Barbell Shrugged - Um, Hey Dad, Am I Fat? - Diesel Dad Episode 22

Episode Date: July 8, 2021

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Welcome to episode 20 of The Diesel Dad. My name is Anders Varner. In today's episode, we're going to answer the question, hey dad, am I fat? And the reason that this question came up to me is super personal. I was giving my three-year-old daughter a bath the other night, and I asked her

if I could use her brush to comb my hair. Now, if anybody's ever seen any of the videos, met me in person at an event, or just seen a video in general of what I look like on Instagram, there's a good chance you know that I have absolutely no hair and have been bald for the overwhelming majority

of my adult life, starting in my late 20s until today. So the idea that I'm going to use a brush is absolutely ridiculous, and I'm trying to use a brush is absolutely ridiculous, and I'm trying to get a reaction out of my daughter. I get it, she gets it. But the thing that happened immediately after me asking if I could use her hairbrush was her looking at me and saying, daddy, you don't have hair,

you can't use my brush. But the thing that radically shifted the purpose of what the Diesel Dad is and what she did next set my brain down a rabbit hole that is almost impossible to come out of. joke about me not having hair to actually asking me a very with an inquisitive look on her face of why don't you have hair and what I did was I made up a bunch of crap I started talking about male pattern baldness as if she has some random idea what male pattern baldness is I started talking to her about some people lose their hair and they have no idea why.

And I started talking to her about when I lost my hair, when I was in my late 20s, and I started telling her why it's not a big deal. And what it was is a whole bunch of lies. I actually have no idea what the genetic predisposition is to having a bald head versus having hair, I'm totally clueless on the matter. I'm sure there's subject matter experts and I'm sure there's professionals that actually understand what male pattern baldness is. I'm not one of them. And if you ever want to know

what baldness is and where it comes from, don't ask me. All I know is I have to shave my head every week. And if I don't, I really start to look super, super bald and I have no clue. I am totally useless. But what happened in that moment was I immediately realized that I was lying to my daughter. And there's no way that she didn't know this. And luckily she's three and me lying to her and making up these stupid stories may have been funny

and passing the buck on actually answering the question but it got me thinking about the number of places as a parent that we end up lying to our kids and those lies depending upon what they are in our relationship to our kids and and their real actual nature of what they're trying to learn is potentially very damaging. And is she going to be damaged because I lied to her about me actually having some sort of answer about male pattern baldness?

No, I hope not. God, that would be so weird if one day she woke up and she was just severely damaged because when she was three, I made up a bunch of crap about being bald. But I have a best friend that for the past 38 years of my life, I started playing hockey with this kid when I was like 4 years old. And I to this day call him fat kid. He's one of my best friends. And I to this day call him the fat kid. My parents call him the fat kid. He's one of my best friends and I to this day call him the fat kid. My parents

call him the fat kid. When we were younger we called him the fat kid. When he hit puberty, lost all the fat, turned into a shredded beast, I still call him the fat kid. And I've always viewed all of my relationships through the eyeballs of a male in which we banter with each other. We joke on each other. We're always poking fun at each other. It's locker room humor. We're always taking jabs. It keeps everybody in check when we're always taking jabs at each other. For the last three years though, I've seen the world in a much different lens through the eyes of a female, of how a little girl grows up in this world. And I've become keenly aware of the messaging that goes out to women. And she's three. She's not really like into magazines.

She's not doing any of this stuff. But I'm always aware, even to the point where when I read kids' books, I notice that the overwhelming majority of the time, the character that the book is talking about is often male. Or if it is a neutral character, like a fish, they often refer to that fish as a he or a him. And it's not really about gender equality or any of these things. It's about an experience that we all go through that we don't actually know is happening around us. It's an environment that we all grow up in, the messaging that we all grow up in, and

I've never experienced it from a female point of view, so I don't actually know until recently what that experience looks like. I've never looked for it. I've never seen what it looks like. And it got me thinking because one of my best friends his nickname is the fat kid and I happen to be a health fitness something professional in this industry with two and a half decades worth of knowledge of understanding how to get people to a body type that they want to have and you start connecting a lot of dots and it's really weird because if you're overweight and you're a dad and you are supposed to be the leader in your household,

what happens if your daughter comes home one day and says, hey, dad, am I fat? And it could be because one of her friends called her fat. It could be because she looked in the mirror and feels like she's fat. She could have learned about being fat from an from a magazine from a commercial she could have seen some perfume thing on YouTube like the number of places that these messages come to your kids is it's an it's an it's a hill that no none of us are capable of climbing to find out where this these messages come from it's actually not possible for us to control every scenario that happens and

when i saw the look in her eye and actually asked the question it made me wonder like how many times do i get to have a moment if she was asking a real question like, hey dad, am I fat? In which if you don't have an education in understanding health, strength, fitness, your metabolism, body fat, if you don't have any of these answers, you're only left with crap. You're left with the exact same answers that I was left at in talking about male pattern baldness and why I think I'm bald, which I have no clue why.

