This is a guest post by a very good friend and long time online coaching client Aron Woolman. For the past five years I’ve spent a weekend in late January in southern Texas hunting hogs and raising money for the kin of fallen special operations forces thanks to Aron’s involvement in the Silent Warrior Foundation. In the wake of one hunt, Aron shared a photo of his freezer filled with meat from this year’s hunting season (including hunting back home in North Carolina). The following was in response to someone criticizing Aron and questioning the morality of his mode of procuring sustenance. His response was so cogent, and so important to understand that I asked if I could post it as a guest post.

 I’d like to address your comment about my refrigerator. I am not a trophy hunter, and most hunters do not fall into the category of hunting mainly or completely because of a desire to kill animals. I view hunting as a way to connect on a very intimate and personal level with nature, our own animal instincts, and with my food.

I accept that some people adopt a vegan lifestyle for both ideological and scientific reasons, and I will not argue the scientific merits of that diet here. I also will not try to convince a vegan that his position is ideologically incorrect, and don’t expect a vegan to (successfully) argue that my life as a hunter is ideologically incorrect.

Most Americans are neither vegan, nor hunters. And I can confidently say that my lifestyle as a hunter is ideologically and morally superior to most non-hunting meat eating and vegetarian or pescetarian Americans. I know that is a bold statement, so let me explain.

Most agricultural animals in this country are raised in CAFO (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation) environments, where they are forced to live their lives in close quarters, standing and covered in their own feces, and eating unnatural diets. Pigs and chickens are often kept in large, long buildings with no sunlight, and are bred under conditions that we would think of as being derived from SAW-style torture films. These situations are unnatural, and immensely cruel. Even organic operations, which often market their products with cartoonish pictures or silhouettes of farms, are not living on the farms that we see in the pictures. Cage free chickens can never see the sunlight and be kept in a chicken feces filled warehouse and remain cage free. “Pastured” animals often live in the same environment, but in a building with a door and a small fenced outdoor area. If the animals can find the door, maybe they can spend sometime outdoors. Still, the majority of their lives will be spent indoors, and this is for the animals being raised for premium products.

For those who forsake animal flesh, their store bought butter, milk, and eggs still come from these sources, as well as the foods that are made from these ingredients. For those who do eat meat, every time you buy food with meat in it from a fast food place, or even a high end restaurant that gets it’s food from a large distributor, you are voting with your wallet to support this industry of cruelty. Think about that. Every time most Americans eat, or buy animal protein at the grocery store, they are making a choice to support animal cruelty. The only way around this is to buy from farmers or a farmer cooperative/aggregator, raise animals yourself, or hunt.

Although I am guilty of eating out at restaurants and occasionally buying ingredients that are sourced from CAFO’s, buying from farmers and hunting severely decreases our support of that system. We are lucky here in the Triangle of North Carolina to have great access to farmer’s markets. My wife and I have made a commitment to each other and to our children not to bring meat into the house that doesn’t come from animals we have hunted or from farms we have visited. These animals are raised in the environments that fill the pictures of meat and produce sections of the supermarkets, environments that are where these animals are meant to be. They live happy, unrestricted lives.

When I shoot a deer (or pig, elk, bison, bear, turkey or game bird), that deer has lived its life in a natural environment up to that point in time. It has experienced less stress than any CAFO animal, and will almost certainly die a quick death. (Part of responsible hunting is only taking shots that you are confident will not maim an animal – there’s no maybe or hey lets wing it.) That meat gets processed by a butcher, and fills my freezer. This year was a particularly successful year in terms of harvested game, and as a result my family will be able to eat from that animal protein for much of the year. My children will not have to worry about antibiotics in their meat, and our food will not be recalled because of e-coli outbreaks at one of the 4 food large food processors in the United States. The fat and chemical composition of the game and farm raised meat we eat is highly superior to even the best USDA Prime cut of meat, because it was fed what that animal naturally eats, not a source of abundant grain caused by illogical farm subsidies.

From time to time, people tell me that hunting is cruel. I argue that eating conventional food is much more cruel. Just because you don’t witness the suffering does not mean that it does not happen. The system is set up to remove you from those thoughts, to remove you another step further from your food.

