Author: Florian Wüest / Source: Lifehack
I remember when I cracked the code to fat loss.
It was in June 2015 and I was staring in the mirror. Traces of a sixpack had become visible. It was my first time I’d ever seen them. Ever.
Since that moment on, my friends asked me jealously over and over again: “How did you do it?
”I thanked them all. But they wouldn’t understand. Weight loss is simple, but not easy.
How I started the vegan bodybuilding diet
It was in the beginning of 2015 that I’d made the scary decision to stop eating animal products and started the vegan bodybuilding diet. I was a meat-head before.
Poultry and rice in a tupperware was the only thing that I’d known. Readily packaged in my lunch box every morning before I left the house. While I did gain muscles with that diet I’ve felt unfulfilled. I had a lethargic attitude, with little energy.
– “Is this what my life is going to be like?” I’d started to ask myself.
I didn’t feel I could reach any destination with the little drive and constant fatigue that I had. People called me “Aschess” way back in high school. It’s the swiss-german word for having no drive. No interest. No direction.
I didn’t have any direction. Nor did I feel I wanted to.
Only later did I realize that it could all be linked to my eating habits. I was eating poison, not fuel. In hindsight, I was a monkey.
The pleasure-chasing money
Farmers and hunters in third world countries have been catching monkeys for centuries. The way they do it is by setting up a trap. A container, filled with fruits.
The container contains two holes, one on the top, one on the bottom. The hole on the top is not big enough to get the food out, the fruits get sneaked in from the bottom by the trap-setters.
Then they wait. Every once in a while a monkey approaches and tries desperately to retrieve the fruit through the top-hole. The farmers or hunters slowly move in but the monkey can’t let go of the fruit. It got competing demands.
The monkey wants to keep the fruit more than it wants to keep its freedom. At the moment of life or death, it couldn’t let go of the enticing promise.
If the monkey just surrendered what it was holding onto, it would be living a free life. At the sight of the dangerous humans, it could have dropped the food, pull out his limbs and flee the scene. Yet it didn’t. It couldn’t.
Monkeys get caught with pleasure traps.
Little did I know that I was also caught in a pleasure trap set up by the food industry.
Pleasure vs Motivation
I am not a big fan of Sigmund Freud and his theories. Yet what I agree with him on is that every human being deals with competing interests.
At 2am in the morning, we decide that we want to better our life in an instant. The next day we catch ourselves scrolling mindlessly through Facebook.
This phenomena can be explained by the motivational triad. Living beings are motivated by three things:
- Pleasure seeking
- Pain avoidance
- Energy conservation
These 3 motivators are omnipresent. We want to get in better shape because we seek the envious stares of our friends at the beach – we seek pleasure. Or because we hate seeing an unhealthy number on the…
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