I don't care why. I don't want to know why. It doesn't matter to me why. But being overweight is a different story. It's a body image. It's a place in society. It's an identity that people will will adopt and if your kid comes up to you and says, hey dad am I fat? We have this crazy opportunity for

for us to have an education in health and fitness and strength and body awareness and body image to have a really great conversation. And it leads me to believe that if adults don't have this, where are kids supposed to get education on health, and fitness, and having a body weight that is healthy? And I realize there isn't one. In the same way that I'm lying to my daughter about male pattern baldness, if you don't understand those things and you're waiting for society or school systems

or health class to actually provide an education and have a real conversation with your kids about body image and body awareness, you're barking up the wrong tree. You're asking the wrong people to do the wrong job because their job at school is to teach you about reading, writing, arithmetic, history, social sciences. Nobody's teaching your daughter about body awareness.

Nobody's teaching your daughter about body image. Nobody's teaching her the importance of proteins, fats, and carbohydrates. Nobody's teaching her what her metabolism is and how she can get it to a place where she feels comfortable, where she's burning energy at the same rate that she's taking it in, taking nutrients in. And it's a really, really interesting thing to me. And it dives into the really, the deeper side of why we created the Diesel Dad. See, I never thought about any of these things

ever before having a kid. I never thought about any of this stuff before having a daughter specifically. I never thought about the fact that the first like 12 years of her life, it's my responsibility to do the best possible job to provide a foundation for her education when it comes to health and fitness and strength

and confidence in herself. And if you are in a place right now where you're 20 to 40 pounds overweight, you have to wonder what is the messaging that's been going to your kids for a really long time. It's about leadership. The Diesel Dad is a leadership platform in which we allow parents, dads specifically, to come in and learn what it means to be healthy, what it means to live the life of a healthy person, what are the habits, what are the behavior patterns of healthy individuals? Because if you're overweight right now, what you're really doing is writing a book every single day. You're writing a book every single meal. You're writing the playbook for how to be overweight. And it's not to over emphasize that

you're a bad parent. That's not the case. The thing is, is all of this stuff just happens. It doesn't happen overnight. It happens one pound at a time. And if every year you add five pounds slowly, and it's all body fat, you don't even recognize that it happens because your weight fluctuates. And then one day you're three pounds overweight, two pounds down the next day, five pounds up. But if you had five pounds a year for four straight years, you're now 20 pounds overweight. You do that for two more years, six years, now you're at 30. Now we're starting to stare down numbers that are really, really unhealthy. And the problem is that this all starts with education. This all starts with you having the ability to have a healthy conversation about weight,

about strength training, about resistance training, about how you approach life and live a healthy existence. I can only imagine how scary it would be if you were a 12-year-old girl and you got called fat at school, especially if it was by somebody that you look up to or somebody that you want to be your friend and it puts you in a really vulnerable place

because getting called fat is not the first time that this happens. It happens when you look in the mirror and you're not proud of their body. You have these thoughts because society's pushing them at you over and over and over again. You see the models on YouTube. You see the models in the magazine. You see that you do not look like them and you start to wonder what's wrong with me and why don't I look like them. And then all those thoughts and feelings manifest into that one conversation where your best friend aka me talking to my best friend i start calling

you the fat kid and i do that for 38 straight years and i love that kid more than anything in my whole life he's one of my best friends but we're 38 now we're we're old people we it's a joke to us we've all we've all matured but if you're a 12 year old girl and you come home and say, Hey dad, so-and-so just called me fat. Am I fat? You have this really, really important moment in life because if you say yes, you've now labeled your kid fat and she's going to carry that identity with her for a very long time. She's going to have a very unhealthy relationship with her body. And if you say no, you're really going down the exact same route because she knows that the answer is possibly yes. She knows that she looks different than the magazine. She knows that she looks different

than her friends. She knows that she looks different than this ideal human body because she can see it in the mirror and see it in the magazines and see it on YouTube and see it in commercials and see it everywhere. The best answer that we can come up with is not the answer that I gave my daughter when she asked why I was bald. It's not running in circles over and over again about a bunch of facts that you have no idea actually exist. But the best thing we can do is to begin a conversation about being healthy. And that is why we really believe in the Diesel Dad and that this is why we have found our place and where we want to take the last two and a half decades of training and coaching people.

