From Mental Transformation to Reality
You’ve made it through the entire book! Hopefully you feel inspired and confident to get started down a new path. You likely read a lot that resonated with you and changed the way you viewed your health and fitness journey. For some people it’s even going to feel like they’ve already experienced transformation. But I want to caution you.
Reading this book will not be enough to change your life. It’s normal for people to read books and articles, watch videos, and listen to podcasts and other material, and feel like they made progress towards their goals. And in a way, you most certainly have. It’s a start. Your identity is shifting. But there’s more work to do.
Right now you have what I call a mental transformation. This is when you consume information that leads to epiphanies, mental breakthroughs, and shifts in beliefs and perspectives. You’ve cultivated a new mindset. But if you stop here, your transformation will never become a reality. It will never manifest itself into your day to day life. It will never change your overall life experience in any meaningful way.
To make your transformation a reality, you have to take it from the abstract mental space in your mind, to the physical reality you live in. And you do that by taking action. You do that by putting into practice all you’ve learned so that you can put yourself into a position of struggle, which if you remember, is what leads to new experiences and breakthroughs.
There’s a big difference between knowing and understanding something. You can read about riding a bike all you want. You can consume article after article about how to ride one. You can hire a coach that tells you how to do it. You could even teach others how to ride one based on the information you’ve read. But until you actually ride the bike, you will never KNOW how to ride one. You will only UNDERSTAND how to do it.
The knowing comes from doing. I can tell you how to overcome your emotional eating struggle over and over again. I can tell you to sit with the discomfort, identify your emotions and your underlying unmet needs, and find productive ways to cope. That process might be a revelation to you. It can even feel like you’ve fixed your emotional eating to some degree. But the understanding can also be a false sense of hope. The understanding can keep you stuck in the mental transformation space.
Until you actually take that process with you into an emotional eating episode and work through the struggle in real time, the transformation will only ever exist in your mind. The experience is what allows you to collect data points that are unique to your situation. It’s what allows you to apply what you understand. You learn about yourself. You become more self-aware. And you put yourself into positions that allow you to experience real transformation. A single real emotional eating episode experienced with the right mindset is worth 100 books. This goes for anything you are struggling with in regards to your relationships with food, body, exercise, and mind.
I’m emphasizing this because many people will finish this book and immediately start looking for more information to consume. They are very smart and intelligent people who know a lot about this stuff because they’ve learned a lot about it. They understand it.
Resist this temptation. Resist living in a horizontal transformation space. Take your transformation vertically. Take the next step up with action.
What will you change with your eating? What will you change about the exercise you do? Did you explore where the beliefs about your body came from? Did you take the Ideal Body Assessment so that you know where exactly you’re struggling with your relationships?
If this book resonated with you in any way you owe it to yourself to go deeper. Surround yourself with other like minded people. Immerse yourself in the ideology. Get help when you need it. But be sure to act on the knowledge. You can’t think your way to transformation. You need real experiences to really change yourself.
Commit to Never Dieting Again
The only way to succeed at your Ideal Body journey is to fully reject Diet Culture and everything it stands for. There is a temptation for people to want to straddle the fence between Diet Culture and the new Ideal Body. But this just keeps you in no-man’s land.
I get it though. You understand why giving up calorie counting and the scale are important for the healing process. But you’re tempted to sneak a peak at the scale, or you still add up calories in your head to give you a bit more comfort and control over your eating. This is completely normal behavior, but it’s like trying to swim with an anchor tied to your ankle.
The Ideal Body Formula is the antidote to Diet Culture. They don’t work in harmony. You can’t take the antidote while sipping on the poison. So trying to take your favorite parts of both just leads to more failure and frustration. It’s not going to work. For the antidote to be effective you have to remove the poison from your world. You have to keep your distance from it. You have to commit to never dieting again. Don’t dabble in the Ideal Body Formula – embrace it completely.
You already know Diet Culture doesn’t work. Ten to fifty or more years of dieting and weight loss attempts is proof of that. You’re reading this book because it didn’t work. But I do understand. Diet culture is all most people know. It’s a relationship they’ve had most of their life. They’ve shared emotional highs and lows together. They’ve been through a lot. So like with any breakups, it can be hard to just sever the tie. Memories pop up of the “successes” you had together and you’re tempted to give it another go. Just remember, this relationship with Diet Culture is toxic. Let it go and never look back.
I admit that can all sound a little dramatic. But it’s for good reason. The pull to go back to Diet Culture is strong and it shouldn’t be underestimated. You have to recognize when those thoughts and behaviors start to resurface so you can squash them before they take you over. I have witnessed plenty of people go back to Diet Culture tactics – cleanses, detoxes, 30 day weight loss challenges, caloric restriction, the next trendy diet. I see them still struggling years later, never breaking free. If you’re not careful, this will be you too.
One year, 5 years, or even 10 years will pass you in a blink of an eye. You’ll wake up and realize Diet Culture just consumed you that entire time and you never got anywhere. We’ve had people who joined our program who fell victim again to Diet Culture and went back to it, only to rejoin our program years later admitting that they just weren’t ready to give up dieting yet.
That’s why I’m being emphatic here. Ditch Diet Culture. Flat out reject it. Every single part of it. Get mad at it if you have to. Get fed up with its messaging that your body is your worth. Get annoyed when you see people promoting Diet Culture tactics, whether their intentions are good or bad. Stay surrounded by people who practice the Ideal Body Formula. And commit to never going back to Diet Culture no matter how tempting it might be.
