Soon Certain and Salient – The Science and My Experience

This is athletes and is not most people. The results are a function of “athlete” as a verb as opposed to a noun. Most people will act like an athlete from time to time insofar as they can be very driven and work very hard, but an athlete is single-minded about what it is they want to achieve and they are single-minded about the willingness to do whatever it takes to move forward and achieve the goal.

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A few weeks ago I was talking to an old co-worker friend from the fitness industry. We were just spit balling back and forth about who the best clients were to get. When I asked him what exactly he meant by the best clients, is it the ones who get the best results, is it the ones who are the most fun to train, is it the ones that are the easiest to train? He replied with “that is a good question, what I’m really asking is your opinion and your experience with clients who get the best results for who they are, and you know right off the get-go that it is going to be an easy experience for both people.” So for the trainer is it going to be fairly straight forward and for them as the client it is going to be very simple. It is going to be hard work, without a doubt, but it is going to be simple hard work. They are going to do what they have to do, they are going to do it as well as they can, and they are going to do it exactly as it is outlined.

Fundamentally, this is the type of question that I love answering because it draws on a lot of my experience in terms of the work that I have done in a variety of different fields along with my academic background in psychology. At its core is the question “why do people do the things that they do?”

Now we know an awful lot about how the brain works, both in terms of the physiological things that occur, and in the fifty thousand foot view of what goes on in the brain and the way people think – so the neuroscience along with the psychology. There is a boundary separating these two things. The neuroscience deals with things on a cellular level while the psychology deals with more of a narrative understanding of what goes on. Regardless of the differences, a lot is known about both things.

There is not much difference between human beings. Genetically, we are all very close to identical and the physiological processes that run under the surface are exactly the same for all people. We are coded in more or less the same way, by and large we all have the same parts of the brain and they all work in exactly the same way. And it is that way with most mammals and most living things. Neurons work the same way, more or less. So given that there is so much similarity in terms of the neuroscience, on the cellular level, why are there different outcomes for different people? Why is it not the same outcome?

That is where the psychology comes in to play. And that is ultimately the question my friend was asking. Who are your favorite clients to work with from the point of view of the ones you know are going to do well, will follow instructions and just be really easy to work with? Well, as the conversation evolved he asked if my experience backed up what I know about psychology. And that is a fair question because my experience NEEDS to back it up because if experience does not back-up what you know about a science, your experience is wrong or the science is wrong, or you have done something new that was not previously known. But one would imagine, that with enough time, over the twenty years I have been working in the industry, I would have found my way into the mean in that the average experience that I have had with people would reflect the average person.

This is more or less been what I have discovered. Some people do not get very good results. They do not get any worse, but they never move toward their goal. The stated goal of losing a few pounds or gaining some muscle, or whatever the goal is that the person decides they want, I know that there will be some people who never move towards it. They will never get worse, which is a version of improvement given that decay is the natural processes as we get older, so that is good. But when they are not moving towards their goal and improving, they are not really getting what they want.

Then there are other clients who get average results, and finally there are the outliers on the other end, those who achieve their potential in the scientifically determined length of time – there is an optimal level of progress and there are a few clients who will hit this. This is ultimately what he was getting at. When someone sits down in front of me for the consultation, and they say “hey, I need your help in doing this thing,” who do I know is going to get the results, and what makes me sure they will? And what then does the science say about these people?

Well, I will work backwards. What does the science say about people who get results? Basically it says that the people who do this collection of things for this time duration at this frequency and for this period of time (in terms of weeks or months or years), will cause physiological changes to their body that are the reflection of the physiological stimulation and the nutritional intervention. So those who get results do those specific things as prescribed and they get these specific and predictable results. For example, they do this program four times a week, every week for three months while adjusting their diet in these ways and they will gain 5 pounds of muscle and drop 5 percent in body fat.

So if that is on the surface, do X, Y and Z in this way and get this outcome, why is it that some people choose to do X, Y and Z exactly as prescribed while others will not do it as prescribed? What is the difference between these people, and the individuals who find themselves in other groups?

The science and a lot of the research that they have done with people reveals that it all comes down to consequences. On first pass, this may seem silly because consequences are punishments and punishments are about reducing particular behavioral patterns or actions. Compare this to reward, which is about increasing behavioral patterns or actions that someone takes, which is ultimately what personal trainers are asking their clients to do.

Think back onto Pavlov’s dogs that salivated at the sound of the bell when they had learned that food was given right after the bell rang. They would start to get excited when they heard the bell because they learned that the bell meant food. The outcome to this was that the dogs began to display a behavior that was not related to the bell simply because they had been reward in the past and had conditioned the reward to the sound of the bell.

On the other side of it is punishment. Whenever a physical or psychological punishment is administered to a creature in close proximity to a particular action or behavior, the frequency of them displaying that action or behavior will be reduced and overtime it will be eliminated. Now the issue with punishment is that it is not very specific meaning that whatever action the nervous system of the animal determined was what led to the punishment will get suppressed. It is not a clearly defined or a concise understanding of what exactly caused the punishment. This means that any of the behaviors that occurred in close temporal proximity to the punishment might end-up being suppressed. This leads to a situation that allows for very little testing or refinement of the connection – since the punishment MIGHT have been caused by any one of these five actions, repeating one of them MIGHT lead to a punishment so it is best to not repeat ANY of them.

This is the opposite of rewards. Rewards tend to be much more specific because there is no risk associated with testing any of the potential actions. The animal is hell-bent on finding out what exactly it has to do in order to get more rewards and it very quickly tracks down that it was this particular behavior.

What does this have to do with success with personal training clients? It has to do with the fact that consequences have a much bigger role in determining who is going to be successful. Human beings are not like any other creature. We get to enjoy things that do not happen, we get to enjoy the benefits and cost of things that are just a matter of perception, so things that we imagine and that never occur. And while any other animal will learn to avoid doing the things that cause them harm or ill-health, a human being will continue to do them.

To this later point, alcohol is good. You should never ever feed alcohol to a dog, it is not fair as it cannot consent to drink. You should not do it. But whenever they have done it they have found that the dog will drink, it will suffer hangover like effects and it will never go near alcohol again. In fact, the dog will become conditioned to avoid alcohol through single-trial learning. When it comes to alcohol, it does not like it, it hates the feeling and it knows alcohol will cause the feeling so it does not touch it ever again. Human beings will continue to do things that cause pain or that simply do not work for them over and over again in spite of the fact that they causes problems. Consequences do not mean the same thing to human beings as they do to dogs. There is a one-to-one cause and effect relationship with the dog while the consequences with human beings are impacted by a perceptual relationship. This means that the cause and effect relationship manufactured by the human could connect absolutely anything to anything else.

The science basically says that someone who shows up for consultation saying “I want to get better at X,” knowing exactly what they are seeking, is highly motivated, and they know exactly why they are doing it, will tend to get the results they are looking for. A perfect example of this class is an athlete. Athletes know exactly why they are doing what it is they are doing and are moving towards a goal. I am not going to say that they are pleasure-seeking but they are looking for something that they view as positive. They want to achieve the highest level of performance so they can increase the likelihood that they are going to win during competition. This is one group who, if they show-up in front of you, assuming you know the science to support optimal human performance and write and administer the program effectively, WILL hit their potential because they will follow the program almost perfectly. These people are seeking something. There is a huge reward in front of them and that is what they are moving towards.

This is athletes and is not most people. The results are a function of “athlete” as a verb as opposed to a noun. Most people will act like an athlete from time to time insofar as they can be very driven and work very hard, but an athlete is single-minded about what it is they want to achieve and they are single-minded about the willingness to do whatever it takes to move forward and achieve the goal.

Most people, in general, are moving away from something they do not like, which is not pleasure seeking. Human beings operate from a pain avoidance point of view when it comes to altering their physical health. The reason is fairly straight-forward, it is hard work. The easiest thing to do is nothing. Change is not doing nothing. Doing nothing is doing what we have automated, living the life that we are currently living. If we want to change our life this means we have to do something other than what is automatic, which is going to require effort. Since we know it requires effort there is a disincentive to doing it if for no other reason than this extra effort (but there are other reason too). Human beings do not really operate from the point of view of spending effort unless we absolutely need to. So we will spend energy to get pleasure, the athlete, and when it comes to everyone else who connects with a personal trainer, they will spend energy to avoid pain. This is the reason why we know someone is going to get great results when they show-up to a personal trainer with a clear idea of what it is they do not want. They are the ones who are more than likely going to do everything that is asked of them. The motivational currency of the non-athlete are consequences.

The science basically says when dealing with consequences, the consequences need to be soon, they need to be certain, and they need to be salient. If a consequence has, in the mind of the potential client, these three properties, they are going to agree to training and they are going to commit to doing what you asked them to do as hard as they can. They are going to do what it is needed to move themselves away from the consequences that are soon, certain, and salient. If the consequences do not possess one of those properties, there is a much lower likelihood of compliance to the requests that will be outlined in the program.

The “soon” is fairly straightforward. The consequence needs to be something that occurs in the very near future and the closer to now it will occur the better. Far away things may as well not be things at all because the brain really does not process things that are distant. Things that actually exist in the here and now or have greater immediacy are going to get a lot more effort and action taken towards their resolution or prevention.

Certain means the outcome needs to be inevitable and there is no possibility of an alternative outcome that is more pleasant or favorable. The reason for this is a cognitive bias called “the optimistic bias” which has a person believed the best case scenario in a situation when there are two alternatives presented. They are going to believe the best case and assume that is the one that will happen and move forward accordingly. This will happen even if there is only a 1% chance of the best case and a 99% chance of the negative or the worst case scenario. The optimistic bias has a person choose a 1% chance over a 99% chance. This defies logic but so do human beings. We are not logical operators so it is not surprising that we would do something that does not make a lot of logical sense. An inevitable consequence or one that is viewed as near certainty is going to be given a lot more weight than something that is viewed merely as a possibility.

Salience has to do with ones ability to visualize, imagine, consider, and bring to mind what the consequences are and what the ramifications will be upon their life. The more clearly a person is able to perceive the future outcome, the greater the level of salience and the more clearly their perception will be of the negative. This is very important because things that are hard to imagine may as well not be imagined at all. Something that is very clear to see, is very simple to imagine and a brain will work with it to a much larger degree. The specific reasons for this have to do with the amount of stimulation that an idea generates. Imagine you are looking at something very clearly and you are noticing everything about it. This is a huge stream of sensory data coming into your brain that it has to process and make sense of. The same thing is true with something that is very salient. You are able to imagine it clearly, able to feel the way it feels, see, hear and get a real sense of the negative outcome and this will generate a massive amount of data that your brain is going to process and operate on.

The more we pay attention to something and the higher our concentration is on what we are thinking about, the greater the cognitive ripple triggered by this stimulation. This larger amount of data will have a much larger impact on our mental processes. Anything that is salient, is clear, is easy to visualize, is easy to understand and experience will have a bigger wave of impact on the brain meaning that more of the will process it.

The end result? A much better understanding of the negative outcome will lead to much better change. This is what the science says, as long as the consequences are soon, certain, and salient, a human being is not going to have any difficulty dealing with them. They are going to treat it as important, pay their respect and take the action that is required in order to address it. However, if a consequence does not have all three of these, or is missing two of them, a person is not going to do anything about it.

Now how does this line-up with my experience? Well, it aligns perfectly.

There are three prospective clients that will show up in front of me and I will know with certainty that they will buy training and get great value out of it by following the instructions and working hard to get the results they are seeking. In each of these three cases, they match on all three of soon, certain and salient. These three types of prospects are illness, recently dumped or single, and mothers of multiple children.

This begs the question, how are the variables of soon, certain and salient present in each of these groups?

Well if you think about illness, which is illness in the person themselves or the illness of someone they care about, it is very salient. If it is in themselves, the doctor has told them that they need to do something about their blood sugar, the extra body fat, or their blood pressure, or else they are going to die or they are going to get sick. Having the experience of the doctor telling them that sickness is inevitable unless they change course makes it very clear to them. The certainty is a doctor saying to them their blood pressure is 180 over 147, which is elevated. So unless there is a good reason for it and there tends not to be a very good reason for that, it is unhealthy and is causing a lot of unnecessary stress on the blood vessels and particularly on the brain. A blood pressure like that for a sustained period of time is setting oneself up for a stroke, a brain aneurysm or any number of really devastating neurological consequences. By ignoring high blood pressure, it is only a matter of time before an artery in your brain is going to explode, and when it bleeds out, it will cause severe intellectual mental impairments and it could actually kill you.

While we do not have any real concept of what it means to be not alive, because we have always been alive, we have an idea and a very negative sense of what it is like to be dead, and of what it would be like to be intellectually impaired because of a neurological trauma that was avoidable. A cancer diagnosis or a heart attack in a loved one has the same sort of quality. We see someone we care about who is sick, which makes for a very salient experience.

The certainty and soon is the doctor telling us that we are sick or destined for a health crisis when they show us a blood test that indicates an LDL level that is very high. These are understood by proxy if we see someone who is sick because this is a clear indication that it is really happening RIGHT NOW. That is a benefit, if you will, of illness. People see the consequences and they match all three of soon, certain and salient.

The second group, the recently dumped, is a weird one but it is absolutely true when someone becomes single, if they have not made the decision themselves, once they get past the grief associated with losing the relationship, they move towards a three to nine month period of getting revenge on their partner. They do not actually want their partner to suffer physically but that they want to send them a message that they screwed up dumping them, so they get after a physical transformation and taking care of the things that they put on the back burner. They take care of their health and they take care of their fitness. Maybe it is weight loss, maybe it is gaining strength to become more mobile and active in order to do things they have never done. Whatever it is, they do these so that at some point in the future they will be able to say to their ex-partner “yeah I’m doing all that stuff now, I look great, and it wasn’t me it was you. You broke up with me and now my life is so much better. You were the liability.”

