In Part 3 of our 4-Part client spotlight series, I get to introduce you to Don McNair. Don and his wife, Amy, have seen amazing weight loss with us to date and while I’ll be sharing Amy’s inspiring story at a later date, I wanted Don to have some time to shine this week. In this episode, you get to hear what led him to RevFit, how he’s been successful at weight loss, what’s kept him motivated and more. I hope you enjoy his story.
Note: I recently posted this on my Facebook page but, in the event that social media decides to bow out on us some day, I revamped the post with some minor edits here for posterity.
My wife, Marissa, and I have always been a partnership of opposites. While there are things that we have historically enjoyed together, the list has always been rather small and we have always had our respective spaces where we could be our own.
Like a lot of marriages, we went through some turmoil awhile back and, in the midst of that, we found a common bonding over bourbon.
It wasn’t a quick transition…
Many people who knew us when we first started dating in 2009 know that not long after the relationship began, I sobered up and didn’t have a drink for about four years. I just found that drinking didn’t do much for me so I left it alone.
When I did decide to pick it back up, it was on our honeymoon when we were “gifted” with a bottle of French champagne while we stayed in Paris. I guess the adage is “When in Rome…” but as it applies to us…”When in Paris…”
However, Marissa was always open to nice wines, craft beers and the occasional liquor. I was having trouble trying to find alcohol that actually sat well on my stomach and, for some reason, bourbon became the settling place.
Initially, bourbon had too much burn for Marissa, so we made a segue way with Manhattans which I got to be fairly good at making. Then, she was able to transition to bourbon on the rocks and finally, neat, the way I take it.
So, last year, we made our first trip down to Kentucky to officially experience part of the Bourbon Trail for our 6th anniversary. We had a wonderful time and had some experiences that we still talk about to this day.
Since then, we’ve come through the Trail a total of four times, knocking out different parts that we either hadn’t seen before or just had a desire to see again.
This past weekend, we went down for our fourth trip celebrating her birthday and our 7 year anniversary. If you don’t know much about bourbon, each distillery is an experience. Maybe you visit because you love the product, or the history or both. I tend to like the product more than the history while Marissa enjoys a combination of both.
On our third day and the final full day of bourbon tourism, a great deal of sampling, driving and history, we had what I believe was our most fascinating experience yet.
When you go to a distillery, you are at the mercy of the tour guide. They share the story, the product line and…maybe if you’re lucky, you’ll get to sample or buy something that is rather unique.
As a bourbon lover, maybe you get to be a part of a single barrel pick that might yield, say, 180 bottles. That means, that once those bottles have been purchased, you’ll never experience the exact same blend again.
Today’s experience trumped that.
We went to a place in Georgetown, Kentucky called Bourbon 30 and we had an experience unlike anything else we’ve had before. We entered a room with probably close to 50 barrels (maybe more) and the option of picking our favorites which we could then blend into a one of a kind bottle.
The safest route is to sample what you like, pick 2-3 favorites and blend them down. We picked 5 initially and asked the owner to provide some guidance in blending the final product. He saw what we picked and whittled down 5 options to 2 and then made a ratio: 75% of one barrel and 25% from another. We tried it and it was delicious.
Then, he drifted off and said: “Hold on a second.”
He changed the ratio and picked a third barrel to go 75/20/5. The final product was even better.
We bottled it, named it, and a picture of it is below.
Some people like beer and maybe the beer industry has something similar. I haven’t touched beer in probably 4 years and I have no desire to go back.
Wine lovers may also have a similar experience and it’s been about as long for me since I’ve had wine as it was with beer. (Marissa still tries wine from time to time).
It’s a long way of sharing an experience that I think speaks a lot about marriage…bear with me on this.
You’re going to experience a lot of things in a marriage…the good, the bad, the amazing, the sad, the painful, the beautiful and everything in between.
Live for the experience (read that again).
You have one life to get this right and you’re going to screw up a lot. Find someone who can help you steer the ship straight again so you don’t make a fateful crash.
I found that person and I hope you did (or I hope you do, too).
Sometimes, you find the perfect “blend” early on and you’re fortunate, you’re happy and life is good.
