How can you watch the Thunder gives their maximum effort against the Grizzlies and not give yours?
Even though no one may have seen it, I live tweeted my NFL Draft Challenge during round one. I did ten pushups for every selection, and fifteen for every trade.
That’s 320
and an additional 90
While men everywhere took a load off with a beer at the bar, or stacked up the snacks at home, I watched it the way men should watch sporting events, I exercised during one, doing 410 pushups.
I know how well food goes with sports, and I know how people who are dedicated fans tend to also be the most sedentary fans. Why not make all fans active watchers? Issue challenges to fans.
Ten pushups per commercial in a basketball game.
Five situps for every point the opposing team scores in a football game.
You might find yourself doing fifteen of something every time someone in your baseball team’s lineup strikes out.
Imagine having to focus for the entire game just like Bosh and Amar'e
This type of exercise, if you watch sports, is limitless. Maybe you’re terribly overweight and you want to start the process with high numbers of squats over time. Maybe you want to improve your pushups to the hundreds. Maybe you’re tired of putting workouts before watching sports. Whatever it is, it is conservative, free, and effective unlike anything I’ve ever done.
That’s because I’ve done it before. My typical springtime ritual for the NBA Playoffs is pushups during commercials, or “Playoff Pushups” as I call them. I take games I know I will watch in full, or games that I’ve just turned on because I’ve got nothing to do, and use them to improve my pushup practice. It’s also a way to build some consistency with exercise over three months. Connecting exercise to things you already consistently do will make exercise more consistent and effective. If we watch sports, then we better be working out while we do it, for those hardcore fans, it may be the only way.
Tonight I will be live-tweeting #playoffpushups during Game One of the Mavericks vs. Thunder series. Join me, we are going to change fitness.
He doesn't necessarily care if anyone needs to sit next to him.
I live in a fat town, a big one actually. It isn’t New Orleans, or Birmingham, or Washington D.C. Its New York. It isn’t some food-obsessed, spread out, laid-back town. The trendy, pretentious city that I’m from has an ugly side. Its common people. The fat, lazy, ill-spirited residents of New York City who crowd the buses and subways, dying for the chance to get a seat, to never have to walk, to never have to take the stairs. They know they are fat, but they must squeeze into that middle subway seat. They know that they are touching you. You WILL be punished for getting on the train earlier than this person. They know that their size is an inconvenience. They stand still on MTA escalators and take MTA elevators instead of the stairs.
Aww. Too bad.
Know what else? They’ve got kids. Strollers, double strollers. McDonald’s bags stuffed in the compartments and Arizona Iced Teas in the cup holders. The kids are three years too old for strollers and have never walked for more than four minutes. If there’s no elevator in the subway, they expect you to help them up or down the stairs with this Escalade stroller. They take up the space of five people between their over-sized body and the stroller. They travel with other parents who bring other kids and other strollers. THEY CAUSE TRAFFIC. They’re listening to headphones as their children cry. Their favorite time to travel is rush hour.
"No Ma'am, you may not have food delivered and waiting for you at 125th Street."
They also fight to the death for seats. They stand at the door to maintain that position in a crowded train. They go out of their way to be lazy and in the way. These are generally the only things they go out of their way to do. The backwards MTA system is built for and around them. “Improvements” to the MTA come in additions to laziness like elevators. I’m from a fat city that could be a fit, stair-taking, gym-hating, active place. I often run in and see races in the city that make me wonder if these are ALL of the individuals who run in the city. I know it isn’t, but it feels that way. I feel like I’m surrounded by fat and acceptance of fat. I feel like the line at the Shake Shack is getting longer. I feel like life is getting slower here like we are in the south.
"So you want me to like, walk up the stairs?"
I remember this being a fast city, with fast money and fast movement and a whole lot of people with places to go and things that should’ve already been done. You can’t move quickly without a hard body, so this overpopulated, over-stressed city is going to slow to a stop if this trend doesn’t stop. In New York, we don’t simply need to look better, we need to be better, or else how can we be special? Fitness in our city should be about being intelligent, hip, crafty, and should help our personal success. It needs to embody everything New Yorkers seem to be to the outside world. Our inability to live up to our expectations will eventually tarnish our image if it hasn’t been already. It starts with us as individuals, and how effectively we use our bodies.
