Case Study: Dan
By: Michael Beiter
Before working with Mike, Dan would wear his golf polo as part of Team Europe at an annual golf tournament emulating the Ryder Cup. Dozens of his friends get together and play courses across the state over a long weekend. He's worn the same polo for a couple of years and tried it on.
"You look ridiculous; you are swimming in that thing!" my wife said.
Dan has to buy new clothes that fit his transforming body.
In 8 months, he has lost 10% of his body fat, totaling 19 lbs of the fluffy stuff.
He has a visible V-torso that keeps getting better as his waist shrinks and his chest and shoulders grow.
Dan's body changes are only part of the picture. His mental milestones are equally impressive.
Two things stand out: his resilience and ability to step into ambivalence.
Resilience is our ability to bounce back from setbacks. Dan broke a foot and lifted so many weights he developed a weightlifter's shoulder. Both are injuries that sideline people for weeks, sometimes months.
Dan showed resilience by not giving up once he was injured. He learned how to scale back his sessions and work around the areas that hurt. In this way, he's continued making progress despite an unplanned limitation.
If that wasn't enough, Dan did all this with a newborn. He could have resilience tattooed on his forehead.
Ambivalence is the state of having mixed feelings or contradictory ideas about something. In nutrition, ambivalence pops up right away. How? When I suggest that a key to fat loss is time spent eating more, it contradicts the fact that weight loss happens when we eat less.
When Dan ran into a stall with his progress, I suggested he start eating more. Once he did it, it finally registered how helpful that would be for him. Now, he's got three weeks of higher calories under his belt and looks forward to more.
His immediate takeaway: "Carbs are in fucking everything."
Isn't that the truth!?
But in all seriousness, without his resilience and willingness to try something counterintuitive, you wouldn't be reading a post about his impressive progress.
