It starts with presence. According to studies, 46.9% of your waking hours is spent thinking about what isn’t going on in that particular moment. For instance, as you walk down the street, your mind often goes to future conversations or past events instead of focusing on the present.http://markfisherfitness.com/dedicated-pursuit-happiness/
When you refer to food as fuel it does NOT mean that you dismiss all the things that food is and does. It does not mean that you see fuel as the only story about food. Rather, it’s a way of communicating food to people who desire simplification of eating in a way that they can relate to and follow.
Hang on; we’re going to get all science-y on your ass.
The all or nothing approach isn’t just flawed — it’s dangerous. The “all” end can lead to obsession (some may binge eat, develop disordered eating habits, use exercise as punishment, etc.), shame and guilt (from being unable to sustain such a rigid methodology), and of course dissatisfaction from never reaching one’s goals. The “nothing” end is, well, where you don’t do a damn thing; you don’t work out regularly or make consistent smart food choices. Since you’re not “doing the plan perfectly” you decide not to do anything.
So, I let a situation that is completely irrelevant to me, out of my control, and 100% not my business, absolutely destroy my day. Oops.
I obsessed over it. I talked it through with my bestie. I ate approximately one bazillion chocolate-covered almonds for dinner. I might have done a little bit of crying.
I tried to take my mind off of it, but I kept choosing to replay everything in my head over and over again.http://us5.campaign-archive1.com/?u=17c1d1bd92a5e1774fe0e76f8&id=e96a46b091&e=7eef2ecd59
It is so important to note that my unhealthy lifestyle was not the cause of my problems, it was just a symptom of a larger issue, not being true to myself and not living an authentic life. I think this is the case with most people who adopt unhealthy eating and workout patterns. A larger issue or stressor is causing them to use exercise and nutrition in a negative manner to control whatever they are feeling powerless over. Like an injury, unless you address the root cause of the problem, you will never find a permanent solution, and will likely experience one setback after another. I eventually recognized this, and made loving my authentic self and living my life openly a huge priority. After all, doing so was a choice. This is when all aspects of my life changed for the better, including my workouts and nutrition.
What’s changed is not our inability to manage our time or “balance our lives” between work and play. What’s changed is that we have more opportunities for work and play than ever before — more interests, more awareness of every potential experience we’re passing up. In short, we have more opportunity cost.
And we’re made aware of this in a terribly connected way each day. Every person who decides to sacrifice their dating life to advance their career is now bombarded constantly by the rambunctious sex lives of their friends and strangers. Every person who sacrifices their career prospects to dedicate more time and energy to their family is now bombarded with the material successes of the most exceptional people around them at all times. Every person who decides to take a thankless but necessary role in society is now constantly drowned in inane stories of the famous and beautiful.
So how do we respond to this new, overly-connected culture? How do we manage our FOMO?You CAN and SHOULD read it all: https://markmanson.net/you-cant-have-it-all
Used to. As if somehow my younger, once stronger self was in competition with my present self.
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Used to. As if today I am less worthy and less of an athlete because I can’t do what I did in the past.
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Used to is just another sneaky way in which my inner critic uses shame and unworthiness to spur some sort of misguided ambition.
But it doesn’t really work that way, does it? Shame doesn’t inspire us to work harder or smarter. It simply keeps us feeling small.Quick read, go enjoy it: https://www.girlsgonestrong.com/blog/mindset/used-to/
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| This is utter fucking bullshit. |
In the last few years, I’ve had the extreme pleasure of fully regaining my worthiness and completely detaching it from my physique. A number of these universal truths contributed to that process.
I want to share five mindset shifts that helped me in my process, and that you might find helpful as well, whether you’ve just begun your journey to body acceptance, or you’re well on the way.
The fitness industry—from gyms to clothing manufacturers—collectively produces more propaganda than North Korea, a lot of it just as crazy.
...the truth is, we’re all tired. Every single one of us. By a certain age, we are all nothing more than an army of broken hearts and aching souls, desperately searching for fulfillment. We want more but we’re too tired to ask for it. We’re sick of where we are but we are too scared to begin again. We need to take risks but we’re afraid to watch it all come crashing down around us. After all, we’re not sure how many times we will be able to start over.
Showing your friends and family only the parts of your life where you have it all together is like letting those people look at a book’s cover or maybe flip through it, but not letting them actually read the book… and then wondering why they don’t understand the story line. We are all too good at keeping a distance between us and others. We hide the ugly parts, the sorrows the fears. Especially the fears. We wear “emotional armor” in an attempt to protect ourselves from being hurt if someone rejects or hurts us. We keep our vulnerability to a minimum in order to prevent others from hurting us, but in doing so, we maintain an extra space between us and them.
On any given day, most of your choices as a giraffe—like what to eat or where to sleep or when to avoid a predator—make an immediate impact on your life. You live in what researchers call an Immediate Return Environment because your actions deliver immediate benefits. Your life is strongly oriented toward the present moment.
