Having a look at Instagram stories and the first story I see is an American guy with over 500,000 followers getting ready to start his summer cut and throwing a full pack of cookies in the bin saying “I’m going to miss these”.

That’s 500,000 young impressionable people who are going to see that and think “Oh I can’t eat cookies anymore now either”, That is not fitness and I don’t care what anyone says, that is not helping young people develop a good relationship with food or themselves.

Getting lean is great for people liking your photos etc.. But as a Personal Trainer, it does not benefit the people I work with!

Me spending more time reading,  listening and learning more information about concerning issues my clients go through is beneficial to my clients. Me re-investing money back into my business to make it better for my clients is benefiting them.

So all of that time I used to dedicate to trying to get as lean as possible, I now dedicate to making myself a better coach and to making my plans the best they can be.

I think this plays into fitness as well.

Every day we can be active is a blessing, everyday we can eat what we want, we are in a great position.

I don’t understand why people would give up so much happiness in the pursuit to change their body composition by a couple of % that they’re only going to stay at for a week or two before they gain back fat.

Now, by all means, go ahead and diet. But diet smartly, don’t think you need to throw out all of the cookies out of your house,  you can never have a pizza again or you can’t go out at the weekend!

Don’t take things so serious, this approach is 100% short term and will never last!!

What I’m trying to say is, if you see someone showing incredible discipline to try get as lean as possible. That’s fine, that’s what they want to do, but it does not mean you have to adopt the same approach. For 99% of us getting extremely lean is not going to pay the bills, it’s not going to get you a pass in your exams, it’s not going to look after the kids.

We all have much bigger priorities in life, so instead of viewing fitness as getting lean, let’s view fitness as taking care of ourselves. Developing a reasonably good level of Strength & Cardiovascular fitness so that we have an abundance of energy to get through the day.

This is what fitness is about, not throwing cookies into the bin for a couple of months so your picture on Instagram can get a couple of 100 likes.