Podcast Transcription: The 6-Step Process To Burn Fat, Transform Your Body And Live Your Best Life In 2023 By Doing Less with Ted Ryce: Part 2

Ted Talk: What's up, my friend? Welcome back to another episode of the Legendary Life Podcast. I'm your host Ted Ryce, coach to CEOs, entrepreneurs, and other high-performing professionals. 

And what we do here at the Legendary Live Podcast is we break down science-based information on how to lose fat, prevent disease, and live a longer, healthier, legendary life. So, if this is your first time tuning and this sounds good to you, you are in the right place.  

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So today is part two of “How to Make Changes That Last.” Now, if you haven't listened to the previous episode, you're going to want to listen to that one. In that episode we talked about why is so hard. We talked about, even though so many of us, we know these stats about how being overweight is affecting our health or how we should get more sleep and so on and so forth, but we don't change our behavior and I go into why that's the case.  

We also talk about what change actually is. And we go through the steps of change. We go through something called The Stages of Change Model, also known as the Trans Theoretical Model. And this is from research, this is from people who've studied change.  

And this isn't something that someone came up with in a blog post and thought it was cool. There are so many people sharing information these days, and there's nothing wrong with that, obviously. I'm personally benefiting from that, but there is a lot of misinformation or just ideas that maybe sound good but don't really work when you put them into real life. 

Kind of like strict diets. It's like, yeah, strict diets work for a little while, but then what happens when you're like, “Screw this. I can't be this strict anymore.” So, scientists are out there trying to figure things out, and people like me take that science and use it with my clients, with our clients. It's a team of people here at Legendary Life.  

So you want to listen to that first episode. And you're going to learn a lot about if you've ever wondered why change is so difficult. Now, in this episode, we're going to be talking about the six key ingredients to making lasting change. I briefly went over them in the previous episode, but today we're going to take a deep dive because these six ingredients, they weren't an episode all to themself. 

So, if you're interested in making changes in your life, you're going to want to listen to this whole series, in fact, this two-part series. But I've got a lot more coming because this is what I found after being in health and fitness for over two decades now, that the biological side, it's really not the challenge. 

People say they have a slow metabolism. They say it's hormones, they say it's all types of things. Endocrine disrupting chemicals in the water. The GMOs that are in our food supply, it's the hormones that are in the animals. It's…Look, I've been down that road, and certainly there's some importance with regards to speaking about those things and talking about how they may affect our health. 

But here's the thing. It's kind of like saying, hey, listen, you know, do you want to save more money? Are you struggling financially? Well, listen, you know how you pay $7 a month for Netflix, if you just cancel that, you'll save money. And you're like, “Yeah, but seven bucks. Mm. That's really not going to make a dent. That's really not going to move the needle in the direction I want it.” 

And so much advice out there. It's tantamount to saying that to save money, cancel your Netflix subscription to save some money. Or stop buying coffee every morning. And for me, I'm like, no way am I going to stop buying my cappuccinos every morning. I'm not going to make them at home. Right? Even though that's more cost effective.  

I need to get out of my house. I need to be around people. Sorry for those of you who are in strict lockdowns. I'm in a place that I still get to go out with the social distancing and all that, the mask and all that good stuff. 

So, listen, what I'm going over here to avoid bringing it back from the tangent here, what we're going to go over here are the six ingredients to change. Now let me just go over the six of them. And then we're going to take a deep dive into each one. So the six key ingredients are, number one, realistic expectations and appropriate goals. 

Number two, having internal motivation. So, we're going to talk about what that means, what motivation is. Number three is core skills. Four is an achievable action plan. Number five is support from your social circle, and number six is support from your environment. And I'm going to use examples out of my life, because I live this stuff. 

I don't just read about it, think about it, and then talk about it. I live this stuff, right? I've got a vested interest. I don't share things that I don't do, even if they work sometimes. I have a standard that I share things that I do or that I actually use with clients. So, let's dive into it. 

Realistic expectations and appropriate goals. Would you ever say…let's say you made 30,000 a year and you're in a job that you're not going to get promoted anytime soon, you can't get a raise anytime soon, and it's not a sales position, so it's not like a commission thing where you could sell more and then make more money. 

