Shawn Phillips - In Defense of a Man’s Life

Nice post from Shawn's Start Strong Monday blog. Shawn knows his stuff, so pay attention - and if you want to really transform your life, get his book, Strength for Life: The Fitness Plan for the Rest of Your Life.

In Defense of a Man’s Life

Tue, Mar 9, 2010

This day, like all days, awaits your best. It’s on your side—pulling for you to show up strong and seize it.

Carpe Diem!

But rather than stoke your body and mind for a day of noble dragon slaying, you rush out the door under assault by a cesspool of stress hormones.

Your day of super-hero like performance is not to be. Rather than a gripping, “Boom, Zap, Kapow…” your day is more, “Fizzle, snizzle, flip, flop.”

Let the follies begin.

This is not some mythic fable, it’s the story of your life. At the start of each day you get choose the story; what will it be today? A tragedy, a comedy or a triumphant story of success?

How Do You Rise Up?

When faced with a fresh, vibrant, limitless day, most people wake up and promptly kick the day square in the nuts.

They disrespect the gift of the day and themselves, shunting their potential, triggering weakness and compromise only to find themselves increasingly frustrated and baffled by the lack of achievement and satisfaction.

This is a common story in people who suffer from the false belief that their mind is the master, their body the servant. One the pilot, the other a passenger—good to the degree that it serves. This belief results in treating your body like it is “The Giving Tree,” (Shel Silverstein’s timeless children’s story) as you mindlessly take, take, take from it what you need to fulfill your desires.

What most don’t see—often until it’s too late—is that your body is actually setting the rules, however silently. And just like The Giving Tree, it has increasingly fewer resources to share until one day it’s all gone. Empty. No matter how deeply we long to continue giving, we’re just a stump—nothing left to give.

The Disease of the Modern Day Warrior

When you disrespect your body this way, your energy evaporates, mind fogs and confidence crashes. You’re not just setting yourself back for the day; you’re hammering your manhood, vitality and life.

This is the perfect formula for the silent epidemic that’s decimating the Strength and vitality of the modern-day warrior, the driven “Type-A” man: Lifestyle Induced Hormone Suppression.

What is Lifestyle Induced Hormone Suppression or “LIHS”? Not to be overly simplistic, but it’s just as it says, a Lifestyle—or “way of living”—that is negatively impacting the positive, life-sustaining hormonal expression of your body and gradually draining your energy, vitality and life.

It’s a lifestyle that regularly includes too much stress, too little sleep, too little intense exercise, and poor nutrition practices like too many sugars and simple carbs, alcohol, too few quality proteins, too little healthy fat. In other words, it’s the most common lifestyle of the American man. Hence, the reason why it’s been estimated that nearly 80% of adult American men suffer varying degrees of LIHS.

Although it does tend to arise with age, aging it is not.

While men in their 20’s are often doing nearly everything possible to suppress their natural testosterone and growth hormone they have a “momentum of youth” that allows them to get away with it. Most are able to resist any serious decline well into their 30’s but come late 30’s to 40+, if your lifestyle is pushing your manliness into the cellar, it becomes increasingly difficult to ignore.

Are You Feeling It?

If you’re a man in your 30’s, 40’s or beyond, it’s likely happening to you at this very moment. As you read these words your body is quietly stockpiling fat, divesting lean muscle, losing strength and your energy is plummeting like a stock early recession.

Men typically will not even consider the inevitable demise of their body and loss of their prime until they cross the “big 4-0.” By the time the harsh reality sets in, the decline has been gaining momentum for the better part of a decade.

Are You Needlessly Tolerating Any of These Symptoms?

• Gradual weight gain, especially around the midsection
• Drop in energy levels after lunch or late afternoons
• Frequent cravings for snacks, sweets or other junk food
• A disappointing or declining sex life (hoping Viagra can change this)
• A reliance on coffee to get you going and more to keep you going
• Lack of energy to share when you get home from work
• You feel like you’ve aged 3 years in the last 19 months

For millions of guys this daily tragedy and needless suffering has been accepted as the price to get ahead. But you’re paying a high-price: your job performance, your relationships and your physical well-being and energy to enjoy life are all compromised. Precisely what you don’t want when it’s your time to “make it happen.”

Unfortunately, it’s common for a man to confuse these symptoms of LIHS with the natural course of aging. It doesn’t help that your well-meaning doctor is likely to support this mistaken belief. Pharmaceutical propaganda helps condition us all, doctors included, to expect and accept that these symptoms are to be expected—and ideally resolved with a handy-dandy prescription.

In typical reactive thinking “logic,” the type that would “treat” a leaky pipe with bucket to catch the water (rather than fixing the leak), medicine loves symptoms for; A) they seem like the real problem and B) one root cause can—and usually does—produce dozens, to hundreds of symptoms.

The drug makers eagerly await your decline with a myriad of symptom solutions—like the mega-billion dollar business of ED drugs, Viagra and Cialis. Push your hormones down long enough and Viagra is going to be your best friend, but reality is, even when it helps you’re still only treating a symptom, not the source. You may be able to get it up, but there’s something much more important, much deeper that’s missing—your drive, the true sense of your vitality.

The latest way men are getting their “mojo” back is found in the growing business of “after market enhancement” or Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT), which includes various methods for getting testosterone, and in some cases growth hormone, back to optimal levels.

Now, I’m all for a man being a man—and there’s an argument to be made for making sure you’re running on a “man scale” but fact is you can’t know if, or what you need, when your lifestyle has artificially suppressed your hormones for years or even decades.

You Don’t Have To Accept This Gradual Emasculation

You’re not one to sit around and let life give you an “ass-whipping,” right? Good, listen up. I’m here to tell you, there’s no reason for you to settle for premature life ejaculation. You can stop the slide and start growing younger, stronger and leaner every day.

A cliché, but true nonetheless: An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure—nowhere is this more accurate then when it comes to enjoying a life-enhancing lifestyle that keeps your body, mind and hormones soaring at levels a decade less your age.

You can get your energy back, regain your strength and vitality, and reawaken your drive for life, from the inside out. And you can do this simply, safely and relatively quickly without dangerous drugs or medical intervention.

The solution I’m talking about requires no injections, no testosterone boosters or taking a complex array of nutrients to stimulate growth hormones. Rather, the answer is in working from the top-down—resolving with the source, your body’s “master control switch.” Master it, restore the balance and your body, and your hormones, will naturally begin to restore to full strength.

I’d like to tell you it’s more complex than this—and of course, on a cellular level it is. It’s the way systems work, dealing with symptoms can get complex but the closer you are to source, the leaky pipe, the simpler the solution tends to be—plug the hole.

NEXT ISSUE: Mastering Your Body’s Master Control

In the next issue I’ll reveal your body’s master control switch and how to quickly, efficiently get it working to help you lose fat, gain muscle, and reboot your strength and vitality—to get your hop, skip and leap back and return to Life @ Full Strength!

I’m looking forward to sharing this life-transforming “miracle” with you—even though it’s anything but a miracle. While it may not be a shocking secret, you’ll find the mechanism and results shocking.

Tags: health, body, mind, spirituality, fitness, Shawn Phillips, In Defense of a Man’s Life, Start Strong Monday, Lifestyle Induced Hormone Suppression, hormones, vitality, energy