Monday through Sunday, I’m up by 5, immediately jumping into a movement circuit and then whatever creative work I’ve prioritized for the day. To an outsider, it would appear I have discipline down. With few exceptions, I fit in my daily workout, eat well, and fend off procrastination. Still, a part of me is always trying to rebel. I finish breakfast and want to keep on eating- just for the sport of it. Its worse on those occasional trips for ice cream.

My wife and I will get a cone and by the end of it I’m thinking to myself, “I could have another.”

Similarly, I’ll set up a word document to begin writing and feel a pull to do anything but focus on creating a coherent message. I want to check email, write fitness programs, call colleagues, read articles, or find any other excuse to be busy while less productive.

When it is time for my workout, I often feel immense inertia trying to hold me still. Even biking to work sometimes invites the flood of wimp instinct. My commute is 10-minutes by car and 20 by bike. The time difference is negligible, yet my inner wimp still makes himself heard from time to time.

Without a doubt the most fulfilling pursuits of my life have been writing, learning, creating courses, and the pursuit of health and yet I’m still constantly tempted to skip these in favor of more passive entertainment.

Facing the Daily Assaults of Impulsiveness

Despite the immense fulfillment health and creative production have brought to my life, I still face the daily assaults of infantile impulsiveness. I’ve become very successful quelling these daily rebellions and am always amazed to find purpose, passion, and flow hiding on the other side. My workout leaves me energized all day, my writing excites and feeds my spirit, and by

5 pm my level of production leaves me gratified and capable of booting down.

I shudder to think what my life would have been had I made it a habit to give in. This is part of the secret to greater willpower: vivid clarity about how painful it would be to choose the opposite, easy path. Because you don’t do the opposite choice once. You do it and it becomes a habit. You skip that planned workout and subconsciously give yourself permission to do it again and again. Your inner wimp wins and you are tortured all day with regret. Your inability to fight for 15 minutes plagues you at the moment and defines you over a lifetime.

Willpower Is the Choice to Create Your Life

Willpower is the ability to do what you know you should. It is the ability to be the person you want to be, rather than an impulsive, whiny child. It is the power to create your life, rather than the entitlement for life to bend and acquiesce your immediate desires. Willpower goes by many names: grit, discipline, delayed gratification, self-mastery, tenacity, awesomeness. Regardless of what you call it, studies indicate that willpower is the primary determinant of happiness and success in life.

Photo by Bev Childress

The famed 1960’s Stanford Marshmallow test put hundreds of four and five-year-olds in a room with a single marshmallow. They could eat the marshmallow or wait the fifteen minutes it took researchers to return and be rewarded two marshmallows for waiting. Participants were tracked over the next four decades and those who waited fifteen minutes were healthier, happier, and more successful by every metric. Similarly, in the 1940’s, Harvard conducted a study¹ to see how long individual college sophomores would stay on a steeply inclined treadmill traveling at high speeds.

Researchers believed test performance would indicate the “extent to which a subject is willing to push himself or has a tendency to quit before the punishment becomes too severe.”

Some jumped off after little more than a minute. The majority made it around four minutes. Scientists contacted all the study participants every two years over the next 60 to collect data and prompt a lifestyle questionnaire. Like the Stanford test, they found that those who persisted longer were more successful and better psychologically adjusted.

Regardless of luck or fortune, chaos repeatedly happens to us all. Those with willpower persist and practice the discipline necessary to weather life’s storms and continually grow. Most essentially, those with discipline will almost certainly practice better health practices, a tendency that makes them more capable and emotionally resilient to whatever life throws at them.

Willpower Is Finite

Willpower is like a muscle in that it fatigues when used consistently and can be strengthened over time. Unfortunately, this breakthrough realization has often been used to discount its utility. Rather than set out to grow stronger, most excuse the cookie binge because it is human nature to indulge at the end of a hard day. True, like our muscular endurance, willpower is finite.

It is highly unlikely that based on a momentary decision you will go from never working out to crushing CrossFit every day for the next 30 years. These things are a process. However, we should all be going to great lengths to train willpower. In this bizarre world where indulgence and instant gratification becomes evermore normal, we should make delayed gratification the foremost objective of our educational and parenting strategies, while creating daily discipline exercises for ourselves.

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”–Mark Twain

Normal May Not Make You Happy

Most of society floods us with messages telling us that “snoozing is great.” “It is human.” “It is what everyone does.” “It is normal.” And they are right. It is normal. Just like its normal to eat predominately processed, sugar infused treats and fast food- just as its normal to rarely exercise- just as its normal to sit and scan your phone all day. I’d like to offer a different message. These things are the norm and will continue to be. However, they won’t make you happy.

