Podcast Transcription: How To Stop Sabotaging Your Health Goals When Life Gets Busy  

Ted Ryce: Have you ever been in a situation where things were going right with your exercise, with your nutrition, you were getting results, you were feeling good about yourself, you were fitting back into your old clothes, you were liking what you saw in the mirror when you got up in the morning?

But then life changes, you get busy. Maybe it’s a change in the year, maybe the holidays hit, or perhaps it’s like some of my clients, where their business starts to grow, they start to acquire new firms, or they had sold their business previously, and then they bought a new one.

And then all of a sudden, they’re off to the races, and they’re struggling to do the things that got them in such good shape during that less busy time in their life. Can you relate to that?

Whether you’re a business owner or not, I mean, I think we can all relate to the idea that it’s so much easier to accomplish whatever goal we want to achieve, if we have that downtime. But here’s the thing, that’s not life, is it?

And today, I want to talk about a client of mine, Damon, who is just crushing it. And when he first joined the program, he did so well. But then, I want to talk to you about the changes that occurred in his business. I actually asked him today after our call, “Damon, I’ve got to share this story.” It’s such a great story, it’s going to tell people the truth about what it takes to, not just transform your body, but to make this into a lifestyle.

What that really means when we say, “Oh, well, it’s got to be a lifestyle.” And the truth is lifestyles, they shift, they change. So that’s what we’re going to be talking about today. I’m super excited to share this with you. Because if you take the information that I’m going to share with you today, it can change everything.

So welcome back to the show. My name is Ted Ryce. I’m the host of the show and also a coach to entrepreneurs, executives, other high-performers. I help them, not just lose fat, because there’s so many things, so many approaches, so many people can help you with that. But what I do is I help people lose fat in the context of their busy life.

And most of the people that I work with are executives and entrepreneurs, sales executives, those types of things.

And today’s client is one of those. So, the story of today’s client, Damon, Damon owns a business, he actually is celebrating his 10th year anniversary in business, and he’s created a very successful company. And he started out just with a revenue of a few $100,000, and now it’s worth in the 60 million. He’s created such success for himself.

About nine months ago or so, Damon hopped on a call with me, on one of those breakthrough calls that I always talked about. We had a conversation about where he was, what he wanted to achieve, and just to see if it was a good fit. We both decided it was. And so, he joined, and man, it was an awesome time at the beginning. He had a lot of time on his hands. And he had a lot of time to get into the gym, he had a lot of time to dedicate to nutrition, and we got great results.

And the first, what was it? He lost about 30 pounds with me, I think like about 28/29 pounds in a three-month period. But he’s continued with me. And as the three months turned into four months and five months and so on, his life also changed. And with the growth of his business, also came a lot of responsibilities.

For example, one of his clients is like a billionaire, and wanted Damon to come with him on his private jet with all the meals already catered by the chef that this billionaire guy had hired. And they flew around for a week doing that. More recently, actually, what we talked about today, he was telling me, “Oh, wow, you know, our business is going well. We’re about to do our retreat for 10th year, and things are going so well. But it’s a lot, Ted. It’s a lot, though. A lot’s going on. And I feel like at the beginning of the program, I had a lot of time to dedicate to exercise to all the things that you’re having me do with nutrition but now it’s like I don’t know what to do here because my schedule not only is it just busy, but it’s a bit erratic. I’m having meetings scheduled last minute, I’m taking these trips, sometimes I know they’re going to happen, sometimes they’re kind of last minute”.

So, he’s got all these other things happening. He’s having to fly out to California and back. He’s going to these other meetings. So, his schedule changed dramatically. And it was really frustrating him, as you might could imagine someone who really crushed it. And what I always appreciate about all my clients, and in this case, Damon, is they take responsibility.

And he came to the call today, he was like, “Ted, it’s not that, you know, these aren’t excuses. It’s just the reality of my situation.” And I feel like in our society, of course, there’s people who are like, “No, it’s okay. Don’t even lose fat. It’s a terrible idea to lose weight.” There are those ridiculous people.

