Author: newstasis_waavrk

Who Are You Feeding?

Having been in the fitness industry for well over a decade, I have heard the following conversation countless times with the same usual outcome:

“I want lower my body fat, and look and feel better.”

“Outstanding, we can help you with all of those things. When was the last time you looked and felt the way you want to look and feel?”

“Oh, it has been a long time, when I was much younger. When I could eat whatever I wanted and didn’t have to worry about weight.”

“Okay, so this is a new journey for you and you’re aware that you’ll need to do a bunch of new things to achieve new results?”

“Yeah, I’m fully committed to doing whatever it takes to reach my goal.”

“Fantastic, this is going to be a lot of hard work, but once you make real this desire to look and feel amazing you’ll be grateful for all of the effort you put into it.”

So far, so good, someone has a desire for something they have never achieved. Given that they have never achieved it, they connect with the experts to learn how to make it possible. For a few weeks they follow the nutrition advice, reduce their stress, train with a trainer 3-4 times per week and independently 1-3 times per week and their transformation has a fantastic beginning.

But this great start is often stopped dead in its tracks when the body and brain begin to make real the story the people tell about themselves. Suddenly and quickly, the person begins to act in a way that isn’t conducive to achieving their goal. Most often the breakdown will be about food – they start to eat food that they know isn’t going to move them towards their goal or they eat in a way that isn’t recommended and that doesn’t help get them them any closer. Other times they stop training with the intensity or frequency that is needed to keep momentum and progress going.

Unbeknownst to them, they are paying service to a version of themselves that didn’t believe that achieving the goal was possible. They are, in essence, feeding their old self and making sure it continue to exist as opposed to altering their actions to become the new possibility.

Call it self-sabotage, the expression of their belief of self-worth, whatever, the end result is the same, corrective thoughts, feeling and behaviors do not get traction and the individual remains the same – overweight, lacking vitality and living an uninspired physical life. It’s an avoidable shame and tends to be the outcome of an incomplete conversation during the initial conversation about training.

What is missing is the needed conversation to get answered the “how did you do it?” questions about your life and how you ended-up straying away from the life you wanted to live. These questions need to be asked because human beings pay service to their uncommunicated habits and because each individual is the expert in how they came to be how they are. They don’t need to get into the “why” questions because the answers to these questions do little to shed light on the new way of being that is needed to achieve results that have never been achieved.

What this does that is so important for transformation is help someone see their past as a series of behaviors so they are then able to see their progress as a series of different behaviors. Their present stops being the past and starts to become their future – it is only through different thoughts, feelings and actions that someone will be able to become transformed.

This needs to happen because human beings are complex and require more than a coat of new paint to become something physically, emotionally and spiritually different. Critical to transformation is the wisdom gained from understanding what was occurring to keep things the same because if these behaviors remain unknown they will repeated.

To do the job correctly a trainer / coach does not just to show people the way to make the lasting change but to also show them how they found their way to needing the change in the first place.

So, how do you feed the more energetic and goal achieving you? It’s very simple, you eat frequent servings for plants and small amounts of meat that haven’t been processed, flavored or “enriched”. You eat things that will rot quickly without refrigeration, things that have not been manipulated extensively to change their form or state. You eat chicken and not chicken nuggets, beef not hamburgers, fish not fish sticks. You eat green leafy vegetables and not just green powders or vitamin pills. You eat small amounts of fruit and not fruit bars. You drink water and not sugar water solutions. Basically, we foods that are high in nutrients and low in energy.

You make and take the time to buy good quality whole foods and prepare it with care, creating meals that don’t look that much different from the foods you bought. You remain open to the possibility for a new you and embrace the reality that this different version needs different things. Then you do these things over and over and over again until they become automatic and part of your new identity.

Ways To Ensure You Don’t Make Progress

Below are some ways to have an average life and to not make progress.

  • Make an assumption without getting enough information
  • Believe that others share the same understanding of language that you do
  • Do not make clear declarations of wants, expectations or boundaries
  • Be afraid to be alone and be willing to put-up with almost anything to make sure it doesn’t happen
  • Fall for the idea of something and enroll others to play a role in making that idea real vs. letting them be self expressed
  • Be insecure
  • Have a strong need to be liked
  • Be a dreamer and give other people the benefit of the doubt
  • Do not learn from your mistakes
  • Put other peoples needs in front of your own

Somewhere between childhood and adulthood there exists a moment of time in which we exist with grounded and realistic possibilities – it’s the few weeks between wanting to be a cowboy rock-star astronaut and accepting that we need to go to school, get a good job, pay taxes, settle down and pass along our wisdom to the next generation.