Sure, this is a story that people are telling themselves, but since there is nothing at all wrong with getting into better shape, I am not going to tell them that they might want to go to therapy to understand the role they played in the demise of their relationship. With people, and particularly people who come looking for personal training advice, they do the work, they spend the time needed to figure themselves out and then come to realize that “yeah I played a role in the breakup. I was not being the best person I could be, I was not playing all out in the relationship and while I do not appreciate the fact that the relationship ended I do sort of understand that it was not working for me therefore could not possibly have been working for them.” But when it comes to those realizations, even when they arrive after spending six to nine months improving their health and fitness, it is all good. They will have a better life, they will be happier, they will be moving themselves forward and while they may not necessarily live longer they are going to enjoy a better health span and that is a big deal. While maybe it was not an absolutely necessary journey, they have done themselves and their future selves a huge favor by improving their health.

So how do the soon, certain, and salient apply here? Soon, the consequences are actually occurring. The person has been made single and is already living in the consequences. Certain, well it is the same thing, the thing has already happened and they are already living it. Whatever that is, they are right in the thick of it because they got dumped. Salient, the same thing as well, there is nothing as clear as living an experience.

The third group is mothers of multiple children. This one is tricky and it took me a little while to figure out but really when it comes down to it, the soon, certain and salient are all exactly the same thing as the recently dumped group.

I do not know what it is like to be a mother but a lot of the mothers I have worked with have all explained it in the same way: you would do anything to improve the quality and life experience of your child knowing that your child has no awareness of what you are doing, have done or will do. They do not say that it is thankless, but they do say the child is completely oblivious to the fact that you have done anything. All they know is that they had a need and Mommy took care of it and that is the end of it.

With one child the mother is going to be able to get back to life much sooner than when she has two or three children. Children are spaced out over particular length of time and while there is no set length of time required for the mind of a mother to determine that it is time to get back to doing stuff for themselves, they are going to hit that point later if they have more children. A person could spend ten years with their primary role being mother, looking after all of the needs of the child, making sure the child is not hungry or suffering in any way that they are able to help the child avoid. Ten years to live for something other than yourself is a very long time.

The soon, certain and salient in this case? The funny thing about this group is that these things are in the past. The person has lived the soon, it is not that the consequences are going to happen in the future, it is that they are happening and they have been happening. The certain, they have lived it. Salient, the same thing, they have lived it; it is very similar to the experience of being dumped in that it is not a thing that needs to be imagined about what might happen in the future, it is a thing that has been happening for a period of time.

If a mother shows up saying “you know, I’ve decided that I want to get some training,” a switch has flipped in their head because they have come to make the decision that they are going to be investing in themselves for the first time in a very long time. There is an opportunity cost associated with doing it – the opportunity cost is taking time away from their children, which has been their focus for the last decade – so they do not end up sitting across from a trainer, asking for help with improving their fitness unless they have actually done the benefit cost analysis. They are willing to say the opportunity cost of continuing to ignore their future is too great so therefore they have to do something. They know what they are sacrificing – time with their children – so they are going to make the most of their time by following every instruction and by trying as hard as they can while they are working out before returning to their role of mother, which remains the main focus of their life.

The beauty about this group in particular is that they are there for themselves in the moment, and in the future. The recently dumped the people are excited but they are there for themselves in the future – the moment they get to show off to their ex. The same applies to their illness group, they are there to avoid something awful in the future. The mother group is there to create something good in the present moment and something in the future or to avoid something awful in the future. They are going to be fully present in the present moment because they need to spend time investing in themselves.

This is how my experience has lined up with the science. When the consequences have the property of being soon, certain and salient, action is much more likely than when they are far away, hard to imagine or unlikely. When the consequence have either occurred in the past, are currently occurring or are about to happen in the near future, there is a very good chance that a person will get great results because they are going to follow the advice that is given. Since professional personal trainers only dispense advice that is scientifically valid, it is very easy to come up with the prescription that helps these people. Do this set of things in this way for this length of time with this frequency over time and you will get these results, and that is really all there is to it. Anyone else who shows up and is sitting in front of you but is there having no relationship to the consequences – there is no soon, certain and salient in what they are talking about – the chances of success are much lower.

Now there are other people who will get great results. Maybe they love working out or maybe they are really powerful at working hard to achieve a future benefit or to avoid a future cost that is not very well defined in their mind. I have worked with people who are not athletes and do not belong to one of the three groups outlined above and who do not have a clear and vibrant picture of the consequences, but who get after it like there is nothing else in their life that is more important. However, the possibility of someone doing the necessary work without the soon, certain and salient being checked off is dramatically lower.

After thinking about it for a few moments, my friends experience did support what I was saying.

Now the objective of this post is to explain that whenever you are doing a consultation or just having a conversation with someone, I do not think it is wise for you to try and point out the consequences of their actions and the inevitable future that they are moving into order to trigger an emotional response and to then capture them in a training program. There is nothing wrong with telling them the truth and helping them see that the destination if they continue down the path they are on is not a very great place to be. That is a fine thing to do, just so long as you do not immediately capture them in a training program for that reason. They will need to spend some time with the information that has been revealed in order for their brain to fully reorganize and understand that “oh my God I’m actually cruising towards bad health and an eventual health crisis, and I should probably do something to make sure that it doesn’t go down like that.”

Triggering these thoughts and emotions in someone and then selling to them without giving them the time to process and integrate that information, can only lead to someone dealing with the consequences of a rash decision as opposed to anything else. Whenever you are having a conversation with someone who is sitting in front of you, unless they are spontaneously hitting on the three soon, certain, and salient in terms of the consequences, or they are an athlete, do not try to trigger the negatives about what could happen if they stay the course and do not try to trigger the positives of what could happen if they change course. Simply talk with them and try to figure out why they decided to have a conversation with you. If they are able to come up with the reasons why they are there and you are not able to convince yourself that these reason are not really something that they spent much time thinking about or that they are not ready to deal with, they are probably ready for training so sell it to them. But if they do not have a clear reason why they are there or a soon, certain or salient in terms of the consequences of them continuing to live the life the way they are living it, it behooves you to just have a conversation to help them figure out the reason why they are there. If they do not know and you still sell to them that then becomes the thing that was done to them.

You will have manipulated them into buying something they did not want.

But on the other hand if you help them unpack exactly why they are there and really help them dig in on their motivations and all of the other things, and they are crystal clear that “yes this is what I want and I want it for these reasons,” sell them the training because they are not going to be upset at you for it. They are going to thank you for it because you will be aligned with them as a partner and help them move towards their goals.

When someone comes and sits down in front of me and says “hey I am looking for your help,” and I am able to track in and find out the soon, certain and salient in terms of the consequences they are hoping to avoid, or if the person is an athlete, or if they are a member of one of the three groups – someone who has seen or is experiencing illness, someone who is recently single, or a mother who has decided to focus some of her time on herself for a change – it is a sure thing. It is not going to be easy money, it is going to be work but they are going to more than willing to put the effort in and the partnership is going to be a win-win.

The “New” Canada’s Food Guide – A Brief History and What Is Missing – Part Two

It is not the sweetness that we find rewarding, it is the reward chemicals that we find rewarding and we learn that sweet things cause a release of these reward chemicals. The same applies to things that are high in fat and sugar. While these foods serve a survival function given that they promote body fat storage, this is not the reason why we eat them. We seek them out because they cause a massive release of reward chemicals and not because we enjoy them directly. These reward chemicals serve as the motivation to take specific actions, actions that played a role in ensuring that our ancestors survived while those who did not seek out high calorie food did not.

This is the second part of this post. If you have not already read or listened to The “New” Canada’s Food Guide – A Brief History and What Is Missing Part One, check it out as this one is simply a continuation of that post

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The next version of the guide was released in 2007 as Eating Well with Canada’s Food Guide and it did contain most of the information that wasn’t included in the 1992 guide. The number of servings of grain products was reduced in general. However, the guide serving recommendations are broken-out by age and gender. This change gave the guide more prescriptive power that reflected the specific and changing needs of each gender throughout the course of their life. In general, males burn more calories and, as a result, their need for vitamins and minerals is slightly higher.

This guide is also more detailed, 6 pages vs. 2, and includes a lot more online features. It is clear that it is an attempt to create something that is more useful and that will appeal to a much wider audience. It includes more information about exercise, both in terms of frequency and intensity, along with the potential outcomes you might experience as a result of engaging in an exercise program.

The 2007 guide represents the first real steps towards “mindful” eating. For example, it invites people to limit certain foods that are high calories, sugar and fat, along with limiting trans-fat. It asks people to “read the label” in order to become aware of what is in the food they are selecting to eat. While these are important steps in the right direction, they are too late for a lot of people given the poor advice that was provided 15 years before. People had free reign for a decade and a half to eat too many servings of grain products and would now find themselves in a less than ideal place as a result of it. Worse still would be the lasting consequence on any of the children who had been subjected to this bad advice – primarily higher levels of body fat and the deeply stored incorrect wisdom inside their brain caused by 15 years of conditioning.

Here’s the problem, while human beings are genetically coded to find certain things rewarding, they are born without any knowledge of just what there things are. Over time they learn how to trigger the reward chemicals and with enough practice and exposure they will develop the exact behaviors needed to release these chemicals. However, if they never get exposed to the things that cause the release or if their exposure is limited or conditional, they will never cultivate the level of refinement that is required to develop compulsive overeating.

It important to step out of this conversation at this point to consider why human beings find sweet things to be enjoyable and why they find fat and sweet combination irresistible. At first thought the answer seems obvious, we like sweet things because they are sweet and we seek out and over-eat food that are high in fat and sugar because they are high in calories. But these explanation are not accurate, or at least, they are incomplete. We enjoy sweet things because our brains release reward chemicals in response to consuming them and with enough practice, we learn that we will release reward chemicals in response to eating sweet things. It is not the sweetness that we find rewarding, it is the reward chemicals that we find rewarding and we learn that sweet things cause a release of these reward chemicals. The same applies to things that are high in fat and sugar. While these foods serve a survival function given that they promote body fat storage, this is not the reason why we eat them. We seek them out because they cause a massive release of reward chemicals and not because we enjoy them directly. These reward chemicals serve as the motivation to take specific actions, actions that played a role in ensuring that our ancestors survived while those who did not seek out high calorie food did not.

Let this sink in.

Now consider the fact that drugs like cocaine and amphetamine do exactly the same thing. When we consume these types of drugs, our brain responds by releasing the same reward chemicals that are released when we eat sugar and sugar and fat combinations.

Now we move on to the 2019 version of Canada’s Food Guide. This version is very different from any that came before it in that it makes no recommendation about number of servings. It is, in fact, a guide in the purest sense of the word. While each of the previous versions doled out recommendation about how much food a person should eat, 5-10 servings of vegetables and fruit in the 1992 guide for example, this version does not. The quantities approach that was taken by all that came before has been replaced with a qualitative method that satisfies a need to educate. For this reason it is better and worse.

It continues to build upon the mindful eating approach that was launched in 2007 and encourages people to prepare more of the meals and to eat with other people more often. It invites people to consider the experience of eating in terms of pace, fullness of flavors, smells, and textures, the amount of chewing a food requires, and their motivation or reasons for eating, etc. All are important considerations in generating any level of awareness about ones eating habits and behavior. However it doesn’t ask people to reflect on how the food made them feel, which is arguably the most important aspect of mindful eating. For example, if someone eats 4 cookies after eating a large dinner and upon reflection realizes that they were not actually hungry for the cookies and did not find eating them to be satiating, it may raise the questions about the function of the cookies and the person’s relationship with ending a meal with something that is excessively sweet. Once asked, it isn’t a very big step from there to realizing that a lot of their food choices have nothing to do with immediate necessity and everything to do with preparing for a time when the food supply is cut off.

The guide is better and worse for the same reason. It’s better because it tells people how to eat and how to approach their food and worse because it doesn’t tell them what or how much of it to eat. It starts off with the assumption that people will do the right thing if they know what that is, and then sets off to tell them what the right thing is. While this is a noble goal, it is based on a mostly false assumption. Most people already have a very good idea what they should and shouldn’t be eating. Almost everyone knows that vegetables are better for you than cookies or chips will choose the cookies or chips over the vegetables. Sure, there are some outlier who do not know the difference between these types of food and will, upon receiving the education that the 2019 guide offers, stop eating cookies and chips and start eating vegetables, and there are people who choose to eat more vegetables while avoiding the other things, but most people are not outliers. Most people have a very good idea and still choose to eat too much of the things they shouldn’t and not enough of the things they should. The guide does not address the fact that knowledge is not sufficient because gaining it does not consistently or predictably change behavior.

The 2019 guide is a step in the right direction in terms of shifting the focus onto food as a thing that is more than just a source of nutrition and energy. The efforts to point out that it is also a source of many different experiences is helpful. While this has always been the case, it didn’t really need to be said before because people spend more time preparing food and eating meals with other people. 50 years ago, a nightly family meal was the norm, with the adults preparing it and the children cleaning up afterwards. Going out for a meal was rare because it was expensive and there wasn’t as much money being earned. Adequate amounts of high quality and highly nutritious food were available. These foods were effectively straight from the farm to the store and did not go through much processing. Things spoiled quickly so people bought only as much as they needed and they had relationships with the people who sold them the food. There was a community aspect to the entire food chain because things were smaller in scale with many local suppliers.

This is not how it is today. My local grocery market just finished renovating the store to add 4 different meal replacement sections to the front portion of the store and these tend to be much busier than the produce section. In fact, many of the people who “shop” at the store only make use of the first 15 meters. While this initially reduced the flow of people though the rest of the store and made the check-out lines run faster, they have reduced the number of cashiers in response to the decrease flow so it now actually takes longer to checkout. It is clear that the changes have increased profits because they charge a premium on the meal replacement items and these sections are always busy; I’m sure that it is only a matter of time before they begin to remove the other sections of the store to replace them with more profitable offerings. I’m not suggesting that the food is bad, it is very tasty. They use high quality ingredients, their recipes are good and it is well prepared. But it isn’t the same experience as selecting the raw ingredients for a meal, buying them, and bringing everything home to prepare. The premiums you are paying for are the convenience of having someone else prepare the meal and the time saving the service provides. So, depending upon the value of your time, it may actually work out to be cheaper to buy it from them as opposed to taking the old-school route.

