Joseph Alexander

Rediscover Your Fitness in 2022

matt@nomeatathlete.com (Matt Frazier and Ben Benulis) — Wed, 24 Nov 2021 16:46:15 GMT

A few years ago, at the start of 2019, I set a huge goal: to get into the best shape of my life by the end of the year.

I had in mind a total fitness overhaul: strength, endurance, mobility, and the best diet I could eat.

How cool would it be to have it all at once?

I spent a long time thinking about how to quantify “best shape of my life.” And I made a lot of plans on how I was going to do it.

And by the time 2019 was in the books…

I hadn’t done a damn thing.

The pandemic in 2020 only made matters worse for my fitness (hello, fresh pasta), and by the end of the year, just before my 40th birthday, I was in something closer to the WORST shape of my adult life.

If you’ve ever let yourself get out of shape, you know how overwhelming it can seem to have to come back.

And if you’re there now — or even if you’re doing alright, but you’re just not where you want to be — then I want to help.

Because this past year, I made the comeback. A week before I turned 40, I bought a 35-pound kettlebell and a book, and started doing a short, daily practice at home.

At first I wasn’t strong (at all), and I got winded easily.

But the routine stuck.

Soon, as I began to see the strength changes and the smallest of physique changes, my kettlebell practice led to slightly better diet choices.

Then a focus on improving my sleep. Then even an occasional hill workout, and eventually, to signing up for races.

And here I am now, stronger than I’ve ever been, and having completed a trail half marathon just yesterday (a tough one that took me 2 hours and 45 minutes!).

In other words, that “best shape of my life” picture is slowly coming into focus… in a totally different way than I had planned that it would.

This week, instead of our annual Black Friday bundle sale, I’ve decided to share a 7-part series about the steps I took to get myself back in shape — from the way I set the intention, to the habit change techniques I used, to the specific aspects of my training that have made it work so well.

So that you can take some of what has worked so well for me, and apply it to your situation, if you’re so inclined.

And no, you don’t need to get into kettlebell training to benefit from this series. (That’s just the tool I happened to use; you can apply these principles to whatever you want.)

Part 1: The Better Way to Set Fitness Goals

I told you about my epic failure of a New Year’s resolution to get into the best shape of my life a few years back.

But there’s even more failure to that story.

At the end of that year — a year of doing very little in the way of physical activity — I turned 39.

I went out to celebrate with my friends at a bar, and when I woke up the next morning (feeling not quite 100 percent), I distinctly remember saying to myself:

“It would be really nice to be in better shape next year when I turn 40.”

But although I did a little better than the year before, I didn’t get far. Covid hit, and that made it really easy to be lazy again.

For the second year in a row, I had failed to do much of anything to get in shape.

And we all know that if you’re not getting in better shape, you’re probably going the other way. Which, like a lot of people in 2020, I undoubtedly was.

But at the end of that year, just before I turned 40, I had a thought — only slightly different than the one I’d had a year before — that changed everything.

“What if I could be in really great shape 10 years from now when I turn 50?”

Since then, I haven’t looked back.

And I can tell you for certain that this year, I won’t be thinking about “getting in shape,” and instead I’ll be celebrating all that I’ve managed to accomplish so far.

So why did this little change make such a huge difference?

For one, it removed the pressure.

A one-year path to the best shape in your life feels… well, intense.

Better get started, because the clock’s ticking.

Redo that diet that worked really well (once).

Miss a day — or worse, get injured and miss a week — and you might as well give up.

It sounds silly, but this isn’t that far from how we really think.

But when I started picturing the fittest version of myself a decade from now, all of that disappeared.

Suddenly I was free to think much bigger than before.

Sure, I pictured the usual stuff of fitness fantasies: lots of muscle, six-pack abs, incredible endurance.

But I also thought about flexibility and mobility, something that’s been on my list to get ahead of before it’s too late.

And then I thought about lifestyle. If I were to be in truly incredible shape at age 50, then what would fitness have to look like for me?

Well, it wouldn’t be an intense grind doing the same old stuff I’ve always done.

It would be new sports all the time, some hobbies that keep me in shape but don’t even look like exercise, and a passion for healthy food and cooking like I had when I was brand new to a plant-based diet.

Suddenly it didn’t seem at all wasteful for me to spend two months learning a new skill (my kettlebell practice) before I started to notice fitness gains.

Because when you’ve got 10 years, there’s plenty of time for new things.

With 10 years to work with, you can even imagine all the crazy accomplishments you used to dream about: the ultramarathons, the Ironmans, the running across the country… whatever it might be for you.

The point isn’t that you’re going to do these things right now. In fact, it’s that you’re NOT going to do them right now.

