What if there was a simple framework that could easily guard you against unhealthy habits promoted in the fitness industry?
Episode Transcript (please forgive occasional errors)
Here with Health REBELs, we are charting a new path to health, one that’s dedicated their focus to wellness, not athletics. Here we break free from common standards and redefine healthy living by following the REBELs Oath.
The REBELs oath says
The REBELs oath says
- Reject extremes
- Energize ourselves through healthy habits
- Break free from common standards
- Excite ourselves about our potential, and finally,
- Love ourselves and act accordingly.
Anyway, let’s dive into today’s episode. central points, one of the central points of my coaching program is the REBEL oath.
And I know you’re familiar with the REBEL oath, we talk about it in the intro to the podcast all the time. And I’m always going to refer back to the REBEL oath. Because I really believe in this framework, it’s a five part framework that really effectively helps us identify what is healthy. But more importantly, it shields us against what is unhealthy.
With one framework, we’re able to really truly identify healthy habits and block ourselves from falling into unhealthy trends. And so today, what I want to do on this podcast is I want to, I want to show how the REBEL oath guides my work as a health coach. The REBEL oath, just as a recap, is five parts. It’s a pneumonic, it spells out REBEL,
R-E-B-E-L
R stands for Reject extremes in health and fitness. The E is to energize yourself with healthy habits, the B is to Break free from common standards. The other E is to Excite yourself about your potential. And finally, ultimately, the L is to Love yourself and act accordingly.
let’s break this down.
The R: rejecting extremes. What this does is it gives a shield against the common tendencies that we run against in in fitness and nutrition. (And a couple other things to lesser degrees.) But we have this we have this natural tendency to race to the most extreme thing.
In fact, a lot of popular workout programs have extreme in the name, right? The most popular workout program of like the 2000 10s was p90x Right, and the X literally stood for extreme. I don’t remember what the P stood for the 90 was the 90 days, 90 minutes, but it was supposed to be an extreme workout. Alright, there’s another really popular population of exercisers that were really popular on TV a while ago. And they always focused on more extreme workouts.
We, we often push ourselves into these extremes because we think that’s the degree we need to get to. The reality is you were born to be healthy. If we think about nature, and what it’s like to be in the natural world, if you were out in nature as a caveman, or cave woman, and you were unhealthy, you would get eaten by a tiger you would get eaten by a bear, right? Unhealthy dies. So your biology, over centuries of natural selection is naturally geared towards being healthy by default. It’s naturally easy to be healthy. Unfortunately, our society has done the opposite. And because we get so unhealthy, we think that we need to make the pendulum swing the exact opposite direction and swing hard, but it’s not true. All we have to do is gently nudge the body and guide the body and support the body in a gentle way. And you will naturally become healthy. Your body wants to be healthy, you were born to be healthy. We don’t need to do extreme things to let your body do what it does naturally. We just need to support it. And when we reject extremes and fitness and nutrition, we get to we get to look for those Simpler Options, right? Instead of trying to do 90 minute workouts that make you wobble all day long.
We can just do some movement. We can just do some movement, check the box, challenge ourselves a little bit, give ourselves a little bit of stimulus to respond. And we’ll get better. We don’t have to crush ourselves. Oftentimes clients are surprised by the first word Our program I give them because it’s less than half of what they expect, right? And they feel bad. They feel like they’re not doing enough.
In fact, if you look at my Client Testimonial with Amanda, she talks about that she did a biggest loser challenge with her co workers before working with me. And they, they crushed themselves didn’t get much results from it. And then when she was talking about her program with Health REBELs to her coworkers, her coworkers, were telling her, you’re not working hard enough, this can’t possibly work. And now a couple years later, she’s got tremendous results. And she’s keeping those results. And she never felt like she was crushing herself or really, really trying to hurt herself or doing anything extreme. We do not need extreme stuff to be healthy.
The second part to energize ourselves with healthy habits. This goes along well with the first one because a lot of extreme things make you feel rundown. They make you feel ragged, they make you feel miserable, they don’t make you feel energized. But I love this one because it allows for people to be individuals. When you energize yourself with healthy habits, that’s biofeedback on what’s working for your own particular needs in the body that you’re living in right now. It’s not asking what’s healthy for your neighbor? It’s not asking what was healthy for you when you were 20. It’s asking what’s healthy for you what’s giving you health right now. Things that make you feel more energetic, you should feel better afterwards, you should feel better after doing healthy habits.
Unfortunately, the Fitness and Wellness industry is a industry of extremes, and usually makes people feel worse, but you should feel good. And if you don’t, that might not be an appropriate recommendation for you. Right? If we think about boot camp classes, there are there is a athletic population that loves boot camp classes, they will work themselves ragged, sweating buckets. And they’ll walk out of there with a smile on their face, hyped up energized after the class that is healthy for them. And then there’s another group that’s maybe not ready for that maybe not ready for that workout. And they’ll wobble though hobble out of that class, they will limp all day, they’ll struggle to stand up off chairs the next day. And by using that energize my healthy habits, we tell based on individual responses, what’s actually healthy for that individual. This is a litmus test and allows you and gives you permission to be you. And to chase your own health.
