Fat to Fit Real Estate Investors

Mike:Welcome to Real Estate Investing Secrets. We’re all looking for freedom and the opportunity to live better, more fulfilling lives, but most of us were trained our entire lives to work for someone else and chase their dreams. How can we use real estate investing as a vehicle to achieve financial freedom? My life is dedicated to answering your real estate investing questions and helping you build an investing business that allows you to change your life and the world around you, and to enable you to turn your dreams of financial freedom into a reality. My name is Mike Hambright from flipnerd.com, and your questions get answered here on the Real Estate Investing Secrets Show.
What’s up, freedom fighters? Hey, welcome back for another episode. This is actually episode number 460. This show is going to be unique. I told you guys at the beginning of this year we’ve kind of changed the focus of our show a little bit and some of it is really more lifestyle-based necessarily than just real estate investing, but it’s all tied together and it’s going to make sense after this show.
For some of you that don’t know me personally, I posted a few things on Facebook lately, some Facebook Live stuff. And those of you that do know me know that as of right now I’ve dropped about 30 pounds over the past maybe four months, let’s say, at this point. And I did that largely by hiring this gentleman with me today, Adam White. So he’s a personal trainer, really kind of helped with a lot of mindset and some habit changing. We’re going to talk about kind of living a healthy lifestyle, or a better lifestyle, as an entrepreneur and how a lot of us kind of throw that to the wayside as we try to build our business, which is exactly what I have done over the past 10 or 11 years.
So it’s going to be a good topic, I think, because hopefully it’s resonating with a lot of you. And if you haven’t lost sight of your health, then congratulations, that’s important. But I think too many of us do and it’s something that I kind of set aside and thought, well . . . I didn’t consciously think about anything, is part of the problem, is I just thought, “Well, the priority right now is growing the business, the priority this month is doing these deals, the priority right now is paying the bills,” whatever it might be. And in the process, you know, kind of lost sight of some things that are important.
So that’s what we’re going to talk about today, is kind of this entrepreneurial curse that we put ourselves in sometimes of not focusing enough on our health. And, you know, if the ultimate thing happens that we want, we build this super successful business, and then you have a bunch of health problems or you’re a fat ass and you’re unhappy with yourself, then that’s not good either. We’re not going to be happy with that.
So, anyway, Adam, how are you doing, my friend?
Adam:I’m doing really, really good, Mike. Thanks for having me on. I’m looking forward to chatting about this, and I’m hoping that my English accent isn’t too hard to understand.
Mike:Yeah, you sound kind of funny. Where are you from, man?
Adam:I’m from Australia. No. No, no, no. I’m from Somerset in England. So I’m from the dreary weather country, so we don’t get sun here.
Mike:Yeah. We get a lot of sun in Texas where I’m at, but somehow I still either manage to be either red or white and I never really get a tan.
Adam:Yeah, it would [inaudible 00:03:08].
Mike:Yeah. But, so Adam works with entrepreneurs and business owners usually to help with some changing, personally, and mindset. And truthfully he’s one of, out of 460 episodes, one of . . . I don’t want to say there’s nobody else that’s been on, but very few people that are not fellow real estate investors that we’re talking to. But the truth is for me real estate investing is a tool to live a richer life. It’s not the end-all-be-all. And so that’s why he’s here with me.
So, Adam, talk a little bit about your, I guess, you know, a little bit high level of why you think a lot of entrepreneurs, in the name of success of their business, become unsuccessful in their health, or in their kind of personal journey of their health.
Adam:Sure. I mean it’s very easily done and it’s an issue which a lot of us, if we were honest with ourselves, are suffering from. But the reality is when you’re trying to create your own business, there’s a level of motivation that you need to push yourself to be able to, you know, get to where you want to go, which means that you have to commit yourself hours. You know, just straight out hours in itself. And what tends to happen is the more we push our business up, the more energy we use and the more the focus and the priority on our health tends to go down.
So what you tend to see happening is people who are really successful, their health tends to be kind of right down here in the gutter, and then the mindset tends to go, “Oh, Christ, I need to fix this now. Now that I’ve got this, I can fix this.”
Mike:Right.
Adam:The danger, of course, is that you could end up trying and striving and striving and, you know, getting up earlier and working later and grabbing food on the go and just thinking, “That’s okay, I’m just going to get the energy any way I can,” coffees and fast sugars, to keep going and keep putting that effort level in and hustling. And you don’t make it because your health depletes before you get a chance. And then you end up with no business and no health.
Mike:Right.
Adam:That’s something which, you know, which my passion is to make sure we can avoid that from happening. You know?
