When I look back at my almost 30 years of working-out, what I see is little trouble staying consistent in the gym, but a Melville-sized white whale in the kitchen.
In the bakery. In the drive-thru window. Down at the Dunkin’ Donuts. That local hole in the wall selling a three-patty smash burger with cheese and fried mushrooms.
I am an absolute fiend for junk food. Chocolate, cakes, pies, pastries, fat-pizza and fat-burgers, gat-dang I will shove them all in my fat face with no remorse while washing them down with 7% beers.
This is not such a huge deal when you are young and living a perma-bulk lifestyle. Not that it’s good for you, but a youthful body is much more tolerant of culinary sinning.
Being over 45 and not interested in looking like a sumo wrassler, the hashtag YOLO diet does not work.
Diet confounded me for so long because it fits into the other 165 hours of the week. You want me to lift for 3-5 hours a week, fine, that’s easy. You want me to deprive myself of delicious goodies for the rest of that time?
It’s easy to be good for a few hours. Anybody can do it.
Being disciplined and on-point for the rest of life, there’s the challenge.
Based on the stats for obesity and lifestyle-related health problems, I ain’t alone in this.
Taming that inner fat-kid is the hard problem, and where all the real victories are found.
Diet is the hardest part because diet is behavior throughout your whole life.
Being good with your food often means hard choices, and not only about tasty treats. Do you stick to your guns and avoid that party you wanted to go to? What about drinks after work? What about the dinner that you can’t skip and you know it’s going to be full of terrible foods?
Food is life. As we’re often reminded, we live in a society where calories are cheap, plentiful, and hard to avoid, while physical activity is at all-time lows.
Yes, over-eating is an environment issue. It’d be foolish to think that your surroundings didn’t influence your eating. At the same time, I don’t buy this line that “willpower doesn’t work” and other platitudes like “over-eating isn’t a character problem”.
It damn sure is both of those. Environment contributes, but so do your own choices, desires, wishes, convictions, and actions. Environment allows character to manifest. Character is expressed in choices and actions within an environment.
Making it into an either-or binary so that people don’t have to take responsibility (and therefore feel upset) is a large part of how we land where we end up.
That debate is tired and not all that interesting anyway.
I can’t imagine any good coming from spending all your time figuring out how to not be at fault for your circumstances. That energy could be used to create the change you want to make.
What’s interesting is the opportunities to make changes in spite of your calorie-rich surroundings and inner character that wants chocolate custard donuts.
My diet’s gone a complete tune-up since 2023 because I don’t overthink things. I also don’t deny myself tasty goodies and beers.
That’s why I’ve got my daughters saying “daddy’s got abs?!?” when we go to the beach. (Don’t get excited. They aren’t that great yet. I’m not a “shirtless pics bro” kind of fitness guy, anyway.)
Environment plus character are not just limitations, they are opportunities. You can fight them, or you can work with them with a couple of simple rules that govern everything that goes in your mouth.
This is but one of many tools in my kit for creating radical transformations in a body with quick, easy, time-saving methods that will leaving you slapping your forehead as to why you didn’t know about this sooner.
I work with clients over 40 to stop beating yourself up (in the gym and out), cut out all the extra junk in your eating and exercise that keeps you stalled, and fix you up good so you can get that flab off, feel better, and look better.
If you’re interested in working with me to see real results for once, and you’re actually committed to doing it, make sure you’re on the list to find out when spaces open.
Matt Perryman