Author: Kevin Geary

Categories
Sweat

What Will the Last 10 Pounds Cost You?

I’m going to be honest with you. I’ve never met someone who successfully lost the last 10 pounds and then told me their life was different because of it.

That’s the big fairy tale. There’s this idea that losing weight changes you in some way other than the obvious physical change. People are tricked into thinking that emotional weight disappears when physical weight disappears. That stress evaporates. That fat cells are replaced by happiness cells.

That’s not how it works. Of all the factors that impact happiness, changing your physical body is one of the least influential. In fact, making that a goal is often detrimental to happiness. There’s an enormous cost to success in that paradigm. Time. Attention. Sacrifice. Obsession.

The reason weight loss slows down as you approach that “last 10 pounds” area is because your weight is normalizing and you’re very close to your body fat set point. This is a body fat percentage that your body is biologically programmed to defend. In other words, it’s not really supposed to go lower than that.

If you want to go lower you have to force it. That’s not something I help people do because it’s antithetical to having a body AND LIFE you love. If you insist on pushing, you can easily end up with a body you love and a life you hate.

Happiness can’t be achieved that way. It can’t be achieved through weight loss at all. It’s achieved through other relevant factors, some of which I talked about in 8 Critical Vitamins You Can’t Afford to Be Deficient In.

If you’re still not convinced, here’s some additional insights into what losing the last 10 pounds can cost you:

– It will require cutting calories when the body doesn’t need to cut calories. This is a huge stressor on the body and will eventually degrade your health.

– It will take away from what you’re able to invest in your spouse, kids, and family. You’re going to have to commit to a large amount of exercise, a no-frills diet, and an unhealthy level of obsession.

– Instead of doing things you love, you’ll have to do things according to a very specific plan. There will be very little spontaneity in your life.

– It depletes your margin—the extra room in your life that keeps you from falling off the edge of the stress cliff. Life without margin is an unhappy life.

– It will affect your social life. You will lose friends. You will lose opportunities to connect. You will have a hard time nurturing relationships.

– You won’t be able to relax. All the work required to lose the last 10 pounds is required to maintain that result. You’ll be stuck in an endless cycle and your worth will be tied up in your weight and the ability to maintain your new persona.

If you change your perspective and let go of this arbitrary goal, you can be happy now. That’s what I want for you and what I hope you want for yourself. Stop obsessing over weight and start focusing on nourishment, health, energy, vibrance, mood, and love.

By changing your perspective, you can stop worrying about the last 10 pounds of physical weight and focus on losing the last 10 pounds of emotional weight. You can dramatically change your relationship with food, body, and self. That’s a mission to be proud of. And that is how you arrive at a place of true happiness.

Categories
Nosh Nutrition x Advice

Use This Powerful Eating Insight to Your Advantage Today

Do you struggle with consistency in healthy eating? Do you have a hard time aligning your behavior with your good intentions long-term?
I want to share a powerful insight with you. It’s a statement that I repeat often because it’s a statement that can open your eyes to why you struggle.
“Why you eat determines what you eat.”
On the surface it seems very simple, but it holds the key to unlocking so much about the food choices you make.
Manufacturers design processed, hyper-palatable foods to hijack your brain chemistry on purpose. They create the perfect combination of sugar, salt, and fat to light up the reward and coping centers of your brain, knowing that you will continue to reach for these foods over and over again.
This is why committing to real food is a critical step in your journey to success. Real food doesn’t hijack your brain chemistry and send your hormones flying in all different directions. In fact, it does the opposite. This makes real food a very ineffective coping mechanism.
Here’s where the psychology of all this comes into play. If your life is full of stress and disorder and you don’t have a healthy, productive way of handling those stressors, your brain will beg for a coping mechanism to protect itself. Processed, hyper-palatable food is a fast, cheap, and easy coping tool.
On the flip side, if you’re in a great place in life mentally and emotionally and you’ve done significant work to mitigate stress, increase margin, and arm yourself with tools to handle the rest of the stress in a healthy way, you will not need the coping ability of processed, hyper-palatable foods.
Why you eat determines what you eat. If you’re eating to cope, you will choose the coping foods: processed, hyper-palatable garbage. If you’re eating to nourish your body and continue your snowball of success, you will choose real, whole foods. Your brain doesn’t seek out real food when you’re in a high stress, disordered state. It seeks out the food that will promote the release of feel-good neurotransmitters.
To complicate this further, I want you to notice that environments that lead to a high stress state are also where processed, hyper-palatable foods are found in abundance, e.g. the workplace.
So what’s the takeaway?
If you want to change your eating patterns, stop trying to consciously change your eating patterns. Instead, work to eliminate stress triggers and work to acquire the psychological tools to respond to stress in a healthy, productive way.
This is what I mean when I talk about changing your relationship with food. What you’re left with is a state of mind that is nourishment-focused rather than drug-focused. A state of mind that is not susceptible to being manipulated by food manufacturers. A state of mind that is almost effortlessly consistent.

