Struggles & Breakthroughs

A member of our Built Daily community submitted a great question for our weekly live coaching call. She had been triggered by her body and was listening to our Fitness & Sushi podcast. On the episode, Deanna and I were sharing our own personal struggles.

When this member heard us talking about our struggles, she thought “if these professionals in charge of teaching me how to feel better about myself can’t feel ok about themselves, then why am I bothering?!?”

To be perfectly honest, when I first read it I felt a bit of shame. She’s right… who am I to teach people how to get over their food and body struggles when I struggle myself? I spent the day thinking about this question and reminded myself of one very important fact – to struggle is to be human.

As a society we have this utopian view that we aren’t supposed to struggle. We see happy people, confident people, people who seem to have their shit together, and assume they don’t struggle. They do.

Not a single person will honestly tell you they don’t struggle. In fact, it’s the struggle that leads to the breakthrough of a better life. The discomfort of the struggle is the currency of transformation.

It’s not about never struggling. It’s about learning to navigate the struggles more effectively and growing. It’s about normalizing them so you stop trying to avoid them, and instead embrace them as opportunities for personal growth.

Nobody wants to struggle. It’s uncomfortable. I like my comfort zone as much as the next person. It feels good. But here’s the thing – change doesn’t happen in your comfort zone. And let’s be real, it can be very uncomfortable in your comfort zone anyways. There’s discomfort in hiding from your struggles and spending a lifetime dieting and hating your body. And there’s discomfort in facing your struggles and growing. But only one of those discomforts is going to result in an improved life experience. So if I’m going to choose to be uncomfortable, I’m at least going to expect a positive outcome to come along with it.

Struggles lead to breakthroughs. Your breakthroughs are born from your struggles. They are opposite sides of the same coin. For every struggle you overcome you experience a breakthrough that will change your life. The bigger the struggle, the bigger the breakthrough.

That is what transformation looks like. It isn’t pretty. It doesn’t look like what you see in transformation photos. It’s not an external phenomena – it’s an internal remodeling of your mind, of which your physical body becomes a side effect.

Transformation isn’t some distant outcome of the future – it’s an ongoing process that happens in the now. It’s that moment that you don’t give up. Each and every time you struggle and break through you experience transformation. You transform yourself over and over again – for a lifetime. Each breakthrough changes you on a deeper level. You think differently. You see yourself differently. You act differently. And that’s when new outcomes are created.

The before & after photos you see aren’t transformation – that’s just body change. There are plenty of people who experience transformation without any change in external appearance. That’s because transformation is a change of identity. You change who you are. You take on your struggles and become a different person. And as a result, your life experience changes and improves.

The more you can understand this the more you can stop running away from the discomfort of struggle. Because avoiding it isn’t going to fix anything. It will only push the same struggle into the future to be dealt with at that time. Struggles never disappear unless they are directly addressed.

You’ve been so close to changing your life so many times already. You’ve taken dozens of different approaches, and they’ve all lead you to that inflection point. This convergence to a single moment happens for a reason – it’s a test to see if you’re ready for the other half of your journey.

Future you, the one who lives a life feeling free around their food and body, is looking back at you just waiting to meet you on the other side of that inflection point. It reminds me of a metaphor of a dog wearing a shock collar for an invisible fence. They stay within their comfort zone because the boundary of it is painful. But there is no physical barrier holding you or them back. There will be pain to overcome if you want to break free, but your freedom is on the other side. It’s time for you to break through that invisible fence and live the life you’ve always wanted.

This pain and discomfort are assets in disguise. They are guideposts letting you know you’re on the right track. They show you exactly what’s standing between you and transformation. The wall of struggle is there to show you where you need to go – not where you need to stop. In time you will even welcome them – seeking them out because you know a breakthrough is on the other side.

Everyone who has ever achieved something great in their life has experienced struggle. And the greater the achievement, the greater the struggles. The most successful people have struggled and failed the most. They just know how to use struggle as a means to empowerment, instead of letting struggles keep them stuck.

Deep down we know this is true. Yet we still try to take the easy route. We take pills. We follow cookie-cutter meal plans. We think we’re going to discover some kind of shortcut. We think we’re going to change without experiencing transformation. But when you avoid the struggle you’re avoiding transformation. The only way to get to the outcome you want is to go straight through it all. No detours. No shortcuts.

If you can change your mindset and start seeing struggle as a good thing, in time you will start to trust the process. You will experience the cause and effect of seeking out and persisting through the struggles. You will experience the breakthroughs and change. Each time this happens you will grow more confident in your ability to overcome obstacles, and more excited about the personal growth that’s imminent.

Setting Intentions

Every Monday in our Elite community we set our intentions for the week. Everyone takes a few minutes to write down and share what they plan to focus on.

Intentions are very similar to goals, but there is a slight nuance to them. For starters, goals have a certain meaning attached to them that make them pass / fail. We are even taught that SMART goals (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time bound) is the best way to approach your desired future.

I disagree, and in practice we’ve found that these goals fail at attainment just as much as diets do. Why? Because they are outcome focused and very black and white in nature. You either achieve them or you don’t. You either succeed or fail.

That reinforces the idea that transformation is some specific event in the future, as opposed to an ongoing process of struggles and breakthroughs. A SMART goal is something like, I’m going to lose 10 pounds in the next month. Yes, it’s specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound. It checks off all the boxes. Yet I’m sure your experience has shown you that this goal usually doesn’t get achieved.

Intentions are different. Intentions are like putting on a new pair of glasses and seeing your world through a new lens. If your intention is to work on your emotional eating struggle, then you end up navigating your environment differently. You see food differently. You notice different emotions. You become more aware of your unmet needs. And you don’t beat yourself up when you don’t fix a lifetime struggle in one week.