You can feel better about yourself by hiding behind how normal your behavior is, but it will continue to limit your potential and impede your development. It will preclude your greatest impact, eliminate countless profound experiences, and leave you knowing you were capable of so much more. Then you, like all of us, will die. Time is all we really have and yours was spent rather than invested.

Combat Negative Cultural Trends

Most of my work focuses on combatting negative cultural trends by clarifying a better path and seeking the secrets of successful change. Yet all of my advice has been useless if we can’t accept personal responsibility and practice a degree of willpower. Learning about habits will only take you so far. Simplifying will only take you so far. Eliminating chips and soda from your home will only take you so far. Until you confront your own personal expectations and chase self-mastery, your efforts are futile.

Quit acting like you don’t know what you need to do. Quit acting like you are powerless to this craving. Quit telling yourself that discipline is easier for other people, or that you just have an impulsive personality. I don’t care if it is nature or nurture that brought you to this point in your life. My only concern is delivering a message that moves people in the right direction. It doesn’t matter if your parents fed you pop-tarts and let you play video games all day. What matters is you can change. You have the power and no one else is going to step in and do it for you.

As Tony Robbins says, “biography is not destiny.”

Solutions-Focused-Therapy has had tremendous success creating change in clients without obsessing on “biography.” Rather than dig through and overanalyze every negative experience of your childhood, these psychiatrists focus only on finding and replicating success. They only want the solutions. The rest they term, “true but useless.”

Create Discipline

My point is not that you should work maniacally or live a monastic life of self-denial. Rather, you should create the discipline to be intentional with how you spend your life. You should work to create the discipline to be healthier so that you have more years and more life in those years.

You should have the willpower to train your emotions so that you treat people the way you wish you could. You should work to create the purpose and projects that honor your short time. Behaving in the way you want to behave starts with committing to training discipline. But how?

You could wake to movement, take a cold shower before work each day, create a meditation habit, or add any of billion small daily discipline exercises. Plan ahead, start small, adapt, and add more over time.

Whatever you decide, the most important part of building discipline is to never allow yourself to not follow through on a plan. If you plan to workout, you have to. Even if your boss was a jerk today. If you said you wouldn’t snooze the alarm, you can’t. Planned to not check email and social media until lunch each day? Then don’t. Too tired and grumpy for that cold shower? Shut up and get in. 99% is a wimp.

The Thousand Dollar Test

So often negative perceptions allow us to talk ourselves out of behaving like we’d like.

• There is a simple trick- the thousand-dollar test. You can’t go anymore. You’re just too tired. You aren’t feeling it today. If someone offered you a thousand dollars to do what you’d planned to do, would you finish? I thought so.

It is a simple way to reframe and reveal the lie behind your sense of powerlessness. What presented as a lack of ability is actually a lack of immediate purpose.

Train Your Willpower

While you can get started training discipline today, your efforts will eventually stagnate. Despite your immense power, the reality is that there will be times you fail. This is why it is so essential for you to make it a habit to learn and grow. This inclination promotes learning from failure and persisting past roadblocks. It opens your eyes to the benefit of other people’s experience.

For more help on your journey to train willpower, check out my new Willpower and Resiliency Course. For less than $10 you’ll gain a better capacity for willpower- the primary determinant of your ability to be the person you want to be.

Reference:

1. Catarina Lino, 'Is Grit the New It? Developing Your Passion and Practicing Perseverance." Positive Psychology Program. accessed July 24, 2018.

Everyone is always looking for quick fixes. No one wants to put in the work that creates lasting changes—which is what you really want in the long run. Right?

So why do we sell ourselves short? I preach about the importance of putting healthy foods into our bodies and the benefits of exercise, but do you really know and understand what causes those benefits inside of us?

I am going to target this article a bit more towards the ladies because they are the majority of my audience and some struggle to truly understand what regular weight training and eating healthy can do for you.

The Importance of Your Metabolism

Metabolism is what we want to boost when trying to lose weight because it is the control center for everything chemical that happens in our bodies. Think of our hormones, the way we feel, how much energy we have, and where we hold onto most of our weight. The higher our metabolism is, the more calories we burn. But when we destroy it when we go on crash diets or we yo-yo diet (bouncing around from diet to diet) we do our bodies more harm than good.

Fortunately, there are a couple ways that work to get your metabolism back in sync.

Metabolism Booster #1: Nutrition

Food and our metabolism are connected through what is called the thermic effect of food (TEF), defined as the amount of energy required for the body to use and store food. Protein has the highest TEF, followed by carbohydrates, followed by fats. This makes having protein with every meal key to helping boost your metabolism.