I often find it interesting that I view the world so differently now that I’ve been a personal trainer. Like really noticing fat people. Recently I went to a Yankees game and realized how many severely overweight people were in the Stadium. I used to go to games all the time and never noticed the parallel between sports obsession and obesity. Face it, we are an envious, self-deprecating, celebrity-obsessed society that is more about watching the best than being the best. Sometimes it feels that “fan-dom” is a celebration of being average; of being one of millions who support the team, but don’t have the skill, drive and passion to do anything at that same level. I say this understanding that the average fan is a team’s target consumer. The team’s goal is to obviously draw fans away from the things that make them feel elite and pull them into things that make them feel indulgent.
Cheerleaders
Fried Food
Family
Alcohol
Giveaways
They’re all things that cause us to make exceptions for our behavior, whether positive or negative. They’re all associated with sports and they’re all things we like about viewing sports. Sports are also better packaged for television now, so that means more sports fans in bars, more sports fans sitting and lying on couches, and too many (east coast!) sports fans in bedrooms, eating in bed as they watch Kobe light up Portland in the late game. What does it mean? Fueling the American obesity problem by marketing to the unhealthy, exploiting their weaknesses for unhealthy things, and making it so that the average fan could NEVER associate with their favorite athlete as a person.
Sports are an amazing parallel for life. Seeing life the way athletes see competition is a way to apply the same focus, effort, and pride to our lives that highly-paid athletes do to theirs. Athletes aren’t simply role models for children whose parents are too lazy to properly raise them, they can be role models for us all. Not all role models are positive though, so adults with adult reasoning can take the negative and positive for what they are: learning experiences.
Our society though is full of adults who admire athletes, pay their salaries with ticket sales, stadium concessions and merchandise sales, but do so as a means of leisure. It seems that we would rather use the image of the fit, disciplined, conditioned athlete to justify excessive eating and drinking than to explore these practices for ourselves so we can know why professionals are so amazing. What we get is a society of fat people with insane expectations of professional athletes who share none of their talents or drive. How can you follow sports intelligently and evaluate athletes moving dynamically if you refuse to even move?
Activity is not simply for individuals who want to look better, it’s just that active individuals look better to everyone. Individuals who watch sports should do their best to also PLAY sports. First, it will help them to properly appreciate athletes’ skill. Second, it will be a healthy way to release the competitive spirit they want to release by drinking and overeating in packs. Third, it allows them to actually draw parallels between themselves and their favorite athletes, maybe helping them think twice before they contribute to a team’s revenue and an athlete’s salary.
And no, they don’t need wider seats at the ballpark…
The problem is that she already thinks it's her right to have ice cream.
The answer was always right there. What causes overweight bodies and comfort with obesity? What causes a person to be satisfied with poor food and exercise choices? What created the negative stigma placed on fitness? What’s the number one thing that trainers need to push out of a person’s head before they push in all the positivity and understanding?
Entitlement.
Our problem as a society is not simply that we increase the population and therefore increase the umbrella our society forms for that population, it’s that the population is unable to value their lives without the society. As long as our society provides things, individuals will think that they deserve them. Just because there is a bus for you to ride, does not mean that you deserve a seat. Our parents create us and within months try to directly acclimate us to both healthy and unhealthy things in our society, not because they feel that any are particularly necessary to life, but because the American mentality is to condition children early on the idea that they deserve enjoyment. So everything must provide enjoyment for children-food, television, school. Everything a child in our society does must be rooted in enjoyment for them to give their full attention.
If the child thinks they are entitled to enjoyment, then the adult, who now abuses the adult privilege of living out entitlements, lives devoid of sensible, prudent, and prosperous practices. We have always been entitled to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” but these terms are created to broadly protect us from tyranny. They were not given to us to justify what I call immediate freedoms. We went from being free to pursue happiness long-term without government interference to thinking that this pursuit is a pursuit of over-indulgence. The ways we feel about the things that drive our emotions, like acceptance, food, family, personal loyalties, and love, do that driving because they are grossly misused by people who think that these things are a right and should not be intruded upon. But no one deserves these things. No one simply deserves thousands of Facebook friends, or huge meals, or a loving family, or for their sports team to win, or to find their soul mate. Still, because so many feel entitled to largely irrelevant things, this is all that concerns us.
