Putting it all Together

Cut yourself slack when necessary but don’t molly coddle yourself either; you’ll only hamper your improvements and ultimately slow yourself down.

All things being equal and without any valid excuses (be honest 99% of your excuses are lies) it doesn’t matter what I put on these blogs, what plans I outline to you, what I write to motivate you, what I write about nutrition, I can show you a all the motivational videos and posters in existence but the fact of the matter is none of that matters if you don’t get up off your ass and start to work for what you want, attack the thing you think you cannot do.

You need to make a clear distinction in your head between failing at something and quitting something. Just because you failed does not mean you quit. The boxer who fights his heart out and loses the fight may have failed to win the fight, but he didn’t quit. For those rounds that boxer went toe to toe and gave it all that they had, there is no shame in failing to win that fight, there would only be shame in quitting when they could have fought on, and the learning will fuel future victories.

The same is true of health and fitness you can try and fail an endless number of classes, sports, exercise, and diet plans. Failure is a part of life; it’s one of life’s great teachers and you often learn more about the task and yourself in failure than you ever would in success. The person who has tasted failure time and time again is most humble and most appreciative when they taste success because they know how hard it is to earn.

The concept here is to give yourself a year of consistent effort to get yourself into a health and fitness lifestyle, you will make small incremental changes to your mental state, your physical activity and your nutritional intake and over time they’ll all add up to a massive change. Like the big ships at sea if you try and turn around too fast, you’ll topple over or you’ll lose something (usually your will and motivation) along the way.

Take the turn slowly, keep things in balance and make the small necessary incremental adjustments to point yourself in the right direction. It’s going to be hard it’s going to be painful at times you’ll take your hand of the wheel and drift aimlessly, but you need to grab it again and get back on track just as soon as that happens.

Making the small changes will allow you to adapt so that your mind isn’t working against you, and you can be consistent in your diet and training. You’re not going to make any knee jerk reactions.

You personally must make the commitment to doing this, you must get up of your ass and try the new things be they food, exercise, or a new activity. Only you can motivate yourself because only you control your body, you cannot go around blaming things like work or people for your own choices. The simple fact of the matter is that if you really tried to have a health and fitness lifestyle you would have one. 

Don’t wait until a Monday to start, don’t tick off days on a calendar, instead just start by making a small change and keeping it up. When you’ve done that make another and if it doesn’t work drop it and learn from the experience, work with yourself not against yourself.

False Gods, Society and Peer Pressure

From all sides of the media, we are constantly exposed to aspects of celebrity or popular culture that are tailor made to invoke feelings of inadequacy and create god like worship of celebrity idols amongst us the ‘ordinary’ people.  Why do we love to raise these celebrity heart throbs and beautiful women to the upper echelons of our perception of human beauty and subsequently tear them down?

It certainly is the case that the Hollywood marketing machine is extremely well versed in how to do just this but still it’s a very strange phenomenon within our culture.

When we’re constantly exposed and now days from a very young age to this media assault on our perceptions it’s no wonder that many people are left feeling inadequate. Logically speaking you cannot compare the appearance of someone who is quite literally paid to portray various appearances and supported in doing so by an army of expert stylists, makeup artists, physical trainers, national experts and even people who coach them on how to speak and what to say.

You’re not comparing like for like.

These celebrities in turn feed the tabloids, magazines and press with stories of their latest scandals, escapades, pregnancies, marriages etc. It’s difficult to find any sort of media these days that isn’t permeated by this celebrity worship culture. It’s a constant stream of never-ending rubbish that we are subjected to on a daily basis.

You’re very likely aware of how this ‘celebrity god/goddess’ culture has impacted your own circles. People often emulate their favourite celebrities in terms of their dress sense, style and in some case they even mirror character traits.

For a lot of people this celebrity culture has the power to influence their decision making especially when it comes to matters of health and fitness. As such I felt it was imperative to discuss it in the book and give my own perspective on what I consider to be a deceitful and pressurising industry.

You’ll note I said industry and it’s very true because what it all comes down to is the bottom line. What the celebrities are earning is a fraction of the total revenue that is generated by Hollywood on the back of the celebrities. Celebrities are often contractually obliged or just commissioned to put their name and support behind products that they most likely never use. It’s a fantastic way of selling a product and giving it some semblance of credibility in an industry (health and fitness) that is saturated with fad exercise tools and programs.

When it comes to your own personal health and fitness whilst I have no problem with people admiring celebrities and aspiring to work hard and gain some of the benefits, they enjoy I think worshipping a celebrity’s appearance or body is a bad thing.

While I don’t want to take away from the talent of people who are actors; be conscious that they have more time, money and expertise available to them to achieve what you are trying to achieve and maintain or improve on it once it’s been achieved.

