There's no point getting all worked up
Change takes time. You need to be calm and level headed. Not emotionally charged.
Is some online influencer getting you all emotionally worked up about how your life sucks? They are just trying to sell you something. Calm down. There’s no point in getting emotional.
Your current physical situation is a reflection of how you’ve been living your life for the past year or two. It’s a lagging indicator. It’s not something you can affect right now.
Turning your life around requires a process, and the process takes time. Respect the process. It will take time for the changes you introduce into your life to manifest into the physical world.
Getting emotional is why people relapse.
Disappointment & Dispair
Let’s say you are 20kg overweight, and you saw something that triggered you to get emotional about how you’ve let yourself go, and you decided that you need to start taking action right now to turn your life around!
Great! Now, what will you do with this emotion? Go to the gym and workout for three hours? Fast for 24 hours today then fast for 16 hours every day for the next week?
Then what?
What will happen when your emotional state inevitably returns to its baseline in a few days?
What will you do when you stand on the scale and see that you are still massively overweight? When you look in the mirror and be disappointed that your gut is still sticking out?
All this emotion, and all this massive action you took this past week, and all of your hard work … and you are still fat.
Getting emotional, taking action, and then seeing that that action produced no tangible result, will convince your mind that action is futile.
Even if you “rationally” know that result will happen if you keep going, it doesn’t matter. You went through an emotional experience that convinced your subconscious mind that taking action is futile.
So the next time you see a delicious looking pizza, your rational mind might think “this will make me fatter, I should resist!”, but your subconscious mind will think “what’s the point of resisting? might as well enjoy it now”.
You are not overweight because you ate too much during Christmas. You are overweight because you have not been properly taking care of yourself for several years now. The people who are jacked did not get this way after going to the gym for three months. They’ve been going to the gym for years.
Let’s go back to the start. Let’s say you are 20kg overweight, how do you fix this? You already know the answer. You consistently follow a system of controlled eating and weight lifting. But you must also keep in mind that it will take a long time. It might take anywhere from six months to a year for your stomach to not stick out anymore.
The only realistic action you can start taking “right now” is:
Fix your self-image. Your perception of who you are and what you value.
Fix your daily habits so that they add up to producing your desired results.
Self Image
You need to have irrational self belief. Separate your mental perception from the physical reality.1
Brainwash yourself. Repeat to yourself all the time “I care about my fitness. I don’t eat junk food. I only eat nutritious food”. Find a short phrase that describes the kind of person you want to be, and repeat it to yourself as if you are already that person. “I don’t need to be eating all the time”, “I have high energy levels when I am fasting”. “I fearlessly approach potential clients with interesting offers”. “I write promotional content for my product everyday”.
These affirmations should not be about any particular result, but about mindset: what kind of person you are, and what actions you do naturally.
Repeat these to yourself endlessly throughout the day: when you are in the shower, when you are taking a walk, when you are at the gym, when you are stuck in traffic, riding the train, etc. Eventually the rest of our brain will start believing these thoughts and adjust accordingly.
Even if your conscious mind believes these affirmations are not “true” and don’t reflect who you are. It doesn’t matter. Infact, that is exactly why you should repeat these affirmations to yourself.
The actual results will take a long time to arrive, so you never evaluate yourself based on the results. The only thing you should evaluate yourself on is whether you are doing the necessarily daily work. Did you eat properly this week? Did you go to the gym 3 times this week? If yes, then you should feel good about this.
Taking the action should become its own reward, completely separate from the outcome.
You should not be “struggling” everyday to not eat junk food. You should not be “struggling” to go to the gym2.
When you are training at the gym, you don’t think to yourself “I’m suffering now, but it will be worth it!”. When you are taking action, you focus only on the action itself. You take the daily action because you do. It’s who you are. It’s what you do.
You don’t need “motivation” to pull yourself to the gym. You can easily prove this to yourself: did you need motivation to go to school everyday (even though you hated it)? Do you need motivation to go to work everyday (even though you hate it)? You just do it because not doing it is not an imagineable option. If anything, you need motivation to quit your job.
