Right then, straight into it. Just finished the first sash with Casey on her introduction to stoicism from her kind of view, which you know, a lot of this stuff can go over your head. When I say like, oh, the stoics two thousand years ago, man, that's really a cynic guy, like a scot mate. I don't care about people two thousand years ago. I don't care about philosophies.

That's just people talking shit. And the thing is, back in those days philosophy was was a way of life, like to love to live rationally wise. And there's a lot of key lessons from that part of history that have been re picked up a thousand years or so later and then have kind of developed into modern day psychotherapy and a lot more stuff than that. So there's a lot to learn and actually we probably lost more knowledge and we know which is such a shame. But that session was awesome because we covered like, Casey basically was like you know, one hundred pounds overweight.

Okay. She tried the OYO diet and everything and she couldn't get her off and it got to the point where it was either she had to change or accept it and you know potentially go off to a premature death because of being so overweight and all the health problems that come with it. And she says she stopped fixating on the end goal. And this is what we say as well, stop fixating on I want to lose 10 pounds. What's the type of person you want to be that 10 pounds just comes off?

Like what type of person, like the person you become is the most important part of the journey. So that's five week challenge. It's not so much about I want to get two kilos stronger on my bent over row and I want to lose 10 pounds and I want to you know get more definition, you want to start becoming the person that will achieve those goals as a byproduct of their lifestyle. Does that make sense? So that means building habits such as tracking your protein intake to make sure you're having a high protein diet with all the amazing benefits that comes with, getting your step count in, the massive health benefits of steps plus you know those calories of course.

Drinking water, training three times a week as opposed to not training at all and being a bit you and there with training. The person that does these in our structures and put health first in their life end up being people that get results over time and it just is part of their life. You see some people who are like really, really healthy, they're in shape, they're happy, they're strong and you say how did you get there? And they don't say I did a six week plan. These true people that are healthy, they go, well, you know, it's just my lifestyle, mate.

It's just how I am. Like, when I go out for food, I eat moderately. When I go on holiday and come back like Celine was talking about, when I go on holiday and come back and I'm four pounds heavier, I rationalise this water weight and I rationalise well, of course, I'm going to be heavier when on holiday for a bit and enjoying myself and you know, is it really that bad, I can get that off in a few weeks and just getting back to my lifestyle that I'm on without being on holiday. Okay, there's no need to take one bad thing and turn her into a mountain. What's it called, turn a molehill into a mountain.

A lot of people do this. And I was speaking to Rhea in the zoom as well, about you know, her problem was she would eat the Twix bar, know, 99 calorie ones and then she'd eat for them and then she'd that's it, just over. I've done all this hard work for a week or two and it's over, that's it and then go back into weeks of you know, just eating shit yeah. If we do what the stoics called the view from above, the zooming out is 500 calories eaten from chocolate, the end of your journey, the end of the results you're never gonna Of course not, it's minuscule. It's only 500 calories.

Like sometimes we think, I've had a burger, like the label we give is worse in our hands, the reality. And also the other way is true as well. We think sometimes, I just had a salad, but then you add the salad from McDonald's just go out of fat and it's actually like seven fifty calories. So of course, there's both ways. But that's why we want to work in the reality side of things.

We want to know, okay, did, yeah, I did have four tricks and a bag of crisps. But let me look at what the reality of that is. Let's work rationally. Okay, this is about 600 calories. I mean, on over 600 calories, use a macro planner, maybe just get on with it and just average out over time.

The person you need to become is resilience. In case you had an amazing definition for this, and I got resilience on my Rugby Warfare t shirts because I think it's one of the most important ways to live is to have resilience is bouncing back. And I love art because it's true. When you think about it, the most successful people in the world are the people that can bounce back faster. So it's not about never having mistakes.

It's not about never fucking up. It's not about never eating an overindulgent meat. It's not about ever getting wrecked on weekends again. Right? It's not about never those happening because they will happen.