Journey Expectations
I’ve gotten the opportunity to watch the Ideal Body journeys of thousands of people unfold. Not to mention, I can personally relate to their experiences because of my own transformation. And something I’ve noticed is there are very similar stages and patterns that people undergo on their journey. If you can understand this, you can manage your expectations and normalize the experiences you’re bound to have.
For starters, the beginning period when you first decide to ditch Diet Culture and plug yourself into the Ideal Body Formula is a highly motivating time. Hope has resurfaced. You finally feel like there’s a way out of your lifelong struggle. And make no mistake – this is the way out. However, this beginning period is also a very shaky stage. You are very susceptible to Diet Culture influences, self-doubt, and any struggles you encounter are real risks to you staying the course.
Understand that this is normal. You have a lifetime of programming to overcome. It takes time. During those first couple of months it takes constant reinforcement, immersion, support, and a focus on curating your environment in way that keeps you on track. That’s why it’s so important to make sure you don’t do this alone and that you surround yourself with people who share the same philosophy as you do. Keeping any remnants of Diet Culture around you puts you at a heightened risk.
But if you can make it through that short window of time, you’ll notice a shift in your thinking. You start to fully embrace this new life and you go all in on it. This is when the real transformation happens.
At that point you are able to really see Diet Culture for what it is. The contrast between your new life and your old life gets stronger and stronger, and it gets easier to say no to Diet Culture. You start to see people who are stuck in Diet Culture differently and actually have compassion for them. This isn’t you thinking you’re better than them. This is you remembering how you felt and how much your life experience was negatively impacted when you had your worth tied to your body and you were constantly obsessing over your food and appearance and fitting into society’s beauty standards. So in reality, you start having compassion for your old self, and you see your old self in others. This makes it so much easier to stay away from Diet Culture going forward.
That said, you aren’t completely in the clear. There will be some temptations to go back to Diet Culture. You’ll get triggered by your body. You’ll have a bad body image day. Or a close friend or family member will have great “success” on a diet.
These experiences will challenge your beliefs. But resist the temptation to go back to a lifestyle that didn’t work for you. These moments are what I call inflection points. And each one is an opportunity for transformation. They are opportunities to rewire your life going forward. So be sure to talk yourself through the situation using the strategies you learned in this book, and take the right fork in the road. Each time you do you will make that path easier to take.
Every day, week, or year that goes by it gets easier to live your new life. Nowadays I’m so detached from Diet Culture that I don’t even know what’s going on in it. I hear about trendy diets long after they’ve reached mainstream. And I’m a health and fitness coach! My mental and physical environments are curated perfectly. I’m not around Diet Culture anymore. And when I am, I don’t see it anymore, because my beliefs don’t align with Diet Culture anymore, and my beliefs are the lens in which I experience the world.
So know that your Ideal Body journey is going to be similar. Manage those expectations so you know how to navigate the ups and downs. If the struggles are normalized it makes them easier to overcome. At the beginning just take things one day at a time. Stay surrounded by people who live the Ideal Body Formula. Create your support network during this sensitive stage. And if you can immerse yourself in this ideology for a couple of months, know that your new identity is forged, and your unique Ideal Body – the NEW Ideal Body, will be yours to experience.
What’s Next?
It’s time for you to start putting the Ideal Body Formula into practice and live it. And to help you do that, I’d like to invite you to join us in our Built Daily Mentorship program.
This is where we personally coach and mentor people through the Formula. Similar to this book, we walk you step-by-step through the process of healing your relationships with food, body, exercise, and mind, so that you can achieve the NEW Ideal Body.
But the big difference between the Mentorship and this book is the community, coaching, support, accountability, and the specific focus on taking action. A book can only do so much. You need to surround yourself with like-minded people. You need support and advice when you’re struggling. And you need to know exactly what to do to implement the concepts I talked about in this book.
That’s exactly what the Mentorship does. Deanna and I lay out a specific process for you to follow that leads to you naturally achieving your healthiest weight. We teach you the specific frameworks we’ve developed from over a decade of coaching clients that show you exactly how to implement the ideas in this book for your own unique situation. And then we personally coach you day to day through the entire process.
This isn’t an informational program – it’s a transformational one. It is focused on holding you accountable to taking action and getting you actual results. Because we are taking you by the hand and personally guiding and supporting you, we’re able to get you to your goals in a fraction of the time it would take to do this on your own.
If this sounds interesting to you, your next step is to sign up for a free Breakthrough Call. On these calls we’ll chat about your struggles and your goals, and we’ll put a strategy in place to get you to where you want to be. And if you want our help implementing that strategy, we can show you what that would look like too.
You can schedule your free Breakthrough Call right here – Schedule My Call
You can also further connect with us by listening to our podcast – Fitness & Sushi. You can find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any of your favorite podcast players. On our podcast Deanna and I dive deep into the topics of the Ideal Body Formula.
Finally, consider joining our email list. Deanna and I write every week and share our thoughts and Ideal Body strategies with the people in our community. We’d love to have you a part of that. You can sign up for our free emails here.
Remember… what you do next matters. Whether you join us in our Mentorship program or not, be sure to surround yourself with the people who share your thoughts, beliefs, perspectives, and goals. Commit to ditching Diet Culture forever. Take action on the Ideal Body Formula. And your Ideal Body will soon be a reality.
