[Transcript] – How An Internet Entrepreneur Went From A Fat Keyboard Slob To Conquering SEALFit Workouts.

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Transcripts

Podcast from:  https://bengreenfieldfitness.com/podcast/fat-loss-podcasts/chris-brogan-fitness-book/

[00:00] Introduction

[01:45] About Chis Brogan and What He Does

[05:34] About the Book

[08:12] Why Chris Needs a Story That Defines Him and Mastering Fitness & Diet

[12:05] Why Will Power is Stupid

[14:11] Why Chris Posts So Many Pictures of Himself on Instagram

[18:01] How Losing Weight Should be an Hourly Experience

[21:35] Chris’ Potent Time Quilting Strategy for Enhancing Fat Loss

[25:11] Chris’ Office Hacks to Stay More Fit and Healthy

[33:13] End of Podcast

Ben:  Hey folks, it’s Ben Greenfield and I usually promise that I’m going to bring you some kind of a fitness expert or exercise professor or physician or world leading expert on nutrition onto the podcast but for today’s special episode I decided to do the exact polar opposite and basically get somebody on the show who is a self-proclaimed ignoramus when it comes to fitness but has actually written a book about fitness.  So he’s in a very unique position but I did actually read his book and it’s quite interesting and there’s actually some pretty cool gold nuggets in there that have to do with fitness and getting a better body and looking better and losing fat and all sorts of cool stuff so my guest today is Chris Brogan.  Chris, welcome.

Chris:  Ben, if anyone’s still wants to listen after that, it’s going to be such a great show. [laughs] I’m so happy to be here.

Ben:  [Laughs] So before you even jump in to your book and I’ll reveal the name of your book in a second, what is it that you do ‘cause you’re not a fitness guy like I just said?

Chris:  Right, you know not officially, I mean I sweat a lot and I fall off of things in the gym a lot and I hurt my body the same way everyone else does but no, my day job is I run a company called Owner Media Group which publishes a business magazine called Owner Magazine and one of the things I said right in the launch of doing Owner was that in helping people kind of grow their capabilities in connections and sort of get them equipped for success in their business, I believe that fitness and health is part of that so we launched a sister magazine called BossFit run by my far more educated girlfriend and love of my life Jacqueline Carly.  BossFit is fitness and health for the busy professional but even when I write over there I’m writing from the perspective of absolute idiot and here’s what I know.

Ben:  Can we back that up a second ‘cause in your book you talk about Jacqueline Carly.

Chris:  Yeah.

Ben:  And she’s a big deal on fitness, kind of.  Can you tell just a little, I don’t want to turn this whole podcast into about your girlfriend but can you tell us a little bit about her and how you guys kind of connected since you weren’t really into fitness?

Chris:  Well, it’s kind of funny because before we were even together she had reached out to me you know, her Twitter name is @fiterella and so one day she tweeted something and I was like, “she seems fit.”  And…

Ben:  [Laughs] That name kind of gives it away.

Chris:  [Laughs]  Yeah, you know, I was like, hey, I’ll ask you things and so she actually was really kind and gave me like some ideas and some plans and just for free just kind of like randomly being nice to me.  I think ‘cause she had a crush on me and whatever.  But I wasn’t exactly on the market but I did what everyone does with free advice which is like file that under ‘I’m never going to do this’ and she probably felt like anybody who ever feels like they fell for the trap of being asked for free advice gave it with like really heartfelt intention and then the person threw it in the trash and she was like, oh, man jerk-ass.  And just went from there, right?  So I think, you know we were off to a really auspicious start.  So when circumstances in my life changed and when things came about and we were actually getting ready to start dating, I mean, I was the heaviest that I’ve ever been in my life and she still for some unknown reason found me attractive, and she had gotten out of being a competitive bodybuilder at that point but she was still giving fitness and health advice and all that.  And when we got together, all kinds of weird things happened where she just finished her Masters in Nutrition and she decided she’s going to go after PhD in Mind, Body Medicine and all that, and she also decided for no good reason she was going to leave her corporate job, start figuring out entrepreneurship, launch a magazine for me and with me.

