Healthy High Achiever Blog

As you know, Performance Lifestyle was born in the Athletic community, and not surprisingly. Athletes unlike crazed parents, business people and students have a more accurate understanding of what it means to perform well. It is about productivity and winning, but first and foremost it’s about making sure you can perform "well", and that’s a matter of lifestyle.

Well, as I was reading a conference summary for cutting edge sports nutrition information, from the annual meeting of the American College of Sports Medicine and the results from over 5,000 exercise scientists, sports dietitians, physicians and coaches who gathered in Indianapolis in May to share their latest research; I always look for ideas that will help Healthy High Achievers who are not sports athletes perform, look and feel better.

There was one insight in particular that really stood out… it was about the elite athletes’ ability to recover (soccer players in this case).

Here is one of the sports nutrition highlights. 

How long do elite soccer players need to recover from a game? In one study, they needed five days for sprinting ability to return to pre-game level. That’s four days longer than most athletes allow…

Think about this for a second. These are elite athletes we’re talking about here and they need 4 days to recover?

Now take the average business person who is working 10 -12 hours per day or more who is trying to train intensely or consistently every day and consider why they my run into obstacles and stall periodically.

In other words, most people set their expectations too high, don’t have the lifestyle to support their training success and don’t factor in everything else going on in their life that is drawing down on the same energy and time, need to recover. This needless to say, affects the results you experience.

Healthy High Achievers know how to gauge their activity levels… it’s all part of the science of Personal Energy Management.

Here are some of the other findings from the conference as written by Nancy Clarke.

John Allen Mollenhauer is the Founder of 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. He is the creator of the Healthy High Achiever - Unleash the Full Potential of Your Lifestyle to Look, Feel and Perform Better!

Feeling Overwhelmed, Exhaustion and Being Overweight Go Hand in Hand

Why are so many people tired, stressed and overweight? It seems the majority of people have a motivation problem; overeating and lack of exercise are implicated as the causes of the overweight condition.

You could say we are overweight because we eat too much and live sedentary lives and that both are causes of obesity and you would be right, at least in part, acknowledging the obvious.

But what is not so obvious, are all the hidden causes of obesity and overweight that are by far more influential in the rise of the obesity epidemic, that reinforce our food and fitness habits to begin with and many motivated people fall prey.

These are matters of lifestyle. How we manage time, spend and recuperate our energy, including but not limited to, the quality of the food we eat and our activity levels every day as we achieve our goals are things that factor into this equation.

Physical inactivity plays a major role in gaining weight, but the reason we are physically inactive most of the time, is exhaustion. How often have you said “I want to exercise” but you find yourself simply too tired throughout the day to get anything done. We’re overwhelmed and tired, lacking time, space and energy to do what we need for healthy bodies. Inactivity is a result, an effect, but not the original cause.

What about the claim that overeating is to blame? We are overeating, yet the primary reason, long before discussing a market saturated with addictive fatty foods, is that most people faced with relentless demands on their time and energy, are worn down and looking for a quick pick me up.

In that besieged state, not only do they eat more for the stimulation they crave and more of the addictive fatty foods that are extraordinarily convenient, but the combination of excessive stress and nutrient-poor food virtually guarantees they will overeat. Overeating is a result, an effect, but not the original cause.

Overwhelmed and exhaustion is the greatest threat to our wellbeing and our weight. They go hand in hand. Look at your life for a moment and think of the ways you feel overwhelmed or exhausted. How often do you feel this way? What makes you feel this way?

Where are you putting your focus - cause or effect?

Are you combating the negative effects of your lifestyle by eating less and exercising more? Or, are you addressing the lifestyle that is promoting over eating and inactivity…?

You can only deal with the primary causes of weight gain at the level of lifestyle. Everything else is an attempt at manipulating your current condition for a short term gain and the results of this approach are well documented.

Do you ever wonder why diets and fad exercise programs don’t work for you? Do you wonder why you start off good for a week or so but then the big plan fails and you feel even worse than you did before?

The high protein/low carbohydrate fad was the classic example of manipulation. Millions of overweight people, addicted to super stimulating junk foods, stopped eating refined carbohydrate and started eating no-carb animal protein to manipulate the storage of carbohydrate in their body to lose weight.