What if you said, well, you know what, I make 30,000 a year right now, USD, just to put some context around. But in 90 days, I'm going to make six figures. I'm going to make six figures in 90 days. How are you going to do that? I mean, certainly it’s possible. You could rob a bank, you could sell drugs, you could do so many things, but how can you do that in a way that is going to lead to lasting success? 

And that's kind of what people say a lot, is they come up with these ideas like, “Oh, I want to lose this much weight in this amount of time.” And usually, the number is quite high. I want to lose 70 pounds in 90 days. What ends up happening—or even 50 pounds in 90 days—what ends up happening is this. 

Think about this. I'm not going to even tell you what happens. I'm going to ask you. Let's say you set out with a goal of losing 50 pounds in 90 days. Now it's within the realm of possibility, by the way, if you were class three obesity or morbidly obese, you could lose 50 pounds in 90 days if you were on a very strict diet. 

It would be hard to do, and you shouldn't be focused on the number like that, and there would probably be a severe rebound when you couldn't be that strict anymore. But it is possible. I know people who've done it. None of my clients have done it, by the way. The most they've ever lost is 40 pounds in 90 days. 

We’ve got people lose 70 pounds in 180 days. And the thing is, that may not, let's say that you start out, and you want to lose 50 pounds in 90 days, and let's say you end up losing 27 pounds in 90 days. And let's not even say that. Let's say that you end up losing about 10 pounds in the first month after really going at it. 

And you start to see like, “Wow, I am really pushing hard. How am I going to get to 50 pounds? If a month of pushing hard got me here, how am I ever going to get to 50 pounds in 90 days?” And you start to realize the chances of that happening are super slim. What does that do to your motivation? And I can already answer it. 

It's going to shoot it in the foot. So many of my clients, when I first started out and didn't pay attention to the expectations that people had, you know, I've been coaching people for 20 years now, and when I didn't pay attention to their expectations, and I shouldn't say, didn't pay attention, what I should say is I let them kind of run wild with their imagination about what was possible. 

And I didn't, hey, listen, we need to talk about what your expectations are. We need to set some appropriate goals. When I didn't do that, people when they didn't live up, when their results didn't measure up to what they expected, it shot their motivation down. It's kind of like that thing: underpromise and over-deliver. 

That's always awesome. But how do you feel if someone sells you something and overpromises and under delivers? We all know how that goes. Realistic expectations and appropriate goals. If you're doing this on your own…Now I can get people to lose around 30 pounds in 90 days if they're obese. That's a good number to shoot for; somewhere in the high twenties to early thirties.  

But the thing is this, right? If you're on your own trying to do this, I have a system that I do, I have a bunch of different tools that I use. But if you're doing it on your own, what I would tell you, look to lose a pound a week. So, if you're doing a 90- day dietary intervention for yourself, expect to lose around 12 pounds or so. 

And if you do that, don't say, oh man, Ted gets, you know, 30 pounds is around the average 20 to 30 pounds. And I say 20 to 30 pounds because weight isn't everything. I have some leaner people who sign up with me. If they lost 20 pounds, they would be unhealthy. So, what I'm trying to say here is you may hear a number like what I get, and you may not be able to do it on your own. 

Of course, you don't run. You haven't been in this business for 20 years. You may be reading about it for 20 years, but people don't pay you to get results. This is how I put bread on my table. Believe me, I take it very seriously. And so, you're not going to have the same skills as me. You're not going to have the same tricks up your sleeve, the same experience, the same know-how, whenever the challenges arise, and there's no problem with that. 

Don't compare. If you're losing a pound a week, you're making great progress. Don't say, “Oh man, that sucks. I'm only losing a pound a week. I only lost 12 pounds in 90 days.” Say, “Awesome. I'm doing great. Let me keep at.” Do you see how the perspective changes? Do you see how this first one has to do with your mindset? 

This is not something that I'm just talking about because I feel like, you know, I needed to come up with something to talk about. This is legit something that comes up all the time in my coaching group and my one-on-one clients. And I'll make this distinction. Of course, this is my own personal experience with clients, but women tend to take this the hardest. 

Guys struggle with it too, but they kind of fall down and get back up and dust themselves off, usually. Women, I find the women that I've worked with, again, I'm talking from my personal experience here, and certainly I don't work with… You know, I haven't worked with every type of woman around. 

