The other day I set a timer for 45 minutes, trying desperately to bust through the sluggish place I've found myself in recently, especially when it comes to writing. I spent 30 minutes starting and stopping ideas, thoughts and sentences. 

Finally, I surrendered to honesty and wrote about everything that was on my mind.   

The struggle is real people. 

And what was on my mind was everything. All at once. Split your television screen into 25 smaller screens. Play 25 different movies with 25 different themes.

This is my mind. 

I don’t talk often about the anxiety that accompanies my depression - but that's really what's been happening. I set a timer and forced myself to write, surrendering to whatever it is that came to my mind. This is my mind. 

Right now I am anxious. Constantly.

My first anxiety attack happened during my first semester of college. The onset was slow - I sat in with new friends, eating dinner in the cafeteria, talking about classes, professors, and weekend plans. My skin felt tingly and breathing was becoming difficult. 

We walked back to the dorm and I went to my room. I had no t.v., I had no computer, I had nothing but my stereo to distract me and it wasn’t working. I went downstairs to the lounge and turned on the t.v. There was an episode of Cagney and Lacy playing and I tried to follow the plot, to immerse myself in the story. 

The ice was pouring through my veins. Slow and cold and winding its frigid way through my body. Every breath was a struggle to catch and each time I was able to take a deep breath, I worried I wouldn’t catch the next. As my panic hit its peak, I finally knocked on the door of my resident advisor. 

“I don’t feel right,” I said.

Eventually, the “episode” was attributed to a medication I took for my heart arrhythmia - a side effect - and so the medication was changed. But when my dad called later that week to check on me, he did something that I hadn’t realized I needed. 

He named my experience.

“I had an anxiety attack once,” he said. “They’re no fun.” 

I don’t know what I said in that moment. But I know it was the first time, despite my having had times on and off throughout high school where I struggled to catch my breath, that I realized what was truly happening for me. I was battling anxiety. 

It might sound small - but what my dad really did for me that day (and the best thing I can tell you about my dad is that if you want to know how the moon got there, he hung it) was give me words for my struggle. And those words gave me some direction. 

While it took me years before I would really treat my struggle, my dad cracked the seed of my understanding a little bit that day. He gave me a name for what was going on, and that name alone made me feel a little less helpless. That name allowed me to say ok, this is what is going on. This is what I can do for myself. 

But even more so, in that conversation, my dad gave me an even great gift. He let me know that he shared my struggle.  

"I had an anxiety attack once."

Experiences like that are scary and unnerving and make you feel incredibly vulnerable - and alone. And sometimes, a gesture as small as naming the struggle, and knowing that you are not alone in your struggle, can be the first giant step towards healing. 

Be kind to yourself, today and always. 

Over the weekend, as I watched my beloved Pittsburgh Pirates tank in the waining days of July, I decided to shift my focus to making a pie chart about fat loss.

Yes, the Pirates played that poorly. 

But I also think that journey to fitness and fat loss can be so overwhelming and confusing, that there is merit to keeping the focus as simple as possible. 

20% Training

In terms of flat out fat loss, some might argue that 20% is a high number. It doesn’t matter what avenue you choose when you begin training. It could be Crossfit, Insanity, yoga, or running. Where we tend to get lost is wondering which method is going to burn the most calories and get us the best results. It’s so easy to hyper focus on the method of training that you can almost paralyze yourself with indecision about which approach is right.

There's a lot of ways to break down fitness. This is just one way to look at it. 

The best approach is the one with which you can build the most consistency. Yes, I'm a fan of strength training for all of the many benefits (increased bone density, muscle mass and independence to name a few), but you need to find one you and enjoy and stick with it. Which brings me to my next slice of pie. 

10% Patience

This number also might be a little low. Patience is the part of the process where you stay the course. Choose one method of training and stick to it. Choose one nutrition approach and stick to it. It’s tempting, even for fitness professionals, to jump from program to program when someone else releases a new product or we find something new. It's tempting for non-fitness professionals when you start a new bootcamp program and then find out a friend lost 50 pounds doing insanity and another lost 30 pounds by joining the new gym down the street. The next thing you know, you've jumped to so many different programs that nothing has worked. 

Choose an approach - choose a gym, choose a coach to work with, choose a nutrition approach and stick with it for six months. 

