Should you aim to be skinny or strong?

 

We all know that intention without action is useless.

But also, action without intention is a waste of energy.

One step further than that, I’d say your intentions with fat loss can either make or break your results.

For example, intending to improve your health for your own energy and confidence will create a hugely different relationship with fitness and results.

Compared to intending to make someone jealous by you getting fit.

I’ll let your imagination fill in the gaps of what someone would do in both scenarios and whether it would help or hurt their fitness progress…

How would they eat?

Would they value the process or only the outcome?

How would they talk or judge themselves as they go?

Today I want to talk about the difference between intending to be skinny and intending to be strong.

Skinny: “I want to lose weight on the scales, and I want to be slim.”

Strong: “I want to feel stronger and have more energy day to day.”

They both sound perfectly fine on the surface, don’t they?

I’m going to lay out the different results that people get by going in each direction.

I’ve trained clients in both camps, and I always see drastically different outcomes because of it.

Aiming to be skinny:

I’ve spoken before about the difference between, weight loss and fat loss.

Fat loss is losing body fat.

Weight loss is to be as light and skinny as possible even if it means losing muscle, bone density and energy.

The problems that come up when aiming to do this are, you slow down your metabolism losing muscle, bone density and everything else with it.

A slower metabolism means, your body is burning less calories even at rest.

You now have less energy, which also means less energy to workout.

Aiming to be skinny also makes many people treat exercise as a trade-off for food.

Making them see food as something bad or to minimise as much as possible.

Not only that, losing weight and staying “skinny” becomes more and more difficult the longer you do it.

As your metabolism is getting slower and slower.

Aiming to be great at your profession is better than aiming to be rich.

Being great at your profession will affect your income positively, trying to jump straight to being rich is a losing game as you’ve missed a key steppingstone.

The same goes with aiming to be skinny.

Instead…

Aim to be strong:

When you aim to be strong, what happens?

You eat more whole foods, protein, vegetables, and you use food as fuel.

When you do that, you have a more objective relationship with food, which means less emotional eating.

“I need to eat to have energy for my day and goals.”

Yes, you do enjoy the foods you eat but your intention is to pick good foods that fuel you.

So, you then eat consciously and trust your intuition of what you need.

And now you have more energy, and you are exercising in a way to be strong, robust, and fit.

Which means more mobility, strength, and endurance so you now feel energised and empowered.

Please don’t forget this part.

You actually lose the body fat that you want to lose.

Here’s why…

You have more muscle on your body from being stronger.

Which means your body burns more calories at rest and when you’re sleeping.

You love the feeling of feeling energised and empowered so you then learn to like exercising more and more.

More consistency creates more results.

Now the association with exercise has gone from, something you must do to deserve calories.

To something that you get to do, to increase your energy, strength, and confidence.

And finally, your results last for life.

If you associate a lot of pleasure to being fit and healthy, you won’t ever want to look back.

If anything, you’ll build more and more curiosity around exercise which keeps it new and interesting.

If looking good and skinny is a trade-off for feeling weak and low on energy.

There’s a high risk you'll associate more pleasure with going back to your old lifestyle.

You can have your cake and eat it by:

Training to feel fitter and stronger.

Eating to have more energy and satiety.

And you can look good and feel good at the same time.

But first ask yourself what were your intentions the last time you tried to get fit?

And what could be a better, long term intention for you this time?

CHANGE IS POSSIBLE

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