Ben:  Wow!

Chris:  And also do her PhD and decide to go back into competitive body building because any one of those wasn’t going to be enough evidently.

Ben:  Wow!

Chris:  And so that’s kind of where it kick started me was because all I kept thinking was my girl is going to be like 7% body fat and really jacked and have huge arms and I probably need to try to catch up at least a little bit and that’s kind of part of what got me there and then the other part is because I ran something called Owner Magazine.  I thought if I’m teaching people to own their choices it’d be pretty stupid for me not to be able to own the distance between my fork and my mouth and that’s really the big impetus that got me started.

Ben:  Yeah, that’s fine.  That’s kind of how I got into triathlon was my wife ran for University of Idaho and I had to figure out how to run just so that I didn’t look bad running next to her.

Chris:  Right.

Ben:  And from there like I ended up totally geeking out on it and going way past her and doing Ironman and all these jazz but yeah, it was one of those deals where I just didn’t want to be embarrassed standing next to her in this case running next to her or far behind her as the case was.

So you wrote this book and first of all for people listening in, I’ll put the show notes for this post up at bengreenfieldfitness.com/starthere but at bengreenfieldfitness.com/starthere I’ve got Chris’ book and it’s called “Just Start Here Lose Weight, Get Stronger, and FINALLY Succeed at Your Goals”.  Now Chris in your book you say that you wrote this book because your friends asked you for it.  And I’m curious why your friends were asking you to write this kind of a book?

Chris:  This is the best part of the story for me because again, I have zero credentials.  There’s almost no page in the book that doesn’t some way say that you…

Ben:  I actually do say that a lot throughout the book you like, “I have no business writing this book” which I kind of got a kick out of because there’s actually a lot of fitness pros writing books that should be saying that.  [laughs]

Chris:  Well, so let me stress that I absolutely know that and it’s really funny like I’m not in your world at all except as an observer and I love watching the fights.  I mean, there’s some guy as we are recording this that’s sort of blowing up all over Facebook right now because he’s arguing that high rep rates in lifting weights is bad and whatever and he’s just kind of blow the lid off and everyone’s kind of like, “shut up!”  And then the other half of them are fighting.  I’m fascinated by this like microcosm.  So anyway, my friends asked me because there’s a real vast difference between looking at a let’s just say Jillian Michaels person or Jacq.  I mean, Jacq went from being a real fat girl who ended up having eating disorder problems.  Who ended up having…

Ben:  You mean, Jacq your girlfriend?

Chris:  Yeah, Jacqueline Carly, yeah.  She had to go through this whole eating disorder thing.  She was a real big girl and so when you look at her now and you look at like she has bigger more strong-looking delts and biceps than average people do.  It’s hard for you to kind of connect with her but everyone who’s known me for the last bunch of years I do a lot of public speaking.  I’m out in a lot of big venues and all that and they’ve seen me for who I am.  They’re like you know, charismatic fat guy and you know, they saw the transformation sort of in front of their eyes so they’re like, “well, I know that guy and he’s like a regular guy.  He’s not some Ben Greenfield so like I could figure him out.”  We’ll that’s what I think they’re getting into.  I think that the thing that turns people on is like well if that is fat, so I could do it, I could do it.  Which is not what you get when you look at like almost any other fitness book out there because you see some dude with like 12-pack abs and you’re like I just kind of have the one-pack so far.

Ben:  Hmm, so you start off in the book by saying that you need a story that defines you. Like throughout the book you’ve got and we’re going to get to all these kind of, I don’t know if they’re like Chris Broganism’s or whatever but you’ve got some really interesting perspectives in the book that I don’t see a lot and starting off you said you need a story that defines you.  What do you mean when you said that?

Chris:  You know, it’s amazing how many times everything in our life is so disjointed and so it’s easy to throw it back out again.  An easy way to look at it is, we all day long make these kind of set of choices we just don’t think about it.  I’m the kind of guy who or I’m not the kind of person who, you know what I mean?  So for instance, if you’re not the kind of person who can say no to a cake then you eat all the cake you see.

