- Drink more water (don’t worry about the Ph level of it)
- Raise your fiber content: chia seeds, flax seeds, raspberries, blackberries, steel cut oats, green veggies, and sprouted grain bread are good places to start.
- Do cardio for mental health, heart health and stress relief. Don’t do it to burn calories (even though it burns calories).
- If you’re doing cardio to burn off what you eat or what you plan to eat, you’re probably missing the point of cardio and your relationship with food.
- For the love of all that’s holy, get stronger. You don’t need to be a power lifter. You just need more strength.
- Love the life you have, not the life you want. You’ll appreciate the life you’re striving more much more if you can love what you have now and improve it.
- Hatred, revenge and holding grudges has never served me well in 47 years. If you live with these sentiments, you’re wasting valuable energy.
- Social media is not your therapist. If you need a therapist, hire one. It may be the best money you’ve ever spent on yourself.
- A lot of people spend time waxing nostalgic about their glory years of youth. In my 20s, I was neck deep in drugs. Do I want to be in my 20s again? Absolutely not. The best years of my life are happening right now.
- Read more books. Real books. Physical, tactile…smell them, devour them.
- I collect records. I’ve become somewhat snobby with them. Being a record collector is a lot like taking care of your health. There is no shortcut to enjoying music that way. It is more expensive than listening to music digitally, it is more time consuming, it takes up more space than digital files, you have to handle vinyl with care if you want it to last. There are lessons in owning vinyl that transition to how you take care of your body. Sometimes, what’s convenient isn’t what’s best for you.
- Do your share at keeping your house clean. There are certain chores I legitimately love doing and I know I’m contributing to a cleaner house, a more organized house and a happier marriage. It is not my wife’s complete responsibility to raise our son and stay on top of the house. That’s teamwork.
- The worst supervisor I’ve ever had in my professional career taught me a very valuable lesson about what kind of supervisor I didn’t want to become. He was a tyrant of a human being and I owe him a debt of gratitude for that lesson of who not to be.
- Carbs, insulin and toxins aren’t the problem with your diet. Guilt, shame and denial are the problem.
- What makes for great and popular social media posts is a terrible example of what works in changing your life. A great social media post makes its point quickly and is there for quick consumption. The things that will alter the course of your life for the better take time, focus and conscious, consistent effort. Don’t let impatience and a need for hyper-convenience derail you.
- Walking is the single most underrated form of movement that you can put into your life.
- With advice, it’s not necessarily WHAT we hear or HOW we hear it, it’s WHEN we hear it that matters. Case in point: how many times have you heard you need to increase your fruit and vegetable intake? It doesn’t matter how many times you hear it. It doesn’t matter who says it. It matters when your body feels like trash and you realize that you can improve your diet by X% by eating more nutritious food. As the adage goes: when the student is ready, the teacher appears.
- Everyone overeats. Seriously. Everyone does. Normalize the fact that it happens and if you feel that the frequency/size of overeating is negatively affecting you, seek help.
- I have loved my wife for all of the 13 years that I’ve known her. However, we have not always had a loving relationship. Changing that reality was a monumental move for our marriage. It made everything in our lives better: the way we treat each other, the way we raise Sebastian, the way we contribute to the upbringing of Jackson, and how we treat ourselves as individuals.
- A good coach puts themselves above no one. I am not better than my clients because my exercise and my diet are generally on point. We all have things we struggle through. I look at coaching much like a slow dance: sometimes I lead, sometimes I follow. The point is to pay attention so you don’t step on toes.
- I have always appreciated dissenting opinions. I don’t need to surround myself with people who agree with me. I want to learn from people who see things differently. The trick is to have a difference of opinion without being an asshole.
- The feeling I get when I take Sebastian into a record store and see him comb through vinyl like I did when I was not much older is a feeling I can’t put into words. I hope he carries a love of music with him for the rest of his life.
- You’re not lazy or unmotivated if you can’t lose weight successfully. You may, however, have a lot of unprocessed trauma you need to work through. See #8.
- To everyone who reads my blogs, follows me on FB or IG and shares my work: Thank you. It means a lot and I try my best to educate, inspire and entertain.
- Some people need a diet/exercise intervention to lose weight successfully. Some people need weight loss medication AND a diet/exercise intervention. Others may need bariatric surgery, potentially a weight loss medication, AND a diet/exercise intervention. There is no wrong path to fat loss. There is what works for you and you are not a lesser person because you couldn’t just work the diet/exercise path on its own. The human brain and human behavior are complex. We were not designed to all travel this world in the same way.