There is no notion that important things, like valuing the body, or instilling positive virtue in younger generations are priorities in our society. We want to have fun, feel good, and never work for anything. Most treat exercise like something they’d never do if they already looked great. The problem is that individuals who don’t like lives of entitlement always get more from exercise than the rest because entitlement doesn’t negatively fuel such a positive element of their lives. Typically, a person says, “I enjoy food, I enjoy laziness, I enjoy enjoyment, and I deserve them all.” Their deserving overrides focus, dedication, and commitment. What’s worse is that they never understand that willpower is not simply committing to exercise, but also de-committing to practices that have always hindered the results of exercise. When a person thinks that these practices are their right, it’s difficult to explain to them that their fitness process will always stall.
We deserve nothing more than the bodies we were given, and building or destroying those bodies is an individual’s prerogative. What doctors and so-called experts won’t admit to those less enlightened is that most of the things we do with and to our bodies are products of the entitlement mentality and in result, harm our bodies from the day our parent sticks the lollipop in our mouth when we’re crying and we associate soothing with sweet. Entitlement, whenever and wherever it’s cultivated in the human mind, begins the direct progression to death. Nothing has created more negative habits than individuals thinking that building negative habits is their right. Our founding fathers never prepared for a population too ignorant to clearly understand and interpret founding documents so much so that freedom for many generations has been freedom to be fat and do nothing. Seeing the fitness industry conservatively, I now know why I loathe entitlement so much. In the most needy areas of our society, positive habits, developed minds, and fit bodies are not the products of mindless resolutions, limited erudition and repetitive jobs, and quick-fix, no work, infomercial exercise or concealing garments. Positive habits are developed within individuals who are intelligent enough to focus on the important in life. But, because of entitlement, there are no individuals. That’s because the thing people most feel they’re entitled to is normality. If you’ve ever just stopped to take a look at “normal” people, you’d realize that the right to be and think like everyone else is a right that has no value.
If you’re here, reading this, then you’ve made the choice to come to Scales on Fire. You made that choice either because you saw the above sticker somewhere, or you found out about this in some other way. Choices though, come big and small, but life’s great choices are made over a lifetime. Our society has become paralyzed in thinking that these grand choices aren’t choices at all. That in some way, they ways we choose to live our lives and treat our bodies is chosen for us. We force children to accept negatives early in life. The parent makes the choice to say to a child early: “face it, I’m fat, so is your father, so are you. It’s in our genes.” They tell them this too soothe the stinging reality that things that have always made them feel good are generally unhealthy and that life can be one long, extended battle with understanding and combating this. They fail to realize that the pleasure of food and a sedentary lifestyle is the problem itself. We associate things that taste good and make us feel good with good times, and hence, do them repeatedly, far more than the human body can handle. Those good times resonate with us. The people who loved us most gave us sweets. The most fun family gatherings were loaded with foods that cause cancer and heart disease. Don’t forget our mothers associating food with love. We overeat because we’ve been raised to think we need to, that overeating is living. Overeating and over-exercising might be living, but just overeating isn’t. We also aren’t active because we care more about the ways our bodies appear superficially and how we look in and with all of our ever-so-important possessions than the ways our bodies actually work.
It’s the same way many women make the choice to be extremely overweight, but get their hair and nails done regularly. A person like that really doesn’t understand that inner beauty has no price and fully facilitates outer beauty. So she could probably be a fit person, have bitten off fingernails, be wearing a baseball cap and no makeup and look amazing, or she could be herself, blame her body on bad genes and still just be a fat person with nice hair and nails. It doesn’t make her healthy, but unfortunately, this choice makes her happy enough. Women like this and many other people in our society are making an indirect choice to stay overweight. Society has provided them with enough mental and physical comforts. There is no incentive to exercise at all, much less as much as a human being should. All of the things our society considers to be fun are done sitting still. There’s an incredible acceptance of flaws that totally contradicts our blatant superficiality. We are a backward, unhealthy, and irrational society that on a whole, chooses to be fat and claims we have no choice.
We should begin to understand that obesity is no terrible hereditary disease. It’s a choice made by individuals and families who simply take in millions and millions more times the calories than they burn exercising. Couple that with the time they spend sitting and “enjoying” things they think they deserve as humans and you’ve got more than an overweight person (because a number on the scale tells maybe one percent of our story), you’ve got a body that doesn’t work, or respond to the brain well. Later you’ve got early Alzheimer’s, you’ve got scary-sounding cancers, you’ve got a body that began the process of dying in your twenties and you didn’t know it. Personally, I’ve made the choice to live and become more alive through exercise. Even further, I approach this exercise conservatively, shying away from liberal exercise practices that only keep people overweight and doubting their own abilities forever. If you agree, I’d like to hear from you. You you don’t agree, you’re probably struggling with your weight, and you desperately need my services.