Now, let’s flip the script and pretend you are one of the humans vacationing on safari. Unlike the giraffe, humans live in what researchers call a Delayed Return Environment.
Most of the choices you make today will not benefit you immediately. If you do a good job at work today, you’ll get a paycheck in a few weeks. If you save money now, you’ll have enough for retirement later. Many aspects of modern society are designed to delay rewards until some point in the future.
What are you so fucking worried about?
You are here now. Eventually, you will be gone. You have but a nanosecond on the universal clock to do whatever it is you’re going to do. When that time is gone, it’s gone. Forever.
That means that although what you do doesn’t matter to the universe, it should matter one hell of a lot to YOU.
In fact, it should matter to you more than it currently does. If you knew how small you are and how short a time you have to do what you can, you wouldn’t waste time watching five fucking hours of TV a day. You wouldn’t waste time doing a job you hate. You wouldn’t waste the little time you have dealing with assholes, feeling sorry for yourself, or being timid about the things you’d really like to do.
She doesn’t owe you a smile, a wave, her phone number, a date, a second date, a kiss, a blowjob or a fuck. It doesn’t matter if you complimented her, bought her drinks, took her to dinner, gave her a ride or made her a mix tape. She doesn’t owe you shit.
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Stop turning a blind eye. Believe what women say, and admit that rape culture is a real thing. I know some people call bullshit on that term, but after reading the comments in this piece what the hell else would you call it?
Muscles heal. Bones grow. It’s the mental part of injury that haunts us – that keeps us awake at night. It’s the demons and the voices in the head – the fear that we’ll “never get back” to where we once were, or we “threw away all that hard work and training” or that we were in the “best shape of our lives” and now can only sit by as first-row spectators to watch as we lose our muscle, our endurance, our speed, our V02Max, and, at the core of it, our sense of self and our confidence.
And, if you really, truly, love your sport, what eats at you day and night is the overwhelming sense of losing a part of yourself. You mourn those missed opportunities. Toeing that start line. The joy of a hard training session and the feeling of accomplished soreness. You feel…lost. A ship without an anchor. Or fries without ketchup.
If you imagine the 4,500-billion-odd years of Earth's history compressed into a normal earthly day, then life begins very early, about 4 a.m., with the rise of the first simple, single-celled organisms, but then advances no further for the next sixteen hours. Not until almost 8:30 in the evening, with the day five-sixths over, has Earth anything to show the universe but a restless skin of microbes. Then, finally, the first sea plants appear, followed twenty minutes later by the first jellyfish and the enigmatic Ediacaran fauna first seen by Reginald Sprigg in Australia. At 9:04 p.m. trilobites swim onto the scene, followed more or less immediately by the shapely creatures of the Burgess Shale. Just before 10 p.m. plants begin to pop up on the land. Soon after, with less than two hours left in the day, the first land creatures follow.
Thanks to ten minutes or so of balmy weather, by 10:24 the Earth is covered in the great carboniferous forests whose residues give us all our coal, and the first winged insects are evident. Dinosaurs plod onto the scene just before 11 p.m. and hold sway for about three-quarters of an hour. At twenty-one minutes to midnight they vanish and the age of mammals begins. Humans emerge one minutes and seventeen seconds before midnight. The whole of our recorded history, on this scale, would be no more than a few seconds, a single human lifetime barely an instant. Throughout this greatly speeded-up day continents slide about and bang together at a clip that seems positively reckless. Mountains rise and melt away, ocean basins come and go, ice sheets advance and withdraw. And throughout the whole, about three times every minute, somewhere on the planet there is a flash-bulb pop of light marking the impact of a Manson-sized meteor or one even larger. It's a wonder that anything at all can survive in such a pummeled and unsettled environment. In fact, not many things do for long.
Go back just eight generations to about the time that Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were born, and already there are over 250 people on whose timely couplings your existence depends. Continue further, to the time of Shakespeare and the Mayflower Pilgrims, and you have no fewer than 16,384 ancestors earnestly exchanging genetic material in a way that would, eventually and miraculously, result in you.
At twenty generations ago, the number of people procreating on your behalf has risen to 1,048,576. Five generations before that, and there are no fewer than 35,554,432 men and women on whose devoted couplings your existence depends. By thirty generations, your total number of forebears - remember, these aren't cousins and aunts and other incidental relatives but only parents and parents of parents in a line leading ineluctably to you - is over one billion (1,073,741,824 to be precise).
This recognition generally ruins culture for you, since culture is built around the game of a meaningful search for eternal truths, timeless values and changeless habits of prowess. And, it goes without saying, transcendence of the unpleasantly transient.
Time, of course, is the merciless slaughterer of all these infinitely qualified anchors of the meaning of life. Wait long enough, and every truth will crumble. Wait long enough, and every value will dissolve into moral ambiguity. Wait long enough, and every habit will decay, first into ritual, then into farce. Wait long enough, and every slain demon will rise again.
And then you will be free.
