The Strength to Lose Weight

Shawn Phillips just wrote a fantastic blog post on How Al Roker Lost 136 Pounds and Found Strength.

A powerful post indeed.
I read it with presence, acknowledging the grace that I know it was written with, knowing Shawn Phillips personally. He is the creator of the Full Strength Premium Nutrition Shake and someone who is a major voice in the Performance Lifestyle and fitness transformation communities.

There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t apply Shawn’s FIT principle, which you can learn about in his book Strength for Life.

I love how he’s embraced the way of “the lifestyle”, recaps and reinforces the points about how Al Roker learned the fundamentals, to change his lifestyle and develop his awareness, even though his point of leverage was a Gastric Bypass, which we know can be deadly.

If that’s what it took for him to change, then there is no shame in that. I learned much from his point about needing something that gives you confidence in the journey, to get you started, to say “I can do this” and follow through, even if what get’s you started is not the healthiest thing in the world. Leverage.

You know I am all about us leveraging and living a truly balanced and healthy lifestyle, successfully, to achieve our goals; something I’ve had to learn how to do painstakingly as I broke the chains of performance addiction that ruled my life, and became a vocal voice in the performance lifestyle community.

I never put much emphasis on weight loss, yet I’ve always promoted the benefit of “living at or near your ideal weight while achieving even your most ambitious life goals” when teaching Performance Lifestyle.

In recent months though, Shawn Phillips initial point in his blog post rings true for me too. I really value going through the day lean and feeling great. I guess I couldn’t admit that, because I hadn’t yet dealt fully with the real reason why my body regularly gained weight… and that was so much stress (even the good kind) that even the healthiest lifestyle couldn’t support my capacity to function and perform optimally.

I was still driving myself into down into weight gain.

I’ve made some key changes to my own lifestyle in recent years, and now I know Shawn is right.

“Next to water, food and companionship, the need and desire for weight loss may well be the next most common attribute of the homosapiens species.
For some it’s a mere 5-10 pounds, for others 100 plus. For some it’s about vanity, others performance—to drop 10 to climb the hills stronger on my bike—and for others it’s nothing less than a matter of life.”

For me it was always about performance, but I am clear that weight gain IS the most obvious symptom of a lifestyle (or some aspect of it) gone awry, and that our weight IS STILL how most people measure their success.

When our lifestyle is working for us, we can live at or near our ideal weight. When it’s not, we gain weight and whole lot of other health and life problems arise. Right again; finding that “way” that works for each of us is unique to us all. Learning the fundamentals like AL is, is “the way”.

Reading Shawn’s post, I have fully arrived at that realization and I am happy so, because we all want to have strength for life, and drop the weight of the past to regain strength.

Strength sustains like nothing else.

Hat’s off to Al Roker and to Shawn for positing his gems of wisdom for us in such a powerful way for all to read. Keep em’ comin’.

A student and friend, moving forward in a position of strength.

~JAM

Filed Under: Featured • Weight Loss