Sometimes it takes a doctor's visit to wake us up. When the doctor sees the blood markers, the visceral fat, the blood pressure, the heart rate, the blood sugar, they go, "You're in bad shape. You need to do something about it." That's what my cardiologist told me a few years ago. He told me I was obese. Obese? Me obese? But he was right. At 35% body fat, I was technically obese. I thought to myself, "I better take care of this -- now."
Muscle is not vanity at 74. It's a longevity organ.
This morning at the gym.
Either you are strengthening your muscles and they are growing, or they are not growing and shrinking. Everything is always changing. And it's up to you to decide how it changes. Your skeletal muscle is going to help you for the rest of your life. The six pack, if it ever shows up, is not the target. It's the side effect of doing boring things over and over again.
Getting in my steps today.
Look at yourself in the mirror. Ask yourself, "I'm 40 (or 50, or whatever age you are). Let's take stock of how I am right now, okay? Where is all this headed? Because it's not going to get better if nothing changes." Fat loss is not a mystery. You know what to do. It means training enough to create a stimulus to create a response. It means developing a small set of habits that are going to move the needle. Simple as that. Three days a week you add progressive overload to your gym workouts, like these guys I was working out with today are doing.
Muscle is longevity insurance. You're not going to look like a bodybuilder unless you want to take steroids. But that's not the point.
Again, we have the knowledge. So why don't we take the action?
You've thought about the thing.
You've read about the thing.
But you haven't done the thing.
And one month, one year, one decade from now you'll be exactly where you are right now.
It's not an information gap.
It's an action gap.
You need to know where you to get to where you want to go.
That's it.