|
|
||||
|
|
Greg Landry's Articles.. Interview
With Chris Widener G: Okay, let’s get started. We have the privilege of having Chris Widener with us today. Chris is a nationally know speaker and consultant. He consults primarily business growth, personal growth, is that right Chris? Chris: Yeah, primarily people who are high achievers who you know, have
already attained some success in their life, but kind of that extra edge
to go forward even more. G: And he also promotes
and produces seminars, meetings and does a little bit of everything. He is
a joy to hear, very inspirational and motivational. Chris, we are glad to have you! Chris: Glad to be here. Thanks a
lot for having me! G: His website is
madeforsuccess.com. He has a couple of free newsletters there and a lot of
helpful information. Well Chris, weight loss as you know, is a difficult task. As it is with
many difficult tasks that we face, having the motivation to persevere and
hang in there when times get tough usually makes the difference between
actually being successful at it and not. I know that that is one of your
areas of expertise. Could you talk to us a little bit today about motivation and
particularly direct this towards exercise and weight loss? Chris: Well, just feel free to jump in Greg, if I can clarify anything
as I am going through. G: Sure. Chris: I am thirty-seven and a half years old. About two and a half years ago, I was 35 and you start thinking about a lot of different things when you are 35 because you are kind of moving out of being a young kid into being a middle-aged guy. I have a wife and four kids. My children are now 13, 12, one will be 10 next week, and the other is eight. My boy is the oldest and I have three younger girls. At age 35, I looked at myself and said, “You know what? You are just FAT!” I looked at it and I got so much going on. I used to be skinny growing up. Not skinny….I have always been what they call “big boned”. But I got out of college and exercised less, I played three sports in high school and I played college basketball. Then I got out and all of a sudden I wasn’t doing that every day exercise. As a bachelor I ate my share of canned chili and macaroni and cheese and Top Ramen. All kinds of fatty kinds of stuff. And then I married a woman who was a home economics major and a great cook. Her mom taught her to cook very, very well. And so, you know, all of a sudden I was gaining a lot of weight. At
age 35, two and a half years ago, I looked at myself and weighed myself
and I was 224. I was 5’11” and weighed 224 pounds.
When I played college basketball I weighed about 180 pounds. So I
had put on about 45 pounds. I had never lifted weights before.
In fact, I don’t even know how I passed the weight lifting class
in high school. I don’t
know how I passed it, because I have never lifted weights. I must have
just cheated on telling them what I did!
But I got through it, took a weight lifting class and barely lifted
anything at the time. So I had no exercise in my life. I had no weight lifting in
my life. I was 35 and primarily
two things made me really take a look at where I was at.
I mean, you know, I could always go out and buy new clothes. A lot of people, that’s what they do, just keep
growing and growing and growing and—Greg, you said in our conference the
other night that people pack on a little weight every year and they just
get bigger and bigger and bigger. So I knew that I had to make an
adjustment and go backwards in my life in the area of weight, for two
primary reasons. Number one: I carry all of my weight in the stomach area, as is typical
I guess, in men. But, what
the studies have shown and what I have read and researched, and you can
tell me Greg, if I am incorrect. But what I have understood is that those
who carry their weight in the abdominal region primarily are at a much
higher risk of heart disease and heart attack, etc. G: That’s right,
Chris. Chris: So I looked at that. I said, “You know, I don’t want to have a heart attack.” My dad died when he was 41. He died of cancer. So I knew what it was like to grow up without a dad. That brought me to the second reason. I looked at my kids and thought, “You know, I don’t want my kids to go without a dad. Secondly, I don’t want to embarrass my kids.” You know? Show up and be all portly. Kind of be the pudgy guy, “That’s my Dad,” you know? I spent a lot of money
on a gym membership and I knew that I would use it because I hate wasting
money. So, I went out and got this family membership, a
very nice health club right in town, about four minutes from our house.
And I started working out. I did 30 minutes a day, 40 minutes a day
on stair stepper, the EFX machine, and treadmills.
