The Bouncing Yo-Yo That Is You: Weight Fluctuations

Well look at you. You've done it. You've conquered your lazy fuck of an alter-ego and managed to get that cellulite-infested tushy off the couch, away from the screen showing repeat episodes of Game of Thrones and committed yourself into adopting a healthier and more active lifestyle.

Except oh wait look at that those two kilos you thought you'd shanked off of you last week seemed to have come back. With a vengeance I might add. Now I'm not talking about a plateau here, I'm talking the scale is showing you going up in numbers despite your more than humble efforts in the gym and in the kitchen.

Overwhelmed by confusion, you try to re-visit your actions over the past week. Was it the extra banana you decided to gorge on thinking that fruits are kosher? Was it your mother secretly rubbing butter all over your steamed broccoli, which would also explain why you could suddenly swallow broccoli without feeling repulsed? Was it perhaps invisible calories floating in the air? Can breathing make you fatter? Should I stop breathing?

You, my friend, are merely a victim to ignorance. You see, a big part of the whole taking the reins in regards to fitness and overall wellness is research and more research. You need to learn a great deal about the human body and its intricate complex network of inner workings in order to truly prepare yourself for the inevitable fact that comes crashing against everyone just like that wave that destroyed the pathetic excuse of a sandcastle you built as a child during that one time your parents decided they could feign being happy together enough to drag the entire family on an uncomfortable road trip to some godforsaken overcrowded smelly beach for a week where you'd endure nothing but mosquito bites, mediocre food, odd family gatherings and sun burns. Ah, to be young again...

I digress.

Your problem is that you're awfully focused on a number. Not just a number that you hope to reach, but the concept of numbers itself. Scales are about as good an indicator of overall fitness as tigers are experts in the field of vegan cuisine. The story they tell you is contorted, if at all true. Scales do not account for the amount of muscles you have gained. They can't tell the difference between bone, fat and muscle. They can't tell you if those two kilos you've gain are split evenly among 300 grams of new muscle mass, a one-kilogram poop currently held up inside your rectum and 700 grams of water weight. A scale can give you a number that is as representative of who you are as that Gothic phase you adopted during high school speaks to who you are as a person. (Editor's note: This analogy only works so long as you had decided to drop the Gothic alter ego from your life by the time you got to college or later on, and if you hadn't, well...I'm sorry for all the anger?)

Weight fluctuations are a very natural part of the life-long fitness journey we're all meant to embark onto. People who maintain a solid figure year-round are those whose lives revolve around that very concept. Their livelihood depends on it, they're sponsored athletes who must be at certain numbers depending on whether or not they're in contest-season. You on the other hand are a college student or someone with a 9-to-5 to job. You don't compete in contests that demand you fulfill a certain number in order to represent under a specific weight class or category.

You're someone with a higher calling. You're someone who wants to be the best possible version of themselves despite of all the odds of modern life and her temptations stacking up against them. Professional athletes have impressive physiques, but I'd say a more impressive feat is maintaining that resolve and sticking it out without being a sponsored athlete whose sole occupation is to workout and eat right.

Me and my pops tearing it up in the gym

What I'm trying to say is this. Relax. It's not a quick stop till you hit a goal weight then unwind. This is a life long commitment. A commitment to always being active and treating your body the way it deserves. Think of it this way, you can have a Mercedes S-500, but if you pump that sweet motherfucker full of diesel, all you're going to end up with is a very expensive car-shaped paper weight. You give it the 95-grade fuel it deserves, and it'll take you places. Your body is the same way. Wholesome nutrition and proper exercise transform your body into an entity that will take care of you down the line just as you have taken care of it.

Weight fluctuations mean nothing if your eyes are really focused on the prize; to be better than you were yesterday.

Living With Fat: Why You’re Destined To Fail Before You Even Start

That’s hardly an inspiring title for an article now is it? Well, it’s intentionally so. You see, I’m about to talk about what none of your personal trainers, gym buddies or fit friends who have been doing this for years will tell you. It’s something that’s almost the world’s worst kept secret if it weren’t for the fact no one likes to address it outright and prefers to give it the elephant in the room treatment. (Which would be impossible to ignore given the fact your average African elephant weighs approximately 5 metric tons and your average household room is roughly 6x6 so that’s a pretty tight and awkward situation to just breeze through)

I digress.

You’re going to fail.  A whole lot.

It may seem and sound like the ultimate cliché, but you should know going into this that you can learn nothing without having failed. How do you know if what you are doing is good unless there are other things that can be done that either do nothing or do negative impact? Your only knowledge of success is based primarily on the premise of repeated failure. That’s how most humans grow from the fleshy pre-packaged predator meals they are as toddlers into 6-lane-highway-crossing-the-road-while-on-the-phone adults capable of making good judgment calls.

The only issue is, unlike life experience that happen and register in your brain on a subconscious levels, we’re almost always acutely aware of our thought process and experience during our on-and-off healthy living experiences. The issue is multiplied by the fact that the fitness industry almost promotes this whole concept as though it can be taken as a cycle or a short-term goal where you can have the body of your dreams within weeks if not hours. It doesn’t help that we’re constantly bombarded with images of superhot fitness models on magazines and websites that are a never-ending reminder of the tub of lards we are.

