Sometimes we need to have in-your-face, terrifying, anecdotal, and personal evidence before we heed the warnings that others give us.
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When my daughters were younger, we often bathed them together to save time.
As any parent knows, you will do ANYTHING to save 15 minutes of your precious day.
And another fact any parent knows:
Bathtime is a disaster waiting to happen before your children are properly potty trained.
(Foreshadowing of what’s to come.)
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Brooklyn was 3 and Ava was only 1.
We had a large, transparent, plastic drinking cup that we had converted into a bathtime cup.
We used the cup to rinse the soap off of the girls’ bodies and get the shampoo out of their hair.
Brooklyn had developed this completely disgusting habit of dipping the cup into the water and putting the water into her mouth.
She would then spit the water out all over the bathtub.
This mortified both myself and my wife.
Every time she did it, we would cringe, and give her warnings:
“Brooklyn, that is so disgusting!”
“Brooklyn, bathtubs are filled with body fluids and dirt!”
“Brooklyn, we clean this bathtub with all sorts of dangerous chemicals!”
And our favorite:
“Brooklyn, before you were potty trained, you pooped in this tub on about 10 different occasions! And now you’re drinking water out of the same tub you pooped in!”
But Brooklyn didn’t care.
In her 3-year-old mind, she saw nothing gross about continuing to fill her mouth with water, and either gulp it down, or spit it back out.
Until one day……….the unthinkable happened………..
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It was an evening like any other.
My wife wasn’t yet home from work, and it was time to give the girls their nightly bath.
They disrobed as I filled the tub, laid out their towels and jammies, and I prepared to clean them.
They both got into the water, and did as little kids generally did – they played with their toys as I sat on the bathroom counter and relaxed for a bit.
Brooklyn, as always, scooped up some water, and poured it into her mouth.
I had given up trying to stop her from doing this. If she wanted to disregard our advice, I wasn’t going to stress about it.
Ava, the 1 year old, all of a sudden got this strange look on her face. She stared off into the distance and her nose scrunched up.
She stood up in the tub, and put her hands against the wall, like she was being strip searched by a police officer.
She squatted down, and flexed her abdomen and bowels.
Of course, I knew exactly what was happening. I said a quick prayer that it would be all in one piece and not “loose”.
Like a Play-Doh fun factory, the turd slipped out of Ava’s anus and splashed into the water below.
My gaze switched over to Brooklyn, who had just finished raising the see-through cup to her mouth to pour another stream of water down her gullet.
Brooklyn’s eyes widened and her jaw dropped. The water slowly trickled out of the corners of her mouth as her adolescent mind began to process what she had just witnessed.
Unfazed (I AM a parent……), I calmly walked over to the tub, and took the cup out of her hands.
In one, smooth, ninja-like motion, I scooped the complete turd out of the bathtub and presented it to Brooklyn.
She looked at me with horror in her eyes.
I softly said to her:
Here you go, kiddo. Would you like to take a sip?
Needless to say, that was the last time Brooklyn ever drank water out of a bathtub.
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Why do we need hard evidence before we listen to the warnings of others?
Why do we wait until the unthinkable has happened to us before we start to take action?
Why didn’t Brooklyn understand that a bathtub is a disgusting place of “nast” until she witnessed Ava defecating into the water 6 inches from her?
We have heard all of the warnings.
The health complications that arise from obesity.
The metabolic damage we do from yo-yo dieting.
The muscle loss which occurs over time if we don’t resistance train.
Time will keep on ticking, whether you want it to or not.
Where will you be in 5 years?
Will you be like Brooklyn, not thinking about all the “bad stuff” until it’s too late to do anything about it?
Or will you visualize the “turd” before you get shit on?
(Sorry, bad joke!)
Many of our fat loss clients hang out regularly in our brand-new Facebook group.
It’s totally free.
We post daily, we ask questions, and we support each other in our goals.
Come be a part of our team.
I promise…………there will be no “poop talk” from here on out.
(Okay, maybe not NO poop talk. How about just “less” poop talk?)
See you on the inside,
Jason Helmes
Anyman Fitness
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