Cooking, Energy, and the Power of Full Engagement

Learning how to cook is the first step in achieving self-actualization.

Hubris? Hyperbole? The ramblings of a sheltered blogger?

Hardly.

While learning how to make a pot roast with mashed potatoes won’t make your life fulfilled in and of itself, it is a fundamental skill that will make your journey there all the easier.

This site is primarily interested in teaching guys how to make healthy (and tasty) food for themselves, but my inspiration for starting it starts in a much different place than most other health and fitness sites.

Instead of helping you get “jacked,” “ripped,” or “shredded,” I’d prefer to help you get happier and more self-fulfilled.

If that doesn’t sound like you, then you know where the door is.

One of the biggest motivations for starting this wasn’t a fitness book. It wasn’t a cooking show, and it wasn’t a state of the art supplement.

It was a business book about energy management.

The “Shocking” Inspiration For This Site

When I started this health and fitness site, I knew it wouldn’t be the usual.

When I looked at a lot of the material available out there for us guys, I realized that most of it was written with a small sub-section of us in mind. Specifically, those of us who:

• Don’t have a very good self-image.
• Think that gaining as much muscle and losing as much fat as possible will make us happy.
• Have the time, money, and energy for a new hobby to become obsessed with.

It’s fitness for fitness’s sake, which is fine if you’re an athlete, bodybuilder, or Hollywood actor, but it’s overkill for the rest of us.

As I’ve mentioned many times before, the benefits of being healthy and fit boil down to four things:

1. It makes you more sexually attractive.
2. It increases your social status.
3. It helps you become more efficient in life (minimizes illness and injury, maximizes energy and focus).
4. It helps you live longer.

But the reality is that getting in shape has a fairly minimal effect on your sexual attractiveness and social status.

It does help to a point, but there are better ways of improving both.

What it does have a tremendous impact on, however, is helping you live a long and productive life.

Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz’s The Power of Full Engagement is an excellent book on energy management (as opposed to time management) that shows how your physical health increases your ability to make things happen in other areas of your life.

Its central objective is to help you “build the necessary capacity to sustain high performance in the face of increasing demand.”

On the surface it’s a business book, but it illustrates better than the entire fitness section of a bookstore why getting in shape is so damned important.

Kicking ass and making things happen in life is perhaps the greatest metric for how self-fulfilled you are at the end of your life. And this can only be accomplished if you are physically energized, emotionally connected, mentally focused, and spiritually aligned.

The Four Components of Energy

The central conclusion of the book is this:

Energy is the fundamental currency of high performance.

• Capacity is a function of one’s ability to expend and recover energy.
• Every thought, feeling, and action has an energy consequence.
• Energy is the most important individual and organizational resource.

And according to Loehr and Schwartz, we all have four sources of energy, defined as follows:

• Physical capacity is defined by quantity of energy.
• Emotional capacity is defined by quality of energy.
• Mental capacity is defined by focus of energy.
• Spiritual capacity is defined by force of energy.

It can all sound a little woo and fuzzy, but this is a system that the authors used to coach high-performers from athletes to businessmen, and it seems to have worked quite well for them in real life.

It’s when you are firing on all four cylinders (physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual) that you are fully engaged. And by being fully engaged, you give yourself the ultimate advantage to getting what you truly want out of life.

How to Increase Your Energy Capacity

It all adds up to a lot of great theory, but how does it actually work in real life?

Since physical energy is the most fundamental (and most often neglected by high-performing people), it’s best to take a closer look at how to implement it into your life.

And it all boils down to one of the philosophies we have here:

Eat Better, Move Smarter, Live the Good Life

And here are the three most powerful skills you can learn to live this philosophy:

1. Learn how to cook a few good meals–This is perhaps the most crucial part. There are many reasons to learn how to cook, but the biggest is that you eradicate most of the junk from your diet and add in all the good stuff. Get started here.
2. Stop goofing off with your workouts–Most fitness advice is written by people who have the luxury of spending hours in the gym every day. You don’t. Implement a more minimalist fitness routine that will give you the maximum bang for your buck.
3. Stop and smell the roses.–Seriously. Most of us are susceptible to working too hard and not taking enough time to rejuvenate. Start going to bed earlier. Spend more time with your friends. And for God’s sake, start making your wants, rather than someone else’s, the primary driver in your life.

The Journey to Full Engagement

The path to self-actualization isn’t an easy one.

You’ll need to harness your energy in all four capacities in order to do so–physically energized, emotionally connected, mentally focused, and spiritually aligned.

Of these four capacities, physical energy is most fundamental. Without it, you may still be able to live a life that is fulfilling emotionally, mentally, and spiritually, but it will be extremely difficult.

You can improve your physical energy by relaxing more, and you can improve it by exercising.

But you’ll get the greatest returns by simply eating better.

And in a world where microwave dinners and take-out abound, there is no better way to do this than by learning how to cook from scratch.

While learning this skill won’t make you happy in and of itself, its far-reaching effects will undoubtedly do so.

When you learn how to cook, you take the biggest step towards full engagement that you can take.

So do it already!

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