30% Nutrition

You’ve heard this before and you’ll hear it again - you can’t out-train a bad diet. It doesn’t matter if you burn 1,000 calories in a workout, fat loss won't happen if you aren't keeping your eating habits in check. Nutrition is so important that you don’t even need to train to lose weight. If you are on point with your nutrition, and on point is different for everyone, then you will lose weight regardless of what you do in the gym. 

40% Kindness to yourself

I think I need to be clear about something here:

Kindness to yourself is not apathy. It’s not a free pass to say I’ll eat what I want, drink what I want, and throw in the towel on this whole process because it’s just not working anyway.

That’s apathy and I can promise you from experience, that’s a dangerous place to be. (Click here for a post on apathy.)

Kindness is caring enough about yourself to make the best choices for you on a given day. Kindness is where you take into account your stress level, mood, and life demands and make the decision, especially in regards to the intensity of your workout, that is best for you.

Some days your body might feel so wrecked by a lack of sleep and life stress that you need to make careful choices about your self-care. Maybe it's a nap, maybe it's a massage, maybe it's 30 minutes in a Starbucks with your headphones on and a good book. Maybe it is a kick ass workout. You need to be the judge of that. 

Kindness is most certainly not beating yourself up more when life is already taking its punches at you. Because beating yourself up for what you did or didn't do the day before serves you no purpose. 

There are a number of different pieces to figuring out which approach to fitness and fat loss is best for you. But I firmly believe that if you focus on nutrition, are patient with your approach, self-aware of your own needs and kind to yourself about those needs, and do some type of training, good things will happen for you.

And that is my hope for you. 

I was given a t-shirt two weeks ago that said:

Stop Exercising. Start Training.

I don’t often agree with slogans on Nike t-shirts. With the exception of the Bo Knows series from the 90’s. I was always pretty sure that Bo knew everything.

Chasing a chicken to help you beat Apollo Creed is a version of training. 

Are you exercising? Or are you training? And what’s the difference? And why do I ask so many questions?

Good question. 

Before we talk about exercise or training, let's start with physical activity, which is described by the Center for Disease control as any activity that gets your body moving. Also according to the CDC, adults need at least two and a half hours every week of physical activity. So doing things like brisk walking everyday (to understand what brisk walking means, check out an earlier post I wrote here), hitting your Fitbit step goals, playing with your kids and grandkids - this is physical activity. 

If you are sedentary in your job then finding ways to be physically active after work and on weekends (or even during the workday with walking meetings or walks on lunch breaks) is an important place to start. But it's just that - a starting point. 

The next step is to add some type of exercise in to your weekly routine. 

Exercise is a physical activity performed for the effect that it produces today - right now. Mark Rippetoe describes it as “punching the physical clock.” When I take my basset hound out for a walk, we’re exercising. Or, lying on the sidewalk because it’s hot and he protests and then I carry him back to the house. So I’m exercising. As a kid, I went outside and threw a ball off of the wall over and over again. My adorable parents go to their local gym three times per week and use the elliptical and weight machines and bands. 

When you start to exercise with a particular performance goal in mind, your physical activity transforms from exercise to training. This is why we train for a 5K or a marathon - we train for a power lifting meet - we train to catch a chicken because it will help us defeat Apollo Creed....

Last night at the gym, I had a long conversation with a client who’s been with us for over a year. She’s lost a lot of weight, kept it off, and is starting to get antsy. I would argue that she has outgrown exercise - now she’s ready to train. She likes the idea of taking her fitness to the next level and is bored with exercise for the sake of exercise. She has built a strong base and is ready for more. That more might be a mud run or an obstacle race - it might be a push/pull meet (powerlifting meets that have only a bench and deadlift, no squat), or maybe running a 5K or 10K.

She doesn't have to sign up for an event like a run or power lifting meet to start training though. She might start training for a 1.5 times bodyweight deadlift. Once she sets a performance goal and gears her workouts towards hitting that goal, she is now training.

There is no one right place to be, depending on where you are in your personal journey. Physical activity might be the goal - and that’s ok - we all need to start somewhere. But if you have been exercising for a long time - going to the gym three times per week and riding the recumbent bike while watching t.v. and are frustrated that you aren't seeing any changes in terms of fat loss, then it perhaps it's time to stop just exercising and start training with a purpose.