But there’s also another type of ridiculous people. It’s like, you tell them, “Hey, this is what I’m struggling with.” And they have these answers like, “Oh, well, if you really want it, you work for it. If you really want it, you make the time for it.” It’s like, “Well, listen, I don’t have any time. If I want to be a father,” because he has a son who’s in high school, he’s got a daughter, I forget how old his daughter is, but he’s got two children.

And he told me today, “Ted, you know, I could get rid of family time to go to the gym. But as I told you, in my story, growing my business, I wasn’t around in those early days, it was quite stressful and I needed to work a lot. And so now I’ve made a commitment to being that father, to being around, to being present.”

And he was telling me about how his daughter loves to watch Survivor, and how that was something they did just the other night. And he told me, “Listen, I know I could take the time away from her and go work out, but I feel like that’s not the right answer. And it’s certainly not the right answer if I want to be a great father. And what should I do?”

And so we talked about it today, and what I explained to Damon, because he sometimes gets lost is, “Damon, Listen, man, I’m not the guy who you hire to get you in shape when everything’s going well. I mean, I can certainly do that. I’ve got the stkill set, the expertise, the experience, I can certainly do that. But I’m not that guy. I’m the guy who you hire when things are tough, when you’re like, “Man, how do I make this happen?”

So this is what I’m here for. I mean, this is where my skill set is, this is where I really shine. I will help you with this. And I want to tell that to you. Because if you’re struggling with this, if you know, yeah, if I don’t want to be a present parent, I can say, “Dad needs to work out,” you know? And then having your kids feel like, “Oh, working out is more important to dad than I am.”

That’s really something I wouldn’t recommend. Okay, I wouldn’t recommend that. And that’s not a good… And if you have coaches or health and nutrition influencers telling you that, don’t listen to them, because they probably don’t have kids. Even I don’t have kids either, but you know what, I remember what it was like when my dad wasn’t around, right? So, I don’t give bullshit advice like that.

So, Damon showed up, he showed up and he was honest about his challenges he was facing. And he was also honest about the frustration that he was feeling because he really wants to change his body. He really wants to get down. He wants to have it all. And I think we can have it all. It’s just a matter of, can we do enough to get results?

Because even if the results are coming slowly, if we’re still making progress, that’s what this is really about. It’s about that consistency. And it’s about putting in the consistency, regardless of whether we think it’s optimal or not. So, what do I mean by that? Well, I’ll talk about that because we changed the length of his workout, we changed his whole workout approach.

Another thing I think is worth mentioning here is Damon’s kind of has been going up and down with his weight and he really wants to take it to the next level, take the fat loss to the next level. And nutrition is the best way to do that. Why? Because it’s so much easier to eat 500 fewer calories than it is to burn 500 calories with exercise. It’s just easier.

The thing is, Damon was in an interesting situation. The situation is this: when he was working out frequently, it helped him so much with his stress, everything was easier, from his meetings that are sometimes back-to-back, from making the right new nutrition choices. So everything is easier when he’s working out regularly.

And the thing is, he wasn’t working out regularly. So, after talking with him, after listening to him for over the months, this is something that’s come up again and again, he feels like he’s really on point when he’s in the gym and working out. For him, it’s not even, “Yeah, okay, I’m doing this to change my body. But where I really feel like exercise shines is it helps me just have such a positive outlook and high energy for the rest of the day.”

And so, after hearing that, I said, “Listen, Damon, nutrition is the key to fat loss here. But what I hear you saying is that you feel right now that exercise is such a big factor in giving you the energy, the outlook and the stress management that you need to do everything else well, and you feel like because you haven’t had that, it’s been harder to do everything. So why don’t we do this? Let’s push nutrition off to the side.”

Again, nutrition is the key to fat loss, not exercise. It’s really hard to out train a diet; for most people, just impossible. But here’s the thing: if we’re asking to dedicate more mental energy—because what I teach isn’t harder, with like, you know, you’ve got to cut your carbs lower. That’s not what we do. It takes mental energy to understand nutrition better, so that you can go out to eat and eat all the things you want and still lose fat. So, it takes more mental energy to do that.

