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The beginner's guide to avoiding fitness BS
Posted on Jan 14, 2020
If you’re just dipping your toe into fitness, you might not know where to start. I didn’t.
New things are unfamiliar. Usually, fitness beginners are drawn towards mainstream health fads. This makes sense, if you’re new to fitness this most likely will be the only stuff you’re exposed to. Keto, Detoxes, Intermittent Fasting, and whatever else is trending right now.
I want to give you a better option than following fads, because the mainstream gets pretty much everything wrong about fitness.
The last thing I want is for your first foray into fitness to end in frustration and discouragement, whi...
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The holidays, food, and fat loss: It's all about your intentions
Posted in Fat Loss, Diet, Nutrition on Dec 17, 2019
Most people gain weight during the holidays. Then they furiously diet and exercise right after New Year’s.
Usually these New Year’s Resolution efforts fizzle out in a few weeks, and people are left with the pounds they gained over Christmas. This means they gain a few pounds every year. Overtime the weight adds up.
And as you get older this weight gets harder and harder to lose. Not impossible, just more difficult. Because you're getting farther and farther from that awesome teenage metabolism. Plus, people tend to get more sedentary as they get older. This is just how things tend to go in the...
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What you need to know about every popular diet
Posted on Nov 04, 2019
Trying to lose weight is overwhelming.
Between feeling uncomfortable in your own skin, not being sure if your hard work will actually amount to anything, and the insane amount of viewpoints on nutrition, it’s easy to feel powerless and unsure that anything will work. Especially if you’ve tried to lose weight before.
And if you’re not bought into your strategy you won’t be fully committed. So in a way, it’s pretty helpful for subscribers of any given diet cult to tune out science in favor of their own dietary biases. Because that conviction means they have the necessary confidence that what the...
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The best way to deal with stress no one told you about
Posted on Oct 10, 2019
I’ve been dealt a hand with a lot of brutal commutes for some reason. The worst instance of this was probably when I lived in Guiyang, China (pictured below).
I’d be literally shoved into a bus well beyond capacity for a minimum hour and a half each way. There was no room to breathe -- especially as people refused to open the windows even when it was nauseatingly stuffy. People would have to fight and barrel their way through the mass of people so they didn’t miss their stop. It was basically like being in a mosh pit on wheels full of hyper aggressive old women for 3 hours a day.
As you can i...
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Why do you have unhealthy habits?
Posted on Oct 02, 2019
Every bad habit you have right now served a purpose at some point.
That habit formed to try and solve some problem of yours. Maybe that habit was a coping mechanism. Maybe the problem it solved no longer exists, but the habit still persists. And sure, maybe that habit ended up creating more problems than it solved. But it’s important to recognize that all of your behaviors served some function at some point.
Because I’ve noticed people are really hard on themselves about their bad habits. If you’ve ever slipped up on a diet and felt like a complete failure, you know what I’m talking about. In ...
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Why we only use calorie counting as a last resort
Posted on Sep 26, 2019
I can be pretty lazy. Or efficient. Depends on your perspective I guess. I just don’t see the point in making things any harder than they have to be.
So when it comes to helping my online clients improve their nutrition habits, we tend to use calorie counting as a last resort.
Here’s why.
If you focus on improving the quality of your foods, you’ll probably start losing weight and feeling healthier without having to implement the royal pain in the ass that is calorie counting.
Whole foods like fruits, veggies, fish, meat etc. have high fullness to calorie ratios. Meaning you can eat to fullness...
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How to escape the comparison trap for better results
Posted on Sep 15, 2019
Some people get lucky when it comes to their weight.
Yes, genetics do play some role in this. For instance, if you’re tall and narrowly built putting on weight, muscle or fat, won’t be that noticeable (raises hand).
But I think the more important thing here is your environment and life experiences leading up to this point. Some people just catch lucky breaks in the life department that end up making it easier to stay lean.
For example, some people grew up with easy access to healthy foods and their parents fostered a healthy relationship with food. Some people found they were naturally good at...
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How to get your nutrition under control
Posted on Jul 25, 2019
Do you ever feel like you have zero control over what you eat? Like no matter how hard you try, or what you do, that you just don’t have the discipline to eat better?
You’re not alone.
Changing your nutrition habits is hard. Like, reeeeeeallly hard.
It’s not really something you can muscle your way through. Well, you can in some cases. But more often than not, this isn’t the best approach. And if you’ve tried to willpower your way to healthier nutrition habits in the past only to run face first into a wall and rebound back to square one, then I’d say this sort of strategy doesn’t work for you....
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Exercise is not punishment. How to be logical about fitness
Posted on Jul 17, 2019
Math is supposed to be cold, objective, and emotionless. But when it comes to food and calories math gets mutated into some weird moral crusade.
High calorie foods are “bad”. And if you eat too many calories you feel like you need to redeem yourself of your dietary sins by working out more.
While, on the surface, this seems like the logical thing to do, it’s not. At first glance, it makes sense. If you eat 500 calories extra, then you can work off those 500 calories through exercise. Problem solved!
Now, there’s a few issues with this. First off, it’s way easier and quicker to eat 500 calories...
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4 reasons your fat loss has stalled
Posted on Jul 10, 2019
It’s suuuuuper frustrating and discouraging when you feel like you’re doing everything right, yet it seems like nothing is working. I get it.
Now, I obviously don’t know what specifically is holding you back. But I do know that there are some kinda sneaky things that commonly sabotage people’s nutrition.
1. Food logging
First one is inaccurate, or lack of, food tracking. Basically humans are really bad at recording things. Like, reeeeeeaaallly bad. Studies have shown that people underestimate how many calories they eat by about 50%.
50%! That’s huge!
So first thing to do if you really don’t kn...