Let's Say Hello

[00:02:27.190] – Allan
Hey Raz, how are you doing?

[00:02:29.260] – Rachel
Good Allan. How are you today?

[00:02:31.720] – Allan
I'm actually really really busy. Trying to get things together. You know we've got a trip scheduled. I got it all plotted out. We're going to get to see all of our kids, our parents and a lot of our friends. And we're going to have small side fun trips inside the states. Still hoping that covid and LAMBDA or whatever the variant is that happens to be the flavor of the day isn't a problem when we get there. But we've planned the trip.

[00:02:57.640] – Allan
It's going to be over thirty seven hundred miles of driving. And, you know, so the flight to Mexico, a week in Mexico, then up to the U.S. and a big old circle across the whole middle Midwest and southeast of the United States to see family because we are we are spread out. I'm just glad there's no one further west than that, because that would have been insane. But we are we're going to do it. It's going to be fun.

[00:03:24.220] – Allan
We did it last year about the same trip. Really. So this one's backwards going I think we're going any kind of an opposite direction or starting from a different direction and actually doing the same loop, but from a different place. So it's going to be a slightly different drive, but a real cool trip and looking for that. But I've got to get so many things done before I do that. So I don't want to because I don't want to work on this one.

[00:03:47.920] – Allan
I want to take this one off.

[00:03:49.420] – Rachel
That sounds good. It sounds like a good plan.

[00:03:52.210] – Allan
So how are things with you?

[00:03:53.680] – Rachel
Good, good. Enjoying the summer get got a good harvest out of our garden so far and we've got a couple of camp out and running trips planned for the fall if they don't get canceled for covid. But things are good right now.

[00:04:07.270] – Allan
Awesome. I'm just so looking forward to getting back to the states and having some oysters, brussel sprouts.

[00:04:14.020] – Allan
All the things I can't get down here. It's just unfortunate. It's not during crawfish season. So I will miss the crawfish, but I might try to see if I buy some frozen just for the sake of saying I had some. But looking forward to it. So let's go ahead and get into the show. OK?

[00:04:28.450] – Rachel
OK, sure.

[00:04:29.740] – Allan
OK, Rachel, today's show is a little different and I wanted to take just a moment because I don't want someone to miss something or to be wondering, is Allan really going to talk about the podcast for two hours?

[00:04:43.840] – Allan
And the answer's no. The answer is no. I'm not going to talk about the podcast for two hours, but I am going to talk about it because I do think it's worth celebrating. What we're going to do is we're actually going to start this episode with the seven things I've learned about health and fitness from five hundred episodes of Forty Plus Fitness. And I made it into an acronym because you guys know I love my acronyms and I called it systems.

[00:05:06.700] – Allan
And so I put your wellness systems just the name of these seven things. And really, in my opinion, if you can if you can get these seven things going, you're going to skyrocket. You're literally, your rubbers on the road you're on. You're going to move. You're going to get some great things done. These seven things that you really just have to spend some time on, and so really as you go through this, I think this should be your favorite episode bookmark it on the show notes or whatever you need to do to go back, because this really does put together a quick framework.

[00:05:40.060] – Allan
The Seven Things is about 30 minutes. And quite literally, literally my notes on that were like three or four pages just just to get through that, because I had so many things I wanted to say and I think I got most of them in there. OK, and then after we talk about that. I'm going to get into what's gone on in the past six years, the starting of the podcast, the whole history of it, because there's probably a lot of things about the history of this podcast that a lot of people don't know.

[00:06:11.570] – Allan
Some things we accomplished and then where it's going, you know, what goes into making it, because for a lot of people, this is like this black box that, you know, OK, how do you do a podcast? And it's like we got to record something, but then where does it go and how does it happen? And I literally walk through all of that and all the people that help me make that happen. And then I get into the book that I wrote and why I wrote the book, The Wellness Roadmap, which is kind of my putting together at that point, which was 2017, all the things I had really kind of learned about health and fitness.

[00:06:46.250] – Allan
And so as I said, I was still learning. So that's why I think if you take the wellness systems and you marry that to The Wellness Roadmap book, you've got a pretty comprehensive guideline to how you can live a healthier, more fit life. And then finally, I get into the online personal training, which was not my original intent before I started the podcast. Once I started the podcast, that's what I was going for, is to have this online business training people, helping them get healthy and fit, helping them get off their medication, helping them lose weight, whether it's 30 pounds, 40 pounds or more, just being there to help people where they are.

[00:07:22.880] – Allan
Because I was a busy executive and I didn't have a coach available and I couldn't go to the gym regularly, I couldn't go to a coach regularly. So I was like, how do I make this happen? How do I make this sustainable? And an online coaching program seemed like the right thing. Just there weren't any of them available at the time. It wasn't available. And I was like, this is kind of crazy that no one's doing this.

[00:07:47.660] – Allan
And only people I hear doing it are elite athletes. So someone's trying to learn snatch or something like that. And it's like, OK, you're going to do this lift film yourself, send it to me in this professional coach, rather than them having to spend tens of thousands of dollars to fly over there. They pay them a good bit of money, but they looked at it on a video and gave them critiques. And so that's that was the only online coaching that existed when I started this.

[00:08:12.980] – Allan
There was probably some smatterings, but you couldn't find it anywhere. So and there also weren't any podcasts for people over 40 in the health and fitness field. So all those kind of marry together and say, OK, this is how I can get a message out and then this is what I can do. So in listening to what's going to happen here, you'll actually then also hear from my clients to kind of understand what online training is about, to understand what they've accomplished and how they feel about all this.

[00:08:38.390] – Allan
So a good opportunity. And what I like about the client testimonials is if after you listen to the seven things, you're going to see how these folks put these things in place. So not only is it me just telling you this is how it works, this is them telling you how they did it and what the results were. So it's a real cool montage. I call it the the testimonial mix tape of things that happen for these for these folks.

[00:09:04.700] – Allan
And I quite literally just reached out to every client I've had in the last year and said, hey, who wants who wants to come out here and have this conversation? And there's there's nine wonderful people that have had great results. Some are newer into it. Some have been around for a while. But, you know, they share their experience. So if you're on the fence and not sure that online personal training is for you, it's well worth listening through this because this will give you a lot of ideas.

[00:09:30.020] – Allan
You're going to hear you're going to hear messages that resonate with you. And I'm going on vacation, as you heard in the in the hello. I'm going on a trip and I'm going to take time off. I'm not going to be on boarding a bunch of clients. I'm not going to be worried about all that. Even though I never have a bunch of clients, I only have a handful at any given time, no more than a handful or so.

[00:09:51.290] – Allan
And the goal is really to take some time off. But if you want to do this, if you want to come in, messaged me on Facebook, email me Allan@40plusfitnesspodcast.com get in touch with me. There's also contact details on the website so you can go to the website, 40plusfitnesspodcast.com and just get in touch with me. Let's spend some time talking about it and if you don't get in touch with me real soon here, it's probably going to be October before I can start working with you because I really don't want to have a huge workload.

[00:10:20.870] – Allan
This is family time. This is me time, and I'm going to do that. So I've never done that. I mean, it's like in so long since I got married, which was eight years ago, I haven't had a time where I just took off and disappeared. And so I'm going to work really hard. I will be there for my clients. So if you're client don't worry, I'm still going to answer. I'm still going to be there.

[00:10:43.700] – Allan
I'm still going to do my client stuff. But that's you know, that's not where I spend most of my time. All my podcast will have been done. So I'm not planning on doing much of that either. So, you know. We'll get this done one way or another, but I just wanted to let you know that I am taking some time off to refresh, revive, listening to my own voice, say to me what I need to do and actually following that advice.

[00:11:11.240] – Allan
And then I'll come back and I'll hire a coach and we'll get back on the podcast and I'll continue to try to bring you the best guest that I possibly can week in and week out.

[00:11:19.040] – Rachel
That sounds awesome. Well, congratulations again, Allan, on your 500th episode and enjoy your vacation. You certainly deserve some time off for sure.

[00:11:28.070] – Allan
All right. Well, I hope you guys all enjoy this episode. Thank you.

Episode

I'd like to share with you the seven health and fitness truths I've learned over 500 episodes of 40 plus fitness I call this your wellness systems.

1) S – Start inYour Head – Mindset.

Everything starts with good mindset. If you keep listening to this podcast all the way to the end, you're going to hear some of my clients talk about their journey with 40 plus fitness and some of the things that they've gone through.

And you're going to hear a lot of them talk about mindset. One of them even called me like a psychologist. I, for the record, not a psychologist, but they recognize that sometimes they're their own worst enemy. And if we don't get out of our way by clearing our mindset, getting the right mindset, we're not going to get where we need to be. You'll also hear them talk about things they learned or being concerned about things, that's another part of this to change, you have to be open to change.

You have to open your mind to learn things and potentially unlearn some things. And you'll hear that not everyone believes in themselves. So we have to get rid of those limiting beliefs. We have to overcome them and we overcome them through mindset practices. I hope you'll listen to the end because it will solidify how important most of the things that we're going to talk about mindset in health and fitness are.

To change your mindset, you have to set your GPS.

G is for grounding, and that's where you set your vision and your why. You're why has to be really, really emotional and your vision has to be clear enough so that you know that you're moving in the right direction. P personalize things, know where you are now, and and set yourself up for having the goals in place, the smart goals, so that you can take those steps in the right direction and know that you're progressing and then the S in GPS stands for being self aware. What obstacles are ahead of you and what pace should you go? Knowing yourself, knowing what's happened to you in the past is going to allow you to see what could happen to you in the future. And so you have to look at where you are and you have to get your your head right. And you do that by setting your GPS. And if you have a well set GPS, it makes this a lot easier down the road.

So. How do we do this? Well, oddly enough, mindset is less about what you do. It's about slowing down. It's about being present. You have to get clear about where you're going, where you are, why you want to be there, and then you set your pace. And you can only do that if you slow down and put those pieces in place. Too many people want to come in and start with strategies. They want to come in and start with a diet.

What diet should I be on? What exercises should I be doing? And that's the wrong question. The first question you have to ask is, is my mind set where it needs to be for me to be successful in the end? So S. start with your head, mindset.

2) Y – You.

And this whole journey is about you. You have to do the work, you have to drive the car. There's no Scotty on the Enterprise that can beam you where you need to be.

You've got to get in the car and you've got to drive there and you have to do it for yourself. No one else can do this for you. Even if you hire a coach, even if you get the best diet in the world, you have to do it. You have to act. So you first and foremost stands for you have to do the work.

And the other part of you is that you are unique. So what works for me may not work for you So you have to do a self-experiment to find out what your solution is. We call it n=1, and that's in the sampling language where the sample size for our test is N=1. So you are the one. You are the one you're working for. You're the one that needs to do this. And so through practice, trial and error, you're going to learn things that work and you're going to learn things that don't.

So you keep what works and you ditch what doesn't. Now, how do you do this? I'm going to say, oddly enough, again, you might also be the problem, most of the people have knowledge. They know what to do. They just haven't done it. They haven't put it in place and they haven't been consistent. They lack the determination and the discipline to stick with it. So you might need help. That self-awareness we talked about in the s setting, you're setting your GPS.

You have to be self aware. You have to know, OK, is there something I can do on my own? And if you struggled in the past, you're going to struggle again. And that's something for you to strongly consider as far as either hiring a coach or having an accountability partner. So you have to decide when it's the right time for you to do this, because you have to do the work and you have to stick with it and you have to find what works for you.

And if you don't do that, you're not going to be successful. So all of this starts with mindset. And then you.

3) S – Sustainable Lifestyle.

If you ate nothing but bananas for a month, you'll lose weight. But then what? If you went on a 30 day no sugar challenge, you'll lose weight, but then what? The problem with most diets is they're not made to be sustainable, they're not sustainable ways of eating. Nobody's going to want to stay in Weight Watchers for the rest of their lives.

But that's how their program is set up. You go in for your way and you count your points and you go and go and go and go. Now, my clients learn that you don't actually have to be on 24/7, 365, but you know where the road is. And you know, when you're taking a detour and you know that you have to get back on the road, that's sustainable. It allows for those moments when you have to do something off plan and then you can get back on plan.

OK, and for a lot of people, when they go off plan because they don't know where their road is, they don't get back to it soon enough and they gain all the weight back. And you don't want to do that. So how do we do this? Well, the first thing you do is you make the road very easy to drive. If you have very good expectations and you pick a pace that makes sense for you, you'll get there.

I had a potential client reach out to me one time and we were chatting on email and she told me, I need to lose 70 pounds. And so I said, OK, how long would you like to take to lose that 70 pounds? Now I'm thinking in my head that's at least a year long project for most people, maybe a little bit longer for her. I don't know. She was a little older. And so I said, OK, you know, what's your thoughts on that?

And she said, well, my daughter's wedding is in two months and I want to lose 70 pounds before her wedding. Now, could I have helped her lose 70 pounds before her wedding? Probably not, but we could have gotten really close. But then what would have happened? She would have gained it all back because she wouldn't have set herself into a sustainable lifestyle that was built on habits that she could keep for the rest of her life, we would have just put her on a killer diet, had her busting her butt.

if she started to plateau, we would push harder. We would go lower. And that's not sustainable. That's not how we build a program that works for you. You have to find a sustainable lifestyle, a way of eating that you can eat almost all the time with the occasional detours. So maybe you want to go spend a weekend or a week at Disneyland or Disney World. And that's your splurge week. Fine. Go that's your detour.

The road is right there when you get back the next Monday and you have to get back on it. But you do that because, you know, there's a sustainable lifestyle and you've built a road, but you know where it is and you know how to stay on it when you need to.

Sponsor
This episode of the 40+ Fitness Podcast is sponsored by Haka Life Nutrition, the maker of GLX3, you know, the benefit of Omega-3 reduced inflammation, which helps with joint pain and heart health.

And, you know, you're probably not getting enough from your diet, but then you read about the mercury in fish or how the fish oil supplement you bought at Costco or Wal-Mart might be oxidized and rancid. Not good. Then you look into a plant-based solution and find it isn't very bioavailable or krill oil, which is much more expensive and isn't really sustainable. GLX3 is very different. It's from sustainably farmed green lipped mussels in New Zealand.

The 17 omega-3s found in green lipped mussels include ETA, which is not found at any fish oil. What is ETA? Not to bore you with the science, but it has been shown to be very effective at reducing inflammation and pain. Haka Life Nutrition has paired this oil with New Zealand olive oil and vitamin E to make a very unique Omega-3 supplement. I think it's brilliant. Mussels are at the bottom of the food chain and have a short lifespan so they aren't as susceptible to mercury contamination and they don't starve out other species when they're farmed in open water.

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4) T – Training.

This one is actually shifted quite a bit for me in the past six years. I used to really think that function was everything. I would see people doing things that weren't functional in the gym, you know, just getting big and bulky. And that wasn't really doing them a ton of good. I would see people doing things that 3weren't really changing their body and again, just really not functionally good. But I've come to realize over the last six years that I am kind of unique myself.

And a lot of people aren't like me. A lot of people aren't driven to go to the gym and get sweaty every day and do those kind of things for particular fitness purposes. So they wouldn't do it. They just would not go to the gym straight away. And so what do we do? Well, start with something that's enjoyable and a lot of people need to do that. That can be going for a walk in nature. It can be getting on the floor and playing with your grandchild.

Things that are functional can also be fun, but don't necessarily think you have to do a bunch of stuff you don't enjoy just for the sake of function. Now, later on, which you're going to find, is that you need to start looking at the relevance of your fitness. So it's great you can get on the ground and play with your granddaughter and get back up, but your grand kids are going to get bigger and you're going to need to be able to lift her and move her around and do different things with them.

So, you know, you're going to need to get stronger. You also know as you get older, certain things are going to happen. You're going to lose some muscle, you're going to lose some bone density. Those can be some problems that will keep you from doing the things that you love. So maybe putting in some training that will help you maintain strength, that will help you maintain bone density are worth it. Now, I've said often on the show, and I've said it often in many places, that I want to be able to wipe my own butt when I'm 105.

So that means my legs need to be strong enough for me to stand up off of the toilet after I squat down. I have to have the dexterity to turn around and do the business. I have to be able to take care of myself. And to do that, I might have to do some exercises that are just not all that fun for me. But they are relevant to who I want to be and they bring me joy because they allow me to do things that I enjoy.

So if you're struggling with a fitness program, it's easy go ahead and start with something you enjoy. And then as you're building your fitness, start looking for those relevant things that you need to do the things that you enjoy doing or that maybe you're no longer able to do. I've seen clients that wanted to go back and play tennis, go back and play tennis. So it's doable. All of this is doable. You can go back, you'll hear one of my clients later on talk about how he's doing things he was doing he could do ten years ago.

He feels younger and that's part of what training and losing weight can really do for you. So as you're looking at training and if you don't like going to the gym, if you don't like resistance exercise, if you don't like sweating, at least start with something you do enjoy that's going to give you some fitness benefit and then proceed from there.

5) E – Eat Real Food.

This is one of the most important ones out there, they're all important, don't get me wrong, but this is where so many people screw up.

There's food and then there's stuff we've been told is food, and I'll say in the grocery store, 99% of what's in there is not real food. They don't call it a food store, they call it a grocery store, and then that's probably why they want to put other stuff in there. That's not real food. So what is real food? Real food was alive at one time, typically when you buy real food, there's no ingredient list required.

You know, if you go and you buy a chicken leg, you know, you just bought a chicken leg, if you buy a chicken breast, you know, you bought a chicken breast. And the only thing they have to tell you is skin on, skin off, bone in, bone out. That's all they really have to tell you. Are you buying a chicken breast fillet or are you buying a full chicken breast? That's all that's really out there.

Now, any other thing that's on that label where they're selling you, the chicken is seller stuff they just want. That's marketing stuff. So all these other things that are on there typically are just meant to market to you, you know, all natural vegetarian, chicken, whatever. OK, but real food was alive at one time. Typically real food does not come in a box bag jar or can. Now there are some exceptions. Frozen vegetables, frozen fruits.

Those were those are fine sardines and tuna and salmon come in a can. Those can be fine. So, you know, just realize, yes, there's some violations of rule. But I would say 99 percent of the time, if it's in a box, bag, can or jar, it's not real food and you should stay away from it. And that typically means the perimeter of a grocery store or better yet, go to your farmer's market. The better it lived, the better you will.

OK, now plants just grow. Now, they need to be nurtured. They need to be taken care of. But they've done so much with our plants through GMO, through crossbreeding, through all this different stuff that they've really and the way they're farming them in the soil, they've depleted the soil. So plants today aren't as nutritious as they were at one time. So look for opportunities to buy plants with no insecticides that they were ripe when they were picked.

And the easiest way to do that is to focus on organic and go with local and in season fruits and vegetables. That's the best way to do it. It can be a little bit more expensive, but go to the farmer's market, you'll find some deals, go to the grocery store when they're doing their clearance deals, talk to the person and produce and ask them, you know, when they put fresh stuff out, when do they change it out and take the older stuff out?

You can probably find some deals that way, but look for the organic whenever you can, because that doesn't have the insecticides on it. And typically it's non GMO, OK. Meat was an animal or egg or something like our fish. Look for animals and fish that were free, that were not farmed. Make sure that if you do buy them, try to go with organic because then they won't have the hormones to make them gargantuan and they'll have limited antibiotics, OK, they can give them some antibiotics when they're sick.

But unfortunately, with most of the farming out there, the animals are always sick. So they're always giving them antibiotics. It's almost like a precursor, almost like a vaccine. They're going to give them this this antibiotic just to keep the animal healthy, keep it alive. And that's just that. So try to avoid those things. When you are buying food, sometimes you do need to buy something that's slightly processed. So an example would be hamburger meat is ground.

That's technically a processing. But if you're buying good quality, it's the same. So look for non processed or minimally processed foods and just realize that most food goes bad. If you leave it on your counter for a week, most real food is going to go bad. So yes, you can find it in the freezer section unless some of these things will last longer, like chicken breasts you can buy in the freezer section, fruits and vegetables in the freezer section.

Most things, if you leave them out on your counter for a week, they're going to they're going to go bad, whereas you can buy a box of Twinkies and leave it in your cabinet for decades. And it's going to be the same. It's not food. OK, and then finally, artificial colors, sweeteners and preservatives are not meant for human consumption. They just aren't they weren't in real food. And when you see natural on the label or natural, it's a natural color, natural flavorings, that type of thing.

All that really means is that it exists in nature. That's not necessarily how they made it or how they got it. OK, so a lot of these things that they put in, the stuff they call food is basically the FDA hasn't really studied it. So they just say, OK, based on what we know, it's generally accepted as safe. And are generally recognized as safe grass and that part of that about that is we don't know, it's just OK, we don't think there's anything wrong with it.

Let's experiment on the human race and see what happens. And so a lot of these things, you know, there was a big outcry about saccharin stack and still on the market, there's things they know about red dye number, whatever. They know it's bad for us, but they don't take it out of food. They label it as a carcinogen. And that's the funny thing is a lot of these additives are on the carcinogen list. The FDA just doesn't know that they're bad enough to cause cancer, but they do know that they're cancer causing.

So just recognize that all this fake food may seem cheap, but it's really messing with you. So it's worth investing a little bit more and eat real food.

6) M – Moderation Threshold.

OK, now a lot of people may not know this, but the 80/20 rule that we hear so much about is called Pareto's Law. And what it really says is when you're doing something, a business is running or you're investing or anything else is that you're getting 80 percent of your results from 20 percent of your effort.

And the principle in that is that if you focus on what those 20 percent things are and you eliminate some of the other things, you can potentially improve your performance, be it athletic, be in business or whatever. That's the Pareto's Law. But in the diet culture, they've taken 80/20 to basically be this idea of moderation, where if you're on 80 percent of the time, you're going to do well. And that is not true for most people, particularly people over 40, OK?

It's wrong for several reasons. Let me go through a few of these. OK, first, most people aren't really good at gauging 20 percent. I was talking to a client and she was like, I'm really, really good during the week. So I plan my breakfast plan, my dinners, I have my precooked meals, everything's on. And then I get to Friday night and we go out to eat and I have a few glasses of wine and then I have dessert and then I blow the whole weekend, she said.

So, you know, I'm at 80/20. I feel pretty good about that. And I'm like, no, you're not at 80/20. You've messed up three days and you've done well for four. So you're more at 57/43. I mean, you're barely past break even. So that's why you're not seeing results. OK, so most people think 80/20 means taking the weekend off and then doing well during the week, but that's not anywhere close to 80/20.

Another problem that comes up with this approach of 80/20 is that they'll take that one step forward and then they'll take a step back. So an example would be, let's say you can go on to a 500 calorie deficit for eight days. And if we go calories in, calories out, a pound is about 3500 calories. So you're going to lose just a little more than a pound. But then you go way over for two days, like we say, with the wine and the desserts and then whatever goes on those other days.

And then there's also probably going to be some additional water because you're eating foods that are inflammatory. And so what ends up happening is you gain that pound or maybe a two pounds back so that step forward and a step back and you're a week down the road and you've actually accomplished nothing is really disheartening. It's really hard to keep motivated and stay determined and be persistent and consistent when all you see is a pound gone and a pound back. And that's what's causing it.

The other issue with this is that weight loss is more than that. Calories in, calories out. It's more than how much you eat. It's it does has a lot to do with the food choices you make. Are you getting the right macros for what you're trying to do? Are you getting the vitamins and minerals that you need so that you're fully nourished? So that your body feels safe, so your body feels comfortable to let some of that weight go, if your body feels like it's starving for something, you're going to eat more until you get what your body feels like it's missing.

So making sure you're getting good, nutritious food all the time is going to help you move forward. And if you're trying to do the 80-20 and you're not getting the nutrition for 20 percent of the time, your body is going to want to overeat a lot more. And that's going to that's going to fade away after you've done your 20 percent off. Also, 80-20 keeps your addictions going. So if you're addicted to sugar and you know you're addicted to sugar, you know, sweet tooth, you can say I'm a sweet tooth.

I love the sugar. If you know you're addicted to sugar, 80/20 can't work for you. Would you would you tell an alcoholic to drink 20 percent of the time and not drink 80 percent of the time? How well would that work for them? You wouldn't say we're doing the same thing with sugar. It's like I'll have my 20 percent on my sugar, but then you stay addicted. You still have that addiction and it just makes it so much harder to make this a sustainable lifestyle.

So if you want to make a change, you've got to get closer to the high 90s. And high 90s sounds like a lot, but it's one cheap meal per week, I mean, per month or you could take a whole day off per quarter. And so that's not a lot of time. But if you're trying to lose weight, you need to be in the high 90s. OK, 80/20 might work for you once you get to maintenance.

So when you get to a goal weight and you feel good and you're putting on muscle and you're getting stronger and things are working for you, 80-20 might be just fine. But when you're trying to lose the weight, you need to be in the high 90s. It's really the only way moderation is going to work for you at all.

7) S – Serve Yourself and Others

We need relationships, we need purpose, and we need passion, it's why we exist.

It's why we're on this earth. We need those to be whole. But you can't sacrifice without serving yourself in so many people, particularly moms. They were bred on this and dads, too, because, you know, I was working. I just had my thoughts where I had to provide I had to have, you know, this wealth and I had to be able to take care of my family. And so I was sacrificing self care for something else.

And we all do it at some level. And so the first step in serving yourself is self care, making sure you're doing the things your body needs. And second step is then nurturing relationships. If you have a good relationship, you nurture it, you take care of it, you water it. If you have a bad relationship, you prune it, you cut it away. Now, that's not always possible, but you need to be thinking about how the relationships in your life are impacting you and your ability to perform self care.

So this can be stress reduction or stress management, getting good quality sleep, having a gratitude practice, trying to find joy in your life, and then on inspiration, getting out and doing things that are exciting and fun for you. Life is meant to be lived. It's meant to be fun. It's meant to be full of joy. And the big part of the wellness model that a lot of us skip over because we're too busy with the weight loss and the exercise, we skip over actually enjoying ourselves, making the journey fun.

You know, if you looked at a trip and you were going to drive from California to Texas, you might dread that trip as a long drive. You know, for me, I'm about to travel back to the United States to see family and our total driving mileage. If you just plot it out on Google Maps is thirty over thirty seven hundred miles. OK, we're going to do that in a little over three and a half weeks. So that's a lot of driving.

But we're going to we're going to get to see our whole family. We're going to see everybody in our family, parents, grandparents, children, grandchildren, all of it. We're going to be able to do all of that. And that's why this is important to us. We want to have those moments now. What are some other things that are going on? Well, I have to stop sometimes. So I've picked stopping points to places that my wife and I have never been in the hopes that we can go do something together and have some fun ourselves.

So we'll potentially stop in and Memphis will potentially stop in. There's a little town in Ohio and then there's another little town in Georgia that will stop in and have a nice afternoon or dinner, do those types of things. So make sure you're doing things for yourself as well as helping others. We need the relationships. We need good relationships, and we need the passion and the promise and everything in our lives. So live today, but do it in a way that's healthy. Do it in a way that brings you joy and do it in a way where you can feel good about the journey.

Summary – Your Wellness SYSTEMS

S – Start in your head mindset. It really is that important. This is the first thing if you don't get this right, you will struggle.

Y – You have to do the work and you have to find what works for you. It's a journey. It's an experiment. It's something you have to do.

But you have to do it. You have to be active. You have to make these things happen. They won't just happen. You can't buy a diet book and lose weight. You have the to the diet, but you have to do it something that's going to work and you need to do something that's going to work for the long term, which is the next.

S – find your sustainable lifestyle. This is not a short term fix. You don't do it and then you're done.

It's all a part of a journey that's going to get you to a better place and then the next best place and then the next best place. And you're going to always be doing this, but you want something that's sustainable. So it's not this, lose it and gain it and lose it and gain it and lose it and gain it. That's not fun. That's not sustainable. You need a sustainable lifestyle to carry you through the whole journey of the rest of your life.

T – is for training. OK, you make it fun. Make it fun. Absolutely make it fun and then make it relevant. So find the functional things that are going to make your life better. They're going to make you able to do the things you enjoy doing for as long as you want to do it. My grandfather stopped playing golf when he was 80. He loved golf. He lived on a golf course for most of his life and here he was unable to play golf.

And it was really because he didn't do anything to keep his fitness and he lost what he loved. And maybe you feel like you're losing something that you loved or have lost something that you love. Try to get yourself back into a fitness mode that gets you there. So train fun, but also train relevant.

E – Eat Real Food. OK, that comes from a bag, jar, can or box. It's probably not real food. And I recognize I say that different every single time I say it, but it's true. Eat real food. That's what our bodies were designed to consume and get our nutrition from. So get the best quality real foods you can find.

M – Moderation Threshold. 80-20 won't cut it, if you're trying to lose weight. You need to be in the high 90s to be successful. The higher in the nineties you are, the more successful you're going to be. The more often you do that moderation thing, the slower your pace. So maybe in your sustainable lifestyle you do need a slower pace because you're not going to hit the high 90s.

Maybe you're just going to hit the 90s. Maybe you are going to be in a high eighties. Knowing yourself and putting yourself in the right place means you can set your moderation threshold to go the pace that's right for you. And then the final

S – Serve Yourself and Others. It really kind of in that order, make sure you're doing the things that you need to do for yourself and make sure that you're living the life you should.

All right. Let's start this off with a little bit about the history of the 40+ Fitness Podcast.

Some of you probably been listening since the very beginning, but many have not. And it found us along the way. I actually started working on this podcast in June of 2015. And what a lot of people don't know is that I actually had a podcast before this one called Internal Audit Mastery. That one I did 15 episodes and I was only getting about six hundred downloads per episode because I really didn't know the industry. I thought I was doing terrible when in fact I was actually doing quite well.

But I burned out and decided to go ahead and drop that podcast. And then a few months later, I decided to go ahead and start working on the Forty Plus Fitness podcast. So I started working on it in June and we launched our first episode in December, actually on December 6th, 2015. Now, as I was getting ready for this podcast, because that's you know, you're talking about a whole six months. What was I doing during that six months?

Well, I was I was doing coaching. I signed up for coaching with podcast Paradise. I signed up for a mastermind. And I was investing and growing the Facebook page, which was great for the launch. But Facebook shortly thereafter killed pages unless you want to pay to play. But I did build a really nice page and had that all built up. Now, we were launched on December 6th and my goal was to make a category called New and Noteworthy on Amazon Apple.

I wanted to make new and noteworthy by January 1st and I actually made that happen. Since then, I've attended two podcasts, movements and Keto Fest twice, and I did that in order to make the podcast even better. I met a lot of really cool people, learned a lot about podcasting, learned a lot, a lot about the business, learned a lot about nutrition, and that really gave me a lot of information. To make the podcast much, much better as we've gone along.

In fact, I can't even listen to the first few episodes without cringing. I've gotten a little bit better at this. So when I first launched, my goal was to have five episodes per week and each day would have its own theme. And then I even brought on clients. I started out with Sandra and she dropped out of training early so I didn't get the full 10 weeks with her. Then I started working with John, who I went to high school with, and his wife Tammy.

And I worked with them for a few weeks, 10 weeks, and they had great results. So it was really good practice. It kind of was proof that what I was doing was going to work for not just me, but other people. And I did that. Those five episodes per week for about four months. And let me tell you, it was it was a killer. I then broke that down to three and I was less stringent on how long those episodes took, which made a little easier.

