Getting ZZZZZs

I always feel a little weird talking about sleep. It seems like a boring topic to me. When I tell people to make sure they sleep well, I feel like I’m that parent standing over their kid telling them to eat their veggies. Yet even though we all know we should be sleeping well, very few people actually are.

This is a big problem. Most people are focused on the 80% of the details that only get them 20% of their results. They focus on tips and tricks and all those little sexy strategies that get you excited to take action and do something different. Because surely your struggles couldn’t be something as simple as sleep issues.

That’s where most people are wrong. If I had to rank all the things I talk about in this book from least impactful to your Ideal Body journey to most impactful, sleep would be rated the highest. It is the single greatest fundamental influencer of your progress, yet is the single greatest neglected aspect of most people’s journey. Health basics aren’t sexy. But then again, neither are the side effects of not doing them.

Too many people are focused on micromanaging carbs, calories, or protein, when they aren’t even getting a consistent 8 hours of sleep each night. That’s putting the cart before the horse. It’s trying to put the icing on a cake before you’ve even baked it.

Lack of optimal sleep handicaps your efforts. Everything you do ends up feeling like you have a ball and chain tied to your ankle. Does it prevent you from taking action? In most cases it probably doesn’t. But it does make everything harder – adding unnecessary resistance to implementing optimum thoughts and behaviors.

Sleep is a prime period of recovery for us. It puts us into the necessary state to recover both physically and mentally. It rebuilds muscles and other tissues. It tops up willpower stores for the day ahead. And it keeps beneficial stress from becoming chronic.

Lack of sleep influences your eating choices. When you’re sleep deprived you are more likely to reach for convenience foods that are more calorically dense. You tend to snack more. You have a harder time finding the energy, and thus the motivation to exercise. You prevent your willpower from being fully refreshed, which means you’re running closer to empty all throughout your day. You become less emotionally resilient, which influences your ability to cope with emotional discomfort, which leads to things like emotional eating, decision fatigue, and a general sense of just wanting to go back to your old ways that require less mental and physical demands.

And here’s the thing – when I’m talking about lack of sleep or being sleep deprived, I’m not just talking about the quantity of your sleep each night. I’m talking about the quality of that sleep too. Because anything less than optimal adds unwanted resistance. You’d be surprised just how much easier your health and fitness journey becomes, let alone your life, when you prioritize the rejuvenation and recovery aspects of sleep.

So how much do you need? Well, studies show anywhere from 7-9 hours per night is optimal. Both less and more than that tend to be correlated to negative side effects. However, these numbers are very individual. Just because you’re in that range it doesn’t mean that’s what’s optimal for you.

So how do you tell how much sleep you really need? I like to use the alarm clock test. If you’re waking up to an alarm, it’s unlikely you’re getting enough sleep. That should be obvious. You are interrupting a sleep cycle and jarring yourself awake. Anyone who has ever woken up naturally knows how much better and fresher they feel as a result.

I personally need about 8.25h of sleep each night. So I’m shutting things down the night before to give me enough time to be asleep by 9:45pm since I wake up at 6am. When I get to bed on time, I tend to wake up naturally sometime before my alarm – anywhere from 5-20 minutes before it. And when that happens, I just get up. I don’t need to go back to bed, because I feel fully refreshed and ready to tackle my day.

This is the true definition of sleeping in. Sleeping in is less about the time you wake up, and more about how you feel when you do wake up. And this is influenced by how consistent your sleep schedule is and how long you sleep.

Sure… there’s the odd day here or there where I get to bed later than that and I have to wake up to a jarring alarm with less than optimal sleep, but that is the exception to the norm. Most people have that backwards and are getting less than optimal sleep 90% of the time with maybe a day or two on the weekend when they sleep in.

The sleeping in that’s currently happening on the weekends, by the way, likely isn’t an accurate representation of the real sleep you need. It tends to be exaggerated due to the sleep debt that accumulates throughout the week. As you start to establish a consistent sleep schedule, going to bed and waking at similar times each day, you’ll get a much better idea of how much sleep you really need.

It’s time to start bringing that refreshed feeling of sleeping in to every single one of your days. The most productive days start, not when you wake up, but when you go to bed the night before. So make sure you are getting off on the right foot. Achieving your goals is so much easier when you aren’t fighting against the wind.

Managing Stress

Stress is not a bad thing. In fact, stress is a very good thing to experience. It’s the very thing that allows us to grow both physically and mentally/emotionally. Stress only becomes a problem when you don’t allow yourself to recover from it, which then leaves stress unchecked and in a chronic state.

There are both physical and mental stressors. And each can be created intentionally and unintentionally.

For example, we’ve all experienced stress from work or life. This is what you’d call unintentional mental stress. It is the result of you being in situations that create emotional discomfort. You can call it adversity, but most would just call it exhaustion, frustration, annoyance, or anger at your life situation. Regardless, if you allow yourself to recover from these stressors, you become more emotionally resilient to the same stressors over time. When you don’t allow yourself to recover from it, it becomes chronic stress, and that can lead to all kinds of consequences – health issues, negative life experience, the people around you getting the residual side effects of your stress, low energy, and so forth.

But this mental stress can also be intentional. This is what a lot of personal development is, and something you’ll be experiencing a lot as you heal your relationships with food, body, exercise, and mind. Intentional mental stress is better known as pushing your comfort zone. You intentionally put yourself into situations that create emotional discomfort in an effort to grow as a person. Maybe you hate public speaking but you do it anyways. Or maybe you have a difficult conversation with a co-worker, family member, or friend over boundaries. Whatever the situation, by pushing your comfort zone, it expands. And after some short-term discomfort, your life as a whole becomes easier and more fulfilling.

Physical stress can also be experienced both intentionally and unintentionally. Intentional physical stress is better known as exercise. That’s right, exercise stresses the body. It’s the stimulus that forces your body to adapt. Every time you run your body adapts and gets faster. Every time you lift weights your body adapts and gets stronger.

But if you leave this intentional physical stress unchecked, it can become chronic, also known as overtraining, or more accurately known as under-recovering. When this stress is chronic you experience issues like injuries, illness, and motivation struggles.

Unintentional physical stress is simply the movement you experience as part of your life. Maybe you have a demanding job. Or maybe you do a lot of physical work around your home. Whatever the case, periods of recovery are required to balance the stress cycle and keep it from becoming chronic.

How do you do that? Some of it you already do. When it comes to unintentional mental stress you take vacations and have weekends to recover. Intentional mental stress that is of the personal development nature tends to come in cycles of pushing out of your comfort zone for a while and then recovering within that new expanded zone until you’re ready for a new push. Intentional physical stress is recovered from using days off from training during the week, extended occasional deloads, and by managing the amount of fatigue you accumulate on a workout to workout basis. And unintentional physical stress tends to also be recovered from in the form of weekends, vacations, and evenings/nights out.

So hopefully you see now that stress isn’t a bad thing. Avoiding stress isn’t going to help you. All that does is shrink your comfort zone, make your life feel smaller, and forces your body to become weaker and less able to handle the functional needs of life. It’s the flip side of stress, aka recovery, that balances this stress cycle and allows you to grow as a person. So don’t avoid it. Embrace it. And then balance it with the necessary recovery if you want to thrive.

