My Bodybuilding Crossfit Life – Why People Hate Success

Over the last three months or so I have seen three different women who are mothers get absolutely blasted by the internet for posting pictures of themselves post pregnancy.  They were getting in trouble because all of them were pretty much flat stomached, fit and pretty fat-free.  All of them did it to encourage others to drop their excuses and get in shape.  However, they were firmly blasted by the internet folk out their for their efforts.

One commentator talked about how obscene it was that there was so much pressure on women to get to their pre-baby look after pregnancy.  Obscene!  How so?  Others felt that these women should apologize for doing this because the pressure was to great they were leveling on others. Others claim that the whole fitness thing promotes poor body image.

Still others pointed to the fact thee women had some special advantage to get their goal accomplished.  Some pointed to the fact they were fit before their pregnancies and so it was easier to get fit after their pregnancies.  Others just plain said their situation must be special because there was no way they could duplicate the results.   Sigh.

I am not the fittest man in the world but I give a pretty good effort most days.  I also think I can sum up all these complaints by the internet getting to the real motivation with one phrase that is quite common these days: ‘Haters are going to hate.”

Lazy people do not like hard workers, undisciplined people do not like disciplined people, people who are unfit do not like fit people.  Now I understand people might have true genuine health issue that prevent them from getting fit but I am not speaking to them.  I am however speaking to the more common culprit of this success hate and that is the one who has built up a mythology about their health that causes them to believe they can’t do it.  In this case there are indeed many moms who buy into the notion that once they are starting to have children they will lose the possibility of a nice body, women who breastfeed buy the notion that once they start down that path their breasts will never look good again.  The problem these women ultimately have is the mom who has three children, breastfeeds and within months after their last pregnancy looks like a million dollars because in all that they didn’t listen to the mythology that being a mom was going to stop them from being an attractive woman.

If I were to look at this from a spiritual point of view as a Christian I would call it ‘envy’ and ‘jealousy’  The fact is people do not like myth busters of any type.  People do not like the welfare family that suddenly decides to open a business and succeeds in getting off welfare and the people who do not like it are the people still on welfare.  People do not like the guy who had nothing in High School going for him who builds a successful company and becomes the rich successful guy with the smart beautiful wife on his arm and it is usually the other guys who had nothing going for them in high school who have used it as an excuse not to be successful that hate him.  Moms who bought into the mythology that pregnancy was the death nail to them being attractive women do not like the woman who prove this notion wrong and do so within six months or less from giving birth to a child.

Sorry, I have my own myths to bust.  “A forty something year old man can’t look great or do that, if they do look good then it is because they cheated in some way (aka steroids, etc.).”  “Weightlifting is for young people.” “You just can’t lose that last bit of fat.”  If I break the myths on this, I will have my own set of haters and I am going to do something with them that they hate even more – ignore them.

Truth be is this is really why haters hate and then write.  They are mad that someone else was noticed for their success and ultimately this kind of jealous hatred is nothing more than trying to get some attention by whining.  Sorry, no matter how much I try to slice it differently this is what it is – baloney.

I have learned that the Biblical axiom of ‘rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those that weep’ is true.  The problem is that many reverse this and laugh when people are weeping, and whine when they should be celebrating someone’s success. It is because they engage in jealousy over someone’s success instead of drawing inspiration from it that they are not successful themselves.

In fitness, you will never be hated more in your life than when you achieve ultimate success in reaching your goals.  You have busted the myths that others hold like sacred relics of a past that said – ‘weightlifting is bad for you, women go down hill in how they look after having children and sex gets worse after marriage.”  None of these are true but people still believe in them because they want to believe them so they can justify their own misery for their own lack of success.

IMHO