Your intentions are like goals, but they don’t have to be fulfilled and crossed off your list for them to be effective. Intentions allow you see your world differently and gather information and data that you wouldn’t otherwise see. As you internalize this input, it changes you on the identity level, and you tend to gravitate towards your desired experience over time.

Goals aren’t bad. They are nice to have as a sort of north star. They allow you to have a general idea of the direction you’re going. But beyond that, most people don’t achieve the goals they set for themselves and maintain what they achieved. SMART goals plus willpower can get you results, it’s called dieting. You can lose 2lbs this week or 10 pounds this month, but if you’re just focused on the outcome at all costs, results will be temporary.

Intentions are process focused. They help you tune into what you want to work on. They redirect your attention to what matters and allow you to filter out all the environmental inputs that don’t.

Will you “achieve” your intention the week you set it? Maybe, but maybe not. Either way it is not a failure, because intentions aren’t pass / fail. Most of the time you will set an intention and then will continue to set that same intention week after week. Each week you continue making progress. You address your struggles and have small breakthroughs. You’re never starting over.

There are times when I’ll work on trying to improve my weekend eating for an entire month. Each time I “wave” through the weekend I gather more information. My intentions allow me to see my weekends differently. I’m more self-aware when they come, and the intention lenses I’m wearing allow me to see the inner workings of my relationship with food better.

I make it through the weekend and I assess and think “I wasn’t really needing that particular food. I already felt satisfied. Next week, if it feels right, I will try eating this other thing instead.” Then when the weekend comes and the action fits – I plug it in. I might go through this process for weeks or even months.

But that’s the difference between intentions and goals. Intentions allow you to actually heal and improve your relationships with food, body, exercise, and mind. Struggles finally get overcome. So results are then permanent. Goals just attempt to get you to skip to the end outcome by a circled date on the calendar. The struggles just get bandaged over. Everything you do becomes a means to an end. And the results, if they even happen, rarely last.

Process vs Outcome

Diet Culture has a tendency to make us too outcome focused. Everything we do then becomes a means to an end. We try to strong-arm our calorie intake. We try to force the number on the scale to go down. And that usually ends with you feeling frustrated, or worse, wanting to give up.

The frustrations you feel on your Ideal Body journey tend to be a sign that you’re being too outcome focused. Anyone who has ever asked -“what’s the point?” when the scale isn’t moving the way they want it to has experienced this frustration.

Picture a spectrum. On the left you have the Process. And on the right you have the Outcome. When things get unbalanced and you start getting too far to the outcome side of the spectrum, you’re going to be frustrated, and your motivation is going to be at risk.

The reason is simple – outcomes aren’t in your direct control. And any time you try to control something that isn’t in your control, frustrations will start to mount.

Outcomes can be influenced, but only when you are directly engaged with the process of the now. Outcomes are things that happen. They are side effects. They aren’t things you do, so you have to stop treating them as behaviors.

Losing weight is not a behavior. Eating xxxx amount of calories isn’t a behavior.

These are both outcomes. They aren’t things you do – they are things that happen. They happen when you stay engaged with the process of healing your relationships with food, body, exercise, and mind.

The process is the journey. It is the now. And it is the only thing in your direct control. It’s also the thing that makes up 100% of your life.

The outcome is in the future. But the future only exists in your mind. So sacrificing your now for a future that isn’t real or guaranteed is a great way to feel miserable every step of the way of your Ideal Body journey.

The path to your desired destination is through your journey. Your journey is life. It is all you have. It is the process. And it is in your direct control.

When you become too outcome focused, all you see is where you aren’t. Time slows down and your journey feels like a daily grind. You get caught up in sacrificing your days for a lower number on the scale in the morning. And when the number isn’t what you hoped for, yesterday was a loss. You lose time. You lose life. You feel frustrated. And you want to throw in the towel even though you know your behaviors are good for you.

Being too outcome focused means you’re focused too much on the destination. You eat for weight loss in the future instead of eating to feel your best right now. You exercise to burn calories in order to move the scale down in the future instead of moving your body because you enjoy it and it feels good right now. You become extra focused on what your body looks like, how much fat is on it, and all its imperfections, instead of acknowledging all that it is capable of right now.

But it’s not about being all outcome or all process focused. Remember, it’s a process vs outcome spectrum, which means there’s a middle ground that balances your needs of the moment with your desires of the future.

Your goal is to ensure you recognize when you’ve drifted too far to the outcome side, and then make the adjustments to bring yourself back more towards the middle. Because that’s where sustainable motivation lies. That’s where you’ll find purpose, peace in your body, freedom in your eating, and joy in your movement. It’s where you’ll find improved consistency and adherence, and more effortless action. It’s also where time becomes more of a friend than an enemy. Because the fastest way to experience your outcome, both in perception and in reality, is to be more present. And presence is found in the process.

So if you want to stay motivated, you need to find the intrinsic value in the now, also known as the journey. Eat because it makes you feel good – now. Move your body because it’s enjoyable – now. Look in the mirror and appreciate what your body can do for you – now. That’s how you stay consistent long enough for your desired outcomes to manifest.

Dealing With Mess-Ups

You are going to mess up eventually. You’re going to eat something you didn’t mean to. You’re going to miss a workout too. These mess-ups are to be expected. It’s what you do after they occur that matters most.

The key is for you to get right back on track with your next healthy behavior. That might mean getting back to productive thoughts, or it might mean getting back to productive actions. You’re never off plan if you expect mess-ups to happen and get right back to the behaviors you want in your life. It’s part of the process. And if it’s part of the process, you’re right on track.

