Nobody is coming to save you
Working with hundreds of clients over the years, you start to see trends, and some of those trends are harsh truths that people don’t always want to hear, but they are precisely what people need to hear.
The decision is yours, and regardless of excuses, it will always be yours.
People get busy. Stress is a bitch. Kids can be a lot to handle. Your job sucks at times. I get it, I do, but that doesn’t mean you don’t take care of yourself properly. It means you have to plan a little smarter to ensure you are—simple workouts, simple ingredient meals, setting boundaries on your time, and following through. The alternative is watching the years pass by, making those excuses, and watching your health fade to zero.
At some point, you have to stop drinking or drink a lot less.
I know people love their alcohol, and America has such a twisted relationship with it. It is an intoxicant that people will look at you weirdly about if you say you don’t use it. Commercials show people smiling and laughing while holding a drink in their hands. Alcohol companies sponsor major sports leagues. In some towns and cities, the nightlife is entirely centered around bars and clubs.
Alcohol also has zero benefits for you.
It hinders fat loss. It slows down muscle gain. It causes cancer, cirrhosis, brain damage, and more.
It can alter your personality, providing you with an artificial social lubricant.
Of all the legal substances you can put into your body, alcohol is the worst. It isn’t even close, but try to tell someone they should cut back, and it’s like you took their child away from them and sacrificed it to some ancient pagan deity.
People will defend their alcohol intake to the death.
“I need it to unwind after a stressful day.”
“It’s a holiday!!!”
“I am on vacation.”
“I am celebrating/watching the game/out with friends/insert shitty justification here.”
Look, I have been there, and I don’t give a shit. It is a harmful substance and can impact your health negatively. At the very least, cut back to the bare minimum if you don’t want to stop. But at least do that.
I can tell you that my life improved immeasurably since I decided to quit drinking for good. I have more money, I feel better, I sleep better, and I am not adding a cancer-causing substance to my body willingly.
You can’t always eat whatever you want. I don’t give a shit what the IIFYM people say.
If you could eat whatever you want and be fit, it would be so much easier to lose fat and gain muscle. As it stands right now, all that stuff you love to eat is loaded with fat, carbs, and calories. Not only that, the amount of calories in a small serving of food is often enough to make most of it not even worth trying to fit into your macros.
One Reese’s King Size peanut butter cup is 200 calories, and that cup is 40 grams. Forty grams of food isn’t going to do a damn thing for your hunger. I am not saying you can’t ever eat a king size cup; I am saying you can’t eat it all the time.
It’s a treat, not a nutritionally sound meal.
Lifting weights is the best way to change your body composition.
There is a reason why bodybuilding is so popular—building muscle CHANGES you. I don’t mean those overly inflated chemical experiments stepping on stage at the Olympia. I mean the activity itself. Building muscle is healthy; it helps you live longer, it can help you stay alive longer if you are afflicted with a life-threatening illness, and it helps you look and feel better.
Every other activity is an add-on.
Lifting and walking.
Lifting and running.
Lifting and cycling.
Lifting and hiking.
Lifting and yoga.
Lifting and BJJ.
The list goes on.
Lifting weights is the foundation on which a healthy life should be built, and it makes all those other activities easier, better, more enjoyable, and more productive.
Maybe you don’t like lifting weights. I don’t care. I don’t always want to lift, but I know how it makes me feel, and I enjoy the results far more than I enjoy spending an hour in a gym.
Stop going out to eat so goddamn much.
The reason why restaurant food tastes so good is simple. It is loaded with fat, carbs, and salt.
Some restaurants will list the calories on their menus, and it’s eye-opening. Some of those entrées have more calories than most people should consume in a day. Of course, they taste amazing; they are supposed to, and that’s why we love to dine out.
The problem with dining out is that it becomes an easy habit when you aren’t prepared or need to make an excuse for not eating at home.
“I am too busy to cook.” Preparation ahead of time helps.
‘I don’t know what to make.” Preparation ahead of time helps.
“It’s just one meal.” That one meal is most likely over 1000 calories unless you decide to be smart about it, and most people aren’t when faced with a greasy burger or a salad with grilled chicken.
There is a time and a place to dine out, but most people need to do it much less.
Nobody cares as much as you should care about your health.
You don’t have a supportive partner? I have seen that story play out dozens of times. It sucks and makes things a lot harder, but this is on you, not your partner. Your partner doesn’t cook your meals, eat your food, or live your life. If your partner isn’t supportive of you getting healthier and in better shape, that is their problem. They should probably be thinking about the reason why they are not supporting you, and maybe you need to think about the reason why you are allowing someone not to support you.
Your friends give you shit for not going out to the bars to watch the games and drink with them. So what. What is more important? Football season and drinking all Sunday, eating like hell, and feeling awful on Monday, or setting yourself up for a healthier future? You can still go out and enjoy the game, but you don’t need to act like you are in college anymore. You are a grown-ass man, act like one. College is over.
Nobody is coming to save you. Nobody is going to hold your hand and tell you it will be ok if you bottle it all up inside like everyone else. Being in shape doesn’t happen because you think about it, being in shape occurs when you take the action, hold yourself accountable, and quit fucking around with excuses.
Society today is quick to accept you as you are, and there is a lot of validity to that. Nobody needs to be made to feel as if they aren’t good enough, but if you want to feel better, look better, be healthier, be stronger, and live longer, that is all up to you. You have to change bad habits, adopt better ones, and sustain them.
It doesn’t matter if you hire a coach, buy a workout program, or pick whatever flavor-of-the-day diet plan you see online - if you don’t make an effort, nothing will happen.
End of story.
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