1. Your name, title, and age? What do you do (or did you do) for a living?
· Chris Weiler – Performance Expert
· Published author, speaker, trainer, coach. Age – 45
· Maximizing performance in athletes, fortune 500’s and YOU!
· National Academy of Sports Medicine – Athletic / Strength / Nutrition Development
· President of D.I.G.S. Inc. (Devil In Gym Shoes)
2. Who was the person that inspired you as a child to eat healthy and stay fit? What was their relationship to you?
I was first inspired by my mother to eat healthy. I was 10 years old when my mother was pregnant with my brother. It was at that time she joined LaLeche League, an organization that promotes a natural, healthy lifestyle and diet from birth, which includes breast feeding.
3. What did they do to inspire you?
My mother became very involved with LaLeche League and over the next 2 years became a leader in the organization. My mother fueled the fire of my voracious appetite for reading and understanding how things work at the root level with conversation, books and research. It was important for her that I explore how the body works, and consistently shared her LaLeche league information with me as well as brought me to meetings to experience conversations and presentations by group members and medical professionals. In our home I observed my mother counsel new mothers both in person and on the phone on a regular basis.
My brother had terrible seasonal allergies that required management during his elementary school years. Since my mother questioned the efficacy and long term effects of the pharmacological choices recommended by the medical community, she declined to introduce them to his system. Instead she began testing natural, whole food based combinations to manage his allergies. Although some of the things he ate and drank looked and smelled gross to me and my friends, my brother loved them and they worked! His allergies were managed with no medication. I consistently saw and believed that the status quo can and should be challenged. I was led to believe that you can wield the tools at your disposal to craft and shape whatever you want to make it work for you personally. This enabled me to see science and research as an objective starting point, but by no means the final word or correct in and of itself.
As an adolescent I became heavily involved in martial arts and at some point began modifying it to suit my needs and movement style. My friends told me “you can’t make up your own movements, you have to learn them.” I replied, ‘why not? Everything that has ever been created by humans started in someone’s mind and made up in reality, including all forms of martial arts.’ It is this spirit of self-confidence, self-reliance and adventure that my mother helped inspire. In my middle teen years, an unknowing co-conspirator named Bruce Lee shared the role model space with my mother. Bruce Lee was famous for creating his own hybrid form of martial arts called Jeet Kune Do. His philosophy, “Absorb what is useful, discard what useless, and add what is essentially your own.
Stay tuned for part 2 of this article shortly…..