It would be easy, and untrue, for me to say that you shouldn’t give a crap about anyone else because we need other people in order to amount to anything. Be it their money, their labor, their ideas, their esteem, a connection to them, or their love, other people are important. But what isn’t important are most of the reasons why we may view them as important. You do not become less worthy if someone isn’t nice to you, you do not become more worthy when you sacrifice your own needs / wants to help another person out, you do not become unlovable if you do not have a romantic partner, and your life does not have less meaning simply because something you planned and worked hard on didn’t turnout the way you had hoped it would.

We need people in our life and in society to make everything possible, what we do not need is the constant internal chatter about them and the impact they have on our lives. The moment of grounded realistic possibilities is the moment right before we began to embody the narcissistic obsession about what other people thought and allowed these thoughts to impact our feelings and actions.

If you want to make progress in life you need to accept that other people exist and serve an important function in your life. But you need to remain diligent when it comes to what this function is. Share the planet with them, but notice always the important aspects of your life and who they are impacted by your view of what other people think, feel and do.

In the end, you need to know what you want out of life and this is impossible when you are spending a lot of your time fixated on what you think other people want out of life.

100 Tips To Have An Extraordinary Life

I found this list of 100 tips to live an extraordinary life by Dr. Sukhi and felt it was worth sharing.

4. Develop a Routine and Rituals.

5. Exercise Everyday.

6. Start Your Day With Visualization.

7. Laugh and Play.

8. Create Short and Long Term Goals.

18. See Challenges as Opportunities.

19. Get a Mentor.

20. Know What You Value.

21. Be Somebody Others Respect.

29. Be Enthusiastic.

30. Plan Your Days, Weeks and Months.

31. Create Extraordinary Experiences for Those You Love.

32. Cultivate the Kid in You.

54. Always Tell the Truth.

55. Be Persistent and Patient.

56. Don’t Judge Others.

There are a number of things on the list that have been posted on this blog before, some that are part of the common experience of our culture and others that are new, uncomfortable and outside the normal way of being. But always keep in mind that an extraordinary life requires extraordinary actions so don’t count on remaining comfortable as being one of those things.

6 Ways To Create A Better Life

Ever see one of those people who is always happy and wonder what they are doing different that seems to bring everything they want into their life? The people will the big smile, the positive energy and a willingness to go along with whatever seems to come their way, as though it was exactly what was supposed to happen? If you ever sit down and talk to them, you’ll uncover some very surprising things about how they engage the world that seem to open closed doors and create a better life at every moment.

Having a great life is simply a matter of finding out and doing what they do so this greatness is within the realm of possibility for most of us. Below are 6 things that you can start doing today that will improve your experience this summer and beyond.

1) Create goals and look at them every morning when you wake-up and every night before you go to bed. You need to know where you are going in order to get there and your goals are the best predictor of your future, if you focus on achieving them. “Book ending” your day with a quick review of your goals primes your brain to work on them while you are awake and while you sleep. In fact, without priming your brain with problems to solve, you cannot expect to achieve anything that you haven’t already experienced. Take 10 minutes to read your goals at the beginning and end of your day to think and feel what it will be like to achieve them. Creating the emotional sense of accomplishment can alter how your process the world and this can present the pathway to everything that you want.

2) Do 4 hours of intense exercise per week. 4 hours is a critical amount, and having your heart rate elevated is key. This minimum amount of exercise will help improve body composition, improve blood circulation and get your body functioning more efficiently. It’s going to reduce stress, improve sleep and help you look and feel great. Good health is often considered one of the top 3 things needed to have a happy life, so dedicating 4 hours out of 168 that are available per week to move you towards a better life is a small time investment.

3) Eat food that you can identify as food and that will rot in a few days without refrigeration. Food is the only thing that actually becomes you. Every cell that you are is made-up of participles that were outside your body until you ate them. Higher quality food is going to supply more and higher quality nutrient so buy the best quality food that you can afford. The food you eat should be identifiable – that is, you should have some idea from where on the farm it came– and when left at room temperature, it should spoil fairly quickly. Things that have an indefinite shelf life or come from a factory tend to be much lower or void of nutrition. Eat as little of these food-like products as you can in favor of whole foods.

4) Be grateful. It is impossible to be unhappy when you are grateful. You may feel many emotions, but sadness will not be one of them. Being grateful creates a sense of connectedness to others that can eliminate feelings of isolation. It will also alter the way you view the entire world as gratitude tends to have a cascading effect on perception – if you process things from a place of gratitude, you will see more and more things in the world to be grateful for, which will make you happier.

