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By Root 625 0

counseling and not just the advice of the Web Soup guy.) We love to talk about the butterfly effect in terms of time-travel movies: “If you change even the SMALLEST of things in a system, its long-term effects can be dramatic.” Why can’t the same be true for lifestyle changes? Don’t you think you would be better off even if you only lived well one day a week for the rest of your life? Chances are, it won’t only be that one day. You’ll feel better, get stronger, and seek out more of the same. Before you know it, you’ll have eased yourself into a far superior habit string. The best analogy I can think of is bank interest. It only seems like a few percent here or there, but over the long term it’s the compounded interest that any obnoxiously wealthy person would happily tell you was one of the contributing factors to their wealth.

Start with incremental change. You’ll get used to it. The key to Homo sapiens’s survival all these thousands of years is our ability to adapt. Just as you got into a groove of treating your body like shit, so will you acquire the desire to hug it.

FEAR OF “GETTING TOO HUGE”

When I first started working with Trainer Tom, one of the things I said was, “You know, I’ve thought about working out in the past, but I just didn’t want to get too huge.” Tom chuckled. He knew this was a common excuse for people who simply didn’t feel like working out. Here are some analogies to that statement:

“I was worried if I got my driver’s license I’d start winning all the NASCAR races.”

“I was worried if I got a job at Safeway I’d end up owning all the Safeways.”

“I was worried if I started putting ice in my drinks I’d deplete the world of its entire ice supply.”

The people who are “too huge” have to work out as a full-time job, eat INSANE amounts of protein (like twenty chicken tits a day), and/or take supplements of varying types. I work out two or three days a week and I am by no means huge. I’m just fit, and that’s good enough.

Honestly, you don’t even have to exercise that much to completely change your life! Do it once a week, maybe twice. And you don’t have to crush yourself each time. If you’re starting from nothing, a half hour on the treadmill a couple of times a week is a wonderful place to start. It’s the consistency that matters. If you do it regularly, you’ll be amazed at how quickly you feel better, AND to your surprise, you will start to crave more physical activity as you move forward.

If you’re not gung ho to completely alter every aspect of your life at once, a philosophy of incremental change is a good way to go. Massive change all at once has a higher failure rate. Do you play guitar? If not, go out and learn guitar for this next analogy. I’ll wait. [pause here]

Hey! How was learning guitar? Are you rad now? GREAT! Actually, what I’m about to say has very little to do with the actual playing of the guitar, so I may have led you astray by telling you to put your life on hold to be awesome at it. It’s about sudden change. When you restring a guitar, it falls out of tune very quickly. The strings are tight and need to loosen up over time into their new positions. A little twist here, a little tweak there done consistently, and you’ll stay in tune longer. Know that the more you try to change at once, the more challenging it will be and the quicker you might fail. It’s OK. You wouldn’t put new strings on a guitar, tune it once, and then yell, “Well, fuck THIS noise!” when it’s out of tune ten minutes later. You know that you are committed to breaking it in and keeping it in tune. We are all like guitars. (Especially because the lengths of our necks and sizes of our holes vary. #HEYooooooooo #HashtaggingOut-sideOfTwitter)

ALWAYS LEAVE FEELING BETTER

“PUSSY! Here’s a tampon to soak up some a those tears!”

“But my back kind of hurts.”

“No pain, no gain! PUSH through it!”

Cut to six-week injury.

How many times has this kind of trainer prevented someone from EVER wanting to work out again as long as they live? Trainer Tom always stresses SAFETY in his workouts. He stresses