This so-called “solution”, while beneficial in the sense that less junk food was being consumed, replaced an already unhealthy way of life with another (consuming large amounts of high fat, nutrient poor animal protein) to lose weight. In the end, this does not lead to a healthier person. You are replacing one bad habit with another and this doesn’t really get you anywhere further into the downward trend.

Where in this grand misdirected project was there any talk of the lifestyle that was giving rise to the consumption of junk food to begin with? Or talk about food quality? The discussion was about weight loss and was non-existent. Meanwhile millions of people struggled, got sick, including Atkins himself (who died) and gave up. This is discouraging to anyone who hopes they can break free of this downward trend. But there is hope out there- once you discover the real problem.

The Real Problem

What is the real problem? Most of us are not managing our energy well. We are overwhelmed, caught up and overcommitted and this excessive energy expenditure promotes the downward trend – exhaustion, over consumption, physical inactivity and being overweight.

The addictive, stimulating food and drinks all around then purport to give us more energy and they don’t. Over stimulation by its very nature is exhausting. These nutrient-poor foods then drive us to over consume in an effort to get our nutrient needs met and it doesn’t happen. Our now overwhelmed and exhausted bodies are no condition to be active. And the answer is eating less and exercising more? You could not assemble a better trap for staying stuck.

Countless weight loss programs are sold as lifestyles and what’s really being said is, “lose weight for life” and of course it just doesn’t happen. Human beings are not robots, we want the natural experience of life and living on a weight loss program is not natural. It’s not that these weight loss solutions don’t or won’t work; it is that they don’t work alone, forever or in some cases, at all.

And so the cycle continues…

Few solutions address the real problem; your lifestyle – why you are tired and overeating, and physically inactive to begin with and the downward trend stays in play. It is this trend, complicated by all the solutions that do not solve the problem that give consistent rise to obesity statistics, even though we spend billions of dollars per year on weight loss.

This graphic above illustrates the downward trend on a population basis and it makes the point that the weight loss industry is not working. Eating less of foods that don’t serve you and exercising a fatigued body even more does not work. You will not see success and any illusion of success will be short-lived.

How you look, feel and perform ongoing are the direct result of your lifestyle, not the result of “eat-less” diets or “exercise-more” workout programs created for the express purpose of losing weight. There are many different factors that go into this lifestyle and contribute to the “downward trend”.

Looking, feeling and performing better is about avoiding becoming overwhelmed, exhausted and overweight. The only way to do that successfully is to manage your energy, including the quality of the food you eat and your activity levels in the process of achieving your goals. That’s means live athletically!

When it comes to your weight, it comes down to your lifestyle and until your lifestyle reinforces your both your health and success, you will find yourself in an extended stay on the downward trend, wondering how to turn it around with the latest weight loss program. 

John Allen Mollenhauer, known as John Allen or “JAM”, is the lifestyle coaching columnist for MyWeightLoss.com. He is a premier lifestyle trainer and coach, and is the founder of Performance Lifestyle Solutions, www.MyTrainer.com and www.PerformanceLifestyle.com, where thousands of people are learning how to achieve their goals in better, healthier more practical ways – like Pros!

Do you have a Performance Lifestyle? If not, it’s probably about time you get one!

Copyright © 2008 Custom Media Communications, Inc, Performance Lifestyle Solutions All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

Hi All,

It’s a snowy day here in New Jersey. I haven’t seen snow in three years!, It’s exciting. And its Friday… a buffer day for me… meaning I take it slow. I operate from a lightly driven place, so I can start to recuperate my energy from the week and prepare for the weekend.

Yes, you need energy for the weekend. If you’re ever wondering why you’re yawning with the family, or unable to slow down, it’s because you don’t have a performance lifestyle yet, and didn’t recuperate from your week.

So, I’ve gotten questions about Performance Lifestyle and how I describe it in one sentence.

The answer is this…

"A Performance Lifestyle is about how to achieve your goals with your health and well-being intact."

Of course, I could expand on this by adding ideas like, living at or near your ideal weight, sustainably and successfully, fit for the challenges ahead, etc… But if you understand what health and well being means, it’s all included.

What Performance Lifestyle does for you is expand your idea of what it means to live successfully.

