I always loved sports. So much so that my family thought something was wrong with me. On Sunday’s I was studying and analyzing the pros. Monday thru Saturday, I was trying to implement what I had learned. Imagine an 8 year old, whose entire family had no interest in sports at all, engaging in this. Bizarre I know.
This continued up into high school. I began lifting weights to get ‘bigger faster stronger’ for football. My mom, who was a vegetarian, always tried to feed me good: home grown vegetables, fruits, and even introduced flax seed oil to me at an early age. I resisted. I went off to college and finally I was free from my mom’s natural food. College diet 101! Ramen noodles, Totinos pizza, a constant supply of cookie dough, wonderbread, lunch meat, and gogurts. If it tasted good, it was going down the hatch. At this point I was still lifting weights and had aspirations to play junior college football. By the end of my first year, I had ballooned up to 229 lbs (I graduated high school at around 180). Sure I had gained some muscle and strength, but I had lost my athleticism, I had lost my vitality and energy, I had gotten very very fat and was on my way to diabetes and a host of other disease. The problem was I had developed an addiction. An addiction to sugar and junk. I had developed TERRIBLE habits. I ate for taste, not health. I knew something had to change, however, I didn’t really know what to do (eating vegetables was still utterly outside my reality for some reason).
For the next 5 years I experimented with different diets and philosophies of eating. However, I could never get over the underlying problem that sent me on a path towards self destruction: addiction. I was addicted to instant gratification. I was addicted to sugar. I was addicted to food being the solution to emotional problems. I would ‘eat right’ (what I thought was eating right) for a few days, then binge. Then the cycle would repeat. Repeat, repeat, repeat. For 5 YEARS. Over this time frame I continued to work out. I wasn’t an athlete, I was a pudgy guy who could lift weights. I didn’t have vitality and energy, I slept roughly 12 hours a night and had continuous ‘brain fog’ throughout the day.
Finally, I came to a point where I said “I’VE HAD IT…NO MORE, IT’S TIME TO TAKE CONTROL OF MY BODY FOR REAL.” There were 2 major issues I had to figure out: 1. Knowing what to do (strategy) and 2. Doing what I knew (application of strategy). I thought I knew what to do when it came to nutrition from years of glorious bodybuilding ‘wisdom’ being pumped into my brain. I thought I knew what to do when it came to training from being a certified personal trainer and avid weight lifter. However, the classic quote on insanity came into my awareness: “the definition of insanity is doing what you’ve always done and expecting different results.” I knew at this point it was time to start over. Time to go back to school with a blank slate perspective and truly figure this stuff out.
I read book after book, article after article. I was completely determined to find answers. Answers that WORKED. I didn’t want to hear advise from some bodybuilder who was injecting a host of hormones in his shoulder every day. I wanted to FEEL good and LOOK good at the same time. I wanted energy. I wanted vitality. I wanted to fix my digestion problems that had started from the ‘college diet’ and had continued to persist up to this point. I wanted to go through a day without feeling like I needed a nap. I wanted to go through the day having clear thinking by my side without having the inevitable brain fog that showed up from 2-6 pm. I wanted to shed the body fat and have a natural lean look.
Most of all I wanted to completely APPLY it. I was sick of doing things half hearted. I was tired of not following through 100 percent. I could no longer stand the mediocrity. I hated it so bad. If this is resonating with you, be glad, because you’re probably at the point I was at and I can tell you that you’ve come to the right place.
To sum it up (got a little carried away there…..lost in the moment of writing), what led me to this lifestyle was frustration and pain. The systems that I developed were a result of arduous research and study, and then personal application. The whole process started from pain.
