How I became a fitness

the talk I'm about to do is on health, fitness, and how it relates to obesity. And these are very, very high-stakes problems. And that's because if you look at obesity in first-world countries let's take the United States, for example. It's got the highest obesity rates in the entire world. 70% of Americans are obese or overweight. And even in countries like France, by the way, did you guys know you have the lowest obesity rates in Europe? Can we get a round of applause for that? That's pretty awesome. 

Yes. Even in countries like France, obesity has doubled in the last 15 years, right? So why do I feel like I have a confession to make? Well, it's because I'm here giving this talk about obesity. And, well, part one of the confession, I really, really love food. I probably more than anybody I know. In fact, this is me demolishing five pounds of fu. Uh, if you guys don't know what pho is, it's Vietnamese ramen. It's amazing. And it's got a lot of French influences. So this is me demolishing five pounds of fu in six minutes. 

You actually get a whole hour to finish it. I was at this restaurant that has this fun challenge, and if you eat the entire fu, you get it for free. And as you can imagine, I didn't go back because I would have done it again, and I would have gotten kicked out or banned from the restaurant. But the point is, I really love eating. It's actually a two-part confession because the second part is that I really hate taking the stairs. If I see a staircase next to an elevator and I only have to go up one floor, I'm going to take the elevator. I'm that guy, right? That guy who goes in the elevator.

 Now, of course, I won't do it if there are a lot of people in the elevator and a lot of people who are trying to get in. But I'll make sure that I dart in, hit the next floor, and click close just to make sure nobody gets in. And then, uh, it's really, actually awkward if somebody gets in because I have to move to the side and kind of look down, and I know they're looking over at me, judging, and I'm just kind of, like, looking like this. 

So pretty shameless about this. Uh, I won't go upstairs unless there's, like, a buffet on the second floor, and that's really only if there's none on the first floor. Um, so I hate moving, and there's a reason for this, and it's because I used to be a fat kid, right? I was obese for pretty much most of my life. Ironically, both of my parents were doctors, and they always told me, to eat less, and move more. And it's not that I didn't try to eat less and move more. I did try very hard to eat less and move more. But it was all for not. I was never successful in doing that. This is actually a two-part picture. I was so fat that there was actually a homeless guy to my right, and he called over another homeless guy. And I was so fat, he was like, Man, I'm glad I'm not fat, dude. It's fine for me to make fun of myself now that I'm not fat. Does anyone see the movie up by Pixar? Yes, I see some hands. I looked exactly like the kid from up, the Asian kid from up. Um, so what happened? How did I make this transformation? Well, I didn't have much going for me, by the way, of genetics or athleticism.

