Barbell Shrugged - 6 Pillars of Sustainable Fat Loss - Diesel Dad Episode 25

Episode Date: July 16, 2021

Busy Dads 👇👇 2 Steps to Start building a strong, lean, and athletic body you are proud of. Join my free Facebook group: http://bit.ly/DIESELDADDOJO Or Schedule a call with me here and will see if I can help you: https://bit.ly/DieselDadConsult ► Connect with Anders Varner: https://www.instagram.com/andersvarner

Welcome to the Diesel Dad. My name is Anders Varner. In today's episode, we're going to be talking about the routines and the behavior habits and how we structure that in the Diesel Dad Mentorship so that you not only are going to be losing the 20 to 40 pounds of excess body fat that you have, building a strong, lean, athletic body that you're proud of, but we're going to ensure that you are creating the routines and the habits in your life so that you have long-term sustainable change and transformation is just not a physical thing but it's an entire lifestyle now from the very onset the moment you talk to me on the phone to see if the diesel dad mentorship is the correct decision for you there's a process that we're going to go through for the entire that is going to be the framework for the entire six month to 12 month journey now how do we structure this well the very first piece is that you need to understand there's six levels of mastery that we're going to go through when we think about these six levels i use the term mastery because mastery to me just means constant practice. We're consistently trying to get better. And if you listened to the episode

where we talked about progressive overload when it comes to your lifestyle, I highly recommend you going back and talking about that. But how are you always progressing the difficulty of your own life, making the choice to become better at what you do by constantly challenging yourself so that at one point in time in the future,

you become, you possess an identity that says, I'm the type of person that enjoys doing hard things because hard things are fun. Doing hard things makes you a better person. It's constant friction and overcoming adversity that's going to challenge you to find new ways to tackle problems in your life and looking for ways to optimize your lifestyle.

When we start to look at mastery as a whole, it's just this constant pursuit of getting better. It's not some overwhelming term that is like, you made it. Because if you ever meet somebody that's a true master at what they do or somebody that's incredibly successful at business or even looking at someone like Matt Fraser in the fitness world, you'll find very quickly there's always things that they're tweaking and working on so that they get better at what they do. Now, in the pieces of the Diesel Dad mentorship that we

want to be focused on, of course, we have macronutrients. We have to find a way to get you eating towards your goals, typically getting you into caloric deficit that is sustainable so that you're not starving all day long. We're also going to be working on building muscle, working on your metabolism. And we've talked about all those pieces many times on this podcast, in these videos. But the piece that I really want to hammer home today is what we kind of label as the mindset but inside the mindset is is a larger category of habits behaviors and routines which are constant conscious decisions that you make every single day that frame your entire life and I really truly mean your entire life we start

with the mind this is your relationship to how you perceive the trajectory of your life. So where you're going is a huge indicator of happiness. If you've ever listened to Aaron Hine talk, he does a great job explaining the trajectory of FIDAID, the trajectory of his employees. And that is their big focus in employee and personal development is understanding that where you are is a result of all of the

actions and decisions that you've made in the past, but they love focusing, and we do inside our mentorship program, focusing on where we're going and ensuring that if we were to graph those numbers of happiness, of leanness, of positivity, of a healthy outlook on your life, that that graph is going up and to the right. Having a good trajectory really gets into being happy with where you're going in your mindset instead of feeling like that depression loop of it's constantly downward spiraling or down and to the right.

That downward spiral is the thing that we're trying to avoid most when it comes to our mindset. If you are hopping on a call with me and wanting to discuss the mindset of fat loss, body composition, building confidence, we're going to ensure that that line is going up and to the right.

And how do we build that plan specific to what you value and what is important. The next piece that we want to think about is the body, right? That's our physical body, our physical capacity to be able to withstand the demands of life, to be able to get up and go play, to be able to be physically present with and trust your body over time, to be able to live, survive, thrive in the environment that you live in. And many times that has a lot to do with lifting weights, boosting your metabolism, and the way that you eat.

As we start to pan out one step further, we think about our significant relationship. For most of us, that's going to be our wives, the person that we are solving the most problems with throughout our day. And the biggest problem most of us are going to have are going to be family work social relationships but the the teammate that we have on our side the most is going to be that significant partner so a relationship and how we view the trajectory of that relationship with our significant partner

is going to be critical to long-term success to any transformation. You wanna be happy in your relationships, specifically the relationship that you have with the most valuable person in your life. As you pan out one more, we start to look at the inner circle, the family and friends that you have, because those people are going to be the most influential

on your environment that you live in. If you have a bunch of friends that love drinking beer on the weekends and you're wrapped into that society and you get social capital from drinking beer and nice beer and having brewed beer and beautiful IPAs and all the things that go along with that social circle, it's gonna be very challenging for you to step outside that,

say, I don't want to have four beers on a Saturday night. I don't want to have six beers on a Saturday night. I don't need a 9% IPA with 800 calories in it. Those pieces are wildly influential on your ability to transform your mind, your body, that relationship, and your inner circle is a critical component to overall transformation and how you go from where you are to where you want to be and losing 20 to 40 pounds. On top of that, when we start to pan out even more, we start to look at a term that we call impact. And what this really is about is a community effect of giving back. And it's not giving back just in like donating to charity, but it's your overall impact on the world.