It doesn’t matter how accurate the information is in the 2019 Canada food guide, a lack of knowledge is not the reason why people choose to eat in a way that does not serve their best long term interests. This occurs because we now have the choice to eat effectively or to eat conveniently. And this brings us to the final thing that needs to be discussed.

Remember that we have the genetic programming to seek out, consume and over-eat high calorie foods in an effort to store energy. Now consider what else we might be programmed to do / not do in order to ensure that there is energy for use later. If you spend the time to consider the possible answers to this statement you’ll notice the irony. If you didn’t take the time and spend the mental effort to generate the answers, you’ve actually modeled the answer perfectly. We are genetically programmed to avoid spending energy doing things that are unnecessary. This includes but is not limited to choosing to avoid thinking about things that do not pose an immediate survival threat and to avoid doing things that will cause us to take physical and mental action whenever possible. Human beings are not lazy per say, we are just not motivated to burn off energy for no reason. When faced with the choice of taking action or not taking action, we’ll favor doing nothing, and when we are faced with two possible actions, we’ll tend to choose the one that has us spend the least amount of energy.

The narrative truth is the human beings are programmed to seek out and consume as much energy as they can and to do this as efficiently as possible with the goal of storing energy for use at some point in the future when food is not available. When we walk into a store, possibly hungry, and are faced with the choice between buying a ready-made meal or buying the items we need to make a meal at home, our programmed desire to save energy will probably kick in and have us standing in line to pick up our meal replacement, one that is larger than what we need and contains more sugar and fat than is necessary. And we’ll go home and eat the entire thing and feel good physically because our brains will release the reward chemicals that come from a good gorge.

Knowing that eating too much will make us gain weight will not change our nature because it IS out nature. Getting fat IS the goal. The genes that would have coded for a different outcome did not get passed along because those who had them died during one of the thousands of famines that hammered our ancestors throughout history.

As well intentioned as the 2019 version of Canada’s Food Guide is, it cannot do very much to overcome millions of years of evolution and “selective breeding” that food scarcity shaped. At best, and it seems like it hit the mark, it can encourage people to take a moment before eating something to consider their motivations for doing what they are about to do. And to maybe, in a moment of mindfulness, make a different choice, one that will ensure a better future, even though it causes the brain to rebel and trigger the negatives emotions associated with the historic and antiquated concern about an impending famine. Will-power and mindful effort towards doing something other than the automatic, something that doesn’t feel as good, but is a step towards full nourishment and sustaining a dietary energy balance.

While it doesn’t come out right and say it, being healthy isn’t natural. It may be somewhat automatic for younger people but it is something that we grow out of as we age. What is natural for us is to sit as still as we can and stuff down our throats as much as we possibly can. This is where the guide comes-up short, and this is understandable because it’s a hard fact to wrap your head around. The fact that it doesn’t even try is what I find so problematic. When this is paired with the fact that guide has a history of offering up bad advice or stating things that are completely wrong, my skeptical nature comes out to play.

Here’s my thinking about the topic of advising an entire population on how to eat:

The Food Guide is doing its intended job at a better than average level. By knocking on the door of mindfulness, it is suggesting that there might be a lot more going on than just what we have been paying attention to.

Crappy food advice and education and going along with the demands of the food industry has created a situation in which only those with money and free time or those who do not have enough money get to remain lean and healthy looking – those with money and free time get to buy the best food and spend time working out / exercising to create a false famine while those who do not have enough money loss weight simply because they are enduring a real famine. The poor do not have a voice and are effectively ignored; which is a shame because the strategy of remaining hungry for longer periods of time is very effective. A voice is given to those in power, the very people who have both money and time, and they get to do the very things that are needed to actually be healthy. Then they get onto their high horse and judge the rest of us for being lazy, which we are, and for overeating, which we do. We are fat and unhealthy because we make bad choices while they are lean that healthy because they make good ones. Surely if we weren’t so flawed we’d say no to the junk food, yes to the vegetables and be moving around more.

But this is nonsense. We are not flawed. We are perfect. We over eat and under-move because our genes motivate us to over-eat and under-move. We don’t think much about it and when we do, we don’t really know why we ate two servings of dessert and didn’t feel like getting onto the rowing machine for a 2000m workout. The fact is eating shittie food is rewarding because our brain rewards it. Burning off extra calories isn’t immediately rewarding and it takes the body a while to learn how to notice that it can feel good. The only thing that we have going for us, when it comes to eating more healthfully and exercising an appropriate amount, is the vision to see it happen and the willpower to do it. But until we understand and realize that eating right and moving more are not a part of our code, we’ll continue to wonder what is wrong with us when we don’t find it easy to live better.

It isn’t easy because it is hard. It burns energy that our body does not want to burn, we have to eat things that offer no immediate release of reward chemicals while avoid eating the things DO cause the instant release of these chemicals. It is suffering and sacrifice and there is almost nothing we can do to have it be anything but that. However, it is only suffering and sacrifice, it is not pain or death. We go without a little reward and overtime we teach our brains how to reward other actions. Asparagus or broccoli will never cause the release of dopamine but the thoughts we have after eating them can cause the release. Walking 10000 steps in a day is not the most effective way to cause the body to release reward chemicals, but the knowing that you walked 10000 steps can become a reason for releasing them.

Mindfulness is the tool we can use to identify and understand the problem and it is the tool we will use to the quickly create the new processes that are needed to actually make living better something that feels better. With sufficient training and practice, you can teach your brain to reward the very things that right now feel like suffering and sacrifice and you can become a person who is chemically motivated to eat right and move more.

Your nature is only your nature when you allow it to remain so. When you pay attention to it and take an active role in shaping who you are, what you do and the choices you make, you will create a new nature. The old one will remain, it’s been shaped over millions of years, but there is plenty of room in your brain to create a second way of operating. It takes effort and practice, but fortunately not the millions of years that the unmoving overeating baselines took. Use your brain, pay attention, be curious and accept the cost and spend the energy, and you are bound to be successful.

The “New” Canada’s Food Guide – A Brief History and What Is Missing – Part One

Body fat is stored energy and the process of storing it when we eat too much and burning it when consumption drops below the levels needed for maintenance represents livings beings best efforts at dealing with periodic food scarcity.

This is the first installment of a post that talks about the new Canada’s Food Guide, its history, and some interesting facts about human beings that make us resistant to the efforts of the government to nudge our eating habits in a more positive direction.

Author Reading Blog Post

A few months ago the government released the 2019 Canada’s Food Guide. This is something that they do every decade or so with the goal of helping to further educate the public about what they should and should not be eating. It’s the government so it’s important to take their advice with a grain of salt because, in spite of their best intentions, they have a country to run so there is a big disincentive to making a very specific claim about the healthfulness or its direct opposite about any particular product given their reliance on the tax revenue generated by Canadian businesses – it would be very unwise to state that “meat is bad for people and should be avoided” even if it is true, which it isn’t, because the meat industry in Canada is huge. This means that the guide is going to be a combination of facts, some speculation based on science and marketing based on the needs of special interest groups and industry lobbyists.

When we look at the first version of the food guide – the Official Food Rules released in 1942 – we notice a single serving of potatoes per day as the recommendation as was a serving of whole grain products along with 4-6 slices of Canada Approved Bread. Milk was recommended for everyone with children drinking twice as much. It appears below:

These are the health protective foods. Be sure to eat them every day in at least these amounts (use more if you can).

MILK- Adults- 1/2 pint. Children- more than 1 pint. And some cheese as available.
FRUITS- One serving of tomatoes daily, or of a citrus fruit, or of tomato or citrus fruit juices, and one serving of other fruits, fresh, canned or dried.
VEGETABLES- (In addition to potatoes of which you need one serving daily) – Two servings daily of vegetables, preferably leafy green or yellow and frequently raw.
CEREALS AND BREADS- one serving of a whole grain cereal and four to six slices of Canada Approved Bread, brown or white.
MEAT, FISH, etc. – One serving a day of meat, fish, or meat substitutes. Liver, heart or kidney once a week.
EGGS- at least 3 or 4 eggs weekly

Eat these foods first, then add these and other foods you wish.

Some source of vitamin D such as fish liver oils, is essential for children, and may be advisable for adults.

It’s important to keep in mind that this was released during the WW2 and while food scarcity wasn’t necessarily a problem in Canada, it was not a time of plenty for most Canadians and the primary reason why organ meat was recommended. Plus, it was also 70 years ago meaning that the availability of particular types of foods was seasonal. Canada is large and it has definite seasons meaning that very little grows in most of the country for 6 months of the year. The robust transportation systems we enjoy presently did not exist meaning that fresh or fresh-ish vegetables from South America or California were simply not available. Flash frozen or canned vegetables were about the only types of garden vegetables that would be available for a large portion of the year.

The food supply chain was very different and much of what we presently have access to did not exist. Sugar was glucose from tropical sources and not sucrose, which is a combination of glucose and fructose, which is primarily sourced from corn. And it was very expensive so it wasn’t used very much. Boxed cereals and boxed anything were not as abundantly available as they are now and the chemical industry, while it did exist, was not such an integral part of what we consider the food industry. It was a simpler time, with fewer choices and with local foods contributing to the overwhelming majority of what was available to buy.

This is not good or bad, just different. The eating habits of people had less to do with food preferences and more to do with what was actually there to be eaten. People would go hungry because of a lack of availability and would find that what they ate would be more connected to the time of year or the seasons than anything else.

The Food Guide was the government’s effort to ensure that the people would receive adequate nutrition, and it didn’t have a lot to do with big business because big business wasn’t really a thing that had much of a foot hold in the food supply chain. Potatoes were recommended because they store well, so Canada had a lot of them. They didn’t grow nearly as much corn or grain as they do now and many of the things that flour allows us to make spoil very quickly without the chemical preservatives that presently exist, so these things would only be made as required.

In the years and decades that followed the introduction of the Food Guide, things changed dramatically. Spoilage stopped being a concern, food processing allowed for the creation of things that would last for months or years, and the things that human beings find palatable or irresistible, became cheaper to grow and manufacture. Food science became a thing and the chemical industry contributed their part to the creation of low cost, low nutrient, high energy foods that have an extended shelf life and trigger all of the reward centers of the brain that were historically only stimulated with rare, hard to find and scarce food. For example, ripe fruit and honey were available seasonally and then not at all. Food science put an end to this scarcity meaning sweet high calorie food stuffs were available year round.

Food choice and preferences took over. We no longer needed to be content with simply satisfying hunger, we could now begin to focus on satisfying a craving for a particular thing. The canned apples or peach jam were replaces as the winter time source of sweetness with things like boxed cookies, candy, or low cost chocolate. Say what you like about the health effects of eating too much fruit, or its relatively low nutritional content, but when given a choice between preserved fruit or modern candy, our species will get more nutrition and less energy out of things that grow than things that are manufactured. Again, this is not good or bad, it is just a thing that is true. Small amounts of manufactured and boxed candy is fine for healthy people, it just isn’t as beneficial as a similar amount of grown food.

The reasons for this are very straight forward. In order to put something in a box for consumption at some point in the future it cannot spoil and it cannot change form. Spoilage is prevented by adding things that prevent it or by removing the things that cause it meaning that preservatives are added or minerals are removed which result in novel combinations of chemicals that have never existed in nature before, let alone been consumed as food by anyone. These products maintain their form though the creative use of stabilizing agents that were discovered by the chemical industry. The traditional oils that were used to make things like bread and cookies were replaced with chemically altered oils that are solid at room temperature meaning the bread and cookies look and taste the same for months. These solid oils or fats are man-made creations and completely new to human beings – we have no evolutionary history with them meaning we have no idea how they will impact our bodies or what role they will play in gene expression.

In this case, this is bad, and for a few different reasons. The first is that adding hydrogen molecules to fat to make it more stable is, in essence, the creation of a new chemical. While it is safe to say that swallowing an individual hydrogen molecule or a few thousand of them along with each mouthful of food will be harmless to human beings, when these molecules are joined to other molecules to form a solid, they are no longer the same thing. Hydrogen is an element and an important gas that becomes a solid at -260 degrees C.

But when combined with other elements, it will help the resulting compound to form a solid at higher temperatures. Our species and anything that is alive on the planet now, only has an evolutionary history with hydrogen containing solids that exist in nature and only in the amounts that occur in nature. The manufacturing of trans-fats to create more stable oils artificially manipulates the ratio of their availability and it makes it available in a way that does not exist in nature – dairy and meat does have some trans-fat, but it also has other things that manufactured trans-fat does not, things that might work synergistically with the trans-fat to reduce or eliminate its harmful effects. The fact is that we KNOW the impact of too much trans-fat on human health, it is bad.

The second reason why adding hydrogen molecules to fat to create a more stable fat can be bad is because of how it will impact the brain. Fat is high energy (calorie) so our species has developed a taste for it because any members of our species that were motivated to eat it would seek it out and consume it whenever they could. This would mean they were consuming more energy than they were burning, and would lead to weight gain in terms of increased body fat. This extra body fat would be used when food was scarce giving these individuals a better chance of surviving a famine. Over time this survival advantage would be passed onto the following generations resulting in the tendency for human beings to find eating fat to be rewarding. By the same token and method, we also find eating sweet things to be rewarding and in a way that is proportional to the level of sweetness. When paired together, sweet things that are high in fat are almost completely irresistible to human beings. We learn very quickly that high fat sweet things give us a reward and we begin to seek out and consume these things. Sweet and fat have existed for as long as there have been people, but the combination of them, or the ease of access to things that contain a combination of them, is much more recent. Manufacture fats ensured that the food industry could supply these types of foods, in a stable form that will not spoil, in a constant and uninterrupted supply.

The food scientists have used our genes against us and created a food that we are almost powerless to say no to. Factor in the health damage that the manufacture fat causes to us and the size of the problem becomes evident. Narrative speaking, we are programmed to seek out and over eat the very things that will, in the long term, destroy our health and hurt our well-being.