This might seem obvious, but getting right back to the thoughts and actions you want in your life is not what most people do. Instead, they overcompensate for their mess-up. And that’s the real problem.

Habits are formed through repetition. Without repetition they never get a chance to seep their way down into your subconscious so they can happen on autopilot.

So when you accidentally overeat, what do you do? Most people think in averages. They assume that if they overate by 500 calories that all they have to do is undereat by 500 calories the next day and no harm no foul.

Technically this is correct. But weight loss isn’t a technical struggle – it’s a behavioral one. What you do and think long-term will have a bigger impact on your results than average calories. Besides… averaging two unwanted behaviors does not turn them into a good one.

Remember how I said habits are formed through repetition? Well what do you think is going to happen when you get a whole bunch of overeating repetitions in followed by compensatory undereating behaviors? That’s right – you’re going to become a very good over and undereater. You’re also going to habitualize all the destructive thoughts that come with those behaviors, like guilt, frustration, and fear of weight gain.

If your goal is to achieve your Ideal Body then you need a good relationship with food, body, exercise, and mind. You get there by getting in reps with the thoughts and behaviors that will lead to those improved relationships.

So when you mess up and overeat, you don’t overcompensate – you get right back to the behaviors you want in your life. You build the habits you want instead of unknowingly making destructive behaviors part of your normal life.

Your success towards any goal, whether that be health, weight loss, strength, or endurance, is more correlated to consistency than it is to the number of calories you eat, the types of food you eat, or how much exercise you do. Living your life on a rollercoaster trying to average everything is not practicing consistency, and it’s not going to change you. It’ll keep you right where you are and will make you more of what already isn’t working.

Think of a horizontal healthy habit line. This is where all your wanted thoughts and actions reside. Your job is to spend as much time at this line as you possibly can. If you veer from this line and overeat you should immediately return right back to this line. This is where you feel your best, and the longer you can spend feeling your best, the better your life will be.

If like most people you overcompensate, you shoot right through the line and end up way under it. You spend no time at it and get no repetitions in at your healthy habit line when you do that.

So if you mess-up, right back to the line. This won’t be your natural inclination though. That’s normal. It’s the old you trying to control an outcome. But the new you’s job is to stay engaged with the process. So you’ll have to retrain your thinking patterns to do that. If you mess-up, right back to the line.

Lift the Deadlines

Weight loss deadlines force you to work against the clock instead of with your body. Yet we’ve all looked at a future date, whether it be summer, a vacation, or a wedding, and have attempted to calculate how many pounds you’d have to lose each week in order to be at your goal in time.

In the short term this can work. Physique competitors do it all the time. And you might have even experienced a period of consistent weight loss in your past. But in each of those scenarios the progress was unlikely to last beyond that deadline, if you even made it that far.

Why? Because your weight loss pace is not determined by how big of a deficit you’re in. This is an overly simplistic way of looking at things. This is paper weight loss and only stands up in a technical world. In the real world your pace is determined by the number of struggles you have and the degree to which you need to overcome them. The bigger the struggle the more time it will take to overcome it, and the longer it will take for weight loss, if it’s going to happen, to be reflected.

Sure, you can play the 500 calorie deficit math game and aim for losing 1lb/week. But the only way you’re going to maintain that progress for life is if the underlying pressures on your eating are addressed.

This is why I don’t like placing deadlines on transformation. When you’re up against the clock you don’t act in your body’s best interest. You end up sacrificing your body’s needs for your ego’s wants.

Deadlines force you to place arbitrary ceilings on your calorie intake in an effort to maintain a particular weight loss pace – a pace that’s usually much faster than what can be handled. So hunger gets ignored. Cravings are dismissed. Energy plummets. Attitudes worsen. Performance decreases.

And if it seems like you’re falling behind your self-imposed deadline, you double down on your efforts and dig yourself into an even deeper hole. You restrict calories more. You ramp up your physical activity. And you start feeling worse about your body and the possibility you won’t reach your goal in time.

While you might begin to lose weight, your relationships with food, body, exercise, and mind actually get worse. And it’s only a matter of time before these negative side effects are expressed on your physical body and you end up back to square one.

Instead, why not focus your attention on identifying and overcoming your struggles and let your Ideal Body take shape naturally at its own pace? Working through emotional eating issues, the binge/restrict cycle, rebuilding trust with food, body image struggles, limiting beliefs, and motivation problems are going to be much more productive uses of your time and energy.

This is the inside-out approach to achieving your Ideal Body. Transformation is the result. The outside-in approach, in contrast, ignores these struggles and focuses on calories in / calories out, eat less / move more, and the scale instead. Short term weight loss followed quickly by regain is the result. Remember, things like eating less and moving more and energy balance are of course important, but they are side effects of your relationships with food, body, exercise, and mind. Trying to manipulate them directly doesn’t fix what’s causing the problem in the first place.

Focusing on calories and weight loss doesn’t make your real struggles go away. It just pushes them down the line for you to deal with at a later time. And by then they’ve become more ingrained into your identity and are harder to overcome.

So let go of the future deadlines and focus on the struggles right in front of you. Masking those struggles with a deficit will never get you to your Ideal Body. The only way out is through.

Instant Transformation

On one random spring Wednesday I got a call from my Dad asking me to come and help him. My mom had fallen down and she was having a hard time getting back up. My dad wasn’t able to help her up by himself.

I didn’t think too much of it at the time. He had given the phone to my Mom and I talked to her to see what had happened. Apparently she had fallen down the day before when she was coming back in from getting the mail.

