How To Turn Your Fitness Aspirations Into Results
I hear it again and again from new people who find my coaching practice and get curious about working with me. They want to be healthier, build muscle, lose fat, and be more consistent. “I want to be and look like you.”
It’s flattering, for sure. Little do they know that I’ve only been this version of myself for less than a decade, and it remains a work in progress. My biggest dream as a coach is to give them the tools and help them find their path in a way that I never had from anyone, and my worst dread is for them not to provide me with enough time to do so.
Perhaps we fall into the cliché of sounding like a broken record in the health and fitness industry when we talk about the threat of instant gratification and the crucial role of discipline, action, and consistency. We make it sound like it’s all about willpower and an exceptional ability to create good habits.
Well, I’m here to tell you that it’s much more nuanced than that.
The truth is that we all have a unique set of traits, history, experiences, genes, and idiosyncrasies that determine how likely we are to adopt a behavior. A white male born in a middle-class nuclear family in an individualistic culture, with safe and predictable relationships, access to nutritious food, average hormone and neurotransmitter signaling, and exposure to athletic activities, will not have the same experience as a black or brown woman born in a culture heavily influenced by communal sharing of food, with a genetic tendency to underperceive satiety signals, living in a high-stress environment, and a deeply-rooted belief that her self-worth is directly correlated to how thin or fat she is.
Each individual will also have lived experiences that make them more or less likely to be averse to change or seek comfort over what we deem to be discipline and doing the right thing. Their environment might also create obstacles to adopting good habits and facilitate the practice of bad ones.
Are some people doomed, then? Am I implying that the man in the example above will be successful and the woman will not? Not necessarily. My point is simply that some people will struggle more than others for reasons beyond their control. I often feel that we paint a picture of success that borders on fantasy, and the less empathy we, as health and fitness professionals, have for each of our unique patient or client histories, the less likely we are to impact their lives positively.
So, how do we transition from aspiration to results if so many factors are at play, many of which we don’t fully understand yet?
Fortunately, there’s plenty that we do understand, and that’s been tried and tested. Without any intention to gloat, and more so with the intent to draw familiarity, I will give my own example throughout these points.
Figure out who you want to be. James Clear discusses this beautifully in his book Atomic Habits. I went from being a sedentary young woman to a person who ran 10Ks and lifted more than her body weight at the gym by clearly defining who I wanted to become. When I started, I desired to be a runner. I had a brand new baby, and perhaps a potent hormonal cocktail finally propelled into action what for years lay dormant as a mere aspiration from watching people in my life be athletes; I will never know. But I became dead set on being a mom who ran and exercised for her baby to grow up watching. That vision has grown, evolved, and branched out but began as a seedling. It wasn’t just nice to think about, I wanted to be it.
Change the narrative of yourself. I grew up telling myself I was terrible at many things and that there were many things I was and wasn’t. I was lazy, I was bad at math, I was mediocre, I sucked at sports, I was a glutton, I was in bad shape. People in my environment also expressed ideas that reinforced my beliefs. “Mexicans are lazy, mediocre people. They never win in any sport.” My mom often referred to herself as a glutton. TV reminded me my body was far from ideal. So, when I dreamed of being that active, health-conscious mother and woman, it felt stupid. How can I become this if every time I look at myself in the mirror, that is not who I see?
Adjust the scale of your expectations. Accept that it will be a long process. The sooner you come to terms with this fact, the better. You’re not here to change your whole history in six or eight weeks, just as you’d raise an eyebrow if someone got rich overnight. You can’t become a different person like you would cram a year’s worth of work into one night for a final school project. Even when you did that at school, your teacher could probably tell and give you a D at best.
Take small, easy steps. A foolproof way to burn out is to go all in immediately, and as you run out of energy and momentum, you crash and resort back to the old habits. Instead of willing yourself to run three miles five times a week, run/walk one mile three times a week. If a task starts to become so daunting it gives you anxiety to even think about it, you will begin to rationalize why you shouldn’t do it. But if you start small, once you’re in action, you will be much more likely to push yourself as you realize getting started wasn’t nearly as bad and painful as you thought it would.
