YOUR BODY WANTS TO CHANGE

  

This thought hit me on my way walking into work after lunch, as I was contemplating the fact that I just ate my 4th identical lunch of the week (combination of chicken tenderloins and thighs in a sugar free teriyaki marinade with cauliflower rice and broccoli, eaten with chopsticks, because I am California yuppie scum) recovering from a morning workout that included 350 dips and 50+ reps of benching with a planned 5 minute run of my daily kettlebell Armor Building Complexes, contributing to a total amount of pressing reps somewhere in the bajillions.  THAT is one hell of an opening sentence: let me take a moment to be proud of that.  But anyway, I’ve already digressed: the above mentioned diet AND training program are absolute loony tunes bonkers and conform to pretty much no “ideal” approach out there.  But I woke up like this this morning

 

 

And I am the product of SOOOOO many bad decisions and ideas as far as eating, living and training go.  I am doing everything wrong, yet achieving results that have gotten me multiple accusations of both superior genetics AND drug usage.  The past 2 weeks I’ve been accosted by 3 strangers who wanted to inform me that I have large arms (thank goodness: I hadn’t noticed!), despite the fact I do 1 set of curls once a week.  I train the whole body everyday, I perform ludicrous challenges like this one weekly

 

 

And here I stand: a living testament to this one fact: your body WANTS to change.

 

And writing this is so weird, because I’ve written on many occasions about how much the body DOESN’T like change.  How it will fight VERY hard to maintain the status quo.  How you have to beat it into submission in order to FORCE it to grow.  But that’s the thing: that’s ALL you have to do to get it to grow.  You have to bend and shape it to your will…but it’s all TOO willing TO be beaten, bent and shaped.  It is modular, flexible, shapeable and transformable.  The body CRAVES change: it’s up to YOU to be the one to do what it takes to give it what it wants.

 

Don't leave it up to others

 

And the implication of this (man, I’m starting a lot of paragraphs here with ‘and’: my 1st grade teacher would kill me) is that it REALLY doesn’t matter HOW you attempt to force the body to change: it wants to change so bad that it will accept just about ANY stimulus whatsoever…as long as it remains CONSISTENT.  THIS is where the body not liking change comes into play.  The body tends to respond to consistent, repeated patterns.  It’s why I constantly say “it’s hard to lift weights wrong”: it REALLY is.  You just need to send the effort and consistency and the change will happen.  But if you’re little Johnny Program-Hopper and you’re constantly changing your approach, the body has no idea what the Hell the demand is, and never realizes an opportunity to change.  It wants that change SO badly, but because of your constant self-doubt and desire to optimize before you’ve even figured out how to achieve “good enough”, you’ve squandered that opportunity and denied the body it’s one real desire: to change.

 

Your body wants to change because it’s unsatisfied with what it is…and who can blame it?  It has SO much more potential just WAITING to be unlocked…and YOU hold the key…and it’s REALLY pissed at you for not opening it up!  All it wants is a chance: an opportunity.  It is champing at the bit here: give it what it wants!

Dan here doing his damndest to try to give it everything all at once

 

It’s why every single diet on the planet works.  Why?  Because a diet is simply a codified approach to eating.  It’s a consistent, repeatable approach based on SOME sort of principle, and that will ALWAYS achieve AN outcome when compared to the chaos that most people subject their body too nutritionally.  So many people live off the “wait until I’m hungry and eat whatever is around until I’m full/it’s gone” diet, and their physique and health are a reflection of this depressing approach.   How negligent: to subject your body to such mistreatment when ANY other approach would be better.  People who take control of their diets start by doing the most important thing first: they exercise MINDFULLNESS of what/how they eat.  Vegans and Carnivores BOTH experience improved health markers, because they went from someone who NEVER thought about what they were eating to someone that took time to think, even for a minute, about what they were putting into their bodies.  They provided their body what it needed in order to change: a mind willing to steer it.

 

“But isn’t chaos the plan?”  Oh my goodness yes!  BECAUSE chaos is the plan, my body has adapted into an outstanding avatar of chaos.  My body is an “on demand” body.  THAT is why I can roll up to a strongman competition having trained multiple times a day leading up to it INCLUDING that morning and still take first in 2 events.  It’s why I can accidentally drop to my leanest level of bodyfat ever when I’m living off fast food for a week.  It’s why I can “break all the rules”: because chaos IS the consistent variable I keep slamming my body with.  It’s not “chaos Monday through Friday, structure on weekends”.  It ONLY knows chaos, and, in turn, it is consistently changing to adapt TO chaos.  Consistency in chaos: how chaotic!

Yeah that checks

 

I realize how much I’ve tooted my own horn here, but the world will beat you down enough that it’s worth overcompensating on your own end in order to achieve some semblance of balance (future blogpost: be on the lookout).  I do so because, again, I am a living example.  With awful genetics, no drugs, substandard nutrition (ask the internet: you need carbs to grow!), and a ridiculous training plan, I’ve still succeeded.  It’s because your body really REALLY wants to change.  It’s so tired of looking like a melted candle, it’s so tired of feeling like it’s got pasta sauce for blood, it’s so tired of BEING so goddamn tired.  It was to move, fight, strain, grow, overcome and achieve: give it what it wants!