Its more than fitness, food and sleep, there’s a much bigger picture and that bigger picture will determine how fit you are, how you eat, how you sleep and more… that bigger picture also needs to be discovered, learned and acted upon.

It’s amazing to me, now at least, how we beat ourselves up at times for not doing this and that better, or sticking to the XYZ program, when our lives and lifestyles are all out of whack. What’s happening is not a lack of motivation; it’s a lack of time, space and energy, and knowledge.

It’s what we call the Achiever’s Paradox - In this “age of achievement,” where we have access to more information and opportunity than at any other time in history, we can accomplish our goals seemingly faster than ever before.

However, we get a paradox… the busier we are, the less time we have to take care of ourselves.

Performance Lifestyle is for achievers – those people who want to get the most out of life and produce their best in everything they do, but not at the expense of their health and wellbeing.

It’s for people who know the many aspects of their life impact on each other and each one needs to be carefully planned and managed if all their goals and aspirations are to be realized.

More soon,

Let’s discuss,

JAM

Yesterday, I got a few understandable email responses to a broadcast I sent, wondering why I would be recommending a business / marketing document to Performance Lifestyle subscribers?

It was about The Attention Age Doctrine 2 written by a business mentor of mine named Rich Schefren. I’m recommending you read this document for reasons that are multi-fold. 

First, most of us are doing business every day in ways that are wearing us down. I learned this first hand by spreading my attention and my energy way to far, at various times in my career, and nearly driving my self right into the ground.

It took me a long time to understand that the way we achieve our goals in life and business has EVERYTHING to do with how we look, feel and perform. Burnout, weight gain, overwhelm, and living deconditioned… are not inevitable states of getting older, or of life itself, they are consequences of our life(and work) style.

Where and how you focus your attention is a big part of your lifestyle.

Performance Lifestyle and the training we do around this idea is all about how you manage your energy, including but not limited to the quality of the food you eat and your activity levels in the process of achieving your goals. We teach you how to live athletically so you can thrive in the face of relentless demand on your time, space and energy.

Part of this equation is where and how you spend your energy.

Rich is talking about our attention, essentially where we spend our energy each day in our business. If your business is not set up right, it’s going to take it’s toll on YOU. From the business perspective I have learned a great deal from Rich about personal energy management (PEM) and have factored it into the Performance Lifestyle model.

His business message is relevant to Performance Lifestyle. So much so, I’m actually kicking off the next Performance Lifestyle Training at Rich’s Strategic Profits Event in Disney World this February.

What he’s talking about in The Attention Age Doctrine 2, is where we spend our attention (energy) and the affect that Web 2.0 is going to have on this, in our business and personal life.

For example, just this past couple months, I launched a MySpace and a Facebook page… the two leading social networking sites

http://www.myspace.com/myperformancelifestyle 

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=633911411

I wanted to get to know social networking in a big way, especially with the new release of www.MyTrainer.com in the coming month - a social network around free workout video’s provided by the worlds best fitness trainers and lifestyle experts.

…within weeks, I realized I had to come up with a lifestyle strategy around social networking because I quickly realized this was sapping my energy. It was like having a part time job on top of my career! I had to figure out how I was going to direct my attention. Fascinating little journey because I, like you, only have so much energy.

Now, I know in the Attention Age Doctrine, Rich Schefren is talking about where you are putting your attention from a marketing perspective, but I’m suggesting you also look at it from the standpoint of how you are managing your energy.

Remember, attention requires energy. Think laterally for 90 minutes and you’ll consider this document brilliant. There are some real gems in there.

The second reason why I feel this document is worth 90 minutes of your time, is this. I serve achievers, people who are up to big things in their life and business, who are overspending their energy and living on the downward trend of overwhelm, exhaustion and overweight which go hand in hand.

In the Age of Achievement (as I refer to it) where and how you spend your attention (energy) every day in the process of achieving your goals is mission critical. Where and how you are you spending it? Get a handle on this, learn how to do it effectively personally and professionally and it will do wonders for your health, success and quality of life.

No conversation about looking, feeling and performing better is going to do you the good your seeking if the conversation isn’t also about how you achieve your goals with your health and well being in tact. It’s not "about" losing weight or eating better, or exercising. You do these things so that you can achieve your goals…

If you felt my email was outside of my bounds, then I would suggest that you expand your scope. I never send an email that is not relevant to your health, personal performance and success.  

