The Fantastic Life Rule: # 7
Stay Out of The Gap
Stress keeps you stuck between the moment that just happened and the life you want to live next. Learn to reset quickly—so you can move forward instead of staying trapped in the gap.
Why Your Nervous System Matters More Than You Think in Weight Loss
I’m an Exercise Scientist Who Knows What Navy SEALs and Zebras Understand That Most GLP-1 Users Don’t
By: Emilio Cagmat
Feb 13, 2026
Several moons ago, when I was an Exercise Science grad student at the University of Central Florida down in Orlando, I used to train late at night at the campus rec center.
Quiet hour.
Treadmills where humming while students sweating out pizza they ate for lunch.
And then there was this guy.
In one of the swimming lanes, he swims, with his flippers on.
He’d push off the wall, disappear underwater, hold his breath longer than felt comfortable, surface, breathe, rest a few seconds…
Repeat.
Just back and forth. Back and forth.
Every night.
At first, I thought: triathlete. Orlando has plenty. Then someone said, “He’s training for the Navy SEALs.”
Not just training.
He already tried. But didn’t make it.
And now he was preparing to go through Hell Week again.
That’s the part I couldn’t wrap my head around.
You already failed. Why go back? To hell week? Arguably the hardest training in the word (you only sleep four total hours in the course of the week. Only four. That’s why it’s hell).
Ego? Patriotism? Stubbornness?
Maybe all three.
But what bothered me wasn’t that he was trying again. It was how calm he looked doing it.
Just controlled discomfort. Night after night.
I didn’t understand it at that time. I thought it was toughness. But it’s more than that.
Today, I have the language to explain it. And let me show you in detail later.
For a geek like me, sometimes when I channel surf, I don’t land on sports.
I land on documentaries.
The kind where a lion explodes out of tall grass and chases a zebra.
You know the scene.
Dust. Muscle. Chaos. Like the roadrunner.
Here’s the thing, if the zebra survives…
It slows down. Walks off. Starts grazing again. Like nothing happened.
Hold that image.
One time I was watching a PBS documentary — could’ve been a deer, maybe an antelope, maybe I’m botching the species — but the scene was unforgettable.
A big cat — jaguar, cheetah, something fast and terrifying — locked in.
Full sprint. The prey is running at top speed and then —
At the last second —
It cuts hard.
Like a tire screeching on asphalt.
The predator overcommits. Dust cloud. Momentum lost. The gap widened and the chase is over.
And the antelope?
Back to grazing. Like nothing happened.
That detail matters, like nothing happened.
Another episode.
A deer approaches a muddy watering hole.
Still water. Quiet surface.
Then the water explodes.
Crocodile.
Teeth. Splash. Violence.
The deer escapes. You’d think that’s it. Trauma. Lesson learned.
But minutes later?
It comes back. Drinks.
Life resumes.
Now…
Doesn’t that feel eerily different from us?
Let me explain.
A zebra sees a lion. Its body doesn’t ask questions.
Adrenaline floods. Heart rate jumps. Blood sugar rises. Everything mobilizes.
Run.
And if it survives?
Ten minutes later it’s back to grazing. Like nothing happened.
No replay of “wow, that was close.” No imaginary sequel in its head. The event is done and it’s done.
The alarm goes off. Then it goes off.
There’s an off-switch.
Now contrast that with us, people, the species called human beings.
We don’t need a lion.
There’s the email from the boss. A lab result. A number on the scale. A performance review. A college application deadline for your kid.
And the body reacts the same way.
Mobilize. Prepare. Survive.
Except…
The event ends.
But the alarm doesn’t. Because our lion doesn’t live in tall grass.
It lives in our head.
We replay the conversation. We rehearse the worst-case scenario. We scroll. We anticipate.
We stay switched on.
There’s a Stanford biologist named Robert Sapolsky who wrote a book called Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers.
His argument wasn’t that zebras are tougher. It’s that their emergency response is brief. (while ours isn’t).
We are not like the zebras that graze food again after a close call. We, on the other hand, turn short-term survival machinery into a full-time lifestyle.
While zebras shut it off automatically.
The beauty of the Navy SEALs training is that they learn to shut it off deliberately.
I mean, the Navy SEALs job is one of the most stressful jobs in the world, we should learn a thing or two from them.