If I don’t believe that fitness is about superficiality, then I shouldn’t always cite superficial reasons to make important decisions right? In our country, ability and qualifications should outshine looks, but they rarely do. In a culture where most contests are really tests of beauty, popularity or both, I’ve always shied away from making decisions about others based on first impressions, pre-conceived bias, or simply aesthetic discrimination. There is though, one area where bias is prevalent in my heart: I won’t be led by a fat person. I like my coaches, bosses, and politicians to be in full control of their bodies. I don’t believe that an individual who has lost control of their own body is fit to lead others in any capacity, and it’s why I can barely even hear the name of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie without imagining scores of overweight Americans flocking to the polls to vote for “their guy.”
Mr. Christie has been the Governor of New Jersey for nearly two years, and in that time, he’s set out to clean up many of the political messes in the state. He’s also gained a great deal of recognition around the country as a possible Republican presidential candidate in 2012, a quest he vehemently denies. Now that Barack Obama has puffed his chest in boasting over his overseeing the mission to kill Osama bin Laden, Republicans, already viewing the incumbent President as “unbeatable” have clamored for Mr. Christie to run in 2012. Unfortunately for Mr. Christie, no matter what his policies are, he will never get my vote. Mr. Christie is a fat man. He is a combination between William Howard Taft and Philadelphia Eagles coach Andy Reid. He is so fat, that he’s too fat to be trusted. He’s so fat, that he could only lead people into a situation where they are fatter. He is so fat, that he’ll be an awful example to children on how to live their lives. He will not be a man who is a champion of self-discipline. Even Mr. Obama, a cigarette smoker needed to go to great lengths to downplay his smoking and highlight his basketball playing. The First Lady, Michelle Obama needed an entire health and fitness campaign to simply show this administrations dedication to the issue. In the world’s fattest, laziest, most undisciplined country, it was necessary in 2008 that voters saw a candidate who had an air of self-control. If even one individual chooses to vote for Mr. Christie, it will display our most dirty American secret, that we are undisciplined because we are endeared by the undisciplined.
Chris Christie, in all his splendor
We love Charles Barkley, his huge gut, his bad golf swing, and his huge mouth. We love other flawed celebrities for many other reasons. Voters love Mr. Christie for many of the same reasons. Americans on a whole have this backward notion that the more regular a prominent individual is, and hence the more like the common man they are, the more accepted they should be. The phrase “down-to-earth” is to me, indicative of an individual who desperately needs to connect with people who won’t ever be in their position. How does a person in a prominent position though, simply flip a switch to be accepted in higher circles? They don’t. In our society the ignorant, the overweight, the unattractive are always searching for traces of their personalities in our leaders, and it allows for politicians like Mr. Christie to appeal to the common man who is afraid to ever change and be better. Mr. Christie is so fat that he is literally down-to-earth. If he runs and is elected, he will directly embody the current American spirit: Here, we care about the issues, not ourselves. God forbid that someone might suggest that care for ourselves would permanently fix a few of the issues, that person might be ousted from the public eye.
If John F. Kennedy were elected today, and preached from the podium to “ask not what your country can do for you, but ask what you can do for your country” to our lazy and undisciplined masses, he’d probably be shunned by his own party and lamented by the libertarian Tea Party Movement. Its just the culture we’ve come to know. We want to get fatter, dumber and protect issues we don’t really understand. Even more a part of our culture is the idea that an individual who thinks like us and shares our weaknesses is fit to lead us. Well, if voters will not vote for those who commit adultery or steal from the government even though many Americans do, then I will not be led by a fat person. I believe that an overweight body, one like Mr. Christie’s is proof of poor sensory decisions with food and exercise within his own mind, and I’d be quite afraid of other poor sensory decisions he’d make if he’s been so personally reckless.
Your closed mind may cause you to have stopped reading at the greeting, or you may be fuming mad at my use of the word “fat” and are only reading because you’d like to unleash verbal vengeance with a comment. To that I say, thank you for reading. You’ll understand by the end. In truth, understanding why being called “fat” angers fat people is their first step to never being or feeling fat. Stigmas, not food and laziness are what really keeps people fat. So let’s tackle your first major stigma: what really is a fat person?