The most common places that we see a really positive impact is in people that are very active in their church. Maybe they're very active in their community coaching. If you're coaching a soccer team, a softball team, a baseball team, if you're very active in your kids' lives and doing things around the neighborhood that involve a lot of families and providing value in that manner. A lot of this stuff is going to be very dependent on your own situation, on your own ability to have time to make commitments to people outside of your inner circle. But we have to start understanding the ecosystem that you live in and how each place and each thing

impacts your overall wellbeing, health, wellness, and your ability to lose weight to get where you'd like to go. So family and friends is your inner circle. Step back one more and you have the impact that you have on your community and how you are affecting others. Now, the final piece that we like to talk about is experiences and hobbies experience and hobbies is really about how you have fun

when you don't have things to do now I am guilty as hell guilty as charged when it comes to hobbies I actually kind of pride myself sometimes on not having hobbies or not having people that, or not having things that I'm attracted to. Like I'm so interested in fitness, I'm so interested in family, I'm so interested in business, and those things consume my life. But my mentor actually challenged me

to think about hobbies in a way of clearing space for you to be able to step away from those things and create a broader concept of the world that you live in and how you experience it. And his example was, well hey, if I showed up into your neighborhood, would we work out together? Well, we might. But what would we do for the most part? He was like, we'd probably go play golf. We'd probably go hang out. And that's very true because I have consistent vacations that I have with friends in which I go play golf. Or when I'm with my family or extended family,

one thing that we always end up doing is we go and play golf. So the truth is that I do have hobbies. I just don't focus on them that much. And we all have hobbies, things that we'd like to do, things that we'd like to get back into. When I moved to the East Coast, it was super important for me to be going, I wanted to get back into playing hockey.

I thought that ice hockey, and it still is, I still have this goal, I just don't have the time with the newborn and all these things and you can already hear me making excuses of why I don't do it. But when you start to understand what hobbies and things and activities you enjoy that don't involve family and work and giving back to the community, like all of those pieces are insanely important, but it's also nice for us to experience the world, create hobbies, have ways

that we can play that don't demand our time from the kids, work, being a husband, and all of the additional responsibilities of life. Now, how do we actually go about understanding why any of this is important? And believe it or not, the reason this system was created is because this is exactly how you experience every single day of your life. So when we talk about the mindset, when we talk about the mind, when you wake up in the morning, the very first thing you do is think. It sets the framework for your entire day. And we want that first thought to be positive, right? We don't want you hopping on Instagram, hopping on Facebook. We don't want you hopping on your email and finding out all this crap that you have to do or all this crap that everybody else is doing. What we want to do to frame our day in a positive way is to have

a mantra or have some thoughts that go through our day about being positive, about where we'd like to go, how we'd like to see our day work, or an overall mantra for our life. Yesterday I was talking to a client, setting up a four-week mantra that he can tell himself because as we work on this mindset piece and kicking off new clients, and his general perception was,

I just want to tell myself that, I want to think about loving myself and bringing love to my own mind and body and bringing gratitude. So love and gratitude were the two words that we were able to hook onto that every day, he doesn't wake up with that right now. He wakes up in pain. He wakes up stressed about his workouts. He wakes up stressed about his nutrition. He wakes up stressed about countless things and None of those in the long term are going to play into a positive mindset, right? If you wake up stressed out every single day

Dealing with anxiety every single day dealing with a negative trajectory of where you're headed You can imagine that over time it just starts to beat you down It starts to become this very very difficult process of getting where you're headed, you can imagine that over time, it just starts to beat you down. It starts to become this very, very difficult process of getting where you're going. On top of that, setting up a positive mantra, it's something that anchors you every single day that you can come back to. It builds a framework for the way that you would like to structure every single day. And I think love and gratitude are a great place to start. If you're looking for something, how do you bring more love to your life?

How do you bring more love to your body? How do you bring more love to your brain? How do you bring more love to your family? How do you bring more love into the gym? And it's a phenomenal tool to think about gratitude that you may not have a perfect workout every day. You may not look in the mirror and be perfectly happy, but finding a place to create positivity, to focus on the

gratitude that you're here in the now, you're able to look in the mirror. You're grateful that you can still make change in your life. You're grateful that you are able to make a conscious decision to get better because right where you're at right now, it's just a stage of life. We've all experienced these stages of life. So if we can bring love and gratitude into our lives and create the next stage and create the next transformation into the person that you're going to be and working on that positive trajectory, all of a sudden, we start to see the light at the end of the tunnel. We start to be happier as we enter the world. And then we focus on the body, right?

