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Archives for November 2015
It’s Not Thanksgiving That Makes You Fat, It’s If You Act Like The Sky Is Falling
Our example lady eats fairly well balanced and healthy meals, with an eye on her portion sizes. She has treats a few times per week and doesn’t go overboard.
Here is the Thanksgiving situation:
On Thanksgiving Day, she eats five times as many calories as normal, with all of turkey and fixings and desert.
Then, on Friday, she has like three times as many calories of leftovers as she normally eats.
Saturday has like twice as many calories of leftovers as she normally eats.
Sunday, starts to feel kind of gross, and has leftovers, but about the same number of calories as normal.
On Monday, hop on the scale. The scale up is up five pounds…. What does she do?
Option #1 — The sky is falling!
She says: “Oh no! the scale is up 5 pounds! That’s it, I ruined my diet plan! I’m just going to start over in January”
Translation: “The sky is falling. I’m going to choose to interpret that as a great excuse to stop doing any work. I choose to eat whatever the f@$k I want between now an January!”
Look, there’s nothing wrong with her choosing to eat whatever she wants between now and January. She just needs to own it. Be honest that she’s choosing to eat what she wants. Enjoy it. And then, if the scale is up in January, it’s ok because she made a conscious choice, and now she owns the result.
Option #2 — The sky is falling!
She says: “Oh no! the scale is up 5 pounds! I’m a terrible person. I’m going to do no carbs, 1000 calories per day, and 6 day per week workouts until I catch back up!”
Translation: “The sky is falling. I’m going to choose to interpret that as that I’m a bad person and I did something morally wrong. I choose to do a ridiculously extreme diet that has a low chance of success.”
Look, if you’ve ever tried super low calories + no carbohydrates before, you know most people can’t maintain it. She’s setting herself up to fail — she’ll be super low energy and craving treats more than normal.
When the person brings the snowman-shaped-cookies in to work, she’s going to lose her mind and eat all the cookies.
She’ll spend all of the holidays bouncing between starving yourself and then overfeeding on extra treats. And then, when the scale is up in January, she’ll know it’s because she made a conscious choice to do something unreasonable and unsustainable, and now she’ll have to own the result.
Option #3 — The smart and disciplined choice
She says: “The scale is up 5 pounds. First, it’s probably mostly water weight. Second, fat is rented with calories, not owned — If I go back to my normal calories, the scale will return to it’s normal weight.”
Translation: “I know exactly what’s going on here, and I’m going to respond to it like an intelligent adult. I’m going to choose not to add any meaning to the scale — I ate more than normal, and it’s up. I choose to just return to what I normally eat, and I know everything else will return to normal as well.”
For lady #3, she goes back to her normal food and workouts. The scale drops a pound about every other day. By the end of the week, she’s back to her normal scale weight.
When people bring in holiday themed cookies and cupcakes to work, she doesn’t go crazy on them because she’s eating her normal amount of food, and doesn’t feel unusually tempted. It does take some willpower, but since she isn’t starving, it’s manageable.
She saves her treats for a few holiday parties she picked out ahead of time, or to have a serving of a special desert she makes for her kids. All in all, she has about the same number of treats she normally has over the holiday season, and it turns out that eating extra at Thanksgiving didn’t have any impact on her leanness or fitness at all.
Don’t Be Chicken Little
In all three cases, the scale was up five pounds. The only difference was what our example lady chose to do about it.
There were two different ways to overreact:
- Eat a bunch of crap for the rest of 2015
- Attempt to starve herself and fail.
Both were versions of yelling “The sky is falling!” when, really, there’s nothing all that crazy going on. It’s a choice to overreact to the circumstances. And that choice to overreact actually has far bigger consequences than the original circumstance itself.
On the flip-side, there was the choice to be smart and disciplined.
The choice to be smart and disciplined usually looks a lot like doing simple, basic actions that you already know:
- Working out 2-3 times per week
- Shopping for obviously healthy food
- Cooking meals ahead of time
- Planning meals starting with protein and vegetables, then adding obviously healthy carbohydrates and fats.
- Managing the number of treats in a week
You Get To Choose
You always get to choose how you interpret your results, and the actions you are going to take in the future.