 I was always the last person to be picked on a sports team. And I did have one thing going for me, right? It's that I was a total geek. I'm the type of person who plays 15 hours of World of Warcraft at one time or downloads an entire season of, um entire season of Game of Thrones, and then does research afterward to figure out why Tywin Lannister was Hand of the King, the Mad King, and then stepped down Game of Thrones fans. Nice. Uh, I wasn't sure if they had Game of Thrones or if you guys watched it a lot in France, but yeah, that's the type of geek I am. And so I took all of that and geekery and took it from video games and instead applied it to fitness. So fast forward a few years later, and I actually became an amateur bodybuilder. Apologies to the Ted people. You're probably going to have to blur that out in the final video. Um, that's actually called a posing suit, which is kind of ironic because it should be more like a posing dental floss, that orange thing. Um, but I became an amateur bodybuilder. And throughout that entire kind of metamorphosis, two things happened. One, I became very passionate about fitness and started a company called Photocracy, uh, thank you for that amazing intro. Photography is a fitness platform and social network with 2 million users. The second thing is that I became a fitness coach. So I help people all around the world make these same transformations that I did. And let me tell you, these people, these making these transformations often tell me that they have not been able to do it before. And no matter how much they try, they could not eat less and move more to get fit. So here's some of my body of work, no pun intended on the body. Uh, but what I did find out is that there's something in common that all these people have, all these people making these amazing transformations. Bless you. And I am pretty much obsessed over figuring out what this commonality is, right? What makes one person successful in fitness when somebody else isn't successful. Now, there are a few things interested in fitness and one thing that struck me is that fitness is not as it seems. And there's no better story to exemplify this than the Twinkie diet. The Twinkie diet was invented by a professor at the University of Kansas. And it was a self, uh, explanatory or it was a test that he did on himself. He said I'm going to eat 1800 calories a day. I'm going to eat 1800 calories a day in Twinkies, Oreos. Pretty much anything you can find in a convenience store. Pretty much my wet dream, eating Twinkies all day. And he did this for ten weeks. What happened? He ended up losing 27 pounds. Now you might think it isn't healthy, but when he looked at his biomarkers and he looked at his HDL, good cholesterol, look at his LDL, bad cholesterol, those all improved. And so he was in the best shape of his life, eating Twinkies. So that doesn't mean don't say that Dick Talons told you all to go eat Twinkies later on. But what this does mean is that fitness, uh, isn't as it seems. And we should all be kind of curious. Now, curiosity is a very interesting thing when it comes to fitness. And there's no better quote than Neil DeGrasse Tyson's quote. All kids are born curious about the world. And this is definitely true if you can imagine being a kid and pushing back on adults when they tell you something. It's not that you wanted to be defiant, it's that you were still building your mental model of the world. You were still building hypotheses. And, uh, I remember my favorite story about me being a kid who was curious about the world. Um, I was with my best friend at the time and these lights are really glaring. I'm going to take my glasses off if you don't mind. Um, excuse me for 1 second. Yes. So we were buying gummy bears at a candy store and we were with his mom. And we go to the back of the car and we start devouring the gummy bears. And the mom turns around and tells us, my friend is Chinese and his mom has a very thick accent, she was like, don't eat all the gummy bell. You got a stomachache. So what were you going to do as a kid if you were eating gummy bears? An adult tells you not to do it, you're going to eat more gummy bears. Let me tell you, I had the worst gummy bear hangover. I had the worst hangover ever, uh, from gummy bears. And I've had a lot of hangovers, but that was particularly bad. But it's not that we kept eating the gummy bears because we wanted to be defiant. It's because we wanted to see what would happen. What happens when you go to adulthood? Now, adulthood is really the death of curiosity. You stopped acting curious as an adult, and you start thinking, you know, about the world. Very common among people. Let's take this example. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, right? How many times have you heard that? Probably a lot. How many times have you stopped to question whether that's true or why that's true? Probably not very much. And so when we become adults, we stop being curious, we stop being scientists. And this is really the death of fitness success. Why is it the death of fitness success? And it's because curiosity is really, really important when it comes to fitness.