For the sake of keeping this on track and because it isn’t entirely clear that GMOs and fertilizers are harmful to us, or as harmful as overeating trans-fat and sucrose, I’m going to return to the topic of the most recent version of the Canada Food Guide after stating that today, thanks to technology and the development associated with corporations and capitalism, we have access to an abundance of food, and year round access to almost everything that we are able to eat. Seasonal eating is no longer a thing that we have to stick to. While local foods will be cheaper at certain parts of the year, these food will be available year round if we have the money to buy them. This means that a lack of availability can no longer be cited as the reason why someone does not follow the Canada Food Guide – a lack of money to buy imported fruits and vegetables remains a reason but, as I will outline, it isn’t a valid reason for most of Canada’s population that live in larger and more populated areas.

A big change with the most recent version of the Guide is the elimination of a recommended number of servings. The previous version still provided a number of servings of each of the 4 food groups broken down by sex and age and it seemed to be geared towards getting adequate nutrition and adequate energy. Be aware, these two things are not the same. Nutrition is the vitamins, minerals and protein a food provides while energy is the stuff that the body will metabolize as fuel to power all of the physiological processes required to sustain life. For example, the body needs a certain amount of vitamin B12 to function optimally and it will get most of this vitamin from the meat you eat. Without the B12, things begin to breakdown and the body will start to direct any available B12 to the most critical processes. This means that a deficiency in a vitamin leads to reduced functioning of specific processes and not a global failure; this is a very good survival approach and is one that is used by most living things because it sustains life giving the organism the opportunity to seek out and consume the missing molecules. Your hair may fall out or your digestive system may become less effective, but you are still able to think and move – to hunt – and find some meat to replenish the B12 levels.

Energy is different from nutrition because it is the fuel for the metabolism. You need to consume energy fairly consistently to keep things going. When your food does not provide sufficient energy, your metabolic rate will begin to slow down and certain physiologically processes will begin to go off line. Non-essential processes will be first to drop off, things like hair and nail growth, followed by muscle repair and replacement of dead cells. Given long enough, the body will begin to consume its own tissues for energy – wasting diseases like AIDS and various late stage cancers are examples of this. However, unlike disease, if someone finds and starts to eat food, the body will start-up these processes and attempt to repair whatever damage was done and take care of whatever needs to be taken care of.

Body fat is stored energy and the process of storing it when we eat too much and burning it when consumption drops below the levels needed for maintenance represents livings beings best efforts at dealing with periodic food scarcity. You can be sure that within the genetic material of all people are combinations of DNA that code for this process and, as a result of the natural selective breeding that periodic famines caused, all of us are exceptionally good at storing body fat. Our potential ancestors who did not have the good genes for storing body fat died off during times of food scarcity leaving nothing but people who were uniquely coded to store fat.

The distinction between nutrition and energy is important because allows for a clear understand for the existence of malnourished people who are obese. The opposite can also be true although much less common given the huge difference between energy and vitamin requirements; one group of people who have a tendency towards adequate nourishment but insufficient energy consumption are those who are trying to extend their life through intense calorie reduction. This group eats large amounts of garden vegetables while refraining from foods that contain carbohydrate, fat and excessive protein. They will still desire to eat more as they will be hungry, they will just choose to not eat and, over time, learn to ignore food cravings and become accustomed to being hungry.

For everyone else hunger serves to motivate us to eat and it does not necessarily reflect our actual needs. It serves our survival needs.

Think about it this way: our genes have coded over-eating into our operating system because historically, those who over ate survived to reproduce. This means that we are coded to do the very thing that causes an increase in body fat. This tendency manifest itself in many different ways, or exists for a few different reasons, one of which is a latency between the time when we have eaten enough in terms of food volume and when the stomach sends the signals telling the brain that it is adequately filled. Rough estimates put this latency period at between 10 and 15 minutes; the exact length of time is less important than understanding the consequences to this phenomenon. The outcome is that we continue to eat past the point at which we should stop if replenishing our energy was our actual goal. This only makes sense IF overeating was in fact the goal for human beings.

Another powerful mechanism, one that I have already mentioned above, has to do with motivation. Human beings will have a tendency to do things that they find rewarding, and we find eating sweet or fat foods rewarding and find eating things that are a combination of sweet & fat to be incredibly rewarding. And it doesn’t take very long for us to figure out what we like and then to go after consuming it. Once we have uncovered it, we will over eat it at any opportunity and will often find ourselves continuing to eat it will after any reasonable amount of calories have been consumed. Some of us will, in fact, ignore the body’s “I am full” signal and continue to eat, and eat, and eat.

This makes sense given the relative scarcity of sweet and fat things in our ancestral past. It was better to gorge when the opportunity presented itself because it would usually only happen during the harvest season when fruit would fully ripen and when animals had enjoyed an abundance of food throughout the summer. Remember, all mammals have a significant amount of their genes in common, so they share the mechanism of storing body fat through over eating with us. Animals have more body fat at the end of fall / beginning of winter than they do at any other time, so they will contain more of the stuff we have learned to crave at this time of year. Coupled with an abundance of ripe fruit, we are going to be highly motivated to eat as much as we possibly can and to overeat, during harvest feasts. This allowed our ancestors to store the maximum amount of energy in the shortest period of time, which helped them get through the winter when food was scarce.

All of this worked perfectly, as evident by our species survival. Historically, we were able to get through the tough time because we over ate during the good times. Those who didn’t over eat, didn’t survive long enough to pass along their genes. While we rarely sat down to eating massive amounts of highly nutritious food, we were probably adequately nourished because the large amounts of higher energy food we did eat contained enough vitamins, minerals and protein for our bodies to function effectively. And it is worth considering the slow burn that nutrient deficiencies have on our ability to function, particularly when compared to the rapid onset of the negative consequences associated with a deficiency in energy consumption.

However, it works too well and it is now a major problem for modern people simply because we are running the identical code that we were 15000 years ago before farming of any type afforded us the freedoms associated with the elimination of food security.

Take a moment to consider what life would have been like before farming. We would exist in small groups and would have to follow the food. We’d eat as much as we could whenever we could, and then go periods of time when there wasn’t enough to eat. We’d live off of our body fat and we wandered around looking for animals to hunt and collecting whatever plant stuff we could that would provide us with anything useful. Life would be hard, a lot of our energy would go towards generating heat to maintain an appropriate body temperature and most of the rest would go toward finding our next meal. There would be very little specialization of labor because there wouldn’t be enough food to free some-up anyone from having to hunt or gather. There would be constant hunger separated by the occasional moments of gorging.

In a world were this was the norm, the ability to store energy when possible and the motivation to do the very thing that was needed to create a caloric surplus that storing energy required were essential.

Fast forward to 1942 when the first Canada Food Guide known as the Official Food Rules came out. Sure, we were running the same code that had us seek out and overeat high calorie foods and to overeat whatever food we had available, but we were not living in an environment of abundance. While it wasn’t necessarily a place of constant scarcity, given that farming existed and we had learned how to preserve enough things to make them available during the winter when nothing grew, it was not a place where there was unlimited food available to everyone. The more affluent did have improved access and they had higher body fat levels as a result, but in general, people looked more or less the same as they had for thousands of years; although there is some evidence to suggest that we were slightly taller and slightly bigger in terms of muscle and bone structure. Obesity was a very, very rare thing and being undernourished in terms of a deficiency of vitamins or minerals was more of a problem.

There was enough energy to go around but there would be seasonal droughts in terms of nutrients. This was not great, but it was a much smaller problem than having your population starving. So the government set out to solve this smaller problem and created the Official Food Rules in an effort to combat it.

Take a look again at these rules and notice how little food is actually being recommended in terms of servings, the language “when available” with reference to cheese and “at least these amounts” and the second last line “eat these foods first, then add these and other foods you wish.”

In my life time, I do not recall there ever bring a shortage of cheese, it has ALWAYS been available as far as I can tell. Regardless, they wanted to make sure everyone got enough calcium and believed that dairy was the best source of it. Next, they believed that if you were able to consume ONLY the outlined food that you would receive adequate nutrition in terms of vitamin and minerals. Finally, you had free range over what you ate AFTER you consumed the outlined food. You were fine to eat other things, like cookies or chocolate, and probably beer, but to do so only after you had eaten the other prescribed items. They are not limiting what you eat, they are saying eat at least these things before you eat other stuff. This form of languaging paints a picture that, as they viewed it at the time, did not include a significant number of people who were eating way too much. Obesity statistics are hard to find for this period of time and, while not statistically sound to say this, the lack of easily available statistics coupled with the available statistics of ~10% 1970, it is probably safe to conclude that obesity wasn’t much of a consideration let alone a problem.

The guide continued along in this fashion for about 3 decades until the 1977 Canada’s Food Guide when it began to take on a more graphical / metaphoric form. There are a few reasons why a flat text list of rules was no longer deemed sufficient enough to capture and maintain the attention of the population, like the availability of colour television, leading to a need to make things entertaining. The colour wheel that featured a smiling sun that was licking its lips is more playful and has pictures of specific food items of each type or category. It is easier to look at and is presented as two sided with more specific textual information on the back.

The name and number of recommended servings per day for two of the categories changed between the 1982 Canada’s Food Guide and the 1992 Canada’s Food Guide to Healthy Eating. “Breads and cereals” was changed to “grain products” and the recommended servings increased from 4-5 to 5-12 as “fruits and vegetables” was changed to “vegetables and fruit” and the number of servings increased from 4-5 to 5-10. These changes reflect an increase in the availability of both grain and fruit along with a refocus on the importance of getting enough vitamins and minerals as indicated by the re-ordering of vegetables before fruits.

I remember this guide very well. It came out the year I graduated high school and it was what was in use when I took a nutrition class at university. It was also what was around when I first got exposed to the Atkins diet – an extremely low carbohydrate eating approach that causes people to enter a state called Ketosis meaning they are burning fat for energy vs. sugar. According to the recommendation in 1992 Canada’s Food Guide to Healthy Eating, it would be impossible for someone get into ketosis if they followed it, even if they only consumed the lowest number of recommended grain servings. We were taught, and I believed, that ketosis was a dangerous state to be in and that it should be avoided at all costs. What wasn’t clear to me at the time was that ketosis was a completely natural state to get into and it was, in fact, the very state that we used to go into every time our food supply was reduced and we began to burn body fat for energy.

For what it worth, 5 servings of grain is a considerable amount of carbohydrate, while 12 servings is a massive amount and much more than most people should be consuming. According to the guide, one serving is 30 grams of cereal which has an average of 20 grams of carbohydrate, or 80 calories. This means that they recommend people eat between 100 and 240 grams of carbohydrate per day or 400 to 960 calories of carbs per day. Eating this amount of well above the threshold for ketosis. While ketosis is not the only way people will burn body fat, it is the most effective way, and the way in which our ancestors would have gone about it given that is what happens when the food supply is interpreted.

While there had been a trend of an increased number of servings of grain products in the newer versions of the guides, 1992 marks a huge increase from a max of 5 to a max of 12, while offering very little in terms of justification for eating more or less of them other than suggesting that teenagers should eat more while adults should eat somewhere in the middle.

The significance of this is very important and it has had a big impact on the number of people who are considered obese in the country. The early guides offered minimums and a suggestion that you could eat more AFTER you ate all of the recommended food, the 1992 guide gives vague advice and doesn’t explain the consequences of eating too many serving. This is a problem because there was no longer any food scarcity. There was an abundance of food, particularly grain products, which are high energy, and a massive selection of refined or processed grain products, which have a lower amount of fiber and therefore a higher percentage of calories that the body will metabolize for energy. Without clear instructions, with a higher recommended number of servings and a lack of food scarcity, people would just eat more because the guide said that they could or should.

Burn The Calories BEFORE You Eat The Crappy Food

Oh, wait a minute, there is a chocolate pie. It is right there for your present self to enjoy. For YOU to enjoy. Future self does not need to know about it. You can just have a slice and never speak a word of it, to them, to anyone. It will be like it never happened. Except if it does happen it DID happen.

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It is probably going to happen to you. You are a healthy eater, you like yourself enough to do the things that your future self will be grateful you did. Heck, you LOVE your future self and are really looking forward to meeting them. For them you would do almost anything. They do not exist yet, but you are willing to do almost anything to make sure they have the best life possible. Good for you! They will thank you for it.

Oh, wait a minute, there is a chocolate pie. It is right there for present self to enjoy. For YOU to enjoy. Future self does not need to know about it. You can just have a slice and never speak a word of it, to them, to anyone. It will be like it never happened. Except if it does happen it DID happen.

Saying no all the time can be tough. It is possible and there will be a time in the future when you are glad you did. But life is not necessarily all about the future. The present moment, now, is actually a lot more real than the future. There are a lot of things to be said about getting the most out of each moment and sometimes that means saying yes to something that is a small speed bump in your journey.

You should give yourself permission to say yes to the things you like but that hurt your progress so long as you are not addicted to them and so long as they do not trigger an all or nothing type of event. Alcoholics are best to always say no to that first drink. X smokers are always better served to never take another puff. People on a massive weight loss journey are best to stick with the program until they achieve their predetermined celebration milestones. If this is not you, if you are a healthy eater who avoids sugar and baked desserts and do not have any celebrations lined-up, saying yes to the chocolate pie occasionally is not a big deal and, if done with planning, can have a very small impact on your progress.

Pay your bill BEFORE you eat. If you are going to enjoy an occasional 750 calorie dessert, create the 750 calorie deficit before you get stuck in.

If you are going to eat it on Sunday, in the 4 or 5 days before, eat 125 calories less than what you normally would or burn off an extra 125 calories with exercise. So long as doing this does not drop your calories below 1200-1400 on any of these days, it will be a wash and everything will work itself out by Tuesday or Wednesday of the following week.

