TJ's Gym Weekly News 11/8/2018

NEW COACH WELCOME!

You may have had Alex Pino as a sub for one of your classes at the gym during the past few months. We are pleased to announce that Alex is officially on our schedule now, working around his firefighting schedule and coaching the Sunday morning classes in Mill Valley. Please check out his bio on our Coach page, and give Alex a warm welcome when you attend your first class with him!

Message from TJ:

The Past. Part 3 (see previous blog posts for parts 1 and 2).
I’ve got a little bit more of the past I need to catch everyone up on before I can talk about the present.

A few years back, I had a strange experience. It was a Saturday morning, I had just come home from work, and Allison was rushing out the door with one of the kids, heading to either a dance or soccer event. As she raced out, Allison reminded me that the other kid was gone for the entire weekend on a school trip.

For the first time in years it was just the two of us: me and Pete. I walked around the house for a bit before starting to panic. Thoughts came rushing to my head about the future: “Once the girls are out of the house, what the hell am I going to do with myself?”

I’m sure some people have this figured out already; they will dive headlong into their hobbies or their projects around the house or their travel. But that ain’t me.

With the help of a number of people, I did the deep dive into figuring out what I wanted to do when I grew up…again. After exploring scary ideas, engaging in lots of dead-end thinking, and having to back-track a bunch, I’m happy to report that I now know exactly what my perfect day looks like ten years from now.

I'm sharing this with you, because defining my future was an essential part of fixing my broken health. I stopped experimenting for the sake of experimenting and started to make solid changes for the sake of my health, this time with a purpose in mind. I pieced together the bits and parts of what had worked in the past and started researching those parts to find out the science behind them, instead of the marketing.

With the goal for my future figured out, there was still an issue to face. In order to succeed and be healthy in the here and now, I had to be honest that for me, it came down to alcohol.

A year ago, something called "Sober October" came across my newsfeed. It was a challenge of abstaining from drinking alcohol for 31 days straight. This seemed excessively challenging to me at the time. A beer or two per night always made the stress go away. I liked having the IPA Care Bear team waiting for me to massage my cerebrum with their fuzzy warm paws when I got home. I had convinced myself that the daily fog I stumbled through each morning from 4:30-7:30am was a result of getting up early. I was dependent on one to two beers per night, and something had to change. But, I didn’t realize that my drinking was why I was constantly chasing the extreme and unsustainable nutrition programs I had been following.

If you’ve ever done the Lifestyle and Accountability Program we offer each January, you’ve been through the "Five Why's." Anyone who wants to make serious change needs to know why they are doing endeavoring to change. Through asking and answering the Five Why's, the truth will eventually be revealed. I put myself through this same exercise and confirmed that I was no longer interested in treating myself like a science experiment.

Another rather harsh reality I discovered, which every single person eventually realizes (and please take this next comment with its intent, which is to help), is that....Nobody Cares.

No person, no thing, no place, no community will make you change. IT’S ALL ON YOU.

Once you've truly accepted this truth, the sky is the limit. That was the key to me turning my 30-day no-booze challenge into three months last Spring and then doing it again this Fall. It's what drove me to find out what would work for me and what wouldn't. It was all on me, and the “it” was not relying on a beer or two every night.

Next week, I will be talking about stress this time of year, and soon I will reveal the plan that works for me. Your plan is out there. Start asking your “WHY” first.

-TJ