Resting Is Doing Something

There are two kinds of people in this world. People who have a hard time exercising when they’re not motivated. And people who have a hard time not exercising when they are. But really, we all tend to experience both of these scenarios at various times.

I’ve come to realize that getting people to take some time off from working out when they’re extremely motivated to exercise is a difficult thing to do. These people have a lot of limiting beliefs surrounding exercise that prevent them from prioritizing rest and recovery.

I was one of those people. I’m the guy who gets super motivated to try a new strength training program, or to take up running and do too much too fast, only to start feeling some aches and pains creep in. Of course I ignore them, because I need to keep working out so that I don’t lose all my progress.

These overuse injuries get worse and worse until eventually I’m forced to take time off. But at this point I have to take a much longer absence from exercise in order to heal my body than if I would’ve just listened to my body and better prioritized rest and recovery.

Not all motivation is good. It’s only good motivation if it provides you with a positive outcome. If your motivation drives you into the ground and destroys your body, steals the energy of your day, or keeps you living in fear of losing your results, then that is not good motivation – it is a liability.

I hear all kinds of reasons for not wanting to take enough days off from exercise or not wanting to rest enough in general. But one of the biggest objections is people say they feel like when they don’t work out that they aren’t doing anything.

Here is what I always say – resting IS doing something. In fact, it’s a very difficult something to do for a lot of people.

Your body doesn’t grow when you exercise. It grows when you rest and recover. Exercise is only a stimulus for growth. It is not growth itself. That workout you just did? You didn’t grow from it. In fact, your body is now broken down and in a weaker state than when you started.

Exercise doesn’t build muscle. It breaks it down. It doesn’t make you stronger. It actually makes you weaker initially. Nor does it make you faster or give you more endurance. These are all just stimuli for growth. For the growth cycle to complete, it has to be paired with recovery.

We stimulate growth, accumulate fatigue, and then recovery and grow. That’s the process. If any of those areas are lacking, the growth cycle will suffer. You will get negative side effects such as injuries, illnesses, and stagnant progress. And when any of these things happen, your motivation suffers and potentially causes a chain reaction downstream.

Your routine breaks down and you become inconsistent. Your eating falls off track, and you stop feeling your best. One thing leads to another and you end up going through a period of stagnation or even regression in your personal development journey.

Only you can determine if you’re getting enough rest. You don’t have to do nothing. Sometimes reduced volume or intensity is enough depending on your overall fitness level. But if your motivation is rooted in fear, there’s a good chance your recovery is suboptimal and you could stand to benefit from more of it.

Remember, operating at high levels of fatigue from unchecked stimulation and stress can negatively affect hormones, mood, thoughts, and behaviors. There are a lot of people who are actually imprisoned by exercise and their lives reflect that.

Exercise is good for you and you should find joy in moving your body. But it needs to be paired with recovery for you to have the best experience with it.

Recovery is what builds you back up better, stronger, and faster. Without it, you simply experience the negative side effects of unchecked stress. Every day you intentionally stress your body without allowing it to build itself back up and become more resilient to it.

So don’t think for a moment that you’re lazy or that you aren’t doing anything when you’re taking days off from working out. Rest and recovery add to your life experience and make you a stronger person in the end.

Get On the Priority List

Sometimes managing fatigue and optimizing recovery means doing nothing and resting, but other times you are able to recharge yourself by engaging in an activity that creates a flow state. For this reason, it’s important that you set aside time every single day that is just for you to do anything that you want.

This me-time is free of most if not all responsibility to others, and is used as a form of self-care. You use it to meet the universal basic need of autonomy and being able to express yourself as a human being. When you do this, you recharge your body and mind, top up willpower stores, and put yourself in a better position to handle the stressors of life.

This me-time is already built into our society. It takes the form of weekends and vacations. These are periods of time that we as a collective have deemed as necessary to charge our batteries and keep our quality of life high. However, in our fast paced society, along with financial issues for some people, these recharge times end up getting squeezed to the point where they feel non-existent.

While many people might get weekends off from their job, many times their responsibilities as a parent are just beginning. Sports, activities, and other obligations can easily eat away at your me-time. This can cause all sorts of unwanted side effects, from emotional eating to depression.

For a lot of people, they put everyone else first at the expense of themselves. When things get busy, the first thing/person to get cut is themselves.

That needs to change. Part of this healing process is learning how to get yourself back on the priority list. We could argue all day about whether you should be priority number one (you should be, by the way), but regardless, you should at least be ON the priority list.

Taking care of yourself and your needs means you are better able to not just handle life, but to thrive in it. That means you are at your best for others and for yourself. No one suffers when you are taking care of yourself.

I recommend that you have this me-time every single day. For some people this might seem like an impossible task. It might require you to have a discussion with your partner and work together as a team.

Deanna and I make sure we have our own time each and every day to do whatever it is we want. We also split up the weekends to ensure that we each have a day free of responsibilities and can just be a human being for once. Saturdays are her days and I take care of the kids. And Sundays are my days when she takes care of them. Although I can’t say that without also saying that there are plenty of Saturdays when she helps me out. Point being, communication is key, but we know that these days are available to us and can look forward to them to recharge.

While you don’t have to do what we do, you absolutely should be finding time for you, and often. When you don’t, negative side effects occur. You start feeling like a shell of a person. Recovery is impacted. And you’re not managing your fatigue optimally. If you’re not careful, this can create a downward spiral or keep you stuck in a state of stasis where very little personal growth and progress happens.

So get yourself on the priority list. Communicate with whoever you need to in order to get any help you need. Whether you work a 9-5 or are a stay at home mom/dad, you still deserve to have your basic human needs met. And it will only improve the lives of everyone around you.

Exercise Is a Vehicle

I walk every single morning. It’s how I start my day. In fact, I probably only miss 3 days a year at most when it comes to getting in my morning walk.

Rain? Doesn’t matter. I bring an umbrella. Cold? I bundle up. Wind? Hate it but it’s not going to keep me from walking. Snow? Hell yes I’m walking. That’s like a vacation down here in Texas.

You might think my dedication to my morning walk means that I love to walk. But I don’t. That’s easier to understand once you consider I don’t like walking on a treadmill, nor would I like pacing around the inside of my house.

When you frame it that way you realize that much of the exercise we do isn’t because we enjoy that particular exercise, it’s because we enjoy the atmosphere and experience it creates.

Exercise is simply a vehicle for creating an experience. It’s not about what exercise leads to – it’s what it does for you in the present moment. In the end, it’s the experience that we enjoy that keeps us coming back for more.

For me, my morning walks check all the boxes that allow me to have an enjoyable experience. It’s outdoors where it feels open and I can get fresh air and be with nature. I get an hour of alone time to do whatever I want, which is usually listening to some kind of personal development podcast or audiobook. I get some time without having any responsibilities to anyone other than myself. And I get to see the sunrise every morning, which can be quite spectacular at times.

Of course it doesn’t hurt that walking in and of itself isn’t something I loathe. It’s pleasant movement for me. It’s not crazy high intensity at 6:30 in the morning, so the resistance to doing it is very low. And I even carry my mug of green tea around the neighborhood. Yup… I’m THAT guy. I’m so consistent with this exercise that strangers will come out of their homes and wonder what’s up if I’m walking at a different time than usual.

