The Worst Enemy of your Fitness Goal

" Rowing harder doesn't help if the boat is headed in the wrong direction."

-Kenichi Ohmae

Up until today, you have been strongly committed to your fitness goal. You are going to the gym anywhere from 2 to 6 days a week, you have started making some healthier nutritional choices and you have been maintaining this hard work for more than 3 months. But today, you feel exhausted and the amount of work that you have input, is not equivalent to the output in the results you have obtained.

You start questioning, what is that girl whose body has continuously changed every week that I see her doing? Maybe I need to do more cardio, maybe I need to eat less carbs and fats, maybe I need to workout 2 hours a day, maybe, maybe, maybe.... You are about to crash and burn and possibly give up on your fitness goal for another 5 years, so I am going to stop you right there.

I want you to consider the possibility that all of the things you think you know about losing weight or transforming your body are a useless collection of conflicting information, provided to you by a)advertising, b)magazines c) family and friends d)various and often opposing fashion health trends e)well intentioned and often mislead co-workers f)etc, etc, etc.

Ask yourself, WHO DO YOU LISTEN TO? Are any of these people nutrition experts? Have any of these people lost weight if the past 2 months in a healthy way? Do these people have any valid certifications and portfolio of having transformed their own or someone else's bodies?

So, let me ask you, why have we collected their advice as our source of knowledge? We don't know what we don't know until we start asking the right questions and for that we got to start looking for the right people and let them take part in our journeys.

For 8 years I worked extremely hard trying to achieve the body I wanted. I have tried many many things during that period of time: being vegetarian, Paleo, diet, cutting carbs, high fat/high protein; varsity sports (training 2 hours 5 days a week). adding weights, increasing cardio, CrossFit, becoming a personal trainer, German Volume Training, designing my own progression programs, etc, etc. I became stuck and frustrated at 133lbs.

Today, the reason I am at 119 with beautiful muscle definition starting to come through is because I admitted that what I knew was getting in the way of what I truly wanted. 8 years is a long time to want something and I was tired of waiting. I had been my own worst enemy thinking that I knew better than all of those people that had tried to help me in the past.

So I threw in the garbage everything I thought I new and with an open mind and a blank canvas I decided to accept the help of the experts around me. Here is what 8 years of being my worst enemy didn't give me. Here is what 5 months of having the right coaching has given me (photo taken on March 4th, 10 weeks to commpetition date):



Ok, so now that you feel inspired by this picture and this post I want you to consider a second thing. There isn't a one perfect plan or a one perfect coach for all, but somewhere out there is "the perfect plan for you" and/or "the perfect coach for you" and the only way you are going to find it is by giving up control and choosing to commit 100% to the plan.

Part of the problem that stopped me in the past from getting to where I am today was that I always chose to try a little bit of this, and a little bit of that, without giving my 100% commitment to any of the plans I followed. Hypocritically I was trying to piece the information and plans that I found to my liking and convenience and trying to obtain results out of that.

So please take notice that I am not saying that Paleo doesn't work, or that Crossfit doesn't work, what I am trying to say is that they don't work when you don't follow the discipline a 100%. And if you did and it didn't work and/or it makes you feel crappy, it doesn't mean its a lie or your body is just meant to stay overweight, it just means this is not the right plan for you and you can cross it out of your list and move on without wasting any more time.

PIECE OF ADVICE: a good length of time to see if something is working for you and your body or not is a 2 - 4 week period of 100% commitment, not 80%, not 99%.

Whatever you do or have, be invested in it 100%. Coach Omar Arvizu from Primal Athletics always says:

"If you are going to be fat and happy, so be it, but if you are fat and complain about it all the time, then do something about it"