I see them almost every day. Articles with titles like “10 Reasons You’re Not Fit Yet”, “If You Want to Be Fit, Do These Things” , and “The Surprising Reason You Aren’t Fit”.

Fitness as an objective state of being does not exist. It’s not a thing. It’s not real. There’s your surprising reason.

No matter where you start and no matter what you do there is not a situation in which you wake up from one day to the next, look in the mirror or jump on the scale or go for a run and go “I did it. I am fit.” My friend and comedian Joe Larson does this little bit where he talks about the gym not working because he keeps going and he never gets fit.

Fitness enthusiasts and people who work in this space love to have discussions and arguments on Facebook complete with lots of hand-wringing and responses formed in such a way that you can tell the author is pretty sure they’ve made their argument so eloquently that they’ve finally found the perfect way to define it.

But it doesn’t mean anything. I can give you some arbitrary definitions, like being able to deadlift twice your body weight, do a few pull-ups, run 3 miles in under 30 minutes and then I can promptly find someone who I would consider “fit” who can’t do one or more of those things. I could then abstract it totally away from exercise movements and say something like you’re fit if you can go for a several-hours-long hike without getting winded or carry a couch up a flight of stairs but it would still be arbitrary and ultimately meaningless.

Which wouldn’t be such a big problem if the idea of “achieving” fitness wasn’t sold as such an objective end point. Something you can succeed or fail at and once you’ve achieved it somehow things change for you. It becomes a thing that some have and other’s don’t. I don’t want that for anybody.

Time For A Language Change

I’ve written several times before about how changing the language you use can change your frame of reference and frame of mind. Here’s another one for you:

Out with fitness, in with better.

You’re only one day away from better.

When you make the pursuit of better your goal, instead of the pursuit of “fitness” then you are winning every single day. Every workout, every lift, everything you do that moves you forward and makes you better.

In changing the entire frame of the conversation to being about better you do away with the idea that fitness is a video game to be beaten by mastering all the levels and defeating the end boss to rescue the princess. You just get better, you get more capable, you get to do more things with more ease. And you never have to wonder if you’ve arrived yet.

Why Does This Even Matter?

Because this matters so much more than most of the stuff we spill gallons of digital ink on in the fitness and training world. Beyond covering the absolute basics of doing productive exercises and making it progressively harder your actual sets and reps don’t matter that much, the minutia of your program probably doesn’t matter, the movements you choose don’t make much difference, it doesn’t matter if you combine your lifting with your cardio, and so on and so forth ad infinitum. It’s all splitting hairs.

But the fact that humans need movement and to be physically challenged is not up for debate.

What matters is whether or not you’ll actually make the effort on a regular basis to challenge yourself physically with some kind of stimulus. And what will have the most profound impact on whether or not you do that is your frame of mind towards it, therefore the language you use to talk and think about it.

It starts with a flat tire. Well, not really even a flat tire. More a soon-to-be-flat tire as you notice that your tire is slightly low when you walk out to your car. But you ignore it because you just don’t have time to stop to put air in it right now.

This is your first decision point. You could make the momentary sacrifice to put some air in the tire, or you can ignore it and carry on.

Left unchecked for a week or two when you finally do put some air back in the tire you will discover that it doesn’t seem to hold air anymore. Now you are having to stop every couple days to put air in it.

Finally you relent and stop at the tire shop to figure out what is wrong. Turns out you waited too long and the tire now has run-flat damage. You need a new tire.

Which is better than the alternative because if you had kept driving on that semi-flat tire in addition to run-flat damage eventually you would have hit a pothole that the flaccid tire wasn’t able to absorb. This would cause irreparable damage to the rim requiring a replacement wheel in addition to the tire. Your shop bill doubles and you have to wait a week without a car for them to order the replacement rim.

Thankfully you felt the vibration caused by the damaged rim, because left unchecked the semi-flat tire and newly-bent rim combined would conspire to damage your ball joints, universal joints, and other expensive suspension components that are laborious to replace.

Ignoring a slightly low tire will end up costing you thousands of dollars and many hours, maybe days, of lost time and inconvenience.

Think about that next time you decide to ignore a small thing in your body that could be solved by trading a few minutes of your time for a workout, or a check-in with a competent professional. I’m not saying you should pump the brakes at every little thing, but it might be worth checking in before you get to the third or fourth round of failure points.