I’m Tony Schober, author of The Ideal Body Formula.
Together with my wife, Deanna, we are on a mission to get people to stop being victims of Diet Culture. We do this through various products and services, such as our podcast, Fitness & Sushi, and our Built Daily Mentorship program.
I’ve been interested in health and fitness for most of my life. I competed in powerlifting at the age of 12, winning my city’s bench press competition by lifting 185lbs at a body weight of 120lbs.
This got me hooked on working out. The strength I had and the body I built brought a lot of attention from my peers. And while it was nice at the time, it marked the beginning of some of the most debilitating body image struggles I would have to live with for the next 20 years.
When I was in college I got sucked into the bodybuilding community where extreme dieting and body manipulation were the norms. I became lean and muscular, but in the process, I developed a horrible binge eating disorder.
It was not unusual for me to eat 7,000 to 8,000 calories in a night after restricting my calories all week. I’d binge and then I’d restrict, over and over again – all in an effort to control the appearance of my body and get back just a semblance of the self-worth I had experienced in my prior years.
This went on for what feels like an eternity. I’d go through periods of gaining 30 pounds in just a month, and it would force me to avoid seeing people out of fear of what they would think. I avoided making friends, going to the pool or beach, and doing anything that would make me feel judged or shame over my body.
Then in 2011, after coming home from a 5 year contract working for the military in Afghanistan, I started my first health and fitness company – Coach Calorie.
It was a huge hit and I quickly developed a huge following. At the time, I exclusively blogged about all things weight loss. I took a science-based, down-to-earth, no-excuses approach to losing weight.
A few years later I started taking on clients that I’d personally coach to their weight loss goals. And I got people the results they wanted. But something was very wrong.
During all this I was still struggling myself. I still had a horrible body image and a pretty bad binge eating disorder to contend with. My life experience was not in a good place.
Like my clients, I was going through repetitive periods of weight loss followed by weight gain. I knew how to lose weight and get others to lose weight, but unfortunately, I came to later realize that I was an unknowing participant in Diet Culture. And my clients? They came along for the ride.
The good news is I eventually got myself out of Diet Culture. With the help of Deanna and a lot of personal development, I healed my body image and overcame my binge eating disorder. I felt a level of freedom that I hadn’t experienced all my life. And I wanted everyone else to experience that too.
So Deanna and I went to work rebranding Coach Calorie. We shut down that business and started a new one – Built Daily. This is where we are now, many many years in the making, helping people just like you get out of Diet Culture and getting their lives back.
This book is the culmination of learning from past mistakes, and fine-tuning the processes that have lead to success for thousands of our clients. Deanna and I want to make sure you don’t waste anymore of your life on false promises of hope, disempowering beliefs that your worth is in your body, or on hiding from your insecurities.
You can be healthy, happy, and confident without having to participate in society’s collective belief that you need to constantly micromanage your food and exercise in order to get your body to a place where it’s valuable and worthy to be seen.
Nowadays we teach you how to get out of a lifetime of food and body prison. We show you how to get down to the root of your struggles and heal your relationships with food, body, exercise, and mind. This is where you will find peace, health, and happiness. And it’s where your life starts to begin.
Tony