But then I just decided, OK, I've done enough, I've learned enough, I've got my reps in and now I'm just going to do one per week. And I started that the beginning of 2018. I decided I wasn't even going to do bonus episodes. I used to do one a week and then I'd throw in some bonuses. But during 2018 I was working on writing my book and I just decided I didn't have time to do three a per week so I dropped it down to eight to one per week and that's served me very, very well.

I enjoy doing that. And then on Episode 451, which was September 14th of 2020, we brought on Rachel Everett, I refer to as Raz on the on the podcast. She's now my co-host. And you're going to get some inside the scenes stuff. If you're on the Facebook group, you can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/group, and Rachel and I are recording some of this episode that you're going to hear today, we did a live to kind of show the setup of how this all works, how we put these things together.

OK, so that's kind of the history. The podcast has been around for about six years. And in that running, we were the first podcast out there for health and fitness for people over 40. I'm now happy to say there are several, but we were the first and we have been running the longest and we're also the largest. We get with over 500 episodes. We've had over 2.5 million downloads and every episode now gets at least 5000 downloads, a very few that fall below that line and some that are very much above that line.

And then the other thing is I've had on 311 guests out of those 500 shows, so it's still a solo shows a lot of other stuff that's gone on. But that's a lot of interviews when you consider that I actually read all of their books. I read every one of those books to make sure that I'm pulling out nuggets of value for you each and every week. And I make it easier on my guests because they know where we want to go.

They know we want to talk. And we're talking about what's in their book, which is really, really great. One of the and now I want to kind of shift and we'll talk about what goes into making a podcast, because I know when I first got into it, I thought it was just as easy. You know, there's audio files just put them together. But to get the sound, to get everything going, to get the right tone, to get the right people, to get everything working, there is there are quite a few moving parts. The question I get the most when people ask about the podcast is, how do you find your guests?

Well, I have a little inside secret that I'll share with you. I go to Amazon and that's where I love to get my guests. I will go on there and I will look for upcoming books that are coming out. And if the topic looks interesting, the title is interesting. I read a little bit about it, a little bit about the author, and I say, OK, this would be a good fit. You can actually sort Amazon and find books that are coming out in the future.

And so that's what I'll do. Or if I have a particular topic that someone wants me to talk about, you know, you've asked on the Facebook group or you've messaged me directly and said, hey, could you cover this or help me with this? I will actually reach out for people to do those discussions. But really, one of the other ways that I get it, it's kind of amazing when you start getting a little bit bigger in this industry, you start showing up on certain lists is I get over 4000 direct inquiries each year.

For people that want to be on the show, either their publicist is reaching out for them or they're reaching out. And to put that in context. I really only have about 40 guests per year. So you're looking at about 100 to one shot of being the guest that I'm going to bring on. But that said, through direct solicitation, Denise Austin's PR person reached out to me. Tony Horton's PR person reached out to me. And so I get a lot of direct inquiries and I basically can't even read them all because there's about a 10 day it's kind of crazy, 10 to 11 a day, sometimes more.

But I basically put those all in a folder. And then if I'm hunting for a guest, I might scan back over the last several and see if I see something that was interesting. Another place where I find topics is in forums. So I'll be on my fitness pal or I'll be on our Facebook group or a lot of other will Facebook groups sometimes read it? And if I see a question that's really interesting or a topic that's really interesting, I'll dive in.

But my favorite my favorite way to get topics is when you ask me a question. If you messaged me or you ask a question, the Facebook group, I can come up with a topic that's just for you, because guess what? It's not just for you. It actually is for everybody. So if you have questions, you have topics you want me to cover, reach out. Now, some people will then try to give me particular guests to go after.

And I and I often do. But there are certain guests that are just not interested in podcasts unless you're Joe Rogan. And they're just they feel they're bigger. They are on the TV markets. They feel the TV is a better exposure for them and they really just don't want to give a podcast the time of day. And so there's some I'm just not going to be able to get and I just have to live with that. There's some I thought I couldn't get.

I reached out to Dr. X at one point and he didn't want to be on the show. And then, I don't know, a year later I reach out again. And he came on the show. So I will keep trying. If I see a book that's interesting, a best seller, if I see something you've asked me about in the past, I find a book on it. I'm going to cover it. So that's really how I get guests.

Now, someone asked in the Facebook group, do I always agree with the guest and have there been any something else going on? And I might just as this I love having on guests that have different opinions than me because I always learn something. Sometimes I learn them right, but I always learn something. So if I feel the guests can bring value to the to the podcast, I'll definitely have them on. I had an agent reach out to me one time, a PR person, and they wanted to they reached out about a book and the title of the book, the subtitle and everything about the description was that you could eat anything you wanted.

You just had to pay attention, a little bit of attention to your portion sizes and your calories in, calories out, and you're going to lose weight. And it was true. You're not going to keep it off. So when I mailed them back and I said, you know, I'm going to ask these kind of questions because everybody's tried calories in, calories out and failed at it. So why do they think it would work now? I never heard back from that PR person, so they obviously didn't want to get into a contentious situation.

So they didn't. And then I was reading one book by an author that I had actually reached out to. And when I got this book and pretty much he was just regurgitating the probably the textbook he had in college that was based on the standard American diet, the the government guidelines for what we should be eating. I canceled the interview. I just said, no, I am not going to get him on here when he's talking about eating basically the food that my plate or whatever they want to call it these days, the government standard for what to eat.

I was like, no, that's that's not going to fly for me. And I don't like the guy. So I definitely didn't want to get into a confrontation so I just canceled and didn't have that interview. And then I'd had guests on that I brought on and I gave them some questions, some points ahead of time, and they wrote out their entire answer and you could tell they were reading. It was really painful. But she had some good content.

She had some good information. So I kept that podcast. And then one time I did have a guest on and we were talking about a topic, that one I wasn't really comfortable with. But I thought, OK, I learned something and I did unfortunately something was wrong with my recording equipment and it didn't record my side of the conversation. So there was really no way for me to use what was there. And her side of the conversation was really messed up.

I could hear her, but it wasn't quality and I wasn't going to put it on the podcast. And I just told her I had to cancel. And because, again, the content wasn't something I was completely comfortable with, I just opted to not do that one. I went on to a different topic and a different guest. So there have been some times that interviews don't go the way as planned when I had Dr. Fong and Jimmy Moore on my podcast together for the first time, the first time they'd ever been on someone else's podcast together.

It happens to also be one of the biggest podcasts that we've had ever released. It did over one hundred and fifty seven thousand, I think, on YouTube alone. It was huge when I had them on the UPS, driver pulled up in his truck and our dogs went ballistic. Three of them just as loud and they would not stop barking. He was walking up and walking back. And so I had to stop, pause and go. And then another time on that same episode, we got to the end and I pushed the end of the recording and we kept talking.

We just kept talking. And Dr. Fong just I mean, the gold that was coming out of his mouth was just awesome. And then he was talking and he said, Did you catch that on tape, too? And I'm like, no. So what I did is I summarized what he had talked about in that episode. So you still got it, but you just didn't get it from Dr. Fong. Now, I used to interview using Skype and a thing called Ecan call recorder.

That was the way when I first started. And then there was some rumblings that Skype was changing their model of the way they work. And as a result, Ecan might not work. And I really couldn't take that chance. There was an up and coming company called Zoom. This is way before the pandemics. This is way before anybody really even knew who they were. It was a point where they were getting customers one by one. They literally called me and I got on a demo with them to discuss the software and discuss where that was going to work for my podcast and whether I want to use it for other things.

But I use Zoom and you can record the calls. And if I'm going to do something that solo or the bits that are just me talking, then I'll use GarageBand and it's free on my Mac computer and it does really well. When I first started doing my recording, I was using audible. And so if you listen to the early ones and then I mean not audible. I'm sorry, audacity. I was using audacity when I first started and I actually got a review that my voice was a little tinny.

And so I looked into other recordings. I started recording on GarageBand and it's much better. I use an audio Technica 8R twenty one hundred. It's about ninety nine dollars on Amazon. I own three of them. Some of them I like to travel with. I'll have one when I travel if I need to do any recording on the road. And then I have one here in my recording area, my desk at the gym and I have one at home on my desk.

So I have these around so that I have a microphone and a plug right into the computer. So it's not any other kind of soundboards and all of that other kind of stuff, I kind of try to keep it simple. OK, when I first launched, I had a professional company go ahead and do my intro and outro music. I gave them, I picked the music, got it. I paid I think I was using Ben Sound.

So it was just I had to acknowledge him somewhere in the show notes, which I did. You'll see that. And I paid them a good bit of money to go ahead and build me out the instro and outro because I want it to sound professional when people are going. And as I said, I wanted to make new noteworthy. I wanted to make this a professional podcast. And so I did do that investment really like those guys. But then because I've gotten more comfortable recording, because I'd gotten more comfortable with sound editing, I actually did the stuff.

I picked different music and paid for it. And this time I do it. I did it myself. I recorded it myself and I like it. I've asked on Facebook group if anybody really wants to change it and I didn't get much feedback that anybody did. So I've just kept it and it works. You know who I am, you know what's going on. And you know when the show's over. As far as sponsorships, I have started doing them a little bit more regularly with the downturn of covid, I lost a lot of my clients.

They just couldn't afford personal training during a period when they weren't making any money or were making a lot less money. And so I lost some clients and I needed to pay the bills. I'm still the breadwinner here, so I started taking on sponsorships. In the way that basically works is I have some resources that I go to, some I try to go to directly. Some come to me directly. But I go out and find companies that I actually believe in their products.

I think what they're selling, the services or the goods that they're selling, I can believe in them and I will go ahead and I will try the product. In fact, I'm trialing a product right now from time line that's called I forget it might appear. Yeah. it might appear. And it's basically food for your mitochondria. And so I've been trying theirs. And later this week I will record a short bit for that prerecorded sponsorship and I will put that and I'll send that over for their approval.

Once they approve it, then they've they've paid for a certain number of episodes and then that will go into each of those episodes. So when you hear a sponsorship, if the product's interesting to you, use the link that I give or and use the coupon code when you buy it. That's the only way they're going to know that I sent you there. So if you go to the link that they send you to, we know you went there.

If you buy it, use the coupon code. They know you bought it. And that's one of the really cool ways you can support the show. If you're needing something and we're talking about on the show, it really does help me if you're if you're using the sponsors. OK, now, when Rachel and I do our sessions, we usually do those on Monday afternoon. We will record that hello segment and the discussion segment. We do that on Zoom.

I record those actually. Again, if you go to the Facebook group you'll see back about a week a couple few weeks ago. You'll see where we did kind of a live of us doing exactly that recording, one of those sessions. And so it's, it's cool because I'll do the interview or I'll do the solo episode and then I'll share that with her and then she'll listen to it. We'll talk about some points we want to go into and then we'll do the recording part.

And that all takes us however long, you know, usually less than thirty minutes. But we end up talking about other stuff because we're friends. Anyway, I do that on Zoom. OK, so when I'm all done with this I have several files. OK, I have the interview file, I have the intro file, I have the, you know, the voucher stuff, all those different files, a sponsor file. So I'll end up anywhere from nine to thirteen files.

I send it off to a company called Bare Value. I think they bought the company I originally started with. When I launched, I was using a guy named Gabriel, didn't really have a name for his company, but he's I think he sold his client list or he got absorbed by bare value. Anyway, I load the files up for them. They do the audio processing, so they put all those files together. They level them out, they make them sound good.

And if somebody said something they shouldn't, then I can ask them to bleep it out. They put that put all that together for me and then send me a message. Let me know that that files available. Once the files available, I download it and then I upload it into a site called Happy Scribd. Now Happy has an AI, so they basically spit back a translated version of my a transcribed version of that, all those of that full episode.

OK, I take that then and I message my VA, Angela. So Angela's in the Philippines. Thank you, Angela. If you're listening to this, I really appreciate you. I could not do this without you. Angela will go through and she will clean it all up and she'll put the speakers on there. So it makes it really easy for me to then post it when it's time. So I end with full transcription of the full episode.

And then she's also been helping me with doing something because I do capture the video version of the recording when I'm interviewing the guests now. So on the interview shows there's a video and Angela has been helping me with the cutting those up into little clips. I share some of those on the Facebook group. So 40PlusFitnessPodcast.com/group. You can see some of those guests, see some of the videos, just like Golden Nugget little clips, you know, usually two or three minutes, four minutes long, something like that.

And then I've also started a new YouTube channel, 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/clips. And so you can go out there and see some of these are just kind of high points of the conversations I've had with these guests. Give you an idea and you can see how it was a zoom call. Basically, now I put it out there. Angela cleans it up, makes it look nice. Does a little stuff with a cover and all that makes it really nice, so you can check out those clips either on the Facebook group or out there on clips.

So now I have the audio file and I have the transcript. I take the audio file and I loaded into a site called Libs. Libsyn is the largest podcasting host out there. And you want to put your podcast on a host separate from your website, because most websites, most Web hosts are not built to stream sound but Lipsyn is. That's all Lipsyn does, is stream audio and video clips. So I use Lipsyn. And they were the largest.

The best that the only one I'd ever even considered going to. There are other ones that are good too, but I trust Lipsyn implicitly. They make it really, really easy. So I put the file on there and then I have to write a little bit and do a little bit of stuff, put a little bit more content like the covers and the things that you see. And then the information. If you look at what's, you know, the show notes things and all that, I put all that in there and then lipsyn, literally pushes that everywhere.

They build a feed and then they push it everywhere it needs to go. So the feed is built to go to Apple, Google, Amazon, Pandora, all of them. So anywhere you're listening to this podcast, it's Lipsyn helps me get it to you each week. And then I go to, I have my website, 40PlusFitnessPodcast.com is hosted on a service called Deluxe Hosting. They've been doing it for quite some time. I was with someone else, but they sold their shared hosting to this company.

But deluxe hosting is actually even better than the one I was working with. I love these guys. They're real quick to help and help you out. They do a lot to really get us going. And then it's basically from that point I put the show notes in there. So basically the transcript I just post, you know, copy paste it all in there, make the post, make sure there's a link to the book which if you want to buy the book, if you go through my link, I get a little help from Amazon.

They give me a little kickback. It's like I think it's two to four percent. So it's not a huge amount, but it's just a nice little bit to kind of help cover some of the basic costs. And then as far as promotion, Lipsyn will post on my Facebook page, my Twitter and my LinkedIn. So that's automatic. And then on the Facebook group and via email, I sometimes send out stuff to let you know that it's there.

I'm actually not really good at promotion. I should be better. So it is one of my weaknesses. I should promote the podcast a lot more than I do. After that, I got into writing a book, so I got laid off in December of twenty seventeen, at the time I had about five clients, so my goal was to previously was to continue to work, do my thing and just have some clients build the podcast up. And then at age 55, I would retire.

Right. That was the plan. Well I got laid off December of 2017, which was about three years earlier than I was intending to leave. So I decided, OK, I need to write a book that's probably the best route for me right now. Not having a job and being home. I have some time. And so I went ahead and you listen to the last five episodes of 2017, I did five special episodes, the 26th to 31st.

That was actually the outline for my book. I literally wrote the outline and I recorded five episodes of what I wanted to have in the book. So it was really condensed version of my book that I did over five episodes. I hired a company called Scribe to coach me through writing a book. I'd never done it before, I'd never published. And so rather than chase publishers and try to get them, you know, do a draft and try to send it to publishers and do that, because I wrote a novel back in the 90s and I did all that.

And you hate getting those rejection letters. And I just really didn't want to go through a lot of that. And I don't want to hire an agent. So I hired Scribe, a really cool company that helps you publish books. They were one of the first in the field and they are probably still the biggest. But there are other companies that do that. But I just needed some help with publishing the book. Now, the one thing that Scribe really didn't do a lot for was the marketing of the book.

And that's why I joined the author academy and they helped me with the promotion of the book and kind of making sure that it aligned with what I do as a business. So I already had the book written and was getting ready to publish it when I joined Author Academy to start working on the marketing. And I hired a friend and his name is Joel to help me do the editing for the audio book. So I had the text from the from the book and then I went through and did a read that was painful.

But I read the book and I recorded it and gave it to Joel and he put it together to get it in the format necessary for getting an audio book version. And so the book went live November of 2018 and it's available hardback paperback Kindle Audible. You just search for The Wellness Roadmap on Amazon and you'll find it. And then I started submitting myself for awards. I was a finalist at Author Academy Awards. You may remember Dr. David Friedman in his book Food Sanity.

He won. I had him on for Episode 331. Well-deserved. David is a good friend now and he deserves that. His book was awesome. And his speech during the awards ceremony was pure gold. So I'm happy to have come in second place to David. And then I did win America's Best Book Award for Health and Fitness. So award winning book. I'm really proud of that. And so it's really that was a really good two years for me with regards to writing a book and then getting some awards and some credit for it.

So now I want to talk a little bit about 40 plus fitness online personal training. Now, as I mentioned, I started the podcast at the point where I did know that I wanted to be a personal trainer. I had gotten my certifications earlier, really to train myself. I was traveling so much. I just really didn't have the time to go to a personal trainer. And I knew I needed some of that, some of the things that they would be able to teach me.

So my goal was to work on it for five years and then at 55, retire. But the layoff came about three years early. So I was out and about and I decided to go ahead and start training people. I already had a few clients when I got laid off, but I became an NSAM certified personal trainer, then went on and got the corrective exercise specialty. And then I've gone on to add fitness nutrition and behavior change from them.

I also went and earned my certified functional aging specialist from FIA, and then I'm a level two online personal training coach with OTA, which is a group that that trains online personal trainers. They've got the best program out there. And I've gone on to get the level to cert, which is the highest cert that they have available. And so for over five years, I've been doing challenges, some free and some paid. I have some do it yourself programs.

I did one on one training and I did group training. So I was doing a lot of these different things and I learned a ton. You know, I've had hundreds and hundreds of people come to my programs. And as a result, I've learned a lot about online training. I've learned a lot about training in general and a lot about what goes on when we're trying to lose weight when we're over 40. Now, I'm but, you know, all the things I've done, I when I sat down and I was going through OTA 2 really my online personal training 2, and as I was going through that, I built up a new program.

I said, OK, I'm doing some group clients and I love that. I'm doing some one on one clients. I love that. But I saw weaknesses in both of those models and I said I can do this better. So I really took all those concepts, all those things. And I came up with my 12-week GAS Program. Now, this program, paired with a legacy program for people that want to stick around, is a program that is very limited and it's a small group.

I'm only going to have 12 participants going at any one time during the 12-week program. And it takes all those. And it's just really, really cool. And I don't want you to take my word for it. I'm really excited about it. But I want you to listen to what some of my clients have to say.

Why did you decide now is the time to hire a trainer or coach?

[01:11:44.690] – Client 1
You know, I was trying to do things to better my health, and I just couldn't figure out a plan. So I would try like a low calorie diet and I would track and try to do that for a few days. Something would happen that I would just give up and think, oh, maybe I need to do something else. Same thing with working out. I was working out, but I try to find what should I be doing? I would do that for a little bit, not really knowing if that's what I should be doing. So I just felt like I didn't have a plan. So when I reached out to you and talk to you about a plan and this is what we're going to do and I'm going to be here to answer any questions, we're going to reevaluate if we need to make changes. I just felt like, OK, now I have a plan.

[01:12:39.170] – Client 2
I chose to hire a coach or trainer because I felt like I needed more guidance in my exercise activities. I wasn't doing enough and I needed specific help with parts of my body, and I wanted to know for sure that I had good form.

[01:12:57.230] – Client 3
Well, I want to take things to the next level. I reached a point in my fitness journey where I felt like that I needed some more professional guidance after about five years of doing things on my own. I was ready to get some guidance that helped me get to the next level.

[01:13:16.970] – Client 4
I was interested in online training because I'd never done it before. And I'm not a gym person. I don't care too much for going to gyms. I've gone a few times and it's not really my thing. So I've actually had a personal trainer come to my house in the past for yoga practice and another one we did Pilates and then when I heard about online training, I thought, wow, I wonder how that would be. I wonder how that would work. And so I was interested and I'm totally blind. So in the personal training sessions here at my house, the trainer would like if we were doing a yoga pose, a trainer would get in the yoga pose and I could check her feet or her hands or her shoulders or whatever, and then practice to pose myself. And I wondered how would this be for me and my particular case? How would that work online? And so it was an interesting concept. I wanted to explore it.

[01:14:24.020] – Client 5
I've been floundering for, what, five to eight years, just kind of up and down in the same ten pound range and not being able to find anything that would help me break through that. So I needed help.

[01:14:38.450] – Client 6
Well, I had listened to the podcast and I've tried all sorts of stuff by myself and I kind of knew a lot about a lot. But I just wanted someone to help kind of focus my energies or, you know, focus on the big rocks that I should be concentrating on and kind of slap me on the back when I'm bothering and keep me on the straight and arrow.

[01:15:05.890] – Client 7
I basically decided to do it because I felt that I couldn't do it on my own. I didn't have enough knowledge or experience to keep up with it on a regular basis.

[01:15:18.970] – Client 8
Well, I've always I've been working out for most of my life and I got to a point where I thought I needed help. And I recognize your podcast well over a year ago. And I knew I wanted a coach. So I contacted you. And at that time I was training for a bike ride bike race and you gave me all the information. But we also agreed that you weren't a fit for me at this time. And while I was training and at that time, it was like for four months or so I was training for this bike race. You contacted me via email to see how it was going. And it always meant a lot to me that after I finished the race, I wanted to pursue something else and I needed help with, you know, the program that you have gas. I just really connected with that for exercising. I've never had a coach, a personal trainer show me how to do the things. So you were able to help me with your programs and give me what I needed while I was traveling. I'm an airline pilot and I spend so much time on the road, and that's what I needed, is more of guidance.

[01:16:37.390] – Client 9
Because I didn't have the confidence anymore that I could do it myself. I knew I needed professional guidance.

Why did you go with Coach Allan?

[01:16:48.670] – Client 1
I've been listening to Allan's podcast for years. I just felt like he had a lot of experience working with people just and I just felt like once I talked to him that he had a plan and he was going to help make my goals happen. And I just felt comfortable.

[01:17:19.120] – Client 2
When I saw Coach Allan was online, I thought that was a neat idea. And some of the things that Coach Allan said were really great. You don't have to reschedule with your trainer, which my other trainer was notorious for, and you can do the workouts 24/7. So I thought it would be a good idea. The other reason for it too, is that Allen works with people who are over 40 and I'm just way over 40.

[01:17:47.770] – Client 3
I really liked what I heard on about six to nine months worth of podcast that I'd been listening to on a weekly basis. I felt like that Coach Allan provided a good balance between work and expectations and did not promise what I consider to be unrealistic outcomes.

[01:18:12.920] – Client 4
His book, The Wellness Roadmap. That book was the most fascinating book I ever read. It was actually the first fitness book I ever read, anything like it. And when I heard that book from the start to the finish, I read it several times and I thought, I need this coach. I need to find a way to get on board with this coach. So I emailed him and we talked. He asked me questions. I fill out an application. And that was the beginning of where I am now. It was amazing. I'm so glad that he accepted me. It was his book.

[01:18:55.570] – Client 5
My husband actually listens to. And he heard that you had this program. And he was he suggested that, hey, this is something different, why don't you try this? And so I went ahead and I looked into it and I just said, yes, that would be good because it would give me the accountability and it was different than what other approaches I had been doing.

[01:19:19.330] – Client 6
I love to listen to a podcast when I work out or when I'm doing anything. And I kind of fell into the 40 Plus Fitness podcast, and I just like your message. It resonated. It made sense. You know, the things you were saying made common sense to me. Didn't sound like some crazy let's, you know, do this and have success in ten days or something like that. It just seemed like a good, healthy, balanced approach.

[01:19:44.080] – Client 7
When I spoke to him, I felt very comfortable with him. I felt that he was going to guide me and I had this kind of preconceived notion like a personal coach was more like a drill instructor, and I didn't feel that at all, I felt like he was there to guide you. I started with the idea of weight loss, but he was more of a guidance in terms of improving overall health, and that's what I got out of our initial conversation. And I think it kind of spoke to what I really wanted, which was improving my health in general.

[01:20:19.860] – Client 8
I chose Coach Allen because I was always searching for something. You know, I've always worked out and I recall in my car driving, I was just searching for I believe it was a podcast for health and exercise. And I listen to just one episode and then I put it into my favorites. And then I continued on listening to a lot of the episodes and I connected. I had this connection with Coach Allan somewhere where I wanted to be in my life and with my journey of health. And at that time that's I looked up on his website, I downloaded his book, I listened to the book, and then I contact him.

[01:21:04.140] – Client 9
Because of the reputation I heard from others who had been coached under him and also because of the research I did myself listening to his podcast.

What are some of your wins? What are you most proud of from the GAS Program?

[01:21:20.760] – Client 1
I have lost some weight and I've lost some inches. And but more than that, I feel like it's more of a lifestyle now. So if I do go off my eating plan when I go on vacation, I know that I'm going to start back up and I look forward to getting back on plan and I don't go to bed feeling guilty or bad like I used to in the past of, you know, oh I ate the wrong thing, oh, I didn't do this. I just feel so much more confident about things my health these days.

[01:21:57.810] – Client 2
I'm most proud of the fact that I haven't given up, even though sometimes I have some valleys that I get into and some ruts that I have to get out of. I love Allan's road map analogy and so it seems like I can get on the detours, all right. But Allan is inspirational and when I've ever talked with Allen, I'm always really ready to get going again and it sustains me for quite a while. I did lose weight. Right now I'm working on losing it again, but I just am very inspired by Allan and I feel like I won whenever I have a full week that I've done some exercise in a day and when I've stopped eating sweets and started really counting things and leaving out sugar.

[01:22:48.780] – Client 3
Well, I've lost a good amount of body fat as well as gaining strength. Definitely do feel like I've been able to take things up a notch and I look forward to continuing to do that.

[01:23:06.170] – Client 4
When I listen to Coach Allan's book he was talking about, used to be and I have used to be, I used to be a dancer, I used to walk a lot. I used to practice yoga and various things in life, stopped those activities. And I had actually become kind of like a non mover. I wasn't motivated. And so what I'm most happy about is I move now. Yeah, I don't dance because my feet got injured. I can't do that again.

But that's OK. I'm doing other things. I've built up my strength. When Coach Allan gave me my first program, I thought, wow, that's easy. That's like wimpy. OK, I have to do some squats, I have to do some overhead presses, I have to do some side lunges and counter push ups or knee push ups and I thought I can do that. It's not hard at all. Like I stood on that band, tried to put press up over my head and I couldn't do it, not even with a ten pound resistance band.

That was a shock to me because I used to be a lot fitter. And as I worked at it day by day, slowly, slowly, I've gotten stronger. And so I'm really happy with that. I'm proud of that. I'm also proud of my nutrition. I eat better. I eat good food, healthy food. I don't drink Pepsi anymore. I'm proud of the learning I've done to learn about fitness and even to share things with my family, the little things that I've learned that I think they might be interested in.

I'm really happy I can do that. So I'm very proud of what I've accomplished.

[01:24:55.670] – Client 5
Well, yes, definitely weight loss. But even more than that was we went to get a DEXA scan, which shows your body fat percentage and from the initial one to the next one. Well, I had been working with you. I had lost in body fat, but my muscles had actually gained a little bit. So I thought that was great in the lady who is doing the Scarers. Wow. Whatever you're doing, keep it up.

[01:25:28.220] – Client 6
I think I'm most proud of when I started the program, my A1C was above nine and the last two times I've had it tested, it's been six and I've dropped one of two of my meds and if I would focus a little bit more, I would be able to drop the other one. So I'm kind of just working on dropping meds. And over the time I've known Allan and interacted with him, I started at 265. I'm currently like 235, so I'm down about thirty pounds, but I still have a ways to go.

[01:26:05.300] – Client 7
I think I'm most proud of the fact that I not only lost forty five pounds, but I also got rid of some of my blood pressure medication and my blood pressure was better regulated. So I would say that that was like a double one. And I also have a lot more energy. I feel like I gained some years more than anything. I feel like, I'm 10 years younger, if you will, because I can do the things I was doing 10 years ago.

[01:26:37.900] – Client 8
Well, my wins are what I've got is of commitment. And when I put myself to something, I know I'm going to be committed on completing that. But what I also learned is I can't do this on myself. So I need some guidance. And with guidance of a coach or an accountability partner, that's what I need. And that's what I'm most proud of. The journey that I've started.

[01:27:03.900] – Client 9
My wins are that I lost a little over 40 pounds, which I did not expect in my wildest dreams. I have a new perspective on the fact that it's not just weight loss at all. It's about your health as you get older and maintaining your muscle mass and maintaining your flexibility and and being able to do all the things that you want to do as you get older. That thought had not really it important to me before until I had coaching.

Do you feel good about this investment of time, effort, and money? Why or why not?

[01:27:45.810] – Client 1
I do feel good about the investment of all of those because I feel like this has been an investment in my health. As I get older, I have a plan, I'm sticking with it. I feel good about those things that I'm doing and before I didn't have a plan. So I just feel like working with Allan has helped me with that. And it has been a great investment.

[01:28:16.350] – Client 2
I feel good about the time, investment and money because I think that it's very flexible. I can do what I need to do whenever I have time. Sometimes I wish I could take more time to have Allan watching me, but I think that's my problem and not Allan's. I enjoyed the things that I do, and it's actually quite a bit less expensive than what I was doing with my regular other trainer who was in person, I could get one week of training, I mean, one hour of training with her, whereas with Allan I can train nonstop if I want to and then were rewarded with the calls that Allan offers so that we can be on top of what's new and he can be on top of what we're doing. And he shows that he cares even though he's got a few of us to care for, and even though mostly we're online and not in person.

[01:29:15.580] – Client 3
Yes, I do feel good. I think it is worth the investment. It's definitely gotten results. And I like the interaction. I like the ability, the accountability and the ability to get answers when I need them. And so I do think it's definitely worth the investment.

[01:29:37.940] – Client 4
Absolutely. It's been the best investment I ever made because it's an investment in me and actually in my family and in my loved ones and my friends, because it's made me a different person. I've changed things for the better. I'm happier. I'm more positive. I'm motivated. I love what I'm doing with Coach Allan. I wouldn't change it for anything. And I'm so glad I did it. And I hope Coach Allan, just 5000 more podcast.

[01:30:08.540] – Client 5
Yes, I do. Sometimes you just need some help or you need someone to help you have accountability and guidance on what to do next. And we're talking about health here. This is determining how you're going to feel in the future as well as today. And that's important. I want to be the little old lady there have been schooling, what in the world is she doing now? And that's where you are.

[01:30:36.890] – Client 6
I do think it's been a good effort of my time and money because it's not that much money when you when you think about it and you know, your health, if you don't have your health, you're screwed. You know, you could have all the money in the world and no health. And, you know, you're the guy from Apple. I can't remember his name, but so that was really I wanted to invest in myself. And it's been great. You know, I feel even when I slip up and I'm like, right now I'm kind of in a little bit of a slump. I feel like I have all the tools to just ride the ship and keep moving forward a second that I don't get in a panic mode or I don't get into the woe is me mode. It's like, well, are you doing what you should be doing, yes or no? And if the answer is no, then make some corrections and keep moving forward. So for that, you know, I've got that great mindset going where it's like there is no finish line, it's just life.

[01:31:35.960] – Client 7
It was definitely a good investment of my time, effort and money, all three. The time and the effort, I wish I had done this sooner because I think I would feel that much better if I started earlier. But that's definitely been a great experience and a great investment because the payoff has been tremendous.