The important thing to remember here is that in order to heal our relationship with exercise, we need to start attaching new meaning to it. We have to stop seeing it simply as a tool to burn calories and manipulate our bodies and self-worth. And understanding that exercise is a vehicle for creating a desirable experience is one of the best ways to attach more empowering meaning to it.

So think about why you do the exercise you do. There’s a good chance that even if you intrinsically enjoy the activity itself, the experience it creates for you is the bigger driver of your consistency and adherence. After all, if you have a crappy experience, regardless of whether you like the activity itself, you are very unlikely to keep putting yourself through it.

The more you view movement as having an experience, the more you’ll see it as an opportunity for enjoyment, and the more active you will be. The more you view it as a means to an end, the more it will feel like a chore, and the less you’ll want to move your body.

The Experience Variables

One of the biggest reasons people struggle to stay motivated with exercise is because they are using it as a means to an end. It’s essentially just a tool for achieving their desires of the future.

This is an issue because exercise takes a long time for real changes to take place. Not only does it take a long time, but it requires a lot of consistency.

An impromptu workout here or there, or working out once one week and then 5 times another, really isn’t going to do much in the name of the outcomes you are seeking. It’s better than nothing, but that kind of inconsistent movement is hard to integrate into your life.

You want to be looking at physical activity on a large scale. Not in days, weeks, or months – but years. This is what you call an active lifestyle.

An active lifestyle is about incorporating movement into your day – every day. And that is impossible to do consistently when you only see exercise as a tool to manipulate your body.

Body changes take longer to manifest than your “willpower workouts” can be sustained. And using your workouts as a means to an end takes a disproportional slice of your willpower reserves.

This is why people struggle to stay motivated with exercise. They keep engaging in suboptimal workout experiences without seeing the future payoff. This would lead to any sane person giving up on exercise eventually.

It’s not the workouts that lead to your desired future outcomes – it’s your experiences that create them. And the more enjoyable those experiences, the more likely you are to manifest the outcomes you want.

But the focus isn’t on the outcomes. The focus is on the now. The focus is on understanding what makes a workout enjoyable for you, as that’s what keeps you coming back for more. We call these exercise experience variables, and they are the key to you finding exercise you enjoy.

If you take a close look at the physical activity you do more consistently than others, you will notice some patterns in the experience that’s created.

Do you like to work out indoors or outdoors? Do you like to work out by yourself, with a partner, or in a group? Do you like to work out in silence, or with some form of entertainment?

Do you like having autonomy of doing what you want, or do you like to follow a workout program or instructor? Do you like a lot of variety, or do you like consistency and certainty? Do certain times of the day click better with you?

All these variables culminate to create your overall exercise experience. And this experience is what creates your enjoyment, which leads to sustainable motivation, which naturally drives your future outcomes.

Strength training, for example, isn’t what you like or don’t like. It is simply the vehicle for creating an experience. And that experience is influenced by the variables outlined above.

If I told you to lift weights at 7am, at a freezing gym with a group of 6 people, with nursery rhymes playing in the background, would that be an enjoyable experience for you? Would you be likely to do it consistently for the next year?

What if I asked you to lift weights and gave you the autonomy to do it as you saw fit. So you decided you wanted to work out mid-morning, outdoors, in the calming quiet of nature, by yourself. Would that be an enjoyable experience for you? And if so, would you be likely to do it consistently for the next year?

Both of those scenarios involved strength training, but the exercise experience was different for both. As a result, very different outcomes are going to be the result.

So focus less on the outcomes and the actual type of exercise you do. Instead, see exercise as a vehicle for having an enjoyable experience, and an active lifestyle will be the natural side effect.

Exercise Empowerment

Exercise can be a huge source of empowerment for you. It teaches you how to set goals and achieve them. It shows you that you are stronger than you thought you were, and that you can do more than you previously thought.

You become more confident and end up taking more risks. You push yourself out of your comfort zone more. The confidence you create from breaking through old performance levels can be applied to your life as a whole.

The resilience you build from pushing yourself to finish that race when everything about you is saying to give up can be used to more easily overcome life’s obstacles. Your discomfort threshold becomes higher, which opens up all kinds of opportunities that were once hidden by fear or pain.

Exercise is more than just lifting weights or doing cardio. It’s about breaking through your self-imposed ceilings and proving to yourself that you are capable of more. The human body has amazing potential, and exercise is one of many vehicles that gives you a small glimpse of what that may be.

It shows you that you are in control of your body. That you have the power to change yourself mentally and physically and direct your life. It puts you more in tune with your body. It better connects your physical and mental being so you can synergistically harness your optimum human experience.

When done correctly and with the right self-awareness and perspective, exercise can be a tool for personal growth in any aspect of your life. So start looking beyond just the physical outcomes it can provide and start considering the positive impact it can have on changing your entire identity.

Take squats, for example. I have a love/hate relationship with them. They are hard. But they feel good to me. I’m not averse to doing hard things, but there is definitely resistance when it’s time to train my lower body.

Not only do I know that my muscles are going to get pushed to the max for the next 60 seconds when I do a set of squats, but I have to overcome a lot of mental resistance to even getting under the bar and doing them. There’s this inflection point that I have to overcome each time. It’s similar to forcing yourself to jump into cold water, or doing something you’re afraid to do.

But each time I challenge myself and push through that inflection point, I achieve personal growth, and I build my confidence and power. I become a more capable person. It pushes my comfort zone and what I can handle in life. Through exercise I train myself to be more resilient and to keep moving forward when things feel tough.

This experience helps me associate new meaning to physical activity. It becomes so much more than something you do to manipulate your body and worth. It becomes a vehicle for bettering my life. And it’s this kind of association that makes me want to continue doing it time and time again independent of what it does to my body.

Most people can look back in their life and remember a moment they’ve had with physical activity that made an impression. The reason why is because it was a moment in time when you had a leap in personal growth. It made an emotional imprint because it meant something to you. And this meaning, whether you realize it or not, influenced other parts of your life.

While I can’t guarantee that you’ve had one of these moments in the past, I can assure you that you can have plenty of them going forward once you detach exercise from weight loss and start seeing the intrinsic value in it.

I have watched people create all new identities for themselves as a result of them completing a marathon, doing a pull-up, setting a PR on a run or with an exercise, or even completing a difficult hike. It was all about what they did in that moment relative to what they previously were capable of. When you surpass a previous identity by reaching into new mental, emotional, and physical territory, you grow. And it’s this process that empowers you to feel strong in body and mind.

Keep in mind that physical activity comes in all shapes and sizes. Certain aspects of it have more value to you than it does to others. Sometimes lower intensity exercise is what you need, while at other times a good challenge is what you want. Whatever the case, you are creating an experience that will make it easier to come back to physical activity time and time again.

When Quitting Is OK

I used to be obsessed with Christmas lights. You might as well have called me Clark Griswold.

I also got really into collecting baseball cards. And then there was that time I started to draw all the time.

I can’t forget about when I became an amateur astronomer either. Have you seen Saturn’s rings?

I’ve also had my phases with gardening, piano, Spanish, and plenty more.