I look forward to talking soon, and I hope you are doing great! I really value you as a subscriber a client and a friend.

Enjoy reading The Attention Age Doctrine.
 

NO.

Living athletically is the "mindset" that makes living a Performance Lifestyle possible. It does not mean you have to be into sports or even be a fitness enthusiast!

But did you know that the top 3% in life, sport and business, the healthy high achievers we admire for how they look, feel and perform, are either athletes or have an athletic background and understand this mindset? Did you know that your trainer or weight loss guru probably has an athletic background?

The athletic mindset is the defining difference. It’s what separates healthy high achievers from those people who suffer from energy, diet, weight, and long-term health issues. What you learn when implementing a Performance Lifestyle is not, how play a sport, it’s how to "live" athletically… successfully.

If you are into sports you’ll play better, but for most people in the 97% who are not sports athletes, let alone elite athletes, living athletically is how you live at or near your ideal weight all year round.

It’s how you achieve your goals in a healthy, balanced, high performing way.

It’s how you maintain your quality of life even in the midst of relentless demand on your time and energy.

When we don’t live in this flexible, agile, and nimble way, or understand the insights and skills that go with this more dynamic way of life to remain healthy, energetic, and strong, fit and powerful, we descend in overwhelm, fatigue and overweight. Then we have to distract ourselves from our purpose and mission in life as a business owner, professional, parent etc, to deal with weight.

Some of us don’t allow ourselves to get distracted and energy and weight issues turn into health complications.

Either way, eventually, the results of a depleting lifestyle will become a colossal distraction, maybe even deadly.

What percentage of people lives athletically? About 3%. The other 97% are the ones making up the obesity and poor health statistics.

You don’t have to be one of those people, and can live a much better quality of life, when you get the athletic experience in the Performance Lifestyle Training, starting on October 11th (bonus week for early registrants) and officially on the 18th.

When you change "Improve" how you live, life will gets better for you and so will your results. Remember, the health and performance results you are experiencing right now are the direct result of your lifestyle.

If your lifestyle is in charge of your health and performance, then imagine what that will do to you success.

< Go Back, Part 5 of 5 

When we hear of a "training center", we think of a place to learn, perhaps on computers, or a place to workout. But I want to introduce to you do a new training center that exists in your minds eye.

For years, through personal experience, talking and observing others, I’ve noticed a pattern. It’s created by the pull we experience in our lives between maintaining our health and success. It’s the age-old dilemma. How do you do it?

We get pulled into so many worlds and their conflicting message that can leave us ungrounded and off center and this is disconcerting.

The success training world say’s "achieve your goals and you can eventually live the lifestyle of your dreams." When we hear this, we forget what lifestyle really means, and before you know it, we’re busting our asses incessantly with visions of BMW’s and homes on the Caribbean. It’s no wonder people drive themselves into the ground. 

The healthy living world is telling us to live a healthy lifestyle but at times, it can seem unrealistic when we consider all that we have to do to maintain our success. The focus is on detoxification, reducing stress, eating less saturated fat, disease proofing ourselves, getting fit, getting enough sleep etc (all important) but for some reason it all seems to distract us from our focus on success. 

Of course, when we’re then faced with the reality that achieving our goals in an unhealthy way has its limits, we hit the wall. Enter the next world we get pulled into… weight loss!

The weight loss world isn’t focused on your health or success in life, they define success by losing pounds and usually in manipulative ways. Dr Atkins was the poster card example of this. Never coming remotely close to solving the real problem for millions of people, millions of people took the bun off their burger to lose weight. They clogged their arteries, were constipated, and experiencing halitosis (bad breath)… and the rest is history. Atkins dies of a heart attack from his own diet and everyone else is left duped, thinking the problem was refined carbohydrate alone.

In Atkins defense, he made some great points, but he was just selling an impotent solution.

Now, we’re pulled in more than two directions and distracted to the left, thinking we’re overweight because we’re eating too many carbs alone and the only place left to turn is to turn to our head.