Better than the lay away approach is to burn the calories as close to before the meal as possible. An intense work out primes the body to shuttle the calories into the cells that need them for recovery before moving them into fat cells for storage. If you have depleted 500 calories of muscle glycogen just before you eat a piece chocolate pie, many of the sugar calories you consume will be help replenish this energy. The sugar will spike your insulin which will also help with protein synthesis further aiding recovery and possibly help you gain some lean muscle. From time to time it is fine to look at food as molecules void of any context, provided you have done the work right before the use the molecules as you would if they were just individual ingredients.

Chocolate pie is NOT the same thing as coco, glucose, fructose, saturated fat, unsaturated fat, and water. The ingredients interact with each other to do things that the individual ingredients would not do on their own. Glucose and fat consumed together create a massive release of reward chemical that glucose or fat on their own do not. The whole is great than the sum of its parts. But occasionally and when done mindfully these treat experiences can promote a great sense of well-being with very little or no negative impact on future you. Just make sure you pay the bill before eating.

When You Know What You Are Looking For, You’ll Be Willing To Pay To Get It

Is the person willing to pay the bill before they start – do they know the value of what they are about to do and do they know why they are enrolling you in their possibility? Are they clear on why it is important to them today and for the person they are going to become? If the answer is yes, if it is obvious that there is only one way forward, success is inevitable and this mutual partnership will work.

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When it comes to personal training and basically any type of training, there are two type of clients, those who do what they are told and everyone else. Those who do the work are generally self-motivated. They may not know exactly why they are doing what they do, but when pressed on it they can come-up with a good reason, or two, or more. Intuitively they understand that they must pay the metaphoric bill before they eat the metaphoric meal – the bill is the work and every decision that moves them forward while the meal is the results they are seeking. For me, these clients are moderately interesting to work with and most of the joy comes from the validation that my methods and programs work and from the empathetic joy of seeing someone work hard, get what they earn, and feel good about it. I enjoy the conversations as well because these types of people have a lot to teach and I have a lot to learn.

Everyone else acts like training is a meal at a fine dining restaurant. It’s an experience to have and the bill will be paid at the end after they know that the experience was worth it. These people are a lot more work. There is a different problem to be solved and I may not know the answer because they don’t know the question. They don’t necessarily do what is being asked of them because they don’t really know why they are in front of me, asking for my help, on a journey that they may not even have started. It’s messy with a much lower success rate. The best case is that they actually start the journey and figure out why it is important OR that a light gets shined on the life they are living, the future that this will create for them, and a sense of peace about both.

The truth is that it is much more important to me that they find out what their goals actually are and not important at all that they achieve a goal that was never theirs in the first place.

I like my life and I believe everyone else should like their life too. If I can be of service and guide / help them automate the making of the life of their dreams then all the better. Sometimes they are already living the life of their dreams and just have never taken the time to notice it. They may not realize what is involved with chasing down a goal and that the actualization of the goal can be rather unfulfilling. After you reach your goal you are still you. You may be a leaner, more muscular, faster you, but at the end of the day, you remain you.

I used to believe that everyone should work out and improve their health. This is something that I no longer believe. I know everyone will benefit from moderate exercise, improved nutrition, reduced stress, and a more mindful approach to life, but that doesn’t mean everyone should go after these benefits. Sometimes these benefits actually make people miserable. Having single digit body fat is hard work and requires a lot of sacrifice. Once you achieve it, it requires continuous effort to maintain because it is a possession of sorts. It is now YOURS to lose, and this knowledge can generate a considerable amount of negative mental energy. And regardless of what you do, if you live long enough, you WILL lose it. Everything that arises will pass away, your discipline, your 6 pack abs, your youth, even your earthly existence.

A quick conversation can unpacked that a person just want to feel happier with who they are, the solution for which is meditation. After a few months of twice a day practice is all that is needed for the laws of nature to reveal themselves, and equanimous acceptance is bound to follow.

An effective consultation can reveal that the goal is simply to feel better. The prescription here is simple, improve posture through the use of structural balance movements, core and breath training. When we automate standing up straight when your head back and breathing deeply into our belly our psychological mind set shifts towards confidence, security, and contentment. The experience of pain is reduced and we feel and act more capable.

Cultivating and maintaining mindfulness is very easy and will add tremendous value to your life because of the compounding effect of experience over time. Improving and maintaining posture and appropriate breathing requires 5 minutes a day of work and offers similar compounding lifelong benefits. These things are easy, and anyone can achieve them. And if they are actually what the person is seeking, it is better for everyone in the long run to just go straight for them.

I am not suggesting that someone should not work out to improve their health. They should, most people should, but it is even better if the person actually wants to do it. There is no downside when someone works hard to get what they want AND need. The same cannot be said when someone gets what they need but do not want. Needs and wants are not the same and when they are not aligned who are we to decide what another person needs?

I find this approach helpful when it comes to training and coaching. Is the person willing to pay the bill before they start – do they know the value of what they are about to do and do they know why they are enrolling you in their possibility? Are they clear on why it is important to them today and for the person they are going to become? If the answer is yes, if it is obvious that there is only one way forward, success is inevitable and this mutual partnership will work. Anything other than this is an indication that they do not really know what they want or that they have not taken the time to get clear on why they want it. A simpler solution likely exists for them, one that has them invest a lot less time and allows them to go directly to what they want.

Labeling A Mistake A Lesson Means You Will Probably Not Learn From It

The funny thing about an honest person who actually believes nonsense is that they are telling the truth when they are lying to people.

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In many of the leadership books and blogs, the notion of mistakes comes up a lot. To be a leader, you need to take action and any time you take action, there is a chance that this action will not lead to the desired outcome. Mistakes are a big part of learning and the best leaders in any industry tend to make more than their fair share of them.

It makes a lot of sense to regard any mistake as lesson. This will make them more powerful because it will reduce the long term consequences of the action. Letting go of a poor decision is easier when we know that we are less likely to make the same decision again in the future.

But I question the validity of the assumption that actual learning has occurred when one habitually label mistakes lessons, given the apparent tendency for people to do the same things over and over again. What may actually be occurring is more akin to a karmic cleanse vs. a real lesson. It is easier to call something a lesson and to state that the outcome was the result of a lack of knowledge / experience than to really dig into what happened and to accept that you had the resources to think the thing through and still chose to act impulsively.

To be clear, I’m not talking about innovation here. Making something new that performs its function perfectly necessitates it having been made and NOT perform that function perfectly more than once. Each previous iteration was not a mistake because the inventor could not have known better. Each version is a lesson that builds upon all of the lessons from before. The outcome was not a result of having information / resources and choosing not to use them.

What I am talking about are all of the times when taking a few minutes to think things through beforehand would likely have revealed a lot of the blind spots or things that did not immediately come to mind.

For example, I used to say “it takes 21 days to learn a new skill and make it a habit” without any sense of irony. I had heard it when I started working at a gym and it was something that we were encouraged to say to new or potential members to let them know that changing course to move towards a more healthful life requires some effort but that the effort doesn’t really need to be sustained (3 weeks was all that was needed before the body would do it on its own). The lack of irony was due to my missing the fact that I had created the habit of saying that saying in about 30 seconds.

Some behaviors will require 21 days, others 1, some 261, etc. I was wrong. I wasn’t learning a lesson, I was making a mistake every time I lazily repeated a simple phrase that served a sales purpose. It turns out that I was lying because I should have known better than to repeat something so trite and catchy. If I had taken the required 3 moments to consider what was going on in the context of my own life I would have realized that 21 days was not an average, was not an actual and did not reflect how things progressed in my own life. When I was learning to become a cycling instructor, I started practicing every day the day after the training workshop ended; so less than 48 hours to create the habit – I didn’t need to convince myself to practice, I was excited to do it. When I decide to wake-up earlier in the morning, it takes me about a week of deliberately getting out of bed at 5:15 am before I find myself walking around at 5:16 am without a desire to push snooze and stay in bed. The habit of mindfulness as it applies to my baseline level of anxiety has yet to full take hold, even after years of knowing that I can be an anxious person and will seek out the experiences that will create anxiety. My journeys down the rabbit hole though are much shorter than before but I am still starting them.

On some level I knew I was talking nonsense. However, it was my job to sell gym memberships so I just kept saying the line over and over again. I got good at it. Prospective members believed me and I think I started to believe me.

The funny thing about an honest person who actually believes nonsense is that they are telling the truth when they are lying to people. Someone who is that convinced that life will be completely different in 3 weeks is able to convince other people of that “fact.” There I was, pouring out sincerity, stoking the flames of hope that their future would be better and all it would take was a few weeks of effort before the body just did the work willingly. I closed a lot of sales because I believed what I was saying, and that made it easier for the people on the other side of the table to believe it too.

It didn’t take long, about 22 days after my first sale, before the evidence began to grow that my silly little phrase wasn’t true. Over a few months it became evident that I wasn’t going to be able to excel at selling gym memberships for much longer because it was clear that people have a baseline and it can take months and maybe years for it to be updated.

I moved on to management, then personal training, and finally fitness class instruction growing further away from the notion that “it takes 21 days to learn a new skill and make it a habit.” For me, selling gym memberships for that club was like convincing someone to convert all of their dollars into the currency of a country that doesn’t exist anymore – it was something that can be done but was probably going to be a mistake and when it came time to correct it, the exchange rate would ensure that the customer lost money. Going from zero to a sustained full speed, which is what is required when someone makes the decision to transform their body composition, is going to require that they create a bunch of new behaviors, put a lot of effort into continuing to do them, and endure whatever sense of loss going without the things that got them to the position of needing to change their body composition in the first place causes. It is possible, but for almost everyone it is going to SUCK.

And that is the power of labeling a mistake a lesson in the fitness industry. There is no cost to it, so doing it eliminates the incentive to actually change future actions. In fact, there is a disincentive to changing because you move away from doing what you know works and into the realm of the unknown. The new actions may not work so you will be, at the very least, going without the sense of certainty that what you are doing is going to be effective, and, more likely, be going without the money. Better to call it a lesson so you get to continue to do what you did before and get the same outcome. This is what immunizes the fitness professional from the pain associated with making a mistake because the reframe allows the “lesson” to be the cost of knowing something and because it ultimately is the responsibility of the member / client / participant to put in the work. If the habit doesn’t take after exactly 3 weeks it is probably the clients fault for doing something wrong. The mistake was not in the BS statement, it was to belief that the client or member was willing to put in the work to form that new habit.

So long as there is no pain associated with the action, the motivation to do anything different will never grow. The client will experience the pain. When, on the 22nd day, going to the gym and eating more healthful food is not the automatic, they will begin to feel the pain of their blown expectation. And this is the problem with not being completely honest with people when it comes to the fitness industry. People are hopeful about their future and very much want to believe that it will not only get very easy to do, but that it won’t take very long for that to happen. “It takes 21 days to learn a new skill and make it a habit” is tailor-made to capitalize on their vulnerable state of mind. They are coached into thinking “sure, it’ll be tough for a couple of weeks but then it will get easy and after that, it’s only a matter of time before I look and feel amazing.”

That just isn’t true. Well, the second part of it might be, that it will be just a matter of time before they look and feel amazing so long as they continue to consistently put in the work in the gym and the kitchen. But for 95% of the people who take-up fitness it can be months or years before their body and brain make the pursuit of physical improvement automatic. Until then, and even occasionally afterwards, it will require will-power. In my experience, the only people for which the 21 days saying actually applies are for those who have taken a short period of time away from their exercise habit. For everyone else there is an almost 100% chance that the saying is false and for those who sign-up for services based on their belief of it will be disappointed and have less money because of it.

My approach now is almost complete honesty and to even attempt to talk someone out of joining or starting because a lot of people do not want to improve their fitness, they simply want to be happier. While becoming a regular exerciser can improve happiness and improve someone’s feelings of well-being, it can also contribute to a lot of suffering, misery, and feelings of shame and inadequacy. If you don’t believe this, consider what goes through someone’s mind when they hit day 22 and find that they haven’t really learned a new skill and have definitely not made it a habit. When they find going to the gym on week 4 to be as tough as or even tougher than they did on week 1, what are they going to think about themselves? When they start to compare themselves to the other members who seem to be showing up 3-5 times a week without any effort and when they remember the certainty in which the sales person or personal trainer told them that it would only take 21 days it will be nearly impossible to not be flooded with feelings of inadequacy and failure. Experiencing these feelings is not conducive to being happy.

I made a mistake and I changed course because I felt horrible for lying to people when they were vulnerable, easily influenced, and when I stood to gain from saying something that sounded true but was clearly false. When I had to face myself in the mirror I realized that I had been using BS to harvest peoples hope in an attempt to help sell them gym memberships. And morally I felt awful because I knew that I had contributed to their suffering. It wasn’t a mistake because I SHOULD have known better and it wasn’t a lesson because I already knew better.

This brings me to some of the other things I was told when I was learning how to sell gym memberships. The sales managers and sales coaches tried to make me feel bad for applying what I knew about people. The statement “how are they supposed to believe in themselves if you don’t even believe in them?” was directed towards me more than once. As was “who are you to judge them for something that might happen in the future? Who are you to deny them the opportunity to have a better life?” These statements feel like they might be true, except I knew that they were not. It wasn’t that I was a pessimist, it was that I was both a realist and someone with a back ground in psychology / human behavior. I believed in the prospective members as much as I believe in people. I knew what it took for me to change my behavior and I knew a lot of the theories about what is required for human beings to be ready for change. The truth is that there are only a couple of short cuts to the process and unless someone arrives at the gym for the first time having taken one of them, having had one of the requisite experiences OR is actually ready to change, they will have extreme difficult making the changes.

Informed consent is a thing that is very important and it was the only thing that we were NOT seeking. We needed and wanted their consent in terms of a signature on a legally binding agreement to allow the gym to access their bank account to withdraw the membership dues. The act of informing them of the actions they were going to need to do was vacated in favor of cultivating their hope and filling their mind with grand ideas that do not hold up. When they failed to form the new habit it was their decision and completely their own responsibility. When I would talk about my concerns about the entire transaction I was reminded that maybe the habit didn’t take because I didn’t believe in the member enough. The fact that behavior change is hard and requires sustained unreasonable effort was completely ignored. My crappy attitude was probably contributing to the member’s challenges in automating a difficult set of complex behaviors that are both physical challenging and are experienced as psychological pain. Initially I adjusted my attitude but it became obvious very quickly that my sincere belief in other people is not sufficient to move them to do anything more than to sign-up and come in a few times during the first few weeks. The heavy lifting needed to be done by them.