I'm just saying from my personal experience, I know we're living in very triggered times where people, you know, might take that the wrong way, that I'm making some distinctions based on gender, but that's what I'm going to do. I find that women, when they don't reach their goal or they feel they should be doing better, they're really hard on themselves, unnecessarily hard. 

And it's not even unnecessarily hard. It's self-sabotage hard. It's like, oh, I've only lost four pounds in four weeks. I am such a loser. And the reality is, you know how you probably heard me say my clients lose anywhere from four to six pounds in the first week of working with me. And that's true, by the way. But what I haven't said is that they lose that and then the rate of weight loss slows down, typically. That's the average.  

Sometimes it stays pretty, you know, it always slows down. It's never four to six pounds a week. It might be one to three pounds a week after, depending on the situation, the person, what they're willing to do, that type of thing. But it always slows down. And what I want to do here and what I'm challenging myself to do is to get you more realistic about what you should expect from your own efforts. 

Or when people sign up and work with me, I want them to understand. Why do I want to do that? Because I'll get better results. Maybe hyping things up, might get more people to sign up, but that short-term gain for me, what I'm looking at is if I get more people to sign up, but they understand, they're coming in with a clear head, clear expectations, appropriate goals, etc., they're going to last the whole 90 days and they're going to get great results, and then they're going to keep things in perspective. 

The last thing I want to say about this is that you have to constantly check yourself. If you're someone who has a lot of negative emotions that come up around your weight, you're going to have to constantly check yourself. All right, so let's move on to the next one. So, number one was realistic expectations and appropriate goals. 

Don't expect to lose something crazy. In fact, err on the side of losing a pound a week. And that's a good place to start. So the next one is motivation, and let's talk about what it means to have motivation. So, let's start by defining motivation. So motivation is the activation of goal-oriented behavior. 

So, when you say you're not motivated, what you're really saying is, I can't activate, I can't go and do the things that I need to do to achieve my goals. Does that make sense? And when you are motivated, you're able to activate that goal-oriented behavior. But what are the components of motivation? 

Because we usually hear things like, well, don't wait to get motivated, take action and then the motivation comes. But then you're like, well, I don't even have the motivation to start taking action so I get more motivation. So let's talk about it. We're going to be talking about this a little bit and how to get that. 

So first thing that we need to talk about is external versus internal motivation. And what we know is that internal motivation—people who are internally motivated are more likely to make behavioral changes that last, well, what does that mean? Let's say for example, you hear from society saying, hey, listen, you're obese, you're going to die an early death, your children are going to grow up fatherless or motherless. It's going to cost you a lot of money. You're going to suffer a lot when you get sick and so on and so forth. Or let's say friends make fun of you; they make fun of you for being overweight or even your family. 

And you get sick of hearing all the negativity. You get sick of people busting your chops about your weight and your fatness. And then you say, you know what? I'm going to make a change to show those people. That is external motivation. Internal motivation is when you feel, listen, you know what? I want to be around for my children. 

I don't want to get diagnosed with diabetes or some other issue, high blood pressure or cardiovascular disease. I don't want to go that route. And I'll give you some personal examples. Like I watched my—for those of you who've been listening for a while, you know that my dad died in October of 2020, from poor health, so he didn't get Covid. 

He avoided that whole thing, thankfully. But his body was falling apart. It had been falling apart for a long time. For me, I don't want to end up like that. I watched him until he was in hospice literally on his deathbed. When he got to shot, that put him to sleep and he never woke up from it. 

I saw that whole progression and I've been seeing his life and. It's gotten me more motivated than ever. It's gotten me more internally motivated. I don't want to end up like that. When I have children, I don't want them to go through what I had to go through. No way do I want that. I mean, it comes from somewhere deep. 

Can you hear it in my voice? I'm also internally motivated because this is part of my profession. Would you listen to me if I didn't look like what you would expect from someone who's in the health and fitness business? Chances are the answer would be no. And certainly, my business has gotten better, not just because of my looks, but has gotten better since I've gotten in better shape. 

It is not just because of the before and after photos I put up, although that's part of it, but it's also—it's kind of me in living life, being more in life because I don't spend all my time exercising or watching what I eat. It's just, it's part of what I do now. It's part of my life. I do it because it lets me do everything else better. 

So that's the difference between external and internal motivation. I see it with my clients as well. Those who have a strong internal drive, they do a lot better in the program. If they just want to lose a few pounds and they're not sure why—actually, I don't take those people in the program. That's what the Breakthrough call is about. 