But they can serve as the motivation for the steps you ARE going to take in the coming days and weeks.

Oh, and the flip side works in your favor too: when you picture the outcome of NOT paying attention to your health and fitness for 10 years, it’s a lot uglier than just kicking the can down the road for another year.

Finally, the decade-long timeline did one more thing for me: it allowed me to feel like I could turn back the clock.

We all have to deal with getting older. I don’t have many regrets, so I don’t feel too anxious around these birthdays with a zero at the end.

But still, 40 and 50… these numbers feel different than 20 and 30.

So to imagine that when I turn 50, I could be in better shape than when I turned 40?

That felt like I was beating the system somehow. And for me, that was pretty exciting.

So as we approach the holidays and another new year, if you’re stuck in the same cycle of hope and inaction that I was, I hope you’ll consider changing your timeline to something longer.

No need to wait until a milestone birthday, or even until December 31st.

Give yourself permission to think a decade ahead, and see how that works for you.

Part 2: The Hardest Part about Getting Back in Shape

In all those years failing in my attempts to get back in shape, there was one big mistake I kept making again and again.

The problem was my very narrow definition of fitness: when I imagined myself being fit again, I only did so in terms of what I had done before.

For example: “run a 3:10 marathon and bench press 235 pounds, at a weight of 155 pounds.”

I had done these things at different points, but never at the same time. So I thought being in shape enough to do all of them would be really cool.

Here was the trouble with that:

Baggage: It came with lots of comparison to my former self. Even months into a running and strength program, I’d still be very far from what I used to be able to do.
Boredom: Neither running nor going to the gym held any excitement for me. I had done them for so many years that I was bored with them.
Conflict: I knew that building the amount of muscle I associated with “fitness” required me to eat an amount of food that wasn’t healthy. So even if I achieved it, I knew it wouldn’t be sustainable or compatible with real health.

I was semi-conscious of all these issues. And yet, I stubbornly still wanted “fitness” as I had defined it, and wondered why I could never seem to get started.

I wasn’t able to get in shape again until I let go of all of that. And once I did, honestly, it was easy.

The first action I took as a result of my new mindset was to buy a kettlebell and a book (Kettlebell Simple & Sinister, by Pavel Tsatsouline). I was clicking around on Amazon searching for something else, and must have seen it as a related suggestion or something like that.

But it spoke to me, and the best thing I did was to listen.

It was a whole new type of training. New lifts with a new apparatus, but more importantly, a new philosophy: no more training to failure, just two exercises every day, and a focus on building strength instead of mass (which I didn’t even realize was possible before; I thought they were one and the same).

Plus, a certain “badass” factor that made it feel like a lot of fun.

For me, these ingredients made all the difference. This didn’t feel like drudgery; it was actually exciting!

I didn’t have any personal kettlebell benchmarks to measure progress against, only two strength standards (one simple, one sinister) laid out in the book.

And it all fit with my newly formed picture of fitness for the next decade: functional strength and endurance, rather than building muscle for the sake of looking good.

My point here isn’t to convince you to get into kettlebells or buy into Pavel’s philosophy.

Instead, it’s to convince you of this:

If your definition of fitness has left you out of shape, then you need to change that definition.

If you used to be strong, fast, and fit, and you’re not anymore, then I bet “fitness” in your mind now comes with some kind of baggage, boredom, or conflict that makes it incompatible with true wellness, just like it did for me.

And if that’s the case, you need to change your definition, or you’ll never be able to make your attempts to get fit again last.

Just like I couldn’t until I changed mine.

(And by the way, I’m not saying you can’t ever do those things you used to love. Once I got back in shape, I found myself interested in running races again. It’s just that that I don’t think they’re your best path back to fitness.)

So how do you change your definition?

Actually, I don’t think you should try to engineer it. Instead, forget all those old rules and what you’ve accomplished in the past, and once you have, notice what speaks to you instead.

And then trust your gut enough to start something new.

If it doesn’t last and it’s just not for you, that’s okay: you’ll gain some fitness and some knowledge in the process.

(I actually had a false start myself: I bought a TRX suspension system about a month before I started with kettlebells, and only used it a few times. Even though it didn’t last for me, it got me moving again and thinking outside of my typical fitness box, and that was a huge step.)

Part 3: How to Make Your Fitness Habit Automatic

A lot of people like to imagine that the way we make changes is just like how we turn lights on or off.

That there’s a switch inside our heads, and if we can summon enough motivation or inspiration to flip that switch, then our habits will be forever changed — and it’ll be easy after that.

This is, unfortunately, a Hollywood myth.

