[[:encoded, "We are honored today to have a very special guest. Our guest today built a multi-million dollar financial advisory firm. However, at one point in his career, he was ready to leave the business world; not because he wasn't financially successful but because he was overweight, unhealthy & unhappy. Beginning in 2004, he went through an inspiring journey losing 140 pounds of excess weight and now competes in triathlons. In other words he went from 313 pounds to 173 pounds. After mentoring 12 friends to lose a combined 321 pounds of excess weight in less than a year, he wrote the book The Fitness Race, which was published in April 2008. The Fitness Race will inspire those who struggle with their weight and give them a plan and path to get as light and fit as they choose. \n\nMark Little will share a brief history as to what actually helped him decide that being 313 pounds was no longer acceptable and his decision to do something about getting lighter and fitter. \n\nHe will also talk about the importance of accountability coaching as it applies to him in his life and in The Fitness Race.\n\nIn addition, Mark will discuss the choices he made in relationship to his eating habits. If I recall correctly, at one point Mark ate a lot at McDonalds and still lost weight. This isn’t a typical story you would hear from most people.\n\nYou can review Mark’s story and the story of others he has mentored at www.TheFitnessRace.com. \n\nYou will enjoy this interview with such an amazing person who has enjoyed and still enjoys both professional and personal success."]]
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[MUSIC] Hello, and welcome to the Accountability Coach podcast, where we will discuss topics, ideas, questions, and issues related to having a totally balanced and successful life. This is Ann Baccrack. We are honored today to have a very special guest. Our guest today built a multi-million dollar financial advisory firm. However, at one point in his career he was ready to leave the business world, not because he wasn't financially successful, but because he was overweight, unhealthy, and unhappy. Beginning in 2004, he went through an inspiring journey, losing 140 pounds of excess weight, and now competes in triathlons every year. After mentoring 12 friends to lose a combined 321 pounds of excess weight in less than a year, he wrote the book, The Fitness Race, which was published in April of 2008. The fitness race will inspire those who struggle with their weight, and give them a plan and a path to get as light and fit as they choose. Welcome, and thanks for joining us today, Mark Little. >> Thank you, and it's my pleasure to be here. Well, Mark, please share a brief history with our listeners today as to what actually happened and actually what helped you decide that being 313 pounds was no longer acceptable. And you were going to do something about getting lighter and fitter. Just kind of give us a brief before and after snapshot. >> Well, like many people, it sort of snuck up on me. I was a fairly fit child. I was never into sports or anything like that. But I was lean and trim as a kid, and after college, I just like many Americans, I got stuck behind a desk and with a sedate lifestyle. I, over the years, slowly gained weight from a normal weight up until when I made up my mind to lose all the weight, I had gained over 140 pounds. I weighed 313 pounds, and I was experiencing serious, serious medical problems. I was diabetic and was experiencing symptoms such as neuropathy and painful pain in my extremities, also blindness. I was experiencing blindness from time to time. I also had a form of arthritis, which was extremely painful, and saw me taking airport assistance at the wheelchair assistance at the airport over half the time. And no mail in my family had achieved a H50 without either a heart attack or bypass surgery, and I was 48. So I just figured my-- the clock was ticking, and I really felt like I was going to die. So I decided that this was a condition of choice, and after struggling with my weight for over 25 years and failing at nearly every diet in the world, I figured there must be a method that works that will allow me to shed all this weight and get light as fit as I want to get permanently. What type of program? I mean, you obviously had to be under medical, you know, somebody medically watching you. Were you? You could say that I had my medical team certainly benchmarked me at the beginning and clear me for training, but in the end, I just simply created a process and surrounded myself with people who knew more than I did about getting fit and eating right. I hired a registered dietician. I started going to physical trainers. I really went-- what many might believe is overboard, and that's why I wrote the fitness race book. I kind of looked back on it after I lost all the weight permanently and decided that really you don't need to do as much as I did with hiring professionals the way that I did it. It helped, but it's not necessary. There's some keys to this that are really more important. Okay. Well, you know, there's so many overweight people these days, and by that I mean it could be anywhere from 15 pounds. Sometimes people feel that they're overweight. You know, as we get older, the pounds just kind of sneak up on us. You know, to people who are like you and maybe over 140 pounds of excess weight, why do you feel so many people struggle with getting lighter, fitter, and healthier? I think it's pretty simple, and I think just like it's snuck up on me over 25 years of today's lifestyle, you know, looking back on it now, it's really easy to cut back on food, and it's easy to kind of pick up the pace and get a little bit more active and burn calories faster and then lose all that weight. But yeah, the reality is it's easier not to. It's easier not to make little good decisions at every meal. It's easier to eat a little more and think that it's no big deal. It's easier to just skip that workout today because, you know, you're busy and you have other things to do. I think it's really that simple. You know, those who struggle with their weight, really in the end, and what I've come to the conclusion is they just simply have not made up their mind to do whatever it takes. And really, for most people, there's no urgency unless you've had a heart attack or some, you know, some have catastrophe. Most people just look at weight losses as, you know, I'll get around to it someday. Yeah, or they think they're