Mike:Yeah. Yeah, and that’s kind of why I called it “the curse.” I think a lot of us . . . I mean let’s just say in real estate specifically, and small businesses as a whole, you’ve got, like, guys like Gary V. and other people that are talking about how you need to work your face off. And, you know, I don’t think any of us think that’s the goal, but we tend to celebrate the hustle part of the business. Which, you know, I’ve worked real, real hard for a long time, I know you work hard, and I think that you get to this maturity level . . . I don’t know if I would start to say, “Maybe I’m more mature now.” I’m 44 years old and maturity is kind of . . . No, but truthfully there is a point where I have more business maturity, I think more about my life. I’ve gotten to that point, or I’m getting to that point. It’s a journey, right? Before, I think, it’s too late.
But I do think the problem is a lot of people correlate success in business with an endless amount of hustle. And in that kind of journey of, “I have to hustle all the time” it’s real easy to say, “I don’t have time to do the things that are important to my health.”
Adam:Absolutely. And that’s generally where most people end up, is pushing and pushing for the hustle, you know, “One more deal. I’ll go to bed when I finish this, this last little . . . You know, this spreadsheet,” or whatever. And before you know it it’s midnight and you’re getting next to no sleep.
And the reality is you’re right. When you look at people like Gary V., they almost promote that type of lifestyle. But I’m pretty sure that if you look into Gary V.’s life with a little bit more detail, you’ll probably find there’s some kind of exercise schedule going in there. I know that if you take someone like Richard Branson, I mean this guy is worth $5.2 billion at the moment. He’s got over 400 companies, 67 years old. And if you can sit there and have a chat to him, you’ll see, he’s said time and time again, “I seriously doubt I’d be as successful as I am if I didn’t focus on my health and fitness.”
That’s easy to kind of look at somebody though who has got $5.2 billion and it’s like, “Well, I bet he hustled at some point.” And maybe he did, maybe he did. But the reality is that you can look at all the successful people in the industry, across the board with entrepreneurs, and you’ll find that the correlation between being healthy . . . And we don’t mean walking around in abs. We mean having high levels of energy, having a body that is in shape, which helps keep that energy and focus up will be the [inaudible 00:07:37].
Mike:Right. Yeah. Yeah, the interesting thing is . . . You know, I want to kind of share my journey a little bit. I mean the truth is nothing happened quickly on the way there, right? I mean I just got to a point to where I saw pictures of myself and I’m like, “Man, I got to change something here. Like, I’ve been, you know, postponing this for a while, many years,” like decades, right? Or maybe 10, 15 years. And the truth is for the first many years of my real estate investing business it was eating on the go is the way that I ate everything, like literally breakfast, lunch. I work in the car all the time, constantly driving around. And it’s just, certainly in America, it’s all too easy to not go through a drive-through or grab something really fast. And then also in America it’s like, “Well, the biggie size is like a nickel more and it comes with a gallon of Coke,” or something. And you just start to . . . We start to equate . . .
You and I have talked about this stuff before, about it’s kind of how you were raised, right? I was raised in the Midwest where if you didn’t clean your plate, you’re wasting. And you celebrate . . . If you’re not feeling good, you celebrate with food. If you are feeling good, you celebrate with food. Like everything is around food. Food, somehow in my life over many years, had become my entertainment. It was my outlet to feeling bad, my outlet to feeling good, what I do when I’m in a hurry. It’s just like everything is about . . . Like you find yourself at a meal and maybe asking somebody, “Well, what do you want to have for dinner?” like the next meal. Like you can never get away from this thing which is eating. And, you know, hopefully I’m not the only one that feels that way.
Adam:And you’re really not. I mean I speak to dozens of entrepreneurs a week and the correlation between everyone is so obvious. I mean the reality is food is a massive part of our lives. We can’t survive without it. You know, and it plays . . . It has different roles in our lives and how we feel. So you’re right to think . . . You know, like I said, we’ve chatted about this before. Sometimes it’s not really the case of focusing on saying things like, “Right, well, just don’t eat your whole meal if you’re full.” There can be something there from your childhood where your parents are saying to you, you know, “Look, finish your plate because we’re poor. We can’t afford to waste food.” Or the classic, “There are starving children in Africa, finish your plate.”
Mike:Right, right.
Adam:You know, and whereas, like, the reality is if your parents tell you when you’re a small child, “Don’t put your hand in the fire, you’ll get burned,” you know, “Be careful on the road, you’ll get run over,” and also, “Make sure you finish your plate because there are starving children in Africa,” you have no reason to not believe the third thing. The other two pieces of advice are sound. And whereas the reality is the third one doesn’t have any real logic. If you eat that burger or not, somebody in Africa is not particularly going to benefit or not benefit. But that then gets carried into your adult life. And then we begin to have a certain relationship with food, certain foods remind us of when we were kids.
