This is a discussion of epic proportions! (only slightly exaggerating)

Here is my last post on this subject.

Your lifestyle is responsible for how you perform, the way you look and feel and whether you’ll achieve your goals in life, business or sport in a healthy and successful way.

Your lifestyle holds THE greatest promise for your health, your energy and fitness, and your success.

The challenge is, lifestyle represents one of our two greatest emotional stresses (how we think and how we live) because there are so many factors that influence it, some within our control and most, out of our control. Influenced by so many overwhelming ways, it is easy to get exhausted and make choices that are less than empowering and result in overweight.

Because we’re living in such a frenetic state, most of the time, we think that changing our lifestyle is hard, mainly because we don’t understand how. We don’t have the lifestyle skills that you hear me talking about all the time on this blog; the performance lifestyle skills that healthy high achieving people have.

These lifestyle skills are not obvious, they require learning and practice if you want to get proficient yet the result are obvious. You live at or near you ideal weight all year round, you exercise for fitness and you have the energy to achieve your goals in life business and sport without the distraction of having to deal with weight and health issues all the time.

It’s why you see fitness, health and well pro’s say over and over again… "it’s a lifestyle". They have learned and mostly through lots of trial and error.

Most people though, have not learned the lifestyle skills I’m talking about and that’s the reason why they go from weight loss, diet and exercise program to yet more weight, diet and exercise programs … to lose weight! They are always losing weight trying to deal with the most obvious symptom of an unsuccessful lifestyle.

We have literally been trained to go on weight loss, diet and exercise programs to solve what appears to be the problem… "overweight". Going on fat loss and weight loss programs, are how we’ve been trained to look at lifestyle change.

Today, it’s become vogue and routine to enter a fitness challenge or transformation challenge when we want to make a change. I think fitness challenges and weight loss challenges are great, they provide the opportunity for people to join others in making major improvements.

Essentially you get a lot of help from your friends, and nothing is more exciting than to get social recognition for making changes in your life. ~ John Allen Mollenhauer "JAM".

My friend Scott Tousignant is doing something like that right now with his 21 Day Challenge, for Unstoppable Fat Loss. He is enabling people to journal their actions to build new healthy habits over a three week period of time, that will hopefully last a lifetime, guided by daily interviews with lifestyle and fitness experts.

I have another friend Rob Poulos who’s doing something similar with his Fat Burning Furnace System for fast and permanent fat loss.

I point these guys out because they are myth busters and I know their weight loss programs are rooted in successful lifestyles practices.

But here is where the ground breaking discussion starts…

There are two ways to look at transformation and I’m going to suggest that neither one of them is the defacto way to change. The reason is, one takes more awareness and skill than the other (your lifestyle) whereas the other (a weight loss, diet or exercise program) requires more intensity and dedication for a period of time…

1. A healthy, successful lifestyle, is the way you live most of the time. When you focus on your ability to perform well by managing your energy, the quality of the food you eat, your activity levels your focus etc…, to maintain your quality of life in the process of achieving your goals, your lifestyle will promote health and success.
   
 
 
 
2. A weight loss, diet or exercise program is designed to challenge you and take you to the next level. Although when it comes to weight loss, it’s usually about getting back to what would be normal or natural, if you were to have a successful lifestyle. Diet and exercise programs are breakthrough periods as you strive for greater levels of excellence and development, and are not the way you live all the time.
   

You build challenge periods into your lifestyle depending on your objectives, but you don’t try to make the challenge your lifestyle. People try to do this all the time and it doesn’t work.

By their very nature "programs" are challenging, because you are essentially changing your whole lifestyle overnight to achieve a desire result. It means radically changing your routine and you have likely attached some emotional or social consequences to not sustaining changes for a least a period of time.

The rally cry is "it’s not weight loss program it’s a lifestyle" but what’s really being said is "go on my program for life" and that’s not a successful lifestyle.

Healthy, successful lifestyles are not as challenging in the sense that you have to accomplish an objective by a specific period of time, yet a lifestyle can be challenging nonetheless, because unless you see your lifestyle as the key to achieving a real goal in your life, your business or sport that inspires you to live in the best ways possible, it’s just easy, today more than ever, to get caught up in unhealthy, unsuccessful lifestyle practices.

The opportunities for poor lifestyle choices are everywhere!

So what’s the solution? A healthy successful lifestyle or a weight loss, diet or exercise program? 

The solution is to learn how to live a healthy successful lifestyle (what we call a Performance Lifestyle in this community), and then challenge yourself in various ways at various times, to take your lifestyle to the next level. For starters that may mean, going on a weight loss program, but then that will change to diet and fitness challenges that will help you eat even better, or take your fitness to a whole new level. There are challenges of all kinds but these are the two most common, of course, it’s because most people are overweight.

So the answer is both, but know this, your lifestyle determines your health and success. If you have an unhealthy lifestyle then a weight loss program will inevitably reinforce your problem.

What’s the key to health and success?

The key is learning how to optimize your lifestyle for health and higher performance to achieve your goals. That means developing a successful lifestyle…learning how to live, better. This is not common knowledge. When you do, you’ll find that it is relatively easy to lose weight, to improve your diet and take your fitness to new levels.

It’s allot easier to achieve your goals in life, business and sport, when you’re fit and powerful, but how can you be either if your lifestyle is driving you down hill?

When you don’t have to work so hard… when you don’ t have to overcome the downward trending effects of overwhelm and exhaustion that prevent your body from responding quicker; when your lifestyle is rockin’, challenging yourself successfully will become a regular thing in your life.

And given the world we live in, you don’t have to live like some purest to have a healthy successful lifestyle. But that’s a discussion for another time.

What doesn’t work is this:

a) Going on a weight loss program that is not grounded in healthy, successful lifestyle practices for the express purpose of weight loss

b) When you attempt to make your weight loss program… your lifestyle! This is what keeps people trapped. It’s why people are unsuccessful at really changing their lifestyle for the better, because they are addicted to tactical methods for weight loss, which if they stop, will only result in causing the most obvious symptom that they wanted to eliminate to begin with, overweight, to return. 

Low carb, high "animal" protein dieting is the perfect example of this… and there are others.

Action steps:

• Take advantage of my friends Scott Tousignant and Rob Poulos, and other great programs like Turbulence Training by Craig Ballantyne. You can get all their links over at www.FitforPower.com. I endorse their programs because they are committed to helping you do it right!
  

• At the same time, get into a Performance Lifestyle that works for you, not against you so that you’ll be far more successful taking your healthy and success to the next level. This key is your lifestyle. I have a new training coming up in September that will help you learn how to change your lifestyle successfully, not once, but any time you need to for better results. 
  

For right now…

1. eat a nutrient rich meal today,
   
2. take a power nap when you’re tired, and
   
3. workout for 10 minutes.
   
4. learn from every experience,
   
5. quickly ditch the guilt if you make a poor lifestyle choice
   
6. and keep moving forward towards goals worthy of your time and energy.
   
7. …

Live Like a Pro!

JAM

John Allen Mollenhauer is the founder Performance Lifestyle Solutions, the better healthier ways to achieve your goals in life, business and sport. As a former worn down workaholic turned Healthy High Achiever, John Allen (aka “JAM”) will teach you how to Live Like a Pro, optimizing your lifestyle the way athletes do for better results. He is the creator of the Healthy High Achiever - Unleash the Full Potential of Your Lifestyle to Perform, Look and Feel Better!