When it comes to choosing your proteins, think of your lean sources of protein: chicken, lean beef, turkey, fish, and eggs. Eating more protein also helps you to feel more full because it takes the longest to digest, hence boosting your metabolism through digestion and absorption. Protein is what builds the foundation of our bodies. If you want a strong structure, protein will help you.

What happens if we don’t eat enough? Well, our bodies aren’t too happy. When we aren’t giving our bodies enough food to eat, everything I talked about above goes right out the door. Our bodies go into more of a survival mode and will store the food as fat instead of burning it for energy.

If you are someone who exercises consistently (specifically weight training), there is pretty much no reason you shouldn’t be fueling your body properly. Ladies, I am calling you out because working with you for over a decade on nutrition, I have really had to get creative in helping you to understand the importance of fueling for weight and fat loss.

Here is an example of what a one-day meal plan might look like for a client. Keep in mind this is a pretty basic meal plan to help get the point across.

Meal #1: Breakfast

• 3-4 whole egg omelet with spinach, peppers, onions, 1/4 avocado, 1 cup berries

Meal #2: Snack

• 1/2 cup hummus with 1 cup vegetables of choice, 1/4 cup almonds

Meal #3 Lunch

• 4-6 oz lean ground beef burger, 1 whole sweet potato, 1 cup green vegetable

Meal #4: (pre-workout snack)

• 2 rice cakes with 2 tablespoons nut butter of choice

Meal #5: Post Workout

• 1 scoop protein powder in liquid of choice, 1 banana, or 1 apple

Meal #6 Dinner (Post-workout)

• 4-6 oz chicken breast, 1/2-1 cup brown rice, 1 cup vegetable of choice

Each of these meals should have at least 25-40g of protein.

Metabolism Booster #2: Weightlifting

As a female weightlifter, I can assure you that lifting weights won’t make you blow up into the female version of The Hulk. Aside from my love of talking nutrition, my next favorite thing to discuss is muscle.

It is commonly known that muscle burns more calories than fat does. If you aren't convinced that adding muscle to your frame is for you, remember that a pound of muscle burns an average of 3-10 times more calories than a pound of fat.

Aside from the positive effects, weightlifting has on the metabolism, it also has many other positive benefits such as helping to make your bones stronger. Ladies, we are more likely to have osteoporosis than men. Please help yourself by picking up something heavy and putting it back down on a regular basis.

I add a variety of weight lifting into my group fitness class, Warrior Body, here in Morgantown, WV. One of the questions I am often asked about my class is if it is more cardio or weightlifting based. The truth is that it is a good mix of both, but my members will tell you that we do a lot of weightlifting. Some examples include:

• Barbell work: rows, overhead pressing, deadlifts, squats
• Kettlebell work: deadlifts, presses, swings, rows, squats
• Dynamic strength movements: tire slams, tire flips

Why is this type of training so successful? It's because this type of training adds load to your muscles and this loading is what creates more muscle mass. The more muscle mass you have, the quicker your metabolism will become—which equals more calories burned!

An example of a circuit in my Warrior Body class might look like this:

• 1: Kettlebell deadlift x 10-15 reps
• 2: Two kettlebell bent over row x 10-15 reps
• 3: Prowler push x 30-60 feet

I typically have this type of workout in a timed circuit, but for this example, you can see that the first two exercises are strength training based and the last exercise is conditioning based. This is just a simple example of what a circuit might look like, but it has all the components of a metabolically effective workout.

The Takeaway for Ladies

So ladies, if you could take anything away from this article, it is this: rip away your old beliefs that food makes us fat and that lifting weights is for The Hulk. Instead, work on adding more protein to your nutrition plan and add more weights to a weekly fitness routine.

This video, above, shows the variety of ways that I implement weight training into my workouts. Think outside of the box and make it fun! If you are anywhere near Morgantown, West Virginia, come on by and join in with our Warrior Body classes, and if you're not,  sign up to join us for our online fitness challenges.

Well, I am headed into the third trimester this week and that’s just nuts to me because it feels like yesterday I found out I was pregnant! This pregnancy has been similar, and yet different (hello braxton hicks contractions already!!!), than my previous ones and I’ve had some requests to write a blog post on all of the products and things that I have been loving so far.  

Let’s jump right in, shall we?

This body pillow! I actually discovered this pillow through Naomi’s blog and I’m so glad I did because it has been a TOTAL LIFE SAVOR. It’s quite large but it’s soooooo comfy and I just wrap myself around it like I’m a koala bear on a tree at night. That’s a funny image but it’s the thing that pops into my head the most! Haha. Seriously though, if you’re pregnant, you need one of these. I have been sleeping better this time around than my other two pregnancies and I totally credit that to this pillow.