You know, there’s a client I had a while back whose relationship with . . . What do you Americans call it? Meat loaf. With a meat loaf.
Mike:I love the meat loaf. Yeah.
Adam:Yeah. It’s a big thing, right? It’s a family type meal.
Mike:Yeah.
Adam:And he would have this from a pretty well-known fast-food chain, or restaurant, in America because it reminded him of his grandmother. It’s a subconscious thing, but it’s something which if you’re not careful can start to really jump in. Especially when we couple that with working hard and being stressed all the time, food then sort of takes on this reward system, this sort of relief system. It’s a way of being able to just, “Okay, I’ve got 10 minutes, I’ve got half an hour on my own at the end of the night, how can I enhance this so I can really enjoy my time off? Let’s get myself some chips, let’s get myself, you know, some takeaway.” And that’s the slippery slope.
Mike:And I think one of the things that happens, I know it happened for me and it probably happens to a lot of people, is it’s so easy to kind of punt and say, “I shouldn’t be doing this, I need to work out more, I need to exercise more, I need to lose weight, but I’m going to start next month.” Or, of course you know this, everybody wants to start on January 1st, which has no real . . . It adds no real value at all other than you just feel some obligation to come up with New Year’s resolutions. But, so it’s easy to punt and say, “Yeah, I need to, but not right now.”
Adam:Yeah. And that’s really one of the biggest issues, is that everyone has this. I mean one of the most common phrases I used to hear all the time which really made no sense, and of course it doesn’t make any sense, would be the phrase, “Okay, I just need to go away and lose some weight before I can come back, get fitter before I come back and work with you.” And that’s sort of such backwards logic, but I get how people’s brains go there because it’s really just a way of just pushing it away for a while.
Mike:Right.
Adam:Because the reality is 9 times out of 10 we don’t . . . Until we kind of really put ourselves in a position where we fully understand what’s getting in the way with our health, what our health is affecting, we don’t really feel that we need to particularly throw ourselves into changing that fully. Especially when we look around and we see everyone else around us kind of in the same boat, it tends to normalize the situation.
Mike:Yeah, yeah. I mean it’s a frequent sight in America. There’s an epidemic of people that are unhealthy and overweight and things like that, and it just starts to become kind of the new normal sometimes.
Adam:Exactly. “Look at Fred over there, he seems like he’s doing okay. He’s always happy and smiling. And he’s bigger than me, so I’m probably fine.”
Mike:Yeah.
Adam:But at the same time, you know, America is unfortunately leading the way in terms of diabetes and heart disease. You know, England is not too far behind. And, as a general rule, Western countries, this is becoming the norm.
Mike:Yeah.
Adam:And that’s something which is so easy to fall into, and then lose sight of. And unfortunately most people . . . The sad fact of life is most people don’t change their health until something scary happens.
Mike:Right, right, right. So the thing for me, Adam, the thing that really made a difference. And people listening, I want you to get some value. This is really what made a difference for me. I’m not the type to be on all these crazy diets, but over the past 10 years I promise you I had tried a few things and I would maybe lose 20 pounds or something and it would come right back on, right?
Because the problem is I did something extreme, like I would work out really hard for like a month and, like, eat lettuce, like iceberg lettuce, with no nutritional value. Something, just like you do this extreme, it’s not sustainable. And the reality is that by working with you, and I want people to get value out of this, is that I lost effectively a pound or a pound and a half a week. Like it came off a little bit faster early on because I changed my eating habits, but it’s changing habits and doing little things.
It’s the same thing, I’ve coached hundreds and hundreds of real estate investors to start their business and it’s the same thing. If I say, “Go make a million dollars,” nobody knows how to get started. But if I say, “Generate two or three leads a day, tell everybody that you meet . . . Hand out five business cards a day,” little bitty baby steps, small wins, and do that consistently, and it’s amazing how things really start to add up.
And it’s so intuitive to me now, but it just took, like, doing small things, sticking to it, seeing results that I could track, and knowing that, “Wow, this is easier than I thought.” And because I’m changing habits in the process, which is what you kind of conditioned in me to help with that, is that there was no extreme on the downward, I didn’t go lose 30 pounds in two weeks. I’ve lost it over time. And the truth is I’m losing about a pound a week now because I’m eating better and I have different habits.
And so I think in America, along with the fat epidemic and all the other health epidemics we talk about, is that people also have been conditioned that, “Well, when you want to lose weight, just go pop a few pills and it’s all just going to go away.” Like, that’s just not sustainable.