But he just didn’t have it in him because of the lack of exercise going on. And the plan that I had wrote for him involved four one-hour workouts per week, and he just wasn’t hitting it. He said, “Ted, realistically, right now, I can do two, maybe three workouts per week in the gym.” And I said, “Okay, let’s talk about this for a second. So how confident are you that you can hit three workouts per week?” And he said, “75%.” So, a 7.5? I said, “Damon, that’s not really…That’s a C, right? That’s a C grade. So, we don’t want a C, we really want to try to get like, ‘Man, this is something I can definitely do.’ So, what about two workouts?”

He’s like, “Oh, I’m a nine with that. Okay, I’m a 90% with that.” “Okay, cool. So, we’re going to start with two workouts for one hour in the gym.” Now, I said, “Damon, may share a story with you of a client who had a lot of struggles timewise and what we did to get him great results.”

And he was open to it, of course. And I shared with him: this guy, he’s a CEO of a company. And then he’s also taken on the role of CEO on a friend’s company.

And so, what he was doing was he was working a few hours in the morning, before he started his nine to five job. And so, he basically had five minutes a day to work out. I said, “Damon, if you’ve got five minutes a day, we can make something happen the rest of the week, we don’t need you in the gym for an hour. And we can also do these workouts at home; you don’t need to go to the gym.”

And Damon said, “You know, I’ve always been a big proponent of getting out of the house. But I see how if I’m making this agreement or putting this rule, rather, if I have to get out of the house, and then it doesn’t happen, I need to be more flexible.

So, I’m open to working out at home.” And so what we did was this, I said, ‘Okay, cool, how many times a week can you work out for five minutes at your house?”

And he said, “Five minutes? I’m confident I can do that four times a week,” and I said, “Okay, on a scale of 1 to 10, how confident are you that you can work out these four times a week?” He said, “I’m an 85.” I said, “Okay, we can do that. We can roll with that. Because if you need to, you just drop one of the five minute workouts,” and that’s exactly what he proposed. “Listen, if I don’t do all four, I’ll just drop one of them, it’s not a problem.” Okay, cool.

So, what we did is this: we took an upper body/lower body approach to not just the one hour workouts in the gym, but we also took an upper body/lower body approach to his five minute workouts at home. Because here’s what you need to know... And you may be saying right now, “Five minutes? I would never do that. That’s such a waste of time.”

If you said that to yourself or even thought that, then you’re missing something big here. Because it’s not about the one-hour workout or the even the 30 minute or even the 20-minute workout, it’s about the consistency. And if you can show up and do the three rules of getting results with resistance training, which is you’ve got to work the muscle, you’ve got to work the muscle to fatigue, and you’ve got to do more than what you did last time.

If you do those three things, you’re going to make some progress.

So always keep that in mind. Never tell yourself—this is the big lesson here. Never tell yourself, “If I can’t go to the gym for an hour or 45 minutes or 30 minutes or 20 minutes, it’s just better to do nothing.” It’s always better to do something. And I love, you know, in a way, I should say this, in a way, I love when my clients get faced with this, because then they have to get to the extremes of doing just enough to get by.

And five minutes, man, even Damon he’s like, “Wow, I can do five minutes. I mean, if anybody says they can’t do five minutes of exercise, they’ve got other issues.” And it’s so true. Everybody has five minutes. And I’m telling you the story about Damon and our journey together in the coaching process together. But what is the lesson that you’re taking away?

Because that’s what I want you to focus on here. If something sounds crazy to you, whatever, throw it away, but if something standing out as like, “Whoa, I could do this.” Or if I’ve sparked something in your mind, “Oh, this is an idea that I can do.” That’s something that you want to either write down or maybe just go take action on right away. So that’s what we’ve done with Damon’s program and adapted to his super busy life.