You don’t always have to be textbook right to be real world right.
The center of the REBEL oath, the geometric central center of the oath and the philosophical center of the whole Health REBELs philosophy is to break free from common standards. If you look around the average American is overweight, unhealthy and unhappy. Right, the common standards around us push us to a default of honestly, excuse my language here, just being fucking miserable. Right? That is the common standard. And that’s not the way we should live life. Life is a precious gift. And we should get more out of it. To get more joy to get more abundance to get more happiness and more health, we really do have to break free from those common standards. It’s a common standard, just the day this the western lifestyle to live a sedentary habit. And if you want a great example of this, go on to my blog health rebels.us backslash blog and find the article. There’s too much juice and not enough squeeze. I’ll link it in the show notes. And if you’re reading this on the blog, I’ll put a link there as well.
But everything about the modern lifestyle has created this culture of convenience that has been deleterious to our health. It has been detrimental to our well being. We don’t have to do extreme things. But we do have to be intentional and break free from common standards. Even in fitness and nutrition. A lot of the advice out there was made for athletes. So a lot of the common standards with fitness and nutrition, we kind of have to break free from as well. But unless you’re an athlete in your 20s trying to get into the professional leagues then maybe stick with those but otherwise, if you have a professional job, if you have family obligations, if you have a nine to five, you have all these things pulling at you. Maybe we need to look at something that’s designed for us. The second e to be excited about your potential to excite yourself about your potential It talks about motivation, but it’s also the number one secret to health results that I’ve ever seen in my career.
I talk about this a lot more in depth in Episode Eight of the Health REBELs podcast. But there’s this weird phenomenon where people that are excited about their programs get good results, even when they do absolutely stupid dumb as shit. I used to work at a gym in Bellevue. And there was a trainer. Love the guy, fantastic guy needed a shower more often. But he just had this puppy dog excitement. He was just so happy to be at the gym, he was so happy to be a personal trainer. And he got good results from his workouts. I would watch his workouts. And they were they were dumb, like just nothing. Like his form was bad. Like the ordering was violated all the textbooks. He if you asked him why he did stuff half the time, he said “I don’t know. I just thought it was felt good.”
Like he had no idea what he was doing, should not have been working with other people. But his excitement about what he was doing got him really good personal results. He got a couple of his clients tendinitis because he was bad. But excitement! Excitement is really, really important.
On the other side, I’ve seen people do stuff that is backed by science that is textbook perfect that is backed by research. And they hate the entire experience. And they never get anything from it. In fact, we’ve done research, there is actual research that confirms that voluntary exercise versus forced exercise releases different chemical signals in the body, your emotional state about your exercise will actually change your biochemistry. And when you change your biochemistry, you will change your physiology, you will change your body, your mind your excitement, your mental state, is what determines your results in a really wild, but proven way we must be excited about our potential.
And then finally, the ultimate the most important is to love yourself and act accordingly. Right? This this shields us against a lot of bad decisions, the misery that people suffer the pain that people go through. If you think about doing that to a loved one, you instantly realize oh, no, I can’t, I can’t do that. I can’t make my son limp around for three days struggling to walk so that he can lose a little bit of his belly. That’s not nice. That’s not caring that’s not loving. Why do I do that to myself? What about the other side? Right? If you when you really love somebody, you want to give them the best. You’re going to try to provide good food, good nutrients, good nutrition, good resources, so that they can grow and develop and be the best that they can. You’re going to encourage them to get exercise so that their bodies the healthiest it can be, you’re not going to ask them to run a marathon. But you’re going to be like, Hey, I’d love to see you run around a little bit. Right when we love someone, we do the best for them. But when you look at health and fitness where people put themselves through the suffering people put themselves through, not very loving.
So love yourself and act accordingly. Give yourself stuff you would give someone that you love. And that’s the REBEL oath. That is the framework that makes the center of my coaching philosophy that every recommendation I give to clients has to run through this and make sense along this framework. Because this five part framework the REBEL oath, as a health coach, helps me identify what is healthy and what’s unhealthy for clients. And for you, I believe it does the same thing. So I’m going to leave you the same way I leave you at the end of every episode of the Health REBELs podcast…
Keep the oath– keep the Health REBELs oath.
I hope that episode helped give you some steps you can take to break free from common standards so that you can live a happier, healthier life. I’d love to continue to support you on that path to redefining healthy living. So I want to invite you to join my free Facebook group, the Health REBELs community. There we post daily content to redefine what healthy living means by following the holistic wheel and the REBEL of you will also get community support with like minded Health REBELs. If you’re not already a member search for the Health REBELs community on Facebook or go to facebook.com/groups/health REBELs I look forward to seeing you in there REBEL