Last summer on the Champions Body for Life Cruise I was asked to do a short program on the elements of doing a challenge, and just for the fun of it I threw in a few minutes about the differences between men and women–both generally and while doing a transformation. Well! That little few minutes ended up being hours of interesting discussion. Many of the people attending that group meeting came up afterward and asked great questions and gave some of their own feed back as well. Here is what I told them. See if you agree or disagree, and see if it might help you a bit in your dealings with members of the “other” sex. (Notice that I didn’t say “opposite” sex!)

When a woman says “I don’t have anything to wear”, she means that she doesn’t have anything new. When a man says “I don’t have anything to wear” he means that he doesn’t have anything clean! Just one example of the absolute TRUTH that men and women communicate differently. Not bad, not good, just differently.

If you ladies chose your mate carefully, because he is devoted to you rather than because of how cute he is or how much money he has, then you can be sure of two things: A. He probably won’t pick up after himself or be real big on intimate talks, and; B. If the opportunity required it, he would willingly die to protect you! This proposition illustrates that men and women show love differently. Women crave intimacy and romance, and men are hard wired to be protective.

A man’s deepest need is for respect. A woman’s deepest need is love. Not good or bad, just different needs–and both need to be unconditional rather than earned.

So, if you have read this far, it won’t surprise you that I also believe that men and women look upon fitness and diet completely different as well. Most women weigh daily–and if they are concerned about their weight, they may weigh several times a day. Most men don’t even know how much we weigh, and it’s not a concern unless we’re trying to “make weight” for some kind of a competition. Otherwise, to men, losing weight is really about “getting in shape.” We join a gym, start jogging, give up beer or switch to lite beer, throw some weights around, and thanks to all that hard work and lots of testosterone, we “get in shape” rather easily, it would seem. Women, generally speaking, gravitate to endless cardio, and long for the slim look rather than the muscled look. So, doing Body for Life can be a very frustrating thing for many women–because the scales don’t move and endless cardio is deemed off limits!

Now, put all these things together, and you can readily see why almost all couples’ challenges are crashingly unsuccessful! Different ways of communicating, different ways of showing affection and love, different ways of looking at fitness, it’s actually not surprising they don’t go well. In fact what IS surprising is that more couples’ challenges don’t end in murders!

The key thing to remember, ladies, (I am writing to ladies because most men won’t even ever look at this post and the guestbook is 75% women) is that neither the man’s approach nor the women’s approach is the right or wrong one–they’re just different.  And the TRUTH is, that because they are so different, a couple together have every attribute that is necessary to survive and thrive in this world!

Our former pastor, Emerson Eggerichs, wrote a marvelous book about this topic, and it is still available if any are interested. Even though it is written to and for Christians and from a creationist point of view, the book is a valuable tool to anyone who truly wants to find a better and less thorny path toward understanding how to interact with the “other sex. The first book is called “Love and Respect” Most of the material in this blog is a paraphrase of Emerson’s work–except for its application to BFL of course!