Categories
Wellbeing

Channel Your Inner Rebel To Supercharge Your Success

You have an inner rebel.

Everyone does. It’s the part of you that puts up a fight every time you try to cut calories, do insane amounts of exercise, and make superficial New Year’s resolutions.

It’s a big player in why you’ve failed many times in the past. But that doesn’t make it a bad thing! In fact, your inner rebel is your biggest asset…if you allow it to be.

See, your inner rebel aims to protect you from absurdity.

Doing Weight Watchers-style programs, forcing yourself to do insane amounts of exercise, demonizing sugar, relying on willpower, and adopting all of the other superficial dieting strategies is an absurd way to live. And your inner rebel knows that.

By the way, your inner rebel can’t be defeated. The more you suppress it, the louder its temper tantrums become. Success depends on channeling your inner rebel by listening to what it’s telling you and allowing it to act on your behalf.

Right now, there’s a good chance you’re trying to defeat your inner rebel on two fronts…

1. You’re going to war with your body in terms of food and lifestyle. This pisses your inner rebel off.

2. Whenever you have an opportunity to make authentic changes, you can’t get comfortable with going against the grain. This is a fear-based suppression of your inner rebel.

What would happen if you flipped this script?

What would happen if you stopped going to war with yourself and adopted an authentic approach to health and wellness?

I’ll tell you: Your inner rebel would stop going to war with you.

What would happen if you allowed your inner rebel to go to war with the mainstream bullshit going on around you? If you allowed it to wholly reject our processed food supply, the obsessive dieting strategies, perfectionism, the rampant search for magic pills, and the obsession with unrealistic body image?

I’ll tell you: Your inner rebel would empower you with self-confidence in a way that you’ve never experienced before. And it would free you from the prison of people-pleasing.

Do you feel uncomfortable traveling in the opposite direction of the herd? Do you feel like you’re stepping on toes when you tell people that you prefer real food? Do you find yourself jumping from diet to diet with everyone else, tuning in to Dr. Oz, and trying to find that (nonexistent) “missing link” to getting a body and life you love?

Do you feel out of step because of your lifestyle choices? Do you feel self-conscious? Do you feel lonely in your health journey?

These are all signs that you’re allowing fear to suppress your inner rebel when you should be allowing your inner rebel to charge forward.

The true rebel doesn’t care what others think. If the rebel has to be alone, the rebel will be alone. If the rebel is attacked, the rebel will stand up taller. The rebel does this because the rebel is concerned about doing what’s right and couldn’t care less about doing what’s popular.

The rebel will do other things that you’ll find highly beneficial. It will help you recruit other rebels. It will inspire others around you who are desperate for authenticity. It will strengthen your relationships. It will give you a sense of inner peace even in times of perceived chaos.

Your ability to channel your inner rebel will make or break your success because the mainstream is a lost cause. If you want to win, you must go against the grain. It’s true with nutrition, with parenting, with finances, with relationships…even with the type of shoes you wear.

If you can’t channel your inner rebel and allow it to fight shoulder to shoulder with you, the herd will swallow you whole.

You’ve seen this. You know people who are slogging through life on autopilot. They do everything the mainstream does and never diverge in any meaningful way. Don’t be that person!

Live your life! Your life. Authentically. Regardless of what everyone else is doing. And the only way to do that is to channel your inner rebel.