The below is a slightly abridged and edited version of Chapter 6 from my book The Thinking Person’s Guide to Fitness
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The Mind Game
Much of what it takes to become fit is mastering the mental aspect. This is especially important for those who are just starting out — or re-starting out after years of “backsliding.” It largely comes down to two things.
Firstly, you need to understand that the process is slow, and you must therefore develop compelling long-term goals. Secondly, you need to retrain your brain in order to make long-term goals more easily override short-term temptations.
The Long Run
If you were expecting to simply read a book and then “get fit” in a few weeks, it’s best to step back right now and take a bigger perspective: this is going to take a while. Becoming fit is a long-term process, measured in years. And though maintaining a given level of fitness is easier than getting there, staying fit — given the issues with our modern environment — is something that you will have to “work on” for the rest of your life. There are no quick fixes, no silver bullets, and no weird tricks that let you shortcut the process.
Here’s a good way to estimate how long it will take you to get in the shape you want to be in: the most fat you can sustainably lose over a long period of time is about one pound a week. If you are very overweight, you can probably lose a little more than that the first few months, and it is also entirely possible for anyone to lose two pounds a week if they really want.
However, quicker weight loss is inadvisable for a couple of reasons. For one thing, it’s not particularly healthy and you’ll lose muscle in the process (if it’s not obvious, in the next chapter I’ll explain why you don’t want to do that). In addition, that kind of weight loss requires a “crash diet” where you severely under-eat; these tend to backfire and cause the dreaded yo-yo effect, where your weight fluctuates up and down based on alternating periods of unhappily under-eating, offset by periods of returning to unhealthy over-eating. Over the long-term, it’s much better to establish good, healthy eating habits that you can stick with for the long haul, even if that means less rapid fat loss at first.
Another reason for estimating a maximum of one pound of fat loss a week is that it sets you up for success: while you may lose a little more some weeks, there will also be weeks where you either backslide, choose to forego a fat-loss oriented diet in favor of a holiday, or simply don’t lose weight for who-knows-why. Progress in both diet and exercise is never as linear as people want, and you’ll often take a step backwards despite all your efforts. So instead of setting yourself up for disappointment, just assume upfront that you can lose no more than a pound a week, and maybe less. If you’ve got forty pounds to lose, for example, expect it to take a year.
Similarly, getting stronger or faster also takes a long time. Even if you don’t want to run a half-marathon or benchpress 200 pounds, the process of going from a sedentary life to one in which you can do a handful of pull-ups or jog a couple miles without feeling terrible takes awhile — if you try to do things too fast, you’ll likely injure yourself and slow things down even further.
One good idea for coming to terms with the long-term nature of a fitness project is to spend some time thinking about your future self, and who you want that future self to be. This “future self” is the you that will exist in two years, five years, or maybe twenty years. This is the you that your short-term self will be potentially shortchanging when temptations and laziness arise, and so you should get familiar with him or her. I’m not going to suggest you make an inspiration board (though if you are into that kind of thing, it will probably help), but perhaps making a list of activities you want to be able to do in old age, or writing a letter from your older self to your current self, is worthwhile.
Whatever techniques you use to create a focus for your future self, go back to them every week or two, especially when you are just starting out. Find a way to meditate on your future self from time to time — doing so will make it much more likely that you’ll give this person the respect you need to when things get difficult.
Retraining Your Brain
Once you have a good sense of your long-term goals and a healthy respect for your future self, you need to figure out how to align your day-to-day actions with these goals, so that you can become that future self. If you are currently overweight and/or sedentary, this means you will need to make some lifestyle changes.
Ultimately, our bodies are the result of our lifestyles. And our lifestyles are mostly made up of small daily actions that get repeated. In turn, most of those small daily actions are habits, not true conscious choices: they are metaphorical grooves in our brains that lead us down certain well-worn paths over and over again. It’s not the conscious decision of whether to be fit or unfit that you need to change — if you are reading this book, you’ve already made that conscious decision. No, you need to change your unconscious behaviors.
To become more fit, we must retrain our brains, in a manner similar to the way we would train a toddler or pet: with patience, love, and a view towards making our unconscious actions “automatically” do what is best for us. This will require willpower, but at the same time it is best not to rely on it any more than necessary. Willpower is ultimately a power of our conscious selves, and subject to limitations. Instead, it is best to create habits and environmental cues that steer your unconscious self towards the choices you want to make. By changing your environment to better suit your long-term goals, and by both removing bad habits and developing new good habits, you will slowly but surely change your lifestyle one step at a time, which is the key to changing your body.
As you read through later chapters in this book, you’ll notice that much of the advice is about ways to retrain your brain (especially in Part II). There are many tips for forming habits, ways to align actions with future goals, and/or procedures to set up your schedule and surroundings to maximize the chance of success. Pay special attention to these sections, and go back to them if and when you find yourself stuck or unable to follow the “real” fitness advice about nutrition and exercise.
Willpower is an important element of becoming more fit, and you should work to increase it. But it is not something you should build your program around. Willpower is best thought of as a kind of muscle, and while there are techniques for strengthening it, it can and will eventually reach a breaking point, at least once in a while.