The Power of Story

by Jim Loehr

  OUR PHYSICAL STATE INFLUENCES THE STORIES WE TELL

  Do you think the story you tell changes if one or more of the following conditions is true?

  You are tired or fatigued.

  You have low blood sugar.

  You have a headache.

  You are ill.

  You are in pain.

  Of course it does! As we’ve seen, when your physical self changes—such as by a sudden drop in blood sugar—then your emotional self changes. Your mental self changes. Even your spiritual self changes. Your whole story changes. Josh Waitzkin, the chess prodigy who inspired the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer and who became an international master at sixteen, went through our program and found that incorporating our nutrition and fitness principles gave him not just greater physical stamina but greater mental stamina, too.

  It is crucial to be aware that what seems like reality to you can completely change when your physical state changes. And in that instant, of course, your story’s shape and color change, too. With more physical energy, you can engage more deeply on a physical level—that’s obvious—but you can do so on a greater emotional, mental, and spiritual level, too. If you do not maximize your physical energy through proper nutrition, exercise, and rest, then you simply cannot maximize the other three types of energy. And there’s a looping effect: If you’re too tired to tap into, say, your spiritual energy, then your failure to do so may influence your physical energy, too, and a vicious circle is begun. Many of us know that losing weight on a traditional diet is terribly difficult. One reason for this is that the story most people are told or tell themselves—Lose weight to feel and look better—is, frankly, not exactly a narrative for the ages. As a life goal for far too many people, the objective of losing twenty or forty or even one hundred pounds simply to look better is just not compelling enough. Many who fail at losing weight that way have lost it when their motivation changes to something more urgent, powerful, and transcendent—lose weight to be around for your grandchildren; lose weight so you will not be wheelchair-bound the last portion of your life; lose weight to improve your chances of having a healthy and uncomplicated pregnancy. By finding motivation from a higher, spiritual source of energy, you can affect your physical energy, too.

  The body we start out with is capable of wonderful things. But if we wish to achieve something truly extraordinary in our lives—be it athletic, intellectual, social, artistic, professional—we must build on this “standard-edition” body and invest it with extraordinary energy.

  Obviously, human bodies are not all created equal. Some of us start with more than others, some less. Some bodies have unique flaws, some unique strengths. Even within one person, flaws and strengths vary from one stage of life to another. But no one has a physical specimen that, without work, will aid them in accomplishing everything they want, in getting their new story to work just so. Not Tiger Woods, not LeBron James, not Michelle Kwan, not you. That’s the bad news.

  You’ll also consider it bad news—certainly not a thrilling reminder—that somewhere between ages twenty-five and thirty, the standard-edition body we were given begins to lose efficiency in its ability to expend and recover energy. For virtually every one of us, if we did very little and just let “nature take its course,” we’d pretty much lose the ability to produce extraordinary energy by age forty.

  But, yes, there’s good news. Really. Our body is spectacularly adaptive, perfectly agreeable to being modified and improved. I’ve never encountered anyone incapable of improving dramatically on what they’ve been given, so long as they want it and work at it badly enough. One of the most extraordinary examples of the infinite adaptability of the human body is Erik Weihenmayer, a mountain climber who scaled all seven of the world’s great summits, including Mount Everest, after losing his eyesight as a teenager. Erik—not only a world-class climber and a skier, but also an author and speaker—exemplifies many things to many people, but none more than this: With the right kind of training, there is almost nothing our standard-issue physical self can’t achieve.

  GETTING YOUR STORY STRAIGHT ABOUT EATING

  When a new group of clients comes through HPI, my team of fitness and nutrition coaches and I hear their stories of perpetual fatigue and wavering ability to focus, then about their dietary habits, and the first thing that often comes to our minds is: diabetes.

