The Quadrants of Diet and Exercise

I am constantly amazed at the great amount of discipline and free will people have just before they start a life-changing program. Of course, this lasts, usually, about a day. Years ago, I published an article about a diet I was doing for a short time and a guy challenged every reader on his blog to follow me—and him—into this great journey.

He quit after one day.

That’s about right for most people. Part of the problem is that all too often, people will decide to do a Warrior Diet (like a Two-Week Cayenne Pepper Liver Cleanse) mixed with a bus-bench workout program.

Let’s look at our four options in my second favorite way of seeing choices—after continuums, of course—the quadrants of diet and exercise.

	Park Bench Workout	Bus Bench Workout
Warrior Style Diet	Tough Diet with Reasonable Workouts	Tough Diet with Tough Workouts
King Style Diet	Reasonable Diet with Reasonable Workouts	Reasonable Diet with Tough Workouts

I think by using the words reasonable and tough, I show my hand a little bit about this point, but I have yet to come up with better. I feel like I need to wave my hands around and say ‘you know’ a lot when I explain it. But, you know, reasonable is repeatable, doable, and believable.

Tough is going to make you wake up at night worrying about the workout or diet.

It shouldn’t be a shock that I suggest reasonable diets and reasonable workouts for most of your year and life. This would work really well if we were all automatons.

Like I’m always trying to remind you, what you ate is much more an issue than this marvelous imaginary world of ‘what you are going to eat.’ The Red Queen of Alice in Wonderland would disagree with this, of course. I think most people fall in love with her great insight that’s far from my view of things—

“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else—if you run very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.”

“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”*

Most people in the fitness industry slide over to the Warrior Style diets and bus-bench workouts. Honestly, few of us have the internal motivation to take on burning both ends of the candle. The Red Queen would love to see you run faster and faster to go, usually, nowhere and, come to think of it, this is exactly what treadmills and exercycles do. I wrote extensively about this in Never Let Go—few of us have the free will, time and opportunity to be so disciplined to do both tough diets and tough workout programs at the same time.

Now, of course, you are the exception, as I am usually told. A very drunk person once said to me, “I’m all about discipline,” both hands filled with food and drink. And, no, I was not talking to a mirror. That time.

I can certainly see periods of tough diets and reasonable workouts for many people. I’ve done this with various diets from Atkins Induction to the F Plan Diet. This approach works well for tightening up after a holiday or a vacation. There is a myriad of three-day, twelve-day and two-week blitz diets on the internet, and new ones appear daily. It might sound counter to what you’ve been reading, but when someone says, “I’m doing the Three-Day Blitz Diet,” I support it as best I can.

Sometimes these little experiments can get a person back on the path. Losing five to seven pounds in a few days is certainly enough reward for the sacrifice of eating much less for a bit. This is not a lifestyle, but you will find that many religious traditions have this kind of communal fast built into the yearly cycle, too. It works, for a little while.

Reasonable diets with tough workouts is the basic template for athletes. There comes a time of year when we need to do The Big Push. It’s ‘all hands on deck’ time and we need to bring up the qualities necessary to succeed. It’s nice to be in reasonable shape going into this ramping process, and this is a fact missed by many. Being in pretty good shape most of the time trumps being on the razor’s edge of perfection.

As Mark Reifkind reminds us, “The first step down after a peak is a cliff.” These are strong words and well worth thinking about when you decide to go on some epic training program while eating only 500 calories a day. Oh, you can do it, but should you? For more on this, read Jurassic Park. Just because you could do something, doesn’t mean you should.

One of my primary goals as a coach is to get you to think about training—and later, diet—in a reasonable, appropriate way. Eventually, these strategies will apply to the rest of your life as well.

I want you to think about and address relationships, community involvement and living your life well beyond the next few decades.

Not long ago, I was in my living room defending the idea of the spiraling of goals. (The more work you do, the more rest, play, and prayer you need. And the same applies to all three.) “It won’t work; you’re telling me I need to make more time!”

The ensuing discussion highlighted the problem with most diet and exercise regimes—the person was in the gym up to three hours a day! The problem was this: Of those three hours, most of it was spent foam rolling, doing dozens of correctives, dynamic mobility moves, and assorted stuff before getting on the treadmill for his cardio. In other words, he was in the gym a long time doing everything, but, in so many ways…nothing.

I took him to Dave Turner’s Hercules Barbell Club. Precisely at 10:00 o’clock, we started jumping jacks and Dave’s long but fast warmup circuit. We then grabbed sticks and went through the basics movements of lifting. Next, we went to the barbells and did 26 sets of exercise under Dave’s eagle eye. We put the equipment away, gathered together to chant the mottos of the Club and walked out the door.

It lasted for one hour. My friend, who could barely walk the next day, told me he understood where all those hours of spending time with family and community were going to come from in his new schedule. Reasonable doesn’t mean easy. As John Powell always says, “I said it was simple, not easy.”

Reasonable looks so, well, reasonable on paper. In practice, it is often the hardest thing we can do.

If I’ve convinced you that reasonable diets and exercise programs trump a few days or weeks of insanity, you’ll be far further ahead. I’ve done my best to show what a prudent approach to health, fitness, and longevity can provide, but the rest is up to you.

Jerry Seinfeld said it best— "But the pressure is on you now. This book is filled with funny ideas, but you have to provide the delivery. So when you read it, remember: timing, inflection, attitude. That's comedy. I've done my part. The performance is up to you." ~Jerry Seinfeld, SeinLanguage

The pressure is on you now. The performance is up to you.