Respect what they’ve done but don’t set out to look like one of the 300 Spartans in six weeks when you have a job, family and a multitude of habits to battle. Be realistic about your situation, plan accordingly and execute. I promise it’ll be less stressful than pinning everything on a six week plan that’s not worth 1% of what you paid.  

Develop a New Mind-set

If you haven’t looked after your body by eating poorly and not undertaking any form of exercise, by abusing alcohol or drugs or whatever your vice maybe you have more than physical issue to overcome in adopting a health and fitness lifestyle.

Above all you’re going to need to develop a new mind-set. The habits that made you keep eating when you knew you were full or the habits that made you smoke a pack of cigarettes a day or drink five pints a night were all reinforced over months or even years of abuse. 

To get yourself to a state of being fit and healthy you need to address these habits and look to slowly curtail them. You’re probably all too aware that going cold turkey rarely works and the chances that you’ll find yourself falling back into bad habits as soon as you’re in a stressful situation are very high.

The way to build a new mind-set is to go about completing the small little changes that I’ve discussed throughout this book. You need to add a small change every week and reinforce it by being consistent. These are new habits that you’re going to form that will replace your bad habits and enable you to achieve your goals.

Imagine yourself laying a path for yourself brick by brick. It’s crucial that you take your time and make slow calculated changes instead of rushed decisions. It’s about working smarter and not harder. You might have an evening routine of binging on chocolate that you just cannot break. There’s no point in just stopping eating that chocolate because you’ve reinforced that habit and you’ll eventually do it again.

Instead focus on creating a new habit e.g., have cup of tea and some light biscuits instead or reduce the quantity of chocolate you eat or is available to you by controlling what goes into your shopping trolley. There’s no special science or magic here.  Before you ate chocolate every night before bed you never even thought to do it, it wasn’t a habit.

Therefore, you created that habit by doing it repetitively. In order to stop you need to gradually reduce it from every night to six nights a week followed by five nights, followed by four etc. and swap out some of the chocolate for lighter biscuits and a cup of tea.

This is your new mind-set; it’s about working smarter not harder. You set about introducing habits you know will get you to your goal of a health and fitness lifestyle and you do this by starting slow and improving week on week. You work with your mind and body not against it i.e., you don’t suddenly deprive yourself of something you’ve had for years instead you gradually reduce and replace the bad habit with a healthier habit of stop it altogether.

This mind-set applies to nutrition and training you’ll take your time with both, have a plan, and stick to it. You’ll breed consistency in yourself, and you’ll improve every day. You’ll learn about yourself and about the food and exercises you’re introducing. As your knowledge goes up, you’ll improve mentally, and you’ll find it easier to reinforce the good habits and cut out the bad.

You’re removing the outside influence peer pressure nonsense e.g., celebrities and advertisements in favour of simple truths and you’re no longer making excuses for yourself. You take responsibility for whom and where you are and if it’s necessary you put a plan in place to change what isn’t working or beneficial for you.

Get your mind right, get your body right and you’ll see drastic improvements in your life I promise you that.

Putting it all Together

If it seems like the task of adopting a health and fitness lifestyle is a difficult one, it’s because it is. There’s no point in lying to you, you’re an adult you need to see things as they are. However, while it is difficult it’s achievable. Most people fail themselves when trying to adopt a health and fitness lifestyle, they don’t work with their mind and body they work against them.

They try to make knee jerk fix-all changes that they themselves subsequently revolt against in anger. The fall-out from approaches like that often take weeks to heal at which point you’ve only succeeded in moving further from your goals.

The good news is that if you take the approach, I’ve outlined of giving yourself a year to properly adopt a health and fitness lifestyle by making small changes each week and being consistent, by allowing yourself the chance to get it wrong from time to time and to experiment both with diet and exercise as much as necessary to find the right balance for you then you will succeed just like I did.

I’m just a guy who faced the same or similar problems as you are now, and I beat them. Not because there’s anything special about me but because I spent years trying. Those years were spent failing and succeeding in tandem because I didn’t have the right knowledge and I didn’t have the consistency I needed to have. You won’t have to go through that because of this e-book. I’ve endeavoured to put everything I know in this book or link it on the website for you to use so you don’t have to do what I did.

If you take a few weeks to fully comprehend these blog entries and take in the Hard Way Fitness message you’re still saving years on the time I spent learning this stuff the hard and slow way. Doing what I did has improved the quality of my life and my feeling of wellbeing. I am rarely sick, I’m physically capable, I am in control, and I am happy with how things are going for me.

I still face challenges and I still make changes, there’s no perfect end state to having a health and fitness lifestyle, it’s a constant evolution, one which you are in control of, and you decided how you want to look and how you want to feel.

