May 05, 2023

#5 | "Healthy body, healthy mind": Sustainable diet, exercise and recovery routines with fitness founder Max Barde

1 hour 7 minutes

Today I am speaking with Max Barde: fitness entrepreneur and co-founder of MTM Personal Training. Coming up to 2 years of working together, I can safely say that some of my cooking, eating, snacking behaviors, on the one hand, but also training and recovery practices have become “second nature”. This means, I don’t really have to think about them; they’re just habits: like brushing teeth in the morning and evening. For many people, this is the key to sustainable results. In this conversation, we touch on the following topics, which can hopefully inform your own thoughts and practices on nutrition and training:

We talk about how to increase accountability and follow-through: Partly by being accountable to a coach or training partner, but also by being accountable to yourself. We talk about augmenting one’s self-identity. This can take the form of seeing yourself as a runner, cyclist, x-fitter, or simply as a “health conscious” person. Shaping this identity is like making a contract with yourself, agreeing who you want to be and then committing to it

We talk about the importance of habits and how to make them "second nature", e.g., what to eat in the morning, how to wind down in the evening, how to show up for training consistently and with as little friction as possible

We dive a little deeper into vicious cycles initiated specifically by blood sugar spikes. We talk about apparently harmless breakfast staples that trigger glucose peaks and troughs, and, by extension, cravings and grazing. Both cravings and grazing happen on the margin of meals, but they can quickly undermine our entire diet goals

We discuss why one part of our brain - the amygdala - kicks into hijack-mode when we are low on blood sugar and simultaneously confronted with delicious, calorie-dense food. Spoiler alert: some very strong survival instincts are taking over our behaviour and steering us towards "binge mode", but there are ways to manage this

Finally, though we don’t use these exact words, we talk about the difference between being an optimalist and a perfectionist. The perfectionist runs the risk of over-managing, over-counting, over-training, falling prey to cycles of inflated expectations followed by disappointment and eventually slipping standards. The optimalist banks on what is “good enough” to make progress and is more generous, allowing themselves to “begin again” when they slip vs. spinning into a cycle of negative emotions and increasingly bad habits.

Sources:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/max-barde/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/malte-primus/

https://www.mtmgym.de/

...more