I recognize the insanity in my own writing, which I’ve often written off as “duality”, because I frequently find myself screaming sentiments that are the exact opposite of what I’ve said almost in the most recent post, and today will be no exception to that. For though I’ve written much on the subject of going to extremes in order to get extreme results, today I wish to discuss the notion of just how LITTLE it takes in order to make progress. But, in turn, because of that, we are truly so very liberated in our pursuit of physical transformation, for it means that effectively ANY avenue we take will lead to success: we simply need to take one. Which, in turn, speaks more toward one of the most significant principles at play here: intention. And this may well be the missing variable in many folks quest for physical transformation: a lack of clearly understood intent, operating instead of a nebulous constructs, hopes, thoughts and prayers. And unwillingness to flat out say “THIS is the thing”, perhaps out of fear that, once identified, their intention is vulnerable to critique, whereas an undefined concept renders itself impervious to criticism by means of a “no true Scotsman” defense. But let us explore just how little is required in order to achieve change, such that we no longer need fear having an understood intent and can, instead learn to embrace just what “one little spark” can ignite.
And now the song is stuck in YOUR head
Our current
state of existence is alien to our biology.
Our bodies are old (at least 6000 years!
…if you believe certain schools of thought, but realistically more in
the hundreds of thousands of years) and were designed to operate in old
environments, and in such environments they operate VERY well. Unfortunately, one of the cool things ABOUT
our old bodies is the big brain they carry, and those big brains got our bodies
in some trouble, because they went about INVENTING an environment that we were
in NO way suited to exist in. We had
bodies built for migration and scavenging, but we created agriculture and a
static environment. We adapted to eating
seasonally, but we learned how to force the plants to grow on OUR
schedule. We were built to experience
stress in limited capacities, engage our sympathetic nervous system to mitigate
the stress, and resume relaxing, but instead created “fake stress” by means of
employment, deadlines, social obligations, etc, and put ourselves in a
perpetual sympathetic state. We were
built for motion, and then we built chairs.
What is the end result of this?
We have bodies that were built to move, to flux between periods of feast
and famine with the changes in the season, to exist in a state of low stress
and instead we have locked ourselves down to a point where we can get HUNDREDS
of steps per day while eating processed “food like substances” and still be
stressed out of our minds without relief.
Our current existence is destroying us.
WHICH MEANS
that literally ANY intervention is going to be a POSITIVE one as it relates to
physical transformation, so long as it is one with intent. So long as we specifically identify SOMETHING
that we are going to do differently than what we are currently doing, we stand
to make SOME sort of improvement to our situation, irrespective of how
insignificant it is. Quite simply, this
is because, often, the introduction of ONE thing necessitates the cessation of
some OTHER damaging thing that is in our current environment. For an absurd example: if you decided you
were going to go on the “Big Mac Diet”, where you ONLY ate Big Macs…this would
ACTUALLY be a significant improvement from the current state of existence for
the majority of Americans. If you’re
ONLY eating Big Macs, this means you AREN’T eating the fries, milkshakes,
office candy, or other processed garbage that exists out there: you’re limited
the dosage of your poison. You cut OUT a
lot of junk by deciding you’re only going to eat ONE junkfood. We’ve witnessed these sorts of interventions
work COUNTLESS times: people switching from regular soda to diet soda, people
swapping from beer to vodka, from triple whoppers to double whoppers, etc. When I was 14 and lost 25lbs over a summer, I
went from eating 6 slices of pizza during “pizza night” to 3 slices, and from 3
cheeseburgers to 1. In all these
instances, the avenue to success is the same: IDENTIFYING that there is, in
fact, something wrong with the current environment and engaging in AN intervention
of some variety.
This outcome looks MUCH better than how the Subway diet went for Jared...
Again: this
is liberation! It means we can do
whatever we want and make progress, because the only place to go from rock
bottom is UP! Which means we never need
to stress on if we’re making “the best decision”, because ALL decisions are the
right one. It simply boils down to you
making a decision you can actually sustain.
And THAT is “the rub”.
Interventions only work if you actually abide by them, which is WHY they
must be “intentional interventions”.
People that approach transformation by just saying “I’m going to eat
better and exercise more” do neither, primarily because they have no northern
star to follow. People that engage in
seemingly stupid interventions STILL succeed simply because they actually ABIDE
by them. It’s why “fad” diets and
programs work: because they are AN intervention from our currently destructive
environment, and often it is the gimmicky nature of them that ALLOW for
compliance, because it’s just ONE thing to do.
So many folks are simply lacking in bandwidth AS A RESULT of our
ridiculous environment that they don’t feel they have the capacity to navigate
anything with any actual nuance, but tell them “don’t eat bread”, “don’t eat
after 8:00pm”, “do 300 push ups a day” and they can now approach intervention
with intent and, in turn, succeed.
So give
yourself the permission required to attempt any means of intervention you
desire in the quest for physical transformation: it’s ALL going to work. ANYTHING is better than our baseline, and
“one little spark” will ignite a significant change simply because it will get
us moving AWAY from center toward something different and better.