And what’s interesting about what Damon’s had, he’s like, “Listen, actually, when I started with you, it actually wasn’t my normal life, it was kind of in the middle of this COVID situation, where I have a lot of time. But now my social life is going back to normal. And also my business is growing at the same time. So, this is really what my life was like before COVID and it’s just kind of getting back to normal now.”

And so, I said, “Hey, listen, if that’s the case, if the COVID time was a bit of an outlier, and what you’re doing now is your normal life, then these strategies are even more important, because what we all need to do is to find strategies that work in our lives, work with our life, not someone else’s, or even a version of our life that existed in the past, but our life today, what can you do today? What can you do this week?

That’s the type of focus, that’s the type of mindset shift that you need to really handle your health. And to not just look the way you want, but to perform the way you want to feel the way you want. So those are the changes that we made, and I’ll update you. What I want to do now is I want to share more of these stories, because this is like the nitty-gritty stuff that doesn’t see the light of day, right?

You hear the stories of the impressive transformations, but you don’t see how the sausage is made. Because sometimes how things happen, it’s not that pretty, it’s five-minute workouts early in the morning, before your 7am meeting that’s going to go a couple hours. And by the time that you’re done with your day, you’re going to be watching Survivor with your daughter, you’re not going to take time away from that to go to the gym.

And so, these are the types of approaches that we need to take when our life gets busy, when we all wish, like we had more time in a day, but the truth is we only have 24 hours. Everybody has the same 24 hours. And certainly, it’s enough time to do things that matter with your relationships, with your business, with your health, if we have the right focus, if we have the right strategies, and the willingness to follow through on those strategies, and to do them consistently.

So that’s what I wanted to share with you today. I’ll update you on how this goes. But just know a couple things here. Let me do a brief recap.

We want strategies. It’s easy to get in shape when it’s easy to get in shape. But we need strategies that help us in our toughest times and our busiest times. No matter what the reason is, whether it’s great things like the holidays or you built a new business, started a new business or whether it’s a tough time like what I went through in October where I was just trying to do the minimum I could while my dad’s health was failing.

Whatever this situation is, we’ve got to stand up to it, we’ve got to adapt to it. We can’t tell ourselves stories about, “Oh, if only it was easier, if only I had more time. That’s the wrong approach. If you have enough focus, if you focus on the problem, or solving the problem, rather, there are always strategies that you can do no matter what.

And so today is an example of how we approached not just the busyness, but also, okay, well, we could have just talked about nutrition, I could have said, “Hey, Damon, I don’t care about what you’re struggling with. Fat Loss is all about nutrition, in your case, at least. So, we really need to talk about that.” But we didn’t do that.

What we listened to is like, “Oh, this is…” so much of the fat loss journey, it’s psychological in nature, it’s managing our emotions, those are the things that make it easier to do everything else. So instead of focusing on the fat loss, we needed to focus on the stress management. And he sleeps well, that’s not an issue. He doesn’t drink alcohol, that’s not an issue. He doesn’t party like a rock star, that’s not an issue.

It really was about like, oh, this business explosion, really, that he’s experiencing, along with the more limited time that he had, not just for himself with exercise, but also, he didn’t want to take that time away from being a dad.

Man, these are the types of stories I love, because it paints a picture of the greys. And so many of us, we just want—you hear so many people tell us like, “Oh, well, if you want it, you’ll make the time.” It’s like, “Yeah, but there’s always a sacrifice here.” “Oh, make the sacrifice.” “Okay, so don’t spend time with my daughter? That’s not acceptable.”

So, if you’re willing to be flexible, these are the types of things that can really help.

Hope you enjoy today. And I would ask you, what’s the big lesson that you can take away from today and put into action in your life? Maybe you think working out at home for five minutes is crazy.

Okay, but what can you do? What did come to your mind? What is something that you can do?

Maybe you said, “Five minutes is crazy. I could always find at least 10 or 15.” Cool, well do that. But never let yourself off the hook. There’s always something you can do. And if you always focus on how to solve the problem, instead of what the problem is, you’re going to make progress. Hope that helps, love you lots.

Keep moving forward, and speak to you on Monday.