Adam:No, no, it’s not, and it’s such a shame. I mean the health and fitness industry is a billion-dollar a year industry and it’s unfortunate that it’s built off the back of a lot of crap. The majority of that stuff is just stuff that . . . You know, here’s the thing. I don’t really care . . . I’ve never cared about weight loss. I really care about weight maintenance. And anything that tells you that you can lose this much weight in this much time by taking this one pill or, you know, following this diet is, in itself, it’s so broad and it’s so unbespoke to you, it’s never going to work. Because the reality is the only way that each one of us can actually sustain weight loss and, you know, maintain a new weight, or get to a weight we should be, is to break our habits, mindset, and lifestyle down one piece at a time.
Mike:Yeah.
Adam:It’s the only thing that works. We can’t crowbar anything into our lives because there’s no plan out there that has been written with you in mind, with the fact that you might get up at 6:00, I might get up at 8:00, you might love fish, I might hate fish. There’s no point in you forcing fish down your gullet every other day because you think it will help you lose weight. And it will, but the minute you stop is the problem and you come back.
Mike:Yeah, yeah, and you haven’t changed habits. We tend to, like, say, “Well, I’m going to eat this,” but in the back of your mind you’re like, “Man, I can’t wait until I get another one of those big juicy cheeseburgers again,” or whatever.
Adam:Absolutely. And the big thing for me, this is the key area, is all of that comes down to what I call the Romeo-Juliet syndrome, which is we always want what we can’t have. So if you take something away from me, I want it. Think of a six-month-old baby, they’ve got your keys. How do you get your keys back? Give them something else, and then you get your keys. But if you just took the keys from that six-month-old baby, they’re going to scream the house down.
Mike:Right.
Adam:I’ve learned the hard way recently. But the reality is we’re no different, we’re just older versions of that baby. If you take something away from me, I might not physically scream, but I am going to feel like I’ve lost something and at some point I’m going to want to have it back. So when we say things like, “Okay, I’m going to stop eating this, this, and this, and just eat this, follow this diet,” you’re effectively saying, “I’m no longer allowed this thing,” and our brains just don’t work that way. We take something away, we want it back. You know, it’s just the way that we’re designed.
So instead it comes down to an approach, and you’ll know this from working with me, where I never say to anyone, “You can’t eat this, this, or this.” I care more about how you go about eating it, and I care more about adding new things in. Because if we can get you to a point where if we add in a meal that you love so much that there’s no willpower required for you to eat it, you’re just like, “I can really eat this?” “Yeah, you can eat that,” then there’s no reason to take anything away. We push that into your diet, something in your diet will basically fall away. It might be crisps or chips, it might be takeaway, it doesn’t matter. But we can change our diet that way.
And that’s the big mistake most of us make when we start looking at diets, is we try . . . Number one, we try and do it all in one go, which is incredibly dangerous.
Mike:Right.
Adam:And two, we take things away. And the key area here is to add new things in.
Mike:Yeah. Yeah, what I found is I just, you know, back to what I said earlier, when I reflect now on my whole life, it’s like, or certainly as an adult and being a busy entrepreneur, is that I eat when I’m bored. I have a tendency to eat when I’m bored. I eat when I’m happy. I eat when I’m sad. It’s just like sometimes I find that I’m eating something and I’m like, “I’m not even hungry. Why am I eating?” And, you know, you have some kind of principles that you helped me follow and it’s like, “Hey, don’t eat unless you’re hungry, stop when you’re full.” It’s like some basic things, but, you know, I think I would have a tendency to say, “Well, man, I’m getting stuffed, but I still have some of on my plate, so let me, like, finish it.”
And I think just this whole thing of, like, if I want a snack right now . . . And, by the way, I still eat some snacks that I probably shouldn’t, you know, but it’s not as extreme as it used to be. It’s like now it’s like, “Okay, that’s in the tolerance level and it’s fine.” And I think just this mindset to say, “If you want a snack, that’s fine, but it doesn’t have to be X. It could be Y.” And what I found out is sometimes it’s just the ritual for me. It’s like I don’t care . . . It’s almost like I don’t really care what it is. It’s just it’s time to have a snack now. And so I could have some, you know, it could be a protein bar versus a sleeve of cookies. Right? Or something. And, by the way, some of those protein bars taste just like the cookies, so what’s wrong? You know, it’s just making bad choices.
Adam:And I think one of the key areas, especially when you’re busy, once again, it comes down to values, doesn’t it? The reason why it’s easy when you’re an entrepreneur to eat a sleeve of cookies is because, once again, our mindset and we’re conditioned to believe that that sleeve of cookies will give us some quick energy. That’s why people drink a lot of coffee. You know, and it’s ironic that we drink lots and lots of coffee to try and keep our energy high, but the reality is the reason that our energy comes low is because the more coffee we drink, the higher we go, the lower we dip, then we have to go high again, then we dip down low. And coffee is a diuretic.