They have some bikes. I did a little bit of the recline bike. What I
decided was that I was going to go every day. I was going to skip two
Sundays a month. So I was going about 28 days a month. Now, I am a person
of extreme rigidity in my schedule. I am a person of habit. So every day,
my day starts this way: I get up at 6:30 or 7:00 and go down to my
computer. So I decided that what I really needed to do, because I am a scheduled person, even though my life style is such that I can do anything I want any time I want, I set myself schedules. I am a creature of habit. So I get up at six thirty or seven, go down and answer all my emails, then I go to Starbucks. Every day. I buy the paper. I buy a tall drink coffee and sit and read the paper. I leave there and go to the health club. Every day at nine o’clock, I go to the health club. Mainly what I do is watch Sports Center. Because I don’t have a television at home, so I keep up on sports by watching Sports Center and I work out on the EFX or the treadmill or the stair stepper. So I knew that for me, if I crammed it into my schedule then it would get done. Now, I give myself a couple of hours to get there, to do my exercise. After 40 minutes of cardio I go and lift. I rotate this way. I do arms one day, which is basically biceps and triceps. Then I do back and legs the next day. So you see, it’s A, B, C, F. In fact, I have an article on my website called that. So I do arms the first day, back and legs the next day, chest the next day, and then the next day shoulders. Then I take a break from that. Then I go back into the ABCs again. It is just—I am not a
heavy lifter, but I do enough so that I really started toning up and I
added a considerable amount of muscle. So I was losing weight and adding
muscle. That is my schedule. Every day, 9:00 a.m.
I did it today. In fact Greg, if you remember right, you wrote me an email
and said, “When are you available?” And I said, “Well, I am available any time, but I prefer
after eleven.” Do you
remember that I wrote that to you? G: Right. Chris: Because I really try to guard that. Lots of times people will say, “When are you free? Are you free at ten?” and I say, “No, I have an appointment from nine to eleven.” And it is an appointment. It is an appointment for myself at the health club. And very, very few people are allowed to encroach on that. Because I view it as something that is good for me. It is good for my family. It’s good for stress relief. It is just good for my health and my self-esteem. All of that. So I really invest in myself every day from nine to eleven in that way. And you might say, “Do you work out all that time?” No, I don’t work out all that time. I will tell you why I give myself extra time. I truly believe that if you are going to push yourself, you also have to reward yourself. The way I reward myself is, every day after I am done with 30-40 minutes of cardio and my weight lifting for that day—my weight lifting generally just consists of three or four exercises, three sets of eight. I am not doing massive workouts, but enough to keep myself toned. After I am done with that, I go down to the fitness sauna and the hot
tub. That is my reward. So
that is why it takes me a little longer than just popping in for 20
minutes of cardio and leaving again. But, you know—anybody could do that. So that is one of the ways that I really started getting
myself in shape, was just scheduling it. It HAD to be part of my schedule.
I know other people that belong to clubs, they have to do it at 5:30 in
the morning. They have to do it after work at 6:00. You know? However
they do it, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, etc, etc. But it is a part of their schedule. I think that that is imperative for us, whether it is losing weight, staying in shape, whether it is personal development. If you are going to grow, you have to have some sort of a schedule for listening to tapes and reading books and that kind of thing. What I tell people is, if you just read 15 minutes a day, which is not a big chunk—over the course of the year you are going to get through a lot of really good books. Or, every day on your way to work you listen to audio tapes that are going to help you grow personally. And then on your way home from work you can listen to whatever you want to. The discipline of
scheduling things into our lives really allows us to grow and develop and
make changes in our lives. If
you leave it to something where you are just saying, “Well, yeah. I
really need to do this. I will do it when I get to it, or when I remember,
or whatever..” You are never going to do it. So, that was really the first
thing that I realized that I needed to think about as it related to my
getting back into shape. The other thing that
really helped me, and it goes back to the two reasons I gave—I talk a
lot about motivation and I have a lot of motivational materials on my
site. But one of the things that I always mention to people when
talking about motivation is when—When we talk about motivation we tend
to think of a motivational speaker. You tend to think of a motivational speaker as someone who is
high on the intellectual scale or high on the emotional scale. You tend to
think of them as being high on the emotional scale, right? High on the emotional—but when you look at the root word of the word motivation, it is motive. And when you look up the definition of motive, it is a ‘reason to act’. So I tend to believe that one of the things we can do to sort of readjust ourselves as we are thinking about motivation, is to think of it not so much as emotional [we will talk a little bit about the emotional part], but to stop thinking of it as this, “Wait until the spirit moves me or I am feeling pumped about exercise.” It is to give ourselves
a logical reason to act and then to give ourselves the discipline and a
schedule that will enable us to act out of that reason.