If you’re the kind of person who is really strict with their regimen when they’re supposed to be and has another plan for when they’re going to allow themselves a treat then that’s who you are, you know.  And so I really think that in defining that story, one of the things that I did for instance was I’ve always had a hard time calling myself an athlete.  The only few times I was involved in organized sports I fell out of them pretty quickly and so one thing I thought was I’m going to define myself as a warrior and I don’t mean that I intend to go to war and kill people or whatever but I really found for instance, a connection with SealFit which is this kind of mix of CrossFit and calisthenics that Mark Divine made.

Ben:  [Laughs] I just finished the SealFit workout like 20 minutes ago.

Chris:  Yeah, I like it.  I mean, there’s two things that I like about it: one is… so it’s too funny I go to this gym where it’s like about a $50 a month gym so it’s not exactly the Purple Planet but it’s also not CrossFit where you pay two hundred bucks to go three times a week with sweaty people.  And so these people all sneak into my $50 gym or $59 or whatever it is and do Crossfit in there anyway, and so when I’m in there doing SealFit like I used to think that people make faces at me or whatever no one could care.  They’re all doing the same thing.  So it was just a way to better define myself so I like to define myself as a king and a warrior and that’s kind of the story.  So I say things to myself and my head like, kings don’t do this or this is not what a warrior would do.  And those kinds of [crosstalk]

Ben:  That works for eating, too.  That works for eating.

Chris:  Oh, yeah.

Ben:  It’s almost like playing a movie in your head and you’re like the character in the movie.

Chris:  Right.

Ben:  I do that a lot, too and it’s silly ‘cause I used to be into like fantasy novels and reading about knights and dragons and warriors and stuff like that and I will still get pictures like that in my head of you know, me like the Conan style dude on the horse like charging with the muscles and everything when I’m working out.

Chris:  Right.

Ben:  And it sounds like a stupid story but sometimes that actually motivates you and seeing that story’s what you need when you’ve got a big chunk of metal on the floor that you have to pick up.

Chris:  Yeah.  No, I mean I read a lot of books about sort of a military indoctrination and things like that.  I’m not one of those like pretend to be military guys but I am very fascinated by what it takes to forge somebody into something morally and one reason when I read was like an entire year of boot and whatever with the US Marine Corps which I think of is pretty solid dudes.  And there was this guy, the rules have changed a lot.  You know, in the 70’s they could like punch you in the head and stuff and swear and say all kinds of mean things, now they have to be a little more gentle but still kind of turn out a decent warrior.  And one of the things that the guy kept shouting at people when they would pick cake up for dessert in the mess hall ‘cause it was at the mess hall, was there like, “That’s not warrior food,” and he’d knock it on the floor.  And I started using that sentence in my head all the time like that’s not warrior food and that’s kind of helping me make some choices ‘cause I would love to eat all of the world’s Reese’s Peanut Butter cups so that you wouldn’t have to.

Ben:  Yeah, or Batman food.  That’s another one that works.  It’s not Batman food.

Chris:  That’s not Batman food.

Ben:  So you also talk about will power.  And you say will power is stupid. Why do you say will power is stupid?

Chris:  Will power to me sometimes is a matter of semantics, but will power to me is like the weakest muscle in your body.  It’s like one of those under your armpit muscles that sort of kind of supports your tricep but doesn’t really do much.  And I think that when I say that a lot of times people use will power to say this, “I want to do this thing but look at me exerting my will so that I won’t.”

Ben:  Uhm.

Chris:  Like that’s the fastest thing in the world to deplete.  What I do is I try to make discipline the truth so I go for streaks and I say, “I’ve already got a hundred days of not doing that that’s because I’m never going to do it again and that’s a streak.”  And then the big vast difference in your head between those two sentences, while I knew you want that cake but I’m not going to eat it because I’m a really good person is way different than, I don’t eat that cake.  That’s not what I do.  Cake’s not on my diet, you know.  It’s a whole different thing.  I was talking to a guy about that today where in which I said, you’ve got to stop saying the word diet.  You’ve got to start saying, this is what I eat because it just does not help.