Because I want you, the dad, the leader of your household, to be able to create a conversation with your kids about what it means to be healthy. And what that means is when your kid comes to you and says, Hey dad, I got called fat today at school. Am I fat? Yes or no isn't the answer. Yes or no doesn't even come to your mind. What comes to your mind is an education, a conversation, a way in which you can converse with your kids

about being healthy. And the reason that you're able to do that is because you are living a strong, lean, and athletic life. You are doing it while you balance family, balance your career, balance fatherhood, and balance your own fitness. You see, this whole thing only works if we have balance between family, fatherhood, and fitness. Those three things have to work together and when you create that that Diesel Dad character, the person that you strive to be, all of a sudden we don't have to worry about these conversations because

you've been through our program. You understand the mindset around being healthy. You understand the daily routines that healthy people do. If you need to lose 20 to 40 pounds, it's not just about sucking macros and calories out of your body so that you lose weight because none of that matters if you don't change the mindset first. If you don't start to objectively view the things that have led you to where you are today, you're never going to be able to make the change that allows you the ability to stay lean your entire life. And I'm not talking about lean like you're a bodybuilder who's about to go on stage. I'm talking about being able to walk around with a healthy body fat percentage so you're not at risk of disease. And it doesn't look like you're,

it looks like you're taking care of yourself. It looks like the body of a healthy person. And on top of that, once we handle the mindset piece where we talk, where you're able to lay out, okay, well, what are the systems and habits and where do you see your life so that you can have a healthy life and a healthy mindset about your body? You see, the body image piece is very important because there's a lot of people that are going to sit here and yell about body image and their health happens in all shapes and sizes. Well, that's great. If you really want to fight hard to be happy at any specific body weight and that's what you want to do, like great. But you can't argue with the numbers and the science. It's unhealthy to be overweight. And we have to have a better mindset

about the fact that this is a reality. You are at a massive risk by carrying extra body fat and you do not want to imply to your kids that it's okay and healthy to be overweight. It's not because that is going to set the path for where they are going and it's not going to be a good thing. On top of that, they don't want it. Nobody wants it. It doesn't matter how happy you say you are. You know you're at risk. You know you don't have the energy. You know you don't have the systems and structures and routines built into your life to have the things that you want and live the life that you want to live. Where you have the physical capacity. Where you're allowed to experience physical freedom. Where you feel the energy to get up and go play. To get up and go lift. To get up and go

train. To get up and go walk. To be outside. To take your shirt off at the pool. To go to the beach during the summer. To live a life with physical freedom. That is what matters when it comes to the mindset. What are the routines and the habits that go into living a life where you have the physical capacity to go do anything and everything that you want. Have you put in the work to be able to train that. These are the things that you need to be able to sit down and have a real conversation with your kids about and the only way to do it is to experience it yourself so they know the signs. They know what to look for. They know what feelings come out of that because when I want

to talk to my daughter, I want to talk to her about strength. I want to talk to her about how awesome it is to be able to lift weights and to be able to move and not feel like I can't do things. I want them to know how awesome it is that every time somebody's moving, they always want me to come because I'm like the best person to help move furniture on this planet. There isn't a couch that I'm scared of. And I say that jokingly,

but it's a super reality that like, I love the fact that all of my neighbors, all of my friends, all of them know that I train hard. It's like the defining characteristic of my life that I am. I'm the strong person. It's incredible. And if you aren't living a life heading in that direction, there's a very good chance that nobody wants you to help them move because they don't think you have the physical capacity to be meaningful in a situation like that i also think it's insanely important not only to just be able to have a conversation about the mindset of it but i want you to be able to have a conversation about the mindset of it, but I want you to be able to have a real conversation about nutrition and actually be able to discuss the benefits of all macronutrients,

talking about building muscle with protein, talking about how you can use fats and carbohydrates for energy. All of those things are insanely important to being able to have a real conversation with your kids and help them educate them on what it means to live a strong lean and athletic life. And if those three things don't matter to you, it's just about being healthy. You have to be able to talk to them and educate them. You have a very finite amount of time in which you can control the foundational education that they have about health. It doesn't exist in public schools anymore. It doesn't exist in private school anymore.

