The Truth About Truth

There are some many things about my job that I love. I get to help people become the best version of themselves imaginable, reach potentials they didn’t know they had, and be able to affect someone’s life in more ways than just their current fitness level. But.

There is also a part of my job that I don’t like. The points where I have to break someone’s mentality of quick fixes and quick results. I realize this should probably be a good thing in my eyes, but I hate doing it. I wish we didn’t believe lies, but we do. We do it because it’s easier than hearing the truth.

It’s the same truth behind why magazines tell you that you’ll lose 10lbs in a week of doing crunches, gain 5lbs of muscle by adding in one miracle exercise, or be significantly happier if you just do X,Y, and Z. We all want the path of least resistance, otherwise we would have to work for what we want.

Wouldn’t that just be terrible?

The unfortunate part is that we’ve all bought into something that wasn’t what we thought it was. How many times have you bought something, looked back on your purchase, and thought to yourself that you should have just saved your money?

Probably quite a few times, right.

As an example, let’s talk about your health:

You’ve been out of school for a while now, but were quite active while you were in it. You’ve noticed you gained some weight and are not sure where it’s coming from. You think to yourself, “I still eat the same, I don’t understand what changed”. So what did change? It wasn’t your metabolism. It’s your lifestyle habits. You stopped exercising, whether it was swimming, playing soccer, basketball, running, or going to the gym. Maybe something got in the way – a significant other, school, work, kids, etc. But you stopped taking care of yourself as much as you were. Things changed and as a result, so did your body.

What now?

There’s a couple of ways to approach making this situation better, here are some of the common ones:

• Change your lifestyle habits

• Take advice from a fitness guru

• Take “skinny pills”

• Say screw it and accept your situation

You ask your friends what they’ve done in the past to lose weight, bulk up, or feel better in general. You get some mixed reviews. Some say you should just eat cleaner and workout more. Some, maybe with a little more experience, tell you to hire a qualified trainer. And some, well some tell you about this great “fitness guy” they saw on Facebook who sells waist slimmers, skinny pills, and tummy trimmer shakes to get you in tip-top shape. Some just tell you that you don’t need to do anything differently and you look fine (a momentary relief).

So many options.

You decide to start “eating clean” and still consume way too many or too few calories…and nothing changes. What?! I thought if I just ate clean, the calories didn’t matter! The quality of your food is high and nutritionally dense. That’s great! But your still eating way over your daily calorie needs and have therefore gained more body fat as a result. Maybe a better option would be to determine your daily calorie and macronutrient ratio

needs and aim to work out often enough to gradually see some changes. But I digress.

Okay, next option.

You decide to now take the advice of the fitness guru and buy his/her waist slimmer for the magical price of half your mortgage and some ultra-healthy shakes to trim down the belly fat. Great! Now you’re drinking $9 drinks that cost $0.35 to make – in a corset! You lose some weight, so you decide to stop drinking the shakes and take off the corset of death.

Wait what?! why is the weight coming back?

Oh right, you went to back to your regular eating habits with an added shake here and there.

Although the premise of a waist slimmer and a couple of healthy shakes are appealing, they don’t resolve the main issue. The promise of quick changes and short sighted lifestyle changes always lead back to the same lingering habits that preceded them. The mentality of short-sighted goals will continually bring you back to the same position, so let’s take that mentality and look at it as a long-term, slowly changing lifestyle adjustment and see where that gets us. I’ll come back to this.

Okay, two options left.

Quit trying and accept your fate or dispel all the crap you’ve heard and seek some real advice. You do some looking around and find out that if you eat a consistent amount of calories (definitely above 1200) and exercise regularly with enough intensity, you’ll lose body fat and keep some of that muscle mass. Maybe you’ll even gain some. For the ones looking to build, eating more seems to help and hey! You find out you can still eat some of that junk food and lose body fat! Awesome-sauce.

What took so long?

Well, the unfortunate truth is that we all tend to take the path of least resistance until it becomes the path of most resistance. We learn lessons the hard way because the first two or three options sounded easier than the last one. So why wouldn’t we pick the first couple? They are the obvious choices. Once again, unfortunately, you had to learn the hard way that believing the path of least resistance is the best path.

If you knew right from the start that to get what you wanted in fitness and in life in general was difficult, would you still choose it? Or would you quit because the road ahead is uncertain and you don’t whether your left foot or right foot goes forward first?

You ask yourself, “what if I fail? what I made the wrong choice? What if…there was a better option I could’ve taken?”.

Guess what. You will never know what the road ahead has for you. The best you can do is take steps and see where they lead you. If you look back on a decision and think it was a bad one, change it next time. If it was a good one, keep going. Learn as you go. Fail, get up, and fail again until you do it right.

This is a key lesson in life. Truth is hard to hear and harder to accept. You will get knocked down over and over, but it’s better than taking the easy route full of fluffy lies and comfort and then failing anyways. Make the hard choices from the start if you can. Be smart about your choices, but don’t let the fear of making one stop you from progressing.

#truth #magazine #lies #mentality