Dear Tiger Woods,

You aren’t trying to be the healthiest golfer in the world. Do not change your diet. Or if you do, keep in mind that your game may change as well. Lowering your weight does not necessarily lower your score. Look at Brooks Koepka or Jason Dufner. There are all sorts of examples.

You aren’t trying to be the strongest golfer in the world. Yes, extra yards off the tee are great, but they don’t mean anything if you can’t get the ball in the cup. Take it to the extreme and you have the Hulk Hogan wannabes hitting the balls half a mile, but they couldn’t hold a torch to the average pro player. Tiger and Rory are exceptions not the rule. And they have had to make major adjustments after they started really hitting the weight room. And they have had their struggles around the greens.

The sport is a very delicate balance of slow and fast switch, power and finesse, and mental endurance. And as we’ve demonstrated in our article about pitching, gaining fast twitch muscles comes at a price.

Your trainer is not a professional golfer. If he was, he wouldn’t be a trainer. He knows how to get you in better shape. If he knew how to make you the best golfer in the world, he would be the best golfer in the world.

Your nutritionist is not a professional golfer. He just isn’t. So start keto or slow carb or whatever so you look better at the beach, but it will come at a cost. Your brain is the most delicate organ of your body. And your nutritionist does not know how your brain works.

What matters is results. Your job is to shoot low. If your trainer or nutritionist takes you down a path that changes your golf game in a negative way, kick the diet. Kick the workout routine. Otherwise you give away your edge. You’re not trying to be the best golfer in the world with a six-pack. You’re trying to be the best golfer in the world.

No one knows how you got to where you were. If they did, they would be there. If anyone asked you, you probably told them that it was all the hours you put in on the range growing up. I won’t argue with that. But I bet you didn’t make drastic diet changes during your teenage years while you were developing your swing and ironing out the kinks. So when you make these changes, be prepared to go back to the drawing board. And there is no one in the world that can get you back to where you were, except you.

Food is fuel

This is what you should be thinking on your diet, nothing else. It’s the mindset of athletes, and it will give you a new lease on life. 

We all need food. It is literally energy. A calorie in physics is a unit of energy.

All food is essentially the same. There are fats, carbohydrates, and proteins. You need all of these. You can debate the ratio, but if you don’t get enough of any, you will not perform or function at your best. I tend to agree that there are vary levels of health of different food, but I’d rather you eat a donut than not eat.

Your body needs it to perform. You are an engine that runs on food. Think critically about what you put in it, but don’t starve yourself and expect improved results.

Your body needs it to recover. Just because you ran today doesn’t mean you can’t eat a decent supper.

Your brain needs food. It just does. Sure, healthier choices help it perform better. But it needs something to function. Low/no carb diets may impair memory. 

Top athletes don’t starve themselves. Eat like an athlete, not a model. If you’re like me, getting in the exercise is not the problem. That’s the fun part. The diet is the painful part. There are successful athletes in almost every subclass of diet.

It’s not difficult. Your body is programmed to tell you when to eat and what to eat. Don’t ignore it. It knows better than you do what’s good for it. There’s a reason we’re all carbohydrate addicts.

Your body is perfectly designed for your lifestyle. If you’re trying to make a change, change your lifestyle, not your diet.

Think about how a kid eats. Sometimes you have to force them sit down and do it. Eventually they do it, even if they may just eat a plate of Oreo’s and strawberries. Then they are straight back out playing. As they should be. And as we should be too. 

Your scale is killing you

Hop on today. Look down. Then decide what to eat. Repeat the cycle until you like what number you see. That’s the only way to be happy, right?

Your scale doesn’t know if you’re hungry. It just doesn’t. So don’t let it decide if you eat breakfast or not.

Your scale doesn’t know your body fat percentage. Well, you may have a fancy scale that estimates this, like me. But otherwise you literally just see a number.

Muscle weighs more than fat. Proven fact. So if you’re the same size [volume] you were last month, and you put on two pounds, that’s a good thing.

We don’t know how much you’re supposed to weigh. We have “recommended guidelines” of height and weight, but I wouldn’t let them rule your life.

The lightest person doesn’t win. I mean, he may, depending on the contest. But if you weren’t meant to be 150 pounds, it’s going to be hell getting there. And after you get there you’re going to be hungry all the time.  [See How to age like white people]

Your scale doesn’t know if you’re happy. So what if you’re perfectly happy and fifteen pounds overweight. I think you forgot the part that you’re perfectly happy. Get off the scale and go back to whatever you were doing before.

 

 

How to age like white people

If you don’t like sarcasm, go read anything else I’ve written.

Let’s be honest with ourselves here. We’re really on to something. For those on the outside looking in, here’s what you need to do to catch up.

Starve Yourself. Just eat less. Or don’t eat at all. Who care’s if you were born to be 250 pounds? Humans have survived worse. Just as long as you can stand on the scale and feel good about yourself.

Drink Coffee. This is super helpful when you’re trying to starve yourself. It really kills the appetite and gives you that burst of energy that you used to have all the time when you were whole.

Get glasses. In the stress of starving yourself, you’re going to start to feel different. Your vision may start to blur. Glasses can help alleviate this annoyance and get you back to what’s important: getting as thin as humanly possible.

Workout when you don’t feel like it. Earn your gold stars. Outwork your friends. That’s what it’s all about. Looking good naked. Win the race to the grave.

Ignore your body. Don’t worry about how sore you are, or how much your stomach is growling after that big salad you just ate. Just keep plugging away. Maybe your headache will go away. You can always just go get coffee in a couple hours.

Get depressed. As you starve yourself with the aid of glasses and exercise, this should be easy. Just go with it. You’ll hate every minute of every day.

Take Meds. Since you can’t figure out what went wrong, and you can’t go five minutes without flipping someone off, go talk to someone. Get them to give you pills. That’s what you need: one more variable to sort out.

That should be enough to get you started. If you don’t start seeing results in 30 days, you’re doing something wrong.