Lessons from a Friday in August
By: Michael Beiter
Here are some notes from a morning full of work:
Grandma, that eats a Hostess cupcake and glass of chocolate milk every morning, says to her son, who is avoiding gluten, "That's just not healthy what you're doing."
Is it any wonder that the son and his wife have difficult conversations with grandparents about what they feed their grandchildren? I've seen this play out more times than I can count.
One of my clients has maintained thirty pounds of fat loss for over a year. He came to check in today after exercising and eating on his own for ten weeks. We typically meet monthly. He maintained his weight and body fat percentage. A guy like this is good at striving for goals, meeting them, and moving on to the next. I had to encourage him to reward himself for MAINTENANCE, or no change, just like he would for GROWTH or FAT LOSS. This is a mental shift that is hard for everyone to make. So this guy is assigned to reward himself with a purchase or experience that makes him feel good and would normally reserve only for celebration.
What is he celebrating? Maintenance. He's going to send me a receipt of what he gets himself. Just know this is one of the hardest mindset shifts to make in fitness.
Another gal, who is 40, came in with one of the more common fitness myths on her mind: "If I don't feel like I'm dying at the end of a workout, I don't feel like I've done enough."
We quickly identified the distortion affecting her thought: emotional reasoning - The assumption that your negative emotions necessarily reflect how things are.
This is the same line of thinking that pervades wokeism.
It's easy to work around. In her instance, we used her Apple watch and her heart rate, minutes exercised, and sets and reps completed to prove that she did plenty of work, regardless of whether she felt like death afterward.
The fittest people out there regularly work out and leave without a bead of sweat on them. They don't need to feel like puking, be covered in perspiration, or be unable to walk for days to know they got work done.