It's about how long does it take you from that time to get back to the person you wanna be. How long does it take? Does it take a day? If it takes a day, amazing. You're never gonna be that far away from what you wanna be.

Does it take a week? Does it take a month? Does it take six months? Does it take until next summer? Okay?

This is the important part. Like, you know, how long does it take you to bounce back from your setbacks and not even setbacks. How long does it take you to bounce back from when life comes and slaps you in the face and goes, hey, I know you're this person, but let me just give you a slap for a minute. And you go, yeah, okay, give me a slap. Let's just get in a tangle for six months You go, okay, that's fine.

That's life. Let me just get on with it tomorrow. So I'm excited to learn more from Casey as well about her journey on this and the catastrophizing element of stuff. And I think it's so important. Like when I first came across catastrophizing, think it was Donald Robson's How to Think the Roman Emperor book, which is based on psychotherapy.

So he's a psychotherapy expert, also a stoicism expert and can I combine them both? And he talked about catastrophizing, catastrophizing, it's such a powerful word because this is exactly what we do in health and fitness a lot of the time and in life as well, we catastrophize all the time. And it's kind of like a drug in a sense because you catastrophize and you mourn and you get like the sense of really weird, we all do it, we get a sense of really weird like it's a nice feeling but it's bad, do you know I mean? And we're like oh I fucking like shit and you talk to someone else and they catastrophize at the same time and the next minute you got 10 people catastrophizing and they're like oh this fucking soul And you all for some reason, it's like a drug and you all love it. And then it makes you all feel better for momentary for a moment.

Then then you then you feel it, and you leave it. And then it's like, oh, you know, you've built someone up, you put a stress response on for one, which is not what we want to You don't want to put your stress response on all the time. Think of car tires. You don't want a stress response on and you're going left, right crazy when you just could go in a straight line, right? You can drive them the road straight, but you're gonna go do you know what, I fancy going mental left and right for about 200 meters for no reason whatsoever because you know, tires you have to change tires.

So the stress response is important to not trigger unnecessarily. But we suffer more in imagination than reality. That's what Seneca says, which is true. And there's another quote like most my imagined troubles never came to be. Karanbou said it was like it's true.

All these worries you have never come to be so we always thinking about things going wrong. So we always we're not working in reality most of the time, working in catastrophizing land and it doesn't serve us with our goals and stuff. And it takes you away from who you need to be. And you got to watch out for other people who catastrophize as well because it happens in groups. I see it in the Facebook groups all the time.

Not so much recently because I try and stamp it out because I'm like straight and direct with answers back and not a mean way just like look that's not true, here you go. But I remember like a year ago, through the Octagon challenge that people post being like, it's been a week and I haven't lost any weight. And then there was like 10 comments and he's been like, yeah, haven't lost any weight. Oh my god, it's terrible. And I checked all of their spreadsheets to see if it was true.

And none of it was true. All of them, all of them had lost weight on average over the first three weeks, like, know, three pounds. But they were saying in the group that they hadn't and everybody underneath was like, I haven't as well and raging catastrophizing. But they weren't working in reality, because they did. So there's there is this weird sense of like, I want like loving catastrophizing and I think we need to break it.

So if you really, if you do it yourself, stamp it out. Marcus Raiders talks about this. He's like, don't be caught, you know, mourning or catastrophizing a court or in the Senate, even don't even be caught doing it to yourself, what in your own mind. Okay, very important to learn. I do it all the time, we all do it all the time, but we have to stop it.

But yeah, there's a PDF of the session which if you haven't got posted in the group as well. But for today, let's keep it simple today. Today, I want you to not have black and white thinking, view from above, will this matter in a year's time, five years time, who do I want to be? Will this matter? Don't catastrophize, it will automatically start happening.

So it's a skill essentially to learn. And I want you to stop in his tracks. Is this catastrophizing? Am I working in reality? Is this realism?

