It’s all about perspective

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 27/01/2024 (818 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Blue Monday has come and gone but winter will stay for a bit yet. Interestingly, Sky Travel, who came up with the gimmick of Blue Monday, is no longer in business.

While there is little to no science behind Blue Monday, it is the dead of winter here in Canada, which generally means more to complain about. There’s little sun, poor holiday eating and spending habits might be catching up, and those recently set new year resolutions may be falling by the wayside. But to quote author and motivational speaker Wayne Dyer: “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”

Stepping into 2024, I was all fired up to tackle my goals head-on. But life threw me a curveball. For a bit now, I’ve been wrestling with some insomnia.

It’s a strange feeling — being a health coach, I’m usually the one dishing out advice on healthy habits and restful nights are a part of that. Yet I am finding myself being a bit of an impostor in that department. It’s humbling, and it’s thrown my expectations for the early part of the year off track.

I put my fitness aims in maintenance mode and my business Cal Fit is going strong with a great team supporting me, but we had lofty goals to start the year that I’ve had to temper, temporarily.

I’m sharing this because it’s easy to scroll through social media or blogs and think it’s all sunshine and PB&Js, but we all face our own challenges. Mine just happens to be in the sleep department right now.

It’s not about ignoring them or pretending they don’t exist. It’s about adapting, seeking solutions and being kind to ourselves in the process. That’s what I’m focusing on — finding that balance and getting back to my peak, one step (and night) at a time.

Getting help and putting in the work is key, so I’ve got that covered. If you’re also having a rocky start to the year, remember, it just takes getting up and trying again.

Just sharing this publicly is therapeutic for me. I selfishly use this space to share my ups and downs, so I hope you don’t mind. I think it’s just as important in my role to share the struggles as it is to promote the highlight reel of successes. I find the negative voice gets louder when I haven’t slept much, so today’s message is about how to navigate “life storms” and still do the right things.

It’s a good reminder for me; and I remind myself I have so much to be thankful for. So whether you’re struggling or not, I just wanted to let you know it only gets better when you change your perspective and persist.

Your challenge today is to take a step toward becoming kinder to yourself. Your mission is to identify a destructive thought pattern to break this year, and to commit to the work of saying, “Nope, we don’t do that anymore.”

No one plays their best for a coach who yells and berates them. Yet, the voice in our own heads is often our harshest critic.

“I can’t do anything right.”

“I’m an idiot.”

“It’s all my fault.”

“I am a complete failure.”

“I’m destined to be overweight forever.”

“I hate my body.”

We wouldn’t allow someone else — a boss, a teacher, a coach — to speak like this to someone we cared about. So why should we allow our inner voice to speak like this to us? The answer, of course, is that we shouldn’t. We can’t.

The way to break a negative thought pattern is to be prepared with a positive one. One little setback is a setup for better things when you see it as such. I still have 49 odd weeks this year to crush my goals.

Be your own biggest cheerleader and catch yourself when you start to berate yourself. I find the best response to feeling down is building momentum through small wins — one good meal, workout or walk at a time.

Regardless of what you’ve done to this point, everything can change when you keep showing up. There’s one thing I know: the “whoosh” is coming for you.

And I’m not just referring to the scale, but mental breakthroughs and in other unexpected ways. As with anything worth doing in life, you will have to delay gratification. You will often go through long periods of doing the work with minimal results, only to experience the “whoosh” effect when a big breakthrough occurs, leading to whole new thought patterns, behaviours and beliefs — not to mention results!

But this only happens when you do the work, when you fight the resistance and when you persist past problems. So stay strong and push on.

How I lost 60 pounds

This was an interesting question that came into my inbox this week, and I don’t think I’ve answered it for a while. I’ve talked at length about the Big 5 framework of foundational habits that make all the difference. But it must start within you before the tactics will ever stick. A combination of commitment, accountability and a potential loss is the formula I backed into.

What is loss aversion? Loss aversion in behavioural economics refers to a phenomenon where a real or potential loss is perceived by individuals as psychologically or emotionally more severe than an equivalent gain.

In order to fully commit back in 2003, I told myself if I didn’t lose at least 50 pounds, I’d quit playing video games for a year (a big deal to me at the time) and left a sticky note on my computer monitor to remind me.

I also enlisted my dad for accountability, who was more than happy to see me get off the computer. I didn’t know it at the time, but this strategy is outlined in The Blackmail Diet, an obscure book by John Bear.

The author battles obesity and comes up with a plan: he signs a contract with a lawyer and puts US$5,000 in escrow. The contract states that if in a year’s time the author hasn’t lost 70 pounds, the lawyer must give all the money to the American Nazi Party.

As expected, a year later he had lost the 70 pounds.

If you’ve struggled to lose weight and keep it off, it’s probably because you treat it like that leaky sink in the downstairs bathroom. You’ll get to it when the mood strikes.

Most of the time, we don’t fail to achieve our goals due to a lack of knowledge and how-to, it’s because we haven’t associated the right level of motivation to the outcome. What you need is something called a forcing function. A forcing function is any task, activity or event that forces you to take action and produce a result.

Let’s start with a real-world example. For one client, he weighed over 300 pounds and had tried countless times to lose the weight, with little success. It kept going in the wrong direction.

But one day his wife unexpectedly gave him some big news: she was pregnant. That was his forcing function. He knew things would be different this time because he wasn’t taking “no” for an answer. He lost over 100 pounds and became the fit dad he envisioned becoming.

For others, it may be a divorce, a health issue or some other arbitrary trigger that becomes the forcing function. Whatever it is, you need to find yours and pair it up with commitment and accountability. Hopefully it’s not a dire “do or die” forcing function, but it sometimes takes that.

With the combination of commitment, accountability and laser focus, I lost the weight within a year, and now, some 20 years later, I’m still doing my thing and coaching others to do the same within a similar framework. Your next diet attempt will be different if you start with this three-step process.

Mitch Calvert is a Winnipeg-based fitness coach who has helped more than 1,400 people transform their bodies and lives over the past decade. Visit mitchcalvert.com/calculator to get a free starter plan — complete with estimated calories, visuals and sample recipes — personalized for your body and your goals.