When all your efforts result in no learning

"It"s easier to evaluate your results through drunken delusion than to gaze soberly in the mirror and face the truth."

I had a conversation yesterday with one of my clients, and as it is predictable in many conversations, weight came up.

Weight is a universal source of grief, effort, disappointment, and self-hate.

But why would that be so?

I can recall, in my life, four "campaigns" to regain control over my body.

The most recent one is successful and is going to last. The previous ones included one or two elements that were not sustainable. for example the first time I was on a starvation diet, and I maintained it for 10 years, until I came to the United States, where the plenty beat me on my a**.

The second one was through using the Greer Childers method, but it was really hard, and as soon as I didn"t do the breathing/exercise combo, I started to balloon.

The third one was the beginning of my experimentation to find what foods I was eating that made me balloon. It resulted in me becoming a whale...

The fourth one was still experimentation, but this time I was mercilessly cutting out stuff from my shopping list, except for purposes of double blind tests... like any and all kinds of carbs, cow"s milk products, even fruits and vegetables that are getting sweeter and sweeter with Global Warming.

I am now at the same weight I was when I got off the plane in 1985.

Of course my health got damaged by a lot of the things I did while I was fat, or while I was trying to get normal.

I am 70 years old for another three weeks, and my arteries are brittle, stiff, and I have symptoms: pain, swelling, and approaching death.

It was like that for both my mother and father, and it is like this for my two brothers.

Our diet has been traditionally void of the nutrients that would keep our arteries young, copper, anti-inflammation stuff, and essential fatty acids.

I muscle tested this morning and in spite of my hopes, this condition cannot be reversed fast. My no-carb diet is good for it, but to soften up my arteries, to make them young again, according to muscle test, I"ll need two years.

Most of you if you heard that anything takes longer than taking a pill, you"d be growling...

But life has its own rhythm, and things take as long as they take.

If you don"t have patience for life, you"ll need patience for death. You may have chosen already.

In every area of life: health, wealth, love and fulfillment.

Now, let me return to the skill-set of managing weight, including getting to your ideal weight.

First off, you need to know what your numbers are.

• Then you need to know and put it in writing what your starting point is: what you are eating, when, how much.


• How you do your shopping, by a list or by hunger?


• What is the specific plan you want to test first and if necessary tweak later. It took me several wild turns to have a diet where I am fat burning, avoid cow dairy, vegetables and fruits, except parsley, spinach, garlic, mushrooms, hot peppers and yellow onions.

Lamb, rarely bacon, some fish, and eggs

For dairy: goat cheese.

I weigh myself every morning right after waking up. On my way to the bathroom I pass the electronic scale, so I never miss stepping on it. There is also a full size mirror right at that spot.

The purpose is to see if the downward direction is holding... if not, investigation is due.

I do my grocery shopping every two weeks, I cut my meat to portions and freeze it a day or two after my shopping day. I have the Energizer Audio playing in the refrigerator on a mini speaker to keep the food fresh and non-rotting.

The rest... not much to learn from, lots of experiments. I make my judgments by the scale and by how I feel.

The essential elements of this whole process are weighing myself every morning at the same time, and watching for the results of the experiments.

Now, listen up, this is the meat of this article:

Depending on who you are, you"ll have an opinion, a story, an interpretation about the feedback.

Which means: you"ll miss the feedback.

Why? the feedback is a fact... weight gain, how you feel.

Your story goes all over the place, celebrating, explaining, feeling guilty.

Unless you can take a feedback and add nothing to it, your experimentation is a scam... and you will never accomplish anything in life.

I teach separating facts (feedback) and story in the Playground program.

But, listen up, many people have done that program, and none of them considered what I taught a life-skill. They thought it was a method to feel better about your past... and yes, it is used for that too. But it is an essential life skill in EVERY SINGLE MOMENT of your life, regardless of the topic or the activity or the pillar of life.

And this is what is my new ambition: to make you live with skills.

What is the most incredible quality of a skill? That it"s portable. That it"s transferable. That it is like breathing: you do everything better if you can breathe... right?

And this is what I found out in that client call: that there is no distinction for you: skill... Your life is fragmented, and not an integrated whole.

There is no chance to have a good life without distinctions... and it is time to wake up and smell the coffee.

You do a lot of work... and it doesn"t all gel into a coherent whole.

Time to change that.