  Not that our clientele is diabetic, mind you. In fact, almost none of them is—yet. But the way they eat—or, rather, overeat, or eat horribly—throughout the typical workday, from a range of high glycemic foods such as bagels, chips, sodas, and sports drinks, triggers an insulin response that can increase the risk for insulin resistance and eventually lead to diabetes, as well as increase triglycerides, promote fat storage, and cause a subsequent energy crash. When blood gets overrun by glucose, insulin is called in, cavalry-like, to clear the system of the excess glucose, a process that takes about two hours. During this time one is considerably more sluggish and less engaged than if one were to avoid foods and portion sizes that cause such glucose spikes and crashes.

  On average, individuals who attend our executive course in Florida arrive with excess body fat, some as high as 48% (the healthy range for most men is 5 to 20%; for most women, 15 to 30%). The attendees achieve an average score of only 51% on our nutrition index. (On our scale, 85–100% = “fully engaged,” 70–84% = “engaged,” 51–69% = “disengaged,” and 50% and below = “seriously disengaged.”). In other words, even now, in 2007, with readily available, nutritionally dense foods and a generally heightened awareness about nutritious eating, too many otherwise informed people have yet to straighten out their story around food. Over and again, their stories are convoluted and self-destructive, and do not meet the Purpose-Truth-Action template.

  For example, an unusually large number of respondents are flabbergasted when they learn that their energy demands increase dramatically twice a day:

  after waking up, and

  when exercising.

  You’d think our nutritionists had just pointed out that the earth was in fact flat. At both these junctures during the day, your need for adequate fuel is critical. This fuel must come in the form of food, the right food. Yet in their survey responses, fewer than half of our clients treat these special periods as special at all. Indeed, we hear all kinds of faulty proclamations: I’m not hungry in the morning, so why should I eat?…I hate the taste of food in the morning…If I eat something before I run I’ll get an upset stomach.

  Because of my experience in athletics, both as competitor and coach, I understand that we often make deals with our body—Go all-out for me another thirty seconds and I’ll give you the next ninety seconds off. But some things are non-negotiable. You can’t function now on fuel you promise to provide later. All the willpower in the world won’t overcome cells starving for glucose; the body, if you will, has a mind of its own. Because so many people eat with little sense of nutritional balance, though, all kinds of strange math invade one’s thinking.

  I worked out earlier so I can have a big piece of pie later, since I already burned off those calories.

  I overate at lunch, I’m disgusted with myself, so for the rest of the afternoon I won’t consume a single calorie.

  I skipped lunch today so I can have a much bigger dinner than usual.

  It simply doesn’t work like that.

  The better and more balanced our diet, the more engaged we can be, the better we’ll perform. Ergo, to perform exceptionally requires a considerable investment. Whether it’s your bank account or your body, you can’t withdraw what you haven’t put in.

  Always eat within an hour of waking up.

  Eat a meal or snack rich in carbohydrates within two hours before exercising and after exercising.*

  What you eat and when will either enhance or hinder your performance. You can’t get around this fact.

  Once upon a time, we all had our food story straight. We ate only when hungry, only until we felt satisfied, and then
no more. Our body’s need for fuel was our lone guide. When was this intuitive Golden Age? When we were infants. By the time we hit adulthood and enter the work world, though, a lot of that primal, fundamental connection with our bodies has been shrouded by other complications, many of which start early. For example, there’s the Clean Plate Club (My overeating will help starving children), which teaches one to eat past the point of satiety. There’s eating as a way to gain a parent’s love and approval. There’s the pressure we feel to eat or overeat in social situations. Some people—for religious or allegedly health-related reasons—fast regularly.