Those were very important for me as I thought about it. Now, I have an article on my website called “What To Do When You Don’t Feel Like Doing Anything”. I think it’s called “Finding Motivation…What To do When You Don’t Feel Like Doing Anything”. Now if you guys are like me, there are times when you just DO NOT FEEL LIKE DOING IT. And so, I sort of set myself up as a person who does 30-40 minutes of cardio and then 30-40 minutes of weight lifting. There are times when I don’t feel like doing TEN minutes of either!
But here is what I have done. I decided that a little bit is better
than nothing. So what I will do is, I will go in and I might just do 15
minutes of cardio. Period. I don’t do 30 or 40. I don’t do any weight
lifting. But I figure, you
know, I can do 15 minutes. I can force myself to do 15 minutes. And then I
might go spend 30 minutes in the hot tub. So you might say, “Chris, it
doesn’t sound like a workout. It sounds like more like an excuse to go
sit in the hot tub!” Well, I am finding an excuse to sit in the hot tub!
By the same token, 15 minutes is better than nothing.
And Greg, you pointed out something the other night in a conference call that you did for me, and that is if a person works out three days a week and then they double to six days a week, you would think that they would double the effect on their body. But what you pointed out is that you quadrupled the effect on your body. So it is better for me to go force myself to do 15 minutes. I will take, I will find all sorts of tricks. You guys might think this is dumb, but I trick myself a lot! I will say, “Okay, I can do 15 minutes because it is actually two sections of the newspaper.“ So I will go in and set
the treadmill at 3.3 miles per hour and I will take two sections of
newspaper and I will say, “I am doing two sections of the newspaper on
the treadmill.” That’s enough. And those are the days that I just don’t feel like doing
anything. So I will kind of
reward myself that way. That helps me to feel motivation when I don’t
feel like doing anything. A couple of other tips: Just start small. If you don’t know how to get involved in an exercise program or something like that just start small! Start out by walking half a mile. Then as you get to finding that you like it or whatever, switch to ¾ of a mile, a mile, two miles or whatever. Another good thing is to listen to motivational tapes, audio CDs, that type of thing. That’s a good thing. I double up by watching Sports Center. I like sports, so I figure, “Hey! I can spend half an hour and catch up on all the sports.” And I am also going to be working out. And I can run on the treadmill or do high level EFX effects or whatever and still watch Sports Center and take care of something that is of interest to me. Maybe you have a friend you don’t connect with very often, but you really wish you did. Well, maybe you say, “Hey, why don’t we walk together for 20 minutes a day? That way we can kind of keep up to date.” Maybe you find a friend that you want to keep up to date with and maybe they also need to do an exercise program. By pairing up you get to kill two birds with one stone, so to speak. You are able to exercise and you are able to reconnect with that friend on a regular basis and increase your friendship. By the nature of doing
it, you end up with an accountability partner. Maybe you can talk about
the foods you ate in that day, or what is coming up that you are afraid
you are going to overeat, or whatever.
So. Those are some tricks that I do in terms of my exercise. Now, I wanted to point out a couple of things as I thought about the
conference call, that you can do in your eating. It is another thing that
I do to limit my eating throughout the holiday season.
For example: Tomorrow I am going to go to my brother’s house with
my whole family, and there is going to be all sorts of food. What I do is,
I decide beforehand what I am going to eat.