For the vast majority of people who try this “overnight” approach to change — whether the goal is to go plant-based, to become a runner, or to give up chocolate — everything seems great for a few days, only to blow up all at once shortly thereafter.

What happens is that their willpower, on which they rely too heavily (almost exclusively), runs out.

And when the illusion of perfection evaporates, they give up completely.

But even though the switch-flipping approach is flawed, good habits don’t have to be hard.

By applying just a few principles of habit change, we can dramatically increase our chances of successfully making changes.

For me, successful habit change boils down to two main keys:

Make only one change at a time.
For the first month or so (until the habit has time to take hold), make your new habit as easy and as pleasant as possible, ramping up the intensity only gradually.

Later in this series, I’ll talk about how my kettlebell practice eventually led to a diet change, a return to running, and lots more.

But for now, the important thing to know is that those all came later, and they came naturally. I didn’t force them.

If I had tried to change all those things at once, it would have been too much, and I would have given up.

So at first, I only focused on one change (the kettlebell practice). That’s key number one.

But the second key is much more interesting.

For the first month of my kettlebell practice, I followed the author’s wise instructions not to begin the actual program.

Instead, for several weeks, my only goal each day was to spend 10 or 20 minutes with the kettlebell, working on my form and paying attention to the smallest of details. (And often I didn’t even use a kettlebell — I safely trained the Turkish get-up form by balancing a shoe on my fist.)

The important thing is that during those initial weeks, I didn’t let myself get winded or sore or anything like that. While those things certainly can lead to fitness gains, the goal at first shouldn’t be to improve your fitness — it’s to build the habit.

I found myself looking forward to my 20-minute kettlebell sessions each day — it was my chance to focus on just one thing, almost like a meditation.

But just as importantly, I was building a skill and enjoying a sense of progress.

There was an element of the practice that was interesting, that left me energized by the end of a session and excited to come back the next day and improve even more.

Plus, without really trying to do so, I memorized the warmup and parts of the workout itself, as I gradually incorporated small parts into my daily routine.

The result was that I never felt the difficulty of that first day in the gym that we’ve all experienced — that stressful day where you’re trying to learn the structure of the workout and the form of several exercises all at once, not to mention dealing with the severe fatigue and resulting soreness.

And all the while I was building some strength, so that when I actually did start the program, it was no great shock to my body — and required very little willpower to keep it going.

Of course, this “learning” phase, where you’re building your mental muscles more than your physical ones, can’t last forever.

If it did, that would still be a lot better than doing nothing. It’s just not the fastest way to progress, once the habit is formed.

So what do you do after you’ve built the habit?

Step 4: Make Your Fitness Routine Addictive

What to do after the habit is formed — after the first month or so — is less certain, and it depends a lot on your personality.

The trick is to engineer your fitness habit so that it’s addictive. You want it to fulfill you on multiple levels, so that it becomes an activity you never want to miss.

This is the difference between fitness being a chore, and it becoming something you do for years.

I’ve coached people who had major breakthroughs when they finally took the time to really think hard about what fulfills them, and then built it into their fitness routine.

A few examples:

Some people love the community and competitive nature of Crossfit, and it becomes something much bigger in their lives than just exercise.
Others love data, so they use wearables and apps that make their progress more visible and satisfying (and shareable).
My kettlebell routine has lasted for almost a year, which is a pretty long time for me. Why? I think it’s because it’s build around specific milestones, or standards, which I can expect to hit every six months to a year, and a steady progression towards those goals. (Not unlike training for running races, which provides progress towards milestones at about the same frequency.)
My wife (who is running her first 50K this instant, as I write this from the car) always calls her mom during her long runs. On others, she and a friend who lives far away “run together” by talking on the phone while they both do their separate runs.
I go through periods where I’m not at all excited about running. But I’m almost always excited about language learning. And so I’ve started using audio-based language programs that require you to speak as you do them. Easy runs are the perfect time to do these programs, since (a) I’m by myself, which doesn’t happen much, and (b) the speaking requires me to run at a conversational pace… something that’s otherwise excruciatingly boring for me.
During a lot of my kettlebell workouts (the ones with generous rest periods, not the more intense sessions), I put on reruns of The Office in the background. I rarely watch TV otherwise, so when work gets stressful I actually crave a workout and the chance to relax and listen to something funny while I’m recovering between sets.

You can see how, depending on your personality, any of these could give you another reason to want to do your workout.

If your workout represents your chance to hang out with certain friends, or to make progress on a language-learning app, then even when you don’t feel like training on a certain day, you’ll do it because you don’t want to miss what comes with it.

On the flip side, make sure that the difficulty level of your workouts also matches what you find enjoyable.

