Your Fitness Resource

Founder, Randy Holland

Dear members,

Last week, we finally launched our blog. There’s a blog for me, one
for Brad, one for Joel, and one for John. When I learned it was waiting
for a submission, I contemplated an opening post.  I have been talking
to friends and thinking about how important it is to continue to
support each other in this difficult economic time. We had just
suffered the loss of several members who were here one day, and gone
the next, declaring the need to cut back. I thought a good topic for
discussion would be the idea of moderating rather than withdrawing
altogether from our local habits. I tried to considered myself as a
consumer rather than a merchant. Was I doing the very thing I hoped
people would not do to our business? I realized how easy it is to
forget my own individual impact on local merchants and organizations,
and how damaging it is to abruptly stop supporting the local world I
live in.

I put the idea together and posted it Wednesday under the
title, ”Don’t Resign, Resolve.” By late in the day, I realized no one
was going to see it. After all, no one knows the blog even exists, and
likely, no one would care if they did know it existed! I thought, “why
are we doing this?” The web experts say it will move our name up in the
search engines. Okay, but I doubt any of us will want to take on a
time-consuming task like daily contributions unless we think it might
be read by someone other than our mothers.  The next morning, I had the
hair-brained idea of sending it around to the membership in hopes that
it might cause them to discover our blog.

BAD IDEA!!

Thursday morning one member marched in and demanded that we give up
her email address and never email her again. ”We’re sorry, ma’am, if we
do that, please keep in mind that you’ll have no way to get your
statements,” we pleaded. “Then I quit!”, she insisted. By the end of
the day, a list of a few dozen members, most of whom I know, had told
their coach they were confused by the letter they got.

I’m starting to get my head around what went wrong here. Maybe a
personal letter and a blog post are two different things. Maybe when
one writes something in a blog post like ”…If you’ve been wasteful,
cut back…If you’ve been over-indulgent, rein it in…”,  it will be
received differently when sent specifically to someone via personal
e-mail. Of course it will!

Getting that letter from an individual would have at least confused
me, and probably insulted me. I apologize. Please rest assured that I
was not suggesting that anyone was personally wasteful or
over-indulgent. I hope you can see how a comment like that to
“everyone” is intended to be read with a spirit of self-examination
rather than accusation, and to elicit commentary. But of course, you
didn’t receive a letter to everyone, you received a letter to you. It
must have made you feel as though I was attacking your core principals.
I would never do that! Again, I apologize.

Bottom line: I sent you a blog post but inadvertently disguised it
as a personal letter. Boy, that was dumb! I also apologize to my staff
- especially Brad, that I didn’t have the good sense to run the idea
past a few soldiers before I pressed “send”.

Ironically, there were a few positive comments. Thanks for those,
but my deepest thanks go to all who spoke up, both members and staff,
in protest.

By the way, I have revised the original post to emphasize
a collective self-examination by changing “you” to “we”. That’s
something I  should have done the first time, but blew that, too.

Humbly,

Randy

Everyone has one. That is, a pattern of behavior that describes the manner in which you interact with food. Call it your Meal Life. The Meal Life of 21^st century people the world over has three parts.  When I say, parts, I mean that people adhere to a tradition of choosing their next meal based on its expected contribution to the pleasures of the next few hours of their lives. Consider the idea of sorting all those decisions into categories of importance. 1 is unimportant, 2 is somewhat important, and 3 is very important. 

Let’s say I am at work and I am going though a typical day where lunchtime comes just like every other day. It’s that moment that occurs daily at the noon hour. Since I have a busy day, I might not even think about it at all before I actually stop to take care of it. No forethought, just something I will check off like the other items on the day’s agenda.  Its contribution to the pleasures of the accompanying hours of my life, on a scale of 1 to 3, would be a 1. If you think about it, the moment I described defines many moments throughout the week. Clearly, from a routine perspective, the lunch meal is routine, but what about breakfast? What about the meal you have at home on Tuesday evening? Can’t these be described as routine? Routine doesn’t mean bad; it just means that these meals contribute little if anything to the pleasures of those accompanying hours of our lives. I submit that all the meals I describe here have a contribution value of 1. 

There is a subtle inference that you shouldn’t miss as this concept illumines your mind.  Obviously, the more low-importance meals a person has, or, said another way, the more 1s she has, the easier it is to manage a food plan. The more 3s a person has throughout the week, the harder it is to manage. Now. Here’s that subtle but important observation: the degree to which order and routine overlays a person’s activities, the more 1s that person will automatically have.  If I am to succeed at the task of managing my meals, I need to bring order to my schedule. In fact, the more order I adopt, the easier it will be to maintain my food plan without trying.

-

Founder

R