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"I need you to tell me I'm doing this right because I feel like I'm eating way too much."

A client sent a message like that a week ago. She has been at the lake for the last few weekends enjoying the good life. Summer, sun, drinks, food, and lake life are usually things that hinder a diet. Not ours though.

She bought a food scale and took it up there with her. She got tired of guessing. All this time she was also working crazy hours and shifts that took her deep into her regular sleep....

Your supporting cast is very influential in your decision making. You can easily determine who it is by looking at your schedule and figuring who you spend the most time with. To no surprise its usually family, friends, and co workers. Research suggests that we are the product of the five people we spend the most time with. 

In Iowa almost everyone has someone in their top five that is falling victim to low activity and oblivious eating. As of this writing we are the 7th fattest state...

I suggest you think first from principles and persuade everyone else to do so too. In this way we are trying to practice some ideals of the enlightenment. 

Immanuel Kant said Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self imposed immaturity. It is self imposed because we often fail to think for ourselves without being guided by others. 

"If I have a book to understand for me, a pastor to serve as my conscience, a doctor to decide my diet, and so on, I need not exert myself at all. I...

Three quarters of dieters will regain their weight within two years of finishing a major diet.

A lot of people end up in a process formally called weight cycling but commonly known as yo-yo dieting. Research is starting to uncover the negative side effects in losing and gaining the same five pounds over and over again. Note: this is five pounds of fat, not the five pounds of water and food we all tend to fluctuate within daily.

We already known that yo - yo dieting is linked with all...

Our fear of hunger is really a sign of progress.

Progress that was built on the shoulders of every dead man and woman that lived before us.

Thousands of years passed where hunger leading to famine was the number one killer of our kind.

We fixed the famine problem - in a way that is fucking incredible mind you, feeding nine billion and having plenty of room for more is not something to look over. 

In its place we have created a new , maybe worse problem in obesity. It causes the current...

My closest business colleague just shared news with me about something he has been working towards for almost two decades. 

Each year the Iowa State Fair holds a powerlifting meet that draws a couple hundred competitors from all over Iowa to get on stage and see how much weight they can bench press and deadlift. It has been run by a single person for nearly 30 years. My friend has been voluntarily helping run the thing for 15 and the torch is finally being passed to him.

He volunteered...

It has become fashionable that the first thing people do when they get to the gym is lay down. In the name of prehab or rehab they enter a facility entirely designed for movement and instead of moving they...lay down.

"I have to warm up" they profess. 

They either forgot or never knew the first few sets of any workout are the warm up. Those sets are of things like squats, presses, and rows. Not holds, foam rolls, or muscular isolations. 

In those sets you grease the groove of the...

Carmen works with Kelly. Three years ago Kelly was weighing her cottage cheese and eating it for breakfast. 

"This woman is effin crazy." Carmen thought. 

This morning, almost four years after the incident Carmen loves cottage cheese - not just for breakfast but any time she feels. And she logs every thing she eats and balances it on a monthly level. 

Between the two dates Carmen and Kelly have worked dozens of hours of lifting weights and logging their macros. They started by...