Sometimes, it takes some “aging” and a little bit of guidance (like we had at Bourbon 30) to come up with something better than what you did on your own. Of course, that guidance can come from a family member, a therapist or a friend and make all the difference…
Sometimes, you just have to live a life that provides enough entertainment, passion, trauma and tension to make you look at each other and say: I want this more than anything else in the world and there’s no one else I want to experience this with but you (the blend)…
And when Marissa and I bottled up our one of a kind bottle, number 1 of 1, I called it “7 Years Later” because I’ll be damned if it didn’t take every day of the last 2,555 of married life for us to arrive here today, share that moment, craft that bottle and say: “We are here because we fought like hell to get here and this little memento signifies 7 years of every moment, good and bad, that it took to get here.”
When I looked out into that room, across all those barrels, I saw something similar: the good, the bad, the great, the not-so-great, and somewhere in between…a little combination that made something magical.
Yeah, I know it’s just bourbon…I might be a bit melodramatic…
But it’s a marriage, too…and there’s drama, and magic, and spice, and laughter, and love, and determination, and perseverance and (if you’re lucky) something called a family.
However, it’s uniquely ours and I hope you have a life, and a love, that provides you something like that too.
Monday the 11th was our official anniversary and, let me just tell you FB fam, I picked a winner in the woman I married, limited edition 1 of 1…just like our bottle.
And to my wife…our very best years to date are these years right here.
In this week’s client spotlight and Part 2 of 4 where we highlight a handful of our clients here at RevFit, I get to share time with Pete Trivelli. We’ve had the opportunity to work with his wife, his daughter, his son, his sister and even his soon-to-be son-in-law. Pete also holds the throne at the Rev for the best trapbar deadlift at 565×1. Not too shabby for a retired fella! In this episode we talk about what his journey in strength and weight loss has looked like, how the community has helped him and how he manages expectations between gaining strength and losing weight.
In 1998, I was attempting college for the second time. I already had two years of college credits under my belt but a nasty bout of depression, hospitalizations, and drugs, both legal and illegal, derailed those efforts.
I was changing majors and schools and I decided to major in music therapy. I had already been writing, recording and performing music for about 6 years and I thought there would be a place to put those talents.
I enrolled in a voice class and walked in for my first lesson with my professor. He placed some sheet music on the piano and said, “I’d like you to sing this.”
I didn’t recognize the piece and I told him as much: “I don’t know this one and I don’t know how to read music.”
He looked at me over his glasses and said: “You’ll never be a musician if you can’t read music.”
I dropped the class the next day.
I thought of every successful musician I had ever known who couldn’t read a lick of music and if the legends were true it would have included: Michael Jackson, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, and Eddie Van Halen and I thought: Who the hell is he to tell me what I can and can’t be?
But the seed was planted. Even though I would go on to write, record and perform for the next several years, I never let his words out of my mind.
That was my fault.
Beyond all of our own negative self-talk, there are the things that people around us will tell us: That we’ll never be good enough, talented enough, pretty enough, or skinny enough to meet the standard.
And once that seed is planted, we run the risk of writing that script, too. We try and take on a challenge and the voice in our head says: Remember when you failed before? You’re probably going to fail again and everything “they” said about you would be true.
Now, my life hasn’t been a smooth sail since 1998. In fact, I spent the next 8 years doing more drugs, getting into more trouble and making a pretty good mess out of my life. But I dug myself out, I got clean, I got my college degree and I started a pretty amazing business.
I’ve got two beautiful boys, an amazing wife, a life that has had more twists and turns than a labyrinth and while my success in life didn’t come through a music career, it came through what I do today as a coach.
One perspective I could have taken was that my professor was right and I’d never fulfill what I thought I could be in music despite a lack of skills. I chose to let his words fuel me and be successful in other ways and, admittedly, I believe I found the better path.
Throughout your life, you’ve likely been told what you could or could not be, what you could and could not achieve, and it’s possible that those words came from people you thought you could trust or people you thought you could respect and once the script began, you kept writing and re-writing those words into your mind.
The words I write to you today are to remind you that you have the ability to change that script, to carve success on your terms and by your definition. I’m 23 years removed from that day in my professor’s class and I’ll be damned if I’ll let the dismissive words of a disgruntled old man decide what good I deserve to have in this life.
That was on me to prove him wrong.
And it’s on you to prove those voices in your life wrong, too.
One of the aspects of this show prior to changing direction with the episodes that I missed the most was client spotlights. In similar fashion to what I did with the last several guests, the next four episodes will be featuring some of our RevFit rockstars and highlighting their experiences since joining here. First up is a family we have had a huge pleasure working with since they started early last year. The Herman family’s story actually begins with their oldest son, Charlie, and would soon evolve into working with his mother, Rachel, and his brother and sister, Joey and Abby, respectively. Tune in to hear directly from Rachel what that journey would be like to date. I hope you enjoy.