The Chain of Emergence
I think people have a tendency to underestimate the importance of mental work, or even belittle it, as if it is not real. It seems obviously more real to go do some pushups right now rather than doing “mental work”. But this view is misguided.
Your actions stem from your mind. What is it that made you get up and perform some pushups? A thought in your mind. What makes you walk up to the fridge to pull out your favorite junk food? Also a thought in your mind.
Your mind is full of patterns of thinking that it has been executing for years. Doing some pushups now will not magically erase all these patterns. They are still there, and they will inevitably get executed again, unless you do something about them.
When you pull your favorite junk food item from the fridge, you might have a fleeting thought: “Oh shit, I’m doing it again! I’m eating junk and it’s gonna make me fatter!”, but somehow that thought is not enough to stop you. Why? Because of your mental perception of who you are and what you value. Your self image is: “I love eating junk food and derive pleasure from it”. There might even be a subconscious self image of: “I’m a fat loaser, it’s natural for me to eat junk food; that’s what fat losers do”.
You can’t lose weight as long as this mental perception is there. You have to brainwash yourself into believing that you are not that type of person, and for this to work, you must separate your mental perception of who you are, from the physical reality of your current condition.
Yes, you are a fat guy, but that doesn’t matter. Your mental image of yourself should be that of a person who takes care of themselves, eats clean, and trains consistently.
This is how I think about the chain of emergence:
Self Perception → Intentions → Actions → Habits → Results
Changing your self image will change the thoughts you think by default. By telling yourself everyday a hundred times that you only enjoy healthy feed and hate junk food, eventually the rest of the neural networks inside your brain will catch on and stop thinking about junk food. You will stop buying it so it will not always be easily accessible in your home. By being both out of mind and out of sight you will find you are not consuming it as much as you were consuming it before.
The ideas you think generate the actions you take, and the actions you take become habitual when you repeat them enough time. Habits are things you do without thinking too hard about. Like: “Of course I’m going to the gym tomorrow at 8am, duh!”. If you’re still thinking “Hmm maybe I can skip the gym this week” then it has not become a habit yet, and you might still have a lot of mental work to do.
Now, I don’t actually have much to say about habit building. There is a lot of content online about the topic, and you can do your own research. It does appear though that everyone these days is recommending the “Atomic Habits” book.3 The only thing I can tell you is that you need to always be watching yourself and your habits, taking note of which habits are determental to your long term goals, and which habits are instrumental to it, and think about ways to get rid of the bad habits and acquire more good habits.
A lot of habits might appear difficult to follow at first, but this is often due to your self perception. You can easily fix this by changing your self perception.
I used to think that I was a night owl. That I hate sleeping early and that I am more productive at night. But recently I discovered (by accident) that this is not the case at all. I started sleeping early for various reasons, and I found that sleeping early and waking up early actually feels rather good. I feel more awake and energetic in the morning, and I can become more productive after a good night sleep. In fact, I came to the conclusion that if you are chronically sleep deprived, you don’t know yourself at all. You have no idea what you are capable of because the real you has never been given a chance.
So many of your beliefs about yourself are false beliefs and are self-inflicted. It’s very important to always be mindful about what you think about who you are, and whenever you catch yourself with a determinental self-perception, start working on addressing it.
If you are pedantic, you might notice that this is the opposite of what I said in the beginning about being rational and level-headed. Yes it is. Bite me.
You might have seen some famous online influencers say they train everyday even though they hate training. What is going on here?
I think these guys have the following mental self image “I’m a disciplined man who does what needs to be done regardless of how I feel about it”. So telling themselves that they hate training feeds into that self perception.
You know what they would hate even more than training? Letting a day pass by without training.
If they thought that they “love” training, then the fact they train everyday would not prove anything about their self discipline, and they would have to find something else to do everyday even despite hating to do it.
I started listening to the book after I had already written the majority of the content of this article, and was pleasantly surprised that the first part of the book echoes some of the same ideas I’m espousing here. I assure you I did not plagarize these ideas from the book. I also found myself disagreeing with parts of the book.
"Fake it till you make it" - it is surprising how much it works.