Your plan can be as loose or as tight as you like. You’re going to have small simple goals in your plan and you’re going to allow yourself to fail on those goals because you now know that failing is a huge part of success and every time you try something, and it doesn’t work you’re removing something you didn’t know and getting closer to your goal. You’re going to use metrics that are beneficial to you i.e., body measurements and body fat percentage not your actual weight as shown on a weighing scale.

You’re not going to quit this plan because it won’t be an option. You’re not going to give your mind the chance to quit on this one because in a year you’ve enough time to plan, test and nail down exactly what you need to. One year from whatever day you start you’ll look back and take in what you’ve achieved. You’ll be healthier and fitter and you’ll be making new goals based on your new position.

There’s no magic trick to getting what you want you must work hard, be consistent and make the hard choices and now that you know that you won’t be duped into any fad diet plans or fitness products. From now on focus on doing the simple things and doing them right consistently and adding them together like the building blocks for the foundation of your future, so that each passing day you’re improving, and you will amaze yourself with what you can achieve and what you will become.

What your start might look like

We’ve talked a lot about taking a yearlong approach to health and fitness and we’ve discussed in detail many of the elements that will be crucial for your success. Talk is however cheap as they say.

 With that in mind I’ve created an example of an eight-week roadmap to give you an indication of what it might look like as you embark on your own health and fitness lifestyle journey. What I’ve outlined here is a diary like example of how things might go for you when you start.

 Week 1 – Started small but did what I planned to do. I brought in a piece of fruit to work with me every day and ate it as well drinking 3 glasses of water every day. I am feeling positive and proud, this might work.

Week 2 – Continuing from last week I’m eating the fruit, drinking more water and I’ve started to take the stairs and only use the elevator if I absolutely must. I’ve started doing research into local gyms to see what might suit me best. I had a tough time in work and felt extremely stressed but I decided not to go and raid the vending machine today, proud.

Week 5 – I’ve made an appointment to go visit a gym I like the look and sound of. I am continuing to eat more fruit each day and up my water intake. I managed to go the entire week without eating any takeaway or fast food. I did have some fizzy drinks in work, its high pressure now so I can’t go too hard on this health and fitness lifestyle just yet.

Week 6 – Gym visit went very well last week so I signed up. I have my first introductory session soon. Diet wise I cooked and ate a portion of vegetables with one of my dinners this week. This was very tasty. I’ve kept up the water intake and the fruit in work. I feel a big difference in myself, I feel like I’m in control and I’m on the right track.

Week 8 – I’ve started to take a multivitamin with minerals, having done some research it seems I might be deficient in some minerals and vitamins, so I want to help my body out until my diet provides the nutrients I need. Gym session went well I’ve got a good starter program that I’m going to do one day a week for six weeks. I was so nervous, but the trainer put me at ease and showed me a great plan that really looks like it’s going to really work for me. They showed me how to use the equipment too so no more guesswork.

Week 9 – Week 1 of my gym program went very well; it was very tough but that’s what I expected, and it will be tough because I haven’t trained in so long. This week I brought in my lunch which I cooked myself on Sunday. It was delicious and I was super hungry.

Week 11 – I’m sleeping better and feeling better, the gym is going well I’ve found that going before work suits best. Diet wise I’m eating much less junk food but haven’t eliminated it. My water intake is way up and I haven’t had a cold or flu in several weeks which I put down to my improved diet and supplements.

Week12 – I’ve completed 12 weeks and I’m so proud of myself. At no point did I put myself under any unnecessary extra pressure. There were weeks when I didn’t want to go but I made the effort and I’m very glad I did now. I’m going to work on coming up with a better diet plan for myself now that I know what works for me and this job.

This is just a brief example of how you’re moving to a health and fitness lifestyle might go. You’ll note that there is no major pressure, no deadlines and everything is done on a trial-and-error basis. Consistency is however maintained on the controllable pieces e.g., drinking the water and eating the fruit.

As things get added they become part of a new routine and are reinforced so that this person can move onto the next element of their health and fitness they want to improve on.

It’s a simple process from a high-level but it does take effort to implement changes to your life. Remember if you didn’t get unhealthy in a day or unfit in a day, you’re not going to miraculously get fit and healthy in a day. Therefore, I keep preaching about the one year to give you time to re-adjust and fail as necessary. Every failure is a steppingstone you just need to make sure you’re making small direction adjustments instead of big changes. It’s easier to correct little changes than it is to remedy a huge lifestyle change.

 At no point does this person insist that they must be fit by X week or day. Instead, every week is about making the little changes and then trying to maintain those changes, once done then something else is added and the cycle continues. Build on what you learn and move forward in the direction of your goals.

Remember, chin up, chest out and handle it.

Yours,

Stephen