And guess what? Not all of these things “stuck”. Even though I was crazy passionate about them at the time, most of them faded away.

But that’s OK! I don’t regret my time doing any of these things even though I’m not doing them anymore. They brought a lot of joy into my life, and there are still remnants of them in my identity.

Not every decision you make has to be a lifetime commitment. This is also true when it comes to picking the type of exercise you do. Everyone thinks you have to decide what you’re going to do for exercise for the rest of your life.

Strength training? If I start it I have to do it – forever.

Running? If I start it I have to do it – forever.

No you don’t! Instead, commit to a lifetime of physical activity, and then go with the flow for whatever sounds good at the time.

That might mean you get really into strength training for a few months, or running, or swimming, or biking, or hiking, or dancing. It doesn’t matter. It’s all physical activity. And if you enjoy it, it’s going to add to your life experience.

Getting rid of the all-or-nothing mindset surrounding exercise is what actually gets you moving your body. It allows you to try new and interesting things that you either might not have ever thought about before, or you assumed it wouldn’t be good enough.

Giving yourself permission to just try things is what opens the doors to new and exciting physical activity. The path of an active lifestyle takes many twists and turns. What you do today is unlikely going to be the same exact thing you do 20 years from now.

So don’t go into this thinking you have to make a forever decision. You don’t. Commit to having experiences with your body. Move it and enjoy it. Move on to a new activity when you aren’t feeling the passion of the one you’re doing. And go deep into the things you become passionate about.

This is what creates a new identity around exercise. You become a sum of your experiences – each phase of your life influencing the next. And at times you circle back around to a past love. But this time you experience it differently, because you’re a different person now.

So go with the flow. Commit to moving your body in whatever way sounds good to you. Let go of the long-term commitments to specific types of movement, and instead start seeing your exercise through the lens of an active lifestyle.

Life Integration

We tend to think of exercise as this separate compartmentalized thing we do. We have our life, and we have our workouts. And at times, these two things can become very different entities. This is unfortunate, as the more we can integrate health and fitness into our day to day life so that it simply becomes our life, the better the exercise experience will be.

It might be easier to think of exercise as an active lifestyle, a culture, or even an identity. Physical activity becomes a part of you. When that happens, it’s easy to be motivated to work out.

It’s the reason why there are people in certain fitness communities who seem obsessed with the kind of exercise they do. It’s as if nothing can keep them from doing that thing.

I’ve seen cross-fitters, runners, bikers, gym-goers, hikers, basketball players, swimmers, and every other kind of fitness character you can imagine integrate these physical activities into their life as a whole. They live and breathe these things. They aren’t just things they do a few times per week to be healthy or change their body – they’re hobbies and passions.

That’s the kind of experience we’re trying to create with exercise, or as I prefer to call it – physical activity, as it’s movement of every kind, done at any time, that we’re looking to make part of our life. When I talk about improving your life experience, this is part of that experience.

But that’s hard for some people. Exercise has such a negative association to dieting, body change, and self-worth struggles, that it feels like a chore and an obligation. They have busy lives, or have desk jobs, and can’t imagine a world where they’d actually want to work out with that kind of passion.

And that’s OK, because you don’t have to call yourself a cross-fitter or a biker to create a better exercise experience. All you need to do is start viewing your physical activity differently and try to blur the line between exercise and life.

How can you make these two things one and the same? When you think of your life, in what ideal scenario could you picture physical activity being an integrated part of it? What kind of movement is in your life? What would you look forward to doing? What would enrich your life?

You won’t get the right answer if exercise is a synonym for body control or burning calories. You probably won’t get the right answer if you think of exercise as a means to improved health either. While physical activity can change your body and impact your health, it’s the experience it creates in your life right now that adds to your fulfillment.

Your body and its ability to move provides you with an amazing asset to get the most value out of your life. Exercise doesn’t have to be a means to an end. It doesn’t have to hurt. It doesn’t have to just be a tolerable thing you do. It’s a vessel for enjoyable experiences, and the more movement gets integrated into your life simply because it makes you happy, the more you’re going to want to do it, and the more you’re going to reap all its benefits.

State Change

I was in a bad mood. All morning I felt like I couldn’t snap myself out of it. Every little thing was bothering me. There was really no reason for it. My mind just felt consumed by negativity, and I was finding fault in everything.

Unfortunately, Deanna inserted herself into my mental stream of negativity by doing something she never should have – she talked to me.

My internal negative state then got projected outwards, and an argument commenced. I have no idea what it was about. But I’m 100% sure it was dumb. It was just my mind attaching onto something in order to quench its need to feel validated.

This bickering went on for hours – until I put an end to the text argument going on from separate rooms of the house and decided to work out.

After just a 30 minute workout I was a new person. Getting my heart rate up and moving my body snapped me out of the negative mental state I was in. The change in behavior had created new thoughts and emotions.

I apologized to her before my workout was even done. I had been caught up in this negative state for half the day, and a 30 minute workout made me do a full 180.

It’s these kinds of experiences you have to start recognizing if you want to start attaching new meaning to physical activity and heal your relationship with exercise.

These experience are what help you find the intrinsic value in moving your body. They change you – not by making you stronger, faster, or more muscular, but by changing how you mentally and physically feel. You get the benefits now. There’s no need to delay gratification. The reward is instant.

Right now you likely see working out as a means to an end. Exercise equals calories burned equals weight loss.

And while there is of course some truth to that equation on paper, the math still has to be played out in real life, which requires you to consider many of the psychological influences on exercise.

If much of the association you have with exercise is all about body manipulation, weight loss frustrations, and lack of enjoyment, then you are going to find it very difficult to consistently engage in physical activity long enough for future outcomes to manifest.

A miserable means rarely takes you to an enjoyable end. So you need to find ways to create new empowering experiences with exercise – moments you can draw on for motivation when your desired outcomes aren’t coming fast enough or fulfilling your expectations.

One of the ways you can create these new experiences is by recognizing the ways that exercise changes your mental state. On any given day, a good workout can neutralize stress and anxiety, boost your mood, improve your confidence, create a “high”, and even take you from a negative body image day to a positive one.

Most of the time our thoughts lead to emotions, which lead to behaviors. And then these behaviors feed back into our thoughts and emotions – creating either an upward spiral of positive thoughts and behaviors, or a downward spiral of the opposite. But you can also insert yourself into that thought/emotion/behavior cycle at the behavior point by working out and creating a state change.

Each time you recognize positive changes in your attitude, energy, or enjoyment as a result of working out, your experience is automatically added to your mental motivation bank, which helps you reinforce the intrinsic value of physical activity. You’re continually reminded that you don’t have to wait for the payoff – the workout is the payoff.

And you still get all those secondary benefits like improved health, strength, etc, because you’re more likely to enjoy the process and stay engaged with it long enough to experience them.

Cultivate the Mind / Body Connection

In order to be able to recognize the changes in your mental and physical states and enjoy the instant and intrinsic gratification of physical activity, you have to be connected to your body. This can be really difficult for some people since exercise has never really been about the now – it’s always been a means to a better future.

But as I’ve mentioned countless times, your desired future is simply the result of you consistently meeting your needs of the now. And one of those needs is having a pleasant exercise experience.