The list is long of the areas in a diet where clients might get sideways. We could look at snacking, grazing, second servings, bites, nibbles, licks and tastes and still not cover every single sneaky place where calories lurk.
Like last week, my hope is to make today’s post short and sweet so that you can start seeing better fat loss results.
And I’m going to break it down to a tablespoon.
I’d like you to consider a short list of the foods in your diet where measuring down to the tablespoon might apply:
-Coffee creamer (35 to 50 calories per TBSP) -Mayonnaise (95 calories per TBSP)
-Cream cheese (50 calories per TBSP) -Peanut/Nut Butter (90 calories per TBSP) -Olive Oil (120 calories per TBSP) -Coconut Oil (120 calories per TBSP) -Butter (100 calories per TBSP) -Sugar (45 calories per TBSP) -Salad Dressing (60 to 100 calories per TBSP)
The first thing I’d like you to do is consider how frequently you use any of those foods. Then, I’d like you to break out your handy tablespoon and start measuring.
When I talk to clients about things like this, the response is generally the same: “Do you mean I really have to be concerned about this?”
And my response might be: If you’re not succeeding at your weight loss goals, this might be a place to start.
One of the main reasons why is because these are the areas that are “criminally” overlooked when it comes to our diet.
We pour ourselves a cup of coffee in the morning and we don’t measure the creamer (or sugar), we eyeball it until the coffee turns the shade that makes us happy. The more coffee you drink, the more of a problem this habit turns into.
We build ourselves a salad (because salads are healthy, right?) and we don’t account for the sprinkled cheese, the chopped nuts or the 300-400 calories of dressing that the salad is either swimming in or is conveniently in the cup that’s on the side.
We stir-fry some chicken and veggies in a wok and when the recipe calls for 1 TBSP of peanut oil, we don’t measure it, we just drizzle some of that bad boy onto the wok and say: Eh, looks like a tablespoon to me (try 2 or 3!!).
The details matter. They almost always matter.
We don’t know how much creamer Starbucks puts in our coffee because they eyeball it too which pretty much negates the calories given on the menu just like we have absolutely no idea how much cheese is on that Chipotle bowl because the gal behind the counter thinks you’re pretty cute so when you say: “Just a little cheese” she puts enough cheese on the top to choke a rat and you’re too kind to say: Um, that’s more than I wanted. Can you put some back?
No, what you do is you grimace a little, act like it’s not that much cheese (yes it is) and you eat every last bit of it.
That’s your homework this week. Break out your tablespoon and start taking a good hard look at some of those places I mentioned above. The tip won’t apply to everyone but I would imagine you’re going to shock yourself by the 100s of calories you never considered before.
In the final episode of our 4-part series together, Dr. Lisa Lewis wraps up with me as we chat about resilience, how to define self-care, how we balance our priorities and a very unexpected (and hilarious) detour on peanut butter. It’s another episode you don’t want to miss.
I’m going to keep this week’s post relatively short and sweet (at least according to my usual trends.)
Your goals for yourself and your ability to reach them come down to (mainly) one key thing: your willingness to change.
I was recently speaking with a client to try and troubleshoot areas in their diet and help get the needle moving the direction they wanted it to go.
When it came to a certain area, a certain luxury in their diet, they very simply said: “Yeah, I’m not going to change that.”
And as their coach, I am 100% cool with that because it demonstrates boundaries (to an extent).
It also demonstrates the power that certain aspects of a diet might have on us.
If I told you to give up all carbs for 14-days to lose weight, could you do it? Yes. Are you willing?
If I told you to train for one hour a day on a treadmill at X.X speed for 21 days, could you do it? Yes. Are you willing?
If I told you to change your carnivorous ways and drop all animal products for a 30 day vegan submersion, could you do it? Yes. Are you willing?
And I pose these questions to you because when it comes to fat loss, many people are willing to do a lot (in theory) to drop pounds.
With just a handful of caveats:
-They’re willing to do a lot until it gets too hard.
-They’re willing to do a lot until it gets boring.
-They’re willing to go to extremes ONLY if the scale rewards them every day.
-They’re willing to do a lot if it’s in the short term.
Here’s the thing. You don’t have to give up carbs for 14 days to lose weight, but you might have to consistently reduce them based on what you’re used to.
You don’t have to spend an hour a day on a treadmill mindlessly moving at X.X speed for 21 days but you might have to start moving a hell of a lot more than your sedentary job allows.
