Ep. 039 - The #1 Health & Weight Loss Secret (for Men Over 40)

SHOW NOTES

What if you could unlock the truth about weight loss for men over 40 with one simple secret? 

Today’s episode is packed with hard-earned wisdom from nearly two decades in the health and weight loss industry.

 The key to lasting results isn't complex - it comes down to one thing - which I reveal in this episode. 

So, let's get started!

TRANSCRIPT

Today I'm sharing health and weight loss secrets. Welcome to man in the Arena, your go-to podcast for all things related to health and weight loss for Men Over 40. Here we discuss strategies that will get you off the sidelines and into the game so you can achieve your optimal health. It's time to lead a legacy of longevity.

Hey guys, welcome to the arena. It is great to have you here. I'm going to get straight to the point today because I am fired up Now. I've worked in the health and weight loss industry for nearly 20 years. Before that, I trained as an elite athlete where I was undersized, un-underrated, but I was always successful because I lived in the gym and I ate right, I didn't drink and didn't party, and I studied kinesiology, nutrition and psychology. And since then, I've owned two different fitness companies and I've worked with thousands of people who wanted to lose weight, get stronger, feel better and get rid of aches and pain and stop the cycle of abusing their bodies.

Over the course of all these years, I've uncovered the number one secret to health and weight loss, especially for men over 40. Are you ready? Secret is there is no secret. It's imperative that you hear that there is no secret. There is no magic pill, including all the new weight loss GLP drugs. There's no diet, there's no power, this or freakish that program that is going to help you lose weight and get in better shape and cure your bodily ills and dysfunctions once and for all.

The truth is, you have to prioritize your health and weight loss and work at it every day if you're going to see lasting results. When I say work, this often gets confused with some Rocky montage type of work, but that's not what I'm saying here, notice. I said prioritize, and prioritize means to treat something as more important than other things. In my opinion, you have your family, your career and your health, and you may also put your faith in there as well. Either way, these are your main priorities and there is enough time in the day to meet the demands of these priorities. If you manage your time effectively, there is also time for fun and relaxation and downtime and other interests as well. Now I work with guys who have a never ending list of tax and responsibilities and I understand there's always a lot to do, but you must prioritize your health Now. Prioritizing your health is more than just treating your health more importantly than other things. At a deeper level. You have to be willing to eliminate the short term discomforts and pleasures you've been accustomed to in favor of your long term health. Instead of seeking happiness and pleasure and external things like food, drugs and alcohol and TV and working, you have to find happiness inside your own head and body.

So if you're overweight, if you're sedentary, at risk of diabetes, obesity, if you're at risk of heart disease or you just feel like shit, ask yourself do I have a health plan? Do I have people who can support me, guide me, hold me accountable? Are there measures in place to evaluate the effectiveness of my plan ie milestones and KPIs? And lastly, ask yourself is there a process to reiterate and make adjustments if I'm finding myself getting off track? After all, creating a plan surrounding yourself with people who can help you stay accountable and then putting that plan into action and evaluating its effectiveness is the necessary approach. It's that simple.

Think of any other area of your life where you've been successful and I guarantee you this is the process you followed. You became a doctor, you went to school and there was a plan baked into that. You surrounded yourself with people who held you accountable your teachers and your peers. You had tests that acted as milestones and you made adjustments when necessary. So why do you guys find it so hard to get in shape and live's weight? Here's why Because they're up against a ton of shit. We live in a world that's set up for you to destroy your physical and mental well-being. The Western world food, entertainment, sex, comfort are all at our fingertips with the press of even just a few buttons and without any effort of all.

So we can have virtually anything we desire. Every point of the motivational triad is covered. Human beings are hardwired to avoid pain, seek pleasure and conserve energy. We now live in a world where we actively have to do the opposite. We have to seek pain, avoid pleasure and expend energy. So when you seek pain, we have to be able to process urges and emotions instead of buffer them away. When we avoid pleasure, we need to stop overeating and stop over drinking, and we need to expend energy. We need to work out, we need to move more, because our lives are so sedentary. Now, I get that it's difficult to get over these barriers, but there is a way and you have to believe that. So right now I'm working with a guy who is six months into his coaching and he's lost 59.8 pounds.