They are trained to shut the signal off, deliberately.
But for the most of us?
We stay switched on.
And then we wonder why our appetite feels louder than it should.
SEALs don’t eliminate pressure.
They train inside it. Cold water. Sleep deprivation. Chaos.
But they also train for something else, and that is the ability to come back down.
They change breathing patterns (which I will discuss later). There’re controlled exposure and repetition under discomfort.
They don’t pray for calm. They practice it.
Predictable hardship builds capacity. Unpredictable rumination drains it.
And if you’ve ever tried to lose weight, this will sound familiar.
Hunger spikes. Scale fluctuations. Plateaus. Social pressure.
If you expect them, you move through them.
If you don’t, they feel like personal failure. And here’s where it quietly connects to GLP-1.
GLP-1 quiets appetite. It helps regulate blood sugar. It dampens hunger signals.
But it doesn’t remove the alarm system.
And when that alarm keeps humming in the background…
We don’t just eat because we’re hungry.
We eat because we’re wired up. Emotional eating is biology trying to self-soothe.
Food becomes fast relief. Especially when the off switch feels broken. And I’ve seen this in some subset of population that GLP-1 don’t work well, people who are stressed out.
There was a time in our life when my wife and I were both carpooling to work.
We were both in a start-up company. You know the type. If it works? We retire early. Another Facebook. Another Google.
If it doesn’t? We’re polishing résumés by Friday.
The upside was intoxicating. The downside lived in the air.
I don’t have to tell you how those drives home felt.
Traffic. Tension. Replaying meetings. Bitching about leadership.
And then one day, almost accidentally, we made a rule.
“When we pass that traffic light… work is done.”
No more post-mortems. No more hypothetical disasters. No more mental board meetings in our Hyundai.
It sounds silly.
But it worked.
The stop light became the off-switch.
The lion stayed at the office.
Now here’s the part most people miss.
Not all of this is bad.
There’s a version that sharpens you.
An emergency medicine doctor I worked with rides her bike to work.
In Florida. Even in the summer.
Which, if you know Florida, is basically a sauna with mosquitoes.
Her husband always asks, “Can you ride your bike today?”
Because when she rides, she’s calmer.
She thinks while pedaling. She processes. She breathes.
It’s intense.
But it clears her.
That’s not the kind that breaks you. That’s the kind that builds you.
There are actually two kinds of stress.
One mobilizes you and then lets you return.
The other keeps humming long after the moment is over.
One is challenge.
The other is background noise that never shuts up.
I catch myself worrying sometimes (ok, most of the time).
And I’ll literally say out loud:
“I’ll worry about that in an hour.”
And strangely… that works too.
Because the body doesn’t just need activation.
It needs resolution.
So what do you actually do with this? Because this isn’t about becoming a Navy SEAL. It’s controlling the stress.
Imagine this.
It’s Tuesday.
You have a 4 p.m. meeting you’re already rehearsing in your head.
Your shoulders are tight. Your breathing is shallow. You’re composing imaginary rebuttals.
Here’s something I do.
Before a meeting that I know will be intense, I stop by the restroom.
Not to check my phone.
Not to rehearse what I’ll say.
To reset. Close the stall door.
Feet flat on the ground.
Inhale slowly for four seconds.
Hold for four.
Exhale for four.
Hold for four.
Do that for four minutes.
That’s it.
It sounds almost too simple.
That’s why most people don’t do it.
But physiologically, something shifts.
Your heart rate variability improves. Your vagus nerve activates. Your body gets the message:
“We are not being chased.”
You’re teaching yourself what the zebra does automatically.
Activation… then resolution.
Another tool I use is delayed worry.
If I catch myself spiraling — about work, about the future — I’ll literally say:
“I’ll worry about that at 7 p.m.”
And oddly enough, my brain relaxes.
Because now there’s containment.
Just like that traffic light my wife and I used as a boundary. You don’t eliminate pressure. You create an off-switch.
And here’s the interesting part.
When the nervous system downshifts consistently…
Cravings soften.
Impulse eating decreases.
You don’t feel like you’re fighting yourself as much.
GLP-1 can quiet appetite. But learning how to come back to baseline?
That’s upstream. That’s training.
That’s available whether you’re in cold water at BUD/S…
Or in a restroom before a meeting.