Month: January 2017

There is a difference in how Marines motivate each other and how civilians treat motivation in the workplace. I learned this first-hand as a young Marine who worked part-time off-base at a store in Irvine, CA.

Marines are challenged by any new Marine who is attached to the unit. If that Marine starts to out-shine the others, the Marines see that as a challenge. They look into their own motivation and find it lacking and raise their level to meet that of the new Marine. Marines won’t let another Marine out-perform them and carry all the weight. If the new Marine raises the operational pace, the rest of the Marines will match it. We rise to the challenge. It’s drilled into us and we are trained to perform this way. That’s why the all-in attitude is something I can take on with relative ease.

Civilians treat challenge from new colleagues in an entirely different way. If the new employee starts by working hard and out-performing the rest in the department, someone (or sometimes even a few of them) will take the new employee aside and tell them to slow down and not make everyone else look bad. You see, it’s easier to slow down the new guy than for everyone else to step it up and match the new person’s operational pace. (I want to add that not all civilians do this. There are many fine people out there who work hard and accept a challenge by stepping up to meet it. However, these people seem to be rarer than they are in the Marine Corps. Again, just my personal observation.)

On this blog, I talk a lot about discipline, determination, motivation, and perseverance. These are concepts I didn’t learn in the Marines, but were taken to a new level of understanding through boot camp and NCO school. Anyone can learn these concepts, but it’s up to you to truly embrace them and use them. These are my secret weapons. These are the tools I used to be successful in regaining my health and fitness. You can harness these same tools. You just have to want to do it badly enough.

That got your attention, so I’ll explain, because I know this is going to be a little controversial. Skinny people who have never been overweight used to try to give me advice all the time about losing weight and getting healthy. They reasoned that they never got fat, so whatever they are doing must be the right way to get skinny. Only they were, at best, half right. I want to add that they aren’t all wrong, either, but they didn’t know how to approach the subject with me, a fat person, in a way that resonated with me. They didn’t know how to get through in a way that made sense to someone who had serious issues with diet and exercise. They also had no idea about the challenges a fat person has to go through to get back to a healthy weight.

Some people just stay skinny despite the food they put into their bodies. My mom’s husband is one of those guys. He can eat endless amounts of food that are horribad for you and he stays thin. His cholesterol levels? Not so good, but his weight and body fat percentages are impressive. I am not one of these types of people. If I overeat or eat bad foods, my weight balloons along with my pants size.

A good friend of mine told me recently that he ignored (literally, with hands on his ears at times) people who would try to tell him how to eat, what to eat, or how much to exercise to get to a healthier weight. He said that these people were either naturally thin or had never been fat. They didn’t know what they were talking about in terms of weight loss because they never had to LOSE weight. They have been maintaining their entire lives. He said he only started asking me questions about my lifestyle after he watched me lose over 100 lbs in one year.

I understand fully what he felt. I felt the same way. Had my cousin not been the person to tell me about Whole30 and Paleo, I would likely have passed up on both. Only after listening to her did it click to me and make sense. Only hearing it from her, someone who struggled with weight even as an athlete, did I listen and take it to heart. She walked the same walk I walked. She knew the difficulties, the challenges, and the pain. She understood.

I’m a formerly fat guy. I once weighed over 312 lbs. For a guy who is only 5’7″, that’s horribly unhealthy. I know how I got that big, and I know what it took for me to get down to 174 lbs. It wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t nearly as hard work as some of the skinnies made it out to be. You see, a lot of skinny people believe that all it takes to get thin is to eat sensible portions and exercise a lot. If that worked so well, I would have never gotten as large as I did. At least, not as quickly. I know what it took for me to get down to a healthy weight, and what it took for me to want to get fit. I can’t say the skinny people were 100% wrong, but the way they go about giving advice and the advice they give wasn’t always on-point. At least not for someone like me: used to be skinny, got fat, and needed to get skinny again.

I’m not saying I have all the answers. We are all different, and what worked for me may not necessarily work for you. But there’s a better chance that what I did can work for you if you are a person who used to be thin and is now fat. Heck, my wife was never a thin person and she is now by doing the same thing I did, so if you’ve never been thin, it may work for you, too. But I want to be clear: I don’t have all the answers. What I have are some tips, ideas, and information that is helpful and may get you the same results I had (or better). And this is all coming from a guy who, at one point in his life, was so overweight that he thought he was going to die and there was no way out of that fat misery. I was wrong. So very wrong.

Well, look at this. The sugar lobby paid scientists to blur sugar’s role in heart disease. This is no big surprise; I’ve been talking about this on PaleoMarine.com since I started this blog. What concerns me the most is how this news isn’t in the US media. Why aren’t we telling people that our nutritional ideas are based on poor or even false science? Could it be that the money behind our media is the same money behind these studies?

No, I don’t wear a tin foil hat, nor do I see a conspiracy around every corner. However, the “low-fat is good for your heart” and “whole grains are good for you” arguments are not holding up in any real scientific testing. I’ve even read a blog that says we need to eat grains because Jesus shared bread at the Last Supper.

Come on.

We need to stick to real science when it comes to nutrition and keep the food lobbies out of science. We also need to reevaluate the studies done in the past to better gauge their veracity.

There’s no real revelation in the article I posted. It echoes the previous links I’ve posted about the evils of sugar and how the sugar lobby paid for the studies to ignore how bad sugar is for us.

I’m hoping because you’re here reading this that you will read not only the link I posted here, but some of the other links about the evils of sugar. If you are going to change just one thing about your diet this year, make it eliminating processed and added sugars in your foods. You will be shocked at how much better you feel, how your health will improve, and yes, how much weight you will lose. It’s that big of a deal.