[01:31:18.800] – Client 8
I do feel good about the investment and the reasons why is I did a lot of research in regards to hiring a coach and I did hire a coach prior to this for a cycling event. And I need the guidance. So when I put time and money into it, it gives me that much more to fulfill my goals that I need to succeed.

[01:32:18.800] – Client 9
I absolutely do. I get the chills when I think what would have happened if I had not gotten in touch with you or if the things I had lined up in order to get your coaching, if those things had not happened, I am afraid to think where I would be right now today.

Is there anything else you'd like to say about the 40+ Fitness GAS Program?

[01:32:42.650] – Client 1
When I started, I was really concerned about the group calls because I thought, I don't know if I'm going to, you know, have the same kind of questions or people going to be even interested in what I have to say? But when I did sign up, I thought, OK, I'm going to make sure that I ask questions. I'm going to do the group calls, even though I'm uncomfortable with it. And that was the biggest surprise for me because I really like the group calls. So I can't say that's a negative because I really do. I just, you know, they ask questions that I have the same interest in. And even if not, I feel like I learned so much. And I do like how you do the you know, whatever's on your mind at the beginning of the calls. So that I think is good. But everything else, I just feel like you're there when I'm having a rough time, you say just set up a call, you'll answer any questions I have or even through the app, I'm able to just reach out or you reach out to me.

[01:33:44.570] – Client 1
So I feel like there's a good conversation there. And then, like I said, I was really surprised with the group. I wasn't sure how I was going to feel with all that, but that was a pleasant surprise.

[01:33:56.030] – Client 2
I think people ought to really consider 40 plus fitness training if they're over 40 because Allan is not 20 something or even 30 something and he understands the body as it's beginning to relapse into old. And if you don't want your body to relapse into old and you should join up with Allan and work with Allan because he's with you all the way on this, given that he's in the same age group and he knows what he's doing and he's had his own successes and failures, that he's had to work through the failures and has had a lot of wins. So it's it's a great thing and motivating to work with Allan.

[01:34:38.840] – Client 3
Well, I really appreciate Coach Allan. I appreciate the efforts he puts in. And it's definitely something that those looking to take things to a different level should be considering.

[01:34:50.990] – Client 4
I listen to 40 plus fitness podcasts every day. I listen to my favorite ones over and over and learn something every time I listen to them, even on repeat lessons, I think they're so valuable. I love them and I love that book. It's a great book. If you haven't read it, please read it.

[01:35:11.030] – Client 5
Yeah, I've been doing some things that I never thought I would, and some of the program aspects of the program were things I kind of heard about. But I thought, oh, that's not for me. And yet I'm finding those things are actually what's working for me. So and then the other things I just thought I would never be able to do, I'm actually doing now so.

[01:35:35.780] – Client 6
Well, I really enjoy that, you know, I can reach out to Allan any time. If I text him or message him, he gets right back to me. And, you know, it's almost like having your own personal psychiatrist because, you know, he just he really talked to you through some stuff. And it's been a good relationship.

[01:35:56.690] – Client 7
I think the biggest thing that drew me to it and looking back at the program after I'm done with it, is that the accountability and the support from other people, just knowing that everyone's in the same boat you're in, we're all just trying to get better. The accountability of reporting to everybody, hey, I did this this week. This work, this didn't work. It keeps you to the program. It really keeps you motivated because motivation alone, trying to stay motivated, It's difficult. With the program, It gives you all those things and the things that you're struggling, that's when you'll talk to someone and the kind of pep you up and tell you, hey, I had that same issue or, oh, this is what you can do to help that out. There's always something there to support you and keep you moving forward. You don't really have those moments where you're giving up because there's really no one there to support trying to encourage you.

The program really did do a lot of that for me. I don't think I would have done it on my own. I know I wouldn't have done it on my own. I've been on diets many times and it just diet doesn't do it, it's all of it together. So having that support, guidance, the knowledge to do what's right and knowing what works.

[01:37:19.920] – Client 8
40 plus fitness has been a pivotal part of my health journey, let's say. And one of the reasons it is, is because as an airline pilot, I'm on the road a lot and I can always find a gym. I can always find exercising. I can always go for a walk or run or whatever the case may be. But what I find really hard is getting organized with food and just prepping. And I think as someone who's traveling, I'm going to be completely honest. It is a hard thing to maintain nutritional goals while you're traveling.

And what I will say about that is, is you got to put in time. You got to put in effort, you got to do your homework and you got to prepare. And the guidance that I get through Coach Allan is he's put me on a program and there's so much information that I'm able to gather, motivation that I'm able to gather in order for me to prep, because it's always been hard being on the road to travel. And also I'm able to get the exercises I need via the website and the apps for me to be motivated and have accountability throughout my process in my health journey.

[01:38:38.940] – Client 9
I would like to say to anybody who's on the fence about considering getting a coach to jump in because Allan provides a money back guarantee. You do have to want it and work for it, but take a chance and put yourself all in. And the results are the benefits of it are amazing.

Post Show/Recap

Post show with Rach

[01:39:07.620] – Allan
Welcome back, Raz.

[01:39:08.820] – Rachel
Hey, Allan, you know, your seven tips systems that you put together were probably all of the key points that every person should consider and their health and fitness journey. There's a few that stood out, but that was pretty much all the most important things that people need to know.

[01:39:29.970] – Allan
Yeah, I just sat there and I was, you know, what do we put into this episode? Because I didn't want it to just be let's talk about the podcast, because I don't think that does six years of work. Justice to say, oh, here I did this and here I did that. We did those things and I had help all along the way. And that was really kind of a theme I wanted to get out of there.

[01:39:51.360] – Allan
I hope I did, was that everybody needs help at some level for some things. And it's hard sometimes to ask for help. You know, you think, OK, if I didn't do if I didn't pay my audio processor to do this because I can do it then because the whole testimonial piece, I put all of that together so I can do the audio editing and cutting and processing and all of that, I can't make people on the phone sound better, but that is what it is.

[01:40:19.170] – Allan
But, you know, we should ask for help. And that was really, you know, in going through all of that was a core theme for me, was don't be afraid to ask for help. But I couldn't just make that the show, you know, ask for help, ask for help, ask for help. I knew I needed to do something more. And that's why I sat down and spent a good bit of time thinking about, OK, what did I learn?

[01:40:41.480] – Allan
what was this all for? Talking to three hundred and eleven guests and reading over three hundred books and having these doing a lot of research and having these conversations and working with my clients, hundreds of clients over that time. What stood out as the keys to all of this. And that's why I wanted to share that. And I do call it your wellness systems. It's just really one system. But I needed another s and they're just the acronym fell.

[01:41:10.380] – Allan
But, you know, I thought, you know, sharing seven things that were really important was a key learning moment, key learning point and really a good summary of six years of podcasting.

[01:41:24.450] – Rachel
My gosh, six years. Congratulations on that, by the way. That's amazing. And this being your 500th podcast is just incredible to me. And I've listened to probably almost every single one of your podcasts and every single one I've learned something. But one of the key things that I find, like in your SYSTEMS acronym, but also that I found in your podcast, is the Making Health and Fitness a part of your lifestyle. Make it sustainable.

[01:41:54.120] – Allan
Yeah, too often will people think, well, I did this diet and I lost some weight and then something happened. You know, I slipped up a birthday party, had a piece of cake, something happened. And as a result of a planned or unplanned detour, as I talk about it in the wellness roadmap book, is, you know, you're always going to have detours. You know, birthdays come around every year. And, you know, I was talking to one client and he has X numbers of cousins and children and family members.

[01:42:29.160] – Allan
And so I was like, so basically based on that number of family members, you're having a birthday party twice a month. You know, every time you have a birthday party, you're going to go off the rails for three days. Well, you know, you just lost one quarter of your whole month off the rails and he said that is if I get back on in three days, you know, sometimes it's a week, sometimes it's a month.

[01:42:57.090] – Allan
And so you want to find those ways that are just it's just your path. It's just it's grooved in to the way you live your life. And that's, you know, I kind of equate it to this. If you get into the habit of running, you change your behavior and you change your identity. So Rachel identifies as a runner. If you do cross fit, you identify as a cross fitter. If you eat a certain way, that way of eating, you call yourself that.

[01:43:26.370] – Allan
You're a vegetarian or an omnivore. You know, if you eat clean, if you're clean eater, a lot of those things actually become a part of your personality. They become how you relate. And they also then reflect the people that you hang out with, you know, a carnivore and a vegetarian hanging out together could happen if they're both adults. But for most people, no, different tribes, different tribes, they're not going to relate and they're not going to enjoy going out to dinner together.

[01:43:57.420] – Allan
And so you start to revolve around the people that fit your lifestyle and if you continue to hang out with other people, it hasn't become a sustainable lifestyle because if you can't beat it back and say, no, I've got to get back on the path, you know, because this is who I am. And so, you know, you might if you went on a trip, you might not run for a week and that would be almost torture.

[01:44:22.500] – Allan
But you should get back, you're lacing up your shoes. You know, the first 30 minutes, hour, two hours you get, you're lacing up your shoes and you're back on the path. And so and in many cases, even the trips you plan, you plan to have running time and so that's you know, but that's the core of it, is that you've built a lifestyle where you said, OK, who am I and what do I do?

[01:44:48.720] – Allan
And the running has become who you are.

[01:44:51.870] – Rachel
And here's to there's two thoughts in all of that, Allan. And there's two things, is that you've developed your podcast, you wrote the book, and you have a wonderful community on Facebook where you've made it just that. You've made it a community where people can be exposed to other helpful people. You know, there's a lot of people on your Facebook page that aren't runners and you yourself are not a runner so much as I am.

[01:45:18.090] – Rachel
Maybe, but but it's still a community where we can look to each other for information and support and encouragement, which is half the battle right there. But the second thing I wanted to mention, too, is with the same thing with your podcast and your book and your Facebook community, I think that you've taught a lot of people how to get back. You mention it, you call it a detour in your book. You know, like you just said, it happens to all of us all the time.

[01:45:45.360] – Rachel
But if we keep the I'll start the diet on Monday kind of mentality or if we decide to quit because we had one day of bad eating and we just ruined everything and we just want to quit, you know, that is just self sabotaging. But you've taught us how to just be kind to ourselves, except that we celebrated a birthday party or had a holiday weekend or whatever and then get back to it as soon as possible. If you make it a bad meal, it's better than you're making it a bad weekend or a bad month of eating, for example.

[01:46:19.320] – Rachel
So I think that's one of the best things that have come out of your podcast and your book and your Facebook community.

[01:46:25.830] – Allan
Thank you. Because, I mean, I'm planning this vacation and the place we're going is an all inclusive resort. And so I'm yeah, I'm literally going to be having dollar bills in my pocket to take the waiters. And I'm not going to care for a week. I'm not going to care. I'm going to I know I'm going to blow up like a whale. I just do. And then I'm going to enjoy like I said, I'm going to enjoy.

[01:46:48.930] – Allan
When I get in, I'm going to have oysters everywhere I can have them. We finally get there because we're in New Orleans. We're going to be in Miami. We're going to be in Pensacola. I'm going to eat a lot of oysters. And I'm going to find brussel sprouts and I'm going to eat brussel sprouts. And, you know, the things I don't get or don't normally eat, I'm probably going to eat and enjoy the heck out of them, you know?

[01:47:11.610] – Allan
And after that's over, when I get back on that plane and I land in Panama City, I'm going to have a plan. You know, I'm right now, I'm researching hiring a coach for myself, an online coach myself. So they'll put me on a program. I'll have the accountability. I'll do the things that I need to do. And I'm working my way of thinking about what is that next little thing I want to do to just keep the fire lit.

[01:47:38.430] – Rachel
Right.

[01:47:39.240] – Allan
And so I'm no different than anybody else. I still have foibles. I still screw up from time to time. And as I said on my Facebook, if the air is human, I'm a humanist human out there, you know. So that's that's really what this podcast is. It's trying to take health and fitness and say it's not about flex Fridays, it's not about competing with anyone else. It's about just doing the thing to make yourself better tomorrow.

[01:48:04.430] – Rachel
Right. You know, the other piece of advice you mentioned is that 80 20 rule. You know, I didn't even think about it until you mentioned it. When I think 80/20, I think you take the weekend off. But that's not 20 percent of my week. So that's another mindset.

[01:48:24.430] – Allan
it feels like it from a time perspective. It went by really, really fast if you were having a good time. And so, yeah, that week that weekend went by very fast.

[01:48:33.450] – Allan
It feels like twenty percent of a week, maybe even less, but It's not.

[01:48:39.060] – Rachel
you know, it that just goes to show that even with all of your podcasts, even after all these 500 episodes, I still learn something that I never gave much thought to before.

[01:48:51.330] – Allan
OK. I hope we have 500 more but at doing 52, one per week that's good nine years or so down the line. So we'll see.

[01:49:03.540] – Rachel
I think you can cover a whole ton of topics between now and then.

[01:49:07.910] – Allan
There's so much to cover.

[01:49:09.320] – Rachel
There really is.

[01:49:10.880] – Allan
All right, Rachel. Well, I'll see you next week.

[01:49:13.110] – Rachel
Yup. Take care.

Patreons

The following listeners have sponsored this show by pledging on our Patreon Page:

– Anne Lynch	– Eric More	– Leigh Tanner
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Thank you!

Another episode you may enjoy

Wellness Roadmap Part 1

Less...

Let's Say Hello

[00:01:31.880] – Allan
Raz, how are things?

[00:01:34.070] – Rachel
Good. Allan, how are you today?

[00:01:37.140] – Allan
I'm doing all right. I had had a really, really good weekend with just a little bit of not such good thing. I lost my phone again.

[00:01:44.850] – Rachel
Oh, my gosh.

[00:01:45.710] – Allan
We'll talk about that in more detail later. But yeah, same scenario shorts out to Bluff coming back in the golf cart lost but not the same outcome, though. The phone survived with no damage. And a nice taxi driver that we actually know here on the island found it. And so we were able to retrieve my phone, but not without a little bit of frustration. And we'll get into that in more detail in a minute.

[00:02:13.040] – Rachel
Sure. Well, I'm glad it has a good outcome. That's a good ending, then.

[00:02:16.910] – Allan
Yeah. How are things up there? Way up there in Michigan?

[00:02:20.900] – Rachel
Good. Things are good up here. On Friday, I got my vaccine. I got the Johnson and Johnson one and done covid vaccine. So I took the weekend just to relax, make sure I didn't have any adverse reactions to it, which I didn't. Just a little fatigue and I'm feeling pretty good. So I'm pretty excited. Some of my family has been vaccinated. The other family members are getting the other vaccines where you need two of them, but we're just that much closer to having a little bit more normalcy. So looking forward to that.

[00:02:55.250] – Allan
Yeah, they're not they have vaccinations here. They don't have as many as they planned to have. And they didn't order enough to vaccinate the whole country. So I'm not going to take a vaccination from Panama. One, there's there's citizens there are a lot older and a lot worse health than me that need it. And then, it's Panama. And so, you know, I'm not going to I'm not going to get it here, even though I could sign up and eventually being 55 would come up on the list.

[00:03:27.380] – Allan
I'm going to wait. My my wife and I are planning to come back to the States in September. And so we'll get tested before we get on an airplane. Don't worry. That's a requirement. Now for us to go to the States, we're going to have to have a test before we leave. So we'll get tested here and then we'll head back to the states and I think September time frame and then go ahead and get it there. We'll be in the States for at least three weeks. So if we have to get to the two stage one, we'll get one when we first get there. And then we'll get a second shot right before we leave.

[00:03:57.620] – Rachel
That would be great. That would be fantastic.

[00:04:00.860] – Allan
All right. So let's go ahead and get into this show, which is about mindset, which is yours and my favorite topic when we're talking about health and fitness. So here we go.

Are you prioritizing yourself?

Today, I want to get into a mindset. Topic that is actually probably one of the most important obstacles that many people face when they're looking to get healthy and fit, and it's not something that goes away without a little bit of work.

And so the question comes up is, are you prioritizing yourself?

Are you probably prioritizing your health and fitness? And it's it sounds like a simple thing, but it's actually a very deep, deep emotional mental adjustment to to have that kind of mindset where you are prioritizing yourself. So I want to dive into it a little bit. But before we go too far, we can start with something as simple as a little quiz. And so there's only three questions to this quiz.

So don't think we're going to be on here for a long time. It's not but three questions. And I want you to rate yourself from a one, which is this is completely untrue to a six – this describes me perfectly. OK, so again, one is the low end of the scale is completely untrue. Up to six, this is a good description of you. How how you actually feel, how you think.

OK, the first one is: I put others wishes before my own or else I feel guilty.

The second one is: I give more to other people than I get back in return.

And then the final one is: I'm so busy doing for the people whom I care about, that I have little time for myself.

All right, now add up those scores and think to yourself about what that number means, and I'll tell you what it means if that number. Is higher than, say, five or six, you might have a problem. You're not prioritizing yourself and what you're basically doing is self-sacrificing. You're taking others and saying they're so much more important than me that I can't do the things for myself that are necessary for me to be healthy and fit.

And I'm not going to jump into the whole airplane put your mask on thing. But this is a concept that unless you break through this effort of prioritizing yourself, if you are a self-sacrificer or you're really going to struggle to get healthy and fit and stay healthy and fit because it's never going to be the priority you need it to be.

A lot of people love those simple rules of the 80-20, and I try to tell people 80-20 is perfect when you're in maintenance mode. 80 at 20 is great. You can stay healthy and be healthy. The problem is for most of us, we're not already healthy. We're not at the weight we want to be at. We're not as strong as we need to be. And as a result, we need to put in more than 80%. If you don't prioritize yourself, that's just not going to happen.

So the first thing we have to look at when we are having this conversation is to actually think about the inner voice that we have, that voice that that tells you how you feel about something that's happening. So an event happens, maybe your alarm doesn't go off and you're late for work. You're going to be late for work. What does your inner voice tell you about that event? And that inner voice is the story, it's the story of our lives from an internal perspective. It often doesn't actually reflect reality.

And I want to take you through and this week, or at least for the next few days, I want you to think about some of the words that that inner voice is using, some of the things that you probably think. And the best way to kind of break that down for me is this phraseology called “absolute words.” And so I want you to pay attention to that inner voice over the course of the next day or two and maybe a little longer and see how often you use words like have to, need, must, ought to, should.

If you find yourself using those words a lot, those are absolute words. That means that your inner voice is feeding you something and saying this is an absolute necessity. You have to do it this way. And if that's the case, then you're not going to change. You're not. Whatever you think you have to do, you will do whatever you think you should do, you will probably do. Whatever you need to do, whatever someone else needs or you think is needed. And then obviously the word must if you must do something, it's something you've got to do and therefore you do it.

If you're not using those absolute words for your own health and fitness, then you're likely using them for other things. And if you are, that's a clear indication that you're not prioritizing your wellbeing. It's just not happening because these other haves, musts, ought tos, and shoulds are getting in your way.

So what's an easy solution for us with regards to these absolute words?

Well, one, when you catch yourself doing this, using those words and it's not toward you, it's not something that you are doing for you. Like I can say, I have to work out today. Obviously, that's not a bad phrase. It is an absolute. The absolute is about me taking care of myself. But if I say I've got to get the food for the kids, I must take them to the ball practice. I must do this and then I must make sure I get this report done at work. If I have all these other musts in my life, it'll be very hard for me to make sure that I go through it. So if I catch myself using one of these absolute words.

Again, there have to, need, must, ought, and should.

If you find yourself using those words with relation to someone else or something else besides your health and fitness, you need to stop and take a step back. And reevaluate if that is an absolute. In many cases, it's not. The world is not going to end if you don't do something that you had to do, that you should have done, that you ought to do, the world might not end. And so taking a moment to take that half step back and evaluate that statement that you just your inner voice just told you that is getting in the way of you being healthy and fit.

It's time to rephrase that and going through the practice of where your is telling you, you know, you must be home by 6:30pm so you don't have time to work out. Well, do you have to be home by 6:30pm. Just ask yourself that question. What happens if I'm not there? Then dinner's not ready at 7:00pm. Dinner's ready at what, maybe 7:30pm? Maybe your spouse can assist you by making dinner tonight. Maybe you go ahead and you order from a food company that delivers healthy choices and you order food in for the family.

So in many cases, when you catch yourself using an absolute word that is not geared towards you being healthy and fit when you really, truly need and want to prioritize yourself in your health and fitness, you've got to change the script. You've got to stop evaluate whether it's true. And I'll tell you, in most cases it's not true.

You're not going to get fired for being five minutes late for work. You're just not. Now, you might if you're constantly late. But for most people out there, a lot of the absolute words we have in our head are actually not true. They're stories that we're telling ourselves. They're stories that we're living to. And as a result, we're not getting the health and fitness that we deserve.

So I just used the word there, and I'm actually getting to a point in my life where I really kind of love words and those kind of things that they mean and what they bring up and how we relate to them. And so I'm using the word deserve.

And I can say with absolute clarity, you deserve self-care. You deserve to be able to take care of yourself. You deserve to be healthy and fit. So what does self-care actually look like?

Well, first and foremost, it includes self-love. I've asked many of my clients if they love themselves enough to do this for themselves. And it was funny because one of the first clients I ever had, her name was Sandy. She said she wasn't sure. Now, the problem came up and Sandy didn't follow through with everything we were doing, despite seeing good results at first. And I break it down to that point, she did not have the self-love necessary to make a change, to do the hard thing.

And so self-love is that expression where you care about yourself as much as you care about anyone else. It doesn't mean that you don't love other people as much because love is not this finite thing that we have that if I give this to this person, I don't have any left for me. That's not how love works. Love is infinite. And so you should be exploring yourself and understanding that if you don't start from my point of self-love, the commitment's never going to be there and you're not going to see the results. So if you find yourself having these kind of conversations where you're not liking yourself and that inner voice is actually a butthole. You need to work on your self-love. You need to actually sit down and start talking yourself through why you're worthy, why you deserve this, why you would love yourself. And I'm 100 percent sure you're going to come up with a ton of great reasons why you should love yourself and then you should love yourself.

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The next thing that comes in is you need to be frank and honest and you need to be frank and honest with not just other people. You need to be frank and honest with yourself. If the inner voice is, like I said, being a butthole, be honest about it. Understand, I have kind of a crappy self-image right now. What are the things I can do to improve that self-image? What are the things I can do to make that inner voice nicer?

Eliminating some of those absolute words is a good first step for that, but you've got to have this inner honesty. You've got to be honest with yourself and understand what's going on. And then, yes, you have to be frank and honest with the people around you. If you're going to do something for yourself, it often means that there's things that you would have been doing for someone else that you're now not able to do. They're going to live. They're going to be fine. But change in your life often means change in others.

I talked in my book, The Wellness Roadmap, about understanding the baggage that you have when you're traveling and how that can affect your path. Now, what I didn't say in there, but it should have been implied is you still need to have a vehicle. You still need to be moving forward. Your pace might be a little different, but you still have to be frank and honest with the people around you that the changes you're making are important to you and should be important to them, because in 99.9% of the cases out there, your why is them? You want to be healthy and you want to be fit for your kids, you and you and your grandkids. And you want to be there for your spouse and you don't want to be an obligation later in life to them because you want to be able to take care of yourself and you want that opportunity to be the person you're supposed to be.

And they should want that for you, too. So being honest and frank with them as far as what you need to be successful, is going to go a long way towards not having them resenting you for going to the gym every day or resenting you because you're not baking as often as you used to bake. Those types of things. So being frank and honest with yourself and others is a very important step towards self-care.

The next is consistency and frequency. You can't do something once and say, OK, that's my self-care for the month. It just doesn't quite work like that. Yes, going and getting a mani-pedi for some people are getting a massage is a great luxury for many and doing it once a month might be plenty. It would be for me. But to actually do what's necessary for you to be healthy and fit, it needs to become a part of a lifestyle that is frequent enough that it will elicit change. So if you're going to say lift weights, you can't lift weights once and say, well, gee, I don't understand why I'm not muscular. I don't understand why I didn't put on much muscle or because you didn't do it enough. Okay? So there has to be a frequency to it that is enough to stimulate a change in your body, to stimulate change in you.

And then the consistency part just means that doing something over and over and over is where you're going to get your real results. I had that conversation with Dr. Pontzer not long ago, and we talked about how you're not going to be able to lose a ton of weight really, really quickly without your body reacting to it at some level. And, so that reaction, which your body is going to do to change up your metabolism, that's going to happen. It's going to happen for all of us. Our bodies were made to do that so we can survive. But the consistency of doing the little things over and over and over, over time is where you kind of make this.

I was having a conversation with my clients the other day. And one of the things I said to them was the Grand Canyon was not built by something major coming through there and digging it out. It was that slow trickle of a small river over many, many years, millions of years, that made the Grand Canyon what it is today. And so you need that little trickle. You need that consistency to see monumental changes in your health and fitness.

So if you have a long journey to take before you're healthy and fit, you need the patience. But you also need that consistency. You have to keep showing up and you have to do it enough where your body recognizes the stimulus and reacts.

And then the final bit on the self-care, what it looks like. It's about an investment. If you're not willing to invest some time, effort, and money into yourself, you're not likely to see the results that you really want to have. Now, the biggest investment is going to be time and effort. You're going to have to make change and you're going to have to spend some time doing this. It's not just going to happen. As I mentioned before, we have a frequency and we have a consistency that has to happen. For that to happen, you have to invest time and effort towards making these things happen.

And then the money part can be a little bit of money. It can be as little as you're investing in some good quality shoes, or it can be as big as saying I'm going to build a home gym and I'm going to spend thousands of dollars to do that. For most people, the investment is somewhere in the middle of that. A small gym membership isn't all that expensive and it's hiring a trainer. When you look at the results that you get often isn't that expensive. If it's going to get you down the road faster.

My wife is working on building up a bed and breakfast, and the guy that was working it was him and his son. And he said, I've got these two other guys to come in and help. And she's like, sure. And the whole thing was by investing a little bit more each week, she's going to get the job done faster. So now she's got four people working instead of two. So the work's getting done faster. And that's what you have to think about with regards to where money can play a role in helping you with this whole thing.

So to kind of wrap this all up, if you did that quiz, that self-sacrificing quiz and you scored, twelve, if you scored thirteen or if you scored eighteen, then you have a self-sacrificing problem. And if you find that your inner voice is not your best friend, you've got a priority problem. Those are two internal things that you really have to get a grasp on.

And a couple of the ways that you can easily see this happening beyond just doing the quiz I talked about is to look for how often you're using those absolute words. They are using absolute words to define what you're supposed to do for someone else and not for yourself, something that would pull you away from doing something for yourself. Those are those trigger words. Those are the things that will tell you where you need to address your time and effort and you need to go and take that step back and analyze what that actually means. Is it actually true in most cases you're going to find it's not.

And then finally, self-care takes an investment. You have to love yourself. You've got to be open and honest with yourself. You've got to be consistent. You've got to put in a frequency of things happening so you can see change. And that typically takes an investment of time, effort and/or money.

So I hope you took something valuable from this lesson. If you did, I'd love to talk to you about it in more detail on the Facebook group. You can go to https://40plusfitnesspodcast.com/group, and we can have a great conversation there about your inner voice, about whether you are prioritizing yourself so you can get the health and fitness you deserve.

Post Show/Recap

[00:24:26.720] – Allan
Rachel, welcome back.

[00:24:28.460] – Rachel
Hey, Allan. Yep, mindset is one of my favorite topics of discussion. That was a really good episode you laid out for us.

[00:24:37.700] – Allan
Thank you. The interesting thing was that I recorded this episode last week and then this week and I lost my phone. And I have to say, there are no perfect people. And I think a lot of things you'll see on social media and Facebook will have you believing that there's something wrong with you and there's something right with everybody else. And particularly as we get into the health and fitness field, I'll just tell you, we're not perfect either. None of us are. And, I'm sitting there really, really angry with myself and the language that was in my head, was not kind. It was not kind at all.

[00:25:22.550] – Allan
Losing my phone the same way twice in really less than three months time. And this is not a cheap phone. This is a 1300 – $1300 phone. Really had me upset. So I'm walking the through the jungle right back to where the howler monkeys were, where I took the video and then that's why it fell out of my pocket was I didn't seal it in my pocket properly, went right back to those howler monkeys and they were just looking at me like I was the monkey.

[00:25:54.500] – Allan
So I just realized, OK, you know, as I walk, I've got to forgive myself. I slipped up. I made a mistake. I got to forgive myself. I've got to think about, Okay, you're letting this happen. This is a theme: going to Bluff, riding in a golf cart, wearing swimming trunks. Losing your phone is now a theme.

[00:26:16.370] – Allan
I have to think about that. I have to make sure I have a plan to make that not happen again. But that has to start with self-love. That has to start with the forgiveness of it. So just be aware that you're never completely on the other side of this, prioritizing yourself and finding self-love and doing those things. It's always a work in progess. You always have to manage that relationship and be aware when it's slipping up, when you're arguing with yourself.

[00:26:44.380] – Rachel
That's so true. Absolutely. And that was a very frustrating time for you, I'm sure. But it's good that you take a minute to assess the situation, kind of troubleshoot problem solve. And hopefully the next time you go find some howler monkeys to take pictures of, you won't you'll be better secure with your phone.

[00:27:03.860] – Allan
Yeah, well there was a lot of things I got on the front end and, and even then once it happened because I wasn't of sound mind, I guess the best way for me to say I was, I was very frustrated, very angry.

[00:27:14.930] – Rachel
Sure.

[00:27:15.380] – Allan
Myself. And it was, I was all that went inside. I wasn't thinking. So there were things that I could have done that would have made my search maybe easier. I found my phone on the Find My iPhone kind of thing. So I knew about where it was. And I just wanted to get there as fast as I could. And so as a result, I didn't think about, well, why not put find my phone on Tammy's phone? So while we're driving, if it starts moving around, we might see that. It didn't cross my mind till we were driving. And the interesting thing about an Apple account, when you try to log into it from another device, is it always wants to send you a code. Now it's going to send that code to one of your Apple devices. I happen to use a Mac, so if I had been sitting at my desk, I could have got her logged in to find my phone there. But because we were already halfway to where we were going, I couldn't actually use Find My iPhone on her phone. I could log into my apple account, but then it wanted to send me that code and I'm like, well, if I had my phone with me, I wouldn't need this code.

[00:28:20.840] – Allan
So I was not real happy with Apple either. Someone just has an iPhone. I don't even know what they do. But I guess they don't find their phone from another device. Anyway, that was my day. Or at least it was it wasn't my day. It was a part of my day.

[00:28:37.940] – Rachel
And that's just how it happens, though. And when life hands you these weird situations, it's easy to get flustered and all of your common sense and all of your reasoning and logic sometimes just goes right out the window until you can just take a minute and breathe and solve your own problem.

[00:28:55.100] – Rachel
Yeah, mindset is a tricky thing. And I guess when I was listening to what you were saying about having an inner voice and being able to prioritize your own health and fitness, it brought me back to the days when I was overweight. And not a lot of my friends knew me back then. But after I had two kids, I had a little bit of extra weight. And it's hard as a mom, for many moms, or moms with the small kids that you can't just leave the house, you can't just leave your kids unattended to go for a walk or run or do something.

[00:29:30.110] – Rachel
And so when I was at that point in my life, I would put the kids to bed at night. My husband was home and so I would go for a run around the neighborhood. I also had workout videos, VHS, aging myself here, but I had workout videos. And so when the kids would lay down for a nap, I would put in a 30-minute workout video and workout in the basement. And so was it an ideal situation? No, but that was the best that I could do at that time to put my health as a priority.

