How much of your energy goes into working out why you ended up here? The bad back, the lost decade, the habit you can't shake — most of us have a well-rehearsed explanation. But what if the explanation is the thing keeping you stuck?
I recently sat down with Jerzy Gregorek on me&my health up, and I don't think I've had a conversation quite like it. Jerzy is a four-time world champion in weightlifting, a former firefighter, a Solidarity freedom fighter from Soviet-occupied Poland, a published poet, a PhD candidate in his seventies, and the co-author of The Happy Body. He arrived in Los Angeles having lost his luggage, with a thousand dollars and the clothes he was wearing. His approach to health comes directly out of that life.
Jerzy opened with a Zen joke. You go forward, you get better, and you die. You go backward, you get worse, and you die. The punchline: so why not go forward? "I choose forward," he told me. "I'm not interested in books explaining to me why we messed up."
This is not positive thinking as a slogan. It's a working method. In four decades of coaching, Jerzy has never been especially interested in how a client arrived at their condition. His interest is entirely in the present: where are you weak, and how do we make that better? If you're not flexible, he's not going to analyse the history of your inflexibility. He's going to make you flexible.
The two things he watches himself never to do are complain and blame. His reasoning is precise: when we complain, we make ourselves a victim, and we put ourselves somewhere it's impossible to climb out of. Ownership can only happen in the present. It's worth noticing how much of our own health talk is archaeology rather than action.
Jerzy trained as a fire protection engineer, and it shows. The Happy Body is built on numbers — for flexibility, strength, body composition and posture. His logic is one I keep coming back to: "I like measurable because it's honesty. You are responsible for something. If you don't measure it, then you are not responsible. You say approximately, and that's it."
Those standards came from observation rather than theory. He and his wife Aniela mapped the height-to-weight relationships of athletes across weightlifting, soccer and hockey to find where bodies perform best. They took their own off-season body fat — around 10% for him, a little higher for her — as a realistic, healthy benchmark rather than the stage-lean numbers they competed at.
The final piece arrived at the 2002 World Masters Games in Melbourne, where Jerzy watched an 80-year-old competitor clean and jerk more than his own body weight. That, he decided, was the standard for a genuinely good life at any age — that much strength, that much speed, that much flexibility. Everything in the programme works backwards from it. The point isn't the specific figures; it's that a goal you can't measure is a goal you can't be accountable to.
Here's where Jerzy surprised me. He's dismissive of the goals most of us set. Losing ten pounds, or going to the gym daily for a month — those aren't goals, he said, they're just things to get. Real goals run five years out.
His reasoning is that big goals do useful work on your behalf. They mobilise you to find a plan, to find people who can help you along the way, and to keep changing. A three-month target rarely reorganises your life; a five-year one does. And the daily progress underneath it should be almost unglamorously small — the micro-progressions that add up while you're not watching.
Crucially, the big goal doesn't come with attachment to the outcome. His own coach told him that the Olympics are "a flicker of a horizon, not the fire" — so don't push too hard, enjoy the training daily, weekly, yearly, and things will happen. Jerzy pursues the PhD, the poetry, the programme, without expecting to become a great poet. "The journey needs to be pleasant, kind, joyful."
There's a lovely proof of concept in his coaching history: a boy with cerebral palsy who couldn't lift a 15-pound bar off the rack. Five years of micro-progressions later, he was pressing close to 170 pounds — and had gone from not knowing what three minus two was to attending college.
Jerzy published The Happy Body in 2009 expecting the book to solve the problem. It didn't. People had the information, understood the reasoning, and still found it extraordinarily hard to follow. That gap is what he's spent the last fifteen years on, and it's why he moved into humanistic psychology for his doctorate.
He calls the moment of change a "flip", and he's experienced it himself — from mentors in the Polish underground, and from Thich Nhat Hanh, whose presence he described as being blessed by a human being. His belief is that "there are the right words at the right time to the right person," and when you find them, it's magical.
He told me about a client who flew in from Nashville, sat through thirty minutes on The Happy Body and said flatly that he didn't care. Jerzy told him he didn't have the right not to care — he had a wife and two children, and his life was bigger than himself. Silence for six months. Then word came back: the man had bought the book on the plane home, read it, gone straight to the shops, and lost 60 pounds in a year. Jerzy is the first to say this happens perhaps once in a thousand times. But it's why he keeps talking, and why he reads, writes, coaches and exercises every single day.
What stayed with me long after we finished recording is that this conversation was never really about body transformation, even though The Happy Body is a physical programme with hard numbers attached. It was about the psychology underneath it — that whatever you've lived through, you can flip out of it and build something remarkable from where you stand today. That's the holistic view I take at me&my wellness: your nutrition, your strength, your mindset and your story are one system, not four. Start where you are, make it measurable, and keep choosing forward.
Want to go deeper on this? Book a free 30-minute discovery call with Anthony at meandmywellness.com.au