Most of us recognize the negative states our body is in. States of anxiety, stress, and low energy are easy to identify with. It’s easy to become your body in those instances. What isn’t as easy for many people is to be self-aware and present enough to notice the positive state your body is in during and after exercise. This takes some practice, but the more in tune you are with your body, the more you can reap the benefits of movement.

What you want to do is try to recognize the different sensations in your body around the periods of heightened physical activity. What happens to your body? What changes? What do you notice about your breathing? What about your heart rate? Do you feel any tingling in your arms or legs? Does your brain feel like it’s been stimulated?

Have you ever felt a runner’s high? What about a pump in your muscles when you’re lifting weights? Did the exercise you just did calm you? Or did it give you more energy? Did it build confidence? Did it change your mood?

Close your eyes right now. See if you can notice and feel your heart beat. Try to feel it not just in your chest but all throughout your body. Pretend like there’s a little you sitting in your head monitoring your body and your thoughts. This is your self. Now pay attention to your breathing. Watch the air fill your lungs and leave through your nose on each breath. Listen to the sounds of your body.

Some people practice this through meditation. That’s a great practice and something I do and recommend for everyone. But whether you choose to do it or not, the goal is still the same – cultivate the mind/body connection.

When that connection is strong because it was built through conscious intention, it then works subconsciously on autopilot. You become aware of the mental and physical state changes that occur when you move your body either during a workout or simply through functional movement. And each time you move your body, you get a dose of satisfaction.

This happens once the negative associations and meaning that are currently attached to exercise are stripped away. Only then can you get in touch with movement’s true nature. That might sound kind of out there to you, a little woo-woo maybe. But ask yourself whether you’re currently getting as much joy from movement as you’d like. And if you’re not, be open-minded to ditching the surface level “exercise is a body manipulation tool” mentality, and instead start turning inwards and connecting to yourself on a deeper level.

This connection with your body is what drives you to want to move your body for the sheer joy of it. It gives you the instant payoff. And it’s what keeps you coming back for more.

Intensity Matters

How hard you exert yourself during your workouts matters. But that doesn’t mean pushing yourself to your limits is always the right thing to do. Sometimes pushing too hard can cause unwanted side effects in enjoyment, experience, and how you feel mentally and physically. This is why the “no pain, no gain” mentally is actually hurtful. Because there are plenty of times where the pain leads to no gain – especially when it creates resistance to you wanting to work out because it makes you miserable.

The same goes for not pushing yourself enough. It’s entirely possible to under-exert yourself and not feel any of the benefits of mindful movement. So you work out, but it doesn’t really feel like you did anything. Neither your body nor your mind were stimulated, so no state changes were experienced. Without them, it becomes difficult to find the intrinsic value in the physical activity you’re doing, and motivation suffers.

Mental and physical state changes happen at both the low intensity and high intensity areas of the spectrum, and everything in between. And each type of physical activity you do has its own unique profile and what I like to call an “exertion tipping point”.

Each type of movement you do has its own bell curve. There’s both a minimum and a maximum level of exertion that leads to a desired state change, and somewhere in the middle is the optimum spot.

And this bell curve isn’t static – it’s dynamic based on certain variables you bring into the movement experience. The time that you work out will influence this bell curve and its exertion tipping point. So will the mental and physical state you’re in when you enter into that particular physical activity.

This is why it’s so important to cultivate the mind/body connection and to work with your body instead of trying to fit it into a cookie cutter workout program. Some days you’re going to have more energy. And others you’re going to have less than ideal conditions. Regardless, if you are in touch with your body, you can move your body in a way that makes you feel good, and leaves you in a better mental and physical state than when you started.

So what is exertion anyways? The way I define it is very simple. It’s a function of both your workout duration and its intensity. In other words, how long you work out, and how hard you work out. And both these variables can be experimented with in order to give you the optimum workout experience.

For example, I greatly enjoy my morning walks. And one of the reasons why I enjoy them is because of the mental and physical state changes they create.

My walks are leisurely and one of the first things I do after waking up. I’m not powerwalking. I’m walking at a normal pace. I’m not checking my heart rate or doing any kind of performance based measuring.

Before starting my walk I’m still not completely awake. My mind is not firing at 100%, and my body definitely isn’t ready to tackle intense physical activity. But after my walk, my mind and body are feeling fresh and ready to tackle the day. I’m ready to sit down and start writing, or even do a more intense strength training workout.

My walk changed my mental and physical states. It primed me for having a great day. But notice how it wasn’t intense exercise. It wasn’t more is better. In fact, it is difficult for me to do intense physical activity so early in the morning. And when I try to do it, it actually has a detrimental effect on my mental and physical states.

For me, at that time of the day, a longer walk at a leisurely intensity hits the sweet spot of that bell curve. When I go for a walk after dinner with Deanna, my walk is shorter. In that instance, a longer walk would also be detrimental to my states. This can always change as time goes on – especially if you end up having an empowering exercise experience that makes you look at the situation differently. So understand that what is optimal is about the now.

Your exertion tipping points and bell curves will look different than mine. Some people like short but intense workouts. Others like their strength training to take a little longer with more rest between sets (less intense).

Your job is to cultivate the mind/body connection so you can find that sweet spot – the spot where you really internalize the intrinsic value of physical activity. Because this is the kind of empowering association you need to cultivate in order to replace the old disempowering one of – exercise equals weight loss.

Physical activity is not a means to an end. It is the end. It just so happens that when you find the intrinsic value in movement, you end up engaging with it more consistently. And when that happens, there are beneficial side effects. But these side effects will always be secondary to the experience itself.

Energy Production

Physical activity should be a net positive when it comes to your energy levels. If it’s not, then something is wrong.

Many people who are stuck in Diet Culture end up experiencing a net negative effect on their energy. This happens for many reasons. For starters, they usually go from doing no exercise to suddenly doing daily intense workouts with the flip of the switch. This doesn’t give your body or mind enough time to adapt to the sudden stress you’re putting your body through. In time, the physical stress accumulated via your workouts outpaces your recovery, and it’s easy to end up taking long extended times off from working out all together due to burnout.

Another reason this net negative energy situation happens is because exercise is normally paired with a calorie restricted diet when someone is trying to lose weight. Physical activity requires energy, aka calories. And when you’re dieting and are in a sudden 500-1000 calorie deficit each day because you want to lose 1-2 pounds per week, it makes it hard to perform at your best. Exercise starts feeling like a chore. Your motivation to get out of bed to do it diminishes, and then you stop doing it. Exercise becomes a drain on your already low energy, and that association becomes ingrained – making it harder and harder to be motivated to work out, especially if your weight isn’t dropping.

So long as you see exercise as a way to burn calories, instead of a tool for enjoyment, experience, and to feel good, you will continue to have a net negative energy liability. If you don’t feel more energized as a result of your workouts, then you either have a disempowering association with physical activity, you’re not eating enough to support that much activity, or you haven’t optimized the amount and type of exercise you do, which usually ties back into the association you have with it.

You should feel good after a workout. Feeling nauseous, exhausted, or any other negative sensation is a sign something is off. Yes… there will be one-off workouts where you push yourself to that point. That’s going to happen. But it shouldn’t be the norm. It can’t be the norm. Your body won’t let it be the norm. You’ll naturally lose the drive to do it unless your fear of gaining weight holds you hostage to doing it. In that case, you’re acting from a place of constant fear AND you feel physically horrible doing it – lose/lose.