Whereas, you know, one of the first things I got you to do, in fact the very first task I asked you to do, was, before we did anything about food or exercise, was just drink two liters of water is our first task. Incredibly simple. But when you start to break down what’s important in our life, we need oxygen, otherwise we’re out of the game pretty quick. The next important thing to survive is water. Three days and we’re out of the game again. Then we look at food, then we look at sleep, and we break it down bit by bit. And just by replacing, not saying to you, “Take away coffee, stop drinking so much coffee,” that’s not the right approach. But, once again, “Drink more water,” the coffee will take care of itself.
Mike:Sure, sure.
Adam:It will naturally go down to a more moderate level. You know?
Mike:Yeah.
Adam:And water and being hydrated is the best way and the most sustainable way of increasing energy off the bat.
Mike:Right, yeah. For some of you that are listening right now, one of the other big findings I had, or kind of realizations, it’s like there’s a series of epiphanies along the way, is it was funny because I would meet with Adam once a week, we just meet on Zoom, on a webinar style call. And sometimes, once a week, you guys have heard me, some of you have been through the Traction process, the EOS, Entrepreneurial Operating System, and you follow this, what we call, Level 10 Meeting. So every week I have a meeting with my team, we have certain metrics we’re looking at, we have certain tasks, things we’re trying to hit, goals we’re trying to hit, and we’re measuring . . . We have reports. We’re measuring our business. We have a dashboard for our business.
And it just hit me one day of like, “Why isn’t my life like that? Why don’t I do that in my life?” And it could be health and fitness, like we’re talking about here. It could even be time with your family. Like if you say, “I want to spend, you know, X number of days with my son and I want to experience these things and I want to go on a date night once a week with my wife,” whatever it might be, I was like, “Why don’t I have reporting for other areas of my life?” And, of course, there are apps and other things you can do, too. Which we use some apps, and some other things you can do to track your weight and what you eat.
And truthfully that’s what made a huge difference for me, was just having a dashboard, just thinking about tracking what I eat and being able to see, like, “Oh my god, I didn’t realize that that fast-food meal that I was eating three times a week has more calories than I’m supposed to even have in a full day.” Right? Just little things. But we’re entrepreneurs here. This is how we think. We think about running our business like a business. You guys that are listening to me, you hear me talk about it all the time, about how a lot of people fail in their business because they don’t treat it like a business. It’s the same thing for your health, you have to have some metrics and you have to track your performance.
Adam:Absolutely. And it’s interesting because whenever I speak to people who I potentially might work with, the first thing I’m looking for is to see that mindset they have in their business. Because the reality is the only thing that’s out is your health mindset is just out of congruence with your business mindset. We already have the skills needed to make this happen. And it might take a few weeks for that, like you said for yourself, for it to finally click and kind of go, “Yeah, makes sense.” But, once again, you didn’t start your business just by going, “Let’s make a million dollars.” You had to break it down bit by bit, target by target.
So setting simple KPIs and, once again, looking at them each week and kind of going, “Right, how can we improve upon this, that, and this?” is ultimately the only way that this works. And that’s why it’s such an easy process once we get that mindset with entrepreneurs, how easy it is for you guys to actually start making some serious changes to your health without it feeling like you’re killing yourself or you have to just eat chicken salads. And, like you said, the most important . . .
And we talked a lot about this, didn’t we? During our time together. Is, you know, my whole approach is to subtly try and just keep that, push that kind of mindset and rhetoric around the business. You know, like, think about it. Like, in your business you wouldn’t just . . . If you’ve got a fire over here, you wouldn’t just ignore this and just kind of go, “Oh, well, it looks like that part of the business is going down. I’ll leave it alone and ignore it.” You have to go and fix it if you want your business as a whole to keep growing.
And a big one, as well, we talked about in terms of business, the mindset needs to be, our business mindset is we don’t get our business to a certain level, and then just walk away. The reason businesses grow and, you know, sustain over years and years is because we’re always trying to grow them. We’re always looking for the next thing to do to take it to the next level. If we stop doing that, it will stagnate, it will fall out of the comparative market, and then you won’t have a business anymore. And our health is no different. The minute we stop thinking about, “How do I improve on this? How do I improve on that?” And it doesn’t have to be dramatic stuff. You know, yourself, you’ve got a team coming out to do a Tough Mudder, that’s a great example.
Mike:Yeah.
Adam:”How can I improve on where I am with my fitness now, you know, where my health is and focus?”
Mike:Yeah. By the way, I forgot about as you just said. So one of the things that Adam had me do was I started to set goals and I started to set smaller goals, you know, a couple weeks out, a month out, 90 days out. You can’t really set . . . You shouldn’t set goals too far out without some milestones, otherwise you just wait until it’s crunch time. But one of the things I did, if you guys are listening to this . . .
