Vuurwapen Blog is Right – Fat Is Not Tactical

Listen… I am not a doctor. That should be obvious to those of you who read here once in a while. This isn’t medical advice. You should check with a real doctor before make any drastic changes to your diet. That conversation will probably go something like this… “Heck yeah you should change the way you eat! You could stand to a lose a few pounds.”

Vuurwapen Blog published a post back in December titled Fat Is Not Tactical. I was already on my path to better health when that article was published so it wasn’t exactly my inspiration or anything fruity like that, but it was timely and served as some positive reinforcement for the path that I was already on. Andrew, the author, talks about coming to the same realization that I did – I’m fat and I don’t want to be anymore.

It is silly to hit the range to practice all these “tactical” drills and buy all this “tactical” gear if I am going to carry around all this extra “tactical” fat. I was a walking contradiction in some ways. I was training skills that my body wouldn’t let me complete to their fullest. Maybe you find yourself in the same boat and you are wondering what to do about it. There probably isn’t really one right answer but I can share what has worked and is working for me.

Can you exercise yourself skinny with out changing your diet? Can a Lorcin get through a handgun course without breaking?

Remember when you were young and you could eat anything you wanted without gaining weight? Remember when you could burn off that entire pizza you ate by yourself just by playing a game or two of pick-up basketball? Yeah, me too… but barely. There are probably some guys who can still do that at my age, but I am not one of them. I am not that old but I have noticed that my body has been changing. Of course, it doesn’t take a keen whit and an impenetrable sense of situational aware to notice a few extra waist sizes and 50 extra pounds. I was exercising 3 or 4 times a week and could never really lose much weigh, if any. In fact, most of the time I was slowly gaining.

Exercise is certainly important, but, for me, loosing weight meant getting real about the way that I ate. There are people who will tell you that if you work out enough, you can eat whatever you want. That might work for some people who are already fit and skinny, but it just isn’t true for the guy who has 50 pounds to lose. That sounds obvious, but I was more than happy to cling to that as justification to stuff my fat face with cereal as a snack 3 times a day. This is what I found to be true for me: I get skinny at the dinner table and I get fit in the gym.

I ended up choosing to eat and exercise in way that was based on the Primal Blueprint. I cut out grains and refined sugar completely. That last sentence is easy to type and a lot harder to do when you have a wife and 2 kids under 4 years of age. Did you know that there are grains and sugar in approximately 457% of our food supply or at least that is how it feel when you are trying to cut them out. It is tough and it takes a lot of planning, but you have to take drastic action if you want to see drastic change. That drastic action for me has resulted in 30 pounds lost over about 3 months.

Here is the bottom line. Improving in any area of your life takes self discipline. Want to speed up your draw stroke? Get out the shot timer and hit the range regularly with a repeatable, measurable plan each and every time. Want to learn to pick locks? Break out the pick set because you are in for some long hours feeling around in a keyway. Want to lose weight and get fit? You are going to have to change your diet in some meaningful way.

Skinny you will outperform fat you every time. Vuurwapen Blog was right. Fat is most certainly not tactical.