So start to feel the difference physical activity makes. Just as you eat to feel your best, you move your body to feel your best. If you eat something that doesn’t make you feel good, would you keep eating it even if it resulted in weight loss? Hopefully not. But if you’re deep in Diet Culture you very well might. It’s the same for exercise. If you’re doing something that doesn’t feel good, stop doing it. Don’t allow the societal pressures of weight loss push you into doing something that doesn’t make you happy. Besides… feeling good from exercise is what makes you want to do it. It’s what gets you out of bed. The payoff is now. But it’s also in the future, because you’re actually doing it. And why do you do it? Because it feels good. See how that works?

Intuitive Exercise

Similar to how intuitive eating allows you to eat in a way that works with your body and its feedback, intuitive exercise also allows you to adjust your workouts in real time based on how you’re feeling and what your body is telling you.

Not every workout you have is going to be amazing. You’re not always going to feel up for working out and/or pushing yourself to your limits. In some workouts you’re going to feel strong and invincible, and in others you’re going to contemplate cutting it short and calling it a day.

These are normal ups and downs of exercise. Even if your relationship with exercise is amazing and you thoroughly enjoy the physical activity you do, there’s still going to be those days where you feel a little off. And that’s when you have to be a little intuitive about your exercise.

Pushing yourself when your body is saying to pull back some is like continuing to eat well past comfortable fullness. Your body is saying to do one thing yet your mind isn’t honoring that signal.

It’s hard for some people to pull back with their workouts. There’s a little bit of all-or-nothing thinking involved that makes them feel like anything less than an all-out workout is just not worth it.

And let’s not get started with suggesting you just not work out today and take the day off. That can really stir up some emotion. Sometimes I don’t know what’s harder – working out when you don’t want to, or not working out when you really do.

But look, if you’re feeling sick or maybe injured, sometimes just taking a recovery day is what’s best in the long run. Maybe you do go ahead and work out, but you just pull back a little bit on how hard you push.

Intuitive exercise isn’t just about knowing when to pull back though. It’s also about knowing when to push beyond what was originally planned.

Sometimes you plan to only lift a certain amount of weight for your workout, but as you warm up you realize you feel really good. So you end up working out with more weight than was planned. Or maybe you do an extra rep or set.

If you like to run, you’ve probably had those moments mid run when you feel amazing and just want to throw in a speedier interval or three. Maybe your easy run pace feels extra easy today. That’s the feeling we’re looking out for that we want to be intuitive with. We want to start understanding effort, instead of relying solely on the numbers.

And finally, sometimes intuitive exercise means pushing yourself to just do something, anything for some physical activity. You’re not always going to feel like working out. There’s a fine line between taking the day off because you don’t feel good, and pushing yourself to do something so you will feel good.

If skipping workouts isn’t the norm but you’re feeling really off today, then that’s when being intuitive might mean taking the day off. But if you’ve been missing workouts lately and the lack of physical activity is making you feel bad, then being intuitive and pushing yourself to just do something would be an act of self-care.

If pushing yourself to work out so you can have a good experience doesn’t get you out of that cycle, then it’s time to explore why that’s happening. Maybe it’s time to change things up. Maybe you need to get back to what makes you happy. Maybe some disempowering associations, such as calorie burn or body manipulation, have crept back in to your workouts. Staying mindful, intuitive, and investigative will help you uncover your truth.

The more you can work with your body, pulling back when you’re feeling off, and pushing when you feel something extra is there, the more enjoyable your workouts will be and the better chance you’ll have at achieving your goals.

Do What You Want

I’ve been lifting weights for nearly 30 years. I started training when I was 12 years old. And excluding a few short periods over those decades, I pretty much worked out 3-4 days per week all of my life. You could say that lifting weights had become a part of my identity. I just did it.

But sometime in my later 30s I started to have some real motivation struggles when it came to getting out and doing my workouts. For whatever reason I just wasn’t enjoying it much anymore. It started feeling like an obligation I needed to fulfill – a should do, instead of an I want to do.

Workouts started getting inconsistent and I would literally stand at my back door and look out the window trying to convince myself to go outside and work out (my home gym is on my back patio btw).

My workouts had become an obstacle. And every time I pushed myself to do one, it didn’t make them easier to do, it made each time more difficult – essentially reinforcing the idea that I was starting to hate what I was doing.

Piggybacking off the idea of Permission-Based Eating, I decided to lower the intense feelings I was feeling around exercise by giving myself permission to do whatever exercise I wanted to do, in as much quantity, whenever it felt good to do it.

This permission, just like with food, brought up all kinds of limiting beliefs. I can’t not strength train… I’ll lose my muscle. Is walking really enough? Can I be healthy and fit just working out a few times per week?

The fear-based pull to run back to my strength training was strong. But instead of falling back into the cycle of negative workout experiences reinforcing my loathing for working out, I leveled my beliefs and started fresh.

What did I want to do? Was there anything I’ve always wanted to try but felt like it wouldn’t be good enough for some reason? How much exercise sounded good to me? Should I train every day or just a few times per week?

What I ended up settling on was to commit to 100 days of no strength training. Instead, I was going to do my daily morning walks, which I absolutely loved doing, and I was also going to try my hand at some daily yoga – yes… yoga, the thing I once arrogantly told people was just a warmup for my real workout.

I bought a mat and subscribed to a yoga app, and I went at it. And it lasted – a week. Why? Well for starters, I didn’t really enjoy yoga all that much. But more importantly, I was really missing lifting weights.

The absence of strength training from my life showed me just how much I actually enjoyed it. Giving myself full permission to do any kind of exercise I wanted severed the negative association I was having with strength training and allowed me to see it for what it really was – something I actually did enjoy, that helped me feel strong and empowered, and was a part of who I was and wanted to continue being.

That’s what permission does. It moves you away from shoulds and have tos and allows you to see your true wants and desires. Getting to that place is the key to staying motivated to doing something for life.

I went back to lifting weights feeling grateful that I had a home gym and was capable of expressing movement of my body in that way. And anytime I feel motivation waning to lift weights, I remind myself that I have full permission to do anything I want. With that mental framework, I know exactly what I want to be doing and what I’m going to enjoy most.

What Are the Benefits?

We’re a very results driven society. Most of the things we set off to do are because we want to achieve something in the future. That thing could be physical, such as money, weight loss, or better health, or it could be psychological in nature, like feeling more confident or more valued in society.

Essentially, everything we do is just a means to an end. The behavior we implement is something we put up with in order to get the reward at the end of the rainbow. It’s a necessary evil.

We even go so far as a society to attach certain meaning to this kind of mindset. We glorify this idea of discipline, and we shame the idea of instant gratification. We create sayings like “good things come to those who wait” – anything to help us justify the discomfort we feel on the journey to some promised outcome in the future.

Article after article touts the “benefits” of doing said thing. Because we think that’s what’s going to motivate us to tough it out and do what needs to be done to achieve those rewards. And why wouldn’t it motivate us? The benefits sound amazing. Who wouldn’t want reduced stress, less anxiety, more peace, better health, a more fit body, more muscle, more strength, a smarter brain, slowed down aging, or any number of the other amazing benefits of exercise?