5) Surround yourself with people who are living a great life and get their help in making your life better. This is a matter of doing what they do to achieve what they have achieved. Copy those who have blazed the trail and get the same outcome. Ask them for help and follow their advice. They’ll save you a lot of trial and error and boost the chances of you achieving your goal.

6) Remain open or childlike! Very often life is not going to go the way you want or plan. Embrace this fact and realize that the things that are unfamiliar actually create more joy in the long run than the things that are predictable. Accept that every lesson grew out of something you didn’t know before. Being wrong is the best way we have of eventually being right, but only when we accept and remain open to making mistakes. If you want to make an extraordinary life for yourself, you need to learn some extraordinary things thought the making of some extraordinary mistakes. Be childlike with your mistakes, be open to making them, learn from them and discard any sense of shame they created.

That’s it, 6 simple things you can start doing that will being to transform your experience of life into the realm of greatness. Begin to do one a week until all 6 of them are a habit and be curious and pleased to see the impact they have on your life!

How Your “Do Not Want” List Becomes What You Find And Get

I was talking to a friend the other day and during the follow-up about our last conversation I asked them about their goals list. When it came to finding a suitable romantic partners they said “I made a list of what I’m not looking for.” There was a moment of silence as I let their words float over me and then said “what’s that doing for you?”

“Well, nothing much. I notice that there are a lot of people who aren’t what I’m looking for, and some of them are actually kind of cute and interesting.”

“Yellow cars” was my reply.

“What about them?”

“Look for yellow cars and after a few days you’ll get really good at finding them.”

The “do not want” list is something that I have heard before and while it is how I used to operate globally, I’ve noticed that in some areas of my life it has either returned. While it is reassuring to realize that it is as ineffective for others as it is for me, I need to be honest and say that I’m wasting a bit of potential every time I operate this way.

Here’s why:

At first pass it seems to make sense given that it is a good idea to have standards – drug addicts, abusers, narcissists or the dishonest should not make an intelligent persons short list of potential romantic partners. Issues arise when someone looks for these things first as a way to eliminate people because you find exactly what you are looking for. There is no shortage of people and that means there is no shortage of defective people. It is almost a certainty that every day of your life you can find a few people that are matches on your “do not want” list. Another certainty is that by spending time identifying the “do not wants”, you will have little time to spend on the “do want” list.

How to avoid this pitfall:

Know what you want. This may not make sense if you haven’t had a lot of experiences, so have a lot of experiences as soon as you can. If you have had a lot of experiences, focus on the things that you liked about the experiences, the things that you wanted to repeat over and over and the things that brought you joy / elation / fulfillment. Make a list of these things and spend some time mediating / thinking about the items on the list with the intention of uncovering a pattern – there is a very good chance that the things you like in your job, your hobbies and volunteer work will be the same things that you are seeking from your romantic life. If you are in a successful relationship, the things you like about it are likely going to be the same things that you should be looking for in your professional life.

All is not wasted if you have a “do not want” list. Simply change the items into the “do wants”. For example, “I don’t want someone who is self centered or narcissistic” becomes “I want someone who has a high level of self awareness”, “I don’t want someone who is dishonest” becomes “I want someone who strives to communicate accurately and effectively”, “I don’t want a career that has me working long hours away from my family” becomes “I want a career that gives me work / life balance”, etc…. Then get out there and have lots more experiences aware of what it is you are looking for.

We attract and find what we are looking for. It doesn’t matter what it is, how it impacts our life or the consequences having it, it will find its way into our existence. For this reason, we need to be very careful with our use of language and seek out the positive things in the world.

Interesting Stuff About Conflicts of Interest

When there is a conflict of interest, people can easily abandon their ethics and serve their own needs. Even good people. Not because they are complete jerks (or jerks at all), but because they don’t actually see what they are doing.

In this clip, Dan Ariely tells a story about why you shouldn’t trust your dentist. The dentist has something to gain from selling you dental services / products but you don’t necessarily NEED the service / product. Gray / silver colored fillings are functionally the same as white once yet the white ones tend to be sold first.

The entire conversation is great, shocking actually. But it gave me some insight into why I despised selling supplements when I was a trainer – because someone was gaining from them being sold and it usually wasn’t the person who buys them.

So what?

