Goal Making - Predisposition vs. Predestination

I've came across this section from a book entitled, 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman by Timothy Ferriss, that would truly help everyone in setting up their goals and motivations.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predisposition vs. Predestination: Don't Blame Your Genes

The marathoners of Kenya are legendary.

Kenyan men have won all but one of the last 12 Boston Marathons. In the 1988 Olympics, Kenyan men won gold in the 800-meter, 1,500-meter, and 5,000-meter races, as well as the 3,000-meter steeplechase. Factoring in their population of approximately 30 million, the statistical likelihood of this happening at an international competition with the scope of the Olympics is about one in 1.6 billion.

If you’ve been in the world of exercise science for any period of time, you can guess their muscle fiber composition, which is an inherited trait: slow-twitch. Slow-twitch muscle fibers are suited to endurance work. Lucky bastards!

But here’s the problem: it doesn’t appear to be totally true. To the surprise of researchers who conducted muscle biopsies on Kenyan runners, there was a high proportion of fast-twitch muscle fibers, the type you’d expect to find in shot-putters and sprinters. Why? Because, as it turns out, they often train using low mileage and high intensity.

If you are overweight and your parents are overweight, the inclination is to blame genetics, but this is only one possible explanation.

Did fatness genes get passed on, or was it overeating behavior? After all, fat people tend to have fat pets.

Even if you are predisposed to being overweight, you’re not predestined to be fat. Eric Lander, leader of the Human Genome Project, has emphasized repeatedly the folly of learned helplessness through genetic determinism:
People will think that because genes play a role in something, they determine everything. We see, again and again, people saying, “It’s all genetic. I can’t do anything about it.” That’s nonsense. To say that something has a genetic component does not make it
unchangeable.

Don’t accept predisposition. You don’t have to, and we can feed and train you toward a different physical future. It is possible to redirect your natural-born genetic profile. From now on, “bad genetics” can’t be your go-to excuse.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Now with "bad-genetics" off of the list of excuses why some of us have a body we hate so badly, we can focus more on getting fit with a newer perspective - a perspective in which change is truly possible, and it is only up to YOU to start and change everything.

-Mr. Muscles