She sounded really tired and exhausted, and seemed to be in physical pain. I immediately left the house and drove 15 minutes to go help out. But when I got there, it was a completely different scene than I had imagined.

My mom seemed kind of out of it. She was talking to me and mumbling and her thoughts didn’t make much sense. I scooped her up and laid her in the bed that was right next to where she way laying.

As I talked to her, her speech was getting more and more slurred. And it almost seemed as if she was about to fall asleep right there and then. It was at that time I realized what really was going on – she had a stroke the day before when she fell.

We called 911 and an ambulance took her to the hospital. It was confirmed. She had a stroke. A piece of cholesterol had broken off and blocked several parts of her brain.

Interestingly enough, I came to visit her in her room later that day once she was settled in recovery. We were talking. Her speech was a little slurred, but nothing too crazy. But the whole left side of her body could barely move.

We both laughed about the situation as we tried to cope, but spirits were still high, as she was going to be starting rehab, and most people improve at least a little through the process.

But that’s not what happened. Over the next 3 months my Mom never left the hospital. She stopped eating. She lost all functionality on her left side. And slowly but surely she lost who she was as a person. Then, she passed away.

I was devastated. I was extremely close to my mom. She came over every Wednesday night to watch my then 8yo son so that Deanna and I could have a date night. And she watched him for an entire weekend every month so we could have a kidless weekend. That doesn’t even include the weeklong vacations we’d take a couple times a year.

She was a fully independent person… until one unexpected day she wasn’t.

I tell you this for two reasons – one, tell the people you love that you love them. Life is short and you never know when you won’t get the chance to do it again. And two – this experience completely changed my life.

Her death was a wakeup call for me. Over the next year I gave up a 20+ year near daily marijuana habit, learned a foreign language, learned the piano, started meditating daily, picked up running, biking, and swimming, stopped binge eating, and wrote this book, among other things.

These were all things I always wanted to do but either I tried them and didn’t stick with them, or they just remained a desire or wish in my life to accomplish before I died.

This experience taught me that I didn’t want to live a life of regrets. I didn’t want to be in the hospital wishing I had done all the things I wanted. I had a moment of instant transformation – an inflection point in my life that changed the trajectory of it forever going forward.

This kind of thing happens all the time with people when they go through a traumatic experience. Someone has a heart attack and they quit smoking, start working out, and get healthy. Someone loses a loved one and they a have a wake up call that they could be next.

But you don’t have to experience the trauma that I did to feel motivated to achieve the things in your life you’ve always wanted. All you need to do is gain perspective on life and what’s important, and then live as the identity you want to be in the future – today.

I became someone overnight. My behaviors hadn’t even changed yet, and the new outcomes certainly hadn’t manifested yet. But as I’ve said many times, behaviors and outcomes are just lagging indicators of your identity. And your identity can be changed in an instant.

This is the kind of motivation you want. It’s pure. It’s you. And it makes it easy to act in alignment.

On the rare occasion I feel a desire to slack off on my healthy behaviors, I channel the strength of my Mom, which is essentially the new life perspective I created from the experience I had with her.

You need to figure out why you’re doing this. You need to go deeper than surface level weight loss. Generate a new experience right now by getting in touch with your purpose and how you want to live your life without regrets. And then start being that person today.

Be Pulled

Too many people are trying to implement a healthy lifestyle while fighting unnecessary internal resistance. They take a behavior-centric approach that is rooted in surface level habit change philosophy, which creates a dependency on willpower for taking action.

When this scenario is present, everything you do feels like a grind. You’re always searching for motivation and inspiration because your willpower tank is always running on empty.

We think of motivation as this force that pushes us to our goals. But that’s not the kind of force we want. That kind of motivation makes our journey feel like an obligation and all our behaviors feel like mandatory errands we need to take care of.

This kind of motivation requires an over-reliance on willpower and discipline to get you through the day. And make no mistake, that’s what it feels like – a daily grind to just make it to the next day, the next week, or the next month.

No one can live like that. No one can sustain that kind of energy long enough to fully realize their true potential.

The motivation we want doesn’t push us to our goals. It pulls us towards them. You’re no longer pushing the snowball up the mountain. You’ve reached the peak and the momentum pulls you down the other side.

This kind of motivation is born from identity and healing your relationships with food, body, exercise, and mind. When these underlying relationships are healed and you’re at your Ideal Body, healthy behaviors come to you.

When you have an unhealthy relationship with exercise, it’s really hard to implement a daily workout habit. Yet that’s what everyone tries to do. When you think of exercise as a tool to manipulate your body and self-worth, or you don’t enjoy it, or you only do it for a future outcome, it’s extremely difficult to push yourself to exercise.

You end up relying on willpower and little tips and tricks to get you to work out. You lay out your clothes the night before to make it “easier” to work out. You talk yourself through taking things one little step at a time. And you put all kinds of accountability strategies and rewards in place to ensure you take action.

Look… if that’s what you have to do to get yourself to work out each day, you’re going to struggle. If laying out your clothes the night before is the thing that makes or breaks your decision to work out the next day, you have bigger problems to solve.

Don’t get me wrong, these tips and tricks can be useful, but only when they are layered upon a healthy relationship with exercise. And only if they are used to get you over the occasional hump of resistance. When the occasional hump is a permanent fixture in your life, there are underlying issues with your relationship with exercise that need your attention.

This goes for all 4 relationships – food, body, exercise, and mind. The surface level tips and tricks are only effective when layered upon a healed relationship. Otherwise, you end up relying on willpower to get you meal to meal, pound to pound, workout to workout, or happy moment to happy moment.

That kind of motivation is fleeting. It comes and goes and requires constant renewal.

