Articles

The Pain/Pleasure Ratio

For the past few years, I have been a listener of Anthony Robbins. In case you don't know, Anthony Robbins is a motivational speaker and educator. One of the aspects of his teaching is how we will either do things to gain pleasure or to avoid pain. (I have coined this as the Pain/Pleasure Ratio, but I will get into that later.)

He explains that most of us go through life avoiding pain, instead of trying to gain pleasure. Furthermore, he explains that our avoidance of pain is primarily due to the fear of failure that you imagine the outcome might be. His response is that you must embrace failure. Be happy. Be glad. By failing, we learn and do better next time. Furthermore, by not trying at all, you are not going to gain anything.

Unfortunately, many of you (not all) live through life to avoid pain. This is especially true as it relates to health and fitness. Looking for the quick fix, you look for immediate results, like quick weight loss. You would rather go on a diet for a few weeks than do what you know are the right things. You know what the right things are: eating a well balanced diet, lifting weights, and doing cardiovascular exercise. But you avoid those things because those things are painful now. It takes time and effort. You realize that if you don't commit, it becomes more painful because failure is inevitable without commitment.

However, what we fail to realize is that the pleasure we get from immediate weight loss, like going on the Atkins diet eventually leads to more pain. You gain the weight back, plus some. Diets like this are not long term solutions to a problem that took way much longer than the length of the diet, to develop. In other words, if you gained 30 lbs of body fat in 2 years, losing 30 lbs in six weeks is probably not a safe, long-term solution. It may take 24 weeks of diet and exercise to actually change the body's metabolism to keep the weight off.

Eating right and exercising is time consuming. You will get sore muscles and might get tired. But, the feelings of pleasure once the pain is over are incomparable to the pain (emotional pain) you feel when you constantly eat bad food and sit on the couch, which is short term pleasure. In this case, your self-esteem is low and your energy is low. How would you rather live your life? Having more pleasure now, only to get more pain later? Or, go through more pain now, to experience more pleasure later?

Do not avoid what you know is the best thing for your health and fitness. If you make a plan, the higher the chance you will succeed. If motivation and education to get fit is an issue, then you should of course, hire a personal trainer to guide you.

Kelly Huggins, B.S., ACSM HFI
The Fitness MythBuster
404.303.8305 kelly@kellyhuggins.com