But I used to take people and they just drop off. People just want to do it. Then they pay you some money and hope that, you know, well, I paid you some money. Help me lose the weight. It's like, well, listen, I can guide you through the process, but I can't come over to your house and smack the fork full of key lime pie from entering your face, okay? 

It's not what's going on here. I don't wake you up in the morning with a bullhorn to get you up on the treadmill so that you get your cardio. So that's the difference between external and internal motivation. So, what determines motivation? Well, importance in value. Importance in value.  

How important is it for you to get in shape? Oh, well, it's super important. Okay. Well, what actions have you taken to get into shape? How much money and time have you spent? Oh, well, I haven't, you know, done anything, but I read some free blog posts. I listened to some podcasts. Well, you're not really showing that it's that important to you. 

You're not. You're putting time into it, certainly, but you're not really putting skin in the game. And here's the thing: even if you are putting skin in the game, we all eventually forget why things are important to us. We forget about our goals and we forget about our values. It's part of what happens to us in modern life. 

We get busy, we get sucked back into our old routines, just like I did when I was taking care of my dad. I mean, it's not that I didn't care about my health. It's not like…If you asked me, for those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, I put on some weight when I was taking care of my dad. 

I was super ripped before, doing pretty well and then I was taking care of my dad. I flew home on a humanitarian flight from Columbia, taking care of my dad. I forgot about my goals and my values regarding my health, and it wasn't that if you had asked me, “Hey, listen, do you care about your health?” 

I wouldn't have said, “Hell no. Who cares about my health when my dad's sick?” I would've said, “Oh, yeah, of course.” But it wasn't in my mind. Something else was taking the mental bandwidth away. So, we need a way to keep these things in front of our mind. That's what the program does. 

As much as I could talk about all the bells and whistles that I offer and all the tricks that I have up my sleeve in my coaching program, the honest truth is a lot of the success that I get is from two things. One, people like me so we have a good relationship. And then two, because they like me, they feel accountable in the program, so they want to keep showing up.  

So, we need a way to go back and revisit these values, go back and revisit our goals. And what I want to ask you when we're talking about this, what does that come up for you? Would sitting down and writing down some goals, would that work for you? How do you keep your values, your goals center of mind?  

I've had several clients who ended up putting a bunch of positive affirmations up in their home office. They're surrounded by these messages to keep them focused. Now, that personally doesn't work for me. I travel too much and I'm not going to travel with a bunch of things that I could put up. 

But I'll tell you, if I ever had—if I ever? When I finally settle down in one place, I will do that. I will put those messages because if you're not getting it, one, a friend of mine—friendly acquaintance, really, but very friendly acquaintance, very successful entrepreneur took his business to eight figures in 2020. 

He said, “Listen, if you're not hearing it enough from the people around you, you've got to do it for yourself. You’ve got to put up these messages for yourself”. And that was one of the ways that he stayed focused on what was truly important.  

So, the next thing—so we've talked about realistic expectations. We've talked about motivation. And we're still defining motivation here, right? So, we've talked about importance in value is part of what determines motivation. And the other part of that is sense of self-confidence.  

Now, psychologists will call this self-efficacy, but it basically means that you have a belief that you're capable of performing in a certain manner to attain your goals. Can I do what it is that I need to do to change my behavior? And it's the perspective that tasks or skills are something to be mastered and not avoided when you're high in self-efficacy. For example, I have my clients track their nutrition.  

The clients who say, all right, this is the next level. I've tried the keto, I've tried the low carb, I've tried the plant-based intermittent, right? Keto paleo diet. Now it's time to really master nutrition and get away from these fad diets, these approaches that can work, but they work by placing these arbitrary limitations just so that you eat less. 

But the problem is that it makes you change how you normally eat, and it's so much effort to keep up. So high self-efficacy. Do I believe that I'm capable of performing in a way to achieve my goals? Can I do what it is that I need to do? By the way, psychologists have measured this stuff and they found that high self-efficacy predicts most smoking cessation, physical exercise, dieting, condom use, dental hygiene, and seatbelt use. 

Okay, this is crucial. If you don't believe that you're capable of achieving it, you're not going to be that motivated. How does that feel saying that? It feels true, right? So these are the two important things of motivation, right? The internal versus external motivation, importance in values, and sense of self efficacy. 