But the motivation that is naturally born from you being healed and at your Ideal Body is a force that attracts your desired behaviors like a magnet. The force is always present, always pulling aligned outcomes to its source of attraction – you.

Once you realize what you really want is a full life experience, that will be the moment that momentum shifts and you see the light at the end of the tunnel. You won’t feel this overwhelming motivational force. Instead, you’ll feel a sense of peace, calm, and acceptance. Motivation will now feel like a habit that happens on autopilot. You’ve finally figured it out. And a new exciting journey is just beginning.

If You Were the Only Person In the World

What is currently motivating you? What is making you get up in the morning and take action towards your goals? Are you being driven by internal desires? Or are you being forced into action because of external pressures?

There’s a question I like to ask myself and my clients to help them determine the kind of motivation that’s part of their journey. It’s a sort of filter that shines a light on whether the actions you take will be enjoyable, sustainable, and thus – effective.

The question is – “if you were the only person in the world, would you still want to ______?”

The blank could be anything. For many people it’s lose weight. But it goes for everything – what you eat, what you choose for exercise, how you view your body, etc.

What this question does is it removes one of the biggest external variables from your motivation – other people. It gets you thinking about whether you’re taking action for you because you want to, or for other people because you feel like you have to. It helps separate your internal desires from external pressures.

If being the only person in the world means you would no longer want to lose weight, what does that mean? It means you’re currently being driven mostly by pressures to change your external appearance in order to conform to societal beauty standards.

Is that bad? Not necessarily. It’s not so black and white. We do live in a society, as opposed to a deserted island, so there will also be some pressure to conform. But when that conforming is your everything, that’s when bad things start to happen.

You start living for the future. You hate the process that is supposedly going to get you to your desired outcome. You focus on aspects of your journey that actually take you further from your goals. And your consistency and adherence suffer because every behavior you engage in is only contingent on what it will do to your body.

That’s what the question helps you figure out. It allows you to take a quick glimpse into the future to determine whether what you do now is actually going to work out in the end.

The same goes for the exercise you choose to do or the food you choose to eat. If you were the only person in the world, would you still do the exercise you do? Would you do any at all? What about the food you eat? Would what you eat change? Why or why not?

The question shows you whether you’re exercising for enjoyment and experience, or for body manipulation. It shows you whether you’re using food as a tool to change the way you look, or whether it’s a resource to feel your best. It shows you what matters to you.

Vanity goals are extremely motivating for people, especially at the beginning of a weight loss journey. But they are extremely hard to maintain. It takes a long time for visual changes to appear – usually longer than you can sustain the willpower to keep taking action. And that’s what you’re relying on when you don’t enjoy the process. So willpower runs out before you get the future payoff of body change that you are expecting. When that happens, you get to the place most people find themselves in and you start to question whether all your hard work is worth it. You start asking “What’s the point?”

If that’s the question you’re going to end up asking yourself, you might as well ask yourself it now – before you even get going. What is the point? Why are you doing this? Would you be doing this if you were the only person in this world? Why or why not? What will keep you taking action regardless of what you look like or weigh?

For me, my motivation is now born out of the desire to live my full life experience. I got fed up with devoting so much time, thought, and energy to molding my body into something that would appeal to others so that I could feel better about myself. I got tired of obsessing about calories and my next meal before I had even finished the one I was on. I hated the body insecurity I lived with that kept me from pools, beaches, and friends.

I just wanted to live my life to the fullest. I wanted to be able to physically use my body in a way that gave me amazing experiences from life. And I wanted to stop letting my perception of my body hold me back from putting my authentic self out into the world without fear of judgement and rejection. I was tired of playing small. I knew my life could be so much bigger. And ever since I found my real “why”, not only has my fitness changed, but so has my business, my social life, and every single thing my self-image had held me back from accomplishing all my life.

Take action for you because you want to instead of feeling like you have to. Take action because your “why” feels like a purpose instead of pressure. Purpose is infinite energy and potential. When you find your purpose, aka your “why”, there will always be wind at your back and momentum pulling you forward. This kind of motivation doesn’t expire. It is a part of you.

Setting a Thrive Floor

You’re not always going to have sky high motivation. That initial spark and drive you typically have when starting on a new goal is going to wear off. When that happens you’re going to have to find other ways to stay motivated. And as I discussed earlier, the purest source of sustainable motivation comes from cultivating an identity whose focus is on purpose and healing.

But even with an optimized identity, there are still going to be ebbs and flows in your drive, attention, and intention. You’re not always going to feel like devoting the same amount of emotional energy and time to your health and fitness goals.

This is normal. It happens with everything we pursue, whether it be goals, hobbies, or general interests. We have seasons of life that can last months or even years. And we have other parts of our life that we’d like to move up the priority list either by choice or by need.

The key to navigating these seasons is to have what I call a “thrive floor”. This is the minimum amount of time, effort, and emotional energy that you personally need devoted to your specific goal in order to not just survive – but to thrive at it.

Obviously this thrive floor is higher than zero effort. Unfortunately, zero is where most people in Diet Culture end up reverting to, and it happens shorty after that initial spark wears off – well before they ever cultivate an identity that will sustain and motivate them for life.

Your thrive floor is also obviously lower than your thrive ceiling – the maximum time and energy you are able to devote to any one goal at a time. Your goal is to stay fluctuating between your thrive floor and your thrive ceiling for the rest of your life.

You’ll likely be at your thrive ceiling when you’re first starting out on your Ideal Body journey. This can last quite a while – months or even years. But there will come a time when it isn’t so high up your priority list. Maybe work is getting really busy, or the kids need more of your attention lately. These things get bumped up your priority list, and your Ideal Body journey gets pushed down a little. It might go from number 1 down to number 3 or 5, but it doesn’t drop off your list altogether. It stays high enough on your priority list that you still thrive as an individual.