No one reads those articles and all the touted benefits and says “no thanks, I’m good”. Instead, everyone says “I want that”, and then they proceed to engage in behaviors they really don’t enjoy, but are willing to tolerate to get those benefits.

This is what you call the “what are the benefits syndrome”. This syndrome actually takes you further away from the benefits, as it leads you to overlook the essential thing that best drives all behaviors and consequential outcomes – enjoyment.

Enjoyment is what gets you up in the morning to exercise. Enjoyment is what keeps you showing up day after day after day. Enjoyment is the gateway into more and different types of exercise. Enjoyment is what allows you to stay engaged with the process long enough to experience all the secondary benefits like less stress, better health, improved brain function, and more fitness. Yes… these are secondary benefits of exercise. The primary benefit? Enjoyment and how that enriches your life in the moment.

When you focus your attention on achieving the primary benefit of enjoyment and experiencing instant gratification, the dozens of secondary benefits manifest naturally. And there’s no need to delay gratification. You stay gratified every step of the way of your journey. You don’t have to be a martyr. You don’t have to be miserable. You don’t have to waste away your life to improve your life. You realize your workout is the reward. It is the payoff. And it is happening now.

Ask yourself this question – “if exercise couldn’t change your body or your health or lead to any other secondary benefit beyond the 15 minutes to an hour you exercise, what would you do for physical activity?”

Some people would say nothing. And that’s understandable when you’ve been conditioned for a lifetime to believe you have to put up with something you don’t really like doing in order to get the benefits you want. But this just shows that there’s some healing to experience in regards to your relationship with exercise. And that starts right here.

Others will have a list of objections. They’ll say things like “well I like doing x, but it won’t do y for me”. They’ll think it’s not good enough, or that it won’t produce the desired benefits. The only problem with that thinking is that not enjoying what you do is a near guarantee that you won’t achieve those secondary benefits anyways. Why? Because you won’t do it consistently, long enough, to experience them. If you hate the process, you’ll never sustain your behaviors long enough to achieve your outcomes.

You don’t have to love exercise, but you do need to enjoy it enough that it will pull you to want to do it. All other goals, as we’ll get to next, are built upon the foundation of enjoyment.

You can’t get the long-term results you want doing exercise you hate, unless you’re one of the rare few who get pleasure from being miserable. And that goes for any benefit you’re trying to achieve with exercise. Instead, filter out the secondary benefits for a moment and start having fun again. Physical activity is meant to be enjoyable.

The Exercise Selection Pyramid

Enjoyment is the foundation of all your goals. Whether you want to get stronger, build muscle, lose body fat, get healthier, pursue sports, do a pull-up, or run a 5k, all of these outcome-based goals are predicated on you enjoying the underlying behaviors that will lead to them.

Picture a three layered pyramid. The bottom layer is enjoyment. The middle layer is performance, and the top layer is physique. You will use this pyramid to help you select the best exercise for you and your unique goals.

Every level of the pyramid is dependent on you fulfilling the level or levels below it. If any lower layer is not being addressed, then the layers above will start to crumble.

For example, let’s say you want to get stronger, so you start lifting weights. Strength is found within the middle layer of the pyramid – performance. In order for you to improve your performance, whether it’s strength gains, as is this case, or whether it’s endurance, speed, flexibility, agility, etc, the enjoyment layer must be built first.

The reason is very simple – if you don’t enjoy the strength training you’ll be doing to get stronger, then you won’t stick with it long enough to realize your strength gains. Sure, you can willpower your way through it for a little while. But consistency will eventually disintegrate, and you will be back to square one. Your strength training journey will be littered with cycles of extreme consistency followed by a sporadic workout here or there, or none at all.

If the performance layer has to do with all the action-based goals you’d like to achieve, then what is the physique layer? The physique layer incorporates any changes to your body, both externally or internally.

Externally this might mean weight loss, fat loss, weight gain, or muscle gain. Internally would refer to changes to the physiology of your body, such as a more energy efficient muscle for running, or a healthier body from reduced cholesterol or improved insulin sensitivity.

In order for these physique changes to happen, the two layers of the pyramid beneath it must be satisfied. If even just one is neglected, then the physique changes will not occur.

For example, if your physique goal is to build muscle, you will need a performance based goal of strength training (the middle layer), which requires you to enjoy that activity – fulfilling the bottom layer of the pyramid. You can’t build muscle without the strength training stimulus, and the strength training won’t consistently be applied to your life if you don’t enjoy what you’re doing.

All physique goals are natural byproducts of the two layers below it. They are outcome-based goals, which tend to happen when you are fully engaged with your journey.

This is why you can’t just mimic your favorite fitness influencer, health guru, or athlete and expect to get the same result. Yet that is what people do every single time.

They’ll see someone’s body that they admire and they decide they want that same body. So they see what they’re doing for exercise and assume they can just copy them and the result will be same.

What people don’t understand is that the people who have these bodies that you admire got them because they were fulfilling the exercise selection pyramid, whether they realize it or not. They’re in the gym lifting weights because they love to lift weights. And their bodies (the physique layer) are just a natural side effect of them fulfilling the two layers of the pyramid beneath it.

When you try to simply mimic what other people are doing, you are working the pyramid backwards. You are starting at the top layer. That’s like trying the build the 50th floor of a skyscraper without building the foundation or the floors beneath it. So you copy what they do, and maybe it works for a bit, but the foundation is so shaky that eventually you become inconsistent.

The top of the pyramid starts with the foundation. Your physique goals start with enjoyment. Decide what it is that you like to do and build upon them. If you don’t like strength training, then don’t expect to achieve a muscular body. If you don’t like exercising at all, then don’t expect to achieve your healthiest body. If you don’t like running, don’t expect to complete a marathon.

But here’s the kicker, when you understand the pyramid, you can work it. If there’s a goal you want to achieve that requires you to do exercise you don’t enjoy, you can work on improving your relationship with that particular exercise. Because more times than not, enjoyment is a byproduct of the meaning you’ve attached to physical activity. So if you can heal your relationship with it and create some empowering experiences from it, you can learn to enjoy it. We’ll be working on that in the next chapters.

Tolerating Exercise

Be forewarned. There are many coaches, influencers, and credible people with initials after their names that will try to tell you that you don’t need to enjoy exercise to do it.

They will tell you that they don’t love exercise – that they just tolerate it because they want to look and feel better. They likely will have also experienced a lot of weight loss holding onto this belief.

This will be music to your ears. You will feel validated and think – “I don’t like exercise either, but I want the results just like him/her, so I will just put up with it and tolerate it too.”

The only problem with this mindset is that through the process of trying to tolerate exercise, most people actually aren’t able to tolerate it. They hate it, so they don’t do it. Turns out that influencer succeeding wasn’t the norm and that you once again confused the possible with the probable.

This is a very hidden form of Diet Culture thinking. Many people who don’t like exercise have come to accept that it’s OK so long as it gets them to the end. This idea of a miserable means justifying an ends has become so normalized, that some people will even laugh at the idea of people saying a very common sense thing such as you should enjoy moving your body.