And, no, you don’t need to remove all animal products and go vegan to lose weight. Not even for 30 days but you may have to remove those desserts you’ve been treating yourself to 5 out of 7 days a week.
Is willingness everything? No.
You do still have to be concerned about your stress levels, your sleep patterns, your ability to prioritize yourself, your health and your goals PLUS potentially be simultaneously raising a family, being an attentive and intimate spouse/partner, and showing up for your job and putting in effort there.
Adulting is not for the faint of heart.
But if you’re stuck with your weight loss goals, take a critical look at what’s happening in your life. Reassess what you’re working with and ask yourself two questions:
As we continue our 4-part series together, Dr. Lisa Lewis is back with me to discuss using strength training and exercise as ways to improve our mental health. Dr. Lisa talks about the chemical changes that happen between the brain and body when we incorporate movement into our lives, how it can be used in place of or as a complement to medication, and why it’s so effective.
By my own admission, I am a huge consumer of books, both in audio and physical format. Like many of my fellow coaches, we are trying our best to keep up with accurate nutrition information, exercise programming, psychology and more, just so we can do our best work for our clients.
I often hear that many of my peers take the time to go back and re-read certain books to try and absorb information they may not have caught the first time around. I believe that sometimes with valuable information, it’s not about “what” you’re learning but “when” you’re learning it.
Certain books tend to keep popping up, not just for coaches but for business executives and fellow business owners, such as “How To Win Friends And Influence People”, “Think And Grow Rich”, “Influence”, and many more.
So, I started taking some of that advice to revisit some of these books since it had been many years since I had first read them and I wasn’t sure how my own evolution as a person and a coach would change how I interpreted what I read.
In Napoleon Hill’s classic, “Think and Grow Rich”, there is a segment where he discusses three problems that affect nearly every individual. And, because I am always looking for ways to draw parallels to the health conscious person, I wanted to expand on Hill’s concepts with my own spin on them here.
Hill explains that of the many things that can keep someone from reaching their full potential, at least three factors stand out: indecision, doubt and fear. I’ll be taking my liberties with each as well as some thoughts for minimizing their influence on your life.
Indecision
It’s not uncommon for the health conscious person to wonder: “Which is the best diet?”, “What’s the most effective method of exercise?”, “Which personal trainer should I hire?”, or simply, “Where should I begin if I want to improve my health and my body?”
These are great questions to ask and some combination of Google searches and social media outlets will give you more options than you ever dreamt were possible. Of course, you can always utilize the age-old option of asking a friend or co-worker what they do for themselves since a good referral may trump what you might find on your own.
However, what we, as humans, understand about options is that some options are good and too many options can lead to “analysis paralysis”. Put in one way, analysis paralysis can happen when we have too many options and we overthink what we have in front of us only to end up making no decision at all because we don’t know the best course of action.
It’s important to note that this happens in nearly ever facet of our lives: to the foods we buy at an overstocked grocery store, to the stocks that we invest in, to the coaches we hire for our bodies or the accountants we hire to oversee our taxes. With abundance of choice, comes the potential for inaction.
It’s also not uncommon for the same health-seeking individual to spend an inordinate amount of time researching, studying and pondering the best options for themselves, all the while doing nothing that equates to actual execution of a task.
There’s a marketing concept that I’ve been a fan of for years because it’s honestly been the best thing for my business and how I advertise our services. That concept is: Ready, Fire, Aim.
If you’re not sure what I mean, many people struggling with indecision are trying to perfect the “aim” and they never actually “fire”. One way to circumvent indecision is to take one step forward and just try something: join the gym, start the exercise app, attempt the diet.
I offer one bit of encouragement as well, fully commit.
If the diet plan is set up for 30 days of effort, go through the 30 days as planned (or to the very best of your ability). There can be a honeymoon period with any new endeavor where the novelty of something you’re starting still has an air of excitement. This generally only lasts a couple of weeks, so you need to be “all in” for longer than the honeymoon period. That’s where you’ll learn if something is truly working beyond that initial high of beginning.
If something really isn’t working for you (such as a diet that is making you feel unwell or an exercise plan that is begging for an injury), abandon ship and pivot towards something that makes better sense for your life.
Oftentimes, indecision comes from waiting for the perfect time to get started. This time doesn’t actually exist. You might have a window of opportunity to get started with a new diet or exercise program but life will undoubtedly throw some curveballs your way to throw you off your plan. #thisisnormal
When you have a “Ready, Fire, Aim” approach to your fitness plan or your diet, you can modify the details as you go along and not worry as much about having the details “just right” before you begin. That’s getting the cart before the horse.