By the way, if anybody is interested in this, we’d love your support. It’s been put on the back burner a little bit because I scheduled it so far out. But we are doing a Tough Mudder, it’s like a five-mile . . . I can’t remember if it’s 5 miles or a 5K obstacle. There’s a longer one, too, but we’re purposely doing the short one because I’m not . . . You know, my goal is not to become an Ironman, my goal is just to feel better about myself, have more energy, look better in a swimsuit, whatever it might be. But I’m not trying to be . . . You know, I’m not trying to be shredded. It’s just not . . . That’s not really my goal.
But, anyway, for those of you, we’re doing a Tough Mudder. I’ll add a link in the show notes here. A couple things that I’d ask for. If you want to do it with us, we actually have a . . . We’ve created kind of a FlipNerd Tough Mudder team. It’s in Dallas and we got people listening all over the place. But it’s in Dallas and it happens to be, I think, September 20th or 21st. But I actually created a Facebook group. I’ll add a link in the show notes here for the Tough Mudder team link.
And what I would say is even if you can’t come to Dallas or it’s not something that you want to do, if you could just join the group and provide some support. As we get closer here, I’m recruiting some people. I had to shame a few people to come into the group, some other real estate investors. And the truth is my hope is to build up a team of maybe a couple dozen people that we all go do this together. But we’re going to wrap in a charity component where hopefully it will help hold us accountable a little bit more that we’re doing this for something other than just for ourselves, as well.
So, anyway, I’ll add a link. I don’t know it off the top of my head, but I’ll add a link. It’s a Facebook group that I’ll love for you to join if you’re listening to this, if you follow us and want to just provide some support and watch us along the way, as well.
Adam:Sure. And I’ve already added myself into that group and I’ll be with yourself in there if anyone wants to ask any questions around what you can do to kind of [Inaudible 00:28:00] minutes. Having a quick back and forth on [inaudible 00:28:04].
Mike:Yeah. Adam, we’ve got just a couple minutes left here, I wanted to do a couple things. I like to give people some action where they can go take action and I’d like you to help with that. One thing that I meant to say earlier and I didn’t say yet as part of this taking action that I want people to know. On my journey, okay? One of my biggest hang-ups is working out. I always found reasons to now exercise or work out because I don’t have time for it. The truth is I have not worked out a whole lot. A little bit, and not as much as I should have in this journey so far. And I know that I’ll plateau out and I need to do more of that.
But one of the things that was . . . It’s intuitive now, but at the time I thought the way you lose a lot of weight is by working out a lot. And the truth is it’s impossible to lose a lot of weight by just working out, without changing your eating habits. Right? I mean put this in perspective. As you know, Adam, we have a Peloton bike. My wife does a lot of Peloton. I have to do a Peloton and bust my hump on a pretty decent course for an hour to lose 700 calories, let’s say. I mean that’s a lot of work.
And the truth is, I’ll kind of throw it out there, I’m not ashamed to admit it, I love margaritas. I’m in Texas, I love frozen margaritas. I love chips and salsa. We eat a lot of . . . We go out to Mexican a lot. It’s funny, when we started working with you, you’re obviously in the UK, you’re like, “Man, you eat a lot of Mexican food.”
Adam:[inaudible 00:29:24].
Mike:And I was like, “Here we just call it food. It’s not even Mexican food, that’s just part of our normal thing.” But it wouldn’t be uncommon for me to go out to dinner and get a couple margaritas at dinner. And if I realized, it’s like, “Wow, I just replaced that margarita, even though I like them, with a light beer,” it’s like now it’s 100 calories versus 700 calories. The equivalent is if I had two margaritas instead of two light beers, I literally would need to go to a spin class for two hours to kind of net-neutral that, right?
And so I’m definitely not saying that you shouldn’t work out, and it depends on what your personal goals are. Hopefully that is a good thing for you. If you know you need to lose some weight, you need to focus more on your health, is that you don’t have to . . . For a long time I threw up the excuse that I just don’t have time to work out. I got to take my son to school in the morning. By the time I get home from work I’m kind of tired and I don’t want to do it. And that means I have to start getting up at 4:00 a.m. to work out. That’s fine if that works for you, but don’t use that as an excuse. Because the truth is the biggest results will come from changes in your diet more so than the actual exercise.