  As we age, our lives, particularly at work, often prevent us from responding quickly, much less immediately, to our body’s various needs (for fuel or rest); we start to change; what is unnatural begins, finally, to seem natural. Our appetite starts to fail—that is, we get stupendously hungry, or hungry at the “wrong” time. We start eating when there’s food before us or go too long without eating, simply because we neglect our needs, rather than eating when our body requires it. Repeat these patterns often enough and our bodies become confused and finally indoctrinated anew, unnaturally, so that we actually start responding to food in a different way; just like that, our story around food becomes corrupted. We start taking in too much fuel. Or bad fuel. Or fuel at the wrong time. Or we’re always eating on the run, chewing and swallowing so fast we don’t even know how much fuel we require. (Forget the whole notion of actually enjoying the food.) To give an example of how a change in circumstance can make the body trick itself: Suppose you found yourself stranded on a desert island. After a few hours you’d feel hungry. But as you adjusted to the fact that there was no easily available food, your brain would start sending out signals that you were not hungry, which in turn would allow you to become more focused, so that you could devote your energy (which your body creates by starting to burn glycogen, protein, and fat reserves) to one of two survivalistic activities: finding food or figuring a way off the island. Indeed, while you’re hacking through the jungle or fashioning a fishing rod, you might experience that physical exuberance sometimes called an “anorexic high.”

  This can only go on for so long, of course; the body, while miraculous in many ways, cannot turn illusion into fuel; and burning fat becomes, after a time, dangerous, and eventually lethal. The point, though, is that, as conditions change, so do our physical responses. In a sense, as notions like “survive” and “thrive” begin to change meaning, the body starts smartly to tell itself a new story.

  With the marooned-on-an-island example, however, at least the body is doing all it can to survive, to live another day. But the adaptations that our body and mind have made for the way many of us live now—to crave salt and sugar; to want to stuff ourselves; sometimes to deprive ourselves for dubious reasons—is not for our greater good. All it does is work to kill us faster.

  We must change our story back to the way it was when we were young, so that we reconnect again with what food does for us. To get our story straight around food, we must learn to eat strategically.

  That’s not always easy. Practically every American restaurant serves individual portions large enough for three people. Or the waiter or waitress frowns to see you’ve left food, not knowing that you’re trying to eat smart; believing that your half-eaten meal will translate into a smaller tip, she compensates by slipping you a free dessert, hoping for that bigger tip. Or you often eat with people who have food issues, from allergies to eating disorders. (Our experience and countless surveys show how prevalent “food issues” are, so it’s pretty much a lock that you’re very often eating with such people.) Or you rarely have time to prepare meals the way you’d like.

  Strategic, balanced eating is possible. But you have to get your story straight. That’s precisely what our nutritional staff does with our clients, week after week. Here’s a very brief summary about eating (more extensive nutritional guidelines and explanations may be found at our website, www.humanperformanceinstitute.com) from our master storyteller and chief nutritionist, Raquel Malo:

  “Re-Authoring” When to Eat, and Why

  If you go too long without eating, or you eat too many high glycemic foods (which include candy, soda, certain sports drinks, and almost anything white—bread, pasta, rice, rice cakes), you will experience those glucose/insulin spikes that make your energy waver dramatically. Once you pass four hours without food, you’re depleted of sufficient energy, no matter how many calories you took in at your last meal.

  As you can see above, at the end of the day you’re set for a deep crash; eating in this way will render you incapable of engaging with your family when you get home. While you didn’t mean for your story to play out this way, that’s how it’s written; that’s how your family experiences it. You need a new story around eating.

  You must eat every two to four hours except when sleeping. You should drink water every thirty minutes to one hour. Snacking between meals helps to maintain energy and never allows your blood sugar level to get too low—thus enabling you to engage better all the way through to the end of the day. (Healthy snacks include fruit, low-fat yogurt, cottage cheese, nuts, sunflower and pumpkin seeds, trail mix, nutrition bars, and peanut butter.) If you do this, you will maintain energy throughout the day, right up until you’re ready to go to bed; see the chart below.

  Feeling Satisfied vs. Feeling Full

  After a meal, you want to feel satisfied, not full, and certainly not verging on a food coma. What are some smart habits to help you achieve this?

  Eat slowly. Put utensils down between bites. Stop periodically and assess your satisfaction. Eat particularly slowly when consuming calorie-rich foods and other food high in fat content, because less is needed to make you feel satisfied or full.

  Eat light and often. This not only stabilizes blood glucose levels but

  improves metabolism

  improves energy levels, brain function, and mood

  controls cravings

  decreases the likelihood of overeating

  maintains muscle mass

  prevents excessive fat storage

  Do not multi-task while eating. Focus on what you’re doing. Engage.