It's really important because there are so many misconceptions about fitness. So, for example, uh, the conception that you need to do cardio to lose weight, right? That's what most people think. Well, there's research to come out. It came out in 2012, I believe, by a researcher by the name of Thurgood. Uh, he and his team found that after they examined a large body of research papers around cardio and looked at outcomes this is called a meta-analysis, by the way. A study of studies. They found out that cardio really had very little effect by itself on fat loss. The second misconception is that doctors are the people that you should look to to lose weight. Now, doctors are great at a lot of things. They're great at fixing disease, but they are horrible, horrible at helping people lose weight. And that's because doctors in med school study how to fix the disease. They don't study anything about preventative health, and nutrition is part of the preventative health field. But not only that, there is a great, uh, very interesting field of discipline called motivational interviewing. And the discipline actually talks about how doctors are incredibly demotivational. Now, they are really demotivational because let's say you are obese. Let's say you have an obese man named Jimbo, and he goes to the doctor, and he knows he's obese. He knows he has to lose weight. What does the doctor probably tell him? The doctor says, Jimbo, you need to lose weight. Thanks, doctor. Okay, well, the sky is blue, and I already knew that. Um, but that's incredibly demotivational, uh, to a patient. The third thing is that fitness third counterintuitive thing is that fitness is about eating less and moving more. Now, eating less and moving more gives you no context about fitness. It tells you nothing about what you're supposed to do. And it's literally like telling a depressed person to stop being so sad. That's not a joke. I'm dead serious about that one. Um, yeah. So you have all these counterintuitive ideas of fitness, and that's why it's important to be curious. So how do you actually know that we know what these misconceptions are, how do you actually create fitness success? The only way to be successful in fitness is to build what's called a positive feedback loop and to make sure that all the things you do around fitness, all the time you spend, the energy, the willpower, all of those things yield results, more results than the cost of those fitness inputs and the cost of the pain of fitness. And if you do that, then you can create this amazing internal motivation engine, and you never run out of motivation. What are the implications of this? Right. Well, the implication is that everyone's different. So everyone has a different positive feedback loop. And if you're somebody who hates cardio, you don't have much time, then you know that performing cardio is going to be something that will not create a positive feedback loop and will probably be worse for your overall fitness, and your overall fitness goals. The implication here is that everything has an ROI, and we need to find the things be curious and find the things that yield a positive ROI and create this positive feedback loop. And that's why I don't know if you guys have the biggest loser in France. Do you guys have that? Um, but it's this show about how these obese people try to lose weight, and it's just horrible for the fight against obesity because it makes you think that to lose weight, you need to starve yourself. You need to run until you pass out. And that is not something that creates a positive feedback loop in the long term. Now, the most important implication of this positive feedback loop is that fitness is actually a skill. And we don't think of fitness as a skill. We think of something like riding a bike as a skill. Right. Not fitness. But if you ride your bike and you fall down, are you going to say something like, I was riding my bike. I fell. I don't have the willpower, I don't have the self-discipline or, uh, the self-control to learn how to ride a bike? No. You're probably going to realize that riding a bike is a skill and that to improve, you have to learn how to ride on different terrains. You need to get repetitions and you need to practice. People don't think of fitness that way. Right. If you fail at fitness, somebody fails at fitness, the most common thing that they say is, I don't have the willpower. I don't have the self-discipline or the self-control. Well, what most people mistake for self-discipline, think that they lack self-control, but what they really lack is self-esteem. Self-esteem is a really, really important concept because self-esteem is the one skill that allows you to view your mistakes as separate from yourself. Right? It's important to forgive yourself so that you can try again if you fail at fitness. And a lot of people think about self-esteem. A lot of people think, Sorry, I keep saying self-esteem. I mean, self-compassion. There we go. A lot of people think self-compassion is something that lets you off the hook. It's actually the opposite. Uh, some researchers at Berkeley found out that if you are self-compassionate and you forgive yourself, then you are less likely to make that same mistake again because you view that mistake as something to learn from. And so self-compassion is really important. And so if you are getting into fitness, fall off that bike, eat those gummy bears. Well, maybe not eat those gummy bears, because that's probably counterintuitive. But metaphorically, eat those gummy bears. The last thing that I'll leave you with is you look at the theme of this conference, and it's the avant-garde. It's this notion of innovation. You can't think about avant-garde without thinking of innovation. And unfortunately, with fitness these days, when you think of fitness innovation, you think of technology, right? It's hard to go a week without hearing about the Iwatch, Fitbit, Quantified, soft, et cetera. Uh, it's hard to go a while without hearing about these tools. But that's all that these are just tools. I would argue that if you really want to move the needle, if you really want to make a difference in your own fitness, technology is not the answer, right? Innovation is the answer, but it's not innovative technology. That's the answer. It's an innovative mindset. Understanding that fitness is more than eating less, moving more, and following things that the biggest loser tells you to do, like running until you vomit. But instead, it's the focus on things like being self-compassionate, being mindful, and understanding that fitness is a skill. In my decade, half a decade of helping people, I'd say that the saddest thing is that when people fail, they think that they fail because they fail to shrink their waist. In reality, they really failed because they failed to expand their horizons. So I could stop at that, but I like plot twists. Um, don't worry, I'm not going to strip on Sage, actually. How much time do we have? Um, one thing about this Ted Talk is that it's on fitness. Uh, it actually applies to a lot of things, right? So think about the last concepts that I talked about. Think about self-compassion, positive feedback, and a loop. Thinking of fitness as a skill. This can really be applied to anything. And so I really want you to think about that and understand that if you apply those to your daily life, you can pretty much succeed at anything that you do.

THANK YOU.

     how I became a fitness