So if you're a person without a lot of self-confidence, well, you're probably struggling with trying to achieve any goal that you ever work towards because you don't believe that you're capable of doing what it takes. We're not going to get into self-efficacy today, but it is something that I'm going to return to, how do you boost your self-confidence?  

So the next thing then, after we have realistic expectation, expectations and appropriate goals, having internal motivation is core skills. And there's two things here. There's internal skills and external skills. So external skills would be like, okay, well, you're having to learn some new exercises to do in the gym because it'll give you more bang for your buck. 

Like, one thing that I do for a lot of my clients is I teach them how to do mile reps. For my clients who are just, “You know, I want to get in there, I want to get a good workout, and I want to get out. I love being in the gym, but I'm a busy person. How do I get in and out?” I teach them mile reps. That would be an external skill. 

Tracking their nutrition, an external skill. Knowing how much grams of protein you're eating per day—external skill. But there are also internal skills, for example, self-regulation. Self-regulation is something that's been studied by psychologists. In fact, you probably heard of the Marshmallow Test. I've had many people bring it up on this podcast. 

I've talked about it and basically, it's like this: the Marshmallow Test, if you haven't heard, if you've been living underneath a rock, living without podcast access, really, or just started listening to podcasts. Anyway, the Marshmallow Test is like this. They had a group of kids said, “Hey, listen, you can eat this marshmallow now if you want, but if you can wait, I'll give you two marshmallows,” is the short of it. 

There were some kids obviously that could not wait and they ate the marshmallow right away and they only got one. And then there were kids who could wait because they understood, hey, listen, I have a strong desire to eat that marshmallow, but if I can just regulate that desire, I'll get two marshmallows later, I'll get double.  

And psychologists who've studied this found that self-regulation predicts success in elementary school, in high school, and performance in SATs. So they found that these kids who could wait and get two marshmallows instead of one. It led to better performance. And Angelo Duckworth, who you might know from her book, Grit, she found that self-regulation is twice as important as IQ for success in school. 

I mean, how many smart people do we know? How many people with high IQs who are just really have the hardware to understand things that other people struggle with, myself included. I don't have a super high IQ. My dad did, by the way. He had a 140 IQ. I do not have a 140 IQ, but he struggled with self-regulation a lot more than I have. 

He can't get himself to do things. Can't stop himself from drinking too much. Can't stop himself from, you know, we all know someone like this. In our world, it's about our emotional intelligence. Can we self-regulate? Do we know how to communicate with people? Not going to open it up about EQ. We'll talk about that another podcast. 

But this ability to regulate ourselves is twice as important as IQ for success in school. So, just to be clear here, what is self-regulation? What does that even mean? Well, number one is self-awareness. So, before we can change something about ourselves, we need to be able to gather data on it and get feedback from ourselves. 

And a lot of us, we struggle with self-awareness. We all do. We've all have blind spots. And the more self-awareness we have, the more we can realize, ah, I do this thing that's getting me this result. It's not that I'm cursed, it's not that my metabolism is slow, it's not any of that. It's that I have this behavior, so I need to change this behavior. 

Because I find that while I used to believe it was my slow metabolism, now I realize that I'm eating about 500 calories more a day just from going to the candy jar during work because I'm bored. And then once you have this self-awareness, then self-evaluation. And what that means is once you have the data from being self-aware, what's the standard you're using? 

Are you above your goal, below your goal? Where are you? Where are you in terms of what you're shooting for? And then self-reaction. Based on how you're doing, what do you do? How you change your behavior? Do you reward yourself? Do you punish yourself? How do you change your behavior? And those are the things that make up self-regulation. 

So, self-awareness, then self-evaluation, and then the ability to respond to your evaluation. Another thing that—where this becomes crucial is stress and emotional management. Let me ask you something. Let's say you are deep into your diet, into your resolutions, and then you started seeing the US capitol being overrun by people wearing Buffalo Viking outfits or whatever they were wearing. 

How did you react to that? Did you start eating as a result? When you look at the coronavirus statistics, how does that affect your behavior? Do you start finding yourself in the fridge even though your stomach's full. So that's another part of an internal skill. So, we're talking about core skills here, and I know we've done, we've branched out a lot by talking about core skills, internal skills, external skills, self-regulation, stress/emotion management, but we're still in the core skills, right?  