[00:30:02.900] – Rachel
And I did have weight to lose. I did have some things that I need to take care of so that I could be a healthier, happier person for my kids. So you just find these weird ways of getting around these situations that life just throws at you?

[00:30:17.990] – Allan
Yeah, I like to tell my clients quite often that life doesn't get in the way, life is the way.

[00:30:24.710] – Rachel
It is.

[00:30:25.550] – Allan
You're not going to get around it. You can't sit there and say, I'm going to wait to do this until I'm not as busy, or oh I screwed up. That will never happen again. I'm like, well, how often does that happen? Every time?

[00:30:39.830] – Allan
And so the point of this is, one, there's not another day. Every day you put off doing the right thing for yourself is lost forever and you're not going to get that time back. If you're looking at it and you're thinking, Okay, I need to prioritize myself but my kids and that's valid. You can't just leave a two-year-old and four-year0old alone in a house and go for a run around the neighborhood.

[00:31:09.770] – Rachel
That's right.

[00:31:10.760] – Allan
Even if you can still see your house from there, some people would call that irresponsible. So you've got to come up with another solution. Now, what does that take? Well, it could mean that you hire a babysitter when you go train. And I know not everybody can afford to do that, but that's an investment. Maybe it's that until your kids are old enough to somewhat be autonomous and be left alone, you invest in a treadmill. So you're like, okay, I've got a two-year-old, a four-year-old. I buy a treadmill. And for about the next ten years, I'm running on the treadmill when my significant other is not here to take care of the kids. And that's your investment in yourself. And so you've got to be willing to make that investment.

[00:31:52.730]
It's time, it's effort, it's money. And it can look like a lot of different things. But it's got to be a solution that you find because you have self-love, because you have to solve this problem. You can't just ignore it and say, oh, I'll wait till my kids are 12 and 14 before I start. Because it won't get easier.

[00:32:13.340] – Rachel
No, it doesn't. And you really have to remember, I know you didn't want to use the analogy of putting the air on when you're going down on an airplane, you put the air on you before you help the people next to you. But that's exactly it. You can't pour from an empty cup. You need to be full and happy and strong yourself, and you need to be healthy. And the more healthy and happy you are, the better person you are for those around you, your family and your friends and your coworkers and everybody else. And it's just so important. You are so important. And you really do need to put yourself first as best as you can.

[00:32:51.890] – Rachel
And often it's striking a balance. Sure, you've got family responsibilities, work responsibilities and all sorts of things, but you are so important to so many people and you should take yourself make yourself the best priority you can.

[00:33:04.400] – Allan
Yeah, it's you know, and it goes it goes even deeper than the being there for them while they're kids. I mean, we're in this I guess the term they use the sandwich generation and the concept is that many of us will be taking care of children at the same time we're taking care of our parents.

[00:33:21.860] – Rachel
Right.

[00:33:23.480] – Allan
Because people are having children later in life, they're putting it off and they're having them later in life. And as a result, they're beginning to have to take care of parents at the same time that they're still taking care of their kids. Now, I can tell you that only one of our boys has a daughter and she's older. It's from a prior relationship. So it's not his. But he's been in the kid's life since she was 10 months old or something like that. So she's dad and he's adopted her and all that.

[00:33:52.970] – Allan
But our other kids are already in their late 20s, early 30s, and they're not even thinking about kids in many cases. So, yeah, I'm going to probably be in my sixties before our daughters really start deciding that they're going to start afamily. And if that's the case, I don't want to be the 80-year old that she's just sending kids off to college. And now I've got to take care of dad.

[00:34:21.320] – Allan
You know, that's. That's not who I want to be, and so this self care is not just this selfish thing, it's really thinking about holistically who you are as a person and where you fit in to this whole scheme of a family and realizing that the healthier and stronger you keep yourself, the less of a burden you are on anybody in, the more you are able to help.

[00:34:45.880]
And so I can just imagine my daughters , look, hey, I'm fine. I'm 80 years old. Send my granddaughter down here to Bocas for six weeks. Come on down, bring her down and maybe we take her back up. But yeah, she can come down. I've got to be able to run on that deep sand and Bluff Beach. And I've got to be able to do the things that she wants to do and keep up with her. To be that individual that can be that caregiver without requiring caregiving myself is really the way I kind of like to couch this. You know, I want to be able to wipe my own butt when I'm 105. It's a funny way, I like to say it, but what it really means is I want to be able to run in deep sand with my granddaughter when I'm 80.

[00:35:36.940] – Rachel
Yeah. For sure.

[00:35:38.230] – Allan
That kind of thing. So, as we get into this, just realize that you have to love yourself. You have to do this every day you give away and don't do it is a day lost and you really need to turn this around. It's really about getting aware of that story in your head and trying to make it a different ending.

[00:36:02.410] – Rachel
Yeah, that sounds great in it. And if anyone listening has any questions or doesn't know where to start, reach out to Allen's Facebook page or email or anything, we would love to guide you and how to make these choices or how to figure out how you can make fitness a priority in your life. We'd love to help you with that.

[00:36:21.160] – Allan
You can go to https://40plusfitnesspodcast.com/group and join the awesome Facebook group that we have out there. There are weekly challenges and we're always having discussions about things that are going on in the health and fitness world. And there's a lot of fun, too. It's not just this and that. I post the pictures of the of the beach there and I believe I put even some pictures of the monkeys that kind of made a monkey out of me. I wouldn't have had those videos if I had found my phone. Those videos are alive and well and you can go out on a group and actually see them right now if you'd like.

[00:36:58.870] – Allan
So anything else you want to go over, Rachel, before you know that?

[00:37:02.680] – Rachel
That was great. Thanks so much.

[00:37:04.510] – Allan
All right. You take care and we'll talk next week.

[00:37:06.760] – Rachel
Yep. Take care.

Patreons

The following listeners have sponsored this show by pledging on our Patreon Page:

– Anne Lynch	– John Dachauer	– Margaret Bakalian
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– Eric More	– Leigh Tanner

Thank you!

Another episode you may enjoy

Wellness Roadmap Part 1

Less...

Let's Say Hello

[00:00:54.050] – Allan
Raz. How are you doing?

[00:00:56.270] – Rachel
Great, Allan. How are you today?

[00:00:58.160] – Allan
I'm doing really well. We record these intros a couple weeks before. So I can say as of February 1st, the gym is open. So I am running the gym now. I've got employees, they're coming in and doing the heavy lifting. I'm here for moral support and just to make sure that we comply with MINSA requirements. MINSA's our health department. So I'm just making sure that we're doing everything the right way.

[00:01:26.510] – Allan
I've got my little video monitors up here on the wall, like I'm sitting here doing my work and I look over. I'm like, OK, they're a little too close. I've got to tell my staff, do not let that happen again. But…

[00:01:36.140] – Rachel
Excellent, very good!

[00:01:37.700] – Allan
Right now everything's good. And a lot of people are excited about the gym opening. I am too. So good times for me.

[00:01:44.840] – Rachel
That's great.

[00:01:45.590] – Allan
How are things up there in the frozen tundra of Michigan?

[00:01:49.010] – Rachel
Still chilly and snowy, but things are good. And similarly, Mike has to start traveling again for his work. So that's that's good for him that he can move around a little bit. I think he was getting a little bit of cabin fever. But the bad news is that means I have to start cooking again. Waa waa waa.

[00:02:09.420] – Allan
Awe. You could do what I did for lunch today. Basically to have food here at the gym because this I wanted to be here the whole shift and I had some things to do during the middle of the shifts. So I boiled a dozen eggs and bought three cans of tuna. And that's that's my meals. So, not flashy, but it gets the job done. And I can do that for here and there. And it's not like I'm really missing out on I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything. Just keeping it simple.

[00:02:36.440] – Rachel
That's good. I printed out some new recipes that I would like to try. And so I've got my meals lined up for the week for dinners anyway. It's just going to be me. The kids are back to school.

[00:02:48.800] – Allan
You know, you could tell Mike he needs to spend his Saturday bulk cooking for the family.

[00:02:54.500] – Rachel
Yes! That would be awesome.

[00:02:57.440] – Allan
You put them in single/family serving things. You put them in the freezer. You put them in the fridge. Done.

[00:03:03.620] – Rachel
Yeah.

[00:03:04.280] – Allan
You could.

[00:03:05.870] – Rachel
I could. But in order to to get back at it, I do need to start cooking again, too. I used to cook. I haven't in a long time and I can get back into it and make some healthy meals for myself.

[00:03:19.280] – Allan
OK, well if you need some new recipes, that's kind of one of the things I've been doing for my online clients. They wanted recipes for like if you're going to eat, I want to eat well. And so, yeah, part of what I do now for my clients online for my 12-week program is I literally about three times a week give them a recipe that I really enjoy. So it's a good mix of dinners, lunches, breakfasts, snacks, things like that. So I'm kind of building, for lack of a better word, a recipe pack. They're not my recipes. I'm borrowing them from online, but I'm just sharing links and PDF print out so it goes back to the source. But yeah, there's a lot out there, but I'll share some of my favorites with you.

[00:03:59.900] – Rachel
That would be great. Thank you so much.

[00:04:03.110] – Allan
Cool. Let's go ahead and talk to Dr. Smith.

Interview

[00:04:46.950] – Allan
Dr. Smith, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

[00:04:49.940] – Dr. Smith
Thank you so much for having me. I'm glad to be with you.

[00:04:52.320] – Allan
The book is Mind Over Weight: Curb Cravings, Find Motivation, and Hit Your Number in Seven Simple Steps. And what I like about this book is that it actually if it gets in front of this, because most people will start with the action plans, the movement, the what they're eating, they just they start throwing things against the wall and then they get frustrated when, a month down the line they're not where they thought they would be. And usually that comes down to mindset.

[00:05:22.700] – Allan
If you really got down to it, it's the mind that's going to make this happen. We've got to get the right mindset. We got to get a brain set first and then act. So it's sort of the, you know, ready shoot aim is what most of us do. And it doesn't work very well when you're talking about weight loss.

[00:05:37.970] – Dr. Smith
Yeah, it's interesting. People's natural tendency is to want to start with the plan, with the trainer, with the gym membership, with the workouts and really all starts above the neck. I mean, you know, the starting point, the ground zero for weight loss and for many things in life in general is really about getting your mind in the right place. And one of the best things that I think about this book is how small it is.

[00:06:05.450] – Dr. Smith
It's seven small chapters. The size is physically small and the read is very quick. However, the information is very dense. I wrote the book the way I would like to receive information about a specific topic. And this book is all about the mental aspect of weight loss or weight management. I think that a lot of people have been effective and are effective at losing weight and maintaining weight, but they would be a lot more effective if they had sharpened their mental acuity as it relates to weight loss and having a better understanding of what I call the weight loss landscape, because it's not always just about what am I going to eat, what exercise do I need to do and what results do I see on a scale it's about where everything fits in your life and it's about your environment.

[00:07:06.980] – Dr. Smith
And that's why I say, you know, I believe people should take a landscape view rather than just a portrait view. You think about when you print out in landscape versus portrait. So with Mind Over Weight, the idea is that; let's talk about the things that have nothing to do with food and exercise first. And one of those things, of course, is trying to unlock your motivation. All of us have motivation somewhere. The question is, can we access it?

[00:07:40.000] – Dr. Smith
And everyone can't necessarily access their motivation. So I start with chapter one right away, which is basically, you know, let's unlock your motivation and understand what it is, where it comes from and how you have to own it. I think that's very important.

[00:07:55.830] – Allan
And as you said in the book, there was a statistic you shared that said by today, which just goes live as February 15th, 80% of the people who had a New Year's resolution for weight loss have already fallen off and they're not going to accomplish that weight loss goal, at least not based on this set of resolutions that they made. But there are ways that we can stay motivated. And in the book, you talk about several ways for us to do that. Can you go through a few of those and let us know why those are important to stay motivated?

[00:08:28.600] – Dr. Smith
We look at motivators, so you break motivation down into what actually motivates you. And the idea behind motivation basically is something that drives you to want to do something to complete, to begin and complete an action, to pursue a goal, to complete a task. And so when you look at different types of motivation, there's two basic types. There's internal or intrinsic motivation and there's external or extrinsic motivation. So you have internal motivators and you have external motivations.

[00:09:03.280] – Dr. Smith
An internal motivator is you are doing something or you're motivated to do something because you are happy or excited or desirous of whatever it is you're trying to accomplish for internal reasons, for the reason of doing it itself. So, you know, you read about maps and study maps because you love the study of geography and you love understanding the relationships between countries and bodies of water. So you're not doing it to pass a test. You're doing it because you want that information, that knowledge excites you, the process excites you.

[00:09:50.800] – Dr. Smith
Whereas someone who is studying a particular topic simply because they want to do well on a test or an exam, they are externally motivated because they want to get the results on the exam, someone who wants to lose weight because they want to look good in a bikini on an island on vacation. And they want people to acknowledge that they look good and say nice things to them. That is external motivation, whereas an internal motivator, in that case, would be, I want to lose weight because I want to make sure that I feel good, that I don't feel winded walking up steps, that I want to be happy and live a long life without being ravaged by disease. That's more of an internal motivator rather than having an external kind of validation.

[00:10:48.470] – Dr. Smith
So in the book, I go through different types of internal and external motivators. I talk about extrinsic like fame, praise, grades, money, awards, social acceptance. Those things typically tend to be extrinsic motivators. Intrinsic motivators, fun, pleasure, gratifications, gratification, feeling of worthiness, of accomplishment, a sense of purpose. And, so it's not that extrinsic motivators are better than internal or vice versa. It's the combination of the two that's important. Having both of them. They work in a complementary fashion.

[00:11:25.180] – Dr. Smith
For example, I just had a boiler replaced in my house. I have two boilers in my house and the technician was explaining to me how it works. It's a two-stage system. The first boiler, which is stage one, tries to heat the house. And if it's too cold outside and the boiler can't keep the house warm enough because the temperatures outside are so cold, it's not being able to do due to the job by itself, the second boiler will kick in. That's stage two. That's the second stage. And so then the second boiler kicks in and together they're able to keep the house warm against the chill outside. Same thing with motivation. If your internal motivator is not really able to keep the fire lit under you and keep you going, then that external motivator can kick in and together they can keep you motivated and on the path of what you're trying to accomplish. And that is why you need both internal and external motivators.

[00:12:23.080] – Allan
Yeah, I agree with that. If you if you go in this, which is to I'm going to hire, train and go and you don't really have a plan and you just sort of say, Okay, I think this is what I want as far as the end game, but you don't have things that are going to make you feel good while you're doing it. So there's little achievable little milestones as you go to say, OK, you know, being happy when you lose two pounds, even though you want to lose 20, that's that start that's that thing that's going inside you feel good about.

[00:12:53.890] – Allan
But then also having friends that you're working out with or a trainer or something like that, I have to show up because they're at the gym waiting for me or they're at the track waiting for me. Those are the internal and the external versions that are going to keep you motivated because you have both.

[00:13:13.330] – Dr. Smith
Yes, 100 percent. And I want to switch to goal setting because that's also part of proper goal setting. I think that another area where people could improve on. It could be very helpful if they get it right is how to set goals. And people don't talk about proper goal setting and goals are very, very important. And how you set the goals is extremely important. A lot of people, unfortunately, will set unrealistic goals and because the goals are unrealistic and they're unable to reach those goals, they actually think that they are failing when in reality they are succeeding, but they'll throw away whatever plan they're on or they'll totally give up because in their mind, the way they framed their goals, it's a failure. But it's really had the goal been more proper and more appropriate, they would actually realize that they're actually succeeding. And so setting the right goals is extremely important before you begin any weight loss journey.

[00:14:23.530] – Allan
Having come from a business background. We set goals all the time in business. And so I was very familiar with SMART goals and I've even talked about that a couple of times on the podcast. But you have a different twist in the book. You call them VERY SMART goals. So this is a longer acronym. I'll take off the back in the smart and specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and and time bound or time restricted. The VERY, though, is the part of that acronym that I'm not I was not familiar with before I read your book. Could you take a few minutes to go through that?

[00:14:55.570] – Dr. Smith
Sure. You probably aren't familiar with it because I created it.

[00:14:58.520] – Allan
Okay, yeah. Maybe that's why I had never heard of it.

[00:15:01.820] – Dr. Smith
I created it. I didn't. It's not somewhere else because I've never seen it before. But and it's not that it's ingenious or anything.

[00:15:08.080] – Dr. Smith
So VERY, V E R Y of the VERY SMART as far as setting goals V is for varied. What people have to understand is that they have to make sure that your goals when it comes to weight loss, are not just focused on one aspect of it. Just don't focus on the scale, have a goal that talks about physical. How far can you walk in a certain period of time? What size clothes can you fit? Have a goal. I want to get from a size ten to a size eight. So when you make your goals, just don't make them homogenous, make them varied, you know, different aspects of weight loss or there are symbolic of weight loss.

[00:15:53.770] – Dr. Smith
The E is effective. There's no point in setting goals if what you are reaching does not provide some type of purposeful and meaningful change. If some of the weighs 300 pounds says that my ultimate goal is to lose ten pounds, I'll be happy with that. That's it. Well, it's great that you set a goal. It's great when you hit your goal. But a 300 pound person who just loses ten pounds, that is not going to be a meaningful change for that person as far as how they look or what their disease risk profile is. So that's not an effective goal. So that's the E for effective for VERY.

[00:16:39.760] – Dr. Smith
The next one is R and R is being responsible. Make goals that will challenge you, that will make you stretch, but make goals that are responsible goals. Don't have a goal where you want to lose 30 pounds in 30 days and you only weigh one hundred and fifty pounds and your five foot four. And in order to hit that goal, you have to do something very extreme and potentially unsafe to try to hit that goal. That's an irresponsible goal. So make sure that your goals are responsible.

[00:17:17.080] – Dr. Smith
And lastly, the Y is yours. People have to set goals that they own, not what others say you should do, not what others expect you to do. You have to own that goal. You have to believe in the goal. You have to trust in the goal, and you have to want the goal. So the goal must be yours.

[00:17:38.980] – Allan
And I like that. I like that a lot. One of the one of the things I would propose is if if one of the reasons that you're wanting to lose the weight is that you went to your doctor and your blood sugar is too high and he's about to start putting you on medication or worse yet, maybe some insulin. And you really don't want to go down that rabbit hole because a lot of people don't come out the other end the right way, then having a varied goal.

[00:18:03.520]
So it's like, yes, I want to lose 40 pounds and I want to lower my blood sugar by three points, you know, take take my A1C from a 10 to an eight, you know, in that same period of time you'll still be diabetic, but you're moving in the right direction. And it's another goal that maybe you didn't lose five pounds this week or maybe you don't lose any weight this week. But because of the efforts you did, your blood sugar is coming down. And that's that's a win. And I think we don't give ourselves those opportunities to have wins. We focus on one number and that makes it quite difficult.

[00:18:44.040] – Allan
Dr. Smith, now one of the areas I think that's really, really difficult for people is that they feel hungry. And for many people, they believe they're hungry all the time. And it's not a true hunger. What they're actually doing is they're craving you know, they want those Doritos. They want the salty. They want that chocolate or they want that doughnut or they're driving by a McDonald's and they smell what they smell and like, oh, I'm getting that drive in line and pick something up. Those are cravings. They're different from hunger. Can you explain the difference and then what a good strategy is for us to beat cravings?

[00:19:21.720] – Dr. Smith
So let me put it to you in two different ways; hunger is your body saying it needs nourishment? It's not specific, it needs food, it needs energy. I'm hungry. A craving is specific. A craving says that I want a double layer chocolate cake. I want a piece of fried dough with powdered sugar on top. That's a craving.

[00:19:55.390] – Dr. Smith
And it's very important to distinguish between the two. Cravings are generated through the reward-pleasure system, the loop in the front brain. And it's all about dopamine. You know, when we enjoy something, our body releases this chemical neurotransmitter called dopamine and dopamine travels forward into the brain and it lets us know this was a satisfying experience and it creates a memory. When I bit into that chocolate cake and released all of that dopamine, it created a memory in my system that I really enjoyed it. And if I do it again, I'm probably going to enjoy it again.

[00:20:44.740] – Dr. Smith
And what happens with a craving is once you've set this pathway up. Whenever you see, or hear about, or smell, however you're triggered by that chocolate cake again, your body releases that dopamine and that dopamine then becomes a seeking behavior. So you now want to seek that particular thing that made you feel really happy and really good and satiated you, you want to seek that. And so it drives you to get it.

[00:21:22.760] – Dr. Smith
It's like drug addiction. It's it's a similar concept of drug addiction. Doing a particular drug gives you a certain feeling of satisfaction. And when you are around that drug again or you think about that drug, then you now have this chemical urge to want to participate in the indulgence or the use of that particular drug. That's what cravings are. Cravings, however, unlike hunger, are short-termed, and they can go away, so if you can outlast your craving and everyone can do it, but one thing to do is to distract yourself while you have a craving because you can outlast it.

[00:22:07.270] – Dr. Smith
And most research shows about 15 to 20 minutes a craving will typically go away. It doesn't mean it won't come back, but it will typically go away. And so if for 15 or 20 minutes you can do something that takes your mind off the craving or remove yourself from the environmental stimulus that's creating the craving, then you may be able to succeed.

[00:22:29.170] – Dr. Smith
Look at it this way. When you get into the car, let's say your oil is low in your car and the light comes on in your car when that oil light comes on. That is your car saying, I need oil. And no matter what you do, no matter how many times you turn that car on or off, that oil light is going to come back on and stay on until you put oil in the car and the car is fed. That's hunger. A craving is when you get into the car and the car says to you, it prompts you on your dashboard and says, do you want to connect your phone to Bluetooth? And if you don't push a yes or no, let's say you do nothing to it. You just let it sit there and you keep driving. Eventually that prompt goes away. It goes away. It no longer stays in the home because you didn't respond in a certain period of time. That's what a craving is.

[00:23:25.870] – Allan
And so one of the one of the things that you want to do is you want to look at what are those triggers for why you're doing the things you're doing. Some of them will be really, really clear. Like if you you're going to the state fair and you know you're going to smell it. You're going to smell that fried dough with with the powdered sugar, you know where that booth is or where all those booths are. Because you smell it every time you go by them, you're going to have that constant trigger. You just are. Now, I'm not saying don't go to the fair, but recognize what that is for what it is. Go get in a line and get on a ride. Go lose your money trying to knock the pins off of the table or whatever you're going to do. But try to do some things to distract yourself because you know those triggers are there.

[00:24:08.560] – Allan
If it's something like a McDonald's, then it's more of a I need to find a different route to work. So I don't drive by that McDonald's every afternoon on my way home because I know if it's a nice day and I've got my windows rolled down, I'm going to smell that when I pull up to that intersection because I always catch that light. I don't want to make that right turn.

[00:24:28.210] – Dr. Smith
And in the book in the book, I give you I give you several other kind of strategies, eating more protein, reducing stress, how to increase your hydration. You know, I won't delve into it. It's in the book. But there are other strategies other than outlasting some. Some people say I can't outlast a craving. I'll give you some other strategies that can actually help you in the book.

[00:24:46.810] – Allan
Yes, you do. Now, the last thing I want to get into is food addiction. You know, I'm I'm not a doctor. You are. So when we get to the point where I have a client that I believe has food addiction, that's beyond the scope of my practice for sure. But how can someone recognize when this is not just a small problem with overeating, but is an actual addiction? How would they know? What are the symptoms? And then if they're going to look for a solution, what are the things they should be looking for in that solution to know that they're not just hiring a quack?

[00:25:20.860] – Dr. Smith
Yeah, it's interesting. You know, food addiction and emotional eating really sometimes overlap. And emotional eating basically is you are eating food not for sustenance, not because you need the nourishment, but you're eating a particular food stuff because you want to address some type of emotional concern or emotional feelings you have. You're angry, you're happy, you're sad, whatever it is. But people who are addicted to food, here are some common ways to tell.

[00:25:53.230] – Dr. Smith
And it's not always black and white, by the way. It can be very complex to be able to ascertain or discern one's addiction. But if you're someone, for example, who simply can't stop yourself from eating when you know that you're already full, I mean, you know that you're full. You you're not really hungry. But there is more food left on the stove and you still have to go eat it. You know, you're satiated, but you still have to go eat it.

[00:26:24.970] – Dr. Smith
Another sign of addiction is when you find yourself constantly wanting to center your activities around food. You want to meet up with a friend, you want to do it at a restaurant, you want to celebrate, you do it with food. When food is such a constant in your life and most of your activities or a large number of your activities are centered around food, then it is likely you may have an addiction to food.

[00:26:58.750] – Dr. Smith
Also, people who are addicted to food. They may have a food, a particular food addiction, like I work with someone on Celebrity Fit Club when we were doing the show and one of the singers had an addiction to pizza and she just couldn't stop once she ate one slice of pizza. She had to have four or five or six. She really just couldn't stop. And just like alcoholism and the addiction to alcohol, you know, an alcoholic, for example, can stay away from alcohol for years. And the minute they have that first drink, they can't stop and cut themselves off at that one drink, they got to have more and similar properties occur with people who are addicted to food.

[00:27:48.270] – Allan
Yeah, again, it's it's it's sad that this is a thing because, you know, like with like you said, with alcohol, it's pretty simple to say I'm not going to I'm not going to go places where there's alcohol and I'm not going to take that first drink. But food, we can't necessarily always avoid food. We still we've got to try to find those triggers. And if you have a food that's making you and you said this in the book, making you feel guilty, you really need to explore that because that's that's a sign that something's going on. If you're hiding your food, if you're guilty about what you're doing, that's that's a big red flag that something's going on.

[00:28:25.860] – Dr. Smith
That's right. That's exactly right.

[00:28:28.530] – Allan
Dr. Smith, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest, and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay?

[00:28:37.080] – Dr. Smith
I think the first strategy for me and everyone obviously has three different things, probably. But for me, it's identifying passion. I think it's important for people in life to really identify something that really revs their engine and they're passionate about. And it could be all kinds of things. It could be music, could be art, it could be writing, it could be food preparation, whatever it is, identify what you're passionate about and really work and curate an environment where you can pursue your passion. I think that's extremely important. It gives you a sense of purpose. It gives you a sense of being meaningful.

[00:29:21.780] – Dr. Smith
The second thing is the physicality of life. Human beings are meant to be physical, and when we are not physical, then our engine, our body breaks down. I never forget a mechanic once told me, he said a Porsche and other sports cars are damaged when they sit in the garage and are not driven. And I thought, no, you're preserving it. He said, absolutely not. He said, when you don't drive a sports car the way sports cars are built, then you end up causing the sports car to deteriorate, the gaskets dry out, the seals start to leak. All these different mechanical things start happening because the car is not being driven like it's supposed to be and supposed to be used. So I think being physical and that's a broad array of activities depending on who you are, but being physical and some type of regular consistent manner is extremely important.

[00:30:22.980] – Dr. Smith
The third thing I would say is stress. There is a mountain of research that talks about the impact, both physical and psychological, that stress can play in our lives. It can affect our immune system. It can, in fact, affect our cardiovascular system. And obviously it can affect us from a psychological standpoint. And I think people need to take more time to really absorb life and where they are and to enjoy the moment and to prioritize their life so that they are not allowing themselves to be stressed by things that at the end of the day really aren't that important.

[00:31:07.770] – Dr. Smith
I think that's what the pandemic hopefully has taught a lot of people, that things that you thought were so important before now that you've been forced to do without and to realign, you realize not so bad after all. I actually didn't need that thousand dollar handbag or those three hundred dollar pair of sneakers. I didn't really need that stuff. Like I was Okay without it. And I survived. And I lived and I wasn't even thinking about those things. So I think that people reducing their stress and being able to streamline their lives and increasing the presence of things that they find or that are more valuable to their existence, I think is important to overall wellness.

[00:31:52.290] – Allan
Dr. Smith, if someone wanted to learn more about you and the book Mind Over Weight, where would you like for me to send them?

[00:31:59.400] – Dr. Smith
My Instagram is at Dr. Ian Smith. Spell the doctor out. I announcement my Twitter is Dr. Ian Smith and my website Doctoriansmith.com, spell it all out

[00:32:10.440] – Allan
Perfect. You can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/473 and I'll be sure to have the links there. Dr. Smith, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

[00:32:21.060] – Dr. Smith
It was very nice talking to you and I hope you have a great 2021.

[00:32:24.540] – Allan
You too.

Post Show/Recap

[00:32:31.000] – Allan
Welcome back, Rachel.

[00:32:32.470] – Rachel
Hey, Allan, with another great interview.

[00:32:34.870] – Allan
Yeah, I'm really, really proud of myself to get through that entire interview. And Dr. Smith. Dr. Smith. And not just breaking out, laughing because of Lost in Space, but…

[00:32:43.660] – Rachel
Oh, for sure.

[00:32:45.010] – Allan
He looks nothing like the Dr. Smith that were in the TV show or the movie. But it was just Dr. Smith. OK, well, yeah, but cool.

[00:32:54.970] – Rachel
The interview is great, you know, as a new personal trainer and just somebody who loves fitness in general when it comes to losing weight, I always gravitate to movement. I always think getting up and moving is a great way to burn off some calories. And in talking with you and listening to your podcast, you take more of a stance with food. You know, the kitchen is where weight loss happens. But actually, Dr. Smith gave us one more thing to think about. And that's where our mind is.

[00:33:22.310] – Allan
Yeah. If you haven't fixed your relationship with food, it's very hard to make a different way of eating a lifestyle. If you're saying, OK, now's a good time for me to change the way I'm eating, everything's looking good. It's you know, it's I made it past the football I cared about. And so the season's over. I can go ahead and do what I want, you know, do what I want to do.

[00:33:46.180] – Allan
If I didn't have a good relationship with food, then as soon as something came up, something terrible happened or something great happened, I would end up reverting back to my old ways of eating my old ways of everything. So any change that you want to have in your life, any change, regardless, it's going to take you getting your head there first.

[00:34:07.990] – Allan
And one of the one of the things I like to share with that is this concept of a Be-Do-Have. I'll talk to my clients about this all the time. But when I learned this is like this was this is a great little easy tool to think about. OK, so if you want to have something, don't start with what you want to have. Start with what it's like to be that person. Okay? So if I say I want to be a runner, well, then I have to I mean, I want to have a running. I want to be able to go out and run. Then I want to just be like a runner. What a runners do. They joined a running club, they buy new sneakers, they get out and actually run. And then you do. And that's the point is like now you consider yourself a runner. And so now you do, you run. So the Be-Do-Have is like just acting like you are that person doing the things that they do and then doing it and then you'll have what they have.

[00:35:06.820] – Allan
So if you're excited about going maybe see a family member finish a 5K or a 10K or something longer, maybe even a marathon, you know, like, gee, I wish I could run a marathon. Well, what a marathoners do. I mean, how are they? Well, they tend to be a little bit thinner only because they don't want to carry a whole lot. I was and I was 195 pounds. They called me a Clydesdale. I looked like a linebacker against everybody else that I was running with.

[00:35:34.960] – Allan
You just consider yourself a runner. So I was running stores, buying running shoes and running shorts and then I was out on the weekends doing my long runs or, you know, in the gym, doing my four hour marathon training workouts. And then I had it. I got out there and I ran my first marathon and then another one and then another one because I had become a marathoner. Until I ran the ultra. And I said, okay, I'm done, I'm going home, I'm tired.

[00:36:04.870] – Rachel
What a powerful mindset. What a powerful change and perspective.