So you’re going to have to look at your journey and identify the key components that are driving the majority of your success – the 20% of thoughts and behaviors that are resulting in 80% of your desired outcomes.

Your daily focus habits are sure to be part of that 20%. And they very well could be enough for you to thrive during those lull periods. And when the spark to devote more of your time and energy to your Ideal Body journey arises again, which it certainly will, you have a solid thrive floor to build on. You’re not starting over from zero – trying to erase the last few months or years worth of neglect.

My thrive floor might be higher than yours, as I help other people do this for a living and prefer to have a higher floor than others. But to give you an example of what my life looks like during these periods, I always maintain my daily focus habits. These include my daily morning walk, my morning smoothie, and listening to personal development every single day (usually on my walk). In addition to these habits, I also write about health and fitness at least once per week. And in our Elite community, I show up every Monday to set my weekly intentions, and I show up every Friday to find and share my breakthroughs.

This is my bare minimum in order to still thrive. I hit this thrive floor maybe once or twice a year for a few weeks. Sometimes it’s for a few months. The year my mom passed away it was longer than usual. When things get busier at home with the kids for only a week or so, it’s shorter than normal.

So your goal is to know your own thrive floor so that you always stay engaged and moving forward with this journey. Because everything we do has ebbs and flows. And if you keep the ebbs above your thrive floor, then you can make huge leaps during the flows.

You Do What You Value Most

In any given moment you’re doing what you value most. That doesn’t mean the behavior you’re engaging in is a good one. Nor does it mean that particular behavior is what you want to be doing, or that it was even an enjoyable experience. It just means you’re doing what’s most important to you.

This can be a hard concept to understand, as many people will look at their life and assume they’d rather be doing other things – healthier things, more enjoyable things, or anything but what they’re currently doing.

But desiring to do something else doesn’t override your built in value system. You will always gravitate towards what you value most in any particular moment.

You could have the best of intentions and desires to get up an hour earlier to work out. But if when your alarm goes off you hit the snooze button and roll back over, there’s something you value more than working out – sleep. When you choose not to work out it’s not because you don’t see value in doing it, it’s because in the moment you saw more value in the thing you did instead.

You might desire to be on a vacation on the beach right now. You might think that has more value to you. But unless you’re on the beach right now, you are currently valuing something else more.

Maybe you’re valuing your bank account or maybe you’re valuing the comfort you’re feeling from not having to ask your employer for time off. Whatever it is, you’re valuing something else more than the thing you desire to be doing.

This is important to understand, as many people struggle with motivation. They want to improve their health and fitness and start implementing some new behaviors, but they really struggle to get and keep them going.

For a new behavior to be incorporated into your life, it means something else must be replaced. All 24 hours of your day are currently filled. Your hours might be filled with sleep, eating, work, TV, rest, phone scrolling, reading, staring into space, or anything else. But every last second is occupied.

Most importantly, every last second is filled with what you value most in that moment. So to replace a behavior, you have to understand what it is you’re valuing in that moment so that you can find other ways to meet that need.

Willpower can only override this value system in the short term. It’s a sort of value suppression tool. But unless the value in the new behavior outweighs the value of the old behavior before willpower runs out, you will revert back to the old behavior.

So what do you do? When you want to implement a new behavior, identify the behavior it’s going to replace, and the need it’s meeting that you are currently valuing. Then find other ways of meeting that need.

Sometimes this just requires shuffling your day around. For example, working out later in the day if you value sleep more.

Other times it will require you to in essence devalue the undesirable behavior you’re trying to replace by changing your perspective and limiting beliefs.

For example, if you want something from someone but are afraid to ask because you don’t want to be rejected, then devaluing your need to feel comfortable, by overcoming your limiting beliefs, can help you take the action you want.

Moral of the story – if you want to be doing something different with your time, you’re going to have to dethrone whatever is currently occupying that space. And for any new behavior to be implemented, it is going to have to hold more value to you than whatever it’s replacing.

The Identity Tree

Transformation comes not from changing what you do, but by changing who you are. And changing who you are is about building a new identity.

Everything you do and have in your life is a function of who you are being. Every action you take and outcome you experience is a side effect of the identity you’ve created for yourself.

On our journey we get so focused on what we want and what we have to do to get it. But actions and results are just outcomes. They are a side effect of who we are being.

I like to illustrate this concept with what I call an identity tree. Picture a tree with roots going into the ground, a trunk rising from the ground, and then branches and leaves coming from that trunk.

Now, when it comes to our life, the roots are our identity, the trunk is our behaviors, and the branches and leaves are our outcomes. So our outcomes naturally flow from our behaviors, which are born from our identity.

Our identity is made up of our thoughts, beliefs, and values. It’s the framework from which we live and experience our life. These beliefs can be limiting or they can be empowering. They are the operating system that drive the actions we take.

Most of us focus on what we want in our life. You want to lose 20 pounds. You want to wear a bikini. You want to look fit. These are all outcomes. We don’t do outcomes. They happen. They are side effects of our behaviors, aka results.

A smaller percentage of us focus on what we need to do – the strategy. This is OK, it’s a step in the right direction, and of course our behaviors matter. But they aren’t the be-all-end-all and shouldn’t be where you focus most of your attention.

You can focus on the trunk and the branches all you want, but unless your root system is taken care of, your personal growth is going to stall. Your beliefs influence your behaviors, which influence your outcomes. So if you want to change your outcomes, you can’t just water your leaves – you have to get down to your roots and address your beliefs.