Some people love the exhaustion (and sometimes, the pain) of HIIT training, and how it makes them feel afterward.

And if you’re really goal-oriented, sometimes really hard workouts are part of the deal.

But pain isn’t necessary for a workout to be effective. The “no pain, no gain” misconception has kept a lot of people from working out, simply because they believe that what they find enjoyable must not be doing them any good since it doesn’t hurt.

(For a good counterexample, look at the Blue Zones, the pockets of the world where people live the longest, and you’ll see that rarely does their exercise cause them pain. It’s enjoyable and built into their daily lives, like walking on hilly terrain or gardening.)

I’ve found my “just right” difficulty with my kettlebell program. The program never has me training to failure, which helps me stay healthy and keeps me wanting to come back. But once I week I push hard and race the clock to complete all my sets within an allotted time, and from that I get the rush and satisfaction that comes from meeting a challenge head-on.

So what should you do to make your fitness routine addictive? I can’t tell you exactly what it will be for you; it’s up to you to figure that one out.

But if right now you associate working out with pain, boredom, or anything else negative, then spend some time thinking about what would make it the opposite for you.

Then do some research or brainstorming to come up with a plan that checks all the boxes, and go for it!

Part 5: How to Support Your Fitness Change with What You Eat

In the 10+ years since I’ve been vegan, last year was the worst I’ve eaten.

And the first eleven months of this year have probably been the best.

I made the change with next to no effort.

How?

It was easy. Instead of struggling to eat better, I first built a rock-solid fitness habit.

And once that became a big part of my life — and I made the obvious connection that my diet can either multiply or squash the results I get from training — I was motivated to change.

I’ll get into the specifics of the diet changes I’ve made, but if you stop reading now, make sure you get the most important point:

If you’re having trouble making a change — whether to diet or fitness or something else — ask yourself what you could change first that would make the harder change dramatically easier.

It could also work the other way around from how I did it:

If you find diet changes pretty easy to make, but have no motivation to exercise… could you start eating ultra-clean first (or intermittent fasting, perhaps) — and then let the changes you see in the mirror motivate you to multiply those results with exercise?

To step back even another level, when someone tells me they’re totally stuck with diet AND fitness, I tell them to start by carving out 30 minutes a day to do some other habit that would absolutely light them up.

Maybe it’s playing the guitar, or reading, or going for a walk; it doesn’t have to relate to food or fitness. But the freedom and positivity that come from that habit (not to mention the trust you rebuild in your ability to make commitments to yourself and keep them) makes the “harder” habits easier to change.

Anyway, back to diet.

The changes I’ve made this year are mostly specific to my own fitness situation, so won’t apply to everyone.

As I wrote about briefly earlier, I used to associate lifting weights with gaining muscle mass. To me, strength and size were the same thing.

And because I was a “hard-gainer,” as they say (not to mention that I eat a plant-based diet, which tends to be lower in calories), I found that I had to eat a tremendous amount of food to support muscle growth.

In other words, being strong was expensive.

Financially, sure. More importantly, when it comes to longevity.

One of the surest, scientifically supported ways to live longer and age more slowly is to eat fewer calories and ask less of your body’s metabolic system — so although it felt good to look big and feel strong, I knew that eating as much as I had to to support lots of muscle was, in some sense, killing me.

But now I understand that strength is different from muscle growth — or rather, that there are two kinds of muscle growth: look up “myofibrillar hypertrophy vs sarcoplasmic hypertrophy” if you’re interested.

The former builds smaller but harder and denser muscles that are actually better at contracting and generating tension. In other words, stronger.

The latter is the result of increased fluid in your muscle cells, which makes muscles look bigger but doesn’t make you much stronger.

And so with this understanding I was able to separate “getting strong” from “getting big.”

Suddenly, it was okay to train hard (with low reps and generous rest periods) and NOT have to eat like it was going out of style.

As a result, I’ve increased my Turkish get-up weight this year from 35 pounds to 80 pounds this year, without gaining much weight — just a few pounds that help me look stronger and more athletic than I did before, but not “big.”

And that’s just fine with me, since I no longer have to make peace with the conflict between strength and longevity.

So my eating this year has mostly been focused on eating less, not more.

I’ve spent many months experimenting with intermittent fasting, where I typically don’t eat until noon each day, and then only begin with vegetable juice (I bought a Breville Juice Fountain Cold Plus, and I’ve been very happy with it).

When you replace the natural panic we feel around hunger with the knowledge that your body is actually designed to be hungry sometimes, it gets a lot easier to enjoy the feeling of skipping a snack between meals, or working through lunch every now and then.

