People want to drop body fat and look better and feel better. They want to have more energy, fit in different clothes and feel more comfortable. Sadly, lots of those people do not want to do the work required to get those results. They look at the scale week after week and are upset and frustrated. They have lots of great intentions, but no results and the thing is fat doesn’t care about you. Fat just sits there, doing its job – storing fuel. If you want fat to go away, you need to control your portion sizes, eat the right macro-nutrients and avoid the junk. Fat doesn’t care if you are too fat, too thin, or whatever, it just sits there, obeying your every move. Eat well and exercise, fat goes away. Eat too much and sit around, fat accumulates. It really doesn’t care. But you should. Excess fat surrounds your organs, joints and all sorts of things, not just the space between your skin and your muscles. If fat was just a visual thing, we would care less about it, but that is not the case, fat is unhealthy, and you should care about it, even if it doesn’t care back.
In direct relation to this, is muscle, and yes, muscle doesn’t care about you either. Muscle is a result – a result of hard work, of commitment, of consistency. Muscle doesn’t care if you want more of it, less of it, feed it, starve it or whatever. Muscle just responds to what you teach it to do every day. If you eat well and exercise, your body will respond by building stronger muscles and then bigger muscles. It doesn’t care if you like them, don’t like them, want more, want less, muscles just do what you ask.
Another thing that doesn’t care about you, is money. You won’t get more money because you deserve it, want it, need it, or anything else. Money is just a tool, and if you want more of it, you need to deliver more value to the world. Get a better education, work harder, work more, work smarter, change jobs, start a company, etc. Money, like fat and muscle, is simple a RESULT. Buy too many things you do not need and you will have no money, whether you like it or not. You also cannot just show up at work, be angry at everyone, rude, talk behind people’s backs, post rotten things on social media and expect a raise – just because you have been around a while. There’s no value in such things, and therefore, no money. Just like fat and muscle, if you want more money, you have to do the work, and compromise sometimes. You have to put in the effort, and at the end of the week or month or year, if what you did made sense and provided value, you will have more money.
The final point, and one of the hardest ones to understand is that people don’t care about you. The sooner you understand this point, the faster you will have less fat, more muscle and more money. It’s all tied together, let me prove it.
When I am swimming in the pool, smashing off laps, and I stop for a breather, and hear the lady beside me complaining to her friend that ‘the jerk in the next lane keeps racing me’ ….um….actually, I wasn’t aware you were there ma’am, sorry. When people walk into my gym, they worry that everyone is looking, judging, but the truth is, nobody cares about you – because they are too busy wondering what other people think about themselves. Maybe they are thinking about taxes, or their kids, or the next event they are training for or whatever, but they most certainly are not thinking about you.
If you worry about what people think about you, it affects everything you do; you allow yourself to be used, treated poorly, or you work so hard to impress people and they don’t notice, then you are crushed. Trust me on this, the most freeing thing you can do for yourself is stop worrying what other people think about you.
Your job, is to focus on what you want. Less fat, great! Burn it off, and be smart about what you eat. More muscle? Great, go earn it. More money? Be prepared to work for it and stop wasting it. Happier life? Remember that you are the number one person in the world that should care about you and that’s what matters most.
Scott McDermott is a personal trainer and owner of Best Body Fitness in Sylvan Lake.