The beliefs you have around food will determine what food means to you. And as we discussed earlier, the meaning you attach to food influences how you interact with it, which will affect how much you eat, what you eat, and why you eat.

The beliefs you have around your body will determine how you treat yourself, and whether your behaviors will come from a place of self-hate and rejection, or self-love and acceptance. And this will determine the health of your body.

The beliefs you have around exercise will determine what movement means to you. This will influence the type of exercise you do, how much of it you do, and every other decision you make with it. And that, of course, will affect your outcomes.

Your behaviors naturally flow from your belief system. And your outcomes naturally flow from your behaviors. If you want to implement healthy behaviors, they must be layered upon an operating system (your beliefs) that is in alignment with your desired outcomes.

If this sounds kind of out there to you, and you’re someone like me who needs more science and practicality, then you only need to look at the placebo effect to feel more grounded. The placebo effect is rooted in the idea that our thoughts, perspectives, and beliefs influence our outcomes. It’s so powerful, in fact, that scientists have to design studies to account for its influence.

So yes, set some outcome goals. Let them be your north star. Attend to your behaviors. Ensure they will lead to the outcomes you want. But be sure you take the time to understand and change your underlying beliefs, as that’s the level where true transformation happens.

Limiting Beliefs

When we don’t stop to question our beliefs, we end up taking them as truths.

False truths are dangerous. Beliefs are not always facts. When we assume they are, we end up being blinded to helpful information that could improve our lives. We filter out all evidence that runs contrary to our beliefs, and we only see the information that reinforces our current belief system.

This cycle can work for you or against you. Empowering beliefs create an upward spiral of improved life experiences reinforcing those beliefs.

Limiting beliefs create a downward spiral of diminished life experiences reinforcing those beliefs. In other words… you feel stuck.

This is important to understand because you can choose to subscribe to whatever beliefs you want, and whether they are universal truths or not doesn’t matter. All that matters is that they are your truth. And whatever truths you choose to live by will determine the outcomes in your life you achieve.

Empowering beliefs and perspectives will lead to more favorable outcomes than limiting beliefs and perspectives. So when you aren’t living the life experience you want, you need to look beneath the hood and see what beliefs you’re choosing to subscribe to, and decide which ones need to be challenged and cut.

We have a lot of limiting beliefs surrounding our goals. We tell ourselves stories that we’ve accepted as truth, when in reality, they are just beliefs we’ve taken from experiences that we’ve made part of our identity. Then we live this identity. We act it out. And we get the results of it.

The experiences we have are determined by the beliefs and perspectives we overlay onto our life situations. These beliefs and perspectives create our identity. This is the reason why if you want to change your life experience, you need to change your identity. From that identity flows behaviors that are in alignment with it. And those behaviors will lead to a series of outcomes.

Your beliefs and perspectives are the reason why two people can watch a house burn down, yet experience the situation in very different ways. If one of those people was watching it happen on the evening news, their experience will be different than the actual homeowner watching their house burn down in person. The house burning down (the situation) is the same, but the way each person is perceiving it is different. This will lead to a different life experience.

That might seem obvious, but we can take that same example and look at it another way. Let’s say we have two different people who are each watching their own homes burn down. Again, this is a very similar situation for each person. Yet if one person believes the fire destroyed everything that meant anything to them, while the other person sees the situation as an opportunity for a fresh start, they are going to have very different life experiences. Each person brought a different identity into the same situation. These identities were made up of different beliefs and perspectives, which lead to different results and experiences.

Your identity interacts constantly with your environment. The beliefs you have about your body will determine how you eat and how you exercise. It will determine your confidence and your self-worth. It will influences how you interact with the world and whether you take certain chances with your career or relationships. It will impact your entire life experience.

The beliefs you have about food or exercise will dictate how you interact with them. Limiting beliefs will force you to see these things as body manipulation tools. You might always feel like food has power over you or that exercise feels like a chore. This will keep you stuck in Diet Culture behaviors, which will negatively impact your life experience.

Here’s the thing – we aren’t aware of most of our limiting beliefs. They are so rooted in our identity and so accepted as fact that we’ve never stopped to question them. But once you realize that beliefs are why you are where you are today, you suddenly start becoming hyperaware of your thoughts and actions and why they happen. You stop trying to force external behaviors and outcomes and start trying to influence them naturally by internally changing your identity, beliefs, and values.

This is the reason why we’ve spent so much time in this book changing the way you think about food, body, exercise, and mind. We’re cultivating a new identity. Tips and tricks and other neat little strategies that Diet Culture promotes and that people are drawn to only lead to you developing limiting beliefs and negative experiences. It’s the reason why so many people feel stuck and frustrated living through the same cycle for decades.

But when you become aware of and challenge your beliefs and perspectives around food, body, exercise, and mind, you open yourself up to creating a new more empowering identity. And this identity will then interact with your environment in a more productive way. You see food differently. You see your body differently. Exercise takes on a new meaning. And all these beliefs coalesce into a life experience you can be happy with.

Self-Sabotage

Most people already know what behaviors are good for them. We don’t need more doctors and nutritionists telling us to eat more vegetables. We don’t need people telling us that we should be exercising. What we need is more people explaining to us why we struggle to do the things we know we should be doing to live the life we want.

That’s where self-sabotage enters the picture. How many times have you tried your best to incorporate healthy behaviors into your life only to talk yourself out of them eventually? The mind is extremely powerful. It can rationalize any behaviors it wants.