[00:36:09.520] – Allan
Yeah. So you got to get your head right first. If you want a lifestyle change to stick, otherwise you're going to fall back on those bad habits because the crutches that are things that carry and we talked about that at Abby Langer, you know, it's really important for you to get your head right. And then the thing we talked about with Dr. Smith that I thought was really important was kind of a new way of thinking about goals.

[00:36:31.450] – Rachel
Yes, of course, he he mentioned the very smart goals and very was a new acronym I had not heard of either.

[00:36:39.070] – Allan
Well, he made it up. So..

[00:36:40.150] – Rachel
That's pretty cool.

[00:36:40.900] – Allan
Yeah, that's what happend. Okay, good. That's why I didn't know this before. Yeah. So do you want to go over very with them again.

[00:36:48.310] – Rachel
Yeah. So V stands for varied as and having different types of metrics to monitor. E is very effective, R is very responsible and Y is for yours. But varied, the V is really what caught my attention.

[00:37:02.680] – Allan
Yeah. And I'll say this, we talked to I mean I guess it was a week or so ago we talked about the, the different health measures. And so that's kind of the thing is if you're looking at your A1C and you're looking at how fast you can walk a mile and you're looking at how many times per week you're able to exercise and what you're keeping your macros are. Your calories that depending on how you want to approach your nutrition, then those are different goals. And so one of them, when things move, moving here and nothing's moving there, if you're tracking those different things, it's a little easier.

[00:37:41.990]
But I wanted to circle back around because we didn't really talk about SMART in the podcast. And so some people might not have heard of SMART goals. But a smart goal is basically specific, meaning you want to do a specific thing. So it's something that's tangible. The next is measurable. So you have to be able to measure it or you don't know that you're doing it. It has to be attainable. So if you set a goal saying I want to be an NFL football player, well, I would say if your listeners podcast probably not going to be able to attain that goal, you might want something a little bit more in line of what's possible to you. And then relevant meaning, OK, it applies to you, you know, so something that would be relevant would be, I want to eat better so I can improve my health and lose weight. Okay, so that's relevant. And then timely. So timely would be how often by when those types of things.

[00:38:42.050] – Allan
Now a lot of people will set a goal and they'll say, I want to lose 30 pounds in the next six months. And and it ticks all those general boxes. Is it specific, 30 pounds? Sure. It's measurable because you could step on the scale each day. It's attainable. I think someone who really puts their mind to it could lose 30 pounds in six months. It's relevant to them because if the doctors told them, lower your weight so you can lower your A1C and maybe get off the high blood pressure medicine, all those different things. And then it's timely. So you've set your six month goal. The problem with that is that that's something you also don't have control over.

[00:39:23.750] – Allan
So I'd love to be able to figure out another way to put another A in there, and that would be for action oriented. So instead of saying you want to lose 30 pounds, what are the actions that are necessary for you to be the person that weighs thirty pounds less? And you would think okay, well, a person who weighs thirty pounds less is more active. OK, so define that. OK, I want to exercise five times per week or six times per week. Okay? And you can be a little bit more specific to say I want to lift weights twice a week, I want to do mobility work twice a week and I want to do some cardiovascular work twice a week.

[00:40:05.690] – Allan
And that's that's your goals. Did you do your cardiovascular work twice this week? Yes or no. And it's within a week's time. So there you go. You know that's what you're supposed to have done. You could even take it out to a month and say, OK, I want nine strength training sessions per month. I want nine cardio sessions per month, and I want nine mobility's sessions. Now, don't wait until the last week.

[00:40:30.050] – Rachel
To get it all in a once?

[00:40:30.750] – Allan
And I try to do 18 workouts in seven days. You want to be careful with that and you do want it from a timeliness perspective to be something relatively soon. So not five years from now, I want to be six inches taller, you know, something that you can actually accomplish and something that's action oriented. So I know I need to work out or I know that I need to eat healthier and I'm going to define that in my terms of eating keto, someone else might say I need more vegetables. So I want to make sure that I have at least two to three servings of vegetables every day.

[00:41:08.690] – Allan
And that's initially that's attainable. And then they're like, Okay, that's pretty good. Now maybe I want to cut back on my starches and my pastas and my breads and just to lower my calories. And I'm not going to measure calories, but I'm just going to say I'm only going to have something white potato, starch, pasta or bread. I'm only going to have that twice a week.

[00:41:33.140] – Rachel
Sure.

[00:41:33.650] – Allan
One serving twice a week. And so that cuts down significantly maybe on what you were eating and now you're eating more vegetables. And if you listen to Abby Langer, you're putting more protein on your plate. And so now your whole macros and calories set is very, very different than the way you were eating before. But it's attainable. You've taken those bridge gaps and you say, okay, this is my goal.

[00:41:57.050] – Allan
Make it something you actually control and you'll be much more effective. I guess maybe that would slide into his effective thing, but an effective goal because you could do all of these things and your hormones are out of whack and you're like, I don't understand it. I'm eating 1200 calories a day. I'm drinking eight glasses of water and I'm walking 10,000 steps every day and the scales not moving. That's not in your control.

[00:42:22.850] – Rachel
Right.

[00:42:23.420] – Allan
But the walking was in your control. The water was in your control. And eating more healthy, all those things were in your control. You were doing the right things, so just stick with it. I'm right now, I'm starting my famine season. And so, you know, my first day of this is okay, how do I how do I control this? OK, well, I've got to keep my carbs low. I've got to watch my electrolytes. And so to go to the gym, I basically boiled a dozen eggs. I got my tuna and my Himalayan sea salt.

[00:42:58.390] – Rachel
Oh, there you go.

[00:42:59.950] – Allan
And so, it's just what is what's in my control. Those are those are actions. Have the food I need to set myself up and and then just charge on.

[00:43:09.640] – Rachel
I think that's great. Yeah. Being actionable and having the intention to be actionable is you're right. It's something that should be added to our goal setting for sure. And maybe even working with a trainer, Allan, because you have a lot of information and your podcast and there's a lot of articles out there and some people may not really think about all these little details.

[00:43:31.450] – Allan
Yeah, I would love to say that I was a provider of information outside of the podcast or whatever I do to an extent. A client will ask me a question about a certain thing and I'll give him or her my opinion on it. That happens all the time. But there's not a lack of information out there. The Internet is just chock full of stuff. Now, it could get very confusing because there's there's all this contrast out there. If someone believes that, someone's doing that. I go on you know, I go on to my fitness pal to check in on things and it's still the same conversation. Just just cut your calories. Just cut your calories.

[00:44:10.970] – Allan
And I'm like, okay, but they've done that, you know, they've done that. And it's not working for them. So you can't just say just cut your calories.

[00:44:17.860] – Rachel
Right.

[00:44:18.760] – Allan
It's almost a slap in the face for some people that have cut their calories to keep saying that when it's not working for them. So. You know, with with my 12-week program, the things that we're really focused on first and foremost is mindset, you know, and then and then beyond that, it's just those kind of simple, subtle change things that are in your control.

[00:44:41.190] – Allan
We can control this. So where do you want to set your line? Where do you want to start this this journey? And then we put that in place. And so it's all custom to them. And then it's like, okay, how much movement can you do? What equipment do you have in your house? Rachel, here, you've got a great little home set up and I just opened up the gym, so I've got a nice little set up. Not everybody has that.

[00:45:05.220] – Allan
Sometimes they have resistance bands, sometimes they have the human body, sometimes they're traveling, sometimes they're home, sometimes… So we all have our own little circumstances. And so, you know, what I'm there to do is basically just help them first, get the mindset and then get the lifestyle.

[00:45:23.040] – Rachel
Yep, that sounds great. Just move that needle.

[00:45:25.710] – Allan
And you're doing similar stuff with your running. You're saying, OK, if you're a runner and you know, you want to stay healthy and you know, you want to do your virtual 5K, 10K or 50 miler in the upcoming months, you've got to train your running. That's that's for certain. And there's a myriads of information out there about running. So you can find a program and you can follow a program. It's free on the Internet, but you still got to get your mindset right. And you've got to get that balance. So you have a program that helps runners maintain their strength and that's going help them stay healthy. Can you tell me a little bit more about that?

[00:46:07.500] – Rachel
On my website strong-soles.com I have a runners' workout that you could download for free. It's bodyweight movements so you don't need any equipment. It goes through all the different planes of motions. It's all the main muscle groups that runners need to keep strong. And it's a great overall body, short activity that you could do a couple of times a week, which is a great place to get started.

[00:46:30.300] – Allan
Yeah. So if you're a runner or you want to be a runner and you want to do it the right way, go check out Rachel site. And someone who wants to lose some some fat, you know, and feel better and get a little bit more fit. You should message me or email me allan@40plusfitnesspodcast.com and I'll give you some information. I'm going to be closing up the pre-launch on this pretty soon here because I've gotten… I'm getting close to my number of the cap number people. I didn't want to run too many people through the pre-launch because I wanted to make sure I had all of it in place. And the results have been just off the charts.

[00:47:07.560] – Rachel
Wonderful!

[00:47:07.580] – Allan
I am so excited! In an average of just a little over two weeks, seven of us so far have lost a cumulative 42 pounds.

[00:47:17.280] – Rachel
Oh, my gosh, that's incredible.

[00:47:20.340] – Allan
Yeah. So I've got some I've got some outliers. I got some guys that are really doing well and I've got some people that are, they're pulling in behind, but everybody's everybody's losing weight. They're feeling good. And, you know, they're just pretty excited about it. They're moving more. They're eating better. And it's just a really good, positive vibe in the group. So I'm really, really excited about what's going on here. And then again, I'll close it and then I'll do the actual kind of the launch thing sometime in March, either the first or the middle of March. But if you're interested in this, don't don't delay. Go ahead. Get on that. Email me and I'll get in.

[00:47:56.520] – Rachel
Excellent!

[00:47:57.240] – Allan
All right. So, Rachel, anything else you want to talk about before we say goodbye?

[00:48:01.380] – Rachel
Nope. That was a great interview, Allan, thanks so much.

[00:48:04.020] – Allan
Thank you. I'll talk to you next week.

[00:48:05.898] – Rachel
Bye now.

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Another episode you may enjoy

Can you lose weight and get healthy eating one meal per day?

Less...

Let's Say Hello

[00:02:16.080] – Allan
Hello, Ras, how you doing?

[00:02:18.570] – Ras
Good, how are you today, Allan?

[00:02:20.310] – Allan
I'm doing I'm doing good. I'm doing really good. We're I think we're we're turning a corner here in Bocas and they're starting to put some things out there that they're willing to do what they call an asynchronous opening to the country.

[00:02:35.560] – Ras
Oh, boy.

[00:02:36.540] – Allan
This means that they're going to have different rules for different parts of the country, which is good and bad. I feel bad for the parts that are going to stay more encumbered and more closed. But it looks like Bocas has done really well with keeping the virus tamed on the islands. So they've said things can open and to my knowledge, I should be able to open the gym. So when this goes live, it's February 1st.

[00:03:00.690] – Allan
Hopefully the health department will let me open. I've expanded the gym, I've brought in new equipment, and I've set up some things that'll spread everything out. I'll have some protocols. I'll have tons of cleaning materials. I'll have a thermometer. I'll have all this stuff. So we should be able to convince them that it's the right time for us to open the gym.

[00:03:22.230] – Ras
Wonderful. That would be so exciting. I'm sure all your clients will be very excited to get back to the gym.

[00:03:28.470] – Allan
I get asked every single day. Tammy gets asked several times a day. So, yes, it's a thing. Yes, people do want the gym open on the island. So I'm working towards that end and it's good. I feel really good about what we've done here at the gym to get ready. A lot of work went into it, a lot of money. Sometimes you know, sometimes when things are tough, you just invest. You invest yourself. You invest in the things that are important to you. It's not necessarily a time to hang back and just let things ride. Sometimes you have to go ahead and take the bull by the horns and barge on in and get this done.

[00:04:06.240] – Ras
Absolutely. That's exciting.

[00:04:08.740] – Allan
How are things up there in the Great White North

[00:04:11.820] – Ras
Snowy. Yeah, we've got some snow. It's beautiful up here. But like you just said, a lot of us up here are runners and we're investing in ourselves, getting ready for some spring runs. Hopefully, races will come back again. If not, I'm sure they'll be virtual. I myself actually am training for a 50 miler. It's in the summer, so it's still kind of hard to tell whether it's going to go or not. So not only am I ramping up my miles, I'm doing all the other things I need to do to be strong and healthy when I get ready for this race.

[00:04:47.430] – Ras
So my runners' workout, which your listeners can find on my website, strong-soles.com is a great bodyweight workout. I do it two or three times a week and I'm already feeling pretty good, pretty strong. So pretty excited for what this year holds.

[00:05:03.780] – Allan
Well, good. You can go to fortyplusfitnesspodcast.com/471 and I'll be sure to have that link there. Links to the book we're going to talk about today. Links to everything. So if we ever talk about a link, you can always go to the show notes and this is episode 471. So good. That's cool. That's great to hear. Rachel, I'm excited, too, because I know for most people are running, they want to run and runner's run and lifter's lift. And that really is a place for us to do a little bit of both so that we're balancing out our training and not overtraining and make ourselves more resilient.

[00:05:42.600] – Ras
Absolutely. It's good to be well balanced, cross-trained, you know, do all the different things that keep your body as a whole in good shape.

[00:05:50.700] – Allan
Yeah, well, we got a review from a listener. We get one every once in a while. So if you want to go give us a rating and review wherever you listen to this podcast, that would just be awesome. But he said we were too touchy-feely. No one's ever said that about me before, but which I think is actually good. That was part of the reason why I brought you on the show is to kind of personalize this a little bit more. And so I think that's a success.

[00:06:19.400] – Ras
Oh, well, that was nice. OK!

[00:06:22.650] – Allan
He didn't like that we were touchy-feely, but that's fine. You know, we are who we are. And like I said, I wanted to get some more balance on the show. So, Rachel, it looks like you've helped me meet that objective. So thank you for that.

[00:06:35.520] – Ras
Good. Well, thanks for letting me chat with you about all the stuff. I love this. This is great.

[00:06:41.490] – Allan
All right. Well, our guest today is a registered nutritionist, so let's go ahead and have a conversation with Abby Langer.

Interview

[00:07:19.160] – Allan
Abby, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

[00:07:22.070] – Abby
Thank you. So good to be here.

[00:07:24.230] – Allan
So today we're going to talk about your book, Good Food, Bad Diet, The Habits You Need to Ditch Diet Culture, Lose Weight and Fix Your Relationship with Food Forever. I really like that title and I really like kind of the tone of the whole book because I think so many of us, we see the stuff that's going on Instagram or Facebook. I'm not even on Instagram. And it's because everyone that does what I do on Instagram is really kind of gloryizing a look, a thinness, a physique that's really probably not attainable by 90 percent of the human beings walking this earth.

[00:08:01.370] – Allan
And many of them started that way. And they've been that way their whole lives. And now they're in their 40s and 50s and look great. And that's good for them. I'm very happy for them. But it creates a culture that I think is really dangerous. And, you know, in the book, you call it diet culture. Can we can we talk a little bit about that and why this is such an insidious problem?

[00:08:21.140] – Abby
You know, it's funny that you are saying that because I was just actually on my Facebook with my daughter, who's 10, and as I was scrolling, there were these ads for yoga clothes two separate companies, actually, and the women in them were so thin. And being thin is not a bad thing, you know, but they only portray they only have thin models on these ads. There's no women in larger bodies or, you know, even average-sized bodies. As I would say.

[00:08:55.130] – Abby
It's just these extreme reed thin women advertising yoga clothes. And I said to my daughter, this is so harmful because it shows little kids that there's only one standard of beauty and certainly diet culture follows along the same way. Diet culture is something that is a philosophy, if you will, in our society that, says thin is best. That is the worst thing that you can be. And you should be thin at any cost. No matter what, because if you were thin, you'll have a great life, your life will be transformed. Which we all know is not true.

[00:09:37.990] – Allan
Well yeah, it's a hard sell. I mean, you know, it's kind of one of those things. I had Rosie Mercado on the show not long ago, and she's a plus-size model. And even within the plus-size modeling department, they have a line, they have a thinness, if you will. And so, you know, she was looking at her career and she was also looking at her health. She had young children and she was just trying to figure things out.

[00:10:05.290] – Allan
But even within that paradigm of the plus-size model, which you would think in a general sense would be, OK, we're going to let women experience and be themselves. And that was supposed to be the messaging behind that movement, if you will. And it just didn't happen that way.

[00:10:25.020] – Abby
No, it still has like you said, it's lies, I mean, plus-size, what passes for plus-size now is… I hate that word plus-size anyway. What does that even mean? But it's like a size 14, 16. It's average now.

[00:10:45.120] – Allan
Yeah.

[00:10:46.320] – Abby
And so it's just so awful. Like why do we have to use these labels? Women and people, in general, come in all shapes and sizes. Why is that bad?

[00:10:56.760] – Allan
You know, I think one of the reasons why we we accept some of that is that we kind of build into ourselves these core beliefs. And you talk about negative core beliefs, because we have we have a lot more negative core beliefs than we do positive, even our most optimistic people. You know, I'm a I'm a fairly optimistic person, but every once in a while, I catch one of these trolls, if you will, coming out and feeding my brain bad food or bad information.

[00:11:25.380] – Allan
In the book, you went through five top negative core beliefs. Can you can you go through that? And then you have a process that in business we would call it a root cause analysis where you just keep asking why, why, why can you walk us through that? Because there's five very important ones that I agree. I see them all the time with my clients, and I think them going through this process would be quite valuable.

[00:11:48.060] – Abby
So let's do the first one, which is thin equals lovable and thin equals attractive. So first of all, actually, before we get started, I want to talk about what a negative core belief is, because I think there might be some listeners who don't know what they are. So we all have core beliefs, whether they're negative or positive. These are beliefs that are most likely established in early childhood, and they basically govern every decision we make, including how we feel about ourselves and what we decide to eat and how many diets we want to go on among other things.

[00:12:27.420] – Abby
But they're basically how we see ourselves in the world. And so my one of the first core beliefs that I talk about is thin equals lovable and and thin equals attractive. In other words, people who have this negative core belief because it is a negative, believe that unless they weigh a certain amount or are at a certain weight, they're ugly or they're not worthy of love. And so I see this all the time. And, you know, a lot of the time it comes from having a parent who cited a lot around you when you're young and because you see your mother or your father getting on the scale or berating themselves in the way they look at.

[00:13:17.610] – Abby
And a child. I mean, I am I'm a mom and, you know, I know children pretty well. They see everything. And even though they might not say anything, they're internalizing those messages, even the subconscious messages they get. So when a child see their parents dieting, they tend to think, well, what if I'm bigger, what if I'm in a bigger body? Am I not going to know who am I? You know, and I worthy of love.

[00:13:48.820] – Abby
So it's just it's pernicious in that way because you grow you you have that negative core belief when you're younger. But unless you bother to find it and and expose it and work with it, you tend to, people to grow up with that belief into adulthood. And I've seen people in their 50s and 60s who still have these negative core beliefs in childhood. And they they don't make that connection like, oh, that actually from when I was really young. So when someone identifies their negative core beliefs, I always ask them to do a couple of things.

[00:14:29.190] – Abby
So the first thing is asking themselves if the core belief is true. Is this really true? Like, you know, where did you learn this from? And whose voice are you hearing? And is this a rational thought? Do you really believe that if you weigh one hundred and twenty five pounds, you're more worthy of love than you are at one hundred and seventy five pounds? Like, where did you learn that from? And I get them to ask themselves questions like the why ask yourself why until you're blue in the face.

[00:15:06.130] – Abby
Why. Like why do I believe this. OK, well why. And then after that happens and they expose that negative core belief for what it is, OK, maybe, you know, I actually acquired this negative core belief, like when I was young and this is my mother's voice I'm hearing in my head every time I think that. OK, lets flip this negative into a positive. So and this is the way you get rid of those negative, core beliefs. Negative core beliefs are trolls they hate the light. I think they hated the water, but they hate the light too.

[00:15:44.790] – Allan
No, you don't get them wet. You don't get them wet. But I think they were they did have an aversion to bright lights. They didn't like bright lights. And you don't get them wet.

[00:15:55.240] – Abby
OK, well, negative core belief hate the light because if it takes their power away, so we spend so much time as adults going on diets and doing everything we can to ignore these negative core beliefs, they are painful to expose. You can like I mean and I say several times in my book, you may need the help of a therapist to do this because its tough. But you can uncover some pretty tough situations or stuff. But it's important to do this work because if you've been covering them up with diets and just negative thoughts for your whole adult life, it impacts a lot and it's unhealthy.

[00:16:42.800] – Abby
So taking the core belief's power away by exposing it, turning it around in your hands and really looking at it where it came from, what it is and how it's affecting you and then switching it to a positive. So, for example, the core belief of I'm not worthy or I'm not attractive enough or thin. You know, you might want to tell yourself or write down that everybody is worthy of affection and love regardless of their weight. And it seems like intellectually we know that. Right. But emotionally, it's such a tough concept to grasp. And it takes a while because you've told yourself something different.

[00:17:27.960] – Allan
Well, yeah, with something like that… To me and again, this is this is easier said than done because we are dealing with emotions. We are dealing with some of our internal wiring. So I'm not going to say this is this easy. But from a conceptual perspective, I have to ask myself. “Would I feel that way about someone else.” As you kind of mentioned, like if I'm thinking, OK, well, I put on a little bit of weight and I'm not attractive to people, nobody's going to love me. The question I ask is, if I were with someone or interested in someone and they put on an extra 20 pounds, would I just decide they weren't worthy of love. And the answer is, that's silly. Of course, I wouldn't.

[00:18:09.830]
Of course not.

[00:18:11.590] – Allan
But to reverse that and say, well, that's how I expect other people to feel about me. Realize that that kind of just took all the air out of that. It's like, no, that's not how people are. And if you're with or around someone, that is get that person out of your life. I'm sorry.

[00:18:29.020] – Abby
Well, yeah. And I get people to actually in the process of turning that negative core belief into a positive, I get people to write down the proof that they're negative core belief isn't true. And that is something about, you know, people might say something like what you just said, you know, I would never do that to somebody. You know, it's the same as I talk about negative core beliefs, but I also talk about peoples hate. Because your tape is basically the negative stuff that you play in your head over and over and over again all day.

[00:19:04.270] – Abby
And I always say to people, would you say these things to someone you love? Would you say to your kids? You know, I'm so fat, I'm not worthy. I have no willpower. Which, by the way, is totally BS. Like willpower does not exist in terms of dieting. And I explain all of that in my book. But you would never say that stuff to someone. You never say, oh, yeah, Martha, you're so fat and ugly. I don't want to be your friend anymore. So like would you say to yourself? And you know, like that it's important to realize how you treat yourself and to flip it around.

[00:19:44.230] – Allan
Yeah. So we've got the thinness equals love. Negative core belief. Where are the other four?

[00:19:51.280] – Abby
So the other so the next one is food is love and food is safety. So when someone comes to me and feels like they have to eat at a certain time of day to make themselves feel better or like they tend to binge eat certain comfort food, I always ask them about, well I always ask people about their childhood anyways. But a lot of the time these people grew up in an unsafe situation, whether their parents were fighting or something along that line and those lines.

[00:20:30.400] – Abby
And they were given food as a babysitter or given food to assuage their anxiety. And as adults, they still use food as a coping mechanism because food helps them feel safe. And you know what, and food helps them feel loved. Now, I'm the first one to tell you that you can show love through food. So this is not what I'm saying, because I'm going to have people saying, you know, but food is love. OK, fine.

[00:20:59.860] – Abby
But it should never be your only tool in your coping toolbox. Right? And certainly, food does not replace love and it doesn't make you safe. So you have and it's sort of like you have the power within you to deal with tough situations without using food. But this negative core belief makes you feel as though you don't.

[00:21:26.650] – Allan
Yeah. It's easy enough to say, OK, this is not just exactly like, OK, there's a bad breakup and the girl goes and gets the Häagen-Dazs and sits with a bowl of ice cream or the guy goes to the bar with his buddies and drinks a few beers.

[00:21:42.190] – Abby
This is like chronic overeating, because you don't want to face what is making you feel unsafe inside. And it's horrible. It's sad. But you know I always tell people you know, this is tough work. My book is not like, oh, here's what to eat. And here's a grocery list and it's a meal plans and go see you later. It's like, OK, I truly believe that there is no long-lasting, meaningful change in nutrition, if you don't clean out your closet first. You've got to work out your stuff around food. And so many pretty much all the books on the market don't do that.

[00:22:24.040] – Abby
They're just like, OK, yeah. You know, like your keto diet. But OK, why do you feel this way about your body? What about your relationship with food? Are you going to destroy it? Are you going to be part of the problem or you'll be part of the solution? This is book part of the solution. You're not going to continue to destroy your relationship with food and your body.

[00:22:42.970] – Abby
You're going to fix those things forever by exposing these core beliefs by looking at your tape, by dealing with all of your stuff around food and your body and then in the in the second and third parts of the book, we're going to put all of the nutrition stuff into the works there.So, yeah.

[00:23:05.580] – Allan
OK, so that's two down. We got three more to go.

[00:23:09.600] – Abby
Thin equals a better life. That's the third one. Listen, I see this I review on my website all of the nutrition MLMs, the multilevel marketing like Prexis, Arbon and Isogenics, all of them are on my website at abbylangernutrition.com. And I'm brutal. But the one thing that I notice about all of these companies is that they promise a transformation. That once you follow their program and you lose weight, you're going to be a different person.

[00:23:46.330] – Abby
But guess what? You're not you're not going to be a different person. You're still going to have the same boss who you hate and all of the issues, you're just going to be a thinner person. And it's not realistic to believe that. So that's a negative core belief. And the other part of that core belief, number three, is thin equals worthy. If you're fat, you're not worthy. You have to put yourself last.

[00:24:19.640] – Abby
You're not worthy of health, you're not worthy of happiness. I've seen this with clients. They come to me and they want to make changes to their diet, but they sabotage themselves. They just don't feel like they're worthy of doing it. They're not worth it. They're not worth the effort. Thinis an effort, right? And we work on that because I end up telling them, you know, you're worthy of good things. You deserve good things no matter what your size is.

[00:24:54.170] – Abby
What does your size has to do with anything? But this is a damaged self-worth. And a lot of the time, again, it comes from growing up in a house where you didn't feel valued, unfortunately.

[00:25:10.620] – Allan
You have to start this journey with self-love.

[00:25:13.580] – Abby
You have to learn self-love.

[00:25:18.410] – Allan
You have to get in there. But you have to get to that point, because any time I've found someone that that wasn't truly in love with themselves, at some level they did. They came back and sabotaged, they self-sabotage.

[00:25:31.970] – Allan
All right. So we have two more of the negative core beliefs.

[00:25:36.890] – Abby
Number four is I can't be trusted and neither can my body. This is sort of like the saying that the wellness culture and diet culture feed off of. There is something wrong with you and we're going to fix it for you by putting you on a diet because you can't trust your body to tell you what it needs and you can't trust yourself around certain foods. That is complete and utter nonsense. Absolute nonsense. And people who have been chronic dieters truly believe this. A lot of them do. Not everybody, I guess. It all comes from… Sometimes kids grow up in a family where parents tried, didn't let the kids self regulate.

[00:26:26.390] – Abby
They really tried to regulate everything. So kids, if they were hungry, they weren't allowed to push it or they had to finish everything on their plate even though they weren't hungry. So they didn't grow up trusting their body to tell them what it wants. And this is a negative core belief that leads people to followed the wellness culture and diet culture down the guarded path and tell them what to eat and how to eat and when. It's just not good for them.

[00:27:02.870] – Allan
Yeah. You see this a lot, particularly with some of the bigger programs. I won't mention the names, but, you know, you have a weekly meeting and you weigh in and it works well for a little while and it doesn't. I'm talking to someone and they've been in that program for three years.

[00:27:18.260] – Abby
They have lifers.

[00:27:21.020] – Allan
How is this going and how is this working for you? And they're like, oh, well, I'm about the same as when I started. And I'm like, OK.

[00:27:30.740] – Abby
No, because here's your relationship with food and your body is worse, actually. Get on the scale and front of everybody, although now it's a pandemic.

[00:27:40.430] – Allan
And then the fifth core belief is I am my diet. And I see far too often this is when people say, you know, talk constantly about good food, bad food and clean eating and all of that, which I just it's like the worst, putting morality based on labels, on food, because what ends up happening is people, this is also very traditional. People don't realize it's happening when it's happening, but they end up associating themselves with their diet. And it sounds intellectually like whatever I like, I don't do that. But emotionally, it happens where if you're constantly eating foods that you deem as bad food, then you're going to believe that you're a bad person.

[00:28:32.900] – Allan
Yeah, I had Dr. Alan Buchanan on and we got to talking about tribalism.

[00:28:39.290] – Abby
Oh, no. It's the worst.

[00:28:40.350] – Allan
Yeah, but that's what's that's where a lot of what's happening here is that someone will go on to say, I eat vegetarian or I eat Carnivore, I eat or paleo. And like you said, that get into the bad food, good food. And then once they start doing that, then they're in a tribe. And so, there's a social cost to them. You'll have someone who was a vegan and they'll get caught eating meat.

[00:29:07.010] – Abby
Oh yeah, I like that girl who had the fish and then…

[00:29:08.990] – Allan
Yeah.

[00:29:10.190] – Abby
Oh!

[00:29:11.750] – Allan
So then when they try to cross culture lines, these, these, these tribal lines, it becomes this huge thing because they've not only identified themselves with that, they've now they've they basically put it out there. They're an evangelist. So they've gone beyond tribal. They're a chief in the tribe. And so if you're following that down and you're not really experiencing life, you're letting food run your direction like the people.

[00:29:42.390] – Abby
You're in an echo chamber.

[00:29:44.450] – Allan
Exactly.

[00:29:45.950] – Abby
I see this all the time, it's the Diet Wars. So you're in an echo chamber of people just repeating the same incorrect facts. Most of the time they're incorrect about certain diet and people wrong. People are so lonely, we're so connected, but we're lonelier than ever. And research shows that and people are looking for community. And so they find it online with these different diets.

[00:30:15.290] – Abby
And it's like against the. I've written about it and been interviewed about it several times, actually. And it's scary. It's really upsetting. It's concerning that people really place all of their value into their diet, it's like your diet. Is you?

[00:30:36.600] – Allan
Yeah, that's scary,

[00:30:39.480] – Abby
It is scary.

[00:30:39.930] – Allan
Yeah. Let's go ahead now, and we've kind of put together the concept of “get to know you.” Start the process of healing, start the process of self-love, get past some of these negative core beliefs, or at least recognize what the tape in your head. And we'll go with tape because I'm of the generation where we used tapes

[00:31:00.930] – Abby
Me too!

[00:31:00.930] – Allan
Not MP3s or whatever's coming down the line. But people still want to know what to eat, how to eat, what not to eat, because everything we've been directed has been said. Don't eat this, eat that, eat that. Don't eat that.

[00:31:19.200] – Abby
It's either don't eat this and eat that or eat whatever you watch and listen to your body. But I. I've been a dietitian for 21 years, and I'm telling you, it's like there's this huge spectrum one end of it is like intuitive eating or be very permissive. And the other end is be very restrictive. And I believe that most people will do far better in the gray area between those two poles.

[00:31:48.780] – Allan
Yes.

[00:31:49.260] – Abby
And so my book is a gray area.

[00:31:52.710] – Allan
Right.

[00:31:53.190] – Abby
I give you some guidelines, but really to try to self manage.