Ben:  Right.  So basically, when you see someone you’re going to eat instead of saying I’m not going to eat that or I don’t want to eat that or I’m going to try not to eat that.  You just think to yourself I’m not the kind of person that eats that?

Chris:  Exactly.

Ben:  And that kind of flows pretty well for that whole story thing anyways, right?

Chris:  Yeah, absolutely because I think the big trick is that we are trying so hard to sort of escape something.  And I mean, that’s the thing, no one follows a flag that says, “Stop doing this.”  You know, everyone follows a flag that says, “Let’s go towards this.”  A revolution isn’t like get away from that guy it’s more like we think we could be the future and so we need a revolution.  Not so much that I’m not going to do that anymore because that still gives too much magnetic power to whatever that was.

Ben:  Yeah.  Cool.  Okay, so there’s this Instagram account called Instagram.com/nothinglost and that’s your account, right?  Nothing lost?

Chris:  I hope so.

Ben:  Okay.  Good ‘cause somebody’s posting pictures of you there if not.  And I’ll link to your Instagram accounts in the show notes for this podcast but you post a heck of a lot of pictures of yourself like at the gym, standing in your gym shirt, gym equipment like all of these gym Chris Brogan pictures.  Why do you put so many pictures of yourself and you talk about this in your book, too.  What’s the deal with the pictures?

Chris:  So there’s a couple of things that I’m doing with that.  One is that I’m sort of demonstrating that I’m there a lot.  And that’s important because I’m kind of amazed by people who say they work out five times a week and I just see amazing pictures of the wine and cheese platter and [laughs] I’m just like, “oh, that’s so cool because my gym doesn’t serve wine but I’m glad yours does.”  The other is, I have this sort of marketing opinion in general which is that the more people see your face the more they’re actually going to find you in some event or something and say hi which is helpful.  Then the other is that I’m looking to actually give some level of motivation to other people and in turn I follow almost 500 people where in which I’m looking for motivation from them as well.  So when I see their selfie on a day where I was thinking I was going to lay on the bed still, I might jump up and do something.

And the other thing is you know, I love it that I’m sort of doing it in wide out in the open.  I’m a big fan of the fact that you know, when you come and take a look at my brooding sexy-self pictures or whatever that I’m also saying I’m still working at this.  This is still a work in progress.  None of these are my after picture.  And so I love that process and then I guess the other thing is that all those pictures of myself quite often come with some sort of message that gives you some sort of thought that’s gone into the process of lifting.  So for instance, one of them is I wrote that I’d lost a little bit of my progress but trying to muddy up my program and whatnot.  And so trying never to use a stumble as an excuse to quit.  So I’m always also trying to say even when I mess up I’m still here and I’m going to do more and that through that process I want people to kind of get that feeling of like, “hey, it’s never perfect but we’re striving to for kind of constant steady for emotion.”

Ben:  Yeah, and it’s so much powerful to then this concept of posting onto Facebook or Twitter what you’re workout’s going to be.  I realize this actually pretty late in the game like last year I realize that you get this satisfaction when you post what your workout’s going to be that can almost make you less likely to complete the workout because a little part of you says, okay me posting that I’m going to do this is almost just as good as doing it.  And I don’t know where I read this but it was basically having the fact that you almost have to be kind of careful with posting your goals or posting your workouts because sometimes it can give you the same satisfaction as having completed it and maybe make you a little less likely to complete it.

So what I do now is I’ll post a photo or a video or something either during the workout or after of kind of like the aftermath whatever mess was created after the workouts.  And to me it helps out a ton because it’s evidence that I was there.  And obviously you’re doing that too with your Instagram account.  Most of your pictures I’m looking at here it’s just like you at the gym doing your thing and you’re obviously sweating and I don’t think you’re taking these pictures before you actually started your workout.  Maybe you are, I don’t know.  Maybe you just go to the gym and take a picture and leave?