It’s the reason why I truly believe more people need a therapist than they need a nutritionist. Everything we do and achieve starts with your psychology. That’s why this entire book is based on healing your relationships with food, body, exercise, and mind. These relationships exist in your mind, and your behaviors naturally flow from the meaning you’ve attached to each of them.

You create a problem when you focus too much on behaviors, actions, and strategies and ignore creating an empowering identity. You create cognitive dissonance. In other words, how you are acting is in conflict with who you are. Your behaviors don’t align with your beliefs. Something feels off. And what typically happens in that scenario is you’re able to engage in these behaviors, but only in the short term. You white-knuckle and willpower your way through the process. But you can’t act out of alignment with who you are for an extended period of time. When your behaviors are in conflict with your identity, they don’t last, and neither do your results.

This is one of the biggest causes of all self-sabotage. It’s the reason you know what you need to do yet you don’t do it consistently for life. It’s the reason you keep starting and stopping healthy behaviors, give up on your workouts, or feel like you aren’t worthy to be loved and accepted as you are right now. It’s rarely the lack of desire that holds us back. It’s that we don’t believe we possess the power to change our lives to the degree we want.

Remember the Identity Tree? The roots (your beliefs) of the tree manifest the trunk (your behaviors), which then creates the leaves and branches (your outcomes and results).

Too many people are trying to insert a behavior into an ecosystem that doesn’t align with it. It’s like trying to inject new behaviors into an operating system that has faulty code. When you try to act in a way that is out of alignment with your beliefs, this new behavior has no solid ground to support it. It exists through willpower alone.

So you’re only able to maintain it as long as willpower isn’t depleted. Once depleted, whether from a demanding day or from something else that requires it, the temporary behavioral supports disappear, and you’re left with the core foundation – your beliefs, aka your identity.

Trying to build a habit on top of a misaligned belief is like trying to build a house on top of water. The behavior has nothing to latch on to, and when that happens, your current beliefs swallow up your best of intentions. You rationalize skipping your workout. You talk yourself into eating things you know won’t make you feel great.

Essentially, you revert back to the identity you were before, because you never really changed it. So your behaviors once again become aligned with who you are and always have been.

To stop self-sabotage you have align your behaviors with your beliefs. That means first becoming the person you want to be by challenging all the limiting beliefs that are keeping you stuck as your old identity.

These limiting beliefs are keeping you tethered to a past version of yourself. They are your current operating system. And they will continue running your old program and giving you the same behaviors and results until you change them.

Imagine yourself at your Ideal Body. Remember, your ideal body is the body you’re in when you have healthy relationships with food, body, exercise, and mind. It’s when you’re no longer obsessing about food, when you feel comfortable and confident in your own skin, and when you’re living your full life experience. Who is this version of yourself? How do you feel? Don’t focus on what you have or what you look like at your Ideal Body. Focus on who you are and what you believe about yourself and how you choose to show up in your life.

Your goal is to step into that future identity – today. To act in alignment with the person you want to be. Notice the differences in your current and future identities and start questioning your current beliefs that don’t align with your desired future self. Where did these limiting beliefs come from? Are they always true? How are they holding you back? What new empowering beliefs can you replace them with? What beliefs do you want to bring into your future? You have a choice. You can change your beliefs. And in doing so you can change your identity and your life.

Once your identity changes, you approach your journey differently. Instead of asking yourself “what do I do?”, you start asking yourself “who am I?”. You focus less on the things you need to do and more on the person you need to be. And with the latter, you automatically know what to do. You get to a point where you don’t just believe you can do it – you know that you will. It’s a done deal. It’s who you are.

You’re someone who takes care of themselves and respects their body? The choices you make will be in alignment with that identity. You don’t talk yourself out of them. It’s who you are. Self-sabotage doesn’t enter the picture because you’re behaving in accordance with your beliefs.

Change Your Past

So much of our past influences our life to this day. We had experiences that created an imprint in our minds. These emotional bookmarks are then held for us and are used to interpret the events of the now.

For example, if someone called you fat when you were 15 years old, and that moment created feelings of shame and embarrassment, then an emotional bookmark was created. And this bookmark holds its place via the use of a belief.

Going forward with your life this belief is used to filter your world. It influences the way you think, feel, and act.

Being called fat at 15 creates a belief that being a certain size is shameful and that other people will judge you and make fun of you. So going forward you act in a way that will avoid that pain.

These emotional bookmarks and beliefs are constantly being created through experiences. The more traumatic, the stronger the emotional bookmark, and the more deeply rooted the underlying belief becomes.

Understanding this you might think that the past is the past and there’s nothing you can do about it. The past can’t be changed, after all. Or can it be?

The past only exists in our minds. The original experience is over. It’s the beliefs that live on to the present moment.

These beliefs are what make you relive that past experience over and over again. It’s like you’re stuck in a loop. The original experience created the belief, and now the belief is forcing you to relive that original experience. The longer it goes on like this the more reinforced it becomes.

Why does this matter? Because your past and present are experienced through the lens of your current beliefs. That’s what your life is – a never-ending series of experiences that are shaped by your beliefs.

So you can change your past (and future) by creating new beliefs. No, you can’t go back and change the original event, but you can change your past in all the ways that it impacts your present and future.

That’s what matters most anyways. You don’t have to carry the trauma of your past anymore. You can choose to let it go. You can choose to change your current beliefs so that you experience your past differently. Because how we interpret our past has less to do with our past, and more to do with our present.

Being called fat at 15 doesn’t have to impact your life at 40. Being rejected at 25 doesn’t have to influence your self-worth at 50. Nor does being criticized yesterday have to change anything about who you are or how you act today.

Remove the emotional bookmark of your past by changing your beliefs of the present. And let your future unfold using your new empowering beliefs of today.