– By Matt Clement –
Most of us know what it takes to get in shape – combine healthy food with some exercise and sooner or later you’ll get there. But knowing what it takes is not enough. The journey to a happier life begins in your mind.
To understand the power of human mind better, we paid a visit to Phuket’s Thanyapura Sports and Leisure Club – a place where experts take a holistic approach to nutrition, fitness… and mind training. Next to Thanyapura’s world class fitness facilities and nutritionist-designed menus at its restaurants, a mind centre exists to provide its guests with guidance on their way to mental balance and well being.
And while each is worth something on its own, exercises, healthy eating and mindfulness work best when practiced together. According to Thanyapura’s experts, 1 + 1 + 1 is more than three.
MINDFULNESS: Pierre Gagnon – Mind Trainer
Don’t react, act
“In some ways, mindfulness is fundamental to everything that we do. Through mindfulness, you become very aware of your environment and instead of just reacting, you begin acting. It all comes down to thinking – a very normal, natural thing that just happens. The problem is not the thinking itself, it’s the relationship we have with our thoughts, both pleasant and unpleasant. Any thoughts that we have transform our body by creating a chemical reaction. Mindfulness allows you to create a distance from our thoughts, stops you from being manipulated by them.”
Permanent bliss
“We all have a zone of pleasure, a neutral zone and an unpleasant zone, and we rarely remain in the neutral zone; most of the time, we move between pleasure and discomfort zones. Through mindfulness you will become aware of this movement and be able to stop it. If, for example, you compensate discomfort by eating sweets, becoming aware of this will help you stop yourself and go back to the neutral zone, and being there is a great pleasure. We tend to think that there is only pleasure and discomfort in life, but the more mindful you become the more pleasure you get from staying in the neutral zone and the span of your happiness increases.”
The power of Awareness
“Awareness is a huge first step, the realization of what emotions drive us. The second step is the realization that those emotions are impermanent, that the feelings come and go really fast. That way when an unpleasant feeling comes and you become aware of it, instead of reacting to it, you can observe it and wait for it to change and disappear. And it happens really fast…”
Your brain can be your enemy
“Once you understand the way your brain works, you realize that it can be your worst enemy. Your brain doesn’t want you to be happy, it wants you to survive another day. And it’s also confused because in today’s world it reacts to our everyday stresses – an important meeting, a bad relationship etc. – the same way it used to react to an encounter with a tiger in the bush. But once you realize that the thoughts you have are harmless and you are not in a mortal danger, your relationship with your thoughts changes, and your brain transforms. “
Impermanence of pleasure
“There is nothing wrong with pleasure and when pleasure is there, stay with it. But all pleasure disappears and we desperately try to cling to it. So when you have a chocolate cheesecake in front of you, enjoy it. But once it’s gone, it is gone. If the cake is followed by some unpleasant thought, let’s say about a bad investment you made, you’ll have this urge to go back to the previous state and you might end up ordering another piece of cake. It might work for a moment but after 3-4 pieces the pleasure is gone again. So the idea is to have the courage to be with your unpleasant thoughts and wait for another positive emotion to come. You’re not the disk jockey, you don’t decide what feelings you get, what music is played. But you can dance to the music, whatever it is.”
From theory to practice
“It begins with meditation, sitting and observing your thoughts. And that’s enough to begin a transformation in your brain. Simply speaking, our brains are composed of gray matter – the computer, and white matter- the cables connecting the computer. Through meditation, you develop the white matter so you become more connected and this gives you better ability to control your thoughts. Neuroscientists say that it takes 300 milliseconds to become aware of a thought. Then you have 200 milliseconds to veto this thought. There isn’t much space left for free will. From my experience, meditation and mindfulness give you more time to veto the thought and the veto becomes stronger.”
NUTRITION: Marcela Soto – Sports Nutritionist
Not just what but how you eat it
“Focusing on what you’re eating, eating it slowly and enjoying the flavours makes a lot of difference. It’s a different, better experience to thoroughly enjoy a healthy meal than to devour a bag of crisps in a minute. We encourage people to chew more, enjoy the flavours and focus on how your body, your brain perceives the food. Also, we introduce more and more raw food here at Thanyapura, which is composed of real, unadulterated flavours, the way Mother Nature gave them to us. And the flavours this food provides are more intense, helping with the mindfulness aspect.”