  Eat only what you need for the next two to three hours of your day. Practice eating less food to assess how long the meal lasts.

  Our best stories are full of great feeling and thinking. Our lives are most deeply felt when we experience them emotionally, mentally, spiritually. But none of that is fully possible unless, first, we are physically whole. And that is not possible without the right fuel—namely, healthy food. What you eat, how much, and when will either enhance or hinder your performance.

  GETTING YOUR STORY STRAIGHT ABOUT EXERCISE AND MOVEMENT

  Most of us work and recover from work in sedentary settings. Cubicles, cramped spaces, chairs, couches. We sit before computers. Traveling to and from this sedentary life we sit in a car, in traffic. Over time, as the traffic has thickened, the cars have gotten more comfortable. CD players, digital radio, three hundred cup holders. Gradually, remaining motionless for large chunks of our waking life has stopped seeming abnormal and actually become sort of, well, okay. Pleasant.

  We need to move at regular intervals. We’re built to move, not to sit. Movement makes the blood flow better. The more we move, the better we feel. The more mentally alert we are. The better we function cognitively. The less muscular tension and discomfort we experience. The more hormones get released, prolonging the salutary effects. Physical movement serves to enhance engagement by improving oxygen transport to cells. Lack of movement for extended periods of time (more than ninety minutes) makes it hard—impossible, actually—to be fully engaged. And the longer you don’t move, the harder it is to be engaged. Why are we wiped out after a long meeting or flight? No, it’s not all from the boring agenda items you’re reviewing on your laptop or the dry airplane air. It’s because we’ve been physically inactive for hours. Our blood hasn’t circulated but instead has pooled, along
with oxygen, in our now swollen feet. (A bit of advice: Never make big decisions while your feet are swollen.) When sitting, you’re stifling blood flow to your largest muscle group, your behind. (And literally causing yourself—sorry—a pain in the ass.) Lack of movement = lack of energy. To rest, after all, don’t we lie still so that we’ll lose energy so that we’ll fall asleep? The more inert we are during the day, therefore, the more we resemble the walking dead. In our survey, the average respondent achieves only 56% on physical fitness, the lower end of the “disengaged” range.

  The more you move, conversely, the more energy you create, the better you perform. To perform better, you need to move more. You simply can’t not feel the positive effect of movement. (Better still is to move when outdoors: Sunlight elevates your serotonin level, further increasing your energy.) Movement almost instantly makes you more alert. One hopes that air-traffic controllers, when on duty, at least pace.

  As Chris Jordan, our chief exercise physiologist and master exercise/movement storyteller, says week after week: Movement is the most powerful stimulant the body experiences. It needn’t even be extended or rigorous movement. Just movement, plain and simple, provides a surprisingly good bang for the buck, particularly when it’s breaking up extended periods of inactivity such as mid-afternoon meetings. For instance, standing up—nothing more, just standing up from a sitting position—doubles your metabolic rate! Go for even a short walk and you’ve more than doubled the burn rate again. To prevent the mental and emotional disengagement that inevitably follow when you don’t move, even small movements of the hands, feet, and arms should be made every thirty to forty-five minutes, and large movements such as walking, climbing stairs, or full-body stretching should be practiced every ninety minutes to two hours. The bigger the range of motion, the better; flexing hand muscles won’t stimulate you as much as flexing arm muscles, and so on. Movement facilitates oxygen transport to the cells. Every time you move a limb, you improve blood circulation to that limb and to the brain, which controls that movement, thus increasing alertness, focus, engagement. When sitting for long periods, don’t remain statue-like; instead, rock back and forth. (I realize that might not always be socially acceptable—say, if you’re sitting in a chapel or at a funeral or a board meeting.) Uncross your legs—having them crossed constricts blood flow—or at least switch legs often. As with food intake—where eating light and often is recommended—so, too, moving little and especially often (during the workday, at least) is beneficial.