You absolutely should enjoy something that consumes upwards of 10% of your waking life for the rest of your life. Why are you willing to go through life not enjoying something that takes hours of your days?

Look… you don’t have to love exercise. You don’t have to romanticize it or make it a passion of yours. Although that would certainly make motivation and consistency very easy for you.

All you need to do is find a way to make it more enjoyable – enough so that you feel a pull to do it. Because simply tolerating exercise, and especially hating it, will not be enough for the majority of people to feel motivated to do it. You will not consistently do what you don’t enjoy. How often, when given the choice, do you do things you don’t like to do? Regardless, what’s the point in having a miserable journey just to have a chance at a future payoff that may or may not ever materialize?

You don’t have to put up with something for the rest of your life because you think you have to in order to be happy and fulfilled. This is not a healthy relationship with exercise. You wouldn’t tolerate a toxic relationship with a person for the rest of your life, so definitely don’t do it with exercise.

Remember… just because you know someone that has achieved the results that you want while not enjoying exercise, it doesn’t mean that will be the likely outcome for you. Nothing is impossible. There will always be evidence out there to validate your struggles or desires. And you will find it and choose to overestimate its application to your own life.

Anyone can learn to enjoy moving their body. And the first step is to break this mindset of tolerating exercise that is rooted in Diet Culture thinking. It’s based on the idea that you must delay gratification, that you have to be disciplined, or even that you’re not supposed to like it.

Break the association that exercise is a tool to manipulate your body – to so-called “look better”. Sever the idea that exercise’s payoff is in the future. Find the joy in mindful movement, the exercise experience, and feeling better right now. Stop doing exercise you hate just to get the body you want. Stop choosing exercise based on what it will do to your body, and start picking physical activity that actually sounds enjoyable to you independently of whether you think it’s good enough. If you enjoy it, then it’s good enough and it’s serving its purpose.

Diet Culture is what teaches you to shun the idea of being content with being happy. It’s what brainwashes you to believe you need to be doing more and more of the things you like less and less. It sells you the idea that exercise is the tool for achieving value in society.

If that’s what you want, then by all means go and tolerate exercise for the rest of your life. Continue in a toxic relationship that reinforces the idea that your body is your worth. Keep believing that enjoyment is only for the few lucky people.

Or, start believing that you were born to enjoy moving your body. Believe that your body serves as a vessel for you to have enjoyable life experiences. Believe that exercise’s payoff doesn’t need to be delayed into the future, but that it can serve as a way to enrich your life – right now.

Is It Enough?

Diet Culture teaches you that there are only two types of exercise – strength training and cardio. Never was this more apparent to me than when my new coaching clients would do their initial questionnaire.

One of the questions I asked them was what their favorite kind of exercise was, and 90% of the time it was either strength training or cardio. When I’d follow up with them and ask them what they would enjoy doing for physical activity if weight loss wasn’t their goal or if they were the only person in the world, they would usually answer that question much better.

They’d say things like they’ve always wanted to learn how to dance. Or they like to walk or hike. Or they enjoy swimming. Or they like to ride their bike, rock climb, kayak, play basketball, or ski.

I loved hearing these answers, as it really brought to the surface my clients’ passions. They lit up when they talked about them. It excited them.

But then they always had a follow-up question for me – “is that enough though?” Diet Culture had reached back up and snatched them from the good dream they were having.

As they were floating up in happy land actually enjoying moving their body, Diet Culture was casting out limiting beliefs in the hopes it could pull you back into the daily drag of exercising to change your body.

That’s when all the doubts would come up. Will doing that build muscle? Will that make me healthy? Will I be able to lose weight if that’s all I do? Does that burn enough calories?

So they’d burst their little dream bubble of actually doing physical activity they’d enjoy, and instead opt for the exercise Diet Culture teaches them that will shed the fat and build muscle in the least amount of time possible. Ironically, they keep trying to create the perfect workout program they’re never going to follow.

It’s tough to break these limiting beliefs. We have studies proving to us that one kind of exercise is better than another for losing fat. We have doctors and organizations saying you need a certain amount of intense physical activity to be healthy. You have weight loss coaches plugging you into their standard meal plan plus strength training plus cardio template.

But none of these things consider the psychological influences enjoyment has on your motivation to be active, nor do they consider one of the most fundamental aspects of choosing physical activity – does it make you happy?

How much happiness are you denying yourself in the pursuit of Diet Culture’s beauty standards? Physical activity is meant to be fun. It connects you to others. It puts you into a flow state. Its purpose isn’t conformism. It’s not meant to be reduced down to a tool to manipulate your body and self-worth. So break the exercise / weight loss association and start moving your body in a way that puts a smile on your face.

Will that “be enough”? No, it will never be enough for Diet Culture standards. You will always be striving for some future benefit you don’t have.

But is it enough to improve your quality of life? It absolutely is. And isn’t that why we’re doing this? Any physical activity makes you healthier. Any physical activity burns calories. Any physical activity builds muscle. Any physical activity makes you more fit. But not all physical activity is enjoyable. So why not do what makes you happy?

Seeing Exercise As a Burden

For many people there is a negative association with exercise, and this can happen for many reasons. For starters, many people start exercising when they start dieting. And due to the failed nature of diets, they begin to associate exercise with failure and misery.

Exercise starts off fun while you’re motivated, but the dieting and calorie restriction slowly but surely result in less energy and less drive to exercise. It’s like trying to drive more on less fuel. Eventually, you just don’t want to, or can’t, exercise anymore.

Another reason is we’ve been conditioned to view exercise as punishment. In schools growing up, we were forced to run laps or do pushups when we were bad. One day my daughter came home and said if she didn’t get something signed that she would have to run laps. I asked her what’s wrong with running laps? And she said she hated running.

Now, before she started school she used to beg my wife and me to come with us to the stadium track. As a 5 year old she was doing sprints down the track with us and running stairs. I’m not even kidding. She thought it was fun. But once school associated exercise with punishment, she didn’t like it any more. Suddenly, exercise hurt.

Many of us still have the associations with exercise from our childhoods. Maybe your parents told you to exercise because you were overweight, or maybe you do it because you hate your body. Whatever the case, when exercise takes on these negative connotations, it makes it less likely that you’ll willingly do it.

If you have a negative association with exercise then your first step is to create a more neutral environment surrounding it. You’ll do that by not thinking of it as exercise anymore and instead start seeing it as movement. That’s all you’re really doing with exercise anyways – expressing movement of your body, and hopefully there’s an enjoyment component to it too.

And then you let go of the ideas that you have to do a certain amount of it for it to be worthwhile, or that you have to do a particular type of exercise for it to be effective. You’re going to do whatever sounds good to you, for however long you like, as many times as you want to.

Exercise is about you. No one is forcing you to do it. You don’t even have to do it to lose weight. Your only goal is to work towards finding joy in physical activity again. Once you get to the point that you’re moving your body consistently again simply because it feels good, that’s when you can visit those performance and physique goals.

In the meantime, the priority is breaking the negative associations you have with exercise. Look at this relationship closely and with an open mind though. Most of us do have remnants of past negative ties to exercise. Old or even current experiences that involve exercise and punishment, no pain no gain mentality, injuries, lack of results, or simply not liking what you’re doing can all be subconsciously influencing your relationship with exercise.