Adam:Yeah, absolutely. And, look, the reality is this. When you are in, you know, in a kind of role where you’re an entrepreneur, where you’re working a lot of hours, there is an element of truth that you can’t just go swan off to the gym for an hour and a half a day, five days a week. It’s just not feasible. But the great news is, like you said, it’s not necessary. In fact, the common exercise that the majority of people, when we look at exercise, you can go anywhere from rekindling a sport you used to love and doing that a couple times a week, going out for a walk. If you’ve got, you know, kids or a dog . . . “Kids or a dog,” I guess [they’re kind of 00:31:02] at the same level. [inaudible 00:31:05].
Mike:Kids, dogs, whatever.
Adam:Whatever. Yeah, if you’ve got a reason to go outside in the fresh air. Like, you know, even something as simple as taking a lunch break and actually just going out and getting some fresh air and eating your lunch 10 minutes away from your desk. What that does is the stress level that we have as we’re constantly working is a hormone called cortisol, it starts to naturally lower. We can’t lose weight and begin to improve our health if we’ve got large quantities of it.
And the same thing comes with insulin. Like you said, you could drink that 700-calorie margarita, then you could go run as much as you want, but it doesn’t make any sense. You could do no good. You’ll get fitter, and that’s what I always say. If you exercise a lot and you want to try and lose weight that way but not change your diet, the net result is you’ll be a lot fitter, but you’ll still be an overweight fit person. But you’ll be fit, you just won’t look it.
Mike:Right.
Adam:And that’s the reality, and I’ve definitely tested that theory in my years. You know, look, I used to be over 400 pounds, I was for a long time, and I was actively fitter than both of my brothers who are naturally slimmer. But I just wasn’t focusing on diet.
So the reality is, you’re right, to get down, it is predominantly on diet, but I’ll actually go further than that and say diet is a side effect if what we’ve done. Really it needs to start with our mindset. We need to understand why it’s important for us in the first place, and that comes from looking at four key areas. How is it affecting your business? And we can look at that from a financial point of view. How much are you physically losing each month because you haven’t got the energy to go to those extra meetings, you haven’t got the confidence to make pitches? You know that the way that you feel and carry yourself in terms of first impressions is actually you’re losing deals to other people who are in better shape. And as hard as it might sound, it’s the reality.
So how is it affecting your business? How would it affect your business if your energy level was at the constant level 8 or 9? Would you get more done? Would you be more focused? How much will that bring you in? Then you look at it in terms of family. How is it affecting your family life? Are you just coming home as a grumpy old bastard because you’ve used all your energy up at work and you’re stressed out? You know, how is that affecting your relationship with your partner? How is it affecting your health?
How does that affect your business? If you go away, your business goes away. If your business goes away, your family security goes away. And everyone, when you start to realize everything is essentially hindered on your health being there. And when we start to understand that, and I don’t just mean talk about it as lip service, but really internalize that and look at it from different angles, that’s where we start to really think about making some proper changes.
So once we get that mindset in place, then we start to look at habits and lifestyles in the form of just breaking it down one to three things each week. No more than one to three things, it’s too much. And then slowly but surely the side effect of that is improved nutrition, making better choices, more consistent exercise. And that doesn’t even have to be, like we said, in the traditional sense, it can just be in the sense of moving or in a sense of getting away from stressful situations.
And the side effect of all of that is that your weight will start to normalize. You’ll go to where you should be. And the more you reinforce those things and keep them building and building momentum with them the easier it is to stay there, against trying to force all the issue on day one and just think it’s about weight loss. Because the reality is if you go into any weight loss goal thinking about weight loss as the target, you’ll hit that target, and then part of your brain will go, “I’ve done that, but I’ll just slowly drift back up to my old weight.” Because we still think like a 250-pound man. And we need to think like a 220-pound man, 210-pound man, whatever your goal weight should be.
Mike:Sure.
Adam:And if you don’t change the way you think about that, you know, if we don’t change that default mindset, we’ll always just be on holiday. We’ll visit that land for a while, but we haven’t got a one-way ticket. We’ve got a return trip back to, you know, back to Margarita Land, as it’s called.
Mike:Yeah, yeah, yeah. Awesome. And Margarita Land is a fun place, I’ll tell you.
Adam:It’s a fun place. I had a lot of good times when I was 400 pounds, don’t get me wrong.
Mike:Yeah.
Adam:[Inaudible 00:35:13].
Mike:And I will tell you it’s a little infectious, too, right? I had some results, people around me know it. I get comments like, “Wow, have you lost weight?” Or people that know me, they’re like, “Hey, you’re looking good.” Whatever it might be, I feel good, the thing is I feel good. That makes me feel food and I want more of that. It’s like there’s some dopamine in that, too, right? It’s like I’m getting results, I’m on a journey, I’m not where I want to be yet, and I feel this obligation, outward facing, that I’ve told people I’m on this journey, that I’m going to continue. And truthfully I feel better along the way.