The second big dietary win of my year has been replacing refined flour (even whole-wheat flour) pastas and pizza crusts with the wonderful substitutes based on chickpeas and cauliflower that are now available (try Banza pasta if you haven’t yet).

I have a soft spot for traditional Italian dishes and handmade pasta, so I still make those things with semolina or whole wheat flour, but I generally reserve them for Sundays.

And that’s the same with eating big breakfasts and drinking alcohol — I try to save them for the weekends. Not in any kind of strict sense, but I’ve fallen into a rhythm that, on balance, adds up to a lot of healthy choices.

In the past, such a loose approach wouldn’t have worked for me. I thrived when it was all or nothing, with no wiggle room.

The difference now, oddly enough, is activity tracking and a focus on calories. Not obsessive tracking, just monitoring closely enough so that I stay connected with the consequences of my food and fitness choices. It has brought with it a whole host of benefits…

Part 6: Let’s Get Trackin’!

For years I resisted the activity tracker / quantified self movement.

I thought these devices were, at best, an entertaining distraction that put too much focus on numbers.

But then I borrowed an Oura ring (from my mom) to diagnose a sleep issue.

At first, I hated it.

I got so addicted to checking my sleep score each morning that it started to impact my sleep… which then made me depressed to see a worsening score, which in turn made my sleep worse.

And so on.

But then I gave it another chance, and eventually came to see that it has immense value as a fitness tool.

Why?

Because a key part of any habit is accountability — and ultimately, accountability to yourself.

The simplest form of accountability is asking yourself every day:

Did I do what I was supposed to do today?

Missing a habit once or twice or ten times in a row doesn’t destroy the habit.

When we stop asking this question, though — when we forget the habit entirely, and stop trying — that’s when it dies.

And what activity trackers do is make it a lot harder to forget.

Let’s say we decide to start running each day…

It goes well for the first week, when we never miss. But then family comes to town or work gets busy, our routine gets thrown off, and we miss two days in a row.

Usually, that’s the end.

We might think about our habit a few more times, but each day we don’t do it, it gets easier NOT to think about it, and soon enough, we’re right back where we started.

But if you’re wearing a band or a ring and checking in on the app each day, now it’s hard not to notice the gaping hole in your streak.

Or you see your “daily steps” and “calories burned” numbers plummet.

If it’s connected to a social platform, now your friends see it too. Maybe they ask what’s up, is everything okay?

It’s possible that you still won’t start running again. That you’ll stop opening the app, and no longer feel the accountability.

But you’re still wearing the tracker, right? (Most of them these days stay on 24 hours.)

And so you’ll keeping seeing the actual tracker — and probably notifications from the app — and you’ll be reminded (again and again) of your habit.

None of this is a guarantee that you’ll keep doing your habit. But you can see what a difference there is between having all of these little accountability tugs, and having none of them — being able to forget about your habit after just a few days of missing.

This works when your habit is well-established, too.

When you’re doing really well — when you’ve built up months of trend data you can look at proudly — things are still going to come up in your life that make it harder to find time to train.

And the same forces will serve to first give you the visible feedback that you took a few days off… and then keep reminding you to come back.

It’s even better if your habit tracker integrates activity level with sleep and overall readiness or recovery.

Then even if you get away from fitness for a while, but you’re still paying attention to your sleep each night, you’re constantly reminded of how your activity level affects your sleep and overall wellness. One more reason to start doing it again.

But there’s more.

A final benefit, for me, has been that tracking my activity helps me make better food choices (without tracking calorie intake — something I don’t think I’ll ever be ready for).

When I see that 30 minutes of running burns about 300 calories — or that my total active calorie burn in a day is, say, 450 calories — that makes it a lot easier to skip that 200-calorie, after-dinner beer I might otherwise want to drink.

I’m not saying I obsess over calories in and out, or that you should. And for some people trying to build muscle mass, it will work the other way around.

My point is that an activity tracker helps you be aware of the impact of your choices, and even more importantly, serves to keep reminding you of the habits you want to build.

Part 7: The Critical Component of Missing from Most Fitness Programs

A few years ago I started doing Muay Thai, a form of kickboxing from Thailand.

It was super fun, really hard, and basically just made me feel awesome (in a “bruised ribs” kind of way).

But there was a problem.

I couldn’t kick.

Not “I couldn’t kick hard.”

I couldn’t kick, period.

When the instructor told us to kick a bag hanging at about waist height, everyone else in the class (including the other beginners) could do it.

When I tried, it felt like someone was stabbing a knife into my IT band. On both legs.

The instructor told me I had a mobility issue and gave me a modified version of the drill.

I went home and started getting my affairs in order.

I was officially old.

———-

After some reflection and research, I realized it wasn’t quite so bad as it seemed.