And when we jumped on our first console call, he said Craig, I don't care about my weight. I just got back from the doctor and he told me I'm prediabetic and I need to change my lifestyle. Now I said to him there's a path in front of you and it leads to your health and within a year you're no longer going to be prediabetic and you won't have a BMI that says you're obese. And he's not alone either. I've seen many other amazing transformations just like this. So there's guys like you who did this while starting new jobs, traveling for their jobs. There was guys who were going through divorce, guys who were still able to perform at a high level without completely disrupting their lives to get in shape. One of the most important words in the English language is the word and A-N-D, so you can perform at a high level and you can be healthy and you can have a great family life. It's not a matter of or. So this podcast was very much a wake up call to some of you. I want you to start taking action today. Without your health, you have nothing, some guys will say. But, craig, I'm healthy, I don't have any really negative symptoms, my blood markers are good.

And I say if you have a high BMI, that's a symptom. If your waist size is over 40 inches, that's a symptom. If you don't exercise, you don't sleep well. These are all symptoms and I want to change them, and here's where we start. There's a number of reasons that hold guys back from getting started, but here are a few that I think are most common. Number one worry.

If you're concerned that you might do something that causes more harm than benefit, ie you're afraid that you're so out of shape that you might have a heart attack. Here's what I want you to do. I want you to schedule physical with your doctor and, if necessary, a cardiologist. Go and get an EKG done and make sure there's no risk factors for exercise. Now, the purpose of this appointment is to not get the thumbs up that your health is fine. The purpose of this appointment is to squash your concerns, to get the thumbs up that you can now start taking steps to become even healthier, ie start exercising, or to take action on how you can manage your sleep apnea. The purpose of this appointment is to help you feel more confident and put your mind at ease, because you have fears that are holding you back.

Once you get the okay, then take action and start moving. Start eating right. The second thing holding guys back is their fear of failure. Ie you're concerned about getting started, not being able to prioritize your health and do uncomfortable work. I understand that might be a barrier. Then I want you to work on being future focused and adopt a growth mindset. We often look to our past for the evidence of future success, and it's an unhelpful way to approach your health, especially if you're unhealthy now. Just because you failed in the past doesn't mean you're going to fail in the future. Instead, I want you to have a growth mindset.

A growth mindset means you look at any sort of obstacle or failure as a possibility or an opportunity to learn and grow. So I want you to expect to encounter a number of hurdles and get excited about how they're going to make you better. Failure is a sign that you're showing up, you're trying new things and, ultimately, it's a sign of your courage.

At the same time, you cannot have success without failure. Let me say that again you cannot have success without failure, because that's where you finger things out and get better. So, instead of avoiding failure, I want you to go and fail faster. So how do you apply this to your health? You start small and you start to see where you can make improvements. You start to see where you can make improvements to your healthy eating and maybe you try a fasting plan and maybe you try to determine if that fits your lifestyle. Or you start to track your sleep and you start to see how that impacts other certain habits. A fear of failure is guaranteed failure. You are failing ahead of time.

A growth mindset helps you take action and learn from your failures and the more you fail, the more you succeed. So fail fast. Lastly, number three, apathy. If your mindset is that you just don't care, you're in default mode, you're not actively pursuing your goals and things that matter to you, and that is until you get to this place of regret. That's apathy's cousin. You eventually get to this place where you do care and you are concerned and you find yourself saying things like why didn't I take care of this earlier?

So how do you know if you're in this place of apathy? I want you to look back over the last five years, one year, six months, and ask yourself have I taken any risk when it comes to my health and I mean good risk. Have I tried to eat better? Have I tried to work out? Have I improved my habits or prioritized my health? And when you value something, you take risk for it. That's how you know if you're in apathy or not. When you are indifferent, you don't take risk.

As I said earlier in this podcast, prioritize something means to take risk and subject yourself to potential discomfort. In some way To get out of apathy. You have to understand that apathy is the worst form of neglect. I heard this once that the opposite of love is not hate but apathy. I'd rather have someone hate me than to not care about me at all. So when you're apathetic about your health, you're partaking in the highest form of neglect. Now, I'm not saying this to shame you, but to help you see that you and your health matter and your health deserves attention and your focus. All right, guys, there you have it. There's no secret to your health and weight loss over 40.

You have to prioritize your health every day. Be willing to experience the discomfort, take risk, overcome failures and take a step towards your own self love and valuing your own health. So get out your pens and start erasing the mistakes from your past and start writing the new possibilities for your future. As always, you have a place you can go to take action and get support and get coaching. I want you to come and join us in the arena. It's the spear methods community where we're doing all this work and we're seeing results and we're making real in capitals R-E-A-L results that last a lifetime.

Thank you so much for listening today and I look forward to next week's episode. In the meantime, keep leading a legacy of good health and longevity. If you're ready to step inside the arena and change the trajectory of your health, head on over to the spear methodcom and download my free guide to learn simple and effective strategies on how to optimize your health today.