By knowing that your service providers are capable of shifting their ethics when they stand to gain from a particular outcome that they can influence, you will maintain a level of objectivity that will empower you to make the decisions that are right for you. Keeping this in mind is always the correct thing to do, particularly when faced with the fact that they may not even be aware of their subjective bias.

Their lack of knowledge is actually what obligates you to maintain your objectivity as it serves your best interests and helps them to maintain their ethical identity.

Why is it so tough to call someone on their bias?

As Dan states in the video “once you meet someone face to face it is incredibly unpleasant to mistrust them.” It can seem like (and be received as) a slap in the face to them and it serves as a reminder that we can’t actually trust ourselves when it comes to vetting bull-crap. The second point is true for everyone so the first point is irrelevant – so what if they or you feel mistrusted, the science supports the fact that people CANNOT be trusted when there is a conflict of interest. When someone stands to gain something, there is a very good chance that they will lie without realizing that they are lying.

Your call to action

Stand-up for your best interests. Ask them for the proof when they make a claim. If something is described as better, find out if this is based on evidence or is just an opinion. Educate yourself. Perform your due-diligence before you buy. Learn to accept that bad feeling you get when you say “no” to someone by realizing that you can buy later. Notice the way you feel when being engaged by others and become aware that being manipulated feels like something; if that feeling is triggered, understand what is happening and move on.

Distance from the consequences

I don’t know were my food comes from other than the store, and before that a factory or a farm. Some of the food I eat is pretty good quality, some of it is nominal and the rest of it is “food like products”. From a geographic point of view, there is a lot of distance from the consequence from how my food comes to become food.

I don’t know the impact of how my words land on others. Occasionally they’ll do what I want them to do, but a lot of the time the impact is unknown and seemingly random. From an emotional point of view, there is a lot of distance from the consequences how my words effect others.

I don’t know the impact of my destructive actions on my future. Smoking causes cancer, too much stress will diminish immune functioning and too much sugar can cause obesity, but there is a long time between the action and the disease, so the things do not seem related. From a temporal point of view, there is a lot of distance from the consequence.

Living in the here and now, it can be a real challenge to predict or see the outcome of action. Logically there is a story to tell – that this will lead to that – but emotionally that story doesn’t feel like anything – cancer, disease and obesity are words more than experiences; in-spite of my experiences with cancer and obesity, they don’t have an experiential meaning to me as I have been an observer of their ravages. There is a great distance from the consequence.

This is the biggest road block faced by most trainers and coaches and one has creativity and laser focused communication as the only real workarounds. It is also the reason why an alarmingly small number of people ever make the life transformations that they are capable of; which is sad because many people suffer needlessly for most of their adult lives with issues that would be addressed with simple behavioral changes.

It’s also why pointing out the consequences of reduced blood circulation (skin and hair problems for women, erectile issues for men, and cognitive impairments for both) often goes a lot further than discussing cancer, diabetes, or heart disease risks. Most people have some notion of what difficulties in these areas are like, or can at least consider the impact of blood circulation issues.

Training Is Action, All Types Of Action

Often forgotten or repressed is the fact that body composition changes are the result of 1000’s of small actions over a sustained period of time. Oftentimes, people simply regard their time in the gym or exercising as their training and neglect the rest of the important steps.

Food consumption is training – eating 5-8 good quality meals per day can be a challenge, more of a challenge than an intense 45 minute workout. But eating frequently is critical in creating new eating behaviors, regulating blood sugar and optimizing metabolic functioning.

Food preparation is training – making 5-8 good quality meals per day can be a challenge. But since food supplies the building blocks needed to remake our bodies, preparing meals of a high quality is essentially MORE important than the workouts we do to break down the tissues that serve as the catalyst for adaptation.

Getting sufficient rest and recovery is training – being asleep before 11 pm has been shown to be extremely important in regulating anabolic hormones and the hours of rest between 11pm and 3am are some of the most critical times for recovery as they represent the best opportunity for falling into the deepest stages of sleep. The body does not recover when it is moving, so lying down and being still (as we are when we are asleep) is important for making the most out of the time spent training.

Reducing stress is training. Cortisol is released in response to stress. It is a catabolic hormone breaking down protein to create sugar to fuel fight or flight responses. ANY stress can cause the release of cortisol so it is important to reduce the stress response and limit the amount of stress that we experience.

Looking after your tissues is training. Rigorous exercise causes muscles to tighten-up, which can place increased stress / pulling on joints that can lead to pain. Maintaining flexibility requires dedicated time to stretch / foam roll.

