Author: Juan Acevedo

PhD. Humanist, Destroyer of Negative Narratives, Constructor of Positive Change. I specialize in aligning the mindset, fitness, and nutrition habits of my clients. Superpower: awesome learner. Founder of SELFMASTERY.
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    Slay you should and Slay you must

    ByJuan Acevedo

    There is this feeling you get when you go to the gym and everything goes your way. I call it The Slayer, because it feels as if Beyonce did a Metal Song: fucking EPIC. You get it in one of those days when the warm up feels light and easy. Your technique sets are a display of grace and control. When you hit your workout the weights move as if they were feathers, your breathing matches your movement in perfect harmony, your transitions are smooth and short, and the only time you trip in the whole workout you stay composed AF and correct immediately with a smile on your face. You fucking slay like Queen-B. Heck! Even your hair game is on point! You finish on the ground exhausted but proud: I am so motherfucking fit, you think to yourself.

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    What we are up against - Part 1

    ByJuan Acevedo

    Let’s start today with a grounding idea: we are fortunate enough to live in an age in which we can actually think about how to optimize our personal nutrition. When I was growing up, everyday I saw people in the streets who did not have enough food--I don’t mean they didn’t have high quality food, they didn’t have any kind of food. Luckily things have changed in most parts of the world. And to be sure, if you are reading this you are just trying to improve your health by tweaking your nutrition. This is a privilege of our times: the great access we have to food, to nutritional information, and to sophisticated metrics.

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    Training Hard

    ByJuan Acevedo

    We all love to train hard. We love the feeling of working our asses off, yet I think training hard, truly training hard, is greatly misunderstood. Hours of media featuring Energy Drinks, Athletic Shoes, and awesome-sports-movies-action-montages has lead us to confuse training hard with intensity. We have this image in our head that training hard is finishing a workout sweaty and gassed, lying on the floor looking up at the ceiling like somebody just punched us in the face and stole all our money while quoting Jame Joyce. That outcome turns out to be  fairly easily achieved: just do 50 burpees as fast as you can without stopping... it will take you less than 5 minutes and if you really commit to not stopping you will finish on the ground regretting life.

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    The Importance of Warming Up

    ByJuan Acevedo

    I think we all understand the importance of the warm up before working out. Most of us have learned it the hard way: that one day when rushed we naively said to ourselves: “the first round will be my warm up”. And that first round sucked, heart rate was through the roof fast, and for the next four rounds you were just trying to survive. Yes, we all know warming up is important, but somehow we all still neglect it. In my experience, this happens because we don’t have any other reason to do it than that we are “supposed to” and anyhow, it often feels harder than the actual workout. The problem with thinking of it this way, is that it makes it a lot easier to say “fuck it, 20 squats will warm me up.”

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    Study yourself

    ByJuan Acevedo

    This story made me realize that when it comes to nutrition it’s not that we cannot see reality, it is that we have NO IDEA. We were never taught how to evaluate whether our eating habits are actually good or not. We have beliefs about nutrition, but we have no way to test those beliefs and, to be honest, most don’t even feel the need to test them. To make things worse, the internet is full of the next best shiny diet: ketogenic, veganism, vegetarianism, low carb, high carb, carnivore diet, paleo diet, whole 30, weight watchers, organic free-range home-schooled turduckens, etc. Combine genuine ignorance with media telling us that there is such a thing as Good Eating that is independent of our genetics, our socio-economic context, our cultural background, and our present state, that there exists a one-size-fits-all nutritional approach that will guarantee you results, and you are clusterfucked, my friend. 

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    Slay your inner troll!

    ByJuan Acevedo

    Trolls suck, and even though they are an Internet creation they are pretty much everywhere IRL too. Yes, they might be called douche bags, and they are not constrained by gender, race, or religion. The only thing that unifies them is that they are just a waste of time and energy. But my experience is that when it comes to fitness and nutrition, we all have an inner troll. And to be honest, this is the worst kind of troll there is.

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    Why train?

    ByJuan Acevedo

    In the world of fitness it’s common to hear that you should find a “why” for your training. The idea behind this practice is to find an emotional connection to some part of your identity to use as motivation whenever you feel like you want to throw in the towel, or not get out of bed for your morning workout. Although this can be very useful, it is also the source of a plethora of cheesy motivational memes and worse, it comes with the assumption that exercise is inherently good for our health and all we need is more motivation and willpower. This seems like an innocent idea but it is NOT. This way of thinking takes from us the opportunity to question the physiological purpose of our training, and in doing so set us up for failure before we even start, regardless of how many hours of sweat we put in. I believe that this is the kind of “why” we should identify. Let me explain.

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    Food is Dead

    ByJuan Acevedo

    Let me start by saying something controversial: there is no such thing as a “healthy meal,” not really. I guess you could eat a very healthy live animal and that would be a healthy meal. But I don’t see that happening often. Food is not “healthy.” Food is more or less nutritious, food is more or less calorie-dense, and food is more or less tasty. But let’s be real: most of the food we eat is dead or dying. In the best case, the food you eat was alive moments ago, (oysters anyone?) however in most cases your food has passed through several industrial processes that stripped its original glorious biology -think Pop Tarts. This might seem like an annoying linguistic distinction that only a nerd cares about. And it most definitely is, but hey! hold on, there is a useful point to be made: the thing that is healthy or unhealthy is you, not your food. Your health is your responsibility, and yours alone. A snickers bar after lunch is not going to make you unhealthy. But a daily Snickers bar after lunch might. A Snickers bar on Monday and then a Coke on Tuesday, plus those delicious donuts Janice from accounting brought to the meeting on Wednesday (because she does not give a fuck), that bag of chips that somehow made its way down your gullet on Thursday afternoon while you were rushing to meet that deadline, and finally that half of a pizza Friday night, plus the tortilla chips and pork belly tacos you ate after you got drunk on Saturday--all this combined WILL make you unhealthy. Repeated actions are what makes you unhealthy; it is your habitual behaviors that improve or harm your health. But ice cream is not “unhealthy” or “healthy.” As matter of fact, that Saturday ice cream you always have with your kids might be the best habit you have. If that Saturday ice cream is what allows you to eat more nutritious and balanced meals consistently the rest of the week, if it allows you to avoid all that junk that Janice keeps bringing to Wednesday’s meetings and the Friday pizza and beer binge, and if it allows you to spend some quality time with your kids, that Saturday ice cream (despite being full of sugar) is totally making you better and healthier in the long term. Enjoy!  

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    Eating in the car

    ByJuan Acevedo

    My job as a fitness coach is to help people create the habits necessary to achieve their goals.  Most of the time those habits go very much against traditional cultural practices, sometimes they go against my trainee’s very identity. This means there can be a great deal of resistance involved in changing habits. When I ask people to eat veggies for breakfast they usually look at me as if I were completely insane.