[00:31:58.350] – Allan
And I think that's what's so cool here, is that you're, I think a lot like me in that I'm I call myself diet agnostic, try something and see how it works for you. If it didn't work, it's not you. It's not your fault that it didn't work. It wasn't the right way for you to eat. You weren't feeding your body the right way for your body to respond the right way.

[00:32:21.990] – Allan
The relationship between carbs, protein and fat, obviously we know that. Give us what our body needs for energy building to put our body together with the fats and the proteins being most fat. Can you kind of go through the process of explaining the relationship between carbs and protein and fat and how we should view that as we're looking at building the way that we want to eat?

[00:32:43.120] – Abby
What I recommend to everybody is to build their meal around a protein. So select the protein first and then fill it in with plants and a little bit of carbohydrate. Most of us will do the reverse of that, but we'll fill a plate with carbohydrates like the ton of rice on our plate and then put a little bit of protein and maybe vegetables after that.

[00:33:05.200] – Abby
My theory is that, first of all, we don't eat enough vegetables and so we need to try to put them in at least two meals a day. But also we tend to stuff all of our protein into the evening meal and breakfast we skip if we're doing intermittent fasting. But which is fine if that works for you. But if we don't get skip it or if we don't skip it intentionally, we end up overeating carbs or we also if we don't skip breakfast at all, we tend to eat a heavy breakfast.

[00:33:45.080] – Abby
What happens is protein releases hormones that help us feel fuller for longer and protein also digests lower and it also burns more calories at rest because your body has to work harder, the thermaic effect of food is what it's called, to break those amino acids down. I know it's very popular right now to put protein into everything. And it's because protein is so valuable because it does affect the satiety levels so much. And it also helps me to build and maintain muscle, especially as we age. So protein first, vegetable, and then a little bit of carbs.

[00:34:35.120] – Allan
Right. It's funny, I had a comment on one of the blog posts today, one of the podcast posts. The podcast about seasonal ketosis. And that's where you go into periods of ketosis for weight loss. And then you say, OK, I know Christmas is coming up or Thanksgiving is coming up or New Year's is coming up. And I know I'm going to want some of the pie or some of the cake or some of this.

[00:35:00.530] – Allan
I think the strategy you're you're proposing there is you kind of go through this is you could still think about those meals, you still think about those opportunities and still follow something like this where you're saying, OK, I'm going to focus on the protein and then again, vegetables and then

[00:35:15.920] – Abby
It's basically setting priorities. They prioritize the protein, number one, and then the vegetables. Yeah, but no food is off-limits. I really don't think there's any food I would ever say you shouldn't eat. I mean, there are foods that are not very nourishing physically. But my point in the book is also to nourish yourself physically and emotionally.

[00:35:43.160] – Allan
I'm just going to throw out there, the only thing I disagree with is transfats even said this in the book, to stay away from transfats. Those aren't…

[00:35:50.150] – Abby
We all agree on that.

[00:35:51.770] – Allan
Tranfats are not food.

[00:35:53.420] – Abby
It's really not. We know that, like, one hundred percent know it.

[00:35:59.180] – Allan
Yeah. And you're right. I think that's the point. We know these things and it's not rocket science, it's food and it's not as complex as people want to make it out to be.

[00:36:09.440] – Abby
People micromanage their diet. And it makes me crazy. Yes, of course there's people who eat to live. I do not. I live to eat. I love food. And I really, truly believe that there's no shame in finding pleasure. Which, again, diet culture tells us is not OK. But food is community. Food is pleasure. I like it fine. You should love what you eat. You don't need to punish yourself by force-feeding your self a choking down the stuff like, green juice or whatever that you are just consuming because it's healthy. So that's why you're doing it. Like no!

[00:36:49.550] – Allan
Yeah. I'm glad you brought that up because one of the things that a lot of people will get into because they're like, oh, I want to feel good. I want to get all the energy. I want to get all those carbs in there, get all that good stuff in there. They'll do smoothies or they'll do juices, the green juice, the fruit juice, and 90% of the time, because that's when they have the time to actually do this. They do this for breakfast

[00:37:16.280] – Abby
And then there's no protein in there.

[00:37:17.120] – Allan
Yeah. Let's talk about why that's not a good strategy and how they should be looking at this a little bit differently, because I think you hit on something really key. There's protein. We're not it's not happening. And even if it is it's a scoop of this or a scoop of that.

[00:37:33.020] – Abby
Yeah, I see. A lot of people, thy'll make a smoothie out of fruits and vegetables and almond and it's like, OK, there's no protein in that. You're going to be hungry an hour later, not even. Or they'll use almond milk and then they'll put a scoop of whey powder. Why don't you just use milk? Why are we overcomplicating this? Whey is so engineered. It's fine. It's the gold standard for protein powder if you want to eat a protein powder. But there's really no reason to do that. You want to eat as food as close to their whole state as possible, whenever possible.

[00:38:14.180] – Abby
And of course, like you're going to want to eat Oreos or Doritos every once in a while. That's fine, too. But if it's the bulk of your diet should be whole or minimally processed foods wherever possible, even if it means that you're buying canned vegetables, you're buying frozen fruits. We have to be inclusive of everybody, not necessarily just people can afford these things.

[00:38:39.140] – Allan
Now, I'll have to full, full admission here. At one point in my journey to try to lose weight. I did a fruit juice cleanse. It was a very expensive one. You buy this for the three days. And basically, it's a juice fast. I think, you know, they said it was like 600 calories a day, some of them were lemon juices and some of them were a little bit more simple, one almost cashew milk. So there was a little bit of fat in there, a little bit of protein, but not not much.

[00:39:11.840] – Abby
Not even close.

[00:39:12.860] – Allan
I was ready to chew my arm off by the second day.

[00:39:17.060] – Abby
And that's what happens. When you finish, you just overeat. It's so silly. Like, there's no reason, no physiological reason why you need to do a cleanse at all. Like your body, your kidneys, your liver. They do the work for you. And really it sucks that all this culture at its very finest.

[00:39:40.370] – Allan
It was. And the only thing I can say is, was it successful. Yes, if you only looked at the scale because I did weigh about five pounds less after that weekend was over.

[00:39:49.750] – Abby
How long did it take you to gain it back?

[00:39:51.620] – Allan
Until I ate something.

[00:39:53.000] – Abby
Right!

[00:39:53.000] – Allan
Anything. Because all that was was stuff that was in my digestive tract that was no longer there and maybe even a little bit of muscle mass.

[00:40:02.960] – Allan
It was just three days. I didn't do it for very long. But it was just one of those things to say, OK, I'm going to try this and see what it does. It was an interesting experience because it would make someone feel good when they saw that the scale went down after three days of doing this. But I knew I hadn't lost any fat and I knew that it would just basically yes, I was starving all weekend and it was punishment. I literally look back at it and say that was self-punishing. That was diet culture, at its best. Right. And it really didn't do me much good at all. And you're right, I was starving the whole time.

[00:40:39.560] – Abby
These juice companies are just making a bundle on people. It makes me so upset because, they prey on vulnerable people who want a solution. But this isn't the solution.

[00:40:51.620] – Allan
Well, the good thing is because you're listening to this podcast, you're not one of those folks that's going to easily fall for stuff like that. You're educating yourself and trying to understand more about nutrition, more about fitness, more about health in general. And so when those companies tell you, you can lose five pounds in a weekend, true, true statement, you will likely lose that weight. But it's not fat. It's not the weight you want to lose. As soon as you come back after you eat something, as soon as you start eating after the second day, I gained every single ounce of that back.

[00:41:23.150] – Allan
It was it was frustrating to a point, but it was educational because now I know this doesn't work for me. So if you look back at and say, OK, I've done this thing, I've done the diet yo yos over and over and over and over, and I always end up in the same place or worse off. It's not you, it's the diet. The diet is bad, but you learn something. So don't take those bad experiences as failure. Don't think of this as a failure. In a general sense. You learned something.

[00:41:51.530] – Abby
My dad used to say there is no failure, there are no mistakes in life because you learn from everything. And he was right.

[00:41:59.870] – Allan
Yes, absolutely. Now in the book you use this term and I love this term, it's called high-value eating. I love that. I actually do. Now there's ten there's ten tenets to that. Could you go through those ten tenets really quickly?

[00:42:14.630] – Abby
Yes. So the first one is a pencil, not an eraser. And this is like my number one recommendation since forever, because we're so inundated with do not eat this and do not eat that. We shouldn't do that, we shouldn't do that in terms of diet. And I believe that people respond so much better to positive changes rather than negative ones. And because we are taking so much out of our diet unnecessarily, the usual suspects are gluten, wheat and dairy. So many people tolerate those. And like some nutrition guru tells them to take them out so they do and they don't enjoy. You know, people can enjoy their favorite food. I add these things back to diet. And I and I want readers to know that unless there is some compelling reason for them to have these out of their diet, that they can add them back. So add foods back into your diet, then you will feel deprived or punished.

[00:43:19.140] – Abby
The second one is eat whole or minimally processed foods as much as possible, and we did go through that. And keep in mind that this high-value eating is the last part of my book. And this is where people get to put all of the stuff they learn about nutrition into practice. So this is the last part.

[00:43:41.210] – Abby
Number three is understand your lifestyle. How many times have I seen someone building their life around their way of eating instead of the opposite way? Your way of eating, I say diet, but I don't mean diet and restrictive way. I mean it. And, you know, diet is what you eat. Your diet should fit your lifestyle, not the other way around.

[00:44:05.850] – Abby
Number four, make peace with your preferences. Why are you talking down that green juice if you hate it? There are so many things to eat and drink on this world, on this earth that, you know, if you don't like something, don't eat it. And so many people say, well, I have to eat the broccoli, I hate it, but it's healthy. OK, there are so many vegetables. Why are you punishing yourself? So make peace with your preferences.

[00:44:33.570] – Abby
Replace the replaceable. So as you go to the grocery store, do not just shop out of habit. If you are habitually buying sugar-sweetened beverages or three different packs of cookies, take those out of the cart and buy them only when you really, really want them. So in other words, shop mindfully. And if you have a lot of people say, you know, well, I buy them for my kids and my husband loves that. But no everyone in your household's habits should be tweaked like it's not just about you, it's about the support that you get from everyone else as well.

[00:45:19.170] – Abby
Number six is be intentional and quiet that diet voice. So when you reach for something and a little voice inside you says, oh, that's bad. You know, you need to quiet that voice and eat in a consistent way, sustainable way. You want to eat when you're hungry and stop when you're full. And we do go through hungry and fullness cues in my book and the difference between fullness and satisfaction, because they're two different things.

[00:45:49.220]
The seventh tenent is all about balance. So I did mention Oreos and Doritos earlier. Those might not be your vices, but everything is valid. And one word that we like to use, which I can't stand moderation because it's so subjective. But there are going to be days where you eat a lot of other processed food and you need to just move on. It's fine, nothing that's going to happen, I promise

[00:46:20.410] – Abby
Numer eight is be flexible, I'm not a rigid sort of person. I won't give you meal plans or anything. You need to learn how to put things into practice, but be flexible. If you're on vacation are you really going to want to follow some sort of diet? Maybe you won't have vegetables twice a day, but you have to be flexible. Sometimes you go to someone's house and they're serving something that you might think it's so high in fat, I don't want to eat macaroni and cheese. You just eat it like. It's fine. Open your mind and just take a breath.

[00:47:00.970] – Abby
Number nine is for you, not for everybody else. These changes that you're making are for you, these tweaks to your diet are for you, because when you make changes to your diet for somebody else or you eat something because somebody else wants you to, it's not a happy situation and it's not productive. You know?

[00:47:22.630] – Abby
And then number 10 is eating eat according to your hunger, not the clock. So a lot of us will be like, oh, it's noon and I'm not hungry. But, I guess I should eat. I don't think so. Unless you have to because you have a fixed schedule. Many of us don't right now because of the pandemic. You really want to become in tune with your hunger and fullness cues. And one way to do that is to really think whether you're hungry before you eat. It's a basic thing. Because if you're a chronic dater, you may feel like you don't have those cues anymore, but I teach you how to get them back. In my book.

[00:48:09.220] – Allan
Great. Abby, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest, and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay and stay well?

[00:48:18.880] – Abby
I think the first is to understand that wellness is not only physical, but it's emotional. And I think too often we shove our emotional wellness to the back burner because we only want to focus on how much weight we can lose or how we look. And so we put that physical wellness first. And but wellness is it's not only what you eat and what you do. It's also how you feel and how you think about food and eating into your body.

[00:48:49.840] – Abby
The other two are, you know, enjoy food. Listen, you're going to grab life by the you know what? Give it a swing because we're here for a very short time. And so don't spend time punishing yourself to be someone you're not. And along the same vein, number three don't send a set unrealistic goals for yourself. I see that far too much. You're chasing a unicorn man. Like be the best you can be for yourself and stop compare yourself to others.

[00:49:22.840] – Allan
Abby, if someone wanted to learn more about you, learn more about the book, Good food, Bad Diet where would you like for me to send them

[00:49:32.650] – Abby
You can go to my website at abbylangernutrition.com. My Facebook at Abby Langer Nutrition. And I'm also on Instagram and Twitter at Langer Nutrition.

[00:49:44.920] – Allan
You can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/471 and I'll be sure to have the links there.

[00:49:51.040] – Abby
Abby, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

[00:49:54.640] – Abby
You're so welcome, it was a joy to be here.

Post Show/Recap

[00:50:01.670] – Allan
Welcome back, Ras.

[00:50:03.150] – Ras
Hey, Allan, another great interview, a lot of stuff to unpack here.

[00:50:08.410] – Allan
Yeah, you know, one of the cool things with my job is that I get to talk to people from all over the world. Abby happens to be from Canada. From a nutrition perspective, their standards are different than the United States. And so some of the things that she's doing and talking about are something you're going to hear. They're not built on. What we have is a U.S. standard. It's a lot less political. There's a lot less lobbying involved. And so in a sense, she has an advantage over dietitians that you might meet from the United States. And so that's why I really like that cross polonization of different places in the world. So you can just hear what's going on with what the opinions are outside of the dogma of the United States.

[00:50:55.480] – Ras
Yeah, that is actually particularly fascinating what other countries think about the common dietary habits for that area. So different from what we do here in the States.

[00:51:06.130] – Allan
And then the other side of it… I was having this conversation recently with someone is that most of the problems that we have when it comes to weight loss and weight gain and all that, it's in our head. It's mental. We've put up these mental barriers, limiting beliefs that are holding us back. And so when you're talking to a dietician and the very first thing that she puts in place is how important mindset is, you have to pay attention to that because that. You have a personal trainer and you have a dietician on the phone saying it's not how much you move. It's not necessarily even the foods you put in your mouth. Most of it's starting in your head.

[00:51:54.370] – Ras
Isn't that something? The attitudes that we have towards food and and they can be so strong without us even knowing it. Really!

[00:52:04.020] – Allan
Yeah. And that's why it's easy to go off-kilter and it's easy to, you know, have addiction problems or just be looking at food as something other than nourishment to an extreme, to a point where it's actually a problem.

[00:52:25.090] – Allan
She is the breakup, I think that's actually probably a good one, because that's one of those emotional things I think most of us have gone through. And yeah. So you're going through a breakup and it's Valentine's. And, you know, Candy went on sale on the 15th and now you're having a Haagen-Dazs and Valentine candy. Weekend. And all that is, is just comfort. You're you're seeking comfort in your food. And that's not a healthy approach.

[00:52:59.020] – Ras
Right?

[00:52:59.770] – Allan
It's not to say food shouldn't be a part of it because, a healthy approach would be to call up someone that, you know, loves and cares about you, that you trust their judgment and to have dinner with them, have a reasonable good dinner, dine, talk, get it out. that's a healthy approach to food, being comfortable and being a part of a solution that's healthy. Not a weekend of Haagen-Dazs.

[00:53:30.940] – Ras
Right. You just touched on it. We have an emotional situation like a breakup or maybe we lost our job or something tragic in our lives. And the more often we just turn straight to food, the worse it's going to get. Where in your example, you take your best friend out for dinner and chat through the stress, then you'll deal with that problem a lot more healthier in that one moment. And then it just becomes one night of terrible eating instead of a repeating process. And it becomes a bad habit over time. If you're constantly reaching for food, then you're not dealing with the problems that you're facing.

[00:54:10.090] – Allan
So having some tiramisu with a good friend after dinner is going to be a lot better than an ice cream over a weekend by yourself watching what is it, the Hallmark Channel or Lifetime?

[00:54:24.380] – Ras
Sure, sure.

[00:54:25.880] – Allan
Whatever's on now. I know what was there at one time. But anyway.

[00:54:32.050] – Allan
The other thing I get caught in because of my accounting background or maybe it's just time wired. But when I see numbers, I'm going to bounce on that one right away. Oh a list. I love lists. And so she had the tenets of health, right?

[00:54:52.030] – Ras
Ten tenets of high-value eating.

[00:54:54.160] – Allan
High-value eating, that's what it was. I love the high-value eating. That's a big part of it. So what was one of your favorites?

[00:55:00.880] – Ras
Let's see. I think be flexible is one of them. I think being flexible with what you choose to eat is important because life happens. You know, like she had said, having birthday cake at a birthday celebration is not a terrible situation, but having birthday cake every single day becomes a problem. But, you know, we go on vacations, we have holidays, we have celebrations. Be flexible as best you can and then get back to healthier eating the next meal. The very next meal.

[00:55:34.510] – Allan
The way I like to think about that is, that's a detour. And like I said in the book, you know, The Wellness Roadmap, if you're driving down the road and you see a sign for the world's largest wooden carved beaver and you want to see that, that's great. Plan to pull over and make it the most valuable trip it can be. So there's a gas station you're going to fill up. Everybody going to the bathroom. You're going to go see the Beaver, take the picture and the selfie, and then you're going to get back in the car and get back on the road.

[00:56:04.900] – Ras
That's right.

[00:56:05.360] – Allan
But if you pull off on that detour and then after you get off the exit, you see a sign for the white alligators a mile down the road. And now your detour is a longer, unplanned detour. That's not adding value to your life. It's not high value. I mean, granted, you might really enjoy seeing the albino alligators. Don't get me wrong, they're cool. Look at the little pink guys and yeah, they're cool, but is that detour worth it?

[00:56:37.810] – Allan
The way I like to put that in real terms with us is, OK, let's say you've decided you're going to eat low carb and you've been doing this for a few months and your significant other tells you, hey, we're going on a business trip for this conference and it's in Hawaii and I get to take you and we're going to go to Hawaii for a week. Paid in full.

[00:56:59.470] – Ras
Whoo! Wouldn't that be nice?

[00:57:00.520] – Allan
You're going to eat the pineapple. You're going to drink the mai tais. You just are. You're going to enjoy a luau. You're going to have the Hawaiian bread. You're going to eat the chocolate covered macadamia nuts. You're going to do those things. That's a good detour. That's a part of the happiness mix of make sure you're doing for yourself things that make you happy, not just looking at food as this restrictive, horrible thing you've got to keep yourself on and punishing yourself. So when you find the detours that are worth it, you take the detours.

[00:57:38.570] – Ras
Mm hmm. That sounds great.

[00:57:40.660] – Allan
You know, we had Dr. Lou and Dr. Rob on and in their book, I guess they gave that at the more technical term. I call it detours, they call it tactical indulgences.

[00:57:49.970] – Ras
Oh, right. Yeah, I remember that. I like that term.

[00:57:54.710] – Allan
And so, you know, just if you're going to take a detour, understand why you're doing it, that's the core of it. And then for the rest of the time, and this is the tenet that I liked the most was whole food. We were designed to eat things that were living. They're not living while we eat them, except some things are, I guess, but for the most part we were designed to eat things that were alive and we're taking the essence of that living thing into ourselves for sustenance. I've never seen a Twinkie tree.

[00:58:30.410] – Ras
No, I have not seen one.

[00:58:31.880] – Allan
I've never seen a Twinkie. I've seen an apple tree. So will I occasionally indulge in an apple? Absolutely. It's a living thing, even though maybe I'm not high on the fruit. I'll have a peach. And sometimes, yes, I'll eat the mango or the pineapple, but that's still whole food. And so, you manage your diet the way you want to manage your diet. You eat the things you want to eat, but in the end, you know, recognize that the more you're eating the whole food, the healthier you're going to be.

[00:59:01.810] – Ras
Absolutely. Another one of her tenets was, be the pencil, not the eraser. And she meant instead of focusing on what you can't eat, erasing things out of your diet, focus on what you can eat. So pencil those things in. And I like that a lot because after a while you'll realize that you feel better when you are adding in more vegetables or more fruits or more whole foods, then taking out some of that processed junk and after a while you won't crave the junk foods anymore. I like that one too.

[00:59:38.140] – Allan
Yeah, my wife used to hate brussel sprouts until she had and prepared a certain way and now she craves them like I do, you know. So she likes the Brussels sprouts now. Be willing to try things because your taste buds do change over time. I used to hate mustard. I used to hate cream cheese. I don't anymore. I love those things. Just give something a try, particularly if you know that it's got what you need. If, you know, it's got the vitamin C, if you know it's got the minerals that you need, give it a shot. Try it prepared a different way. Okra, if you let it get all slimy, I hate it. But if you let me if you make it crispy I love it! Especially ocra in a gumbo. But anyway, it's real food. Be willing to try something else. Yeah, that's absolutely right. Pencil it in. I like that.

[01:00:35.890] – Allan
And then the only other thing that I would, I would put out there is that if food is stressing you out, OK, if you're like constantly stressed out not knowing what you should be eating or stressed out, that eating this is going to cause a problem, you're doing it wrong.

[01:00:56.020] – Ras
Sure.

[01:00:57.400] – Allan
Food should not be stressful. We go back to that mindset thing. If your choices for food are really causing you some grief and concern, if it's a constant conversation point of, are you going to eat that or am I going to eat that? You've got to work on that relationship.

[01:01:19.150] – Ras
Absolutely. She had mentioned that we are not what our diet is. We are not defined by our diet. And if you obsess too much about it, then it's taking away from your life instead of giving to it and nourishing it.

[01:01:36.490] – Allan
Yeah. And that's why I will throw out some things like you should eat Whole Foods. But what happens like you said, you go over to someone, it's their birthday and they have a birthday cake. You have a taste of cake, you know, not a half a pound of cake, but…

[01:01:53.890] – Ras
Right?

[01:01:54.700] – Allan
Have a little cake. Enjoy yourself. If someone goes somewhere, like you said, it's a friend, maybe it's your friend that's really stressed out and she wants to order the tiramisu and share it with you. You're going to tell her no because you're on a diet? No, you're not. You're going to have tiramisu with your friend and you're going to comfort her, just as you would hope that later on she's going to do for you.

[01:02:17.380] – Ras
That's right.

[01:02:18.280] – Allan
And so she's not spending the weekend with the buckets of ice cream.

[01:02:23.590] – Ras
Perfect.

[01:02:28.780] – Allan
The whole big takeaway of all this is you've got to build a good relationship with food if you want to maintain a healthy weight. That's what they do. We talked to Dr. Taubes. I mean, he's not a doctor but he should be a doctor. But Gary Taubes a while back. Our body is going to listen to what we feed it. We put food in our body. It's signaling, and then the hormones are signaling. And then our body is doing what it does. And if we're signaling to our body that we should be eating more because we're not getting the nutrition we need and our relationship with food is bad, the cortisol is higher, the cortisol causes the spike in insulin. And so you end up with this whole cascade of problems that didn't start with the food.

[01:03:18.180] – Allan
It started in your head. It started with your hormones. So relax, take a deep breath, and enjoy your food. In the end, that's the difference, the fundamental difference for people that want to lose weight and those that don't have to lose weight is they just have a better relationship with food overall.

[01:03:41.870] – Ras
I think that's a perfect place to start to, to get to know your body a little better and to understand your food choices a little better.

[01:03:50.260] – Allan
Absolutely. All right. Well, Rachel, I guess with that, I'll let you go and we'll see you next week.

[01:03:55.810] – Ras
All right. Take care.

[01:03:57.010] – Allan
You, too.

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Another episode you may enjoy

Improve your self-esteem with Rosie Mercado

Less...

[00:02:53.190] – Allan
Hey Ras how you doing.

[00:02:55.170] – Ras
Great. How are you today Allan.

[00:02:56.790] – Allan
I'm doing pretty good. Feeling really good. You know life has it, things are really, really good and things are opening up here in Panama so it looks like my wife and I are going to get an opportunity to come back to the states for a little while, visit family. We've been storing all of our crap what crap we have left. You know, you say you sold everything, but we didn't sell everything. We ended up with a whole garage full of stuff that's in our daughter's garage feeling kind of bad that it's been there for as long as it's been there because we moved it all in there over a year ago. And so she's like, you know, she's really cool about it, actually cooler than I would be.

[00:03:38.690] – Allan
But it's like I've got to get there and get that. Plus some of the equipment, some of the stuff that's in there. I went for the gym. Now, the gym is not going to open any time soon. Panama looks at gyms and things. We're just like disco tecs and, you know, that kind of thing. So, yeah, they haven't opened the schools. They're not going to open the discotheques and they're not going to let us open the gym. So we take advantage of the time that the gyms closed to go ahead and take a trip to the United States, get that equipment, get it in there. So when people do come back. It's going to be a pretty cool place.

[00:04:07.750] – Ras
Awesome, that sounds great.

[00:04:10.200] – Allan
So let's go ahead introduce today's guest.

[00:04:13.250] – Ras
All right.

[00:05:03.320] – Allan
Sharkie, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

[00:05:06.110] – Sharkie
Thank you, Allan. Happy to be here.

[00:05:08.220] – Allan
You know, as someone who kind of grew up being an athlete, I just have to say I love the title of your book, When at Aging How to Stay Fit Free and Love Your Retirement. I just like that whole concept of winning this thing is just really, really uplifting.

[00:05:24.000] – Sharkie
Well, thank you. We all want to win. Right. So it's an empowered approach to life and aging.

[00:05:31.890] – Allan
And I think it's just one of those things where not many people approach this from the perspective of as a manageable thing like you're managing a game or you're managing a sport. And there are strategies and there are rules and there are things you can do and you have to play the game right or you age faster than you should.

[00:05:52.270] – Sharkie
Right, exactly. And that's what I'm trying to get out there because I see a lot of people that hit a certain age. I think 50 is probably the age where most people kind of go, oh, my gosh, what's going on? This is crummy. What can I do? And so, yeah, this is meant to help.

[00:06:12.810] – Allan
Good, good. And I think it will because some of the things you share in here, I think are just classic. There are things that we all should be doing. Rather we're fifteen or eighty-five, you know, because we want to live a long, healthy life here. And it's not about longevity, it's about having a quality of life, which is part of what winning is about. We've got to do the right things.

[00:06:36.240] – Sharkie
Exactly. It takes work.

[00:06:39.870] – Allan
Everything worth while does. So in the book, you share what you call some rules of aging, because we're approaching this like a game. And if we want to win, we need to know the rules. Can you go through some of the rules of aging so anyone getting ready to age knows how to play the game?

[00:06:58.910] – Sharkie
Sure. Well, I came up with these, so you probably won't find them any place else. But as I was going through studying the process and comparing it to sports, I thought, well, as an athlete, you need to know the rules of the game. So here are the ones I came up with. And the first thing is every living thing ages. And so it's not something that we can avoid, but we can control it. So that's the good news.

[00:07:27.420] – Sharkie
But we're all going to go through some kind of process with aging. It's not, and you know, the only alternative is actually leaving the planet. So it's something we're all going to do. And if we're lucky. Right. And also, I want to make sure that people know that you can live a healthy, fulfilling life at any age, but it does take work. We can't just do nothing. Like we were younger, don't remember getting away with stuff like partying all night or and feeling great the next day.

[00:08:00.180] – Sharkie
But that's not going to happen as we get older. So we have to realize that it does take work if we want to have a positive, vibrant life as we get older. And here's one that I want people to know. We are responsible for how we handle the aging process. Our doctors can only do so much. And I think a lot of times we just sort of, oh, I don't feel good, my doctor will take care of me.

[00:08:28.770] – Sharkie
Well, that's not the way it is and winning at aging. We have to be responsible for our lifestyle and how we feel as we get older. Because the doctor is just going to bring us back from disease. Right. That's what they do. So but another thing that I think is really cool is the rate of aging is actually related to our lifestyle, our attitude, and genetics. And the cool thing is that we can control two out of those three things.

[00:09:00.360] – Sharkie
Obviously, we can't control genetics, but we can control our lifestyle and our attitudes. And so that's what we need to focus on. And then the physiological and psychological conditions are really more important than our chronological age. So in other words, don't you know people that are 80, that are vibrant and healthy and other people have all sorts of physical and mental problems. So it's not really the age. So it's again, a lot of these things are controllable.

[00:09:34.440] – Sharkie
We don't get older at the same rate and have the same conditions. It's an individualized process. And when it comes to aging, it doesn't matter who you are, it matters what you do. And also we have to respect aging. I call aging in the book a bitch. So respect study and understand the beast or she will take away your quality of life. And again, how we age is up to us. We need to get in the driver's seat. We need to get behind the wheel. We need to stop being a passenger and a back seat driver. So that's the rules of aging and understanding those things. That's how we're going to win.

[00:10:20.100] – Allan
Awesome. Awesome. Now, in the book, when you talk about getting healthy, I guess, or dealing with our aging, you used an acronym and I'm like one of these. I go crazy for acronyms. I love them, but your acronym is RAP. Can you tell us about what the pieces are of RAP and why each is important?

[00:10:40.850] – Sharkie
Right. I call it the power of rap. And it's really getting your mind on board because most people focus on their bodies. But if your mind isn't on board, you're not going to get the results that you want. So the mind and body have to be working together. And the three characteristics as an athlete that I think all top athletes share are: Resiliency. That's R. Accountability and Purpose. So did you want me to go through those three and explain them to you?

[00:11:13.880] – Allan
Yes, please.

[00:11:15.590] – Sharkie
OK, so Resiliency, agings a challenge. And so we have to, if we're going to take this path, which most of us are going to do. We have to toughen up. And as an athlete, when, if you played a sport, you didn't probably moan and groan or quit when you lost a game or something happened. You stepped up, you went back to practice and you did it again and you tried again. And so that's what we have to have resiliency. If we get knocked down, we need to brush it off, get back up, and keep going.

[00:11:53.920] – Sharkie
So winning and aging is tough. It's not for wimps, that's for sure. So we have to quit complaining and just say, OK, this is the way it is and I can do this and I'm going to control what I can control. So the Rocky movies are a great example of how many times did that guy get knocked down and get back up.

[00:12:18.710] – Sharkie
So and the second one is accountability. And I think we have a serious problem with accountability in our society today. It's like nobody wants to take responsibility for their choices.

[00:12:31.030] – Allan
Right.

[00:12:31.790] – Sharkie
So, but as we get older, we have to start doing that. We have to take a look at what got us where we are today, and we have to accept the responsibility for that. So we really have to say, hey, you know, I made these choices because of that. Maybe that's why I'm dealing with this and I can change those choices. Too often people blame other people or blame the conditions. And as an athlete, you probably know, that that never got you better at your sport. So that's the accountability factor.

[00:13:10.880] – Sharkie
And I use a fun story in the book about this guy at this conference I went to with all these trainers and they were trying to say the coolest things that are out there in terms of supplements and gimmicks. And this guy came up when it goes, I don't know everything about it goes, but I have something that works just tell your client to stand in front of the mirror with no clothes on and say, I am responsible for this and I am the only person that can fix it. That was a powerful message.

