You can motivate with a carrot or a stick - I discovered how to create your own carrot

This book is different because I’m not an expert in anything to do with health and fitness. The only subject I’m an expert on is how I happened to end up in great shape at age 61; amazingly great shape considering my sedentary nature and lifestyle. But as for advice on health and fitness per se, actual experts have wrtiten plenty of books that tell you everything you need to know. It would be silly for me to suggest otherwise.

But those experts can't tell you how to actually follow their advice; so many people read what they say and know it's right, but never carry through; they never reach the point where daily physical activity becomes a lifestyle habit just because it makes them feel good. Probably the most trivial reason for a daily workout, but the most likely one to keep you coming back for more. But that's typical of human motivation overall.  Motivation is the need to satisfy a desire, not to acheive the biological result. Eating satisfies hunger but provides fuel, sex satisfies desire but provides children, daily exercise provide health and fitness.

There's a problem with that last one. Daily exercise provides health and fitness, but it doesn't satisfy any desire. That's because the requirement for daily physical activity is built right into day to day life, or at least it was a long time ago. But since the advent of agriculture, the amount of required daily activity has decreased and the amount of high-calorie, low-nutrition food has increased beyond measure. So the 'mechanism' to extend fitness and health as long as possible into old age is defeated by lack of need in the short term.

So, although they are important, and I do have some exercises I recommend,  my 'advice' has nothing to do with the right exercises and the right things to eat.  It has everything to do with motivation; which means creating a 'desire' to be satisfied. I stumbled on how to do that by accident, but the trip is not the destination; even though it was accidental for me  I can tell you how to do the same thing. Part of it is kind of like mechanically establishing a habit, which is what I tried to do in the beginning. That approach worked better and more quickly than I could imagine, and it was far more than just establishing a habit. You can scoff and say it's too simplistic, but it took me by surprise, so until you try it for awhile you can't possibly really know what I'm trying to get across.

One way to help explain it a little better is to get back to the experts that have all the information you need. If you’re reading this introduction, their advice probably isn’t working for you, or at least not as well as you would like. Why not?

Probably because nearly every one of those professionals will tell you quite happily that being successful takes hard work and discipline. All I can tell you, is when I was a younger man, I might have been deluded into thinking that would work for me. But now I know better, so when I hear ‘hard work and discipline’, I’m outie. So, my approach is specifically about avoiding the drudgery and angst that comes with the cold-blooded self-discipline required to do a regimen of specific and increasing exertion day in and day out and contemplating that routine from here on out. I know for a fact that doesn't work for me. That's why I had to come up with a different approach.

Speaking of  when I was young… I was about thirteen when I got a basic set of weights -  barbell, dumbbells. I was enthusiastic because I wanted to look like the fitness icon of the day – Steve Reeves or maybe Charles Atlas. But it turned out lifting weights wasn’t fun, just hard. I didn’t even make any excuses – it was just hard, I didn’t like it, so I stopped.

To be fair, I made infrequent, brief attempts to get started again with that and other types of exercise for the next 20 years; but for most people who never get into a regular exercise routine, I think that’s the story of their life.

In short, the  professionals can tell you what works, but they can’t tell you how to drum up the self-discipline to make it work. Personally, I never have a problem with self-discipline. I don’t bother it and it don’t bother me. (rim shot) HI-YO!!!!

The funny thing is, the secret to ending up in great shape in old age, or at least increasing your odds, is the same as the secret for enjoying every day of your life more from now on, starting today. That ‘secret’ is so simple that this whole book is not about telling you what it is, or even convincing you that it works, but about getting you to actually take advantage of it and get started.

Here it is: Make a commitment that from now on you will start a workout every day without fail, no excuses barring actual emergencies. You can stop the workout almost as soon as you start, but you must actually start.

That’s it. As long as you keep that commitment, you’re golden. It’s enormously positive just in terms of self-esteem, if you start a program you know you can stick with and actually stick with it. Obviously, if you choose to cynically start and deliberately stop right away day in and day out, you’re not going to get any results. But why would you bother to do that?

Let me tell you the typical scenario from my experience. Let’s say you ride an exercise bike as your workout and you’ve just come home from your primarily sedentary job and you’re burnt-out mentally and it feels like, physically. The last thing you want to do is get on that exercise bike. But, and if you believe anything I say, believe this – the more you feel like you don’t want to ride that bike, the more you need to do it.

The key is, you only have to make an honest effort by starting a workout; you’re not committing to twenty or thirty minutes. That’s all you have to do to get rid of the nagging guilt that will result if you don’t do it. Now keep in mind, if it was a twenty or thirty minute commitment you might be able to be ok with the guilt, I know I was. But if it’s something as simple as this - if you can’t do this successfully, how pathetic are you? That’s actually what I used to tell myself.

