On Professionalism and Bullshit: A Weight-loss Story

“I’d try weightlifting. But I don’t want to get too bulky. I don’t want to look like a man.”

“Weightlifting is fun, but I don’t want to do that because I’ll get fat.”

“I have to lose some weight. So I’m going to stop weightlifting and drop some body fat. I wish I could do both.”

I’ve been hearing these excuses, in one declarative form or another, for as long as I’ve lifted weights. I’ve also complained about them ad nauseum, on my social media soapboxes, to people in the gym, or over pints. I don’t know what compels me to believe that writing something more formal and of greater length is going to accomplish anything. They say writers write what they know. And after years of being acquainted with it, I’m something of an expert on this one field: Your Bullshit.

I’ve been big my whole life. Not Paul Bunyan, corn-fed, farming stock big. I recently went into a Duluth Trading Co. store and found out how comically small I am compared to actual big Americans (I’m a medium there). But I’ve had a 50 inch chest since before I ever started lifting weights to get strong. My shoulders span the breadth of most doorways. I was 5’10” at a physical when I was 12. They said I would grow to well over 6 foot. I am still 5’10”, possibly slightly shorter.

Being big is accompanied by an appetite. Maybe I could blame the evolutionary survival mechanisms that my grandmother instilled in us, even generations removed from attempted genocide in Ireland. We had food a plenty. Your plate was filled with it. You ate until that plate was empty, because someday, young man, there might not fecking be any. Of course, this hasn’t been the case. America isn’t the only country with obese people. But it’s the only one I’ve been to so far where I notice the obese poor people. And as new Americans, my family embraced the plenty of food, with no thought or education on nutritional content. Shepherds Pie all day.

I don’t recall the rate of advancement of my bodyweight and/or height. I do remember going to sign-ups for Pop Warner Football, somewhere around 13 or 14 years old. I remember the intense, collective gaze of all the coaches from across the room, salivating as I walked towards the weigh-in area, praying that I was under the cap of 180lbs. I can’t remember the exact number, but it was north of 200. I would be excluded from the simulated gladiator sport of American Football until High School, by which time it became evident to me that I was way behind in the skills necessary to succeed in the sport. I’m actually thankful that happened, and disappointed rugby or weightlifting didn’t find me sooner.

With the exception of a few years at the end of high school and just after, physicality and sports have been apart of my life enough to keep me from joining the outright obese quadrant of our population. Again, this is not to say I’ve ever been thin, or even knew how to take care of myself for much of this time. But it was enough moving around to keep on moving around without issue. It wasn’t until I found and started thinking about weightlifting as a sport that I ever really considered being aware of what I weighed everyday. By then I was sitting around 250lbs, usually somewhere between 110–115kg. This put me in the unlimited category against men who typically weigh a minimum of 300lbs and comes with a culture of tending not to really care much at all what you weigh. But in a sport obsessed with absolute numbers, you keep it on your mind.

I was only ever told to train hard, sleep well, and eat a lot. Your body will determine what you need to weigh. And for the most part, this general wisdom still holds true. We, as coaches, could do with a little more communication on what types of things you should be eating in abundance. And we, the coaches, aren’t the only people to blame for the very prevalent, failure to understand basic nutrition science. This age of leisure for the general populace is still a very new idea. After millenia of trying to understand and battle ailments outside of our control, humanity in certain parts of the world has rapidly been presented with the issue of self-inflicted disease from our own marvelous abundance and reduction of survivalist activity. Exercise as a hobby is a privilege only the wealthy and landed have known until the last century.

So I lifted and I ate, until one day I found myself up to 130kg, or around 285lbs. When you’re only 5’10”, that feels like a whole lot more. I couldn’t stand it any more. So I got help. I learned and made lifestyle changes. I added in an hour of walking, because after you train with heavy weights 9xWeek, walking is about the only thing you have the extra energy to do. Slowly, I lost 10kg/22lbs. My body composition improved. I was training the same volume at a higher average intensity, going heavy in both the mornings and afternoons. I increased my competitive total. My absolute strength either remained the same or slightly increased. With the exception of tearing my shoulder labrum, this was probably the best I’ve felt in my life, physically and mentally.

Fast forward 3.5 years and I find myself in a slightly different boat. It is no longer my job to train 9xWeek. My ability to train my sport is significantly limited from the surgical repair in my shoulder. I have the added responsibility of running a weightlifting program/gym, a constant source of stress that is probably responsible for 99% of the arguments I have with my spouse. I’m painting this picture for you to understand something: my give-a-fuck was pretty low. When things aren’t going right for you personally or professionally, it’s easy to fall back on the crutch of something familiar, like eating to your heart’s content.