You’ve got to develop these skills. And here's the thing, there's not a real roadmap here. Some people have a lot of self-regulation and they need to work more on the external skills because they just don't know what to do. Others need to work more on the internal skills. Again, it depends on you.  

And I want to ask yourself, how do you do? What do you need to work? So, I know what I teach people and it's based on my long onboarding process. I have a long conversation with clients and that's how I know what to do. I don't just give them my cookie cutter routine because that doesn't work and that's the real reason I don't do it.  

What I do is very time intensive, but it's what works. So, we're talking about this six ingredients, just to remind you. The number one is realistic expectations and appropriate goals. Two is having internal motivation. Three is having core skills, and then fourth is having an achievable action plan. Achievable.  

And I want to define achievable here. It's two things. One, you can do the things now, but also you can keep it up. So, achievability and sustainability, right? Because the big problem here is not that people don't know how to lose weight. People know how to lose weight. People lose weight all the time. 

In fact, people have lost hundreds and hundreds… I've had one client tell me “I've lost 400 pounds, so I know how to lose weight. The problem is I keep gaining it back.” So that's the issue here, right? We need not something that's achievable, but also sustainable. And I'm not saying that—and as we talked about in the last episode, for people to quit cigarette smoking, it takes four to five times. 

So, I'm not saying that you're, you know, it's not necessarily unsustainable if you're failing and going backwards. Part of the sustainability, I would argue is understanding, hey, listen, this is going to take me a few before I master this, but I certainly need to tweak it every time to get better. 

I can't do what led me to get success in the short term, but ultimately falling back in the long term. I had one of my clients who went to a weight loss center and they lost a bunch of weight over six months and then they put it all back on because they weren't taught anything. They were just using liquid. 

They were doing a liquid diet, a protein sparing, modified, fast, managed by doctors, by the way. And yeah, they got results. I think the weight loss was somewhere around 50 pounds, but they ended up putting it back on and that's why they ended up working with me. So, we need something that's achievable and sustainable. So achievable, it's more in the short term.  

If someone asks you, hey, listen, you're going to work out twice a day and three times a day on Sunday, is that achievable for you? For some people, it might be. They're called professional athletes. But if you are an accountant, an entrepreneur, an attorney, a doctor, you're a busy professional and you got a family, probably not going to work for you, you're going to need something else. That's not achievable. 

And even if it is for you, is it sustainable long term? So, something to think about there. Something I think a lot about, how can I get this person the best results and fit it into their life. I try not to change people's lives too much. I try to get them to improve, to work smarter first, and then after we get them working smarter, then let's look at working harder if you, if you want. So, achievable and sustainable plan. 

So, the next thing is support from our social circle. As you can imagine, health related behaviors are very much influenced by the people around us. I talked about the research of Nicholas Christakis over the years. He found that even if you're three degrees of separation away from someone who is obese, it influences your chances of being obese. 

Again, that's correlation, right? Not causation. It's not because someone you don't even know who's obese and therefore, you're obese. It just is talking about the environment that we're in and these correlations that we've found. So, if you're someone who tends to eat a little bit too much or drink and or drink a little bit too much, there's a very high chance that your friends and family eat a little bit too much and/or drink a little bit too much too.  

If you're someone who's overweight, most of your friends and family fall into that same category as well. We find our tribe and the tribe has similar behaviors. So, what do you do here? Because this is a problem that comes up for a lot of clients. 

So, either you, one, the obvious is change your social circle. You’ve got to stop hanging out with your friends who just want to sit on their butts and pound wings and pizza and beer or tapas and white wine or charcuterie and red wine, whatever it is. You need to change your social circle. You need to hang out with people who are actually doing things other than just stuffing their face and getting drunk, if you want to change. 

That can be very difficult though. So, if you are in a situation where you're like, well, I love my friends. Like they're not the healthiest, but I mean, they're…And I'm not BS-ing here. I really love my friends. They love me. They're there for me. I trust them with my family, trust them with my life. Well, you don't really want to get rid of those people just because they’re a few pounds overweight. Or even obese, right?  

But if they're really that good of a friend or family member, you've got to give them clear instructions. They need to know about your goals, your values, and what they can do to help or support you. 