So we turn to the world of Peak Performance and psychology. Surely poor thinking is the cause of this. Like all the other worlds, there’s valuable information to learn here and it’s good. The message is, change your mind to change your life. You might even have to go to a psychiatrist to get your head straight from being pulled in so many directions. This camp is about getting your thinking right. 

Ironically, we still haven’t solved the real problem; why we’re overwhelmed, exhausted and overweight! Surely, the answers are out there. You may already have the answers. All of these worlds, with the exception of the weight loss industry (quality players notwithstanding) which in my view is a grand misdirected project, offers great and needed information. But do you ever feel like something is missing? Like you’re floating in space and can’t bring it all together? 

What’s missing is called the Training Center, otherwise known as a Performance Lifestyle. A Performance Lifestyle bridges that gap between health and success. It’s all about how you structure your life and how you live (your lifestyle) to achieve your goals in a healthy way, that’s successful.

It’s the hub; it’s the training center, which every other area of our life depends on. It’s not a weight loss program or a healthy lifestyle program alone, even though it is the healthiest lifestyle. It incorporates success training and is about how you achieve your goals in a healthy, balanced way so that your focus can stay on success, and you don’t compromise your health to begin with. Your training can be about improvement, not making up for what you’re losing every day on the downward trend so many people live on.

A Performance Lifestyle enables you to improve your thinking, your health, your body and your success, without all the conflict and for the right reasons.  

If you’re not living a Performance Lifestyle right now, you’re likely living a depleting lifestyle and feeling a bit bounced around. It’s what happens in the Age of Achievement where the busier you get the less time you have to take care of yourself and you think the problem is the symtom.

I’m going to show you how to establish a Performance Lifestyle. There’s a formula and you need to learn it. I’ve enlisted the help of some of the top professionals in health and success training to help me do it.

So, stay tuned, turn up the volume on your speakers, in preparation for the next Performance Lifestyle Training, I’ve got some audio’s and interviews coming your way.

< Go Back Part 4 of 5 

Do You?

You may be thinking "well that depends"… "If overwhelm exhaustion and overweight are the symptoms, what’s the real problem?

     "I’m already eating less and exercise more than ever before and it seems to be working?

Notice what you just read, (hypothetically)… neither statement addressed the real problem. Neither was focused on you achieving your real goals, in life or business in a healthy high performing way. So far, your focus is on the symptoms of your lifestyle, which are getting in the way your success, because your health is compromised.

You think your problem is overweight it’s not. If you’re are eating less and exercising more on purpose to lose weight, your lifestyle has gone awry, and you’ve yet to discover the real problem.

I know you’re expecting me to say, "the real problem is what is causing overwhelm, the exhaustion and the overweight right?"

If you thought that, you’re right.

Your life, and how it’s set up, your lifestyle, and the way you are achieving your goals… are what I’m speaking. That’s what this whole conversation is focused on. That’s the real problem! 

Your Lifestyle in the Age of Achievement, is the biggest difference between Healthy High Achievers and achievers of all other kinds. It’s the way their lives are set up, lived and focused. All of these aspects are in alignment to support their health and promote their success; what they’re really up to in the world. 

If you are experiencing overwhelm, exhaustion and the overweight condition, you are out of this alignment and no amount of "eating less, and exercising more" is going to solve the real problem.

You actually may be set up for for healthy and success, but if you are simply not educated, for example, about the difference between a Nutrient Rich diet and a nutrient poor one, a big error in judgment like that can really trip you up.  

Performance lifestyle training and coaching focuses on getting your life, your lifestyle and your goals into alignment and that requires a focus on what we call the Training Center. 

I’ll introduce the Training Center in my next post -

Up next, Part 5 of 5… 

< Go Back Part 3 of 5 

In my last post, I was talking about how Healthy High Achievers see things very differently. They aren’t bopping around buying impotent solutions to deal with symptoms (that are the direct result of their lifestyle) that don’t solve the problem.  

They buy into "potent solutions" that are called lifestyle solutions. LIfestyle solutions solve problems, because they are sound. The don’t cause more problems.

As a result of lifestyle solutions, Health High Achievers get better results. They essentially, have more things going for them, than against them. Each aspect of their life and lifestyle is coordinated around the goals they seek to achieve and the experience the life they want.

Are all aspects of your lifestyle working for YOU and the achievement of your goals, including, what you eat and your activity levels?  