So, you turn on some music and get on the bike. You turn the pedals a few times and it’s not as bad as you thought. It actually feels kind of good to push against a little resistance and get the blood flowing a little. Since you’re already on the bike and you can quit anytime you want you might as well make a little bit of an effort, say until the end of the song…

That’s how it went for me. And I want to say again, the most incredible discovery was how sure I would be that I would stop almost as soon as I started. I would literally think “Today is different, I just want to veg, so although there’s no point,  I’ll keep my commitment and make a start on riding the bike”. I would think that in spite of the fact that I had that same thought the day before, and the day before that, and the day before that…

Of course, after awhile that conflict went away because I was ‘addicted’ to how I felt after riding the bike. Previously, I was more or less content to come home and just veg out for the evening. Now that I knew the difference, I wasn’t content with feeling like that anymore and I just blew past any reluctance. Sometimes I’d start riding and for one reason or another think “This isn’t so great, maybe I’ll stop early today”. The instant mental response was “If you stop now, you won’t feel any better than when you started”. That did it every time. I wasn’t enjoying the bike all that much, but I wouldn’t enjoy the alternative either, and it would last all evening. If I kept up with the bike, it would only last thirty minutes or less, and I would enjoy my evening.

You may point out that I had the advantage of a specific goal in that I wanted to study in the evening. But that’s not the point. I only intended to exercise every evening until computer school was over. But once I “internalized” how great I felt, regardless of the need to study, I wasn’t content to go back to feeling lethargic again. So the goal I achieved was different from the one I had in mind and a lot better.

So that’s the secret. Just keep it up long enough and put in a little effort until you get sucked in. It’s not quite that simple, because it combats human nature as expressed by the natural tendency towards gluttony and sloth when possible. Our bodies are configured for a time when the opportunities for either were few and far between and not to be squandered.

Now the opportunities are endless – my approach combats the situation by focusing on the nature of “feeling good”. When your metabolism ‘thinks’ that physical effort is required to live day to day and that adequate food is available but not enough for gorging, then it keeps the internal chemical balance ready for action – which makes energy available for thinking and for acting – which is what feeling good is all about.

The converse is an abundance of food for the eating. Your metabolism doesn’t care how you ‘feel’. If gluttony and sloth result in lethargy, so what? If there’s no need for action, there’s no need for energy to be expended in mental and physical preparedness. The only time you ‘feel good’ is through sensation – food and entertainment.

As Al Stewart sings in "The Sirens of Titan", “I was the victim of a series of accidents, as are we all”. I was lucky enough to be the beneficiary of a series of happy accidents that resulted in my stumbling upon the principles of energy focused exercise and the Quest For Endorphins. Through this book and through this website I hope to share them with the world at large. It truly is a different approach and one that most people would not stumble upon. And because it de-emphasizes self-discipline and drudgery it’s one that most people could stick with, if they only will.

But most people won’t, which is good, because I’m hoping to make a buck by writing a book to convince them otherwise with pop psychology and wacky theories that come from my life experience. They may be inaccurate, but this ain’t rocket science. And their whole point is to convince your inner helms-person of the path you want to take and why, not to write a reference book or make posts on Wikipedia.

You may not think you need a daily workout regimen because you get plenty of activity otherwise. That's great, but will you always? Are you on a course like some people I've known over the years who do a crushing routine every day and eat absolutely clean, then after months or even years suddenly get sick of it and go completely the other way. Are you a college athlete who will take a long break after college and imperceptibly sink into a physical hole that's too hard to climb out of because the only way you can imagine doing it is with the drills and wind-sprints and physical hell you had to go through for years in the first place. Look at the increasing evidence that demonstrates regular strenuous activity helps preserve health and prevent dementia. Not only that, but robustness, which comes with regular exercise, is imporant in and of itself for the same reasons. So unless you're sure you will keep exercising regularly from here on out, why not establish a safety net by deliberately establishing a daily exercise habit that's reinforced by the positive feedback of better mood and increased energy for hours every day?

So the idea of exercising at least a minimal amount every day may seem trivial, but so is eating to satisfy hunger. And if you can establish a hunger for the energy resulting from exercise,you'll achieve the really important result of quality of life into old age. It's a totally different approach from any I've heard before, so hopefully the idea of trying it is kind of exciting. It's an easy way to start thinking of yourself as a person who "gets it", and does something about it every day instead of just staring old age in the face like a deer caught in headlights.