One size doesn’t fit all
“Your life is different than mine and small details can change a lot. Sex, age, level of fitness, all affect the nutrition we require. There are different lifestyles and they require different diets. It’s not the same for parents who share their meals with their children and for business people who attend a lot of social gatherings where they tend to overeat and overdrink. There are different goals and different ways to get there. What I do is I give people personalized guidelines on how to achieve what they want.”
Not just weight loss
“Nutritionists are there not just for people who want to lose weight. I think everyone should see a nutritionist. Of course, people who try to lose weight might want to do it more often, maybe every couple of weeks, but even if you live a healthy lifestyle, it’s good to consult an expert to see if what you are eating is good for you and what improvements can be made. There is a lot of misinformation about nutrition on social media and a lot of controversy around different ideas, so people get very confused. Experts can help debunk some myths and provide true knowledge.”
Diet > Exercise
“Proper metabolism and healthy lifestyle come in 70% from diet and 30% from exercise. Workout improves metabolism but just a little. So if you exercise and then follow it up with a pizza, you’re doing more harm than good by not providing your body with the fuel to recover. Of course it’s not like you need to eat super healthy all the time, a once-a-week “cheat meal” won’t affect you much, but you cannot balance a bad diet with a lot of exercise, especially as you grow older.”
Healthy holiday
“Many people who stay at high-end resorts and hotels, do it regularly. They travel from one place to another every couple of weeks. This is the kind of lifestyle for which a nutritionist’s guidelines come especially handy. It helps you to keep up with your goals. A nutritionist can make the right choices at the breakfast buffet, adjust your lunch menu to what you expect to have at dinner, tell you how many glasses of wine you can have etc. That way you can keep up your healthy lifestyle when you travel for business or pleasure and not jeopardize the achievements you already had back home.”
Don’t eat less, eat better
“It’s not quantity that’s the key, it’s quality. If you give your body the fuel that it needs, you won’t crave food so much. It’s all about creating a balance. Of course, there are going to be some restrictions for people who are trying to lose weight, but it’s not just cutting the portion down or following some strict diet of just eating apples and pomelos. When you consult a professional nutritionist, you will receive a menu adjusted to your personal requirements. In fact many of my clients tell me that after consulting with me they can eat more than they used to, they just eat better.”
FITNESS: Stefan Lange – Personal Coach and Group Fitness Trainer
Fitness for the body, fitness for the mind
“Sport is basically making up for what we lost with the growth of civilization. We used to move but now we have all these elevators, escalators, cars. With sport, we move again and it changes our bodies, it’s important for everyone, especially those who sit behind the desk all day long. But sport also changes the mind. From personal experience, if I can’t do my exercise for a while, I feel discomfort. When I practice my sport I feel more like myself, my body feels better. And 99% of people I work with will tell you the same thing.”
You don’t have to, you want to
“First of all you need to realize that you don’t do sport for anyone else but yourself. Nobody is forcing you to do it, you want to do it. That’s why when people come to Thanyapura we first talk to them to ask what they want to achieve, what are their goals. Only then we find the best way to those goals. We create routines that are not easy to break, we have coaches who know how to keep the motivation up, we have group sessions where the dynamic is fantastic, people support each other.”
Not just how you look but how you feel
“Training isn’t only about growing muscles and losing weight. It’s about stability, strength and ability to do more. The feeling of strength inside you, becoming less tired. For example I train mothers who recently had a child, office workers with backache resulting from long hours in a sitting position, and they come to me after training and say “I feel better”. That’s the best thing a coach can hear.”
You set the goal
“No one can set your goals for you. In today’s world, we like to push the responsibility away, put it in someone else’s hands. But there is a part that we need to do ourselves, you have to take the first step and only then, we can provide you with help. First you want, then we give you what you want.”
Make it personal
“Many people try to exercise by watching YouTube videos, and then they are coming to us and complaining about different pains. I say, let the experts do the experts’ work. Online instructions are easy enough to follow but you’re never sure if you’re doing it right. And once you start doing it wrong, it can be difficult to correct it. If you spend half a year doing an exercise incorrectly, it will take us another few months to correct it. That’s where personal training comes in: we can focus on specific goals and master the technique. And then there is also motivation. Not all people have enough of it to train for an hour with high intensity. With a personal trainer, you will feel more motivated.”