This all comes down to the following couple of facts:

The first is that people operate using a system of rewards and punishments. Rewards serve to fuel action and to repeat an action that lead to the reward. Punishments serve to reduce action in general but specifically the action that caused the punishment. At the shallowest level, things that feel good are rewards and things that feel bad are punishments. With references to the “it takes 21 days” line I learned, it was initially reinforced because it seemed to be effective at getting people to sign-up for a gym membership. The closing of the sale felt good because it meant that I had performed my job well and would result in higher wages come pay-day. However, after the first month, I began to notice that the new members were not that much different from me and many were having difficult forming that habit. Their pain and eventual disillusionment started to weigh on me. They had a desire to finally make the life of their dreams and started with such hope that it would become a habit very quickly. Reality landed on them HARD after the first few weeks turned into a month and it remained a constant challenge to eat better and drive to the gym to do movements that are not innately rewarding. Either because they were telling me this, I was reading it on their faces, or because they stopped coming into the gym, I was getting absolutely clear that the exercise habit is a tough one to create. The words that had once been powerfully reinforced though sales began to be experienced as punishments when I realized that I had lied to the people who had trusted me.

On a deeper level, the pleasure and pain can be perceived as either reward or punishment, and this is the area that my NOT taking the effort to more fully inform them of what would be required to become an habitual exerciser and more effective eater came back to haunt me. At this deeper level, were pain can be viewed as a reward and pleasure can be viewed as a punishment, the person needs to take the time to think about what is going on in order to manufacture the meaning that matches reward or punishment. For me, as a sales person, closing a sale would only feel good when I made it as clear as possible what the first few months of the gym would be like for them and the sense of loss or sacrifice that comes along with changing your diet to remove sugar and junk food while increasing the consumption of highly nutritious foods. My aim became disclosing as possible about how long it would take to reach their goal and the number of times they would have to say “no” to something they wanted and “yes” to something that felt uncomfortable in the short term.

Of course two things happened here. The first was that the sales managers and coaches did not like me going off script and tried to move me back on course; which I wasn’t having any of because I had grown tired of feeling like a lying jerk. The second was that the members who signed-up became active members because they were fully aware of what was about to happen, had considered it, and had still made the decision to join. When, 8 weeks later, they still found that they had to call upon their willpower to come to the gym at the end of their work day, they were not plagued with any feelings of “why hasn’t this become a habit yet?” or “what is wrong with me, why can’t I like this?” They did not like it, but they accepted it as something that they were going to have to do in order to get the thing that they wanted. This, more than anything else, is the formula for success – consistent hard work over time. They were able to view showing-up and making it to the end of a workout as rewarding in spite of the fact that NOTHING about it brought them any measurable pleasure. They manufactured a meaning that served as a proxy for pleasure to allow their brain to reward the behavior.

This is what is called the “discipline high.” You trigger chemical rewards in response to doing things that are hard, require will power, and for which there is a big disincentive to doing. Pain becomes pleasure-like, pleasure becomes pain-like and the person takes the actions they accepted as part of the journey. This type of meaning manufacturing might have been what the “21 days to learn…” statement was getting at, but it was never outlined or explained to me this way.

Now it turned out that because of my updated approach, the powers that be thought that I would be a better manager than sales person and I got the opportunity to perform that role at a different club. I employed the same updated approach with managing the team as I had with selling memberships and they responded in more or less the same way. Improving at anything will take sustained work, a lot of which will not be directly rewarding. The sooner you accept this fact and just start doing it the better the process is going to go for you.

Years later, when I look at those first steps into to the fitness field I smile and feel grateful that they are behind me. At the time I didn’t realize that it is a self-help industry and that no matter what I bring to the table the members, participants, or clients will need to perform the work. I can motivate, want, coach, etc. until I’m exhausted, but if they do not put in the effort there will be NO transformation. They need to help themselves and until they are willing AND doing it, nothing is going to happen.

It is a fun job for many but for me it is only fun when there has been full disclosure and the person is agreeing to perform their role KNOWING that it is going to be hard work, mostly thankless, void of any physical reward and is not something that feels good initially. Each of us have the potential to learn how to work our muscles in a way that causes them to release feel good chemicals but reaching this point requires the body to work at a particularly hard level for an unpleasantly long period of time. Put another way, you need to be very fit, have strong muscles, and the ability to tolerate a large amount of discomfort before the body will respond by releasing endorphins to numb the pain and boost the pleasure. This can take 3 to 9 months, which is a lot longer than the 21 days I used to promise. BUT when you know that it will happen and that the journey towards that moment might just suck completely, you are much more likely to accept the work as part of it and just do it.

I’m now much more inclined to consider a mistake both a mistake AND a lesson. It is a mistake because the pain is a necessary part of the process. It reduces the chances of me repeating an action that causes pain. This simultaneously creates the opportunity of a future perceived contrast reward in so far as any elimination of pain is experienced as pleasure when contrasted to the possibility of that pain. The pain eliminates the actions that do not work as the prospect of pleasure serves to fuel different actions in the future. In the absence of certainty that an action WILL lead to a rewarding outcome, we leverage this hope of a rewarding outcome to keep trying.

Don’t let yourself off the hook by labeling a mistake a lesson. Your brain learns better when there is something on the line so keep it there and learn from your mistakes.

Truth vs. Happiness – Most Want Happiness

Regardless of how I feel about what I have written since I started newstasis.com one thing has become clear, some of it lands on as negative or bitter so therefore it is negative and bitter.

I accept these interpretations. While I believe that I am not a negative or bitter person, I do see the negative of my choices and can very easily see the negative of a lot of situations. I speak from my experiences within the fitness industry, the experiences I have had, the conversations I have engaged in, and the things I have seen. The fitness field is an industry with a success rate of about 20% or less for people who engage professionals for needed help, the turn over rate for fitness professionals is more than 50% over a three year period, and the churn rate for new participants is close to 70%. Summed up, very few people benefit from the existence of the industry, most of the people who stick with it are lifers (those who’d be doing the stuff anyway) or people who will die early if they DON’T stick with it, and many of the best (in my opinion) fitness professionals leave the industry after only a few years.

I’m entitled to my own opinion and in this case, it matches the facts – most people who are involved in the fitness industry achieve a very small level of success that lasts for a short period of time.

Admittedly, I have more control over myself than I do anyone else, and when I am working as a fitness professional I try to do the best work I am capable of. Part of doing the good work is to try and stop people from hurting themselves BEFORE I try to help them because preventing someone from hurting themselves is a form of help. All things being equal, I will dig in deep about why someone wants to get into better shape and will often try to talk them out of it.

Here’s the thing, trying and failing makes failing again in the future more likely. If someone isn’t ready, they shouldn’t bother. There is a lot of evidence created when we set out to do something and end-up not doing it and this evidence goes a long way to evolve our identity. This is not to say that I will tell someone not to work out, I encourage people to move more, to enjoy the feelings of hard work, and to maybe learn to love the sense of accomplishment at the end of a challenging workout. I might even invite them to notice the feelings of connection with the other people in a fitness class and how all of these things make life more enjoyable. Each of those things is true and are sources of happiness, and are worthwhile if for no other reason as they are fun and make life a little better.

But that is about as far as I go with it. The fitness industry is a self-help industry and most people won’t help themselves for long enough or hard enough to transform their bodies, and that is fine. Having the body of my dreams wasn’t nearly as rewarding as being able to do 12 pull-ups or riding my bike up the Niagara escarpment 10 times in a day. In fact, having abs was something to not have anymore, and that created pressure, boosted my narcissism and made me fearful of certain foods. Don’t get me wrong, I like looking fit, but I LOVE feeling great and doing fun and challenging things. Time will take a toll on my appearance, the toll it takes on my ability to do things is more or less determined by me.

I don’t even encourage people to stop smoking anymore. Smoking isn’t healthful or alivening, but neither is unsolicited advice or coaching / requests to do something that you don’t want to do or stop something that you want to keep doing. Everyone stops smoking eventually and they’ll stop when they are ready or when they die. Until then a smoker should enjoy their cigarettes completely because if you’re going to do something harmful you bloody well better enjoy it.

What does all of this mean?

There is a time and a place for the truth and that time isn’t always and that place isn’t everywhere. I try to write as honestly as I can and if someone happens to interpret that as negative, then my words were negative and I am therefore negative. If they choose to not read them again, that’s a fair choice for them to make and I support them in it.

I write knowing that some people would rather feel good and be happy than engage the negative in an attempt to deal with what is. Again, I support people in the decisions and am equally grateful to be part of the choice, even if that choice is to not read or listen to my words.

I KNOW how to use language to create a powerful impetus for change – just take one of my classes and you’ll notice just how much harder you work there than most places on earth – and that is what I have been doing with my blog. I could just as easily state that working for free benefits business owners a lot more than the person who is giving their time away and leave it up to the reader to draw the conclusion that when you give away your time, you are proving that your time has no value, but that leaves too much unsaid or open to misinterpretation. Instead I said unpaid internships are a scourge and hurt everyone; even those who get the free labor.

My dad once said that it is too bad that I couldn’t work for other people because getting a job with a corporation is a great way to do a lot of cool things while having someone else take on the majority of the risk. I agreed with the second point but wasn’t sure I understood him saying that I couldn’t work for other people. When I asked him about this he said: “You can be fantastic and you can be awful, but you are never in the middle, which is the realm of working for other people. You have a way of engaging the world that is interesting to those around you and will bring them along for the ride as certain as you are about the right way forward. And the moment someone disagrees with you and prevents you from taking the righteous action you know is correct you become awful.” At the time I wasn’t sure how to take it but I warmed up to the essence of what he was saying. He was at least 90% correct at the time.

As I have gotten older, there has been a shift in my approach. I am certain I am right about fewer things, but I am absolutely certain about the things that I am right about. Experience, education, and curiosity do this to a person if they are open to the lessons and willing to be wrong in order to one day be right.

In all of it though, I remain intolerant to dishonesty. This is why my feelings about the fitness industry seem to be unchanging. It remains an industry in which opinion is presented as fact, science takes a back page to gurufication, and hope is weaponized to harvest fresh souls. But my absolute contempt of dishonesty applies to all areas of my life. While I have grown less inclined to prove someone to be a liar and to fight with someone who is playing fast and loose with the facts, I notice when people are not being truthful either through deliberate attempt to deceive or through an act of willful ignorance / motivated reasoning. They are flagged in my mind as being dishonest, self interested, or too lazy to put in the effort to see reality in a way that doesn’t serve their interests. I’m content with leaving them alone and allowing them their chance at happiness because when someone is that motivated to maintain their fiction or that resistant to the truth they probably don’t have much else going for them.

Of course, they’ll be left alone only when their lack of honesty is harmful to only them. The moment it begins to contribute to the suffering of other people is the moment I begin to track in on their intention and their reasons for avoiding the truth.

Finding Your Passion As A Fitness Professional

This article is a continuation of the post What Role Do You Play As A Fitness Professional so I recommend you read that one first and then follow it up with this one.

How will you know what type of training role you are passionate about?

This is a good question for which there are a number of different and great answers. Knowing the answer, or at least knowing AN answer, is arguably one of the most important pieces of insight a human being can have in guiding them to have a more enjoyable and fulfilling life. The reality is that most people do not ever think about the question, let alone taking the time to uncover an answer to it because they simply just follow their nose and go along with whatever comes to mind from one moment to the next. Plus, it can be hard work to take a personal inventory and dig into your life in a way that is prying and revealing. This means that for many, luck is the only way in which they uncover their passion because their life is just a big experiment of trial and error. The quality of your life is too important to leave to chance, so it is very important that you spend some time to come-up with an answer to the question “what are you passionate about?”

This article was supposed to deal with personal training but the advice about how you uncover your passion is general, so anyone can use it. “Passion” is not job or career specific, it is a technology that one uses for engaging the world that will predictably create a consistent state of mind that has some very distinct properties. Experience is necessary for knowing what you are passionate about, so if you are brand new to the field of personal training you may want to book mark this page and revisit it after a few months of full time work. No harm will come of introspection without experience and if nothing else, it will make you more self-aware that life can and should be meaningful from moment to moment and not just on pay day.

All you will need to complete this exercise is a pen or pencil, some paper and about 30 minutes of uninterrupted time. It cannot be done on a smart phone or a computer because they offer the opportunity for distraction and, more importantly, they place a layer of distance between the words that flow out of you and how they appear. It doesn’t matter if it is messy and slow, the goal is to draw out from your brain the experiences and memories that land as significant, important, and represent the answers to the questions that appear below.

There are no right or wrong providing you are doing your best to surface the information that is being call on and as long as you don’t think about “looking good.” The truth about the world and about life is that the people who look the best are the ones who are living their own life doing the things that make them feel the way they want to feel and not tearing down the journey of other people. Anyone who cares about the rightness or wrongness of your passions and choices in life does so out of self-interest and NOT because they have any compassionate feelings towards you. If you are trying to look good, you won’t to those who know and like you, so just take the time to answer the questions honestly so you can get re-calibrated and know which way is forward.

And even if you find out that being a personal trainer isn’t something you can be passion about, having a clear picture of the value you need to deliver in order to have the life you desire is only going to make your life simpler and more straightforward. Before you know what it is, the answer could be anything and is therefore massively complex. As soon as you know, the answer becomes one thing and that is very simple to deal with – achieving it will require hard work, but at least you’ll know what the work is.

Ask and write down the answers to the following questions, the rational for the questions and other comments will appear below the questions:

1) What do you like doing” or “what do you get enjoyment from” as it applies to training.

2) What are you good at doing” or “what have your clients told you that you are good at doing” or “what have your clients told you that you do differently from other trainers that is good?”