- I love my mother. I miss my father.
- There is no one-size-fits-all probiotic for gut health. We don’t know enough about the gut microbiome yet. That being said, a probiotic is likely safe for you to take and either you find the benefit or you don’t. You still probably need to revisit #2.
- Just because something is natural doesn’t make it safe for you.
- If someone you follow makes you fear certain foods and you do not have an allergic reaction to said foods, you should probably unfollow them. Fear mongering has absolutely no-place in a reasonable diet.
- About the only thing in nutrition that has very little gray area it’s this: you need to achieve an energy deficit (through either intake or output or both) to lose fat.
- Asking an individual to make changes to their diet is challenging enough. If they’re in a relationship, those changes are harder to make. If they’re in a relationship and raising a family, it’s even more challenging. That doesn’t make change impossible, it means that the more people who eat within your close environment, the more they have a direct influence on how, how much, what and where you consume food.
- Fat loss solves SOME problems. It doesn’t solve every problem. Not every pain and discomfort in the body is because of excess weight.
- Your body is constantly giving you signals. Spend less time numbing out emotions, stress and discomfort and pay attention to those signals. It could save your life. This has nothing to do with how much you weigh.
- I talk trash about a lot of things. Part of it is me just being opinionated (especially with music). There’s actually only one thing in life I truly hate. It’s cancer. Fuck cancer.
- I made a pact with myself at the beginning of this year to get my wife and I out of town for an evening each month. I didn’t succeed with that pact but we were able to do more than in previous years. I’ll keep an eye on that for 2023. That’s not a New Year’s resolution, that’s taking care of my marriage and reestablishing some sanity for us by having a routine getaway.
- Stop reading about self-improvement. Start improving. You can’t simultaneously read about ways to move your life forward and be executing on the knowledge.
- The only time motivation is more important than action is when you’re just getting started. It’s what you need to get you off the couch. After that, action will always precede motivation. Show up when you don’t feel like it (especially when you don’t, unless you’re sick or injured).
- On the note of injuries, they happen. This could be related to exercise or not. The goal is to recover as quickly as you can, rehab what needs it and move the other parts of the body that can still be stimulated. We can’t eliminate the occurrence of injuries, we CAN work to reduce the frequency and severity of them. Also, see #33
- Turn off all electronics (phone, laptop, computer, kindle, tablet, TV) within 30-45 minutes of bedtime. Use the bed for sleep and sex. You’re welcome.
- I am extremely lucky that I work at a place that I genuinely love coming to. I spend 60+ hours a week at the Rev and I don’t take that circumstance for granted. I don’t believe that you need a job that you love to be happy. I do believe that you need a job you can do proficiently that allows you the time and space to do something you love outside of it.
- If you’ve hired someone to be your coach, tell them about yourself. Not just your goals. Talk about your pain, talk about your past, talk about the things that rattle around in your head at night. THAT’s the stuff that will help you get closer to your goals. The less you unveil, the less a coach (or therapist, for that matter) can get to the heart of the obstacles. If we’re talking about diet, it’s never JUST about food.
- You can’t be great at everything. Give yourself a tablespoon of slack if you really kick ass at certain areas of your life but you’re a hot mess of a human in other areas. Hi, I’m Jason. I’ll be your coach and conductor on the Hot Mess Express. Put your seat belt on, grab your popcorn, we will be listening to no Taylor Swift music on this ride.
- There is almost no reason whatsoever to be hopped up on caffeine all day long. The problem isn’t that you need more caffeine, it’s that your sleep habits are god-awful. Why are they god-awful? Because you drank two coffees, 2 Bangs and you thought you needed a pre-workout before your evening lift. Get.Some.Sleep. Read #39.
- There’s a really good chance that you need less variety in your diet to succeed at fat loss (or at least get momentum in starting fat loss). Start with consistency and predictability and be okay with some boredom. Add in variety as you go along.
- A little bit of hunger is okay on a fat loss diet. Being ravenous with a growly tummy is not okay.
- Most diet advice on the internet is terrible advice for people with a history of eating disorders.
- I have done a lot of things in my life that I am not proud of or am otherwise ashamed of. I have also done a lot of good, caring, and thoughtful things. Every day, I have a choice of what tape I want to play on loop in my head of the person I think I am: the person I’m proud of or the person I’m not. That tape informs the trajectory of the rest of my life. You may not have the same past that I do, but pay close attention to what your tape is playing on loop in your mind. The message matters.
