A Little Perspective Goes A Long Way

Sometimes I wonder if losing weight was easier 50 years ago. No… the physics of our bodies and metabolisms didn’t change. Heck, even our willpower and our ability to say “I don’t feel like getting off the couch right now” didn’t change. What did change was the “culture of now.” Lest anyone think I’m about to hop up on a Luddite soap box about how technology is evil and we should go back to pre-computer days, I want to first take a minute to remind everyone that I’m writing this article on a blog and work with Chris Powell on an Internet-based weight loss program. While I’m not necessarily the first person to Tweet every time I find a penny on the sidewalk, I’m also clearly not suggesting technological advancement is the worst thing that’s happened to the world. Instead, I simply want to point out how one of the side effects of the digital age is a tendency to expect instant gratification.  For example, if I can’t remember the name of an actress from a movie, I don’t have to call a friend who’s really good at remembering those kinds of things… I can Google it. If I want to see the score to a baseball game on the other side of the country, I don’t have to wait for the morning paper… I can check my cell phone. If I want to tell my best friend in Japan something, I don’t have to mail a letter or wait until I know he’s awake to call him… I can send an email, a text, a tweet, write on his wall, poke him, throw a virtual snowball at him, or any other of a variety of digital communicatory abstractions that, 25 years ago, would have sounded like gibberish.

My point is—and yes, I am coming to one eventually—in a world where we expect instant gratification and instant results, weight loss becomes much more challenging. I’m as guilty of it as the next person. I order vegetables at one meal instead of the fries and I expect to see a drop on the scale the next day of at least two pounds. Or I do an extra 50 crunches one morning and I expect to see washboard abs the next time I look in front of the mirror. But that’s not how our bodies work!

Just because the rest of the world is moving faster than ever, our bodies are evolving at the same slow rate they’ve been evolving at since the Dawn of Man. Perhaps in another 10 billion years or so an extra hour on the treadmill will knock off 10-15 pounds, but for now we’ve got to learn to be patient with our weight loss. Changing our habits now isn’t going to result in an immediate achievement of our goals. Always, always, always try to view your fitness and lifestyle progressions in perspective. Doing this will help you account for the fact that our bodies don’t change nearly as rapidly as the world around us.