about doing it? I think only the movement portion, and the motor cortex is the only portion of the brain that shows a decrease in activity when we only think about something.

Have you ever had a dream that impacted the rest of your day? No matter what you do you’re left with a lagging feeling that started with the dream. Would having that same experience in real life have create a similar impact, maybe not the same but one as equally profound? I’ve had dreams that stayed with me because they felt so real – it was as though I had actually had to run for my life or jump from a building. That’s because my brain DID response as though I was running for my life or jumping from a building. Technology shows us that this is how the brain works.

I’m sure you’ve had the experience of thinking about something that makes you angry and gets your blood boiling. The response is exactly the same as the real thing, you get an adrenalin spike as you charge up for action. You’re having a real physiological response to a mental stimulus. You can create whatever emotional response that you like by thinking about things that evoke that response.

It really is a stimulus response world. No matter what it is, it you are old enough to read and comprehend what I’m saying here, you probably have had enough experience to create 10000’s of response / stimulus pairings. Very rarely will you be faced with a situation for which you do not have a response.

If this is how the brain works, how do we put it to work for us?

Start changing your thought patterns. Stop thinking thoughts that create negative emotional reactions. Think of kittens, or stake, or something that causes you to respond in a positive way. Start thinking thoughts that foster the emotional state that you need to perform at your best at every moment. I do my best blog writing when I think of things that give me hope and optimism. My best song writing comes out when I’m feeling down or heart broken. When I’m at the gym trying to lift heavy I need to manufacture feelings of personal injustice to give me something to rise against. When I’m engaging someone in a discussion, I’ll picture myself being open and receiving their knowledge. Whatever it is, if I can perform better in a different state of mind I’ll work to find that state.

It only makes sense to do this. Find what makes your performance better and hack your brain to manufacture the emotional state that will allow you to tap into it.