Joe Average Gets Fit

Signs sometimes give me whiplash… well, mental whiplash.

“Get a new body. Get a new life.”

That’s what I saw in the window of a niche gym next to a grocery store that I frequent. There’s usually a parking spot open in front of it, so I see their advertising. “That’s backwards,” I thought to myself. As I was running the outskirts of the grocery store my brain was churning, re-examining the statement from different angles.

Human experience shows that that people tend to think that success comes from the following sequence:

1. Have.
2. Do.
3. Be.

In other words, you must first have something, which allows you to do an action which will allow you to be something pleasant. A template that we’ve all seen comes from the weight loss industry (over $45 billion in the U.S. alone). It tells us that if we have product Z, we’d do weight loss (often without fuss or effort), and thus be happy, successful, popular, etc.

Falling into this thinking is a common human behaviour. It’s comforting and looks like the easier road since it allows us to push responsibility for a segment of our lives onto somebody else or their thing. Unfortunately, it perpetuates a cycle of frustration and dissatisfaction. We become frustrated because having product Z didn’t produce the desired results (usually a sense of happiness or satisfaction)…. though when product Z came along we conveniently forgot that neither did products A through Y.

Change of Mind

My journey has followed the opposite path. The things that we have in the physical world, most especially the things most personal to us — such as (un)fitness — are ultimately outcomes of what happens in our heads. Our thoughts control our actions. Our actions impact our results. Our results… we see as our lives.

Lasting change comes from the opposite order:

1. Be.
2. Do.
3. Have.

If we change our state of “being”, i.e. how we look and think about our lives on a consistent basis, our habits will follow. In other words, we start to “do” the things we think about. As our habitual actions become aligned with those that produce desired results, “having” fitness is inevitable. Be. Do. Have.

Do not confuse this with the “think happy thoughts” or “Law of Attraction” crowd that believe that intense visualization and belief alone will cause change. Beliefs that don’t effect useful action will alter nothing in the physical world.

This is along the lines of how I understand what Ghandi meant when he said, “We need to be the change we wish to see in the world.” It’s not esoteric existentialism, but practical advice.