And I think that this whole aspect of deciding before hand is a
powerful thing for keeping us on track, whether it is financial or weight
or business, career, whatever. If you decide beforehand, think about the options
you have and decide beforehand what you are going to do— Like, for example tomorrow: I know there is going to be turkey. And there is going to be potatoes. There is going to be corn. There is going to be goodies. There is going to be, X, Y, Z, L, M, N, O, P…fill in the blank, right? So I have decided that I am going to allow myself, if I take seconds on anything, let me take seconds on the turkey! Because turkey is really not that bad for you. It is the LEAST bad of all the things you are going to eat tomorrow. And I have decided that I will allow myself a healthy serving of potatoes, a healthy serving of corn and all the different things that I want to eat. If it relates to appetizers, I am going to say, “Okay. I am going to allow myself two appetizers and that’s it. Two appetizers.” So I know that I am not limiting myself like, “I can’t have any appetizers. I can only have turkey and corn.” I am allowing myself to
eat by deciding beforehand. There might be seven different types of
appetizers and I will say, “I am going to eat one each of my two
favorites. Period.” The I wait for the meal and eat the meal. After the meal,
normally you look around and go, “Wow. There are cookies, there is
chocolate, there is cake and pie.”
Well, I decided, I will allow myself one cookie if there are
cookies, and one slice of one of the pies, and that is it. So you know? It is probably not the best thing to do, but again, it’s Thanksgiving and if you allow yourself to splurge—I think the key is to decide beforehand. To make that decision beforehand so that you don’t have to go, “Well, I am going to eat until I am full,” or “I am going to eat until I swell up!” You know, how a lot of people do on these days. So, I think that that is a real key thing to disciplining ourselves. I am really big on this
idea of disciplining ourselves because I have found that the people who
are most successful in life, whether it is financially, career, family,
weight loss, health—they are people who are able to successfully
discipline themselves into healthy habits.
And those are the kinds of things I think are really, truly
successful in helping us achieve anything in life, whether it is again,
money, saving, positive relationships, weight loss, etc.
As I think about the kinds of things that
you wanted me to talk about today, Greg, those are the things that I try
to implement most in my life. They have been very good at helping me drop
weight, gain muscle mass, fit into the kinds of clothes that I want, and
that type of thing. So those are my sort of “Top Hits” for getting motivated,
staying motivated. And a lot of motivation I think really comes down to a
motive, which is a reason to act, and the discipline to follow it out. G: Great, Chris.
You know, that is one of the points I was going to ask you
about—about having the motive, having the reasons to do it. One of the things that I really encourage people to
do, and I just wanted to get your take on this: Is to sit down, maybe over
a period of a couple of days, and every time that they think of a reason
that they want to lose weight, they want to be healthier, etc, to make a
list, a very personal detailed list of their motives. In other words,
“Why is this important to me?” Is it important to have it on paper? Chris: Yes. I definitely think that it is important to have it on paper. In fact, Napoleon Hill in his book, “Think and Grow Rich”, when he interviewed Andrew Carnegie, Andrew Carnegie said that the number one thing to do to attain wealth or success is to write things down. That was sort of the first time that anybody promoted this idea of absolutely writing it down. They have done studies and have found that people who write down their goals versus people who do not write them down are almost infinitely more successful. In fact, one of the biggest research projects they did was at in a Harvard class of 1955 or 1965, whatever. They brought them back 20 years later and asked them, “How many of you wrote down your goals, and how many of you didn’t?” What they found in the end was that the people who wrote down their
goals on a regular basis and followed them were earning seventy- five
percent more money than the people who weren’t, all of whom graduated
from Harvard, the same college, in the same year. So they all basically came from the same place, and
they found that people who wrote down their goals are much more likely to
achieve them. I wanted to mention one other thing that you talked about, a motive or a reason to act. I remember reading a story about one guy who was significantly overweight by a couple hundred pounds and just never really found the reason to lose weight. Well, his daughter became very ill and needed a transplant. I think it was a kidney transplant. Both of her kidneys had failed and she needed a match. Well, they found out that her father was a match. He was the only match in the family. They came to him and said, “Well, you are the match. The problem
is that we can’t do surgery on you because you are too heavy.” That
gave this man the REASON to act. And, over the course of about 11 months,
they put his daughter on dialysis just to keep her while her father lost
somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 pounds. That is what it took for him.
It took for him to say, “My daughter’s life is more important
to me than having that second piece of cheesecake every time.”