The only possible means I see of getting things done when you don’t particularly have the willpower is to clearly define your why. Examine if your why is significant motivation. Do you really care about your reason for doing “x”? Because if not, odds are you won’t be successful at all.

With your why examined and affirmed, you can reverse engineer concise goals, and then establish a professional system that guides you to achieving them. I use that term, “professional system”, for a reason. Most of you do not work what might be described as your “dream job”. There are likely varying shades of fulfillment from certain tasks in your workplace, with some of them being quite rewarding. Everyone I know has some bullshit thing they must get done, because it is their job to do it. My lifters come and tell me some new bullshit thing they had to get done that day. It is remarkable how many bullshit things people don’t particularly want to do get accomplished every single business day.

Your goals must be approached with that level of professionalism, or you will not achieve them. The benefit of your goals, is that they come from an intrinsic passion to achieve something dear to your heart. You get to do this. You don’t have to. The reward to you personally will be immensely satisfying. Achieving it will differ in no way from the workmanship you display in your daily profession.

Let’s go through this together, using my own situation as an example.

Why?

To push my body towards its highest possible physical capabilities in the sport of Weightlifting without the use of illegal drugs. To leave to no opportunity unexamined. To walk away with no possible shred of regret or doubt on what could have been.

Goal

• Compete at the Weightlifting World Championships.

Requirements

• Lose 13kg in 4 months
• Set Personal Best in the Total, post surgery, in a qualifying event

Means

• Regimented Nutrition and Meal Preparation
• Elimination of Social Activities that may lead to food or beverage choices that do not fit parameters
• Intense Training Protocol
• Quality Sleep Hygiene
• Supplemental Cardio sessions as needed

I came off the worst competitive performance of my weightlifting career and decided I wasn’t going to settle. My why gave me my tangible goals, and I executed them with the same professionalism as when it was actually my job. Body composition improved again. My strength did take a little hit, but my weightlifting total improved. I was feeling the most physically prepared in some time. And I achieved the end goal. There was no bullshit task too great. I had to. I wouldn’t accept an alternative.

Which brings us, rather discursively, back to our original discussion on your bullshit. Weightlifting is not for everyone. The vast majority of happy, exercise-minded individuals will not have my why. Discover your own, and determine what may be worthy of your professionalism. I want weightlifting to be available for those with casual interests and those with serious competitive aspirations alike. I think both of those relationships with the sport can still teach some very real lessons about yourself.

If you’re going to walk into my gym and learn about weightlifting though, please leave your bullshit at the door. Don’t tell me you can’t lose weight because lifting makes people fat. Your fatness makes you fat. Your lack of discipline makes you fat. Your binge drinking four days a week makes you fat. Your pispoor intensity and lack of conviction in your physical efforts makes you fat. How dare you accuse weightlifting. Your why for losing fat simply isn’t strong enough. This is ok. Self-examine, and find a why that might be sufficient.

Do not tell me you need to stop training with weights because you need to lose weight. I have lost a cumulative total of 23kg or 50lbs while training my ass off for competitive weightlifting, and improved my performance along the way. Your why for training weightlifting simply isn’t enough. This is ok. Reflect and examine. What why will give you enough contentment to pursue whole-heartedly? I have watched you grow more rotund, after turning away from hard training with your bullshit, piddling around in search of the next thing.

Do not tell me you will get bulky and look “like a man” from teaching your body how to strength train, while touting the benefits of toning in the next sentence. There is no muscle toning: there are only strong people and weak people. I promise you will never look like me or any athletic female you project your own body dysmorphia onto. Not only do you not possess the physiology. You simply lack the mental ability to undertake so great an exertion for the prolonged body of time that would make such a physique possible. We can teach you. We can show you what it means to actually try fucking hard at something. We can show you how to cope with the failure of your immense efforts. These lessons will reverberate through your being and exercise themselves into every facet of your life thereafter.

I expect none of you to do the things I have done, for so mediocre of a career, in an arena the general populace can’t be bothered with. Instead, I hope that you find something meaningful enough in your life to escape your bullshit and sacrifice more than you would’ve ever dared possible. I hope you find a love so consuming that you can’t possibly live without it. Absence from that thing is not life at all, but a death sentence with the added indecency of eternal longing for a missing piece of yourself. I hope you find whatever that is, and it absolutely kills you with sublime grace.