I come from a private school background. Nobody taught me about this stuff. If it wasn't for the weight room and the people that I hung out with in weight rooms, I would have never, ever, ever learned what macronutrients were if i didn't have a dad that lifted weights all the time i would have never known how protein played its role in building muscle i would have never understood what carbohydrates were i would have just been looking for fad diets all over the place to fill gaping holes on why I was unhappy or why I didn't have the body that I wanted. You need to have this information because it's super important to be able to

just start the conversation, to be able to fill in the holes where your kids have questions. They're going to want to know how to train. They're going to want to know how to build muscle. And even if they don't, you need to be able to explain to them in a progressive manner why strength training is important. They need to know how to build muscle. It's so important. Not just because they're likely playing sports or they're likely trying to get better at something or the importance of being able to have mobility and joint health. But like, man, the thing that I'm most grateful for in my life is being introduced to lifting weights and barbells. Literally everything in my life has come out of the fact that I enjoy lifting weights.

From this house that I'm in, this camera I'm recording this on, my wife was a member at my gym. Every waking moment of every day for the rest of my life is shaped by the barbell. It's provided the experiences that I would have never had in my life had I not fallen in love with this thing. And I don't expect your kids to want it or love it as much as I do. But what I want is you as their parent to be able to explain to them why training is important. I don't care if they play in the freaking band. The ability to use resistance training is one of the biggest and best tools that you can give to your kids.

Teach them how to work hard. Teach them how to move well. Teach them how to get stronger. Strength is empowering. It gives us this feeling that we are capable, that we have this ability. Just adding five pounds to the bar each week gives you this very basic simple skill of making something progressively harder and that skill can translate into a way of thinking that allows you to chase success in everything you do and on top of that I want the people to understand what their metabolism is if you go on the internet and type in metabolism, I can't even imagine how many trillion websites show up that are just chaos. Who do you trust? And the worst thing that can happen is that your daughter actually goes and Googles her metabolism.

And finds a whole bunch of products that just suck. And a bunch of blogs that suck. And a bunch of influencers that suck. Some of them are great, awesome. Most of them though, like they're making content every day because it keeps them in an algorithm. It's really important for you to be able to teach your kids what their basal metabolic rate is. Teach them that burning calories is not some fluke magical thing and your metabolism isn't something

that you can just put in your body and take it. We were all born with one. You were just born with a shitty one. I'm sorry to hear that. Like, oh, well, did you just have a slow metabolism? Must be your genetics. Sorry I gave that to you. No, it's not.

That's not what your metabolism is. Your metabolism is a very simple thing to understand. Your basal metabolic rate, the amount of food or the amount of energy that you need to just stay alive. All the chemical and hormonal reactions that happen to your body that we don't even care to know about. It keeps your brain moving, right? The thermal effect of physical activity, how much, how many calories do you burn from the amount of movement you're doing in the day whether it's intentional exercise or just getting up and walking talking to your friends hanging out being being a kid going out and playing you can explain these things to your kids and they will know that 60% of the energy that they take in is just to keep them alive.

An additional 30% is all the activity that they do in a day. And then there's 10% at the end that just helps them digest food. Because it's a very expensive process to turn a piece of chicken into protein that goes into your muscles. So that you can get stronger. And once we do that, you will understand that calories matter. Calories are insanely important. That balance of what you need to stay alive, the amount of activity you do, and the amount of energy it takes to digest and process food is the amount of energy you need to maintain the exact body weight that you want to be at. And if you're eating above that, you're gonna put on weight. And if you're eating below

that, you're going to lose weight. So it's it becomes an insanely easy, not complicated process at all for you to be able to communicate really healthy intelligent knowledge to your kid about their metabolism. These things are insanely important to me. The Diesel Dads started as this cool idea because I just wanted to get all the dads that like lifting weights together. But what happened was people started reaching out to me and they started telling me that they were unhappy, that they were overweight, and they didn't have answers of where they wanted to go and what they wanted to do. And if you don't have that, how are you going to communicate to your kids? Because every single day you're writing a freaking world-class playbook for how

to be unhealthy and unhappy. You do not want to live your life being overweight, unhealthy, unhappy. And it's a very simple process by learning the education that is the Diesel Dad. We created the mentorship because I want to work specifically with dads. I want dads that want to live a great life, to lose the body fat. And we created this system because it's the most comprehensive system that we can create to get you the education that you need so you can lead your family in the manner that you know you want to do this question um hey dad am i fat it plagues me it's it crushes me. It's the thing that I want more than anything. I work with dads because they're the access point for us to help the next generation. I want to help dads because they're the access point to me being able to teach kids all around this country how to live a

stronger, healthier, more athletic life, how to empower them with the knowledge so they don't have to worry about being sick and unhealthy and obese. It's not like obesity is going away. I think on average last year, I read that as a collective country, we all put on 30 pounds of fat. It's terrifying. It's terrifying to think what's happening to kids when they take PE out of school, when they take health education out