3) Have there been moments that you have experienced while training a client that you are able to bring to mind that you were lost in time and space?” Phrased another way, list all of the training experiences that you have had were your mind was completely focused on the client, their movements and creating the solution to the problem they have asked you for help to solve.

4) What training experiences have you had that have left you feeling energized or elated and what experiences have you had that have left you feeling completely drained and empty of energy?”

5) How much money do you need to make per week / months / year to have your needs met, some of your wants met, to be in good standing with the CRA or IRS, and be saving money for retirement?”

6) When you look inside, are there jobs or tasks that you think SHOULD be done and that you are put on the planet to do?”

Question 1 – Doing things that you enjoy. There is a relationship between enjoyment and passion because it is very difficult to be passionate about something when we are in a negative state of mind. Enjoyment should not be mistaken with feeling good – pleasure is a separate experience and while the two things may go together, they do not necessarily have to.

Question 2 – Doing things you are good at. Getting good at something does not happen by accident. There is a formula – paying attention completely while practicing consistently for a long period of time. It’s very simple, but it is hard work. The fact that you are good at something is an indication that you have put in a lot of the work for some reason. This reason is NOT chance or a random thing. More likely you did it because it didn’t seem like work while you were doing it. This characteristic is important because no matter what you do or how much you like doing it, following your passion in terms of work will not mean that you do not work. The opposite is true, you will likely spend more time working, and most of this work will be at a very high intensity. While it is not impossible that your passion will land on something that you have not yet done, it is best to consider the things we have already done when checking for clues. There is a lot of useful information that we’ll benefit from processing before we go off into the realm of the unknown in the event we need to go looking further.

Question 3 – Being completely present. This is the opposite of clock watching, being aware that other people in the gym are watching you, or wondering what else might be going on. Some might describe this as a flow state or a hyper awareness of the present moment. I’d describe it as interfacing with reality in such a way that your brain and body react to whatever is going on without a moment of thought or consideration.

Question 4 – Level of energy tasks leave you with. I find this question to be one of the more interesting and revealing questions that someone can answer simply because most people do not think about the world in terms of energizing experiences; although most are familiar with draining ones. This is weird given that humans spend so much of their life working. A third of your week days and a quarter of your time is spent in an activity that is aimed at generating enough money to make life possible. Consider that for a second. While is seems like maybe it’s fine if you hate your job, or just don’t like it, but if you were given the task of designing a life for someone else, would you set it up in such a way as to ensure that a quarter of their time was spent doing something that was draining, unpleasant, or the chore that “work” seems to be for so many people?

Look at it this way: Let’s say that you have a life expectancy of 80 years. Consider that while eating a chicken wing at your 60th birthday party you start to choke and no one comes to help you out. You die and it’s all over. Now imagine that no one in the world thinks there is anything bad about this. They just see it as normal and the way life goes. Lots of people die at their 60th birthday party. In fact, it’s kind what 60th birthday parties are for. Everyone just accepts that the final 25% of your life is just taken away because that’s just how it goes.

It’s a stupid thing to think about because we are raised to believe that life is precious. There is a disproportionate amount of money spent on the healthcare for those who are in the last years of their life meaning we want to prolong it for as long as possible. There’s no way anyone would agree to just cut it short by 20 years and eliminate 25% of it. Except this is very close to what most people do with 25% of their life. And it isn’t the final years when mobility and vitality are reducing, we are burning 25% of the time between 25 and 60 – 35 years of living and hating a quarter of it.

This is why passion is so important and why working at something that leaves us feeling energized should not just be a luxury, it should be a necessity. Energy is critical for engaging the world, being alert, and enthusiastically identifying and solving problems.

Question 5 – The amount of money you need. This question has very little to do with passion per say, but knowing the answer to it will close off a lot of open loops that the brain has evolved to be concerned about that siphon off a lot of useful mental energy. A simple fact about the brain is that it cannot focus on the present when it has doubts about the future. When it is not certain that there will be enough money to cover rent and food next month, it will get caught in a loop trying to solve the problem of getting enough money to cover rent and food. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but thinking about a solution to a problem that you haven’t really realized is a problem is not the same thing as taking the actions that are necessary to solve the problem. In fact, the brain spontaneously seeks out problems to solve even when no problem actually exists, so knowing how much income you need to cover your needs, some of your wants, and your retirement will effectively shut down 85% of the automatic problem finding and solving that the brain gets after.

Question 6 – Your unique purpose for being on the planet. This question has nothing specifically to do with training, fitness, or exercise; although the reason why you do these things might reveal a lot about the answer. Doing a job that fulfills your purpose will contribute more to the quality of your life than almost everything else.

The concept of purpose is relatively new, and is a consequence of technological improvements and the specialization of labour that have allowed us to get our needs met with incredible ease. Since we no longer need to spend all of our time hunting, farming, building shelter and protecting ourselves and our families from threats, we have the ability to expand our understanding of who and what we are past the boundaries of mere survival. This is both bad and good. It’s bad because it adds a level of complexity to life that cannot exist when one is in a constant battle for survival – when scarcity and danger lurk everywhere, remaining alive IS our only purpose and taking care of things didn’t leave much room for anything else.

This is no longer the case, there is a lot of space to fill with novel activities or things that are done for no clear reason other than for their own sake. We are now free to do almost anything, and that means that we need to figure out what that is. This isn’t as easy as it seems given the hollow and empty nature of many things. Narrative meanings are complicated and not self-evident. The level of knowledge / wisdom / understanding that is required to accurately articulate a congruent meaning is remarkably high. It can be argued that without society the notion of living a life of meaning would simply never have been considered let alone talked about.

It’s very deep. Meaning requires a system of morals / ethics along with a clear understanding of the scale of experiences ranging from bad to good and then to better. While human beings may be innately curious and are spontaneously moral in so far as we know the difference between good and bad, or good and evil, the plotting of experiences as bad, good, or better is not universally shared. Some people who love working out will consider an exhaustive near maximal piece of work to be a better experience than a warm-up that isn’t painful, hard or even remotely tiring. These same individuals would consider the same piece of work, if done to unsuccessfully make a connecting flight at the airport, to be a bad experience. When this is compared to moral rankings, reducing suffering or improving someone’s well-being are ALWAYS morally positive actions, regardless of the level of ease at which the goal is achieved and regardless of the person.

Having said all of this, we live NOW when there is both the free-time to fill with activities and the baseline level of knowledge to allow for the cultivation of a narrative meaning for our purpose to life. We are of course able to ignore this opportunity and just run through life on autopilot, enjoying and suffering whatever happens to occur. Congruence and consistency are not critical for life to continue; they don’t actually matter when we get right down to it. Life however, becomes much clearer and a lot easier when we are able to answer the questions “why am I here on the planet” and “what is the purpose of my life?”  Knowing these things gives us direction and power / energy to START and KEEP moving in that direction, which makes decisions easier and creates a strong rational for the logical trade of effort in the quest for a specific outcome.

Once you have answered the questions, reread the answers over and over again and allow your brain to track in on the patterns or realizations about the connection between all of these things. There will be something there that you will have been living by but have been completely unaware of the role it was playing on your decision making process. This step is not easy to explain given the nature of how human beings think and the impact our personal history has on shaping the specific nature of our individual thinking. But a lack of ease should not stop you from taking the time to uncover the invisible patterns in your life, particularly given the huge upside to doing it.

As thoughts start to flow into your mind, start writing them down. Spelling, grammar, and sentence structure do not matter, what is critical is capturing the thought. Most of them will not be accurate and may not have anything to do with anything important. But each one of them that you capture will be like a stepping stone that moves you across the stream. This practice can be helpful in other areas given how it serves to interrupt your automatic thinking and force you to critically review the words that you write down. Under normal thinking conditions, a thought enters our mind, it is instantly accepted as true and then we reprocess it. This is only the experience of it, the reality of it is that we have already started to reprocess the thought BEFORE we became consciously aware of it. By writing it down, we get to go back to the beginning to re-evaluate the statement for accuracy while buying our brain a little bit more time to generate other thoughts or possibilities.  

The more your write, the better your thoughts will become in general. Some of them may seem silly, some of them will be silly, and some of them will be transformative leaps forward. Just keep writing them down. The purpose of this exercise is not to end-up with a single uniform answer that reframes your entire life as a straight line between related events. That might happen, it has for some, but that isn’t the goal. The truth is that life is so complicated, that YOU are so complicated, that a uniform theory of everything isn’t really in the cards. Instead, you are trying to generate clarity about the interconnections of your choices. There is a thread that joins them all, and that is what you are trying to find and start to pull on.

At some point you will either have a flash of profound insight, run out of thoughts, or possibly be flooded with a sense of gratitude. All are fine. Exhausting your thought stream is a powerful accomplishment, one that will pay off over the days and weeks that follow. Thinking is both fast and slow. The results can be instant or they can take time to grow. When nothing more is coming out, you can be confident that you have pushed a lot of information into the brain that the slow thinking will be working on over the next few hours and days. Be aware that these insights will be revealed shortly and be ready to capture them when they bubble to the surface.

The profound insight and sense of gratitude should also be captured on paper. Both will be staggering to your thought processes and to your consciousness. Both will steal your attention and effectively hold it hostage for a period of time. Good, that’s what you want. Emotional experiences that are this powerful tell us that something very important has occurred and the emotion is the brains way of telling us to pay attention, learn, and use the information in the future to shape our decisions.

Once you reach the end – either by running out of thoughts, feeling grateful, or having a profound insight – make sure you captured everything in writing and then do something else if you can. Clear the mind and give the brain a chance to process everything that it has experienced during the exercise.

The eventual outcome will be a sentence or two that describes why you are on the planet. It will be so much more than that though. The sentence or two will contain what you would do with your time if you didn’t have anything else to do. If you won billions of dollars, after you got back from a long vacation and grew bored with eating the best foods and had grown tired of amusing yourself almost to death, you would do things that were the manifestations of the purpose statement / sentences. While you may not have the luxury of not having to work, you do have the opportunity to seek out work that allows you to live your purpose.

This is where question 5 comes in. Most of us do not need nearly as much money as we think we do. We come to need it because we don’t enjoy our jobs and the money allows us to distract ourselves from the hellish experience we are living through. When we are pursuing meaningful work that allows us to actualize our purpose, we do not need to be distracted from our life. In fact, our work will give us energy while we are doing it and it will allow us to sleep very soundly at night KNOWING that what we are doing matters, is helpful, and is a good use of time. We’ll get paid enough to live comfortably, so we won’t think about money and will be free to put our full attention into our work, which will help us do the best work we can. Our clients will notice and respond to this. They will work harder, recommend your services, and feel completely connect to you as both a service provider and as a human being. You will grow your business and your level of wealth will climb.

Most importantly though is that you’ll be content, valuable, and completely present when you are working. Your conscientiousness will be at its peak as the right answers will just come to mind and flow out of you. There will be no need for motivational self-talk and you will have abundant energy for work and for life. And this is what living on purpose is all about, having passion for every waking moment and every action that you get to take!

What Role Do You Play As A Fitness Professional?

In the world of fitness there are many ways to contribute to the lives of the participants and matching the role you are most passionate about with the clients who need this type of help will open the doors to your most satisfying career. Sadly the opposite is true, choosing to work with clients who do not need your specific type of help will result in a boring and short career as a fitness professional.

First things first, fitness professionals serve as proxies for their clients. When a client doesn’t know the proper way to move, they connect with a trainer who knows how to move. When a client doesn’t have the appropriate nutritional habits, they’ll connect with a coach who knows the proper food and ways to eat. When a client doesn’t have the needed will power to sustain regular workouts, they connect with a coach who will act as their will power, being collaboratively forceful to get the client to do that which they lack the will to do on their own. If a client is unwilling to commit to a better future, a trainer will get their commitment by selling them a block of training. When a client gets caught-up in their stories, a coach will give them a different perspective and help them separate the truth from the fiction within the story.

Given that we act as proxies for our clients and that we have a particular passion / ability, we cultivate long gratifying careers when we are able to be passionate proxies to our clients. For example, if we love coaching movement, particularly foundation movement, we’ll be most satisfied when our work is made-up of coaching newer trainees who are open to the coaching and highly motivated to adapt. We’ll be less satisfied coaching high level athletes who know how to move efficiently and even less satisfied trying to get people to commit to a better future, as these clients have not yet agreed to be coached so there won’t be any movements to prescribe, watch, or correct. By the same token, those who love to help clients generate future possibilities will feel stifled if they spend their time engaging with people who have actually made the decision to move forward with training because these clients need movement coaching.

There is a life cycle with training spanning the range between non-trainee (A), thinking about it (B), beginner (C), intermediate (D), advanced (E), athlete (F), and relapsed non-trainee (G); this last group is distinct from the non-trainee group but only for a while – after a length of time those who are no longer working out become non-trainees.

It is not unusual for a trainer to enjoy working with people from a variety of these groups, to have a specific gift for one of them and to find the rest of them to be unappealing or exceptionally hard to work with. For example, there are similarities between B and G in that neither is actively working out BUT both are more open to it than someone who simply doesn’t do it (A). B and G just need to uncover the compelling reason why they need to start and they will begin. Person G might have achieved their initial objective and stopped why person B never found out what that objective was in the first place. The conversation with B and G will be very similar, while these conversations will have a completely different tone, feeling and intention than those with someone who has no interest in working-out or has not yet realized that they have a compelling reason to do so.

Training beginners is very different than training advanced participants, and while training advanced people has a lot in common with training athletes, athletes need more structure and planning in order for them to be in peak physical condition for their key performance dates. Athletes are very easy to train in terms of their motivation and willingness to do what they are told, a coach needs to be very specific with what they are telling them to do as there is very little room for error given that a small change in form will have a much larger impact in terms of performance.