In speaking directly to "fat" people, I could be including people like actress Jennifer Love Hewiitt. But hey, if she's unhappy, then she's fat, if she's not, she's pretty normal.
A fat person can be anyone who is uncomfortable with their bodily appearance (and thinks they’re over-sized, overweight, or out of shape) and thinks that the solutions to their problems are far more complicated than simple exercise and common-sense dieting. A fat person can also be someone who has lost control of body parts and is out of touch with this fact. I understand that those two definitions include a broad spectrum of individuals who are either unhappy with their bodies or can’t do a single thing with their bodies to fix their problems or even go about their days properly. The estimation is that there are a great deal of fat people out there, and based on plain sight, I’m right. With all of the people considered obese by our government, plus all of the people of average weight who hate their bodies and are buying quick-fix programs from info-mercials, plus all of the people who have given up on all of it and are letting their appearance alter their every day lives and relationships, that’s a lot of people who are either fat, or think they’re fat.
I doubt these women have low self-esteem, or want to change, which would make them REALLY unattractive, even to the men who like them.
So, if there are that many people who are not only fat but are aware of it, then who benefits? The fitness industry, that’s who. Something that fat people need to quickly understand is that even though the language in the info-mercial is warm, and the guy creating the plan has the body you want, a group of guys in suits created this product, or that diet. Even worse, they could care less about you personally. They think about you only in terms of how you will look to spend your money, how desperate you are, and how easy they will make the process. So remember that empowering yourself to change the things you hate about yourself is much better than trusting a face in the television.
The same goes for gyms. Gyms are really no more than a huge bundle of all the things we don’t need to be fit. They are great for fit people, and truly fit people can enrich their lives and progress with all of the things gyms have to offer. Fat people are paying for all of the comforts of gyms, they also can’t seem to attend gyms without these things. Also, they use all of the equipment gyms offer in ways that potentially injure them or even cause them to gain more weight and size. Gyms could change for the better, but their business would falter. The reason is that all of the negative things that effect fat people work together. They’re made to think that fitness is a small part of life, and that fit people live glamorous, unrealistic lives. Then, when they realize that their personal goals might take a lot more work than they’d understand and still won’t happen by a certain date, they become frustrated, and do negative things to their bodies to seek results. The people selling these products, creating these programs, and personally training them, all know this and operate based on it. It’s a cycle more viscious than most we’ve grown up understanding.
Next, I feel implored to tell you the real reason that fat people are unattractive. There are many people who love and respect overweight people, are their devoted spouses, or simply lust after their type particularly. Most people though, can’t really attract themselves to people who fit my personal definition of fat. People aren’t attracted to lowered self-esteem, and those attracted are considered predators and creeps. Lowered self-esteem is what drives people into the web of faslehoods that fuels the fitness industry. It’s also not what anyone who might be interested in you wants to hear. Knowing that you lack control over your own situation is most likely the least attractive thing in our society. So while a flabby belly might scare away some of the opposite sex, talking about how you’ve spent years trying to fix it will turn anyone away.
Also, losing weight is difficult. Most difficult when you think you’re right. As a matter of fact, think back to everything you’ve ever thought you knew everything about that was seriously important, it didn’t get better until someone or something opened your mind. Not only is getting fit no different, it’s probably the best example of this. My advice is to not let it be difficult. Back to your thought about knowing it all, didn’t every solution simplify the problem until it was no longer a thought? Most of the time, it was something you were desperate to organize and take control of with lists, charts, or scheduling, only to find that the solution took no time or stress at all. Taking stress out of personal problems is the only way to fix them. Otherwise, they don’t fit into your schedule or your life.
The fact that fat people stress over being fat, food, and perception is the exact reason that goals are never seen. Even the idea that the goals are set is hurting. Most fat people have no idea how their bodies should look, or how to exercise, live, and eat when they’re actually hungry. They can’t combine their search for pleasure-eating food because it tastes so good to them, only exercising when it makes them comfortable, doing things that harm them in the future just for the impression of looking better-these are all things that don’t work along with real fitness and real results. Real exercise is full of empowerment and daily enrichment. It just takes time, but not only will you look sexy to all the fat people, but everyone will think that your discipline, not just your derriere is sexy.