And if they don't, you really need to reevaluate how good of a friend they actually are, even if they do other things for you. Human beings are so weird here. You would be amazed at the number of clients that I've worked with, who've heard from their spouse, who've heard from their children—obviously, you can't get rid of your kids. Might be able to get rid of your spouse. I'm just kidding here.  

And I'm making jokes because it brings up this complicated situation. What are you going to do with your kids who are busting your balls because you're losing weight? 

I had a woman who was struggling to lose some fat, and she started getting results working with me. Her kids, said, “Oh, you're getting too skinny.” Have you heard that before? I had a guy whose spouse was saying that to him. I've had numerous accounts of this. And back when I was in Miami, I had people who told me stories, like their whole family was just on them about losing weight and said it was a bad thing because in Hispanic culture, there's a tendency to do that. 

And I've had people ask me for help. “Hey, listen, my family, they're Cuban and they're sort of like, Hey, listen, you need to eat more or you're not eating enough.” And the truth is, people's ideas about what is enough is coming from a screwed-up standard. Totally screwed up. Totally not based on numbers, not based on evidence, based on what they think is right or what their experience has been. 

So, it opens up a can of worms, but you need to be able to clearly and effectively communicate what your goals are, your values, and, and what people can do to help you. And here's the other thing: you don't just tell people once and then it's one and done. You've got to do it on an ongoing basis because it's you're basically asking them as you are changing your behavior, they need to change theirs. 

And change is hard for everyone. That's why people should be more compassionate about people doing dumb stuff. Criminals, you know, it's a different situation, but people doing dumb stuff. We all do things that we know we shouldn't do. And it's like if you're asking someone to change their behavior, it's like, hey, you're massively overweight. Why are you telling anybody to change your behavior? You can't even stop eating to the point where you're putting your health at risk.  

You have no basis for judging people and trying to get them to change their behavior. Just as people who are maybe super fit and who complain about people being overweight, but they got a drinking problem or a drug problem, or a sex addiction problem, or gambling problem.  

Like, nobody has any…right? We all have this compulsive behavior, whether it's social media, gambling. Whatever it is. We all have this compulsive behavior. We all struggle with it. How about a little bit more compassion, a little less finger pointing, right? Because what we're really trying to do is we're really trying to shift the focus from ourselves and onto others. Play the victim.  

Anyway, I digress. But social support is a tricky one. And then the sixth one is support from your environment. So if you've got a problem, like I d— like, I don't keep sweets here because I eat them. It's as simple as that. But if you have kids who they don't struggle with overeating sweets, in fact, they're fit and they're going to all the different classes, the dance class, the soccer class, you are doing whatever it is kids are doing right now with covid and they don't have a problem regulating their food intake but you do. Again, that's going to come back to that communication.  

But as much as you can, you want to control your environment. You want to control the stimulus, right? Stimulus control. In other words, remove foods from your house, or only buy exactly what you're going to eat. 

When I buy dessert, it's the amount that I'm going to eat for one or two times and that's it. One or two days and that's it. I know whatever I'm going to buy, I'm not going to get the Costco super duper value saver eight gallon ice cream tub because it's going to last a few days. I buy small amounts. 

I pay more money for smaller amounts of dessert. Why? Because most people look at it in terms of, well, if I buy this one Haagen Daz bar, it's three bucks, but if I get three, it's five bucks. So it just makes sense economically to buy three, except you eat all three of them, you get fatter, your health gets worse, and you hate yourself more in the mirror. So you're not getting a deal. Okay? 

So, you’ve got to understand how you can make the environment work for you and how some of culture, the food environment that you're in, works against you. The more marketing that you're exposed to, the more you're probably going to struggle.  

I stream everything. I don't have cable. I haven't had cable in years. Every once in a while, I'll be staying at a place that has cable and every other commercial is a food commercial. Breathe in the bacon, breathe out the bacon, you know, all this ridiculousness, and it's like, wow, this is totally crazy. 

And it starts influencing your thoughts, and I could imagine doing that for years, probably influences your behavior. Otherwise, marketers wouldn't spend money on advertising. So control the stimulus. Think about what you're exposed to. Think about the foods that are around, think about the foods that are in your house. 

We'll talk more about this because a lot of grocery stores, they've got tricks to get you to buy more. And again, they're just trying to run their business. They're not thinking, they're not trying to get everybody fat and diabetic. They're trying to sell more stuff. Not to make excuses for their behavior, but I just want to look at it more objectively so then we can be more objective and not let our stress systems get alarmed. 