So in terms of changing habits . . . And, you know, I don’t want anybody to think, like, you can’t go out to dinner anymore, you can’t do these things. It’s just you just make different habits, different decisions when you’re there most of the time, not even all the time. Like, you might be able to cheat here and there and still be okay. It depends on what your goals are. But I think just that process of this journey, it gives me energy, as well. Right? It’s like in the past some big greasy burger may have made me feel good. Now it makes me feel good when I hit the scale and I’ve lost a pound or two. I’m like, you know, “It was worth it, I like it, let’s do more of that.”
Adam:Yeah, absolutely. And when you finish work and you don’t feel like all you can do is just collapse on the sofa.
Mike:Right.
Adam:And around these sort of takeaways and having food that you, “I could never give up cheeseburgers,” or whatever. The reality is that anything that we do should come with some degree of moderation. If you were eating chicken salad every day when I first met you, I’m going to turn around and say, “You’re eating too much chicken salad. Like you’re doing that to the extreme.” Everything should be in there. You know, like, yeah, absolutely, if we eat cheeseburgers every single day, we’re not going to hit our goals, that’s just pretty obvious, right? We know that chocolate is bad. We know that cheeseburgers are bad. The reality is it’s just getting it to a position where it becomes the exception in our day-to-day life rather than the rule. And most people the rule is on-the-go food, you know, and it’s fine.
It’s like we reset our brain every morning and we don’t think that we’ve . . . It’s like having a credit card where once you’ve maxed it out, you just hide it in the cupboard and pretend you never had it and just go and get a new one. And the fact is that, you know, you’ve got to open the letters, and the fat letters will keep coming until you . . . You know, at one point you’ll get a red letter and you find yourself in the back of an ambulance. And that’s not what we want. We need to manage that credit, same way that you manage your business. Like we said, it always kind of comes back to that same analogy.
Mike:Absolutely, absolutely. Awesome. Well, everybody, if you’ve enjoyed the show today, I want to . . . Adam is going to tell you how to get a hold of him in just a second. Yeah, please go out to Stitcher Radio, iTunes, Google Play, YouTube, wherever you’re listening or watching this at, and if you got some value, just share it. Share it out on social media somewhere. No matter where you’re watching this at, you can share it on social media. And, also, if you subscribe or give us a little love in terms of a rating, we’d appreciate that. It’s types of things like that that keep us going and keep me wanting to do this and adding value back to you, so we appreciate you.
So, Adam, if folks . . . I know you’re pretty active on Facebook, that’s kind of how we talk a lot, a lot of Facebook Messenger stuff, and I know you have a website. If folks want to reach out to you, tell them where they can go.
Adam:Yeah, so they can go to one of two places. Like I said, you know, I’m very easily findable on Facebook, you just type in the search box . . . Or facebook.com/adamjtwhite, I’ll pop up. Just click away, add me, say, “Hello,” I’ll ask you, “Why?” and then we can have a little chat. Or you can go to my website, which is unbreakableclansmen.com. Just type that in straight into your web browser, “unbreakableclansmen.” Don’t worry about the “www.” you don’t need it. I don’t know if that’s good or bad in the end, it’s probably a bad idea, but there we go. And you can jump on there, scroll down to the bottom.
Generally what I do for everyone is sit down and help them understand what a plan would be for them. I’m not, as you know yourself going through my process, I’m not someone who’s just like, “Come and join me and we’ll work together.” Step one is you need to know what you need to do and what you don’t need to do. And I’m more than happy for anyone watching on here to sit down for 20 minutes with you and help you come up with a game plan and what we need to do.
Mike:Awesome. Awesome. And it kind of goes without saying that I’d recommend Adam. I’m thankful for him being a part of my journey, and it’s definitely somebody that I would recommend. So we’ll add links in the show notes, guys, for those of you that are driving in your car right now and you weren’t able to write that stuff down. Just make sure that you go down to the show notes and check on the links there. And I’ll also add a link for the Tough Mudder group that we talked about. If you want to join us, we’d love to have you. And if you just want to follow along and provide support, just get in the group. And truthfully that’s in September, it’s a little ways out, but we’ll start to have more and more banter as we kind of get the year going here.
So, Adam, thanks for joining us today.
Adam:Yeah, it’s been my pleasure, Mike. I really appreciate you letting my come on. It’s been great.
Mike:Yeah, and thanks for, you know, really helping me and thanks to everybody for allowing me to kind of share my journey a little bit with you. Sometimes just talking about real estate all the time is that we lose sight of why we’re doing these things, right? This is a journey to financial freedom and health freedom and freedom of our time, like all those things, right? So awesome.
Everybody, hey, until the next episode, stay strong, stay cool, keep fighting for freedom. See you on the next show.
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