DO YOU WANT THE KIND OF BODY THAT WAS BUILT BY MILK DUDS?

I owe the topic title to u/CommonKings over on reddit, who is an absolute psychopath regrading all matters of training and is absolutely on my kickball team for Ragnarok (dude ran a version of Deep Water where he STARTED at 2 minutes rest and went down from there, f--k me).  Predictably, I was slumming it on the internet and came across a (hopefully) young trainee that was wanting to know if they could make use of Milk Duds (a confection of chocolate coated caramel, wherein 3 of the first 4 ingredients are simply different ways to say sugar [corn syrup, sugar, and dextrose] and the “milk” finally shows up as skim milk on ingredient 5) as a means of achieving their goal of physical transformation.  They assured us all that they would, of course, be following a diet that hit ALL the necessary macro AND micro nutrients: the Milk Duds were simply going to be utilized as a “necessary evil” in order to achieve their caloric goal of the day to promote muscular growth.  What a dandy idea: candy for gains!  To which I asked the eponymous topic title: “do you want the kind of body that was built by Milk Duds?”

At least go with the Peanut M&M... for the protein

 

I’m gonna go full Aristotle here folks: your body is a reflection of your habits.  There is no greater truth teller than your physical appearance.  Now, I’m not going to go full Greek here to present the idea that beautiful people are more virtuous than ugly people, because we can only get so jacked but no one can fix our face, but as far as what our BODY presents: it’s telling ALL of our secrets.  There is no hiding behind a screen or an alias or some e-stats: our body presents to the world a sum of our habits.  And that’s the thing: it’s HABITS.  It’s the things we’re ALWAYS doing that the body shares with the world.  If you absolutely crushed your last workout, and the 24 workouts prior to that were phoned in, your body is going to display those 24 workouts, not your last one.  And expand that out to the micro level: if the ONLY physical greatness you achieve daily is a 1-2 hour workout, and you spend the next 22 hours being a slob, what do you imagine your body will present?

 

This is such common sense thing that NO ONE wants to acknowledge because it’s “unfair”, but your body doesn’t care about fair: it shares your secrets with the world.  This is “being that which does”.  A body that constants experience toil, suffering, and overcoming is going to outwardly reflect a being that suffers, toils and overcomes…and those beings are physically awesome.  A body that constantly experiences leisure, comfort, and pleasure is going to reflect a being of leisure, comfort and pleasure.  From there, it’s a question of ratios: the greater the time spent overcoming, the more the body reflects an overcomer.  And, for those of us pursuing physical transformation, we seek to be an overcomer.

The body, seen here, overcoming

 

Your “body by Milk Duds” is not the body of an overcomer.  It is the body of a schemer.  Of a trickster.  Of someone who relies on guile vs brutality to resolve a difficulty.  I am sure your cranium will enlarge to accommodate your big brain that came up with this foolproof plan to almost quite literally “have your cake and eat it”, but your body will reflect that OF a cake-eater vs an overcomer.  Just from a very basic common sense perspective I ask you the question “do you want the kind of body that was built by Milk Duds?”  I ask this question and it upsets you because you don’t WANT the answer to be “no”, but we already know that, by asking for the permission to do it in the first place, we KNEW it wasn’t right: we just hoped we were wrong about BEING wrong.

 

“But Dave Tate lived off of Oreos and Little Debbies when he was in his prime!”  And what did Dave eat ON THE WAY to those confectionary treats?  Have you, gentle reader, gained up to 275lbs of bodyweight on chicken, rice and broccoli before you finally hit a gastrointestinal wall that necessitated having to overcome THROUGH comfort?  Can you imagine the sort of twisted Faustian deal wherein one must actually force the intake of the very foods people consider “treats” because they are so nutritionally dense that they can finally bridge the gap necessary to create FURTHER growth in the pursuit of physical transformation?  To have to totally warp your own reality such that the very thing that people use to experience transient dopamine-releasing joy through simulation of simple pleasure centers is instead utilized as a tool to create even further discomfort, agony and toil in the pursuit of physical transformation?  The cenobites couldn’t devise such insanity…and, meanwhile, Dave would be the first to tell you that he looked physically awful during that time as well, because the body will STILL tell all of our secrets: we’re eating more candy than we’re not eating.  Yeah, we may be squatting 900lbs and benching 600…but we are still candy eaters.

Shirtless, not to show off physique, but because you're ALWAYS sweating when you're this big

 

BUT, the tyranny and cruelty of the body can absolutely be played against itself, because it is nothing but transparent in its evil.  We know EXACTLY what the body is going to do: it’s going to share our secrets with the world.  In turn, all WE need to do is control the secrets.  If we do not create gossip, if we live on the straight and narrow, if we exist AS overcomers, the body will have no choice but to share THAT secret.  Do you realize how empowering it is to have so predictable of an enemy?  To know, before the battle starts, EXACTLY what they are going to do?  This is playing rock-paper-scissors with Bart Simpson: I can lament the fact that I can never play scissors, OR I can celebrate the fact that victory is assured because my opponent ALWAYS chooses rock and I merely need to pick paper. 

 

All we need to do to succeed is have boring secrets to share.  When we are consistently overcoming, in the realm of training and nutrition, we will have a body built by overcoming.  When are consistently eating Milk Duds, we will have a body build by Milk Duds.  Which one do you want?