Because what's stage two? What's the very next thing that you do when you wake up in the morning? You go to the bathroom and then you look in the mirror. And when you look in the mirror, for the most part, if you are joining our mentorship, you have had struggles with your body. You've had struggles with your mind. You've had struggles. You don't like the way you look when you see yourself in the mirror. It beats you down. It looks like you're incompetent. It

looks like you have no confidence. You feel like you don't have any confidence. Why would anybody look at you and respect you because you look this specific way? And the truth is, it doesn't have to be that way. We can start to develop a mantra about things that you like about your body. We've had members in our mentorship program start and we challenge him. We say, hey, I want you to write down one thing positive every single day. You're gonna have the worst day of your life,

but you have to focus on one thing. And what happens through this mentorship program is it starts off as this very superficial thing. You go, I like my eyes. And the next day is like, I like my wrist. These are like actual things. And then you start to see the transformation. It says, I feel pretty good today. I'm starting to see myself lose weight. I'm starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. I'm no longer in pain. I feel good. I feel capable. I feel confident. I feel like this is working. I can't believe how good I look. People are noticing how good I look. People are noticing and commenting on and asking what I'm doing. These are the

things that start to snowball. It's these little tiny daily commitments to yourself to be able to get up, look in the mirror, and find something positive. It starts with having love and gratitude in the mindset. Then it goes into building confidence in yourself when you look in the mirror, starting to say things positive. And then step three, as you leave the bathroom in your day, where are you walking back into? Most likely you're walking back into your bedroom and you're going to see who? Your significant relationship. And it's important that when you see that person, we express some sort of love, some sort of gratitude. We always kind of come back to these

specific things, right? Love and gratitude are so important in just our general existence because it's so easy to be negative towards ourselves and pick ourselves apart. But when you walk back into the room after leaving the bathroom and saying something nice about yourself, about your body, to look at that person, they might still be sleeping and just go, hey, I love you. And by no means am I perfect. Do I do this every single day? No. But when I'm having great days and when I'm on a roll and when things are moving well, I tend to find ways to look at my wife and think, man, I'm fucking so grateful that I get to do this parenting thing.

It's so hard. But damn it, am I excited that you're like the teammate that I chose for life. It doesn't happen every day. Some days we fight, some days there's friction, some days there's frustration, sometimes there's kids, sometimes there's business, sometimes there's things. And it's all a part of the big cycle of life and all

of the feelings and emotions that go into it. But if you can have that conscious effort to look at that person and just say, damn it, I am so grateful that all of these struggles and trials and tribulations that I picked you to be the person that I want to do this with. And we've got each other's back. We're the ultimate teammates. You're my significant relationship. You're my significant person. You're the person that I have chosen to do this with for my entire life. It's never going to be perfect, but consistently checking that box, consistently trying to put more effort forward, trying to tilt the scales towards positivity and love and gratitude is the key factor. And then as soon as you leave your bedroom, what happens?

Now you walk into the house, the main house, right? Your kids are there. Family and friends, that's that inner circle. And how do we start to contribute to that inner circle? How do we start to have a better relationship with our kids do we start to have a better relationship with our kids? How do we have a better relationship with our friends? How do we start to create an environment that allows us to create positivity inside that ecosystem that we live in most of the time. So having a quality conversation about nutrition

and fitness and healthy living with our kids, it provides a massive amount of support inside the house if you're not constantly battling having crappy food around or constantly battling kids that wanna sit and watch TV or play on an iPad. How are we impacting the family and friends when you get around your friend group? In fact, we actually have put together documents that allow like letters that are pre-written for you to hand to your family, to hand to your friends, to hand

to your significant people so that you can explain to them that you're unhappy where you're at, things are going to be changing, and that you would like their support more than anyone else in this transformation process. And what these notes do is just, it's just an honest letter that says, look, I'm in a place right now where I need to make changes.