exempt from something happening to them probably. Yeah, I think so. Give us an idea of why the fitness race method seems to work for those who actually join. Well, the fitness race is a methodology and really it's built on the way that I built my business. I built a business app using a certain methodology and it occurred to me one day that maybe this methodology would work with my goal to get lighter and fitter and sure enough it did. And really, the key to the fitness race method is that our process does not move forward with an individual who joins our fitness race until we are convinced that that individual has resolved to make the effort required. If we're not convinced that you as an individual are willing to make the effort to get as light and fit as you set as a goal, then why spend the time in the effort convincing you to, you know, care about your own goals. So we focus our process on making sure that people are resolved and have made up their mind to make the effort. Once they've made up their mind, then the fitness race process focuses on having them set a physical goal, some physically active goal, something they cannot currently do, something that's challenging to them, and something that's within the next six months. So you put something on the calendar, if you can't walk five miles, then maybe you could set that as a goal. If you can't run for 20 minutes, then maybe that's a goal. If you can't spend all day at Disneyland or Disney World with your kids or grandkids, maybe you could set that as a goal. We have people that have set all kinds of goals in the fitness race, from hikes in the Grand Canyon to just simply being able to do two chin-ups or 10 chin-ups on a bar. You know, it really is up to the individual, it should be something they can't currently do, but it's something that we circle a date on the calendar, and then on that date, you will be able to do that so that we have a date, certain fixed milestone to work towards. And at that point, the entire process is focusing really on holding you or the participant accountable to their goal and to their desire, what they say they want to accomplish. Okay, so there obviously is some kind of a screening process that lets you know that they're serious about this. Yes, we start our process with a success roadmap, and we work with each participant to really gauge their seriousness about their willingness to make the effort that's going to be required of whatever it is that they set as their goal. Great. Well, you mentioned accountability. How do you hold the participants accountable? Well, I'm mentored 12 people. After I lost all my weight, I mentored 12 people to follow the same process candidly, and I was unsure if what I did would work for others. I didn't know if maybe I had some sort of superhuman willpower after 25 years of struggling with my weight. So I experimented, I got 12 of my friends who were struggling with their weight to follow my method and sure enough, by following my process in less than seven months' time, about six months' time, these 12 people lost 321 pounds of excess weight, and that model is what we use with the fitness race today. What we do in is we team these participants in the fitness race up in groups of three, and these teams are basically set up so that they ensure that to each team, each team member ensures that everybody else has a specific plan of action, and that plan of action to get to their goal is actually placed on to their calendar. Because we're all busy, and we found that, you know, somebody just has it on their task list to do four hours of training in a given week. Now, that's kind of like a wish list, but the minute it makes it onto the calendar, it increases the probability of actually occurring quite a bit. And at that point, then each participant just is tasked with making sure that everyone on their team honors their calendar and holds them accountable to that, and helps them measure the effort required by their goal against the effort they're actually seeing of the members of their peer coach accountability team. So they kind of watch each other to see if they're really making the effort required, and they hold each other accountable to that. Well, why do you think that the accountability coaching works so well with the fitness race participants? You know, and that kind of goes to the human psyche. I think it's just that the way we as humans are, and I can only speak from my own experience, but I would say that in my own case, I would just come to the conclusion that using myself is kind of a baseline. I just believe that most people have way too many excuses. You know, they have good intentions to do training. They have good intentions to cut back on eating, but just making small bad decisions each and every day, you know, or I won't work out today, or oh, this will be the last big lunch that I take this week or whatever excuses. I just think people have too many excuses. Most people take the path of least resistance, and I think accountability works because when you are really serious about a goal, like in my case, I wanted to get down to my high school weight of 173. I was serious about that, and I think when people are really serious about their goals, scrutiny by an outsider really gets you moving. The fact that somebody else is aware of what your goal is and what it requires and holds you accountable to make the effort that you place onto your calendar, and it creates deadlines and milestones, and you know, if you're goal-oriented, it really helps because we all need these deadlines in the course of a week. You know, you have a date on Thursday to meet with your accountability team, and they're going to ask you, did you do your four hours of training this week? That creates a deadline. So you have up till Thursday to get your training in. It's really a form of encouragement when someone else insists that you keep your commitments to yourself, and you see progress, and I think all of that goes to making accountability the key to this whole thing, because somebody else monitoring the fact that you keep your commitments really increases the probability that you will. Yeah, and you probably don't want to let your team members down either, because they're encouraging you. That's right. You want to see them make progress too. You don't want to be the bad example. Yeah, excellent. Well, let's talk about choices for a minute, and choices that you made with your eating habits, for example, and if I recall correctly, at