of school. All those budgets are being cut. And what are they doing? They're shoving standardized tests, reading, writing, and arithmetic, social sciences, U.S. history. It's all this classroom stuff, but there's no education on how to be healthy. We somehow have overlooked the fact that we need to have healthy kids in this world that know how to be healthy to continue being integral parts of society that are functioning. I can't work with all the kids. I don't work with kids. I don't know how to do all that. I have one kid of my own. I have another one on the way and it's enough for me. But one of the things that I want to do more than anything is I want to help dads understand the process, the

systems, the routines. I want them to understand the five components of how to be healthy. I want to help them lose the body fat. I want to help them stop blaming their genetics. I want to help them stop blaming external things. I want them to be able to have conversations of health inside their household. I want them to know that it's okay if your daughter walks up to you and says, hey, hey dad, am I fat? I got called fat at school today. Am I fat? That they don't have to say yes or no. They don't have to fumble around for answers about crap they don't know about. I want to be the person that allows them and gives them the answers so that they can have better conversations with their kids. I know this one took a little bit different turn.

I hope it hit you kind of in all the feels. I hope that you share this with a friend. If there's any of these Diesel Dad episodes that I just want the world to hear, it's this one. It's my biggest message to the world. It's my biggest message. It's the future of where Barbell Shrugged is going. It's the future of the thing that is the most passionate to me. This all hit me because my daughter asked why I was bald and I didn't have an answer and I lied to her. I lied hardcore.

I fumbled around. I made a bunch of crap up. It was all wrong and I lied. I acted like I knew an answer. Luckily, I don't think that me lying about being bald to her is going to affect her too long. But some of those questions that come to us, we don't always get those moments to come back. We don't always get a second chance. In fact, if your daughter walks up to you and asks you if

you're fat, I think you have one chance. Because if you say yes or no, that answer is going to stick with her forever. However, if you're able to have a conversation about the mindset of being overweight or the mindset of being lean or the mindset of body image, all of a sudden now you've built a relationship with your kids. You've built a relationship with your daughter. You've built trust.

And from there, you can take that trust and grow it. And you have the ability to teach them about nutrition you then open the door to teaching them about strength training and resistance training if you teach them about resistance training you teach them how to build muscle which is one of the most important pieces to understanding your metabolism and if you can teach them about calories and how they work and how your body needs energy and how it processes energy and how it uses energy, then you have an ability to create a great conversation based around health and empower them with the ability.

You can even make fun games out of it. You can have them track their macros. You can give them the opportunity to understand what it means to eat their body weight and protein every day. It's absurd to think that parents don't have the skill set to be able to teach their kids what protein is, how they track it and why it's important. I think that our ability as parents to be able to empower our children with good knowledge is the most important thing.

You would never teach your kids how money works without teaching them budgeting. You would never teach them these super simple things that they're going to need for their entire life without having the education around it and one of the the easiest ways to find out if you have the education or not is to wake up and look in the mirror and if you're unhappy with what you see and you know that you need to lose between 20 and 40 pounds, just know that every day you're writing a playbook on how to be unhealthy

and how to not be happy with your body and how unhappy and unhealthy that makes you. And all of that messaging is getting passed on. I don't think you're a bad person. I don't think anybody is intentionally being malicious, especially when it comes to their kids. I think that life gets fast, and it's really hard for us to slow it down.

And when things get fast, it's really easy for us to get get stuck in really bad patterns and my job and the diesel dad mentorship is to be that pattern interrupt and and pump the brakes a little bit and just say hey it's cool man we're here but you're on the phone with me or we're working together because you know that you're not being the dad that you want to be. You know that you're not leading from the front. You know that you're not building an education system in your house.

In fact, you are building an education system. You're just not building the one that you want your kids to have forever. And we build that system in the diesel dad mentorship we build your ability to understand the mindset of fat loss and living a strong lean athletic life we build your understanding of macronutrients we build your understanding of muscle how to train why to train we build your understanding of your metabolism what it takes in order for you to take in the appropriate amount of calories throughout the day, burn them appropriately so that you start to use the stored energy that is stored on your body as body fat so that you burn it and you develop a body that you are proud of. And then most importantly, we teach you how to do all this in a very simple manner so that you don't have to sacrifice family, you don't have to sacrifice your fitness, you don't have to

sacrifice fatherhood, and you start to understand that it's impossible for all three of them to work without you directly in the middle of them living your best life, being proud of who you are and making an impact on your family in the biggest way possible. My name's Anders Varner. This is Diesel Dad episode 20. And I appreciate you listening. We'll see you guys next week.