The notion that 4 hours of physical exercise is sufficient to create a body transformation is not accurate. It is a great start, and they create a critical foundation from which to base all other self improvement actions, but they represent about 50% of the effort that is required.

“Playing Full Out” – 10 Signs That You Are

A few weeks ago I attended a Toronto Power Group Meeting. It was both the first session of the season and my first session. The host got the things started by setting some ground rules for success and to help us get the most out of the time there; and our time on the planet.

One of the things he recommended is “play full out” which is effectively giving 100% of our passion, intensity and energy to the task at hand. It’s what athletes and most highly successful people do. It doesn’t ensure success, but it goes a long way at guaranteeing you don’t regret or ask the question “what if?” later in life.

What does playing full out looking?

Barbara Stanny has posted 10 Signs You’re Playing Full Out and it captures a lot of the behaviors, and how it looks and feels.

  1. I know what I want and am committed to getting it. (And if I don’t know, I devote time and energy to figuring it out).
  2. I am so focused on my vision that I don’t get distracted or scattered  by irrelevant, draining, or conflicting tasks.
  3. I am willing to experience whatever it takes—defeat, embarrassment, even humiliation—to achieve what I want.
  4. I am constantly doing things I’ve never done before and/or don’t want to do.
  5. I make at least one unreasonable (i.e. scary) request a week.
  6. I don’t say ‘yes’ when I really want to say ‘no,’ even if it means rocking the boat or upsetting another.
  7. I regularly seek out support, and refuse to spend time with or discuss my dream with naysayers (even if they’re related)
  8. Every time I’m afraid to do something, I force myself to do it anyway. (And I  catch myself when I try to justify not doing it.)
  9. I am rigorous about the thoughts that I think and the words that I use, making sure they’re positive, supportive, and appreciative (of myself and others).
  10. I take time to relax and pamper myself so I don’t burn out.

It’s an interesting list and definitely worth considering. In most cases, the only thing that is stopping us is our own mind and the lack of possibility it allows us to see.

Keystone Habits – Becoming A Dieter Through Exercise

Over the years an unusual pattern / occurrence has come to light with most of my body transformation clients – if they exercise more than 3 times per week their diets improve, they stop smoking and they reduce their consumption of alcohol.

The inverse is not true though, those who fix their diets, quit smoking or reduce drinking do not spontaneously start exercising.

This is significant because when it comes to improving the quality of life, correcting nutritional habits is a bigger player than exercise. If you want to reduce body fat, which is associated with reduced risks of most illnesses, diet is a lot more effective at achieving this than exercise. Many forms of cancer are associated with poor dietary choices and the debilitating effects of diabetes can be severely reduced by cessation of sugar in all forms.

However, bang for your buck, working out 4 times a week will contribute more to improving your health and health related behaviors than just trying to fix you diet IN SPITE of the fact that fixing your diet is actually what will help you the most.

Exercise is special because it is a keystone habit – a keystone is the center stone in an arch, the final stone to be placed and the one that holds the entire arch together. Exercise serves this function when it comes to living a healthy and the highest quality life possible. It teaches the body / brain that actions matter and this creates the momentum needed to start caring about the consequences of other actions. Those who exercise more, eat better, drink more water, sleep better, smoke and drink less, have better sex, make better decisions and save more money.

Quitting smoking, improving ones diet, or reducing alcohol consumption, while all critical in improving the quality of life, do not play a keystone function with behavior. As such, they rely on will power to maintain and tend not be to self-sustainable over the first few weeks or months. Relapse tends of occur when routines are disrupted or when one is challenged outside of their normal day-to-day levels. Further more, cessation of anything that replies on willpower alone to achieve tends to be associated with higher levels of stress which themselves increase the risk of failure.

Improving your life without starting an exercise routine is possible, but it is much more challenging and relies on the creation of new habits that are rewarding in the long run but represent short term sacrifices. This is unlike exercise because exercise is rewarding almost immediately, and in the long term benefits are undeniable.

To this end, it really doesn’t make a lot of sense for someone who is over the age of 35 to try and address their weight concerns through diet alone. In fact, the best thing they can do to improve their diet is to exercise more. Frankly, the best thing they can do to improve any aspect of their life is to exercise more.

It doesn’t take much. 4 hours of moderately intense exercise each week will quickly begin to reverse some of the signs of aging on the body and begin to motivate your brain to correct other habits that are not working for you.

Get out there and start moving more! Join a gym, start play a sport you love, take-up cycling. It doesn’t matter what you do so long as you get moving. Do it for a few weeks and be pleased to notice the positive changes in other areas of your life.