And so that is what it took. We don’t have to have it be something drastic. But the fact is that when you are overweight, there is something drastic. And that drastic setting is that you are much more likely to die at an early age. In fact, Reader’s Digest this past month had an article about things we are afraid of and things we are not. They said so many people were afraid of SARS. And SARS only killed 220 people and now it is basically gone. But is affected all sorts of travel and commerce, and international trade, all of these things. Very few people died from it. Well, 35,000 people a year die from the flu. And something like 180,000 people die every year from heart disease and heart attacks, a lot of which is due to being overweight. So the fact is that being overweight—we’re not afraid of it because it’s not immediate. SARS is the kind of thing where you say, “Oh, I am going to go to China and I am going to die!” But the fact is that you
are much more likely to die of heart disease if you are overweight, albeit
maybe in ten or fifteen years, than you EVER are to catch SARS even if you
went to the middle of Hong Kong, Shanghai or Bei Jing in the midst of the
height of the SARS craze. That to me is a reason to act, and one of the
primary reasons why I did it. Because
you know, some people might say, “Well, I’ll live to 60 and I will
lead a healthy life.” Well, the difference between living between 60 and
living until 75 is probably the difference between seeing eight
grandchildren and seeing 14 great-grandchildren. Those extra 15 years are
going to mean a lot. G: Great, Chris! Thanks. Well, we have a couple of minutes left. Let’s open it up for a couple of questions. Does anyone have questions or comments? Gwen: This is Gwen. I have
a question for Chris. When you joined the gym, I assume the whole family went. Chris: Yep. Gwen: So, you said your wife is a good cook.
So, she changed her style of cooking or what? Was it a family
agreement, that everybody would do the same thing? Chris: Yes. Absolutely. I mean, the kids dread it, you know? Going to the club every day! But we each go. And I was very purposeful about joining it because I knew that if I joined one of these $14 a month deals I would never use it. So we pay $175 a month for this gym membership. The fact is that they don’t make a nickel off of us. Because I take my shower there everyday. My wife gets up and goes in the morning and she takes her shower there. We are using their water. We are wearing out their equipment. My kids go there five days a week, every day, Monday through Friday. My wife at three or four o’clock. I usually don’t get home until six, so I know that at some time in the afternoon she takes the kids down there. We tell the kids, “You can swim and play and do all you want, as soon as you are done doing laps.” So we have created this lap system. At a certain age they have to increase to a certain number of laps. So my 13 year-old son has to do 25 down and back, and then he can do whatever he wants. He can go mess around, sit in the hot tub, throw balls, whatever he wants. My eight-year-old, she started this when she was seven, and we made her do eight down-and-backs. Our pool is probably 25
or maybe 30 yards. It takes her 10 to 15 minutes, but, “Until you do the
laps….after that you can spend 45 minutes building little floatee
rafts.” We have just incorporated it into that. We really try to watch the kinds of foods that we
eat because it makes no sense to work out and then kill it all with high
fat foods. But yes, it was a
commitment that our family made. Gwen: Great. G: And you are creating a healthy
lifestyle for them, Chris—an active lifestyle. You are making that part
of their daily routine, and I think that is vital. Chris: Exactly, Greg. It teaches them. They might grow up and decide not to do it the way
we do it, but at least we gave them the example. The other thing we are trying to do—The studies that I have
read show that if you are overweight as a child, you are more likely to be
overweight as an adult. We are trying to keep them [healthy] and develop
habits that will be very positive for them as they grow older as well. We
feel like if they are at good weights as children, that is more than
likely to extend itself into adulthood. G: Right. Well, Chris,
we really appreciate you being here. You have been a big help with lots of
good information. It is just a pleasure having you on.
Once again, Chris’ website, if you want to swing by, is
madeforsuccess.com. There are
lots of good articles and lots of good information there. Chris: Lots of articles
from Greg Landry!!! G: Well….[laughs]. I appreciate it. We will talk again soon! Chris: Thank you very much! Bye all! Author and exercise physiologist, Greg Landry, offers a very supportive, effective weight loss program for women. It is the most successful weight loss program available for women. Get details and a free newsletter at his site: http://www.GregLandryFitness.com copyright 1995-2008 by Greg Landry, M.S. |
|
||