My adult life since college had comprised 15 years of running followed by 5 years of sitting.

No wonder my hips were locked up, and side-to-side movement of my legs was out of the question.

But the wake-up call had served me.

Being strong and having decent endurance weren’t enough.

Suddenly I saw the vicious cycle unfolding in front of me:

Lack of mobility would stop me from doing things I’ve loved and cause injuries. Which would lead to less activity, even worse mobility, and more injuries. And so on.

Until it all ended with a Life Alert “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” moment.

I wasn’t old yet, but THAT path would sure make me age a whole lot faster.

And there was some good news.

If my behavior (the running and the sitting, rather than just getting older) had caused this lack of mobility, maybe some different behavior could reverse it.

And that’s how I discovered Dr. Kelly Starrett and his book, Becoming a Supple Leopard.

———-

Truthfully, I didn’t really dive into mobility work the way I should have back then.

It took a few more years, a pandemic, and the “Holy crap, I’m almost 40” moment to get me started with my current kettlebell routine.

And it was that kettlebell program — with my obsessive focus on form, along with the bumps and bruises that come with new training — that prompted me to pull Dr. Starrett’s beast of a book off my shelf and really get into it earlier this year.

Now, my living room is strewn with a growing collection of mobility balls, tension bands, foam rollers, and voodoo floss (don’t ask).

Mobility has become an essential part of both my fitness routine, and my wife’s as well.

I would have never said this a couple years ago, but if I had to choose just one of strength, endurance, and mobility to have for the next 50 years, I’d choose mobility.

In a heartbeat.

Because without it — and an understanding of proper biomechanics that you’ll get from resources like Supple Leopard — the other two will only inevitably lead to injury as you place more demands on your body.

Of course, I’m not nearly expert enough on mobility to give you advice about how to do it. I’m new at this.

Mainly, I wanted to open your eyes to this often-overlooked component of fitness — one that’s undoubtedly beneficial to all athletes, but especially important as we age.

I hope you’ll check out Kelly Starrett’s work, Jill Miller’s resources, NMA Radio guest Aaron Alexander’s site and podcast, and this NMA blog post by Luke Jones as some great places to start.

(And a bonus resource, which I haven’t read yet but is high on my list: Ready to Run, Starrett’s book on mobility for runners.)

———-

And with that, our Rediscover Your Fitness series comes to a close.

Coincidentally, we’re headed into my favorite month for inspiration and habit change (plus all the holiday stuff that makes December so much fun).

So I hope you’ll take advantage of this wonderful time to make something happen — even if “something” is only the plans to come bursting out the gate on January 1st, 2022.

Thanks so much for reading,

Matt

PS. Finally, a reminder that Complement has sponsored this series — and that today is the very last day for Complement’s epic Black Friday sale.

Our entire product line of plant-based nutrition products is still 25% off, but just through the end of the day.

And just so can see how Complement works in action, here’s how my family uses Complement:

For nutrients, my wife Erin and I both take Complement Plus daily. My two kids take Complement Core.

We also add Complement Protein to my son’s smoothies since his soccer training regimen is so intense.

Erin and I both use Plant Bites to fuel our long runs, and my kids often eat them before soccer games.

Finally, our snacks these days (and most of my post-workout meals) are Plant Protein Bites, an uber-clean alternative to processed bars.

My team and I created these products for ourselves and our families.

That’s why we love them so much.

If you think you and your family would benefit from a supply of Complement products as we head into 2022, click here to save 25% before the sale ends at the end of the day today.

Thanks again for reading.

The post Rediscover Your Fitness in 2022 appeared first on No Meat Athlete.

7 Deliciously Simple Ways to Eat More Greens

matt@nomeatathlete.com (Matt Frazier and Ben Benulis) — Wed, 15 Sep 2021 16:14:21 GMT

Just about everyone needs to eat more greens.

Even you, healthy eater.

Because according to Dr. Michael Greger, only 1 in 25 Americans eats 12 servings of greens per month.

Which at first sounds kind of good, to think you’re that one person in 25 who gets a gold star.

But get this. Twelve servings per month is only a quarter of the amount Dr. Greger says we should be eating for optimal health. He recommends that many servings per week — an amount that very, very few people actually get.

Greens are packed with nutrients, and low in calories. So on the ANDI scale, which measures nutrients per calorie (remember the scores that used to be posted all over Whole Foods salad bars), greens top the charts.

Another good reason to eat greens: many greens also fall into the class of cruciferous vegetables (kale, collards, and mustard greens, to name a few), which provide large amounts of cancer-fighting isothiocyanates (ITC’s) like sulphorophane. According to Dr. Joel Fuhrman, in population studies, cruciferous veggies appear to be about twice as protective as other vegetables against disease.