Shield yourself from the disappointment of failing. Failing is a natural part of change and will be part of every step of the process. If you keep getting shocked without warning, you will be paralyzed. If you expect the shock, it will still hurt, but you will learn what to avoid and prepare for the next time. Know you will fail at one point, and it’s not that big of a deal. Imagine walking across an open field in the middle of a forest with enemies hiding behind the trees. Your goal is to reach the other side of the forest. You are carrying a big, wooden shield, which slows you down. It’s heavy, but if you drop it, an arrow will hit you and likely end your journey. You’re scared shitless, but the shield protects you. You get hit by multiple arrows, and your heart races each time you do, but you’re safe, so you keep going. You keep trying to make it across, switch your angle, learn to dodge, maybe take a few steps back, and stop to catch your breath, but eventually, you make it.
Understand your shortcomings and challenges. Awareness and deprecation are two very different things. The former lets us know our starting point and helps us create a strategy, while the latter victimizes and stops us from taking action. If a person is suffering from depression, for example, telling them to get over it, stop being so sad and lazy, and go for a run because it’s healthy for the mind will be ineffective and counterproductive. Encouraging that person to understand their ailment and provide the tools and information so they can seek help has much better odds of having a positive effect. If someone has always noticed that they couldn’t stop thinking about food and have struggled with portion control, and we gaslight them and tell them they need to be more disciplined while ignoring a potential biological trait working against them, they will get stuck in an endless cycle of weight loss and weight regain.
If we don’t know what we need to work on, we cannot address and improve it. But once we have that knowledge, we shouldn’t use it as a crutch to justify our lack of progress. As I said earlier, the narrative matters. I, for example, tend to coddle myself when I’m about to face something challenging, and I seek ways out of fulfilling the commitment. It probably stems from my childhood, when my parents would pull me out of any activity that I didn’t like or was too intense for my sedentary muscles. Paired with my social anxiety, which I’m willing to bet is half inherited and half nurtured, it makes participating in sports a nightmare. It made showing up to my first run club sessions one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.
But I am also a perseverant person who rises to a challenge and doesn’t dwell at the bottom for too long. That’s my narrative. So once I became aware of my limitations and put all of the points above into practice, I could grow out of it one day at a time. It’s not gone, but I’ve put in enough effort and given myself plenty of time to learn how to improve that behavior.
Change your environment as much as you can. I feel like a bit of a privileged hypocrite when writing this point because I know some environments are impossible to get out of by choice, especially those that have to do with war, poverty, abuse, and disease. But I might as well highlight to you that if you also live in privileged conditions like mine, in which you don’t have to worry about your next meal or your safety, there are things about your environment that you can change. You can venture out and try a hobby that involves walking with a group instead of drinking alcohol. Look for ways to make connections in the circles that could get you closer to making health-based decisions, like an urban gardening project or a local run club. Perhaps you don’t live in an area with as much access to fresh food as others, but you can try more canned legumes and vegetables. Be explicit to your friends and family about the new things you are trying to prioritize. Maybe you’ll inspire them to do so, too.
Never stop learning. I’ve tried most diet fads out there. There was a time when I did Paleo, spent all my money at Whole Foods buying nothing but organic stuff and feeling on a moral pedestal for it, and believed that artificial sweeteners probably caused cancer. There were times I thought I knew a lot. Most of us have been at the peak of delusion for too long and not enough at the valley of despair. I've come a long way thanks to my insatiable thirst for learning. I don’t attach myself too firmly to any ideology should it ever be confronted by better evidence, nor should anyone. Knowledge is compounded by many minds who came before us and many more that have yet to follow.
We are all born into this world with a specific hand dealt to us. If you’ve made it this far into the article, I’m betting there are certain traits and experiences within you that have brought you here. There are probably things that you want to improve, and you’ve made it into the right circles to access this type of information. Maybe it was just a coincidence. Who knows. But now that you know you have a hand to play, play it long, expect to lose, keep learning, one game at a time, and don’t stop trying.