Chris:  No, you know what, there’s days I really wanted to.

Ben:  [Laughs]

Chris:  There’s days I was like, you know I’ll just get in here and get this but I try to even in some way or another demonstrate that I’m pretty sweaty like I’m looking at from like the end of June or whatever and I’ve soaked the shirt because one of my coaches just basically said, if you’re not soaked all the way to your socks you didn’t do anything today.  He didn’t care what I lifted.  I just had to be soaking wet without a swimming pool involved.

Ben:  That’s right.  And sweat has a nice anti-aging effect, too.  Of course.  The hidden bonus of sweat.

Chris:  I’ll take it.

Ben:  You talk about how losing weight is an hourly experience.  What do you mean by that?

Chris:  Well, it is kind of amazing.  We do this with a lot of parts of our life and that’s the other thing I learned a lot in the gym over the last year and plus it’s just that a lot of what I learned in the gym relates to business and so we’ll say you know, I’ll say this to somebody, what do you intend to make in a year?  And they’ll say to me a million bucks and I go, “oh, that’s great that’s $84,000 a month or whatever it is.”  And they go, “oh.”  And then they start thinking about what it’s going to take to make $84,000 a month and I say, that’s $22,000 a week, how are you going to do it?  And so like when I say that your health and fitness and everything is an hourly event, that Reese’s Peanut Butter cup that you ate that you say, well, no one even saw me eat it strangely shows up on your waist, though.  It turns out.  I wish that any food that you didn’t see me eat didn’t count, I’d be slender.

Ben:  Right. [laughs]

Chris:  ‘Cause I’m like Swiper in Dora the Explorer I can eat fast and invisibly if I have to but it doesn’t work that way.  And so one of the things that changed in my process was that if I stumble, if I eat something bad, if I make a choice that I’d rather not have made, I make up for it in the next hour.  I try to make sure that I drink a lot more water for instance, to kind of lubricate and flow and whatnot.  I ty to adjust the rest of my caloric intake for the day to account for that dent and so on.  So I try really hard to make sure that there’s no wasted moment.  There’s no like, oh I’ll pick it up tomorrow because the minute you do that everything breaks.  Like everything goes horrible.

Ben:  You talk about this in the book too like your hour long workout is basically 4% of your day.

Chris:  Yeah.

Ben:  And so it really is what you do with a lot of those other hours and I think it was JJ Virgin who recently having a podcast and she’s like during a workout you’re not burning fat, right?  You’re burning sugar.  So you bump up your metabolism and you’re burning carbs but the other 23 hours of the day that you’re actually burning fat.  And you know, I love that concept that losing weight really is kind of like an hourly experience.  It’s not just like this whole like get in at the gym at the end of you know, sitting in a chair for eight hours a day or whatever.

Chris:  Yeah, I mean one of the ways I’m trying to get at that I mean, there’s a lot of people who are using some form of a fitness monitor these days like a FitBit.  I’ve got a Fitbit on.  I’ve got the one that’s supposed to burn your wrist off and I love it and I’m not surrendering it until they give me a new one, but what I like about it is there’s something in there that says how active were you per hour?  And right now, mine looks like a guy ready to flat line it’s just like nothing, nothing.  Work like crazy.  Nothing, nothing, nothing and I’m like aahhh, I need to make a jolt every hour.  I would love to see that thing burst every hour.  And that’s going to change so much compared to that I-went-to-the-gym righteous feeling.  It’s like oh, well you know, I can’t say stagnant the other 23.  So I guess I’m going to allow for sleep but I’m going to make sure that the other time that I can do some work, Ben I’m going to do it.  I’m going to try to stretch it across the day even a little bit more ‘cause I think it’ll burn even more.

Ben:  Yup, I have this rule that on days where I know I’m not going to work out, I have this rule and it’s every hour I have to do 30 burpees.  So by the end of the day, that takes about two minutes so I’m getting two minutes of anaerobic workout every 60 minutes and by the end of the day I feel just as good as if I’ve done a full-on hardcore workout.  So yeah, I mean, I love that concept and it kind of relates to something else you talk about in the book and this you bring up in relation to travel.  You talk about time quilting.  Can you explain what you mean by time quilting?