An easy way to look at it is like this:
What would my best version of myself do?
Whats funny is, our best version of ourselves usually takes smart and disciplined action. It’s usually a fairly conservative response to a situation: It’s just: “What’s the most obviously healthy thing to do right now?”
The more often you practice being your best version of yourself, the better you get at it.
Have a great Thanksgiving!
by Josh Hillis
For Trainers: Review of Cervical Thoracic DVD
Just got to watch Sue Falsone‘s awesome DVD on the Cervical-Thoracic Junction.
For non-fitness professional peeps reading this, your thoracic spine is your upper back. Your cervical spine is your neck. When things don’t move well at the cervical-thoracic-junction, you get poor shoulder mobility. That means you suck at overhead pressing and handstands and anything where your arms need to go overhead.
Most people spend waaaaaaay too much time stretching their shoulders, and not nearly enough time mobilizing their upper back.
For Trainers:
If you have any clients that are tight through the upper back or have trouble with posture — this DVD has some brilliant, and actually really simple correctives for posture and mobility.
Especially loved the breathing work for mobility or stability, and different body positions for emphasizing different things and/or different levels.
I had seen rainbow breathing before, but I hadn’t seen how to regress it for clients who don’t have the mobility yet to even start. Likewise, I loved how to use breathing in flexion, extension, or side-bending, to emphasize mobility in different places.
Also loved wall biofeedback stuff for posture (that was done in a really smart, new way, that I hadn’t seen before).
If you’ve kicked around PT or corrective exercise world in the last couple years, you’ll have seen a couple of these things before. Mostly it was just done in a way that was simpler (read: smarter and clearer) to teach and for the client to do correctly. Combined with the new stuff, and the way it all stacked together in layers made a really cool system. Also loved the final level of putting it all together in a couple yoga postures.
As trainers and kettlebell instructors, smarter ways to get better quality movement out of the c-t junction is *always* a thing. Totally loved how smart, simple, and systematic this DVD is.
For Clients:
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the way this is presented is going to be a hard watch for someone who doesn’t have a solid background in corrective exercise or physical therapy.
I’m going to recommend this as a trainer-level resource. I think even some new trainers might have trouble keeping up.
This is Every Day Stuff
As a trainer, this is a DVD full of drills that I’m going to be using with clients every day. This isn’t fringe or exotic mobility stuff. This is the legit, every day correctives you are probably going to want to have all of your clients using.
Just the breathing stuff alone is worth the price of admission. Highly recommended.
—By Josh Hillis
FULL DISCLOSURE: I got this DVD for free to review. That being said, I get sent TONS of stuff to review, and most of it I wouldn’t put my reputation on. This DVD I feel like is the kind of thing that would really make a difference for trainers who have clients with cervical-thoracic mobility or posture issues.
Enjoy Holiday Free Days
Just don’t turn them into free months.
Official Halloween Candy Plan:
- Let the kids eat it however they want
- Then go back to their normal eating plan
You actually don’t have to manage things that happen once per year.
Manage the every day in between.
Just my perspective, from working with adult clients for so many years. The dumbest thing ever is to waste energy managing one-off events. They just don’t matter. At all.
Edit: Have already gotten hate mail LOL
This post was mostly a reaction to seeing 12 posts by trainers about “how to manage your kids Halloween Candy eating today!”
And most of it struck me as “here’s how to make your kid afraid of sugar” kinds of stuff.
Vs. “lets teach your kids about moderation and enjoying holidays” or “lets focus on the day to day and not the once in a while”
So this isn’t an actual recommendation for *your kids*, of course you know better than I do.
This is more for all of the trainers who are trying to give their clients completely bizarre expectations about holidays and food.
And most of it struck me as “here’s how to make your kid afraid of sugar” kinds of stuff.
Vs. “lets teach your kids about moderation and enjoying holidays” or “lets focus on the day to day and not the once in a while”
So this isn’t an actual recommendation for *your kids*, of course you know better than I do.
This is more for all of the trainers who are trying to give their clients completely bizarre expectations about holidays and food.
Let me restate the last part again — Manage the every day stuff.
Not the once per year stuff.