Stawicki - The Fitness Expert Next Door: How to Set and Reach Realistic Fitness Goals in 10 Minutes a Day: Parenting Your Smart Underachiever With Consistency and Love

How to Change Your Life in 10 Minutes a Day: The Fitness Expert Next Door

By Michal Stawicki

Copyright 2013 by Michal Stawicki. All Rights Reserved.

1. Introduction

I plan to make a series of booklets sharing my experiences of my life transformation. The one about weight loss is first. I am not a fitness guru, not even a personal trainer. I'm not a diet specialist. On the other hand, while not being any of above I did manage to lose 15% of my body weight (I'm a short and skinny guy, in absolute numbers it is just 25 lbs). I can do 100 consecutive pushups, 54 consecutive dips, 33 consecutive chin ups. And I didn't need any fitness guru, personal trainer, gym membership or diet consultant to do this. I didn't spend a lot of time or a lot of money. Weight loss is just a byproduct of my life's transition. And my fitness form is just a byproduct of my weight loss.

I'm a busy person - a full time employee (I spend about 18 hours a week commuting), father of three and a husband, a church community member, a blogger. But I discovered I don't need a lot of time (in daily terms) or money to lose weight. By sharing my story and advice I want to convince you, that you don't either.

I intended this book to show purely my personal story, but then I ran across an old friend of mine that I hadn't seen in 10 years. He is also a busy father, husband and employee. And he also lost about 12% of bodyweight on his own. It made me think that my story is not so unique. Well, it is of course, because every human being is unique, nonetheless there are lots and lots of ordinary people's stories who get fitter, who changed their lives for better.

I was already writing this book when I stumbled upon research published last year in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine showing exactly that. They surveyed over 4000 obese people (BMI >29.9) among whom over 2500 reported an attempt to lose weight. Over 1500 got significant results. Research showed also that simple strategies were a greater success factor than participating in a commercial weight loss program.

Over 60% of fatties who attempted to lose weight got significant results!

Weight loss is not rocket science. It's not something reserved for the privileged, movie stars and TV presenters. Ordinary folks burdened with duties, jobs and families can do it, too. Thousands of people like you and me do it every year, every month, every day. Your neighbor did it. You can do it, too.

Les Brown said: "You will fail your way to success."

And he is so right! I failed my way to weight loss. I had vague thoughts about losing some weight as long as 5.5 years ago. I started seriously losing some pounds a year ago. 54 months of failure! I did everything backwards. I started from the totally wrong point and gradually drifted in the right direction. And I found tactics which bring results.

I'm not going to impose my super effective fitness program on you and charge $39 for it.

You don't need my knowledge to lose weight. Not that it is insufficient, it allowed me to get my results. The knowledge is at your fingertips - the Internet is full of diets, workouts and fitness programs. They work for some people, for other people - they don't. I don't accuse the fitness industry of preying on the naivety of their prospects. All those different programs have their advantages and are effective - under specific conditions. If you do what they say, when they say and in the way they say, you (usually) get the results. But the problem is, you must bend to those rules and there is no universal detailed method which will work for everyone.

Imposing my rules on you will not be necessarily effective anyway. For example my wife decided to lose some weight when she noticed she was several pounds heavier than me. She asked me for advice, I answered: "eat carrots as a snack", because it was what worked for me. She did it and got a stomach pain. I didn't even propose she follow the murderous workout program I practice, due to one simple reason - she hates physical exercises. From all the physical activities the one she enjoys most is shopping. To be specific - shopping for outfits.

What you need is an incentive. An internal motivation. A story which will make you think that this is actually doable in your case, too. A few simple tips that will point you in the right direction. A fundament of "10 minutes philosophy", which you can make your very own life philosophy. This book is intended to help you to come up with your strategy, that will work for you, so you can decide on your conditions, your time frames, your methods and your results. And above all, that will be believable for you, so you actually will start, will take action based on this strategy.

Ten minutes

I'm deeply convinced that daily, consistent action absolutely must lead to results. Period. Well, to say that "I'm convinced" is putting it mildly. I KNOW that daily, sustained action brings results.

I know it because I do practice this rule in many areas of my life. I focus daily on specific actions, committing 10 minutes to them. I do track my results. And I do see them improving. I got results in such different areas as weight loss, finances, learning skills and relationships. I strongly suppose that it is a universal law applicable to absolutely ALL areas of life.

If you do something daily and you are not getting the desired results it simply means you are putting at least as much daily and sustainable effort against those results. Let me give you a practical example. If you exercise 10 minutes a day, the same routine day by day by day, your muscles have to became stronger and your weight must drop, UNLESS you counteract your exercises by introducing more calories to your diet or by lying on the couch for the rest of the day.

The more action, the better results, up to some reasonable level - take a look at the chart below:

The shape of the curve is called normal distribution in probability research. It is in statistics something like the number in math. As can be found in many equations describing the texture of the universe, normal distribution can be used to describe a multitude of quantities in physics and measurements in biology including IQ, height, weight and many more. According to central limit theorem the mean of a large number of random variables tends to normal distribution. And in our big and complicated world a lot of effects are presented by a large number of random data. I did study the statistics (years ago) and still don't understand most of this stuff and it's out of the scope of this book anyway. If you are curious, it is explained in a forthright way here: http://askville.amazon.com/Central-Limit-THeorem-apply-statistics-life/AnswerViewer.do?requestId=7620607

Firstly, to drive a point home (and to get away from scientific theories) please compare my pictures from the beginning of the book with the photos of my friend:

I lost about 25 lbs in 10 months, Nathan lost over 40 lbs within 90 days. I used about 25 minutes a day for my overall fitness program, his daily walk to a grocery store - and it was just a small part of his program - took him more than 30 minutes every day.