[00:13:40.490] – Allan
There you go.

[00:13:43.040] – Sharkie
And the last one is purpose. And I know that that means a lot of things to a lot of different people. But basically, it's knowing what you want and start being excited about getting it. I think too often early in our lives, we're trying to make ends meet. We're taking care of our family. We're concerned about our careers. But a lot of times after 50, now's the time for us to kind of go, hey, what do I really want?

[00:14:13.940] – Sharkie
We've never really asked ourselves that question before. And once we find out and it's different for everybody and that can be more than one purpose, it gets you excited about life. It gets you excited about getting up in the morning and getting going. And a lot of times when people retire and they lose some self-worth because they're not doing this what they've done for so many years. And but they still have their gifts. They still have their energy. And so they just need to find a way to channel that. And so those are the three things that I think are really, really important. The three characteristics that you need to win at aging.

[00:14:56.120] – Allan
Yeah, I completely agree because things are going to happen. You had a knee replacement, I think you said, that was that required rehab, required some really hard work to work through that you easily could have just quit and said, OK, well, now I'm just going to sit here and start doing something like reading because I can't get back in the gym. I can't go do my exercises. I can't do the things I was doing. But you did the rehab, so now you can.

[00:15:26.530] – Sharkie
Right, and I got to tell you, anybody that's considering a knee replacement, it's not an easy surgery to recover from. I was six hours on this machine every day that took my leg through different ranges of motion. And I had to do that to get back to one 120 degrees in flexion and extension. And it was hard and it was painful. But I went, there's no way I'm going to have gone through that surgery and not come out better. So, yeah, I got to do it.

[00:16:02.740] – Allan
I tore a rotator cuff and, you know, went through and I had the surgery on a Thursday and I was in rehab on Monday. And I was like, I'm not playing around with this. I'm going to get this shoulder back as quickly as I possibly can.

[00:16:17.590] – Sharkie
Good for you.

[00:16:18.580] – Allan
And then and then the other two, I think we can look at the Blue Zones and some of the other books that are out there, and they kind of make it clear if we don't have a purpose, we don't have a fire. And if we don't have a fire, then that's not really the life we want to live anyway.

[00:16:34.240] – Sharkie
Right.

[00:16:34.860] – Allan
And then after that, it's like, OK, so here you are and you have this self-awareness. What are you going to do about it? And, you know, we don't have necessarily, unless you hire someone, you don't have a coach out on the field telling you, OK, run this play, do that play, do this thing. You've got to figure some of that out for yourself.

[00:16:52.660] – Allan
But the reality is that information's there. It's not rocket science, even though the body's a really complex organism, we know the things we're supposed to be doing, eating whole food, moving, meditating, sleeping. You know, we all know those things. So I think it's really important for folks to really wrap their head around all three of these in your RAP, because it is each and every one of them is important. You can't get there without all three of them.

[00:17:20.980] – Allan
Yes. Yes.

[00:17:23.230] – Allan
Now, you brought another concept into this thing and again, goes back to your sports and athletic days, the concept of playing offense and defense, because I think most of us are thinking and just thinking in terms of, well, we're going to play this game and play defense. I'm going to try to avoid getting older. I'm going to try to avoid hurting myself. I'm going to, you know, try to avoid some of the things that maybe I did in my 20s and 30s. You know, we're thinking of it from a defensive perspective, but you say we have to do both. If we're going to win this game.

[00:17:54.090] – Sharkie
We really do offense, obviously scoring. So if you're in a team sport, you want to score. And defense is preventing the other team from scoring. And actually, when when you're in sports, I think a lot of times people focus more on offense. Right. So like a coach that wants to run and gun and just in basketball and get down and shoot within eight seconds. And, you know, basically, if if you're successful, you're going to win, right. Because you get more opportunities at shooting.

[00:18:28.900] – Sharkie
But a lot of times sports, they actually don't work enough on defense. And defense, if two teams are similar defense is preventing the other team from scoring. Right. So you need them both. You need them both. And so you need to be proactive in terms of offense. You need to go after a healthy lifestyle. It's on you. It's your responsibility. You need to do this. The doctor is not going to make you do it.

[00:19:03.910] – Sharkie
So but defense, I think, is what I'm looking at defense in terms of what aging is, prevention. And, you know, taking a look at something like COVID, which hopefully will go away soon. You know, we all hear the prevention. Wash your hands, social distancing, masks, don't go to large gatherings, eventually have a vaccine. So COVID doesn't win. And so I think that we need to have both. And there's a lot of overlap between the two. But we can't just focus on one. We can't just focus on defense. We can't just focus on offense.

[00:19:48.170] – Allan
Yeah. And I completely agree with you. There is one thing I'd like to say is, you know, with COVID and again, I agree with you, I hope this is something we get rid of and don't have to deal with again, for a long, long time. But I hate the term social distancing because to me, it's a horrible, horrible choice of words.

[00:20:11.310] – Sharkie
It is!

[00:20:12.270] – Allan
We want physical distancing.

[00:20:14.070] – Sharkie
Exactly!

[00:20:15.150] – Allan
So we need social you know, that's part of purpose. That's part of why I'm doing what I'm doing, you know, so I don't want to socially distance myself from the people that I care about. I want to be, you know, not necessarily physically around them, because that's you know, that's part of the issue. I have to be smart about it. But I think the core of this is that defense isn't all that sexy. You know, it's just washing your hands, doesn't seem like, you know, a big, sexy thing to do, whereas, you know, get on the bike and go for a ride and you know, and you're enjoying the outdoors and you get at the same time, feeling the wind on your face.

[00:20:51.750] – Allan
And, you know, you break a record because you went faster this time than you've gone in a long, long time. So you have a new PR and that's exciting. That's fun. That scoring is fun. Sometimes it's just, you know, brush your teeth, wash your hair. You know.

[00:21:07.200] – Sharkie
I know, prevention is not fun.

[00:21:11.430] – Allan
Yeah. Yeah.

[00:21:14.830] – Sharkie
Offense is fun.

[00:21:14.870] – Allan
But you still have you still have to do both.

[00:21:17.490] – Sharkie
Right.

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[00:22:46.740] – Allan
Now, in the book, you went through the components of fitness, and I always like to, if I see someone who's written about this, I really, I like to come back to this, because I think it's, you know, will typically if we start working on fitness, there will be something that we're going to be really, really good at. Like you might be really good at cardio and you can ride your bike forever and you can go, go, go, go, go. But you lack upper body strength or you don't have much mobility or balance. Can you go through the components of fitness and why each one, what we should be doing for each one of those, particularly as we start getting older.

[00:23:22.080] – Sharkie
Right. Right. Well, first of all, we need to know that they are all important and so you can't just be healthy and when at aging, just doing one thing. And so the one that gets the most attention usually is cardiorespiratory endurance because it's systematic, which means that affects all the systems of the body. And the definition of that just scientific is the ability of the heart and lungs to transport oxygen and nutrients to the cells and eliminate waste products so the cells can do their jobs.

[00:23:56.490] – Sharkie
And so that's basically what it is. And as most of us know, that's prolonged, sustained large muscle movements. Like riding your bike, like walking, jogging. And so usually the timeline on this is to do so at least for 30 minutes a day. And yet it used to be that that was the main guideline. But now we know that we can cut it into chunks. It doesn't have to be non-stop for 30 minutes. And so we can cut it into chunks and still get the benefits from it.

[00:24:33.780] – Sharkie
And there are so many things that we can do with cardiorespiratory endurance. And I think especially now people need to get creative, because a lot of the things that they've done in the past, they can't do anymore because of everything shutting down. So, yeah, and getting outside is a great way to get your cardiorespiratory endurance. Writing an exercise bike indoors is very different than riding it outdoors, right?

[00:25:05.160] – Allan
Yes.

[00:25:06.670] – Sharkie
Yes. And so that's the one that gets the most attention, but one that I think is especially important, especially as we age, is the muscle fitness, which is muscle strength and muscle endurance because as we age, we lose muscle mass if we don't work on keeping it. And as you know, a lot of people, as they get older in their 80s, a lot of times they lose their mobility and nobody wants to lose that. And so we have to keep our muscles strong and active. And there are two components. Again, muscle strength, muscle endurance, we can work on them together or we can work them separately. Most people work them together, and that's just lifting weights or doing resistance training. And the reps would be somewhere between 8 and 12 reps.

[00:26:02.400] – Sharkie
And you can do a whole muscle resistance training workout in 20 minutes and so it doesn't take that much time. And you can do it at home with weight machines, you can get strap's I have a TRX machine at home that really works. So there's a lot of different ways to do that. Resistance training. It's not just on the machines that you have at the gym. And so those two are very important. But flexibility is too, that range of motion present at a joint. I mean, we want to be able to move our bodies so we can get up off the floor. Right.

[00:26:44.470] – Sharkie
And that involves stretching, making sure that we do work the joints through their full range of motion each and every day. And one of the best ways that I like to do it is through yoga. There are so many different yoga practices out there. Some of them are physical. Some bring in other components like meditation. But combining flexibility with your other workouts for cardiorespiratory endurance and muscle strength is very doable. So there's a lot of hybrid workouts out there that do all three.

[00:27:19.770] – Sharkie
And the last one I would like to talk about his body composition because and that's the proportion of body fat to the fat-free mass. And people need to understand body composition is, because otherwise a lot of times people start a resistance training program and then they stand on the scale and they go, oh my God, I've gained weight, especially for women. And a lot of times that's muscle mass. That's. Good. So getting a body composition test is really, really important to know what that mass is.

[00:27:54.990] – Sharkie
Obviously muscle. We want muscle and if we have too much body fat, we'd like to get rid of that. But what happens as we get older, especially when we get to be over 40 with losing that muscle mass, ok, and a lot of times we don't notice it happening. We start to put on body fat, ok, and we're doing the same things. It's kind of like we haven't changed our lifestyle, but we start gaining weight. And I think especially this happens to women and so. So we need to be aware of body composition. So those are the components, muscle strength, muscle endurance, cardiorespiratory endurance, flexibility, and body composition. We need them all to win it aging. Yes.

[00:28:39.770] – Allan
Yes, I agree. That's why I wanted you to go over them because I do think it's really, really important. And the cool thing about all of them is that you mentioned yoga for flexibility and mobility. You mentioned different ways that we can get cardiovascular fitness. You mentioned different ways that we can do resistance training. And even with body composition, we can try different things. So it should never be stale. It should never get old. It should be something where you're excited to do it. You know, and particularly, I think when people want to continue sports into their 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s, that's an excellent opportunity because it clearly demonstrates that you're keeping yourself fit and capable.

[00:29:30.690] – Sharkie
Yeah, sports are great because they combine all of these components. I mean, you're you have to work on muscle strength, you have to have the endurance in order to go the distance, you have to have the flexibility. So, yeah, you're right. So sports are a great alternative. And people who play sports a lot of times don't realize they're working out because they're having so much fun. Right.

[00:29:56.610] – Allan
Until you're sore the next day and you're like, hey, I did something.

[00:30:03.000] – Sharkie
I earned that soreness.

[00:30:05.030] – Allan
Yeah.

[00:30:05.550] – Sharkie
No, we won.

[00:30:08.670] – Allan
Or we scored!

[00:30:09.300] – Sharkie
We scored

[00:30:10.020] – Allan
Yeah, the offense scored. Now we got to play some defense and get ourselves recovered and ready to go again. But, you know, in the book you talked about meditation and meditation used to be one of those things we would say woo-woo. And occasionally you would do it with yoga, you know, with a little less of a spiritual backing to it. But I think now if you didn't know meditation, I mean, they've been in a rock, if they don't know. But meditation has become a little bit more mainstream. But you mentioned three breakdowns. And I just kind of want to go through them because it's three types of meditation. So just like we talked about with fitness, there are different modalities of how you can do and accomplish that task. And it's no different with meditation. Can you talk about the three sections or approaches to meditation and what he does?

[00:31:03.450] – Sharkie
Sure, sure. The first one, I think, is the most common. It's called exclusive meditation. The reason that works a lot of times because your brain has something to focus on. Your brain likes to have something to do. Otherwise it's going to just, you're going to have the monkey mind. Right. You've got it all different times. And I think probably the one that I like the most and I've taught my yoga students is a primordial sound, exclusive meditation, where they focus on saying to themselves, SO, s o on the inhale. HUM h u m on the exhale.

[00:31:47.850] – Sharkie
And it's real easy. But for some people, it's hard because the mind likes to wander. And I tell my students, just go back when your mind starts to wander, just go back. So on the inhale hum on the exhale. Because what that's doing is it's giving your whole rest of your body a chance to relax, because if the mind is always running amok, it's yourselves are listening to your mind. So if finally, your mind has something to do that's just repetitive with just one thought, one thing, then your whole rest of your body gets to relax.

[00:32:26.340] – Sharkie
And it's an easy exercise, meditative exercise to do. And a lot of my students just really enjoy it. So they feel so much better afterward and you don't have to do it for very long. I learned this at the Show Presenter, Depok Chopra. And when I first went into that meditation room, I couldn't sit still for five minutes. After learning this technique, I could be there for 30 minutes and it felt like two minutes.

[00:32:56.180] – Sharkie
And so it's it's very powerful and it's very easy. The Inclusive one is a little harder. And so this one, you're kind of letting in the thoughts and but you sit quietly and you just let your brain do the thoughts. But the key here is to not attach any judgment or any emotion to the thoughts. So it's like you're watching them from a distance. It's like you're sitting there watching logs go down a stream one at a time. And I've done this also in my class.

[00:33:29.620] – Sharkie
Some of my students really like it because what ends up happening, you're watching yourself think and the thoughts start to slow down and eventually sometimes the thoughts stop. And you're just there totally relaxed in a meditative state. Isn't that cool? So that takes, that's a little harder than the exclusive. The mindfulness we can do every day doing anything. We don't have to sit down or lie down to do mindfulness. It's just being totally aware in the present moment.

[00:34:06.520] – Sharkie
And sometimes I'll use a mindfulness technique in terms of just doing a body awareness exercise with my students. I'll have them start at the top of their body and just send their awareness up to their forehead, or to their mouth. They become very aware of the present moment as to what's going on there. But we can do this at like when we're washing the dishes instead of thinking about everything else going on in the past or future. We're just washing the dishes and just be right in that present moment.

[00:34:42.580] – Sharkie
So the mindfulness, I think, is really cool because we can do that anywhere, any time. And it's very, very relaxing and soothing. Most of us spend our time either in the past thinking about what we did and obsessing over what we did wrong or we're worried about the future. So mindfulness is a technique on how to stay in the present moment.

[00:35:06.910] – Allan
Yeah, and guys washing the dishes counts as washing your hands so use that as some mindfulness time.

[00:35:14.560] – Sharkie
That good. That's good.

[00:35:20.620] – Allan
And I've done all three of these. And you're right, the inclusive one is kind of the hardest one because invariably I would think of something that I needed to do and I was really afraid to let that thought go. And it took me a while to say, OK, it's going to come back around. I'll remember it. I know I will. But yeah, you get something that is big and you're like, oh, I got to get that done. And yeah, now I'm sitting here not doing it. And so it's a little harder to balance. All of these are easier, particularly.

[00:35:49.990] – Allan
I mean, other than the mindfulness, I think all of the other ones are much easier if you have some guidance. So, you know, you might get some apps or go on YouTube and get some videos, you know, to listen to. But when they're guided, it makes it just a little bit easier to get into it. And you start out five minutes and you get comfortable with that. You stretch it out to a little bit longer. And yeah, before you know what you're capable of doing a lot more than you would have thought.

[00:36:15.810] – Sharkie
Right. Have you ever done a guided meditation where they actually the audio takes you to a place and describes the place and you're actually using your mind to be there? Have you ever done that?

[00:36:27.890] – Allan
Yeah. I've done one of those. I was I subscribed to the Headspace app and it had all kinds of stuff in there. And it was, part of that was the stress relief app so I spent a lot of time with that. But yeah, they had the others. I've gone on YouTube as well and listened to a few where they're like, OK, you're going to leave your body and try to imagine yourself floating above you. You see yourself there?

[00:36:51.680] – Sharkie
Yeah.

[00:36:52.450] – Allan
You go up to this place where you don't feel any pain, you don't feel any regret, you don't feel anywhere.

[00:36:57.980] – Sharkie
Right, that's right. Yeah. Very cool.

[00:37:01.690] – Allan
Right. So Sharkie, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest, and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay?

[00:37:11.380] – Sharkie
Well, OK, I'm going to take a holistic approach to this, if you don't mind. So, yeah, I'm a health professor and I teach holistic health. So I think we need to and I'm going to talk about three that basically is most of that. But, the fourth one, if we have time, some people will find it harder. The first one people will identify with that, because that is talking about your body, that your body in terms of what you can do to make your body healthier. And that's the wellness.

[00:37:45.550] – Sharkie
So one area that I think a lot of us, the nutrition and all of us want to know what's the best way to eat, and there is an idea called bio-individuality, which actually means we're all different. There's not one diet that is for all of us. So we need to spend some time figuring out the kinds of foods that feel good in our bodies and help us live our lives. And because there are some foods out there that are deemed healthy, but they're not healthy for some people. Some people have food allergies. Right.

[00:38:26.030] – Sharkie
So it takes time and motivation to really explore foods in terms of what we enjoy, what feels good inside of our bodies. And one thing I would say to everyone is to try to stay away from processed foods. You mentioned that eating whole foods because of all the toxins, the toxins put us at risk for autoimmune disease and everything else. And so if we can just stay away from those kinds of foods and add more whole foods, more fruits, and vegetables, fresh, more whole grains, more protein that is clean, we would notice a difference. And so that's the physical part.

[00:39:14.240] – Sharkie
The next one is, I think, even more important, and that's the mental-emotional components of wellness. And like I said, the mind and body are connected. So you can't just work on the body and not have the mind on board. And I think one thing that all of us can do as we age is start having a more positive mindset. You know, the paradigm for aging is it's an eventual period of decline. And that's pretty depressing. I like to say it's a challenge, it's an opportunity and it's a privilege. And so just doing that kind of changes the feeling of what aging is about. And so we need to look for the good instead of always what's wrong. It's hard to do in this day and age, but we can do it if we focus on what's good today.

[00:40:05.830] – Sharkie
We can have a journal. We can basically do this. We can look for the good and focus more on what can I do not what can't I do. What can I do that I want to do? And then I just had a person on my show, his name is Ted Larkins. He wrote the Get to Principle. He goes instead of saying, you have to do this, I get to do this. And so this is all mind-shifting towards positivity, which I think we need to do. We need to stop complaining about everything.

[00:40:40.810] – Sharkie
And the last one is social, social wellness. We need to put together our own change. We probably have a lot of people out there that draw our energy away that are negative. All they do is complain we need to get people in our lives that are positive and have the same goals as us. When I was doing a lecture once this woman raised her hand and because I told I identified those people as social vampires and she goes, What if you're married to one? And I said, well, you need to crowd him out with other people in your lives that are positive. And so and we get to choose our own team. So it's not like we're back in the days where we had tryouts and stuff to be on teams. We get to choose our own teams now, and that includes our doctors and our health providers. And so, yeah, so we need to get our team together.

[00:41:37.310] – Sharkie
And the last component is spirituality. And I tell my students, I give them one phrase, and have them think about it. Imagine that you are spiritual being having a physical experience. And when I tell them that some of them just kind of go, oh, I mean, isn't that a cool thing to think about?

[00:41:59.770] – Allan
Yeah.

[00:42:00.730] – Sharkie
Yeah. And so so those are the approaches, the three strategies that I use with that last one thrown in for fun.

[00:42:08.980] – Allan
Thank you, Sharkie. If someone wanted to learn more about you, learn more about the book, When it Aging, How to Stay Fit, Free, and Love Your Retirement, where would you like for me to send them.

[00:42:20.500] – Sharkie
My website. It's my name SharkieZartman.com. And they can also go to Amazon and the book is up and there'll be some reviews up there and some information. And also my other books can, are up on. Amazon and Barnes Noble and but basically my website has pretty much mostly what I do and my background.

[00:42:53.330] – Allan
Cool. Well, you can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/452 and I'll be sure to have links there in the show notes. Sharkie, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

[00:43:04.880] – Sharkie
Well, thank you for having me, Allan. It was fun.

[00:43:07.370] – Allan
Well Ras, that was a pretty cool episode, don't you think?

[00:43:15.170] – Ras
Oh, it was. Lots of good information here.

[00:43:18.380] – Allan
Yeah, she was just a spitball of fire. I really enjoyed the conversation with her. And, you know, while we were recording her, I think her husband was in the background, Pat. And it was funny because in the book he and I don't even know that I got into this in the interview so much as I did afterward. Sometimes I have better conversations afterward sometimes than I do during the actual episode. But her husband, Pat, you know, one of the things she said about him was that he wants to live until at least 200. And so I wanted her to know that I'm in Pat's corner there. I hope Pat makes it and leads the way for the rest of us to live longer, healthier lives. So it was a really cool conversation.

[00:43:53.150] – Allan
And I promise, guys, we're past that point of talking about aging. I've had three or four episodes in a row. So we will move on and will talk about some other things next week and I'll let you know what's going on. But so what were some key things that you took away from this episode Ras?

[00:44:07.760] – Ras
Well, she's got the point right on the head here is that we all want to win at aging, don't we? We want to have a really good quality of life as we get older. And sometimes that's hard to get to unless you put in the effort.

[00:44:23.700] – Allan
Yeah, I think so many times people look at the aging curve and they just think, OK, that's my path. That's what I'm going to follow. You know, my grandfather lived till he was in his 60s. My father died in his 60s. So, that's my path. They both had diabetes. Therefore, that's my path. My whole family has obesity problems and the issues that come along with that, that's my path.

[00:44:45.870] – Allan
But the reality of it is if you approach your life with the mindset that it's not your path, you decide your path, then you can change that trajectory. It doesn't have to follow the standard path where you're living the standard life expectancy of, you know, your family or your history. You can rewrite that second part. You can go on a different path and live longer, live better. And I like that she looks at it as a competition, as winning something, because if you go in with a losing mindset, then that's where you are. You know, it's the Ford quote, if you think you can. You're right. If you think you can't, you're also right. You lead a lot of what goes on with your life, with your mindset.

[00:45:34.140] – Ras
Absolutely. I like how she mentions you can't change your genetics, but you can change your attitude and you can change your lifestyle. It's so true.

[00:45:45.480] – Allan
Yeah, and so many things that we're facing today, you know, obesity, some cancers, heart disease, stroke, Alzheimer's, a lot of these things we're learning are lifestyle diseases. We, unfortunately, we're doing it to ourselves and we've got to fix that.

[00:46:04.960] – Ras
That's so true. She mentions about being proactive with the offense, about taking the lead and leading a healthy lifestyle, making the changes to lose weight, gets healthier, get stronger, and do what you can. I mean, you just don't have to sit there and age. You can do what you can to enjoy it and improve the quality of your living as you age.

[00:46:26.590] – Allan
Yeah, I liked that she had that offensive approach along with the defense. You don't win a game without having both. But, you know, most people don't think about the offensive part of this. And one thing that I like when I'm working with clients, and they'll invariably want to use the scale as a measurement of success. And so I'll be working with them and then they'll step on the scale. And they've gained a pound. And it's like a tragedy, you know, they want to they just basically want to quit and if you look at it from the perspective of a football player. And I don't know how much you know about football, but in general, you have four downs to get 10 yards. So you have four plays to get the ten yards that you want to get.

[00:47:10.650] – Allan
And if a team goes out there on their first down and maybe they lose three yards, you know, they ran the wrong, they ran to the left and the guys on the left on their side wanted it more than our guys did. And we lost you know, we lost three yards on that play. We don't punt the ball. We don't stop. We don't quit the game and say, well, I'm just going to stop doing this. What we do is we know we have three more downs. We learn from that play. We say, hey, let's not run that play again, you know, maybe later in the game we'll open things up. But let's not run that play right now because it's not going to work. It's not working for us the way we want it to. We've got to get positive yards.

[00:47:49.070] – Allan
So now we're looking at throwing the ball or we're looking to run to the right, or we're going to do some kind of misdirection to take care of those aggressive players over there. But we do something different because we know we have more downs in us. We know we have more opportunities. So I agree with that. We can win this. We have to think of it as a total game. You know, aging is not a thing that happens to you today and something that's happening every day. So you're in the game every day whether you want to or not. You just have to choose if you're going to continue to lose those three yards, every single play, or if you're going to make some positive yardage here and there where the game lets you. And that being offensive-minded gives you that opportunity to take advantage of things.

[00:48:31.940] – Ras
That's absolutely right. And in the world of running, we, when you're out there running miles, things happen. It always does. You feel a hot spot and a blister comes on. So you stop and tend to it. You're feeling hungry. You stop and have something to eat. The whole point is, is that you're listening to what your body is telling you and you do something about it. Again, you just don't have to wait around and see what happens next. You take control and if you encounter a problem, you learn what it takes to fix it and get after it.

[00:49:03.900] – Allan
Absolutely. All right, so anything special going on for you coming up?

[00:49:12.030] – Ras
No, just running miles. It's a cut back week for me, so I'm just taking the miles a little light this week. But next week I'll be ramping back up again and I'll have some double-digit days

[00:49:23.100] – Allan
Double digits, love it.

[00:49:24.870] – Ras
My favorite!

[00:49:26.900] – Allan
A lot of me time, a lot of me time.

[00:49:29.100] – Ras
You bet ya!

[00:49:29.440] – Allan
Getting those miles, good for you.

[00:49:30.420] – Ras
For sure. Thanks.

[00:49:32.250] – Allan
Now me, the cool thing is things are slightly opening up here in Panama, so it looks like I'm going to get a chance to come back to the States for about a month to see some family take care of a few things that I left undone in Pensacola. So we're looking at taking a trip there in October. So about a month from now, I'll be in Pensacola, where we're flying into Miami, and I'll spend a few days there.

[00:49:58.980] – Allan
Then we're going to drive up to Pensacola and we'll spend about a week there. Then we're going to drive up to Indiana, near Chicago and spend about a week there and then to Asheboro, North Carolina, which if you look at North, can I just point your finger right in the very middle of it? That's where Aspro is. I'll go there for about a week and then we'll come back down and we think we think we might have to get one of those little speed tests, you know, just to know that we're not infected before we get on the plane.

[00:50:25.680] – Allan
Right now, they're charging about two hundred fifty dollars for those COVID tests. So we have about right now the way the rules are. We have to have that within 40, 48 hours of getting on an airplane. So we'll go down into the Miami area, get that test, wait out the results. I think it's supposed to be immediate now, but we'll see. See, we have to get one that we get an answer for relatively quickly.

[00:50:48.420] – Allan
And I think they're like 250 bucks. Maybe the price will come down before then. We'll have yeah, well, we'll have the test. But yeah, we're driving all this other than we are going to fly into Miami. So we've got a couple of flights and then we'll be in Miami and then we're going to drive. So my wife and I will get a lot of car time, a lot podcast's audience.

[00:51:07.480] – Allan
That sounds awesome. Well, it is awesome. You start looking well. OK, that's a four and a half-hour drive. That's a six and a half-hour drive, but an eight-hour drive. That's twelve, which.

[00:51:16.920] – Allan
So lots of time in the car sitting. But if you're anywhere in between all those things, just reach out to me: allan@40plusfitnesspodcast.com, I'd love to hook up. We can get a coffee or have a cocktail, depending on what time of day or night it is and how much further I've got to drive. But you know, so you do reach out and you know, again, I'm around. So I do want to meet you if you're there.

[00:51:40.740] – Allan
So so do that. That sounds great. All right. Well, Rachel, you have a great week.

[00:51:47.200] – Ras
Thanks. You too.

Patreons

The following listeners have sponsored this show by pledging on our Patreon Page:

– Anne Lynch	– John Somsky	– Melissa Ball
– Barbara Costello	– Judy Murphy	– Tim Alexander
– Bill Gioftsidis	– Leigh Tanner	– Wendy Selman
– Debbie Ralston	– Margaret Bakalian

Thank you!

Another episode you may enjoy

The longevity plan with Dr. John Day

Less...

Hello and welcome to Episode 450 of the 40+ Fitness Podcast. Thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness. I'm really glad you're here and I hope that you're someone that's actually gone back and checked out the other 449 episodes we've done, which include over 275 interviews. It's kind of crazy how many people I've talked to over the years about health and fitness. And today I want to talk about something that's really, really important to me because it's a personal experience.

It's something that happened to me recently. And I'm talking to a lot of people and it's happening to them, too. And I want to give you the tools to get past this. And so I'm going to call this episode, “How to Turn Each and Every Slip Up Into Success.” And yes, even the best of us, the best personal trainers, the best fitness people out there. Every once while we make a mistake, every once in a while we slip, it just happens.

We're human and you're human, too. And so a lot's been going on in the world. And I want to kind of talk about my perspective of going through all of this with COVID, with the racial strife in the United States and obviously an upcoming election. Things are really, really crazy in the United States. And it's really hard to be on social media and do those types of things, because, quite frankly, it's just it's scary and it's frightening and it's hurtful and, you know, just all these emotions that are coming out.

I want to talk about this a little bit and give you some of my perspectives. And then after that, I want to give you some tools, some tools to help you the next time you slip. This is a process that I developed to work with my clients because like myself, many of them were struggling. And as I was finding my way out of the dark, I laid some bread crumbs to help them along the way as well. And it's been beneficial to everybody that I've talked to using this method. So I want to share it with you now.

COVID-19 hit the United States in January. I think the first case was registered up in the State of Washington around January 20th. And since then, it grew and grew and grew and obviously has grown into something much bigger, but not quite as big as they projected. So that's the good news. But the reality of it is COVID affected just about every single human being on this earth.

It's changed the way we live. It's changed the way we do almost everything we do and it's changed what we can and can't do. I'm in Panama and I can tell you Panama did not treat COVID like a joke at all. In fact, once they started getting cases in Panama and they were concerned about the medical system being able to keep up, they shut us down. And when I say shut us down, I mean, they shut down all the businesses, every single one of them, except grocery stores and pharmacies.

There was nothing else, just the pharmacy. You could go to the ATM if you needed some money and the pharmacy. And that was it. And they shut us down to a point where I was allotted two hours, two days a week to go do my shopping and that was only for necessities. I wasn't to be out there walking around, getting exercise. I was out there to shop. And so this was my Tuesday morning and Thursday morning from 7:30 – 9:30am were the only times I was allowed outside of my apartment.

Women were allotted 3 days a week. Monday, Wednesday, Friday again, all these times were based on your personal ID card. So your passport depending on whether you were a citizen or resident. Since I'm a resident, I went with my passport. So my time was set. If I was caught outside, they would you know, sometimes they're checking your ID if you're outside of those times or you're somewhere where there's obviously not a grocery store or pharmacy they would arrest you, take you in, and they were doing that for a lot of people.

They really locked us down and that went on for nearly six weeks. So they did slowly start kind of opening things up. And as I'm recording this, you know, sort of the last week of September, I mean, August I'm sorry, you know, they still we still are locked down on weekends. And that means from 7:00 pm on Friday afternoon and evening until 5:00 am Monday morning, we're not to be out and about.

So the police are patrolling. If they catch you out, they'll arrest you. We're required to wear masks. So the whole argument that a lot of people are having about masks or not to mask. They'll arrest you. So you wear a mask. So that's been Panama. We're still on a curfew, so I can't go out at night. So from 7pm to 5am, you can't be out. That's every day.

