Zen Fitness, Tao Health

By Scott Abel

What would "Zen dieting" look like? How can it help with mindfulness and mindful eating?

How can the Tao help with the stress of staying consistent through life's vicissitudes, or the challenges of sticking to a workout plan or meal strategy without feeling deprived?

The answer is that both Zen Buddhism and the Tao focus on approaching life as it is, and not necessarily as you want it to be. Both these approaches have strategies that are integral to what the author, Coach Scott Abel, calls getting "real" about getting real.

This short, easy-to-understand book offers a new approach to fitness and the fitness mindset; it advocates approaching all aspects of life with calm, assertive energy. This is how you can approach your diet, your workouts, and the regular real-life stressors and hiccups that inevitably pop up in our busy, day-to-day lives. The book argues that authenticity is the key to peace of mind, and that happiness comes not when we reach such and such a weight or some arbitrary bodyfat percentage, but when we learn to focus on and enjoy the process it takes to get us there. 

Zen Fitness, Tao Health is not a book with exhaustive lists of "acceptable" foods, meal plans or workout regimes; it is a book that suggests adopting a different mindset towards these things. If you've struggled with these things in the past, and you are looking for a different approach, Zen Fitness, Tao Health suggests one.

This book focuses on:

• Fulfillment and achievement
• Zen mind and lessons from child prodigies
• Zen dieting and being mindful
• Blocks to mental clarity
• Authenticity and its relation to peace of mind
• Pure motivation—and its opposite

Get your copy of Zen Fitness, Tao Health. Learn a practical, unique way of approaching the challenges that come alongside fitness and health in the real world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scott Abel
• Release date: Oct 27, 2016
• ISBN: 9781540162229

Book preview

About the Author

Scott Abel has been a personal development and physique transformation coach for over three decades. Although his background is in sociology, he specializes in weight loss, staying lean year-round, metabolism, and long-term, sustainable solutions for permanent transformation.

He has helped hundreds of clients balance high-level goals with busy careers and real life. This includes coaching high-level athletes, helping clients win elite bodybuilding and figure titles, and more.

To learn more about his coaching, visit scottabelfitness.com/coaching

Your Free Gift!

Thank you for getting this book. As a free gift, you can download the Abel Starter Set, including The Mindset of Achievement and Intro to Metabolic Enhancement Training (MET) (yes, the entire books) completely free.

The Mindset of Achievementis about reaching goals, sustaining them and building on them. If you’ve ever achieved something (e.g. weight loss) only to find you couldn’t sustain the success, this book is for you. It has chapters on habits & routines, motivation, getting out of ruts, fear of failure, mastery and much more.

Intro to Metabolic Enhancement Training (MET) explains the methodology behind this unique metabolic training program, and includes two full four-day programs for fat loss, hypertrophy, and metabolic enhancement.

Just go to scottabelfitness.com to get your copies from the homepage.

Table of Contents

About the Author

Your Free Gift

Section I

Introduction

Chapter 1. The Tao Athlete

Chapter 2. Pure Motivation

Chapter 3. Zen Dieting

Chapter 4. Tao of Optimism

Chapter 5. Blocks to Mental Clarity

Chapter 6. Zen Mind

Chapter 7. Lessons from Child Prodigies

Chapter 8. Peace of Mind and Authenticity

Chapter 9. Running from Shadows

Chapter 10. Calm, Assertive Energy… or Chicken Little?

Section II

Collected, Unorganized Thoughts on Tao and Fitness

Other Works by Scott Abel

Section I

Introduction

∙•∙

How can I stay consistent year-round?

I can’t seem to stay on track.

I find I rebel against my diet and want more freedom. I just always want more variety.

I always get so close, but then I sabotage myself.

It’s not fun anymore.

What you see above are the kinds of statements I hear very often from my clients or potential clients. People come to me for coaching, not just for diets and workout programs, but also for advice on staying consistent, and eating and living sustainably.

Assuming there are no physiological or metabolic barriers to one’s goals, consistency and a healthy mindset is what separates those who succeed from those who don’t. With that in mind, I often get questions about how to be more consistent, or how to stick to my diet, and other similar questions.

This book addresses that.

"No, Scott! But we don’t want to hear about this ‘Tao’ nonsense!

Just get back to the fitness stuff!

Just tell me how to stick to my diet or whatever!"

I am telling you!

I’m just using a different vocabulary than you are used to. This book doesn’t talk about the perfect diet for maintaining a six-pack, or how to step on a bodybuilding stage, but if you’re looking for a blueprint for how to be consistent, this is the way.

When many people in the actual fitness industry address this kind of thing , it’s in the most superficial, hackneyed and trite kind of way. I’m sick and tired of the macho stuff being posted on the net: Go hard or go home, "Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing, Just be more self-disciplined if you really want it, You need more willpower!" and so on. It’s wrong-headed. It leads to unhealthy mindsets that emphasize struggle and deprivation, or it leads to focusing on things that don’t matter, all while losing motivation for what does.

Sometimes the answer is to step back, and learn to enjoy the experience of the actual process, and bring out your best self, and challenge yourself to grow and become even better. This book addresses that.

This book will reflect the writings of the Tao Te Ching in some form or another.  It’s not an in-depth examination or explanation of Tao concepts, or the concepts of Zen Buddhism. Rather, it borrows from these approaches here and there to help you deal with issues related to calmness, authenticity, motivation, mental clarity, and personal growth. I sometimes use the terms almost interchangeably. There are, of course, distinctions between the two, but I feel that for a project like this, focusing on them misses the forest for the trees. Both use the same general principles: to focus on life as it is — not as you wish it were — and to deal with it as such.

Chapter 1.

The Tao Athlete

∙•∙

In my opinion, sport is form of human expression, and can be defined as art. It produces beauty and meaning.

Athletes can be thought of as artists, and athletics teaches all kinds of basic life lessons and lessons about life itself.

Blending the mindset of the artistic athlete with the peace of mind that exists within the Tao — that is the essential discussion I want to have in this book.

Athletes who are able to follow their inner vision for themselves are always going to feel differently, train differently, and approach their goals differently, relative to their fellow competitors.

These athletes will be less likely to get caught up in externals of measurement, and they are less likely to be overly affected by individual wins or by individual losses, or by other attachments that come from the outside-in approach.

These things will still register, of course; it’s just that they won’t be the driving forces of the Tao athlete’s motivation and their love for their sport.

The Tao athlete has a deeper motivation. He is not using the activity to measure himself. He is losing and finding himself, discovering himself, and creating himself within being an athlete at his chosen sport. Motivation tends to be a very personal thing to the Tao athlete. It is something he will never lack.

The Tao athlete embraces the fact that his body is the house where his true self will reside for the rest of his life. Like any house, the Tao athlete makes this house — his body — a place where he can be at home.

He creates a physical living environment within himself, and it is one where the more he likes his surroundings, the more he experiences a lack of clutter, by letting go of mental and emotional attachments. The more clean and organized it is, the more likely he is to be at home within himself. He will think more clearly and he will be a better version of himself.

Motivation becomes a non-issue when you live from the inside out. The Tao athlete has a natural connection to all of what he does. The athletic expression of self within a sport is merely one element of that connection.

The Tao athlete would be unlikely to define himself as a football player,