one point, you told me that you had eaten at McDonald's and still lost weight, and I found that amazing. So what choices did you make that others typically don't? Well, again, I think it's all about making good choices, and it occurred to me in McDonald's one day that they have a lot of good choices on that menu, and my reality is that I travel a lot. I find myself in airports and traveling quite a bit, and I was actually looking for some restaurants or someplace that I was everywhere, that I knew the menu well, and I could make good choices. And when I really looked at their menu one day, and I saw they had so much grilled chicken and so many salads, and they had gluten yogurt parfaits for crying out loud, and sliced apples, you can pie at any McDonald's. When I realized that all these things were available there, it just occurred to me. It's not really about McDonald's. It's about the fact that our people really looking at wherever they're eating to see what good choices are there. I love the opinion. You can make good choices at almost any place you eat. I mean, every convenience store and gas station these days, and sales, apples, and bananas, you can make good choices in so many ways. But McDonald's is a metaphor for me. I did eat at McDonald's about 65 times per week during my journey to lose 140 pounds, but it was because I could just stop in for a quick snack, and it was healthy, and that tied me over for an hour or two, and McDonald's are everywhere. Yeah, and it's just, it really comes down to choices. So you can choose to do something, or like you said, you can choose not to, and it's sometimes for most people it's easier not to. Give us some perspective. Does it, does it cost anything to, you know, join the fitness race program? No, you just go to thefitnessrace.com, put in your name and email address. You'll start getting updates, and we'll tell you exactly what the steps are that you need to take to follow the process that we take with the fitness race, and see if you're willing to make the effort. If you want to buy the book, there is a cost to the fitness race book, but that's not required. You can join the fitness race for free. Wow, that's amazing. Is there any type of goal that you have related to the whole program that you started the fitness race? Actually, I do have a charitable goal. I would like to get the fitness race book to the point where it's generating a substantial amount of profits for charity. I'm supporting a project with Bright Hope International in India right now to help people that are living on less than a dollar a day. And the challenge that I make to the fitness race participants is that if they sign up with the fitness race, I try to get them to commit to donating a dollar for every pound that they keep off for the rest of their life to some charity of their choice, their church or their charity. And my goal would be to get people worldwide through the fitness race, to lose a billion pounds, and thereby donate a billion dollars a year to the charities of their choices. So what you're saying is basically if I lose, for example, 25 pounds and keep it off every year, I donate 25 dollars a year. That's all? That's it. Wow, that's really impressive. And to get people to join in that seems pretty simple to me, and especially if it's free. You got to love that. Tell us, you know, what really I guess prompted you to write the actual book, the fitness race? Well, I've started with my weight for 25 years, and I wanted to share the process that I use to utilize to lose all that weight. And there's a really simple four-step process. And because I had mentored others to successfully follow it, I basically wanted to share what I had done and mentored with them. And especially, I was focusing on people who were very goal-oriented, like me. There's so many people who just can't, who are successful in other areas of their life, but they just can't seem to tackle this weight and fitness problem. And so I particularly wanted to appeal to people who, like me, felt like they had tried literally every diet, and then tried literally every exercise program. And nothing worked. If you're out there and you've struggled with weight for a long time and think nothing works, I would encourage you to try this if you're goal-oriented. Well, that sounds great. How can the people listening join the fitness race or get a copy of the book or both? Well, just go to thefitnessrace.com and you can either join the fitness race, or if you just want to check out my before and after pictures, it's quite shocking to see someone go from 313 pounds down to 173 pounds and doing, you know, triathlons every year like I do. But those pictures are there. And the fitness race book is also available on the home page at thefitnessrace.com. Well, Mark, we really appreciate you spending your time and expertise with us today. And for those of you who are listening and interested in learning more about Mark Little's fitness race, so you can set goals around being lighter and fitter, go to www.thefitnessrace.com. My hope for our time together is that you got value and an idea or two that will help you be even more successful personally and professionally. You may be wondering what should you do next? Well, on www.accountabilitycoach.com, you have access to at least nine free personal and professional development resources you can take advantage of right now. Review the 30-day self-study course so you can discover for yourself how to focus on your highest payoff activities that produce the biggest results in the shortest amount of time so that you can experience that feeling of true and total success and a fantastic quality of life. This program is effective and powerful at improving every area in your life in 30 days time. This program will change bad habits into habits that will lead you to achieving all of your personal and business goals. Aim for what you want each and every day. Until next time, make it a great day. Today and every day. Thanks for listening.
[[:encoded, "We are honored today to have a very special guest. Our guest today built a multi-million dollar financial advisory firm. However, at one point in his career, he was ready to leave the business world; not because he wasn't financially successful but because he was overweight, unhealthy & unhappy. Beginning in 2004, he went through an inspiring journey losing 140 pounds of excess weight and now competes in triathlons. In other words he went from 313 pounds to 173 pounds. After...
