In my experience fitness is less about self control or will power and more about creating routines that lead to fitness.
For example, I have a routine of going to a group fitness class at my gym in the morning. I don't need to summon willpower, I just have a morning routine that involves doing x thing at y time. No thought required.
Given the abundance of options for fitness classes and meal plan services, you really can just put this on auto-pilot and have a lifestyle that is healthier than 99% of your peers.
> Given the abundance of options for fitness classes and meal plan services...
This is part of what's fucked up about modern American lifestyles.
We shouldn't be promoting layering healthy behaviors (fresh foods and exercise) on top of our default lives -- we should be doing a better job of engineering our environment to make those things the default for all people.
F.ex. what if we highly taxed automobile entry into urban cores and shopping districts?
Right. Design our cities so that getting around while getting exercise is safe and easy. And restaurants/etc should give you healthy portion sizes by default, not rely on your self-control to stop eating. And so on...
Every yuppy feels compelled to remind you they go to the gym, expecting a pat on the head for being a responsible citizen, when it's really a sign of a dysfunctional lifestyle. Cordoning off a discrete slice of time to "be healthy" is pathetic imo. I'd much rather just be healthy. Gorillas don't work out.
But because I live in suburban Australia and eat the same pesticide laden slop as everybody else, I too have a gym membership.
> Cordoning off a discrete slice of time to "be healthy" is pathetic imo.
What does this actually mean to you? Walking or even running is certainly not comparable to going to the gym, so what, should we lift heavy weights as part of our regular jobs to keep up our upper body muscle mass?
The results I've seen, and please correct me if my knowledge is wrong / outdated, are that modest physical activity (i.e. not gym, but more than our sedentary lifestyles) regularly nets most of the health benefit.
Ergo, we don't need to turn our jobs or built environment into Ninja Warrior.
We just need to build it to encourage that modest amount of activity.
Unfortunately we know that simply convincing people to change their behavior is very, very, very fucking hard. Individuals can and do pull it off, yes, but we're talking about a society level change that needs lots of people to succeed at this.
It is empirically and demonstrably ineffective as a solution.
Routines help because they reduce the impact and uniqueness of the good behaviour. Another approach is to do things that have high positive pay-off but include health benefits you wouldn't target but get "for free". Example: I ride my bike to work because it's awesome, faster and makes me feel superior. That I get exercise and help out the earth is a side effect; I'd probably still ride my bike if it was unhealthy and produced more CO2
Habits are great, but I'm in great shape because what I do is fun. When it's not fun I called it "training" and that's usually for some huge goal that'll at least be fun to look back at 10, 20 years down the line to marvel that I did a thing.
I guess what I want to express is habits are one step closer to a lifestyle change and that's what keeps one ultimately healthy (mentally, too). We can't have nightmare commutes to soul-sucking jobs to continually have people addicted to looking at screens and think that there's no fallout. Adding, "but now there are drugs!" isn't an advancement.
There is still a certain degree of willpower involved in routines. I wakeup every morning and workout, and every morning I have to fight my brain to get out of bed. I've been doing that for 10 years.
That being said - I do feel like reducing the amount of willpower needed is the key. I love junk food, but if I never buy it at a grocery store it's much easier to cut it out. If I have no chips in the house I could still get some at the corner store, but I need to be much less disciplined than if the chips were in my pantry
For example, I have a routine of going to a group fitness class at my gym in the morning. I don't need to summon willpower, I just have a morning routine that involves doing x thing at y time. No thought required.
Given the abundance of options for fitness classes and meal plan services, you really can just put this on auto-pilot and have a lifestyle that is healthier than 99% of your peers.