Primally Pure vanilla almond body butter. This stuff is just luxurious and I rub it generously on my growing belly every night. And guess what? No stretch marks! I love the scent, which isn’t overpowering and smells like cookies, and the whipped texture of the butter. The ingredients are just SO good and I feel great about using this on my body now and every day. When I ordered it originally, I got the big size and I am so glad I did. (PS – it’s great even if you aren’t pregnant!)

Storq leggings. Okay, I am not one to bad mouth other brands, but let’s just say that over the years I have pretty much tried ALL the pregnancy leggings on the market and have always been let down. They either get all stretched out or get pilly after a couple washes. Or they itch?! What the heck. The last thing you want when you’re pregnant is to be in itchy leggings. Anyway, these are soft like butter and the very best I have ever tried. I literally live in them. They are sooooo soft and comfy and I either wear them with long tunics or just t-shirts. I really think they are comfier than my pajamas. I have a few things from this brand that I absolutely love and, let’s be honest, I probably will order another dress or two in a bigger size before this baby makes his appearance. I am a huge Storq fan – worth the money, friends!

Vital Proteins Collagen Peptides. I put a scoop of this in my coffee every morning and can’t taste it at all. I love knowing that even with just one scoop (the serving size is two scoops), I am getting 10 grams of high quality collagen protein first thing in the morning. I also have tried their new matcha collagen and love it (it tastes like the more expensive matcha I had been drinking prior to getting this!). 

Surf Sweets gummies + sour worms. Keeping a baggie of these little organic gummies (sweetened with fruit juice!) in my purse during the first trimester really helped with some of the nausea I experienced. This was my first pregnancy that I felt nauseous most of the time during the first 14 weeks and these helped! I also tried the popular “preggo pops” but those didn’t really do much for me.

Serola Belt. My midwives let me borrow one of these belts to help ease the discomfort with my pubic bone and it has really helped! I can’t say I remember to wear this every day, but on the days I do wear it, it really helps (more than anything else I have tried). I have a size medium for reference.

Investing in myself. I feel like I have invested in myself more this pregnancy, whether that’s through groceries to my door, meal delivery services, take out for dinner, pedicures or new “fancy” body products. I’ve given myself the permission to spend a little more money than I normally would on what might seem like “extravagant” things for myself (pedicures really aren’t that extravagant but you know what I mean). It’s so worth it! Sometimes just getting that new body lotion in the mail…or having a bag of groceries show up at your door so you don’t have to drag your toddlers to the store for the billionth time when you feel like crud are just WORTH IT. I’m terrible at accepting help from others but I’m pretty good at online shopping. Hahaha ?  I am busy taking care of my kids, keeping the house together, running a business and GROWING A NEW HUMAN so I refuse to feel guilty. 

Garden of Life Vitamin Code Raw Prenatals. I often get asked what vitamin I take so here you go! I have taken these through every pregnancy so far and like them a lot. I also take an iron supplement a few times a week, a daily probiotic and a magnesium supplement (natural calm).

ALL of the peaches, berries, cherries, watermelon, grapefruit juice…..basically all fruit in general. ? I crave fruit every pregnancy and so summer is great time to pregnant for me! I feel like I’m saving money on not buying as much wine these days (haha) so I can put that towards tons of lovely organic produce! Unfortunately my kids are total fruit monsters, too, so I have to hide some of my peaches from them or they will all be gone within an hour of shopping. 

Spindrift. Oh my goodness, this is just the best sparkling water I have tried. I love the lemon flavor so much. It’s also Luke’s very favorite thing so we usually share one during “happy hour” ( aka all of us drinking Spindrift on the couch watching Mickey Mouse Clubhouse at 4:30pm). 

Giving myself a break. I guess this sort of goes along with investing in myself? I used to be VERY anti-tv for my kids. Then I got pregnant. LOL. But seriously, I would let Grayson watch a Daniel Tiger and then feel so guilty about it and beat myself up thinking all screen time is the worst thing ever. Okay, I had to let that go real quick! Now I realize how silly I used to be. Letting my kids watch an occasional program here and there has been vital to survival these past six months, especially when I felt so sick in the first trimester. Mister Rogers, sesame street and mickey mouse are not going to kill anyone…and provide me with a chance to rest with my feet up (or just lay on the couch with my eyes closed!). Giving myself a break also has to do with giving myself a break with exercise. The fact is, I’m just not really going to be working out as much as I used to be, and that is okay. Keeping my kids alive is my main goal these days and I bet I get plenty of steps in just chasing them around the house in the afternoons…this is just a season and one day I will be back working out and doing yoga and my kids will all be in school……. ?