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Thursday, August 29, 2024

The Warrior Emotion

  August 29, 2024    

Nick Cave has taken over my life for the past month.

Mr. Cave has been putting out music since the mid 1980s with his band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. He’s also a writer, screenwriter, poet, and all-around interesting dude.

His band’s most famous song, “​Red Right Hand​,” serves as the theme song for the show Peaky Blinders, which I have been watching this summer.

And last week, Nick Cave turned up again in my life, and I can’t stop thinking about his words.

In a recent interview with Stephen Colbert, Cave talked about a letter he received from a fan who struggled to find hope as a young father:

“Following the last few years, I’m feeling empty and more cynical than ever….do you still believe in us [human beings]?”

Whether we’re struggling to stay motivated on a project or goal, or we get overwhelmed as a ​”Receiver of Memories” for all the pain in the world​, I know what it’s like to get cynical and lose hope sometimes!

I bet you do too.

Which is why I was so damn moved by ​Nick’s reply​, which I promise you is worth the watch:

Because I’m a nice guy I took the liberty of writing out Cave’s reply here:

“My early life was spent holding the world and the people in it in contempt. It was a position both seductive and indulgent.

The truth is, I was young and had no idea what was coming down the line.

It took a devastation to teach me the preciousness of life and the essential goodness of people…

…It took a devastation to find hope.”

Here I paused the video, and learned that Cave’s 15-year old son had accidentally fallen to his death back in 2015.

Armed with this knowledge, I continued watching the video and was moved to tears:

“Unlike cynicism, hopefulness is hard-earned, makes demands upon us, and can often feel like the most indefensible and lonely place on Earth.

Hopefulness is not a neutral position.

It’s adversarial.

It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism.”

Hope Plus Acceptance

I’ve ​written about acceptance​ quite a bit in this newsletter, as it’s the skill I’ve had to work hardest at developing for myself over the past few years.

I’m now realizing that acceptance combined with hope is the most powerful path forward when we are trying to navigate life.

It’s not just having passive hope that “things will work out.” After all, things might not work out. At least, not the way we expect them to.

Rather, it’s actively cultivating hopefulness that we can endure whatever comes our way.

In a ​past newsletter I wrote about hope​, I pulled this quote from Dr. Lakshmin’s Real Self-Care:

“Hope needs to be “something you do,” not “something you feel.”

Hope can be practiced by locating a deep desire, value, or commitment and taking a step towards it.

…While optimism is the sense that everything will be okay, people who are hopeful have the understanding that things may not be okay, but that they have agency to make things a little better for themselves or for others.”

Hopefulness is the warrior emotion that lays waste to the resistance in our heads.

Hopefulness helps us realize “Even if life is a dumpster fire, I have the ability to endure and survive whatever ball of chaos is heading my way.”

I leave you with this today:

Whatever goal you are working towards, whatever struggle you find yourself stuck on, no matter where you find yourself in the game of life…

I hope this newsletter reminds you that you have agency.

I hope this newsletter reminds you that any progress you make today, no matter how small, is powerful.

As Nick concludes in the final moments of the video above:

“Each redemptive or loving act, as small as you’d like, such as reading to your little boy, or showing him a thing you love, or singing him a song, or putting on his shoes keeps the devil down in the hole.

It says the world and its inhabitants have value and are worth defending.

It says the world is worth believing in.

In time, we come to find that this is so.”

-Steve

The post The Warrior Emotion first appeared on Nerd Fitness.



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Monday, August 12, 2024

What if you NEVER get there?

  August 12, 2024    

About a year ago, I decided to make a big change to this very newsletter you’re reading.

You see, from 2020-2023 I was pretty unmotivated to do my job.

Which is kind of amazing, when you realize that I have complete autonomy, created Nerd Fitness, and essentially built my own job.

I had spent years trying to be the person that I thought Nerd Fitness and the community needed me to be, instead of doing what I’m actually good at (writing interesting things in fun ways and helping people level up).

How did I find myself in that unwanted place?

One small decision after another, slowly over many years.

I kept picking projects I didn’t like and forcing myself to do them, but justified it to myself by saying, “I just have to do this until [arbitrary goal or date], and then I can be done.”

The problem of course, was that I never reached my arbitrary goal. Or I changed what the goal was, or the world changed, or the business changed.

I ended up spending every day doing something I didn’t like, for a payoff that never came.

I did this for years, and burned myself out.

After ​lots of therapy​, long walks, soul searching and failing repeatedly, I finally asked the important question: If I NEVER “get there,” what would I do differently?

I realized I had to change how I spent my time and how I set goals.

Instead of doing stuff I didn’t like and hoping for an eventual payoff, I restructured my day around why I started Nerd Fitness in the first place:

Reading widely about random topics that pique my interest, and then sharing my excited thoughts on those topics with a bunch of nerds (hey, that’s you!).

Since then, I’ve written dozens of newsletters about weird topics, hobbies, life, philosophy, and everything in between:

130,000+ people now get this newsletter every week, and it’s only reinforced my decision to stop focusing on the destination and get back to finding ways to enjoy the journey.

I plan on writing this newsletter for decades to come, and I am excited about this opportunity to email you weird stuff weekly.

I now ask you the same question.

What if you never “get there”?

Years ago, I stumbled across somebody on Reddit asking what the worst part was about being overweight.

One answer broke my heart:

“The fact that you put your whole life on hold, telling yourself that you will resume living when you lose the weight. Then, not being consistent with said weight loss journey and basically…never getting to truly live.”

