Social support and lifestyle changes
I don’t know about you guys, but when it comes to lifestyle changes regarding nutrition and exercise, there are a lot of things going on emotionally, especially if you’re new to the whole concept. I can just imagine the emotions going on the first time someone enters a gym, seeing all this unfamiliar equipment. The feeling of being somewhere that is new, not knowing what to do or how to do it. Being stuck in a body that makes you feel insecure about your self and seeing all the fit and good looking people running around in their tank tops and skinny pants, smiling like they own the place.
This insecurity may also come to play for many people the first trip to the grocery store. I don’t mean that people who decide to make a positive change to their diet and exercise have never been to the grocery store before, what I mean is that they haven’t been there with the mindset - I am here to find healthy things that will make me healthier and make my body feel good. This may sound like second nature to many of us, but for most out there, it's not. Most of us don’t see food as carbs, proteins and fats, we see it as it is - food. Many of us don’t even know that there are things like different kind of potatoes, or that there is a difference between chicken breast and chicken wings.
The majority of my carrier, these are the people that I have worked with, not elite bodybuilders, figure athletes or supermodels. No, average Joes that just want to make a positive lifestyle change regarding their nutrition and exercise so that they can move, feel and look better. After some time, if I can convince them to stay with me as my client for a longer period of time, they may want to take it to the next level and get in really good shape with six-pack abs, yeah, the whole package so to speak. But almost all of them start out not knowing what to do or how to do it.
The tricky thing when you first decide to make a positive lifestyle change regarding your diet and exercise is the people around you. If you don’t surround yourself with people you know will support you in your endeavour, things may not go the way you planned. I would go as far as saying that this is one of the most critical aspects when you first start out. If you don’t have the social support you need, chances are that you may fail in your quest for a healthier life.
It has happened more than once that my clients have told me that they don’t get the support they need to sustain the things we are doing. When I hear this I get really pissed of. Because for me, it's hard to understand how you don’t want to support your loved ones when they are trying to do something good for them selves. The people that are supposed to be there for you when you most need them aren’t. For me, that flies in the face of everything we know when it comes to being there for someone we love and care about.
The thing is, I don’t think we do this on purpose or because we don’t want to see our loved ones succeed. I think we do it because of some underlying jealousy, normalization and justifying of behavior. We have a hard time accepting that someone else close to us are doing something good for themselves if we are not doing the same for our selves. To see someone close to us grow as an individual can be a drastic wakeup call. It makes us think about our own lives, and if we want to make the same kind of changes, it will, at first, take a lot of work and dedication from us for it to happen.
But the thing that ticks me off the most is when my clients come to me, saying that someone close to them is telling them that they are beginning to get “too skinny” or “too big”, when they in reality are starting look freaking amazing. And just to be clear here, when I say “ too big”, I mean muscle. The same goes for “too skinny”, here I am referring to fat mass, not lean mass. The “too big” aspect more often then not refers to my female clients. Their female friends are telling them that they should be careful about putting on more muscle mass, because if they do, and then stop training, everything will turn I to fat. I wonder when this stupid myth is going to die? I hope very soon.
These two comments often have two outcomes. The first and most common one is the person stops training and eating the way they do, and the second one- they want to prove the person wrong which makes them even more motivated.
I think that all this shit (excuse my French) originates from all the misconceptions about fitness, health, nutrition and exercise that are floating around in our society. We don’t know what a healthy body is supposed to look like anymore because of all the obesity and unhealthy people surrounding us. The normality today is overweight and sick. This gives us a pretty skewed picture when it comes to nutrition, exercises and our bodies. It is more acceptable to point out that someone trains too much or have too low body fat then it is to say that someone is carrying too much weight or that he or she needs to start eating better because they look like they are nine months pregnant.
Have you ever been at a dinner party or at a café with your friends and they are eating dessert after the main course or some kind of cookie with their coffee? I bet you have. Have you also gotten those weird looking faces when you don’t eat dessert or a cookie when everybody else does? I have, and I bet you have too. This is something I don’t understand. Why can’t we say no to these things without getting some comment or a look that almost makes us stigmatized, like we are a different kind of species by saying no. Why can’t they just tell us that they admire us for our character by choosing not to eat the dessert or the cookie?
I think its time that we reevaluate our lives and what we would like to call “quality of life”, that we take a step towards a healthier, stronger and sexier lifestyle. It's time for us to support our loved ones in their quest for a healthier life, because as I said at the beginning of this article, that’s what can make or break a person that is new to this kind of life.
The norm today should be fit, strong and sexy - not overweight, weak and slow. It is time to make a change and its time to do it now.
//Cheers coach Daniel Rimfjäll