Chris:  Oh yeah, I mean I really love that process and I use it for all my business.  It’s amazing how many times we waste time and I had this [0:21:55.0] ______ little quote that’s totally true which is that, we always consider time such that there’s an infinite amount of how we treat it accordingly.  We always consider money as if there’s a finite amount of it and we consider that accordingly and it’s obviously the opposite.  We can always give more money but we can’t get more time.

So when I’m travelling one of the things that I’m doing is I’m looking for work and I squeak in like a brisk walk.  If I’ve got conference calls I want to make sure I’d be walking as fast as I can or whatever I can do that doesn’t really make it awkward for the other person.  Your 30 burpees is exactly right.  So I’ll do push-ups, I’ll do air squats.  I’ll sneak into the bathroom and do air squats on the toilet if as long as it doesn’t sound like I’m doing something gross.

Ben:  Uhm.

Chris:  Which I stole from Ferris who said that I think in “Four-Hour Body” where he was like I hide everywhere and do exercises and I thought that’s brilliant and I bet so few people are going to do it.  I’m just going to do it. [sniffing sound]

Ben:  Oh yeah.  I mean, I’m that guy who occasionally sneaks in to the family bathroom at the airport just so I can do a quick workout in the bathroom.  I think it’s only been once that I’ve walked out and had a really upset mom outside waiting for me. [laughs]  It usually works out okay.

Chris:  Yeah, and the other thing I do is I make sure that I handle all the nutrition things when I’m travelling.  I make sure that I’m not going to mess up by having not brought my own stuff with me because holy cow, people make a lot of great excuses at the airport for instance or why they have to eat the peanut M&M’s at the mini bar and I also try to bring some smallish stuff.  I wish to God I could bring a kettlebell everywhere I go but it turns out that’s not a great plan so I bring some resistance bands maybe jump rope sometimes or a lot more often I bring a yoga mat even if I’m not going to do yoga but I’ll use it to just make sure the floor’s what I want it to be.

I love books like “Power to the People” and all that where it’s like there’s so many body weight things you can do.

Ben:  The Pavel Tsatsouline book? 

Chris:  Wow! You did such a great job of pronouncing that.

Ben:  Yeah, I know.  I practiced before our podcast.

Chris:  Do it again.  Pavel who.

Ben:  Pavel Tsatsouline.  Works better if you had a drink beforehand.

Chris:  That’s slick.

Ben:  Yeah, I totally agree.  In my bag it’s usually the suspension training strap that I’ll use in the hotel room.  I throw in an elevation training mask in which is freaking awesome for hotel stair repeats where you just like go up and down the stairs with this elevation mask on and you look like a firefighter too.  It’s kind of heroic.

Chris: [Laughs]

Ben:  Where you freak people out if the hotel’s on fire.  And then a power lung in my travel bag so when I’m driving my rental car and kind of stuck in traffic or whatever if I’m in LA I can do power lung breathing while I’m sitting in the car but yeah, pretty much anywhere I go same thing.  I’d never really heard the concept of calling it time quilting or taking your scraps of time and using them to get fitness done but I love that kind of concept and that phrase.  So it doesn’t look like you trade-marked it so maybe I’ll steal it.

Chris:  It’s all yours.  Go for it.

Ben:  Alright.  Cool.  So another thing that I wanted to ask you about was for you working on the computer which I take it as somebody whose job is kind of you’re basically an internet entrepreneur more or less.

Chris:  Sure.

Ben:  It sounds like.  Do you have specific ways that you’ve hacked your office, kind of changed the environment in which you’re working to either help you stay more fit or help you stay more healthy while you’re working?