Every day, I see people doing exercise they hate, or trying to follow a diet they don’t enjoy, to reach an arbitrary number on the scale that they think will make them happy.

Most can’t stick with the diet or workout for more than a few weeks, get demoralized, and give up.

Others manage to lose the weight, only to realize seeing a smaller number on their scale didn’t magically solve all of their problems. They decide the daily misery isn’t worth it.

It’s time to flip the script and give up!

We’ll never “get there,” because “there” isn’t an actual place we can get. It’s a state of mind.

This should change how we think about the workout or diet we choose, the goal we design our life around, or the expectation we set for ourselves.

My goal with this newsletter, and for our coaching clients, is helping people reach the following realization:

Finding ​ways to enjoy exercise​, and making ​dietary changes that don’t feel overwhelming​, is the only path forward. Even better, this often results in reaching our goals faster than when we chased fads or strategies we hated!

I’m reminded of this quote from philosopher Sam Harris:

“Most of your life is the process of solving problems.

It is not, and never will be, a condition of basking in the absence of all problems. There will always be something to do.”

Author Mark Manson put it more succinctly:

“Don’t hope for a life with no problems. Hope for a life with better problems.”

What are you going to do differently?

As Albert Camus explains about ​Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the hill​, there’s a beautiful freedom that comes with acceptance of never “getting there”:

Sisyphus is “free” from the hope he would ever succeed. He accepts his fate he would never win, and thus can just get to work on finding meaning in pushing that rock, watching it roll back down, and starting over again.

None of us are getting out of here alive, and today is the only guarantee.

I want to hear about what you would do differently if you knew you would never “get there.”

What would you change?

Would you:

I want to hear what you’ll change on your daily journey.

Hit reply and let me know. I’ll be over here pushing this boulder up a hill.

-Steve

The post What if you NEVER get there? first appeared on Nerd Fitness.



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Tuesday, August 6, 2024

Can you really be Diet Resistant?

  August 06, 2024    

In 1992, a study was conducted on weight loss resistant individuals.

In this study, the lab specifically studied people who reported eating less than 1200 calories daily and had bodies that were resistant to losing weight.

Researchers set out to explore this phenomenon:

  • Were their bodies kicking into starvation mode?
  • Did their bodies process calories differently?
  • Was something else going on?

They brought these people into a metabolic ward, and used an energy tracking system that involved “doubly-labeled water.”

Essentially, these techniques allowed them to track everything exactly: How much energy was expelled via waste, sweat, or breath, how many calories were consumed.

This is the gold standard for tracking calories “in” and tracking calories “out.”

Group 1 included the people above who were described as “diet resistant.”

Group 2 was the control group: people who had zero history of “dietary resistance.”

What did this study reveal?

What was different about how Group 1 processed calories compared to Group 2?

The result: ​not much​!

Total energy expenditure and resting metabolic rate in the subjects with diet resistance (group 1) were within 5 percent of the predicted values for body composition, and there was no significant difference between groups 1 and 2 in the thermic effects of food and exercise.

Here’s what the study DID reveal:

Subjects in Group 1 drastically underestimated how many calories they were eating by an average of 47%.

This meant they thought they were eating 1200 calories, but actually consumed 1800 calories or more.

Group 1 also overestimated how many calories they burned through exercise by 51%.

Which meant if they thought they had burned 300 calories exercising, they really only burned 200 calories.

Combine these two things and most of us have a massive discrepancy between how much we think we eat, and how much we actually eat.

We humans suck at all sorts of things!

Life is hard, and ​we humans aren’t cut out to thrive in a world of abundance​.

At the same time, we’re pretty bad at quite a few things:

I can tell you what we’re really good at though: crafting narratives.

Our brains will jump through hoops to craft a story that explains why our body doesn’t obey the same laws of thermodynamics as everybody else.

It’s similar to the story we tell ourselves about getting older: “Of course I gained weight, my metabolism slowed down when I hit 20/30/40 years old,” when ​science tells a different story​.

Our brains are convinced by these narratives far more easily than accepting the uncomfortable reality:

If we are ​trying to lose weight​ but the scale isn’t going down, we are eating more than we realize.

YES, hormones and stress and life and our environment and relationship with food can impact how much food we eat, or the types of food we crave. Some people have medical conditions that impact how their bodies respond to calories or exercise…

But when it comes to the number on the scale, our bodies still obey thermodynamics.

This is actually amazing news, if we can accept it.

So let’s start there.

Self-compassionate Acceptance

If we’re telling ourselves a narrative that we’re broken and progress is hopeless, we can start with self-compassionate acceptance:

Of course we suck at counting calories!

Of course we don’t know how much we actually eat!

We’re not cut out for this type of environment in which delicious, calorie-dense food is always available.

That doesn’t make us a bad person, nor does it mean we need to shame ourselves or beat ourselves up.

Instead, we can accept that we’re bad at this (because everybody is), and then adjust our behavior accordingly:

  • We can learn how to actually track calories, educate ourselves on actual serving sizes for our favorite foods or meals.
  • We can work on ​eating more nutrient rich, filling foods​ that have less calories. Lean protein, fruits and vegetables. It’s quite tough to “overeat” vegetables!
  • We can cut back on easily consumed liquid calories and switch to zero calorie beverages.
  • We can use ​Ulysses Pacts​ to protect ourselves from…ourselves.

And even then, despite our best efforts, we should accept that we’ll still eat more than we think each day.

Not because we’re broken, dumb, or stupid.

But because we’re human.

-Steve

The post Can you really be Diet Resistant? first appeared on Nerd Fitness.



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