Granted, some approaches to diet and some training plans are truly inflexible. For instance, if all you have is 30 minutes to train 3 times per week, this is not ideal for scheduling time to train for a full marathon. You’ll want to work within the constraints of how your life currently operates.
Nike famously uses the tagline “Just Do It” and aside from it being iconic and very catchy, it rings true here. Make a choice, act on it, and modify to fit your life as you move forward.
Doubt
In managing self-doubt, I’d ask you to consider a few places in your life that may require attention:
-Comparison to others
-Self-sabotage
-Lack of self-worth/self esteem
Anything you can do to better yourself will require you focusing on your efforts alone. There will always be someone stronger, younger, faster, or with enough genetic gifts to excel at something. This is not where your attention should be.
While it is immensely inspiring to see someone lose 50 pounds in 6 months or lift 3x their bodyweight, you may not have the same body, the same ability to train, or the same access to foods that someone else has available to them. Be mindful of your comparison to others and put your time, effort and energy into how YOU can be better, more consistent or more committed to a plan of action.
If you’re trying to lose weight, it’s easy to get lost in the belief that if you’re not 100% “on the plan” then any deviation throws you completely to the opposite end of the spectrum. In other words, you find ways to sabotage yourself repeatedly. If your diet doesn’t go according to plan, you’re always one meal/one choice away from being right back where you need to be. If you hadn’t planned on pizza on Friday but it was all that was available, try not to beat yourself up for what you had access to. Many people struggling with self-doubt and its partner in crime, self-sabotage, will turn pizza on Friday into a complete weekend free-for-all. The best analogy I’ve heard about this behavior is to consider the flat tire. If your car gets a flat, you don’t slash the other three out of frustration. You fix the one that needs it and you get back on the road.
Lack of self-worth or the feeling that you don’t deserve a better outcome is probably worthy of an article all on its own. In short, look at the areas of your life where you know you have strengths and find ways to make those strengths outshine the areas you’re not as pleased with. Dr. Lisa Lewis and I spoke about this and the “negativity bias” on our recent podcast together. Believe that you deserve better than what you currently have and work towards that goal. It could be a leaner body, a stronger body or a more positive mindset. This may also require the help of a qualified therapist.
Also bear in mind that doubt can be either positive or negative. A certain degree of doubt might be what keeps you from making careless decisions or allowing emotions to rule when a more logical path would benefit you more.
Fear
The last point of mention is fear. This could be a fear of failure or the fear of ridicule or shame. When I think about fear of failure within the context of my work at RevFit, it could be a client who’s weighing in and is afraid the weight will be up as opposed to down or a client who’s trying for a new personal best that they’ve missed before. This type of fear can be paralyzing just as much as what I referenced above regarding indecision.
Wayne Gretzky famously said: “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” When it comes to fear of failure, these words could never be more accurate. You have to be willing to miss, you have to be patient when the numbers on the scale and the training plan don’t go perfectly. The silver lining to this is that you can learn a great deal about what’s “off” when you’re not rewarded with another drop on the scale or another great lift. This feedback is vital for future success.
With fear of ridicule or shame, many people never join a gym because they fear what they’ll look like in front of others. Maybe they aren’t happy with their current physique or they’re afraid to try a machine or exercise for fear of not doing it properly and potentially embarrassing themselves.
I can tell you, wholeheartedly, that most people in a gym are only paying attention to what they’re doing and not what others have going on. I won’t say that embarrassing things don’t happen in gyms. I’ve personally been pinned under a barbell twice for letting my ego get the best of me on a bench press. The first time happened at a big box gym nearly 20 years ago and there was not a soul around who saw it even though it felt like the whole world watched it happen.
Most importantly, a “good” gym will be culture focused where the potential for embarrassment is non-existent. Our members at RevFit know that size, height, weight, and shape are irrelevant. We embrace everyone who comes in to improve themselves.
In summary:
-Take action to reduce indecision
-Develop self-confidence in tasks that demonstrate your strengths to reduce doubt
-Fear is frequently overcome by exposure. Do the difficult things, be willing to make mistakes and learn where you can improve.
Coach Jackson (below) is showing off his number three to remind you that indecision, doubt and fear affect everyone in nearly all facets of life. Be cognizant of how prevalent they are in yours and remember that all three of those factors are likely holding you back from better outcomes.
Jason Leenaarts 