Chris:  Yeah, you know it’s funny because all these people show me their great $4,000 standing desk or whatever or their desk treadmill and all that.  I’m always like, hey good for you.  ‘Cause you know it’s better.  I get that but I bought off Amazon, I bought like a $79 laptop stand that musicians like Skrillex or somebody would use and it just fits your laptop and a little slidey yody thing for a mouse that I never use so I just put drinks on it.  And I use that and I use the kitchen counter top and it turns out that also works.  So I do that and I live in a loft so it’s just like one big square room except for the bathroom and there’s a climbing rope because I have a 16-foot ceiling.  So I could kind of do that in between.  I’ve got resistance bands out.

So here’s one trick: it’s like if you don’t have an infant in the house or whatever, I’ve got resistance bands out.  I’ve got a kettlebell sitting right there.  I’ve got dumbbells sitting on another table so I can grab stuff and do sets in between my work because the stuff is out and saying, touch me.  And that’s so another time quilting thing so I might be on a phone with somebody talking about something, I might push the speaker button and do a whole bunch of shoulder presses or something that I need to get done.  They don’t know.  They don’t care.  They don’t hear me huffing and puffing so I just get it done and then it just kind of keeps you know, time under tension is this thing that people say would be great.  It’s always weird like you kind of more than me but people say stuff like, if people can do more time under tension then it would be great.  And then they have all these reasons why no one’s going to do it.  I just find, again if you just sort of pepper it throughout the day it’s going to work a lot better.                     

Ben:  Yeah, exactly.  Actually, while we’ve been doing this podcast I’ll bring it up by the mic so you can…  I don’t know if you can hear it.  It’s oiled pretty well but I’ve got this grip strengthening device because I’m prepping for Spartan races right now and I found that my weakness is when I get like halfway through like a traverse wall or a monkey bar set, my grip starts to fail so I use one of these little grip strengtheners when I’m podcasting now and I’ll just do my right arm until it just goes crazy burn and then shift to the left arm and yeah, it just sits there on my desk and I squeeze it.  I bet you didn’t know I was working out while we’re talking.

Chris:  I did not.

Ben:  Yeah, but I was paying attention to.  I promise.  So you’ve got this book “Just Start Here Lose Weight, Get Stronger and FINALLY Succeed at Your Goals” but what I didn’t know what you mentioned earlier in the podcast was that there’s an online magazine that kind of lays out some of these concepts as well, is that correct?

Chris:  You know, it’s not written by me at all I mean, I write one article out of the bunch but what we did was we gathered up.  This is the weirdness of being me is that all these really nice people who have something to do in the fitness and health industry are all were willing to work with Jacq and I, Jacqueline Carly and I on putting together this thing called BossFit Magazine and it has nothing to do with my theories because it’s everybody’s take on stuff but we come up with how to advise every month around some theme that would relate to a busy professional’s kind of life.  So we talk about travel.  We talk about corporate wellness.  We talk about ways to hack in different ways because sometimes people aren’t necessarily.

Ben:  BossFit Mag, is this.

Chris:  Yeah, bossfitmag.com.

Ben:  You’ve got lots of articles here about sex.

Chris:  Oh, that’s the month.

Ben:  Why kiss can make you sick?  Is your libido on fire?  Five exercises you can do for better sex.  So this is the sex month issue?

Chris:  This was the sex month issue.

Ben:  Okay, that makes sense then.

Chris:  We had so much fun doing that, by the way.  The only problem is that every time we put out a tweet about it, you get a lot of followers that you don’t want ‘cause they’re all weird robots.

Ben:  Who writes all these articles?  Is this all you and Jacq or just everybody?

Chris:  No, there’s like 20 or so authors, so Dr. Terry Simpson is really fun because by day he’s a lap band surgeon and by night he’s a culinary medicine expert who teaches you not to need the lap band.  Julia Ladewski who is a powerlifter and also a competitive physique athlete with Jacq.  I wrote one the same sex month that was sort of like, sex yes! and I talked about exercises I thought would help.

Ben:  [Laughs] Is your training ruining your sex life?  The five reasons.  You skip sex because you’re too sore from your last workout.  You skip sex because you’re worried because it will impair your recovery.  You cut sex short because your muscles are too sore.  You can have sex without pain because of an injury.  You never have time for sex because you’re too busy working out.  I think I’ve qualified for two of those criteria in the past.