Am I being rational? That's what we need to do before we start letting our emotions run wild. Okay, so you want to say to yourself view from above, am I catastrophizing this moment? And I want you to start thinking about, you know, when you start getting, you know, procrastinating about stuff and all that. I want you to come back to your one big thing if you haven't had it done and just get it done.

The more kind of like think about what you have to do and Celine was brilliant when she said this last night as well on session. She said when she comes back from holiday, she doesn't think about, oh, I'll start Monday. She just gets back to it because she knows that's what she's got to do. So if you know what you've got to do, just go and do it. The more you debate things in your mind and this, you know, you're building resistance, because you're arguing with yourself if you're gonna do it or not, that's wasting energy.

And by the time you guess to it you don't do it, times pass and you feel worse. You know you gotta once you decide what you're gonna do go ahead a hundred miles per hour. That was Napoleon's number one advice guys. Okay? Napoleon's number one advice was once you've decided rationally what you wanna do, you go 100 miles per hour towards that.

You don't even hesitate. And this is the thing, I want to go to the gym now. Okay. I go now. Go.

Just start walking. Get your clothes on. Just get the movement going and it'll happen. So don't catastrophize today, do from above. Tomorrow I'm going to be covering a lot of recent research studies on fat loss on behaviour.

I spoke about one last night, which was about if you eat food at a table, and you're very mindful about every bite and taste and you're like this is you know, you're going through it, you're focusing on the food, nothing else. You eat and compare that to eating whilst watching TV, you actually eat about thirty-forty percent less calories, less food volume, if you're mindfully eaten. So let's try and look at our behaviours. We just eating when we're talking all the time to someone? Are we eating watching TV all the time because if you're doing that you are going to eat more until the show is over.

Okay, and there's another study as well showed like sitting down on the couch, if the sweets were nearby within the arm reach eating it, if the sweets were six foot away just out to reach or whatever, hardly anyone was going to get on it because it just couldn't be bothered. Think of the remote control. Remote control is in is it right by you change channel, remote controls in the other chair, and you want to change dial, you go to know what, I'll just sit here for forty minutes watching this, there's someone I don't know what because I can't be bothered to get up among remote control. So we have to look at our environment as We have to make it easier for ourselves. Think and I'm speaking to Reese, she's a teacher and you know people always coming in with snacks and stuff.

Sometimes the answer isn't always fight with willpower, your willpower will run out. The goal isn't to use more willpower, the goal is to use less willpower and then when we do need to use it we've got 100% willpower reserves and we can say no and we can be bam okay that's what I'm using my willpower for. If you have to say no, I'm using your willpower to fight against things all day every day is gonna wear out and you will give up and it'll be over. So they've done research on this. It's actually the people that use their willpower less than are more successful as opposed to people being able to have more willpower.

Does that make sense? I hope it does. So look at your environment, make it easier for yourself, read Atomic Habits if you haven't already listened to an Audible or read it just like get it done. It's a great book, full of golden nuggets, read that book, it'll change your habits, change your life, and then you know use your stoicism for the other parts and you know turtle for the rest and happy days guys. That's all I gotta say.

But enjoy yourself. We got strength workout leg day today. So leg day in the morning, leg day in the evening and yeah, that's it I think. Yeah, leg day and then tomorrow is a muscular endurance workout. And then that's week one done and the yoga on Saturday.

So I hope you're enjoying. If you haven't started yet, do not worry. But that's all I gotta say today, guys. I'm out. And remember, it's the name of the podcast, so maybe you don't have to be I don't have to tell you every day.

But if you break things down one day at a time, if you can just do things for today, you can do it tomorrow as well. And then you could do it another day and another day. So just focus on today, your one big thing. What do you have to do today to make a success? That's all.

What's your one big thing that's going make your day a success or make the biggest impact? Get that done, other things follow instead of a huge to do list. And that's it. And focus on other parts of your day. Just focus on tonight.

Enjoy yourself. Speak soon.