We're still in this general lockdown. We're trying to slow the spread of the disease in the hopes that a vaccine will come. And that's been my life. You know, my gym's closed down. I was locked in my apartment for four months or more, unable to go out more than a couple hours, twice a week. And quite frankly, I melted down. You know, it was a hugely stressful situation, just reading what was going on.

Even though I could focus a little bit on my clients and I could focus a little bit on my business, I wasn't able to really put my all into that because I was just really struggling with this huge trigger event in my life that scared the crap out of me when I first heard about it. And as a result, I did what most people do. I spent all my days reading articles.

And in fact, you know, because I'm a data geek. I'm an information geek. I was reading every single article I could get my hands on in my search criteria. I just basically would say COVID-19 coronavirus, but not anything that mentions President Trump. And so I removed all of that political garble that was going on because it removed all of, you know, the opinion and stuff that was out there. And it gave me the medical information, the studies, the things that were actually going on in the medical community. The discussions they were having, the treatments and the, you know, the discussions of how they were going to do you know, virus, I mean a vaccine.

I was reading up on this every single day. And the reality of that has hit me that it just really, it pushed me further down. It kept me depressed. It kept me just addled. I didn't have a solution in my own head how I was going to handle this and what it was going to mean to me, to my wife, to my family. You know, our parents are up there in ages. They're all in their 70s. And quite frankly, they're not in the condition to handle something like this.

It was just really, really devastating for me to be sitting here in Panama and think about the things I couldn't do. And even if I had gone up to the United States to be around family, I really wouldn't have been any help to them to protect them. It just would have been the same. So we decided to stay in Panama and we're stuck in our houses and our apartment.

As a result of the stress and everything that was going on, I kind of slipped. So my slip and it involved alcohol. It involved almost no movement. I did bring some equipment from the gym over to my apartment and it sat and gathered dust in the corner. The whole time, I didn't really even have any desire to work out, which was really, really strange for me. But the impact of what was going on in the world, the stress that I was feeling and just feeling incapable of doing anything about it really, really bothered me.

So the no movement, the alcohol, the eating crazy stuff, you know, here and there, the cumulative impact was huge and it was weight gain. You know, the COVID 15 is a real thing. I did my part. I gained my fifteen pounds and I felt terrible about it. But it was, you know, it was just a reaction to what was going on in my life. And it was a major slip for me health-wise. It was not something that I wanted. It was not something that I planned. Sometimes I do plan to gain some weight and enjoy myself and go have a couple of weeks of, you know, fun and crazy at an all-inclusive resort or at a football game or just on some vacation. But this was not that social media.

It was just driving me batty and, you know, as I was going through it. And then, of course, the violence and stuff that was starting to happen in the United States particularly, and all of that coming through, it was just huge. Now, with that, I did slowly start to come out of it and think about what I'm doing and why I'm doing it.

So in a sense, this was very much a wake up call for me. I was sitting around thinking, you know. Why am I so bothered by this and what is really driving my behavior? What's the lesson out of all of this? And the reality of it was a few things. One is, you know, I'm watching videos of kind of crazy violent stuff happening. And I'm you know, I'm watching a woman or a man and they're in their 50s around my age and they're getting beat up and they're not able to defend themselves, are not able to help themselves.

And I'm watching people die, not necessarily watching them die, but hearing about the deaths and realizing that they're dying. Not necessarily because they got COVID because a lot of people were getting COVID and just moving on with their lives, recovering and moving on. But there are people just that couldn't recover and they couldn't recover because they just basically weren't taking care of themselves. So, you know, the first realization that came out of this was that COVID-19 is not the Spanish flu.

You know, that we want to compare it to the last pandemic. But the reality is this is apples and oranges. We know how germs pass now. They didn't know as much back then when Spanish flu was going on. And really the only reason that we're having to deal with COVID as much as we are, because in a real sense, it wouldn't be much worse than a flu if we were all healthy. But that's the point. Our health is crap in the United States.

You know, two-thirds of people are overweight, one third are obese, pre-diabetes, diabetes is just rampant. Heart disease is the number one killer. And, you know, as I'm recording this, I was thinking, you know, people aren't taking care of themselves. And right now and like I said, as I'm recording this, you know, there have been 180,000 deaths in the United States, which is tragic. But what we don't think about is there's 480,000 tobacco-related deaths every year.

So if you count the 7 months that COVID's been around as of this point in the United States, it's killed 180,000 and 280,000 have died of tobacco-related illness. Now, I know there's an overlap there. And so what COVID is actually doing, rather, we want to admit it to ourselves or not, is it's just accelerating our death.

SPONSOR
This episode of the 40+ Fitness Podcast is sponsored by Fastic before we had refrigeration, processing and bulk transportation, we just didn't have access to food like we do today because we're opportunistic eaters. Most of us consistently eat more than we should. And our bodies don't know how to signal to us that we've had enough. I practice intermittent fasting regularly, and it's a strategy many of my clients use to get control of food and as a happy side effect, lose weight. Fastic is an app you can download on an Apple or Android smartphone. It's a pretty snazzy app with a lot of tools to help you do intermittent fasting, right. It not only lets you track your fasting, but water consumption, steps and a lot of other things.

You can also connect with a fasting buddy to help keep you even more accountable. If you have an iPhone, go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/ifastic. For an android, go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/afastic. If you're interested in learning more about intermittent fasting, or just need some help getting started. Go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/ifastic for an iPhone. For an android, go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/afastic.

Now, we talked about aging last week and a little heads up the next couple episodes are also about aging because as I was going through my moments, I was just thinking, you know, we're aging and we need to be healthy. And so how do I teach people how to age better? How do I teach them to be healthy longer? Because we don't want to go out that way. And, you know, so, you know, we have to take responsibility for our own health.

You know, I had to take responsibility for my health and my fitness. So, you know, when I see some 50-year-old guy getting pummeled or some 50-year-old woman getting pummeled, I have to think in terms of if I were in the United States walking around and got into that situation, am I the victim that they're going to be looking to mess with or am I someone who basically looks like I can take care of myself because I'm in good health and I'm reasonably fit.

It's not that you have to look like Mike Tyson to survive in this world, but the reality is they're much less likely to victimize you, to bully you, to attack you if it looks like you might be able to hurt them back. And so I don't want to throw this out there and really upset a lot of people, but, hey, if this is you, get a little upset, you know, that's OK. This was my wake up call.

If I'm going to take care of my loved ones, I've got to be there for them. I've got to be able to do the things that are necessary, you know, and it goes beyond being able to help my wife out of a wheelchair 30 years from now. It goes to the fact that if someone sees me walking with my wife, they just see me as someone to just pass on because they don't want to attack me.

If a COVID virus or something like that, something similar to this comes again, like I am generally now, I want to be healthy. I want my vitamin D to be where it's supposed to be. I want my B vitamins and zinc. I want all those things in my food so that I'm already healthy. In fact, I stepped up my supplementation because I was locked in an apartment. I've got vitamin D, I've got zinc, you know, like it's almost like a medicine cabinet kind of thing, which I normally wouldn't do, but I just didn't want to take chances.

Being locked in an apartment, limited access to the food. I mean, I have access to food, but it's the same food. So just making sure that the varieties there I've started supplementing. And so I was able to kind of turn this around and I turned it around and I started thinking, you know what I'm doing? All I'm doing is the basic thing that successful people do. The way you get success in this world is you learn from your failures and you do that by doing three things, and that's what I want to share with you.

This is my three-step plan for recovery when you slip. So pay particular attention to this one.

OK, so the first thing is to forgive yourself. And this is the most important thing if you don't really forgive yourself and I mean really like self-love deep. I made a mistake. I screwed up. I shouldn't have sat there and drank myself silly and ate myself silly and sat on my couch reading about COVID virus, things that really weren't going to impact my life or improve my life.

And I did those things for six solid weeks. I can't do that again, but I need to recognize that there were triggers, there were things that made me do that that were out of my control, and I didn't take the moment to stop myself and stay in control. So that's on me. But I have to forgive myself. So I accept responsibility and I forgive. And from that forgive. Now you're ready to move to the second step.

The second step is what did you take away from that moment? What was the learning experience of that moment? So for me, it's when I hit a really stressful period of time, I need to move. I need to move one way or another. Rather, they lock me in an apartment where they really lock me in a room or they lock me in a bathroom. I need to move and I'm going to move next time. If something like this happens and they lock us down, I'm still going to move. I'm going to keep moving as long as I possibly can because that's really helped me.

Since I got out of this, I've been walking regularly. I've been lifting regularly when they started letting me out to do other things besides shop. So I've been doing those things. And it's meant a world of difference, having that movement in my life, doing the meditations, doing the things that are going to relieve the stress, that will keep me from the actions that are detrimental to me. So I learned a lot out of this about myself.

You know, your trainer is not perfect. I'm human and I have to accept that and I have to act on that when something bad is happening, I have to recognize the symptoms and I've got to do something about it. So I've I've changed up a few things in my morning rituals. I've gone through some training. I've done some extra work on myself, mentally, physically. And that's helped me a whole lot. Moved way past where I was.

Now the third. And again, I'm not going to say this is the most important because really the forgiving is. But if you don't act on what you're supposed to do, you set that plan. You're like, OK, I'm going to meditate every morning. I'm going to go for long walks. I'm going to commune with nature. I'm going to get as much vitamin D as I can possibly get by supplementing and getting out in the sun. I'm going to do these actions to protect myself, to make myself stronger, to make sure that I'm the person my loved ones deserve. Then that's the action and that's when you have to do it. Now, what I did as a part of my action was, you know, I stepped up and said, you know, I'm going to go ahead and launch and do a round of what I call eight weeks to WOW.

And unfortunately, as you're hearing this, we've closed out on the third round, which might actually be the last time I do this in 2020. But I went through eight weeks to WOW with the first group that went through and we were all seeing great success, which was really up-lifting. And I, basically going through that program, lost 12 pounds. And then I went through my Strong, Lean Over 40 program, which, you know, I sell it as a program which is a strongly energetic program and then basically lifting part, which would be the coaching part.

And I've been doing that now for about three or four weeks. And I'm down below my pre COVID weight. So the fifteen pounds that I gained, I've lost more than that since May 1st. And I did that because I went through that three-step recovery plan. You know, the three-step plan is to forgive, to learn and plan and then act. OK, so you've got to do those three steps before you're going to get past this, because if you don't forgive, you won't recover.

If you don't set a plan, learn something and set a plan, then you won't step in the right direction. And if you don't actually act, then you're not stepping at all. So it takes all three of these in that order for you to be successful at recovering from a slip. So if you want to go from slip to success, you take those three steps. Now, I'm going to offer you a free gift.

If you go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/slip. I'm going to have a little cheat sheet. I call it the slip to success cheat sheet and it's going to kind of walk you through those three steps and give you a little bit of insight into each one and how to apply it in your life. So go ahead and go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/slip and you can download the plan, the cheat sheet and it'll be like I said, it will kind of walk you through.

So if you're finding yourself right now sitting there saying I'm a victim of the COVID 15, you're not a victim, stop being a victim, take action, forgive yourself, set a plan and take action. And this little gift, this little cheat sheet is going to help you get on that track. So you are not a victim. We are not victims. We are in control of our future. We write our own next chapter. Our next chapter hasn't happened.

Now, we have an option right now to take out the pen that we've been writing our life with, and we get to write a new story starting today, so if you're ready to do that, to get this cheat sheet and then reach out to me and let me know what I can do to help you be successful in your journey forward. So I appreciate you being on the podcast today.

The next couple of episodes are going to be about aging. They're really good conversations. I was in kind of an aging mindset as I was going through the last month. And this is what came out of it. We ended up with a theme like that. But, you know, the world is not always positive and it's really, really hard for us to keep moving forward when things just seem to be falling.

You know, at some point, Sharknado is probably going to happen in 2020 because, you know, it's been that kind of year. We kind of laugh about, you know, we're going. But there are two hurricanes coming into the Gulf of Mexico as I'm recording this. So, yeah, it's just a really, really strange year with a lot of stressors in front of us. And having a plan is going to help. Now, the core of all of this, and I want you to start this today, is I need you to start using positive self taught and using positive thinking, have a positive outlook.

I know it's hard, but you're currently healthy. You're currently in good shape, at least more in better shape than being on the other side of the grass. You're listening to this. So just recognize that you do have control in rewriting your future and you can start today. So make that conscious decision to start and then recommit.

Go back to your why and your vision. As we talked about in the Wellness GPS, if you have those two things, they're always going to be that rock, that foundation that keeps you solid and on your feet ready to move forward. OK, so when you take that recommit, you get into it, boom, I'm in. And then you go through and you go through that three-step plan. You're going to make this happen for yourself. I have no doubt whatsoever.

Patreons

The following listeners have sponsored this show by pledging on our Patreon Page:

– Anne Lynch	– John Somsky	– Melissa Ball
– Barbara Costello	– Judy Murphy	– Tim Alexander
– Bill Gioftsidis	– Leigh Tanner	– Wendy Selman
– Debbie Ralston	– Margaret Bakalian

Thank you!

Another episode you may enjoy

Nobody's Perfect

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00:03:07.080] – Allan
John, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

[00:03:10.780] – John
Thanks, Allan, great to be with you

[00:03:12.700] – Allan
Now I got your book, Innercise: The New Science to Unlock Your Brain's Hidden Power, and, you know, I've read a lot of books and I've read a lot of books about the brain and about neuroplasticity. This was probably the most practical book on neuroplasticity that I've ever read.

It was not just the theory of this is how the brain should work or should fire, this was set Innercise, exercise for your brain that actually makes this stuff happen. And, you know, you said in the book, don't do all of them at one sitting because it's too much. But I found myself as I was reading, trying to do them.

Yeah, it was exhausting when you got to the beach one, it's funny because I um, that was just a meditation I started doing for myself to fall asleep if I woke up and I was feeling anxiety and I would just imagine myself walking down a beach. And so it was just it was interesting. You started going through that. And I was watching it and reading and it was like, oh, goodness, I had to go take a nap.

I was like, so relaxing and so awesome. So, again, I really enjoyed the book. And then I went on to even go do the Brain-a-Thon, which again, was awesome. So thank you for that. I appreciate sharing that. I really appreciate you being here today.

[00:04:41.960] – John
Thank you. The book Innercise was all around when I came to the realization that I have and everybody who is with us today has a trillion dollar brain, but we weren't given the user's manual for it. And, you know, everybody knows that I could exercise to build up my cardiovascular system and to build up my lung capacity and to strengthen my muscles if I want to exercise. But what about our brain, the greatest neuro muscle and bio-computer in the whole universe?

[00:05:18.320] – John
What are some techniques that we can use to get our brain to work better and to get us to focus more, to create empowering habits, to let go of stress or anxiety or uncertainty or fears that hold us back? What about that? And for many, many years, I've been practicing the mental and emotional techniques that I laid out in Innercise and actually give people the audio, enjoyed it and have a great dialogue about it.

[00:05:49.160] – Allan
Perfect. So in the book and I think this is where it clicked for me to understand this, is that I work with a lot of clients and they're trying to lose weight and they're trying to get fit and trying to get healthy. And for some of them, it just seems so hard.

[00:06:08.340] – Allan
And, you know, they struggle and they struggle and I'm like, you know, I know you want this. I know you're committed to this, but it's not happening for you and we've got to break that down. And you use this term cohesion and dissident's kind of talk about one of those kind of things that holds us back that we're not even necessarily aware is happening. Can you talk about that?

[00:06:30.130] – John
Sure. So, listen, we all develop our habits, right? We have habits the way we think on a regular basis. We have a habitual way of feeling. We have behaviors that lead to our results. So when we understand our brain just a little bit better and we understand that every one of us is already one hundred percent disciplined to our thoughts, our emotions, our feelings and our behaviors. And so changing is hard if you don't have the right process. So whenever we're looking to change our eating patterns, when ever we're looking to change how much activity we get in the day, whenever we want to change, how much sleep we get when ever we're looking to change our own self image of ourselves, which is something we've had for 20, 30, 40, 50 years, that requires understanding.

[00:07:32.140] – John
How do I make change easier not easy, but easier. And this is where most people have an issue. It's not in the intention or the goal that's the problem. It's what happens after that that's the problem. And so when we understand that our brains all work identically, every human beings brain works identically and our brain works on a couple of principles. So let me give you a couple of these principles.

[00:08:04.570] – John
Number one is any time that our brain experiences a change, a change in our behavior, a change in our diet, a change in our exercise, our brain goes, hey, what's going on? You're using energy and our brain wants to conserve energy. So anything that is going to use up more energy the way I think or behave, our brain is going to go what's going on here? And it's going to resist. So that resistance is our brain wanting to move back into its comfort zone. Right. Just like a thermostat is meant to keep temperature in a room at a certain temperature that's set in the thermostat. Our brain wants to have you keep the same settings. You're awake, you're eating your exercise energy expenditure. That's one.

[00:08:55.320]
Number two, whenever our brain feels that there might be real or potential pain or discomfort, it says, hold on a second here. I don't want to feel any pain or discomfort. Well, guess what? Changing our diet is considered uncomfortable to our brain, starting to exercise, even though it feels good to do it, it also means we might have muscle soreness. It also means that we might have aches and pains, etc.

[00:09:23.170] – John
So our brain is trying to resist anything that's going to cause us pain or discomfort or having less than what we had before. So understanding that these are natural mechanisms of our brain, we can start saying, OK, are there some techniques that I can use to make this easier versus easy? And the answer is yeah, there's a lot of techniques that we can use to re-commit to reframe things. So first thing that I share with people who want to lose weight, first and foremost, stop thinking of what you need to do is losing weight.

[00:10:05.680] – John
As soon as our brain thinks of losing anything, it resists it. Why? We're always taught to find what we lose, find what you forget. So what if we instead said, OK, what do I really, really want? Is that weight that I want to lose or is it fat that I want to release? Right. So if we think about body weight as extra calories, extra energy, what we want to do is we want to release that energy and use it.

[00:10:34.390] – John
But that's really not what we're looking to do. You know, the reason we want to, I'm going to use a term that I don't like to use is lose weight, is not for the losing the weight. It's for how we're going to feel about ourselves. It's for the love where we're seeking. It's for the self belief about ourself that we want is for the lifestyle that we want its for the energy that we want. And so what if we instead of focused on losing weight, we focused on what's the lifestyle that I want?

[00:11:09.830] – John
What are the benefits of that lifestyle, instead of focusing on what I'm going to have to give up, what am I here to gain by doing this? Instead of focusing on a diet, why not focus on a new way of eating as a new way of being. The very fact that, you know, the word diet, the first three letters are die? OK, dieting is hard, but figuring out a meal plan, a way to eat that sustains me that I could that I could keep doing past one week or three weeks or six weeks, that's a totally different focus.

Instead of focusing on what I'm going to have to give up, what am I here to gain by doing this? Instead of focusing on a diet, why not focus on a new way of eating as a new way of being. @johnassaraf Click To Tweet [00:11:52.970] – John
Now, most people try to lose weight and they say, OK, I'm going to lose 10 pounds with 20 pounds or thirty pounds or fifty pounds or whatever the amount is, and they alter their behavior until the point of reaching their goal, and then they revert back to all of the old behaviors that got them to gain all the weight. So instead of having their brain focusing on the behaviors and the way to be for losing weight, why not say, nope, let me make a lifestyle change that will empower me or make me feel better for the rest of my life instead of for a week or two or three.

[00:12:30.530] – Allan
And so what you're basically doing is you're kind of getting cohesion between what the body wants, which is to be what the subconscious brain wants it wants to be able, wants to have adequate energy. It doesn't want the knees to hurt when you're walking up and down the stairs and losing weight as it will, we would think about that logically. The words we use is doing that. But you're using the term release, which is a very different thing than the losing.

[00:12:56.300] – John
And the other thing that we need to understand is water is weight. Muscle is weight, we don't want to lose weight, you could lose two, three, four, five, six pounds of water and weight in a week. But you're going to get it all back. You can have one dish of pasta or rice and it retains two and a half times its own weight and water and gain it all back. So what we want to do is we want to activate fat release so that we use our fat stores as energy. And that's really what we want to do.

[00:13:33.130] – John
We want to create an environment within us so that the food that we're eating gives us energy and what it is that we're doing for basic survival needs but then through hopefully a little bit of exercise, we are using fat as fuel for the energy requirements that we need. And we create initially a slight imbalance between how much we're consuming and how much we're using.

[00:13:58.340] – John
And in doing it slowly instead of fast and really focusing on fat release and sustainable weight release or weight loss, if that's what we want to call it. Now, we're looking at a totally different game and we're not looking at going on a diet which is is really detrimental to a lot of people's heads and hearts because they suffer these, or they gain these high wins and then they suffer these lows by gaining all the weight, which happens for ninety seven percent of people.

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[00:16:03.350] – Allan
Now, when you're talking about exercises, I mean Innercise excuse me, know, one of the things that you brought up there was there's lots and lots of different ways to Innercise, much like with exercise. So I could I could decide to go ahead and do an aerobics class where I can go lift weights or I can go for a run or I could go skiing or I could go hiking.

[00:16:22.220] – Allan
There's so many different ways that I could exercise to affect different things balance, mobility, strength, endurance. It's much the same way with innercise. But there's about seven key areas that you identified in the book that we can innercise to benefit ourselves. Can you talk about those?

[00:16:38.670] – John
Sure. So let's just take the, you know, the self-image side of our brain. Everybody knows that they have a self-image of themselves. And so if I was to ask you to draw yourself out or to write down what you feel you look like, would that either visual or written description match the way you want to look? And for most people who are maybe overweight, there's a mismatch. What if I said that if you, for example, went to some magazines where they had people with your type of physique that you want to have, those realistic. What if you cut out a picture of a physique that you wanted and you took your own face and you put it on top of that picture.

[00:17:35.730] – John
And what if every day you looked at that picture and you started to see yourself moving towards that over a period of time, whether it's one month, three months, six months or one year? You said this is the body that I'm going to have. This is the body that's giving me energy. This is the body and physique that's going to make me feel the way I want to, look the way I want to. What if you start to just visualize that every day?

[00:18:01.650] – John
What if you started to emotionalize what would it feel like to actually be in that body? What would happen is you would start to develop a new self-image that would override your old self image. It's almost like recoding software on a computer. Your self image is nothing more than cells in your brain of recognition of what you have seen in the mirror ten thousand times and what you have thought about a hundred thousand times.

[00:18:34.000] – John
And so when we start to use, for example, visualization, visualization is a simulation. When we start to simulate in our mind's eye on a new body, the new energy, how we will feel, the complements we might get, the things we might start seeing to ourselves about ourselves, we start to rewrite our own hidden self image and overlay a new self image around that.

[00:18:59.830] – John
And when we start using innercises, whether it's verbal analyses or emotional innercises or mental innercises to activate cells in our brain and then reinforce those cells and patterns in our brain, we know that whatever we do consciously, repetitively over time becomes an unconscious pattern. And so we can use a variety of different innercises to rescript, reshape imprint what it is that we want instead of what is.

[00:19:36.410] – Allan
Yeah, so, you know, the way I kind of look at it and you said something really important that I want to go back to is realistic, you know, don't don't sit there. I can't pull out, you know, you know, say Arnold Schwarzenegger and put my face on his body and say, you know, when he was at his prime and say, that's what I'm going to look like in a year or two, that's not realistic. But if I do find, you know, a body body style, I think that's going to fit me, and I begin to think of myself in those terms that's going to affect my subconscious, which is going to then affect my behavior. And make me start doing the things that are necessary to have that body type.

[00:20:13.650] – John
Absolutely. There's a visual that I like to share with everybody just to show them how this can work. I'm going to ask everybody who's listening right now a question. And the question is this. Can you slowly jog a marathon right now?

[00:20:32.300] – John
And I work out almost every day, and I cannot right now. Like I'm not in shape to jog a marathon 26.2 miles. Now, here's the second question for everybody who's listening, as if we agreed today that a year from now or 18 months from now or even two years from now, we're going to jog slowly and healthy and a healthy way, a marathon, 26.2 miles. And today all we did is we got from a seated position and stood up and then sat back down.

[00:21:07.640] – John
That's all we did today, maybe five times during the day. And then tomorrow we did it five times and the next day we did it five times. And we figured out what would be a really good eating plan for energy. What would be a good little movement plan for flexibility and some balance. Could we maybe in a week, if we were sedentary for the last five years, could we maybe walk in our apartment from the sofa to the kitchen? And the answer is probably yes.

[00:21:35.640] – John
And then once we did that five or 10 times, could we walk outside maybe a tenth of a mile slowly. And then could we walk two tenths of a mile, then can we walk five tenths of a mile, then can we walk one mile, if we did it in a healthy way? The answer for almost every single person is if I started off that slow, yes, I could do it.

[00:21:57.850] – John
Well, let's take it out to three months. Could we get faster, stronger, better in three months and build a foundation? Yes. Well, what about three months later? What if we hired a professional to help us get in better shape? And then we started to slowly once we release the weight, once we felt more comfortable, we started having more energy. Maybe at a certain point we needed to do a slight, very easy job. Could we do it? The answer is, of course we could.

[00:22:29.880] – John
Well, then guess what? If we could do that, could we build up the muscle and the endurance as we got stronger, as we release the weight? Could we possibly in a year or a year and a half or two years slowly jog a marathon? And the answer is yes, and how do we know that we know that because millions and millions and millions of people start off just that way.

[00:22:54.350] – John
So even though we may not see the end outcome right now and even though we don't have the knowledge or the skills or even the resources to do it, could we gain the mental and the emotional and the physical fortitude to be able to do it if we committed to it? And the answer is yes. We have all the knowledge, the skills of how to do it right now.

[00:23:19.460] – Allan
Yeah, you've just described how I trained for a Tough Mudder. I was in no shape to even consider doing a Tough Mudder. I could do a 5K obstacle course, I couldn't do a 13 mile one. And so I was I was watching the videos of the people that were completing it and they were doing it. And I was like, OK, that guy has a grip strength. That's how he's able to do what he's doing, that person stronger.

[00:23:41.990] – Allan
That person isn't carrying as much body fat. And so the visuals I had in my head was a person is doing that. That's not me today but that will be the day that I do that race and I committed by signing up for it. I wrote my check, you know, give my credit card number. I got the ticket for my daughter and I. And so the commitment was there.

[00:24:02.110] – Allan
And what that meant was each day was, OK, I've got to get my grip strength a little stronger. If it's just hanging from a pole, you know, a pull up bar, that's how I'm going to start getting my grip stronger. And then I was doing pull ups and then I was doing, so it's just a progressive thing over time. And it's those little bitty things like if you put a penny in a jar every day and then and then after two weeks, double it and put two pennies and after two weeks double it and put four pennies. After a while, you realize you basically have your retirement taken care of. It's that kind of building that you get out of all of this.

[00:24:35.320] – John
Yeah, and whenever you're looking to, you know, to change from one habit to another, from a destructive to constructive, from disempowering to empowering, there's something that I teach all my students and that is reduce it to the ridiculous. So reduce whatever it is that you need to do or want to do to the ridiculously small. Right, and so one minute a day, two minutes a day, three minutes a day, five minutes a day for 100 straight days builds the habit.

[00:25:09.270] – John
Once we have the habit, we can build the intensity and the duration. And so instead of trying to do everything in the first week or two weeks, why not focus on I'm going to develop empowering, constructive habits that I'm going to stick to instead of something that's not sustainable. And so when we're thinking about our brain. Let's understand how it works and our brain resists big changes, our brain resists anything that takes a lot of time and energy.

[00:25:44.790] – John
And so when we want to develop a habit of this is what I would like and I'd like to sustain it, let's reduce it to the ridiculously small so that I can develop the habit that I can add layers afterwards.

[00:26:03.750] – Allan
Now, one of the things you went into the book, and I think it's it's really important, is that if you don't set a goal the right way, your likelihood of accomplishing that goal goes way, way down. But you talked about a function of something called brain friendly goals. Could you go into that briefly?

[00:26:20.910] – John
Sure. So it actually piggybacks on. What I just said is there's different parts of our brain. If you think of your brain almost like an orchestra or a band, you know, there's different musicians who play different instruments. Well, there's different parts of our brain that does different things and when we can get our brains, different parts to work together in synchronicity and harmony, it works a lot better. So, for example, there's a part of our brain I called the Einstein part of the brain.

[00:26:52.320] – John
That's really good for imagination. What I would like, what it would feel like and be like and how can I achieve it. All right. There's another part of our brain which I call is the Frankenstein part of the brain that is analyzable. What can go wrong here? What if you start and you don't continue? What if you get hurt? What if you embarrass yourself? Or what if you're ashamed or ridiculed or judged because you give it your best and you fail?

[00:27:18.810] – John
So our brain, in order to make brain friendly goals, works like this. What do you want to achieve? Write that down. Why is it really important for you to achieve it? Write that down. How can you get started? OK. Write that down. When are you going to do it? Put it on your calendar. What are the tools or resources or people that you need in order to help you get that all together? That's a brain friendly goal because now I have the what, the why, the how, the who, and the when, and our brain goes, OK, are you committed to doing this or are you interested?

[00:28:02.400] – John
And this is the question of all questions I have, because when somebody says, here's what I want, I always ask them, well, are you committed to that or are you interested? And many people say to me, what's the difference? I tell them, what if your answer is going to cover stories or reasons or excuses, why you can't or why you won't if you're interested, you know, when it's time to do it, you're going to come up with a story, reason or excuse.

[00:28:26.370] – John
But if you're committed, you will overcome the story, the reason, or the excuse. If you're committed, you'll do whatever it takes. If you're committed, you will override the “I don't feel like it.”

If you're committed, you will overcome the story, the reason, or the excuse. If you're committed, you'll do whatever it takes. If you're committed, you will override the "I don't feel like it." @johnassaraf Click To Tweet [00:28:39.540] – Allan
I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest and happiest you can be? What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?

[00:28:47.220] – John
Well, number one is, what does it mean for you to be well? Right? How are you thinking? How are you feeling? What are you doing? Whose life or whose whose life is impacted other than just yours? And so whenever we think about wellness and well-being, define it for yourself. Define it for yourself. For me. Tell me, how do you define success? For me success is harmony between health, wealth, relationships, career, business, fun experiences, charity, spirituality. For me, it's that harmony. That's success. It doesn't make sense for me to have so much health, but not wealth, so much wealth, but not health. So for me, it's that harmony. So that could feel like my life is in flow.

[00:29:43.520] – Allan
OK, thank you, John. If someone wanted to learn more about you, learn more about the book Innercise: The New Science to Unlock Your Brain's Hidden Power and all the wonderful things you're doing over there with your company, where would you like for me to send them?

[00:29:56.420] – John
Thank you. I think they can hop onto Amazon to take a look at my book Innercise or my other book Having It All, which is also New York Times Bestseller (also available on Audible). They can if they want to go deeper into the brain around making more money and to financial success. They can go to brainathon123.com. I'm on Instagram. I'm on my Facebook fan page. I'm on Twitter. And then obviously our websites JohnAssaraf.com or myneurogym.com, which is my company.

[00:30:31.220] – Allan
Yeah, I did the Brain-a-Thon this weekend. I made it about three quarters through and I just a lot it was wonderful. And then I just joined your Exceptional Life Program, so I decided I'm seeing a lot of you lately, but yeah some really cool stuff. Thank you so much for being a part of Forty Plus Fitness.

[00:30:51.660] – John
Thank you my friend. Thank you so much for doing this.

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