Failure – especially when it comes to fitness and leading a healthy lifestyle – is downright imperative. You won’t be getting very far – and certainly not maintaining your gains and success – without repeated failure. Failure is pivotal because it’s a flagging of what needs to be changed. Your nutrition might need tweaking. You might need to change the way you workout. You might need to not spend so much time sitting at your desk. You might need to improve your sleep patterns. Whatever it be, it’s of the utmost importance that you listen to your body and gauge your plateaus and setbacks as temporary educational failures.

The issue here of course is that most people quit upon being introduced to their very first experience of failure. A lot of people simply can’t handle or fathom why it is that they’re not flexing out their guns and opening beer bottle caps using their abs within weeks of starting to workout and just straight up quit the whole thing. The obvious mistake is that most people do treat it as a short-term process with no real lifelong commitment in mind.

That’s where you fucked up big time kids. Without that mental switch and belief that this is a lifestyle – note the term “life” at the beginning of the word insinuating longevity – you won’t get very far. You’ve got to know, realize and wholeheartedly believe from the bottom of your heart that while you can draw short-term goals; they ought to fall within a larger long-term plan. A plan that involves a lifestyle commitment from nutrition, general activity, exercising and more.

If it sounds like a hard concept to grasp, don’t worry, it is. It’s something that can take some time to develop internally until you are finally ready to accept – and more importantly learn – from your failures along the way. If you grab a Big Tasty in a moment of despair, if you skip working out for a week because you’ve got a big project coming up at work and just don’t have that kind of time, if you get injured and can’t workout for a while or just about anything else that can be considered a setback.

It’s okay to fail, as long as you keep on going.

Face Your Face: Realism 101

Before you even think about it, you better shut the fuck up for a second and go through this. We all, and I mean all do this. We start out our little fitness experiment, some call it a phase, and we all kick it off with a vision. In most of our visions, it’s usually us standing at the end of the road - which we presume took around a month or so - looking so good we make Adonis look like a prison bitch.

Y’all be trippin monkey balls if you’ll keep thinking like that.

You are only setting yourself up for failure, disappointment and frustration if you think, even for a second, that there are shortcuts when it comes to fitness. If you’re going to the gym for a month or two before beach season so you don’t look like an incarnation of Shamu on the exclusive A-list beach party queue, then good for you, but then again, this post isn’t for you. It’s for the person who wants to actively take the first step towards actively changing the way they live. It’s about a commitment towards changing yourself for the better.

Setting goals and realistic expectations is arguably as every bit as important as nailing down the perfect nutrition/exercise plan. Setting goals isn’t only about telling yourself the road is long and hard. Hardly, it’s more about setting timeline expectation. It’s about setting milestones along the road so you can review your progress, check on what is working and what isn’t, and most important, to tweak your plan according to what you see so you can keep moving forward and avoid plateauing or falling behind.

For instance, most men or women who are in it for the fat loss think that it’s about putting in three hours on the treadmill and living off tuna, apples and lettuce for a few weeks. As I mentioned before, that road will only lead to seeming success with underlying fatal health risks. It’s simply not a sustainable mode of life. Being honest with yourself is key if you actually want to switch your life around. Set goals with deadlines. These deadlines don’t mean the road is over, they simply mean it’s time to look at what you’ve done over the past period of time and review whether or not it was working for you. Has your nutrition been on point? Have you noticed your diet needs more carbs? More fats? More proteins? Is your exercise on point? Do you need to switch up the kind of cardio you do? Do you need to lift heavier, or lift more? It’s all about these tiny little details.

Es hatte auch anders sein können

That’s emblazoned eternally in ink forever on my right outer thigh, and the German idiom simply translates to “It might as well have been otherwise”. In the context I found it in, it was about how the smallest and seemingly most insignificant of details are the ones that end up with the largest effects. Little things carry more weight collectively. It’s about the attention to details. Details as simple as quitting that daily can of Coca Cola, or replacing your sugar with honey for your morning tea, walking up the stairs instead of taking the lift if your destination isn’t too far up.

Little things.

Aside from planning ahead realistically, it’s just as important to leave your ego at the door. A lot of us assume that we can do more, or rather, over-estimate what your bodies are capable of within a certain time frame (blame the media for that!) and therefore become quickly frustrated when after an entire month in the gym we don’t look like those assholes on the fitness magazine covers. Your ego is largely responsible for that. You should learn never to compare yourself to others, and most of all, fitness professionals on magazine covers. You work a 9-5 (or longer if you’re me), you have responsibilities, errands, maybe kids, or even demanding pets (you might be me). Those people’s entire lives revolve around being fit, they get paid and get sponsored by supplements companies to look the way they do. You’re a normal human being operating under entirely different parameters, and it only gets worse as you get older and the responsibilities stack up.

You’re not going in there to squat 100 kgs on your first leg day. You’re not going to be doing jump-clap push ups and one handed hanging raises by your second week. Progress is termed so because it is progressive, it happens over time, and it takes time. There are no shortcuts if you want sustainable gains and successes. Cutting corners always ends up in failure; there is no other way around that.

Make a plan. Stick to it. Set milestones. Review it. Tweak it. Progress always.

Check yo self before you wreck yo self!