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Determining what is enough is the antithesis of growth. Enough is different for everyone and serves as the true north star for those willing to buck the trend of wanting more. 

True freedom is gained when you define upper bounds to your goals. 

It's worth figuring out what your own sense of enough is. 

This allows you the super power of saying no to doing the expected or to opportunities that don't serve you. 

You will experience a true sense of satisfaction when you...

The most misunderstood of all sleep aids is alcohol. That's because it is not a sleep aid. Plenty of people believe alcohol helps them fall asleep easily or that it makes them sleep sounder throughout the night. Both beliefs are wrong. 

Alcohol belongs to a class of drugs called sedatives. It bind to receptors in your brain that prevent neurons from firing electrical impulses. Noting that alcohol is a sedative confuses people. "Drinking makes me liven up and become more social,...

The word 'diet' is a noun of Greek origin. 

According to Merriam-Webster it can be used as a noun to mean four primary things. 

1. Food and drink regularly provided or consumed.

2. Habitual nourishment.

3. The kind and amount of food prescribed for a person or animal for a specific reason.

4. A regimen of eating and drinking sparingly so as to reduce one's weight.

The first two are what I think of when I hear the word 'diet.'

But many of you reading this and those I work with...

Performance goals are a lot like outcome goals but they are usually associated with external validation. This is especially true today with social media and comparison culture conveniently tucked into our pockets. You may be shooting for a specific performance like a personal best lift or faster time to complete a workout/run. 

Mastery goals are about learning, developing skills, and the value we derive from becoming good at something or understanding it deeply. 

Performance goals...

When we eat more calories than we burn we gain fat.

The scale goes up. 

The same is true of the opposite; when we eat less calories than we burn we lose fat.

The scale goes down. 

Knowing how closely related calories are to scale weight is important because we can use the scale to indirectly measure calorie intake. 

AKA no food logging. 

Doing so is easy. 

Find a weight range you are comfortable with. Remember the weight classes wrestlers were dividing into in high school?...

When I was growing I was taught to filter my speech with the suggestion: "Would you say it to your grandma?"

Now I ask clients about their eating and exercise with: "Would you teach it to your kids?"

Like a teenager losing half their vocabulary with the first filter the second one eliminates a whole bunch of diet and workout BS. 

Would ya teach your kids not to eat carbohydrates ala keto?

How about having them consume half their daily nutrition from powders  and all of their vitamins...

Believing there are good and bad foods, or cheat and non cheat, or any other black and white break down is a distorted way to think of food. Such labeling of food often leads to binge eating. 

There is no such thing as good food or bad food. Or a right food or wrong food. There is no such thing as a fattening food or fat burning food.

If you want to lose fat the only way to do it is to be in a calorie deficit. It doesn’t matter where the calories come from in a purely a fat loss...

I will eat right when things calm down. 

When she was younger Kelly was able to maintain a healthy weight because of all the sports she played. As she got older and settled into her career as an accountant she started steadily gaining weight. Her desk job was sedentary and she missed all the activity her younger years provided. Over the course of a decade she gained close to fifty pounds of fat. She reached a point where she had to do something about it and started working to lose...

Your first priority should be you. If you don’t take care of yourself first you won’t be much use to anyone else. 

One way to get stuck is to get your priorities wrong. Getting them right is harder than it sounds. When I started personal training I worked with a bunch of people who were older than me. I was 20 ish and spent my days walking clients through exercise sessions. It doesn’t take many counted out loud sets for the conversation to shift to the person...

How is modern more stressful? 

Many modern stressors simply mimic danger whereas the responses we developed were to actual danger. That traffic jam is not as threatening as the pack of hungry predators. Your boss’s bad mood pales in comparison to the dangers of an unsheltered snow storm. Our modern situations seem stressful psychologically but they don’t present the same physical threat we have grown accustomed to. Today our stressors are small but constant. In the...