I love you, I'm grateful for our friendship, but I need your help. And if it's Friday night and I say, I don't want the beer, or I don't for our friendship, but I need your help. And if it's Friday night and I say, I don't want the beer or I don't want the cake or I don't want the snack or I don't want the charcuterie board or I don't want whatever it is, I'm not asking you to understand everything,

but I'm asking you not to give me a hard time. I'm asking you not to pressure me into doing things that I know aren't healthy for me right now. I'll be able to come back. I'll be able to help you, but right now I gotta focus on me and I gotta find a way that I know aren't healthy for me right now. I'll be able to come back. I'll be able to help you. But right now I got to focus on me and I got to find a way that I can start to change the environment,

the ecosystem that I live in so that I can get where I want to go and be happier and be healthier. As you take one step outside of that, it's the community and the impact, right? And for many of us, this really is our job job this is the place that you spend the most time creating as much of an effect on the community and the people around you so if you have a job that you that you dislike which so many people do I've had jobs I hate in the past I've created jobs for myself that years down the road I end up hating it

was like part of like why I sold my gym. I created this environment that six years later I just I hated. I didn't want to be a part of. But all of these things you have to have this internal conversation and go, how do I make this better? For me it was selling the gym and restarting my professional life and my career and my general understanding of fitness and how I wanted to coach. For you, it may be that you can't leave your job and that's fine, but how do we find ways

to manipulate that ecosystem inside your work so that it is creating positive change in people, it is creating this positivity towards your life. There's a lot of aspects to this that are unchangeable, but at the same time we can tweak the system a little bit. We can bend the rules a little bit so that it feels like we're creating more freedom. So you're not making wild, outlandish, crazy off-the-wall decisions, but you're tweaking things a little bit. You're tilting the scales in your favor to create a healthier environment. Now one

way that's super positive is our ability to get out and be a part of our church community, be a part of our neighborhood community, be a part of the swim team down the street, to be able to coach your kids. There's things like this that are very obvious in their direct impact on your community and the people that you surround yourself with. And those are the things that we want to start paying attention to. How do we affect the community?

And when you develop an attitude and a mindset of positivity, you start to see the world open up a little bit so that you have the ability to go create a positive impact on your community and feel really good about it. Because when you feel good, you make better decisions. When you're impacting the world,

you feel better about everything. And then as we pan out one more time, and this is our experiential model when it comes to the Diesel Dad mentorship is, how do we create experiences? Where you are right now, if you need to lose 20 to 40 pounds, and you're not happy, you're not confident,

you don't feel competent, you don't feel like you can achieve the things that you're setting out to achieve, because you feel soft, you feel slow, you feel sluggish, you don't have that strong, lean, athletic, confident build. It's not woven into your DNA yet that you are the person that's able to achieve the things that you want to achieve. What we want to think about is in six months from now, what is an activity? What's a hobby? What's that thing deep down inside you that

you wish you could do, but you just don't have the confidence. You don't have the physical capacity to be able to do that. So you've just written it off. You've blocked it out of your mind. And what we do is we set that as your goal. We set that as the anchor. We set that as in six months, you're going to achieve that. And it's written down. You put a date on your calendar that says, I'm going to do this. It could be the five mile hike with your kids. It could be going to the water park and feeling good with your shirt off. It could be just going to the pool and not having to wear a shirt into the pool. There's countless, countless things. And it's all personalized because I don't know where the ultimate value in your life comes. For me, it's about creating experiences. I never, ever want to feel like my physical capacity is the limiting factor in how I am

able to provide high level experiences and play inside my family. So we're constantly outside, we're constantly playing, we're constantly running, we're constantly doing things so that we don't have to worry about what could be if problems arise if I'm overweight and it's it's impossible for me to get into the things that I want to do the experiences I want to have there should never be a physical capacity that limits us and where we want to go now what that is for you I don't know that's why we set up a phone call and we build that experience out. We make that experience real and tangible.

We put it on the calendar. We make sure that there's a thing that you're reaching for. And we hope that it involves your kids and your family because those are the experiences that tend to provide the most value when we're able to lead our families into an experience that creates memories that that you have for a lifetime if this is a a process that you want help going through there's a link down in the show notes and description please get in there schedule a phone call with me we will walk through all six of these levels building out the idea of this Diesel Dad Mentorship, we're getting clearer and clearer

on exactly how we do this. The mindset that you need to create a positive trajectory in your life. The conversation you need to have with your body so that you feel proud of where you're at and how you can start to tilt the scales in your favor to build confidence and competence. How to have a better relationship with your significant other. It's super important. You guys are the ultimate teammates and you got to be on the same page to make sure that you're attacking things as a team, a unified team. And then panning out to your families and friends. That's that inner circle, right? The inner circle creates the environment, the ecosystem that we live in. One more, what is

the community effect? What's the impact that we have on our community that allows us to radically affect other people's lives in a positive way? And then as we pan out more, we're setting that trajectory towards an experiential piece, something that you know you can't do right now because you don't trust your body, you don't trust your life, you don't trust your experiences, you don't trust the strength that you have. But in six months, we can build that. And you're going to put it on your calendar. And I can't wait to discuss what's important to you, what you value the most. Make sure you get into the show notes, into the description. This is the Diesel Dad. My name is Anders Varner, and we will see you guys next time.