“So, tell me why”
Silence
“You’ve been at this for 22 weeks now, don’t you think its time you stopped?”
The prominence of the coffee machine’s whir highlighted my surprise at the question.
“Now that I think about it, I don’t even know why I’m doing this!”
Yusef and I were discussing our plans moving forward for diet and training and I was furiously chasing 5% body-fat.
I’d been dieting for 22 weeks and progress was starting to slow.
We sat in a small coffee shop, mulling over carb timing, de novo lipogenesis and the pros and cons of keto.
I sat staring past Yusef’s shoulder into space as he spoke…thinking about how great it would be to FINALLY reach my goal, about how I could finally eat to the point of being properly full for the first time in months.
When he asked me why, it caught me off guard. Was it for myself? For other people? Who was I even trying to impress? Why...did I even care.
I’d been so caught up in the specifics - grams of carbs, numbers of re-feeds and minutes of cardio that I’d totally lost sight of what I was even chasing, why I was putting myself through this.
I was even so focussed on some intangible goal in the future that I couldn’t stay present enough to discuss how to get there!
For the majority of my training life I thought being lean meant you were successful, the gold standard. Influenced by magazines, fitness websites and photoshopped versions of my dehydrated idols, I’d decided that to be truly content - I needed to be as lean as I could be.
The insidious thing is, looking back, I’d been really lean for weeks by the time I turned to Yusef for help. In reality, I’d surpassed any initial expectations I had of how lean I could get…yet I kept on pushing.
Why did I care?
Simple, but hard to admit.
I cared what others thought of me.
Don't we all?
With predicable consistency we rate our lives against those of others and focus the majority of our actions to impress our peers. We choose the clothes we wear, the cars we drive, the jobs we work, even the people we sleep with, based on what we think our friends and family will think.
“If I manage to get really lean, my friends will all envy how I look and of course - I’ll be more attractive won’t I - who doesn’t want that, I’ll be so happy and life will be amazing!"
I was chasing approval, not from myself, but from others.
I was hungry, tired, suffered mood swings, low sex drive, loss of strength, lack of quality sleep and all consuming food focus.
What’s worse, as I got leaner and even after I’d unveiled a full set of abs, all I could see was how I wasn’t quite at my goal yet - the progress I’d made evaded my thoughts as I critically evaluated why I couldn’t lose those last few pounds.
3 years on from the end of this diet and I’ve drastically changed how I feel about leanness…Ive stopped caring. Am I miserable and upset with how I look?
The opposite. In fact, Yusef and I often discuss the last few years of our training careers as being the equivalent of enlightenment as far as fitness is concerned.
Below, I will explain a little of what I’ve learned from my journey.
Exaggerated impressions
The obvious starting point is to examine where we all obtain this idea that being lean is desirable.
Fitness models serve as the constant reminder that society has an expectation of how we should look - an attractive ideal that we should all pursue and they’re everywhere.
Obviously, in the fitness sphere itself, lean photos appear on the side bars of most websites and shredded abs smother protein tubs. But now, lean physiques can be seen in pop-media, heat magazine even have a “torso of the week” feature just to remind women (and men) that there is standard for a male’s body.
Its also rare (read: never the case) that you seen a less than lean model on the cover of FHM.
Of course, the degree to which this is the case depends on your social sphere - I can’t imagine the guy j...