But enough with that. We all know greens are incredibly healthy (it’s one of very few things almost everyone in the nutrition field agrees on), and we need to eat more of them.

So how we can get more greens?

7 Ways to Eat More Greens

1. Start a daily salad habit.

Most people don’t mind salads, especially when you’ve got a dressing you’re digging.

So how can we eat more of them?

For me, it’s two ways.

First, you can make a giant salad with beans (I like chickpeas, myself) your default lunch. Make a tasty oil-free dressing, then make salad easy: keep two kinds of greens in on hand — one mild and one more bitter (like dandelion greens or cabbage) — and combine them in equal parts. If you like, put it in a wrap.

If you want to add other veggies, great. But like all habits, the easier this one is to do, the more likely you’ll stick with it. And if all you did was get a giant handful of two different greens plus a serving of beans for lunch each day… well, you’d be doing alright in my book (and Dr. Greger’s, for that matter).

If lunchtime salad isn’t your thing, my favorite trick for getting my family (and myself) to eat a salad with dinner is to prepare the salad first, and put it on the table while you’re making the rest of the dinner, so that everyone will want to eat while they smell the rest of the food cooking.

Otherwise, far too often, we tend not to eat much salad, because we want to get to hot, tastier food that comes out at the same time.

2. Blend greens into your smoothie.

Even if green smoothies aren’t your thing, you can still get a serving of fresh greens in your morning smoothie.

Spinach is my favorite for its ability to slip unnoticed past my taste buds. But baby kale is surprisingly hard to detect as well, and it has the added bonus of being cruciferous.

Thinking again about habit formation, you want to start with a very small amount, and only gradually increase the greens as you get used to the slightly different taste of your smoothie.

One more trick to cut down on waste: when the greens in your fridge (you know, the ones you’re making those salads with?) are just about to go bad, throw them in the freezer, and then use the frozen ones in your smoothie.

3. At dinner time, think “grain, green, and bean.”

Let’s face it: with the busy lives most of us lead, greens don’t make it onto the dinner plate very often.

It’s not that we don’t like them… it’s just that it’s so easy to NOT make them. Very few dinners depend on the greens, so when we get busy, the greens are the first food to go.

Enter my favorite simple meal planning strategy: a grain, a green, and a bean.

When you don’t know what to make, just thinking in these terms as you glance through your fridge and pantry should help you see meal ideas where previously there were none.

But a grain, a green, and a bean doesn’t have to just be a big bowl of mush.

Consider these far more interesting dinner choices:

Chickpea and pasta soup with kale
Spicy tempeh tacos topped with lettuce or cabbage
Stir fry with tofu, bok choy, and brown rice
Fire-roasted tomato pasta with chickpeas and arugula (note: I first posted recipe before I was vegan; now I’d omit the cheese)
Rice bowl with black beans and spinach, topped with peanut sauce

Yep, they’re all non-mushy examples of a grain, a green, and a bean. (Okay, maybe the last one is mushy. Still good though!)

4. Make greens the main event.

Sure, a grain, a green, and a bean will get you a small serving of greens most nights. But every now and then, eat a lot of greens, by making a dinner that features greens front and center.

A few of my favorites:

Saag paneer, an Indian dish based on spinach (tofu replaces the cheese cubes in tasty vegan versions)
Espinacas con garbanzos, a Spanish spinach-and-chickpea dish loaded with smoky paprika flavor
Sauteed beet greens with white beans or chickpeas, plus a little bit of orecchiette pasta (a typical dish in Puglia, Italy)

Like a lot of people, I wouldn’t like to eat a greens-first meal every night, but once every week or two, a big pile of greens on my plate (usually with lots of lemon juice) hits the spot.

5. Find a side dish you love.

Like I said, when life gets busy, we tend to omit the greens in favor of getting something (anything!) that’s vegan on the table. Preferably something the kids won’t fuss about.

But what if you had just one, go-to side dish — based on greens — that you loved, and you knew you could whip up reliably and quickly?

Then you could add it to any quick weeknight pre-soccer-practice dinner, to give the whole family a hit of greens, and feel like you’re not failing at parenthood.

In my house, we’ve got four of these standbys — and they all happen to be cruciferous:

Simple steamed broccoli (not technically a leafy green, but you know, desperate times…)
Sautéed broccoli rabe (blanch it in boiling water just until it’s bright green, then sauté with garlic and crushed pepper — and we use all the bitter leaves!)
Air-fried brussels sprouts (I like to toss them in oil, salt, and pepper, but even just plain turns out great with a little drizzle of balsamic glaze at the table)
“Brazilian” collard greens

That last one is my favorite. I don’t know if they’re really Brazilian, but somehow my kids got the idea that they’re the favorite food of a Brazilian soccer player, so we went with it.

