By Loki Robinson
Healthy eating. Exercise. Yoga. Adequate sleep. All of these things are things you know you need to be doing, to some degree, in order to live a good life. So then why is the average American overweight or obese? Actually more than 60% of Americans are overweight or obese. That’s crazy.There are more resources than ever before on what it takes to be healthy, yet these problems still exist. What gives?
Well, in addition to the abundance of helpful information out there, there is an equal – if not greater – amount of garbage being shared around the world, from ignorant professional to ignorant common man, then from common man to common man, and so on.
It’s no wonder that the US GDP depends on “healthcare” for more than 15% annually. That’s outrageous. How is it considered healthcare if the way the money is being made is with people being sick? It’s more like sickcare. This is unfortunate, and it is part of this nasty cycle of ignorance between common people and the corporate profit machines.
In order to realize why diets don’t work, we need to break down the idea of a diet, the common man’s goals and the running knowledge of how the mind works.
#1: What is a Diet?
Dictionary.com says a diet is a “particular selection of food to improve a person’s physical condition…” I don’t think this is the same way most people interpret the word diet. Most say I’m going on a diet, the same way they’ll say I’m going to the gas station. They do it, then it’s over and they come back home.
A diet doesn’t work because it’s a potential temporary fix. It’s like saying I’m going to work a new job for a few weeks, make a billion dollars, then quit. If you’ve figured out a way to do that, please include it in the comments below. But otherwise, I don’t know that that’s been done.
A diet should really be a lifelong promise to yourself to love yourself, and one of those ways the love will show will be an automatic choice to fill your body with nutritious food.
#2: Motivation Isn’t Unlimited
95% of people fail at their new years resolutions in about 2 weeks. This makes sense. People try – they really want to make changes, but they don’t prepare their minds adequately. A potential new years resolution might look like this:
Guy sees his old friend that lost 75 pounds in a year from working out, and it inspires him to get into the gym on January 1st. Guy goes and buys new running shoes, a new iPod shuffle, the most expensive gym membership available and the best personal trainer.
Guy watches 4 hours of YouTube videos straight about the exercises he’s going to do. He makes excel sheets, he tweets his goals and also posts on Facebook everyday about his new future life.
He successfully goes to the gym for about 2 weeks, then, something at work forces him to miss a workout, or his car breaks down, or his alarm doesn’t go off that day, or he his kids prevented him from eating before his workout so he can’t go, etc, etc, etc. These are all a bunch of excuses.
A few weeks pass by and he goes to the gym less and less, and he eventually stops going. Essentially, his initial motivation was huge, but he did not commit enough energy to his dream. If you don’t risk enough for your potential victory, you’ll be content with losing your small investment.
#3: Change Your Baseline
In the previous example, the guy didn’t dare think for more than 10 seconds in his whole failure. Yes, he planned his logical, linear steps for completion of his dream, but he didn’t plan the non-linear ones.
He didn’t commit that no matter what, I will go to the gym X number of days a week. He did it more like, “if I have time.” That’s one of the worst cop out lines someone can say. If you really wanted to do the thing, you’d make time.
This guy has to change his baseline thinking. What that means is, before he does anything physically, he must alter his thoughts.
This is the thing that most men would rather die than do. This takes serious work. Instead of watching 4 hours of workouts on YouTube, his time would have been better spent searching for prompt questions to see where his mind is at. Then he could take the other 3 hours and answer the questions.
These questions would lead him to think deeply about why he must take on this challenge. If he does this at the beginning, the secret is that when the time comes when a barrier will appear (it will), possibly in the form of a cold or a car breaking down, he’ll have the mental fortitude to say “okay, I can take care of this, and still go to the gym. I must.” Change your shoulds to musts, and watch the magic.
#4: You Can’t Eliminate Fear
Most men are afraid of fear. They’re not afraid of crashing their car at 100mph or having their body breakdown from a horrible diet, but they fear fear. They fear that feeling inside when something they know they need to do appears in front of them. Call ’em butterflies if you wish.
These men think that there is some genetic difference in the successful in that they don’t feel fear, or are immune to it. They think there is some complex secret to success. In reality, everybody feels the fear. The difference is that the ones who live their lives with courage do stuff in spite of their fear. They do it anyway. That’s being a man
#5: Long Term Vision
You’ve got to have a why. This man’s why may be so that he can go on a run with his wife every once in a while and not hold her up, or go hiking with his son, or any number of reasons why he MUST succeed. If he figures this out in the beginning, and puts a lot of energy into it, he’s more likely to not quit when fear strikes.
#6: Embrace Change
Change is life. Change is everything. The false attachment to what is, is unfortunately delusional. People are born and they die, businesses open and they close, and people get fat and unhealthy and they lose weight and become more healthy.
The sooner you embrace this, the sooner you can start going with the flow of life instead of trying to go upstream.
#7: Huge Power
The power of the human mind and all of the things it can do are probably unlimited. Man is an incredibly complex, amazing being – IF – he uses his power. If he doesn’t, he falls into the depths of poverty, sickness and wretchedness.
Men, I will leave you with a link to my favorite story of human empowerment of all time. It’s about a man named Morris Goodman. He’s known as the Miracle Man.
If you have any thought that you can’t do something, take it from a guy that crashed an airplane, was told he’d never breathe, walk, eat, drink or speak ever again…and 8 months later did all of those things. Check out the 30 minute short film on YouTube here.