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This is Optimal Living Daily, episode 2786, Making Peace with Your Body, by Rachel Trotta of RachelTrotta.com. And I'm Justin Malek, your personal narrator, usually, well, every day, but on Sundays, I share an episode from another podcast in the Optimal Living Daily network. Today's comes from my brother's show, Optimal Health Daily. Fun fact, he does the same thing that I do here, reading an article to you every single day of the week to help optimize your life, but he also answers listener questions on Fridays.
And if you send a relevant health-related question in, you'll get a copy of our Optimal Living Daily workbook. It'll be digital if you're outside of the U.S., but it can be physical, a hard copy, personally shipped to you by me if you're in the U.S. totally free. All you have to do is send a health-related question in to health at oldpodcast.com and then listen into that show on Fridays.
Again, that's Optimal Health Daily. But with that, let's get right to the bonus episode as we optimize your life. Making peace with your body by Rachel Trotta of RachelTrotta.com. The moving target of self-love.
One of the tricks of leading a long-term healthy lifestyle is getting your mindset as balanced as your body. As a fairly lean athletic person, I have a secret for people who aspire to get in better shape. If you take care of your body, it is an act of love for your body. You decide to love your body through action.
Feelings of self-love, of looking in the mirror and thinking, yeah, who's that fox, will follow action. However, if you wait to love your body as a spontaneous feeling, it will never happen. Why? The closer you get to the perfect body, the further away the perfect body seems.
Your standards raise along with your progress, and it becomes a frustrating moving target. Does this mean you shouldn't aspire to be leaner or fitter or to be faster or to be more athletic? Of course not. But, and this is a big but, you must decide to love your body through self-caring action, and you must make peace with your results before they even happen.
The paradox of the perfect body. What's another one of my trainer secrets? My clients with the commercially best bodies, the ones who look like traditional models or who can rock a swimsuit in a way that would make most jealous, are sometimes, well, very often actually, my least confident, least secure clients. They're the ones that would prefer to not wear a swimsuit and instead to obsess about cellulite.
That extra 1% of fitness is incredibly elusive. It is an odd phenomenon that your standard for aesthetics climbs as your fitness improves. If you are purely motivated by aesthetics and do not have at least some component of a desire for performance, speed, strength, pain relief, or another non-aesthetic goal, then you should buckle up for a very bumpy road of disappointment. If you think a certain aesthetic goal will make you happy, let me give you a preview of the path.
Once you lose 20 pounds, you'll want to get rid of your love handles. Once you get rid of your love handles, you'll want a flatter stomach. Once you have a flatter stomach, you'll want muscle tone. Once you have muscle tone, you'll want a six-pack.
Once you have a six-pack, you will decide that somehow your thighs or your arms are not up to snuff. It really never stops. You can always look better somehow, and the standard of perfection keeps getting further and further away, just beyond reach. I know this because I have experienced it myself, and I've seen clients go through this process.
It is why it is essential that, in addition to aesthetics, because I don't think it's helpful to pretend that aesthetics is not a factor, you must have performance goals. How to make peace with your body. Performance goals save the day. What do I mean by performance?
Here are a few examples. Squatting or deadlifting your body weight or more. Running a new race or running a familiar race faster. Mastering pull-ups and chin-ups and push-ups.
Getting rid of any nagging pains you may have. Habit-based goals, like doing a workout a certain number of times per week. Living pain-free, being capable of lifting, pulling, or pushing your own body weight, moving faster, having a healthier heart, and being able to push yourself harder and longer are all skills that have the potential to both extend and enhance your life, both in longevity and in quality. The irony is that there is an aesthetic payoff for building your fitness goals around these baselines.
Getting stronger, getting faster, and moving better will all likely yield body composition changes that are incredibly elusive if you chase them all out, but can be familiar friends if you just allow them in. Action is key. The magical mindset shift is moving your intention from approval to action. When you chase aesthetic goals with a one-track mind, your gauge of success could be how you feel about yourself on any given day.
Unfortunately, this can be incredibly random. Despite our best power of positive thinking efforts, we don't always feel great about ourselves. Variables from hormones to a bad meal to a friend's comment to fluid retention can all impact the way we feel about our bodies. Even worse, the way we feel can impact the way we act.
When we feel badly about ourselves, we typically don't take measured and sober action to make ourselves feel better. We often either overeat, think self-soothe, or go into an over-exercising and under-eating frenzy that is an unrealistic, random, and unsustainable plan. However, when you incorporate aesthetic goals into a well-balanced, structured, organized plan of attack on performance goals, you will instead have measurable and observable markers of progress, be more accepting of both good days and bad days, feel proud of what your body can do, improve your actual markers of health, and increase the likelihood of continued fitness as you mature and age. While there are a myriad of other benefits, the key is to demote the factor of how I feel about my body or what the scale says from being the primary marker of progress to being only one part of the process.
I'm not saying it will never play a role. Of course it will. We all want to look great. But when you stop giving your feelings about your body so much power and invest more energy into your routines and performance, it's incredible how much better you will feel about yourself almost right away.
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And head to superpower.com and use code OLD at checkout for an additional $20 off your membership. Dr. Neil here for my commentary. When discussing appearance, some of my favorite examples to use are from the movies 300 and Man of Steel.
Both of these films changed how people viewed fitness. How was it possible that these actors who were not athletes became such physical specimens? After both of those movies came out, you should have seen how many clients contacted me and said, I want to look like this. And held up a picture of either Leonidas or Henry Cavill.
Actors in both films thanked Mark Twight, their trainer, for these physical achievements. Mark Twight, while grateful for this appreciation, believed that people were a bit misled by his training approaches. In interviews, when asked about how muscular his actors looked, he has said, quote, it gave people the wrong idea. Aesthetics are actually our last concern.
My gym focuses on building true fitness, not the appearance of it. And true fitness comes from training the muscle that sits in your skull, your brain. End quote. What he's talking about, of course, are our mental barriers.
And just as Rachel mentioned, Mark Twight believes in performance-related goals. If we focus on being just a bit better tomorrow and then the next day and then the next, bigger muscles and a flatter stomach will eventually follow. As Rachel put it so perfectly, what will happen when you do finally achieve those six-pack abs? Will you then say, well, I did it.
I met my goals. Guess I'll stop working out now. Probably not, or hopefully not. It will just leave the door open for us to find something else to critique about ourselves.
But if we can focus on performing just one more push-up or one more pull-up or add one more pound to our deadlift or squat during our workouts, these habits will force our muscles to grow. These habits, when performed consistently, will lead to our bodies eventually burning fat for energy. And in turn, between our muscles growing and eventually burning fat for energy, we're going to change how our bodies look, for