Personally, I connect best with C and D, and moderately well with B. I have enjoyed training athletes but accept that there are better coaches for them than me, and I don’t have the innate patience to work with them effectively. I’m much better at getting people to move safely than I am at getting them to move specifically. I have coached weight lifting and power lifting and I don’t find it to be very appealing. However, I am very effective at getting someone to push themselves to their physical limit in a functional circuit or to dig a little deeper and cross into the realm of maximum intensity in a cycling class. I’m also much better at noticing and pointing out the tiny physical changes in terms of appearance or ability that are experienced during the first months of training than I am at analyzing the lifting numbers and determining an athletes rate of neurological adaptation.

All of this is to say that I am a great trainer for people who are just starting out and I am an effective sales person for those individuals who are on the fence about starting a workout program. I have the science background to design effective advanced programs although I do not have the passion or interest to take people through them on a regular basis. I just don’t engage high performance athletes because their training time is too valuable to be spent with me and my coaching time is too valuable to be spend with them. E.g. if they want to go to the Olympics or become a professional they should work with someone who is able to take the time to plot their course very specifically, while I am taking the time to move hundreds of people through the phases of not being sure they want to work out to not being sure they can work out to being sure they can work out to knowing what to do to get what they want, how intensely to do it and how to avoid injuries while doing it. When the fit is right, I LOVE what I do, just as my clients LOVE learning what they need to do, as well as what they CAN do – it will be a pure WIN:WIN. When the fit is wrong, I call my mistake and find them the right trainer. Even though no one is really losing, it is always better to exit break even situations and seek out a WIN:WIN.

Given that I like people and have a genuine curiosity about how they engage the world, it is common for me to have the enrollment conversation with people that I never end up training – either because they are a better fit with another trainer or because it was discovered that they didn’t actually want to work out and simply needed some perspective about life and their relationship with it. E.g. while most people would benefit from physical exercise, not everyone should set about trying to improve their body composition or improve their fitness. Exercise feels amazing for a lot of people who work out regularly – exercise of a specific duration and intensity will trigger the body to release reward chemicals that are pleasurable, reinforcing, and which have a positive impact on mood and psychological health. However, the intensity is rather high and the duration is relatively long, so triggering the release requires a baseline level of fitness that is fairly high. 15 minutes of movement at an average intensity of 82 percent may not seem like a lot, but anything above 80 percent is very close to breathless effort that is physically painful due to the accumulation of lactate. Until your body learns how to tolerate this discomfort, exercise is not going to be immediately pleasurable. So while the human being can be trained to make exercise feel fantastic in the moment, doing so is a skill that requires a lot of work that has all of the characteristics of suffering.

If working out is not for someone, it is better to find that out at the beginning and to completely avoid starting. Too often when a large training package is sold to someone who doesn’t actually want to improve their health and fitness, there is a large drop in the quality of their life because they are out the money, the time, they get nothing of value out of the workouts, they hurt physically, and in the end the entire experience has been a massive waste of resources. This doesn’t work for me because my main objective is to reduce suffering so if I convince someone to take a journey that they honestly don’t want to take, regardless of the long term potential health benefits, I have contributed to their perceived and actual level of suffering. It’s so much better to not start the journey than to begin one that doesn’t need to be undertaken.

I’m not saying that these people deserve to have a miserable life or that they do not deserve to enjoy the benefits of regular exercise and improved health and fitness. They do deserve to have an amazing life and reap whatever rewards they can. It is just that improving your health and fitness is hard work and not for everyone. It won’t necessarily make someone happy and in the end, the relapse rates for people who achieve a big fitness goal are very high. Feeling good and being happy are not the same thing, so when someone comes to me looking to become happier I’m going to take a straight line to the activities that lead to increased happiness and, for the record, working out and achieving a massive body transformation do not make miserable people happy in spite of the fact that they make the person feel fantastic.

In a way, I started off my career as a fitness professional believing something that wasn’t true and when I began to notice that people didn’t work the way I thought they did, I had to change my course. But what I learned during those fifteen years is useful, valuable and exactly what some people need. There is nothing to be gained by throwing it all away; the opposite is true, it is science and it is effectively instructions on how to engineer fitness. It’s knowledge and wisdom even though it was a mistake to believe that fitness is the same thing as happiness. Engineering happiness is a different science so I have had to learn it.

This means that I can work with a larger percentage of people, lead them to a couple of different outcomes – fitness and health and / or happiness and well-being – and direct them towards their actual desired path much more effectively than had I only one set of tools. This keeps the job interesting and it allows me to contribute to the positive life experiences of a larger number of people. Most importantly for me, I get to do what I am passionate about without having to convince people that they need something that they don’t. I have the freedom to work with the people I am best suited for and to actually reduce the suffering of both active and sedentary clients.

I will post the second part of this article, Finding Your Passion As A Fitness Professional, early next week.

When You Train Is Who You Are

In Choosing A Fitness Club – Post Revisited I covered some of the considerations a person might have when making a decision on what gym to join. There was a section in which I made reference to the five distinct types of people and how they tend to self-select their training times:

They are early morning, off-hour, after work, late evening lifters, and the generalists. As rules of thumb, anyone who is willing to get out of bed to go to the gym will likely be highly driven and have less time to waste on things they deem as unimportant. The after work people will have a similar desire to waste as little time as possible. The late evening lifters tend to have a very focused lifting intensity but a more laid back approach to their between sets time. Off-hour people have selected these times because they work for them in terms of traffic flow and life management. The generalists workout whenever they can or feel like it.

This is an interesting topic that I need to expand on because, in general, people unconsciously and automatically find the time that works for them and just stick with it. With the exception of the generalists, the people who workout whenever they can make the time or feel like it, the chances of people remaining as active members at a gym are determined by their ability to get this time of day selection correct. Rephrased, most people who cancel their gym memberships or stop going to the gym / working out do so as a consequence of choosing to train at the wrong time. My belief is that it isn’t that the time was not convenient for them it is that who they are is not convenient for the time they picked. Who they are is NOT so malleable as to become whatever they want it to be.

There are five different types of people which correspond to five specific time frames in terms of when people train at the gym. Anytime, or what I referred to as generalist, early morning, off-hour, after work and late evening. Let’s talk about each one specifically because being able to identify which one you are will go a long way in making sure that you get the best start on your deliberate fitness journey:

Anytime / generalist – these are people who can workout whenever they feel like and will tend to do so based more on their availability than any other factor. These people tend to be lifers who enjoy working out for its own sake. Moving feels good and being healthy is not a matter of choice, it’s a matter of necessity. There is a very good chance that if you are one of these people you already know you are and you are already a member at a gym and working out regularly. Of those who are not regular exercisers, only a very small percentage of them belong to this group. It is possible for people to become a member of this group by joining one of the other four groups first, developing the exercise habit, learning how to really enjoy it for its own sake, and them transitioning.

Personality traits include independence, internal locus of control, lack of a need for social approval, strong time management skills, self awareness and a tendency towards free-thinking. They probably won’t talk much about their training or workouts and will simply just do them. There is a very good chance that they will look like they workout and their food choices will tend to be on the healthy side of the scale. Consider these people to be the doers and not the talkers who roll with the punches in order to accomplish unreasonable amounts of work.

Early morning – these are people who need to workout early in the morning, usually within an hour or so of waking and their first venture out of the house will be to the gym. Their training goals will primarily be to improve fitness and improve body composition with a higher focus on reducing body fat. They may not necessarily be morning people and may drag themselves through the first thirty minutes of being awake, but they will show a dramatic surge of energy once their workout begins and will always leave the gym feeling WAY more energetic than how they arrived. They will show a propensity towards “all or nothing thinking” and this will manifest as a need to get to the gym by a certain time or else not going. Missed workouts will not be made-up later in the day and will only be made-up later in the week.

Personality traits will include being highly driven, goal oriented, binary in their thinking, a tendency towards accountability to other people leading them to benefit from group fitness or personal training experiences. On days that they miss their morning workouts, as opposed to off days, they will be a little insufferable and will operate very differently compared to the days they worked out or took a planned off day. It is be as though one bad decision first thing in the morning serves to set the tone for more bad decisions through out the day. These people are best served by getting out of bed as soon as the alarm goes off in the morning, so to NEVER push snooze, and get up at the same time every day REGARDLESS of what they have planned. A successful first five minutes will result in a day of massive action and the creation of a lot of forward momentum.

Off-hour – these are people who have the flexibility to workout more or less anytime and choose to get to the gym when it is less busy. There reasons for training will be varied – strength, body composition, muscle growth, fitness, cardio performance, or for pleasure. They will have a similar mind set to the early morning people in terms of there being a cut off time for going to the gym although they will have a wider range in terms of when they can go. If they miss a workout, they can catch-up later in the week or will do more work in the remaining workouts of the week to make sure they get the training time in. The people will be the first to have training partners or to form more obvious social groups. For example, the early morning people might participate in fitness classes and spend time socially with the other participants, but their conversation during class will have a transactional flair and may lack a closeness or softness that is afforded by having more time to fully engage someone. Off-hour people, on the other hand, will be able to take the time to engage other people in a more connected way. Their closeness will be obvious to others and it can often be interpreted as cliquey. This is usually not the case however as they will welcome new members in and will quickly begin to look out for the needs of others.

Not all off-hour people are joiners or part of a group. Some will be as single minded as the anytime / generalists or the early morning people, but just have the flexibility to go to the gym whenever they like. With these specific people, they will display the same “no nonsense” approach to their time at the gym and will come across as transactional vs. collaborative. They have a mission while they are at the gym and nothing is going to get in their way from achieving their objective.

Personality traits for those who are not like the anytime or early morning people might include a more calm, deliberate or laid back approach to life, having a success pattern that includes a social or connection component, an absence of any perceivable sense of urgency, and the heightened quality of relationships with the staff.

After work – these are the people who workout right after work and for which the gym represents “me” time in terms of throwing way the days stress. Their training objectives will be very similar to those of the early morning – general fitness and body composition with a higher focus towards reducing body fat – and they will have an awareness that they will be able to have a higher degree of flexibility with their dinner as a result of working out so close to it. Their food choices will be positively impacted by this proximity and their workout will serve to empower / improved decision making – their meals on workout days will be healthier than their non-workout days , with particularly positive impact on their dinner choices. They will have slightly more flexibility when if comes to delaying their gym visit, but there will be a cut off and most of them will NOT come to the gym if they go home first. Missed workouts will only be made-up later in the week and the effect of missing a planned workout will very often lead to a series of bad health choices in the hours between the missed workout and going to bed. The elation that is experienced by the early morning people will not be so obvious or may not even be present. However, the workout will serve to refocus them for the rest of the day and the massive reduction in physiological and emotional stress that their training causes will manifest itself as a enhanced sense of well-being, contentment or peace of mind.

Personality traits include being driven, goal oriented, determined, the ability to manage time and balance many competing demands. There will be a more or less equal mix between those who are accountable to themselves and those who are accountable to other people, although most will have an internal locus of control in terms of determining what they want for their future. The mix of energies will be broad ranging from almost manic with an exceptionally high sense of urgency to a low almost sedated “I don’t give a crap” / “nothing matters” which will have a lot to do with the evening responsibilities of the people – parents will still be getting after it because their day is about to begin again while those with fewer responsibilities might be crossing off the final item on their daily “to do” list.

The after work group will be the largest of the five. It will show the greatest diversity in how they use the gym space and services. There will be a high number of group fitness enthusiasts and a higher percentage of personal training consumers. Monday and Tuesday between 4:45 pm and 7:15 pm tend to be the busiest times of the week, with Saturday morning being a distant third, although there are regional specific patterns based on demographics.

Late evening – these are the people who, for the most part, go home after work to eat dinner before coming to the gym. Their training goals are very much on body composition with a big focus on gaining muscle, and on the development of strength. In general there will be a much higher percentage of males vs. females when compared to any other time of the day. The energy will be lower and slower with the exception of the periods of time spent under the bar when the people will be putting between 75% and 100% effort in. To a neutral observer it will seem like very little work is getting done when compared to early morning and after work. However, it will only seem this way. The reality will be that while there are fewer calories being burned via the cardio equipment and classes, there will be a lot more work being done in terms of force X distance. The time needed by the central nervous system to recover from these great efforts is the reason why the energy between sets will be very low. There is a great sense of urgency but these people have learned how to channel it into the lifting.

Personality traits include being driven, goal oriented, strong willed to stubborn, with an almost complete self-accountability to oneself for the work that needs to get done, with mixed accountability to others for showing-up. This is the realm of training partners because of the need for spotters and because progress is so slow the lifting of heavy objects can become a hyper competitive way of keep things interesting. These people tend to never miss workouts and will usually create and stick to a very rigid schedule that does not change often or vary much. The physiological reasons for this are clear and fairly well supported by evidence – building muscle is a process that requires you to train a muscle a particular way, give it a specific length of time to recover and then train it again, over and over again for years. Getting massive is not something that happens by accident or as a consequence of achieving any other fitness goal. This is different from fat loss, improved general fitness or specific cardiovascular health which are complementary objectives – by training for one you inevitably achieve the others.

There will be a much lower percentage of people who are doing intense cardio training because of how that type of training ramps up metabolic rate and tends to make falling asleep very difficult. This is why there will be very few people training to reduce body fat at this time of day. Very few general interest classes will be offered during this time and those classes that are available will tend to be very skills focused with a narrow appeal – boxing or other combat type sports.

How do you make use of this information? The first thing you will need to do is figure out what you are trying to achieve and consider what your schedule looks like in terms of open times you have or can make to train. The next thing you will need to do is take an honest inventory of your traits and begin to compare them to what is outlined above. Once you start to get a feeling for the type of person you are, factor in your training goals and consider what the ideal time of day is to fit that training is. Re-look at your schedule to see if you can make this time available for training three to five times a week.

None of what I have said above should be taken to mean that you cannot make a less than ideal situation work. You absolutely can, but knowing that you are moving forward into a head wind is often the only thing that is needed to ensure that you keep moving forward. No matter what your goals are, you will need to do a lot of work and this work is not ever easy, even when you learn to love doing it. The thing is, it’s a lot easier to learn to love working this hard when your training time matches who you are. The weights will give you enough resistance, there is no point in adding more friction by trying to do something that you have never done during a time that doesn’t suit you doing it.