The biggest problems of our time today, are low energy, fatigue, depression, overweight, and a myriad of other health problems associated, and ALL are the result of relentless demands on our energy and lack of support, in one form or another.

We’re being called upon to perform at ever high and higher levels and this is affecting both our health and our ability to succeed, sustainably. 

To be able to perform and be both healthy and successful, we have to see things (lifestyle in particular) differently than they way we have in the past. If you’re going to perform better without killing yourself on the slow plan, you have to live better and the last time I checked that meant changing "improving" every aspect of your lifestyle, not only your diet.

The lifestyle that you have right now, that got you here (wherever you are) is not going to get you to where you want to go if improving your life situation is on your mind. Not only that, times have changed, the pace of life has sped up and we need better solutions to deal with the impact of it all.

We need several solutions over the course of our lifetime, maybe more or less than you’ve required to date. But how do you know if you’re buying into solutions that will actually solve the problems you are facing? To know the answer you need to understand the new "Training Center". I’ll be talking about that in part 5 of 5 in this series.

First, ask yourself. Do you want to solve the real problem…

Stay tuned for part 4 of 5.

It’s that last week of August and many of us are in slow mode. That’s a good thing, so, I just wanted to touch base and let you know what’s in store for the next couple weeks.

Over the past couple weeks, I’ve been introducing you to some basic Performance Lifestyle concepts; idea’s that bridge the gap between health and success, and which, you’ll ultimately learn in what we call… Performance Lifestyle Training.

Leading up to the next training starting end of September, get ready for some can’t-find-anywhere-else insights (not like this) from conversations I’ll be having with top experts who have learned to bridge that gap, with successful lifestyles centered on performance. 

People like:

Scott Tousignant, Scott Colby, Linda Cook, Jessie Hipolit, Kevin Gianni, Rob Poulos, Tom Perkins, Carol Cash, Dax Moy, and you’re truly… JAM
 
Ultimately, where this conversation is headed (and will always head) is we’re going train you on how to establish a Performance Lifestyle that works for YOU and the achievement of your goals, successfully.

Keep an eye out for the live round table discussion via teleconference, called Your Lifestyle, In the Age of Achievement. It will be unlike anything you’ve ever heard before; a spontaneous no holds barred discussion, on the subject of lifestyle that will change your life, body, and business forever!

After that we’re going to give you the opportunity to learn what it’s taken most Healthy High Achievers 20 years or more to learn on their own.

So get ready, here’s part 3 of 5 of Performance Lifestyle, "what is it?"

<Go Back Part 2 of 5

The people who live a Performance Lifestyle, see things very differently. and it’s why they’re called Healthy High Achievers (HHA’s). They live "healthy" lifestyles but healthy living alone doesn’t explain why they get the results they do.

I’m a big proponent of living a healthy lifestyle. I promote several healthy lifestyle’s such as www.NutrientRich.com, the new trend in eating and others, but sleep, a focus on diet and exercise alone, as foundational and beneficial as they are, are only part of the Healthy High Achievers formula for success.

By themselves, sleep, food and fitness training aren’t nearly as potent as they could be, in helping us face challenges and improve the quality of our lives, if they were seen as essential, but only components of a lifestyle focused on managing your personal energy, which promotes both health and success.

Healthy High Achievers work out yes, they do the stuff you see in the magazines (well, almost) depending on what magazine you’re reading. It’s what you’re not seeing (or learning) that makes the difference, that can only be explained in the context of the Performance Lifestyle they live. 

Healthy High Achievers have a different mindset, a far more potent lifestyle and a more complete approach to acheiving their goals, than the average person has.

I’ve actually gotten tired of saying "live healthy", especially when I myself know that the reason why I get better results than most people is only partly because of how I sleep, eat and exercise. The Healthy High Achiever, does not wake up every day focused on health (unless they’ve lost it).

They wake up every day, like you I’m sure, focused on success… the things they’re up to in the world. In other words, they are focused on their goals. And their goal is not be healthy. They want be healthy, but their real goal is to be more successful.

Health is our birthright, it’s only part of the real goal!

So what bridges the gap between their health and success? A very potent solution, called Performance Lifestyle.

Stay tuned for Part 3 of 5