No Excuses, No Apologies. Just Action and Excellence.

Let’s kick off the New Year the right way though, and set the scene with a theme for 2017, as follows! 

No Excuses:

I hate these jerk offs on social media that post those “what’s your excuse?” bodyshaming type memes. That’s not what I’m getting at here. People don’t need an excuse to not do something that’s not something they want to do, and not something they’re all that interested in. You follow?

But I’m talking to people who ARE interested in pursuing their goals through fitness. To those people… be looking for ways to make it happen, not reasons why you can’t. Don’t cheat yourself like that.

So it means you’ll have to get up early to train? So be it.

So it means you have to train in the evening after work and there’ll be days when you’re tired and tempted to just zonk out in front of the tv instead? Go fucken train.

But you don’t like the right foods? That’s not a thing. Do some form of IIFYM.
Too busy to eat regular meals and snacks? Bullshit. Schedule your meals and have a plan based on choices you like, to meet your requirements. As a living organism you need to eat, and you inevitably WILL eat… so do it with a plan to meet your requirements and facilitate health, happiness and results. Any variation on “but I can’t” is bullshit.

Some of us will find this more challenging than others… but try your best. Even a small improvement is worth making, and the situation is never hopeless unless you refuse to try.

No Apologies:

You need to eat and you’re passionate about training.

Lock training into your schedule. Plan and eat stuff that you like.

Anyone has a problem with it? thinks they get to have an opinion on it? wants to distract, derail, or discourage you from doing what YOU want and what is in YOUR best interests? They can go fuck themselves. They can zip it.

Action:

Not just “action” but RIGHT ACTION.

Strategic action. Productive training and fueling for results rather than restrictive eating and destructive fatigue chasing “calorie burning” approaches. Train with an enjoyable and strategic approach that is conducive to your goals, whatever they are.

And Excellence:

We’re here to have a good life and be a version of ourselves that we’re proud of. Not thinking “I wish I could, if only… & if not for all these reasons”. Find a way. Find all the ways. It doesn’t have to and probably never will be perfect but do what you can, as well as you can, as often as you can, and be proud of yourself.

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Mindset Coaching

This was supposed to be a video but the camera kept screwing up so I decided to come home and eat instead. Then I posted it as a facebook post... but facebook did that fun little thing where it detects that you put a lot of thought into something and therefore refuses to show it to any of your followers. Thanks for that.

This is important stuff though! Too important to go to waste... so I'm moving it over here to blogspot for prosperity.

Now though; mindset.

Mindset is important, but a lot of people talk about it as if it is ALL that matters. "If you just have the right mindset and be positive and love your self" blah blah blah. Sadly, nope.

If you want to be successful at ANY goal in life, it comes down to consistently taking the appropriate action. Not just "take action" either, that's another thing, that is. Consistently taking The Appropriate Action.

That might be described as working to an intelligent strategy, periodically assessing your progress, and then revising the strategy as seems best indicated.

MINDSET is a great influencer in how likely you are to adopt that correct course of action, vs some other course of action or inaction instead.

So IMO you can "believe in yourself" all you like and that's great, but if you're not also working consistently to an appropriate strategy, that belief is likely to dry up as you fail to see any progress.

On the other hand though... not believing in yourself or in your potential for success is likely to be a self fulfilling prophecy as you resign yourself to some other course of action (or inaction) other than the one someone would take if they declared to the world, "this is what I want, I believe in myself and I know I can be successful, and here's how I'm about to make it all happen, just you watch".

That's how you want to be thinking. Although even if you WEREN'T so upbeat and optimistic, but you did it that way anyway, you'd get where you're trying to go.

So, mindset matters. But here's what else...

If you really, REALLY insist upon success... it's not enough to want, hope, or even intend to be successful. You need to make a decision, and decide that you will ensure success.

In our training related goals we do this by having a plan. Not merely the intention to make it to all of our training sessions, but a schedule we have decided upon at which time training IS gong to happen. Not merely the intention to log our meals at the end of the day and see if we were within range of our fueling requirements, but a plan based on choices we have decided upon in advance in serving sizes that we KNOW will bring us to the right balance over the course of the day.

Not just knowing what needs to be done, but actually have a plan and a schedule we will work to, that ensures that was needs to be done does in fact get done. Anything else... hoping for the best, seeing how things turn out... that's all still leaving a lack of success as an acceptable option.

At least in the early in stages until it becomes second nature, you must DECIDE to be successful and then set up a plan in advance that ensures success.

What's next?