Back to that internal skills and regulating stress. So think about your environment. Think about how it's supporting. I'll tell you one more thing that I do. And this a bit of a no-brainer for those of you, I mean, for everyone now. Because of Covid, a lot of us aren't going to gyms. I stay in places where I can go to the gym. I've been doing that for a long time. 

I got a client who's lost 40 pounds. And he needs to lose a lot more. He just got elliptical for his house. He's on there every morning like clockwork. He had the motivation, but it took him a while to pull the triggering to spend the money and invest in getting an elliptical for his house. 

And whenever I settle down in a place, you better believe I'm going to have at least one or two pieces of cardio equipment. And again, I'm not saying cardio is the way. I'm saying get whatever it is that you need. Get the adjustable slack tech dumbbells from Boflex, if you can find them. 

I don't know if those things are still scarce like in 2020. Maybe people ramped up production to meet the demand. But think about how you can make it super easy because so many of us were like, especially Americans, I find, we like to really like, “Oh yeah, we’ve got to work hard!” No, you make it easy. 

Make it as easy as possible. I am so lazy when it comes to this stuff. People have me all wrong and it's, I try to make this stuff as easy as possible for myself. I try to make it as easy as possible for my clients. There is no nobility in this struggle. All right? There's no nobility in this struggle. 

Maybe it's something to talk to your friends about, your coworkers about, whoever you're talking with this stuff about, but there's no nobility in it. Make this as easy as possible. Support yourself. Set yourself up for success. Something that is bit of a bonus tip that I'm not going to go into too much here, but think about building a life that supports you, you know, as a bit of a bonus ingredient. 

One that doesn't come from research, just one that comes from my personal experience here. It's like if you're in a relationship where you're not getting enough sex, for example, and it's driving you to eat, or there's some things that aren't talked about and it, and it's just like, “Well, this sucks, but there's always food.” 

Well, that's something that…Or exercise for that matter can be like, well, I can't get out of here. This situation sucks, but I can go to the gym and bust my butt for an hour and I come back and I feel a lot better afterwards. Or you're in a job that is in your words, soul sucking. Listen, that's not sustainable. 

And I hope a lot of people are waking up to that because of this whole covid thing. We were putting up with a lot of crap in our lives. Certainly, I have because of the stability and if we really are honest, a lot of us are just afraid to do something different. Afraid to step out of our comfort zone. 

And certainly, I was. I've been in personal training 20 years before I left. And I've been doing coaching, I guess 22 years or 21, 22 years now. I've been doing it all online for the past three years, but I’ve got to work on my numbers there. I'm getting confused. But the point is this, I love what I'm doing now and the amount of freedom that I have and what I can focus on, and what I can do, and what I can work on, it is for me.  

But when I first started personal training, it was for me too, but I grew out of it. So many of us, we grow out of our relationships, we grow out of our careers, and we're afraid to take the action. We're afraid to sacrifice to make those changes. But what ends up happening is you still sacrifice, don't you? 

Those goals, those dreams become the sacrifice. So there's always sacrifice. So if you find that you're doing that in your life, either with your career or with your relationships, look to build a life that supports you. And that's not a quick fix. Now I can teach you how to track macros pretty fast, but if you're in a relationship that really needs some work and needs some therapy or you need a divorce, look into that. 

Take the action, right? Look into fixing those things because those are the things that I find keep people stuck big time; some of the stories that I've heard. So look into that. That's a bit of a bonus tip there. Something that we can talk about more another time. But I want to wrap things up now. I hope you got a lot from today. 

And again, if you enjoy what you heard today, make sure you are subscribed to the podcast so that when one of my episodes goes live, you get it right to your device. And if you've been listening for a while, you really appreciate what the Legendary Life team brings to your week, leave us a review. 

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Okay. That wraps it up for today. I hope you have a great. I hope you take away lessons about how to change your own behavior from this. And remember, you can make this happen. People have gone to the moon, people have solved all types of crises, and this whole coronavirus crisis will be solved as well. So, whatever you're facing in your life, there is a solution for it. Always remember that. All right, that's all I've got for today. Hope you enjoyed it. Speak to you on Friday. Have a hell of a week, and I'll speak to you soon.