Here’s how we make (so-called) Brazilian collards:

Remove the ribs from collard greens and wash the leaves and dry them well. Then roll the leaves together like a thick cigar, and slice them as thin as you possibly can — like 1/8-inch or even smaller, a chiffonade.
Get a large pan really hot. I like to use cast iron, but any big, sturdy pan should work. You don’t want to overcrowd the greens, because you want them to caramelize a little, rather than to steam in their own liquid when they’re too crowded. If it’s two crowded, cook them in two batches.
Toss in the shredded greens, along with a little bit of oil. Move them around with a wooden spoon, but let them sit for a few seconds here and there so they get a little color.
When they’re tender, move the greens to the side of the pan and add a little bit of oil, a minced clove of garlic, and some crushed red pepper to the pan. When the garlic is fragrant, stir it into the greens.
Add salt and lemon juice to taste, and enjoy!

6. Juice them.

Yes, I know.

Juicing greens isn’t the same as eating greens. You don’t get all the fiber, and it’s easy to go overboard on the juice and get too much sugar (especially if you’re juicing fruits).

And the truth is, juicing leafy greens is tough, just because the yield is low. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t consider it.

I used to be kind of anti-juicing (“It’s not a whole food!”), but now I find it a really nice way to get a bunch of nutrients from veggies that I normally wouldn’t eat when I’m busy. And so for you, maybe juicing veggies could do the same.

I’ve been drinking vegetable juice as my first meal of the day, around noon, as a way to come off a nightly intermittent fast, and usually, the only leafy greens I use are leftover parsley or mint that we might have from dinner the night before. It contributes a little flavor and some nutrients, even if the volume just isn’t all that much. (I do use lots of celery and cucumber, though, so even though they’re not leafy, at least they’re green!)

If you’re willing to invest in a masticating juicer, you’ll get more from the greens you juice, and in this case, you’d be able to get a ton of nutrients in a glass. Add some carrots, beets, or a small piece of apple if you can’t handle the flavor of greens alone.

Of course, you’ll want to make sure you get some whole greens in your diet too, but in my opinion, the extra nutrients from the juice are a good thing, so long as you can drink them without adding a lot of sugar (aka fruit juice) to mask the taste.

7. When all else fails (and maybe even when it doesn’t)… use a greens powder.

All of the above methods can work. They’re all simple, but none is truly “easy,” because it’s just not that easy to eat our greens.

Or rather, because it’s so easy to NOT eat our greens.

And so I’ve decided that the smartest choice at this phase in my life — when my priorities are longevity and sports performance, for both of which greens are immensely helpful — is to try to do those things and to have a fallback.

And that fallback is a greens powder — a daily scoop I can add to my smoothie (or, if I’m traveling, to a glass of lemon water) — to know that I’m doing a whole lot better than when I’m not getting any greens at all.

But the fact is I’ve never taken a greens powder consistently. And what it comes down to is that I’ve never really believed they provide enough nutrition to be worth it.

Sure, they provide a whole slew of superfood-sounding ingredients, but they don’t usually disclose the amounts of the individual ingredients used, and because of that, it’s very hard to imagine they’re using the greens in the amounts that are scientifically shown to be beneficial.

In other words, for me, 50+ superfood ingredients in minuscule amounts isn’t as good as five in amounts that have been scientifically demonstrated to be effective.

So that was the mission I gave to our team at Complement:

Create a greens powder in the Complement style (i.e., ultra-pure, nothing to hide, so we can be completely transparent about what’s in it) with science-backed amounts of greens in each serving — amounts that the evidence clearly shows have a positive on your health, so that I can know I’m not throwing my money away, but instead, making a positive investment in my health.

Our greens powder won’t be a “proprietary blend” (also known as “we don’t want to tell you exactly the amounts of ingredients we use because we use so little of the good ones”) of 197 superfood nutrients, mushroom complexes and goji powder and all of that nonsense.

Instead, it’s just five nutrient-packed greens — barley grass, spinach, moringa, chlorella, and broccoli sprouts — with the amounts printed right on the package.

All in a daily scoop, in serving sizes that science clearly tells us are beneficial — so we can sleep a little better when life gets busy, knowing we’re getting our greens (actually, sleep is one of the benefits!).

So that’s been our project for the past few months, and I’m excited to announce that next week we’ll be offering the brand new Complement greens solution for pre-order.

If you’re on our email list, I’ll be in touch with some more details soon.

Until then, you’ve got six other ways to get those greens!

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