If you have decided that your training & condition related goals are important to you, and that success is the only outcome that you can accept... now's the time to drop your email address into the box at the top right of the page, to gain access to a whole stack of free resources and learn how to join my Flexible Fueling Online program where we'll work together on a custom strategy.

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Then and now...

I was just thinking of a couple of things. Back when I started doing this, it was because people asked me to. The online coaching stuff, I mean. It wasn't something many people were doing as far as I'm aware, but I do vaguely recall people speculating that it would become big in the near future, as it is has done.

Anyway. I started doing it because a few people wrote to me from around the world, saying "I love your blog, I wish I lived close enough to come and train with you..." and we'd get talking and I'd give them a program and some macro targets. After the first handful got excellent results, word got out, more people wanted programs, and fast forward to now and a whole unique system has evolved.

The eating disorder awareness and relapse avoidance stuff that I do, that's another thing. I started doing that because people asked me, too. "You have helped me so much, you need to let other people now that they can come to you for help so that they don't end up with someone else who is going to mess them up"... that sort of thing. I wasn't sure about the ethics of it, you know?

So that's the other thing. When I started doing this, not many people were doing an IIFYM or Flexible Dieting approach. In fact I don't even think the phrase "Flexible Dieting" had been coined yet. In the groups I was in at least, it was all "clean eating", "paleo" and in particular it was "elimination diet".

This was highly, HIGHLY problematic.

An elimination diet is highly restrictive, with any grain based or processed foods, any legumes, fruit & dairy "eliminated". Now while there may be medical grounds for such a diet in some cases, for a PT to believe EVERY client who comes to train needs to be on such a diet is highly problematic, especially based on the assumption that they ALL have conditions such as "leaky gut" and "adrenal fatigue" which (a) have no basis in science, and (b) if they did exist would constitute medical conditions to be diagnosed and managed by a medical professional and not by a fitness professional.

Clearly, right?

The additional issue with such approaches is that clients literally are taught to fear foods of different types, are taught to ascribe moral value to foods of different types, and are taught that failure to see progress / lose weight is due to any specific individual instance of moral failure where they have partaken in "unclean" eating.

For example... not losing any weight this month might be put down to having cereal, or toast, or a slice of birthday cake two Tuesdays before last. Which is beyond preposterous and beyond problematic, especially if you consider what drastic action a desperate and vulnerable client might take to rectify a situation where they are feeling guilty about having just eaten something they "shouldn't have", and believing that it will render all of their other efforts in training and adhering to the rules of the diet void, and meaning another week or month or however long without making progress towards their weight loss goal.

It was ALWAYS a "weight loss goal", as well.
That's something else that has changed, this time for the better.

Now... how an elimination diet or similarly restrictive diet might result in weight loss is quite simply because people have less options to choose from and in particular less energy dense options, so they tended to result in a much lower total energy intake and a higher percentage of that intake being from protein. Eventually more people were able to understand, any weight loss was due to the reduction of energy intake, rather than because any specific food or subset of foods was causing weight gain / precluding weight loss outside of the context of excessive total calories. This is a vast improvement in terms of being a more evidence based approach and one that less resembles orthorexia nervosa, however the issue you have now is that a poor understanding of this theory of energy balance means that it is interpreted in overly simplistic terms of "if they are losing weight they are in calorie deficit, if they are not losing weight they are in calorie surplus", which is more often than not applied in terms of continuously and recklessly slashing intake targets, adding more and more high intensity exercise sessions to maximise energy expenditure (aka "burn calories"), and perhaps even to introduce fasting when this fails to result in fat loss.

Whereas previously the blame for a failure to see fat loss would have been any isolated instance of failing to "eat clean", currently the blame will be on any isolated instance of failing to restrict to the prescribed calorie limit &/or to adhere to a precise macronutrient split. So... as an aspiring trainer who is networking with people in the industry, you will frequently see social media posts talking about how online coaching is a great way to supplement your income without taking on more clients locally, with free webinars or paid mentorships to teach you how to write the right blog entries and social media posts and email subscription content to get people to sign up and pay the money for your new online lifestyle coaching service.

And that's fine... we all want to make money, and if you can make money from helping other people get happier and healthier and to make progress towards their fitness goals, all the better.

For the consumers out there though and especially ones who may have been unsuccessful and had a bad experience with online coaching, especially of the "you must still be eating too much" variety... you have to consider: they may have a professional web presence and be good at marketing, they may have been taught how to say all the right things, tug on the heartstrings &/or manipulate people into wanting to be accepted and belong to their "tribe"... but are they actually any good? Do they actually have a good understanding of how training works, how sports nutrition & fueling works, and do they actually have any experience at coaching people?

That's what I'd want to know.

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