After I’m done writing them, I put all these blogs into ChatGPT.
I actually have a huge project titled, creatively enough, “Blog Posts” with maybe my last 50 posts loaded in
Chat knows my writing style very well. And it always gives me the same feedback.
(Side note: you can go into settings and change Chat’s tone by prompting it on how you want to be spoken to. The default setting has a bit of a “yes man” quality to it. Like your Elvis surrounded by goons who are on your payroll and would rather see you die on a toilet than tell you that, perhaps, you are overdoing it on the drugs. But I’ve coached ChatGPT to shoot me straight, which it now does. Pretty neat.)
As I said, Chat always tells me the same thing:
This is a pretty solid blog post, Dan. You are about 85% of the way there. Let’s take a look at what’s working and what will get it from a "B" to a solid “A” that will truly resonate with your audience.
It then congratulates me on really maintaining my voice and putting something out there that is truly my own. Apparently it has recognized that I am going to weave in a Justin Bieber joke, some Bugs Bunny-level sophomoric comedy and wrap the whole thing up in an inspirational or emotional bow that seemingly comes out of left field.
It will then proceed to tell me that the advice I am giving is very solid and will help my audience. Which is, according to it, a rare trait when it comes to the health and fitness space.
Who knew?
Finally it will hit me with the bad news. Primarily that my openings are too self-indulgent, are 30-40% too long and would test the patience of a high-level monk whose only goal is to learn how to bench press.
For what it’s worth, Chat is not wrong. I’ll probably put this very post in and it will tell me that my intro about my intros being too long is too long and I will be stuck in the middle of a very meta argument with a machine that is unquestionably smarter and perhaps more insightful than I am.
In any case, I find it ironic or dumb or whatever that I spend my time trying to get validation from my AI overlord and then summarily dismiss the revisions that would garner such approval.
That’s correct. I don’t actually do anything Chat tells me to do when it comes to my writing. And, I know exactly how it must feel about this (if it has feelings at all). Because loads of people ask me for fitness advice and then completely ignore it.
Equally interesting and even more confounding is that people will give themselves health and fitness advice and then quickly find reasons not to follow it.
They will get a report from the doctor or catch a glimpse of themselves in the mirror on a Tuesday afternoon and realize they must (MUST!) start eating better. But just as quickly they decide that they should really start their plan on the following Monday because they read an article that claims that Mondays are really the best day to start.
Or they will take a tour of a gym with the intention of training three times per week but not join because they may schedule a 10 day trip to Bali in 7 months from now and they don’t want to blow the consistency that they haven’t even begun to build.
Your body, like everyone else in your life, pays way more attention to your actions than it does to your words. You can tell your wife from today until tomorrow that you are going to start the laundry. But until you actually do it, she doesn’t give a shit.
Your body is the same way. It doesn’t care that you are “going” to start eating 200 grams of protein per day or start doing the compound lifts. It just knows that you typically spend your weekends sitting on the couch hitting a vape pen while being wrist deep in a bag of Pirates Booty.
Luckily, your old pal Dan is here to help.
Because most people don’t need a ton of help knowing what to do (although they may get the finer details wrong) but they do struggle with finding systems and strategies that allow them to get it done.
Ironically, when I lost weight initially, I was the opposite. I didn’t know orange juice was primarily a carbohydrate. I didn’t know that strength training would have helped me more than spending my time on the elliptical. I was just white knuckling it. I decided I wanted to lose weight and stayed remarkably dedicated to it even though I didn’t have a clue. In my experience most people suffer from the opposite.
Nowadays you have the internet and the aforementioned ChatGPT and, most importantly, this blog to set you straight and lay out the plan for you. It’s executing the plan that’s the problem.
You don’t need more information. You need strategies.
Strategies allow you to implement the plan. To ideally make it as mindless and painless and robotic as possible to execute the plan. And not to wait until Monday to do so.
I’ll give you my favorite example of a strategy. Intermittent fasting.
For over a decade the scientific literature has proven that IF does nothing magical. It doesn’t alter your gut microbiome. It doesn’t promote growth hormone release. It doesn’t induce autophagy.
What it does do is limit the amount of time during the day that you can eat, so people eat less. And eating less is the way to control your calories and lose weight.
So while IF isn’t magic and doesn’t work how people think, it’s still a good strategy for a lot of people who struggle to control calories.
My favorite strategy, and the one that actually does have evidence behind it, when it comes to nutrition is food logging.
Whether you want to gain muscle or lose weight, logging your food actually works better than any other intervention when it comes to reaching that goal.
That’s right. More than going vegan or going keto or tracking macros or joining the carnivore subreddit, simply keeping track of what you eat will have the greatest impact on what you eat.
Tracking apps are great for this but here is another endorsement for using ChatGPT to log your intake.. It can help you develop a strategy that will have you reaching your goals and then you can have an active dialogue with it daily about what you’ve been doing and it can course correct in real time. It’s much more conversational than something like MyFitness Pal and you may find yourself trying to be more adherent so you don’t let down what is essentially a soulless machine.
It’s kind of like how you interrupt your Little League game to “feed” your Tomogachi cause there was no way you were going to let that little digital pet die. That is, until the screen started fading and you didn’t have any of those weird round watch batteries so you just threw it in a drawer and never thought about it again.
Final strategy. And before you start with eye rolls I fully recognized that this is a biased take. But it doesn’t make it any less true. Join a gym or training program or get a personal trainer where the cost makes you slightly uncomfortable.
People are much more motivated by what they might lose as opposed to what they might gain. So going to Planet Fitness for a free Tootsie Roll and a few machine chest presses may seem like a great idea. And you might actually do it occasionally.
But pay $150 per hour for a personal trainer who has a no bullshit cancellation policy and suddenly you will find yourself crawling out of bed at 5:30AM with the biggest wine hangover you’ve ever had in your life because there is no effing way you are just losing that money.
Set up a system where the consequences are a real forcing function of you attending and, voila, you are magically getting in those three sessions per week.
All right, I’m about to “command A” and then “command C” and put this all into ChatGPT so it can tell me what I already know. That the information is great and the voice is strong. It's really going to love the Elvis joke. But the opening is too long. In fact I should consider cutting the whole thing by 30%.
And what happened to the emotional twist ending?