Chris:  Well, I mean there’s times, man.

Ben:  I’ve had an ab workout before where I skipped sex because of like my abs have not completely recovered totally. [laughs]

Chris:  Sorry, honey.  I’m not in the mood.  Oh, my belly.  Yeah, we had fun with that.  That issue was hilarious because there were a lot of questions that came back and I mean, some of the people who were like Tom Terwilliger who was like Mr. USA back in the day and all that and just fascinating responses.  I loved it more than I thought I would to see what people came up with.  So it’s great.

Ben:  That’s cool.  Let me add this to my feed reader bossfitmag.com.  I’ll put a link to this in the show notes too.  Cool.  Well, Chris anything else that you want to share with folks.  Any last tips, tricks, secrets that you’ve found in your non-fitness expertise?

Chris:  Well, you know one of the things that I wrote a lot about in “Just Start Here” which I say this is what’s lacking in most of the fitness and health books that I’ve read growing up is all about the mental game and I wrote a lot in there about mental toughness because partly it’s because it’s Jacq’s PhD, so I’ve been reading over her shoulder a lot.  Probably because I’ve been interviewing all kinds of guys like that like Mark Divine from the Navy Seals and Tim Grover who coached like Michael Jordan and people like that.  I’ve been talking to a lot of people who make mental toughness part of it and I found that all my games and real success started coming when I worked really hard on my mental game.  It had nothing to do with what I ate and like doing dead lifts.  It had everything to do with putting my mental game in such a great shape that I could take it on.  So I mean, that’s the one big thing is that even if you’re like an absolute expert and people who listen to you must be ‘cause you’re like some crazy other level.  That’s what my book offers is that some people aren’t is that a whole like get really smart.  And the other thing I did a little different is I just made it ridiculously prescriptive.  Like I just, “Just Start Here”.  And that’s why I named it that because I figured there’s so many books kind of like you could do this or you could do that.  Mine is just start here and then you could figure it out afterwards what’s going to work or not for you.

Ben:  Yeah.  Cool.  Lots of good pictures too.  I’ll put a good before and after picture of you as well as the book up in the show notes over at bengreenfieldfitness.com/starthere.

And by the way, speaking of Mark Divine, for those of you listening in this particular podcast episode is going live I think the morning that I start Mark’s Kokoro Camps so if you’re listening in say a little prayer for me.  So I’ll be out there doing a little mental toughness workout of my own for about the next 56 hours.

So Chris, thanks for coming on the call, man.

Chris:  My utter pleasure, Ben.  It’s really an honor.  Thank you so much for having me.

Ben:  Alright, folks.  Check out the book “Just Start Here Lose Weight, Get Stronger and FINALLY Succeed at your Goals” over at bengreenfieldfitness.com/starthere and thanks for listening.

 

 

Chris Brogan (pictured above after going from a fat keyboard slob to conquering SEALFit workouts) is author of the book “Just Start Here: Lose Weight, Get Stronger and FINALLY Succeed at Your Goals. “.

As an internet entrepreneur, Chris is a self-professed complete non-expert in the field of fitness.

But nonetheless, I read his book.

And it is actually quite good.

So in today’s podcast episode, Chris joins us, and you learn:

-Why you need a story that defines you if you want to truly master fitness and diet…

-Why willpower is stupid…

-Why Chris puts so many pictures of himself on Instagram…

-How losing weight should be an “hourly” experience…

-Chris’s potent “time quilting” strategy for enhancing fat loss…

-And much more!

Resources we discuss in this episode:

Chris’s Instagram account

Just Start Here: Lose Weight, Get Stronger and FINALLY Succeed at Your Goals.

BossFitMag.com

Do you have questions, comments or feedback about this episode, or thoughts about Chris Brogan in general? Leave your feedback below!

Read more at: https://bengreenfieldfitness.com/podcast/fat-loss-podcasts/chris-brogan-fitness-book/

 

 

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