YOUR TRANSFORMATION

“TRANSFORMATION IS WITHIN YOUR REACH. I KNOW IT’S INSIDE YOU. LET’S GET TO WORK.”

Your Call to Action

There’s a big difference between knowing what to do and actually doing it! Everyone, no matter how young or old, fit or unfit, healthy or sick, has the potential to do either a worse job or a better job with eating and exercise. You have the potential to make giant leaps forward with the right mindset and methods.

Being human, there is unconscious resistance to making dramatic forward progress toward long-standing improvements in eating and exercise. Whether you like it or not, your unconscious mind is genetically designed or “wired” to cause you to eat delicious food (healthy or unhealthy) and avoid physical exertion, regardless of any long-term negative health consequences.

However, the good news is that you have great power to overcome and outsmart this unconscious resistance by:

acknowledging that unwanted resistance exists,
developing techniques that keep your conscious mind in charge, and
practicing these techniques to ensure they determine your new habits.

You can make dramatic forward progress toward your health goals. The conscious mind–the part that “knows better”–is smarter and more resourceful. It may be weaker than the unconscious mind sometimes, but you can strengthen it. In fact, you must strengthen your mind to strengthen your body. Interestingly enough, the process of improving your health and your body actually strengthens your mind.

Finding Your Reasons to Act

Your health and your life are important. Have you really thought about the reasons to better yourself physically and mentally? Are you ready to do some deep soul searching?

Your Doctor may have said you are at risk if you don’t eat better. Your friends and family may be putting pressure on you because they love you. But for you to commit to the possibility of a great transformation, you must determine exactly what your reasons are, and why they are so important to your life.

A key question: “Where would you like your health and your life to go in the future?”

It is important to consider both the benefits of change, and the drawbacks of failing to change, when considering the reasons that are most important to you.

Positive

(to achieve the good things)

Feel better physically
Feel better mentally
Look better
Have energy
Live longer
Gain confidence
Feel proud
Please family

Negative

(to avoid the bad things)

Avoid heart attack
Die too soon
Avoid diabetes
Missing opportunities
Regret
Healthcare costs
Hospitalization

It is not enough to clarify your reasons in your mind. You must record them in writing in order to truly complete the process of identifying your reasons to act. Recording your reasons allows you to view your reasons on a regular basis. When resistance to change occurs, it is crucially important to have your recorded reasons available to remind you what is at stake.

Heartfelt commitment to change

Once you have fully identified and clarified your reasons to actively pursue lifestyle change, the next step is to learn how to find and harness the inner power to drive you to change in the face of unwanted resistance.

The power to overcome the unwanted resistance comes from focusing on the difference or “reality gap” between your current circumstance, versus the way you want your life and your health to be. It is not enough to dispassionately consider the presence of this reality gap. It is crucially important to focus on the way this reality gap makes you FEEL. Tap into your emotion. When you consciously and deliberately explore this gap and your reasons for overcoming it, emotion serves as the fuel that converts your desires into action. If you are dispassionate about your reasons you will probably not succeed. For some people it is a matter of allowing yourself to become emotionally charged and passionate about your reasons. For others, depending on personality, it is a matter of requiring yourself to engage in this way. The unconscious mind respects passion, not logical reasoning.

You will likely feel a combination of positive and negative emotions when you honestly and deliberately explore this reality gap to fuel your reasons for action. You may simultaneously experience excitement, optimism, elation, anticipation, anxiety, fear, anger, jealousy, regret, or mixed emotions. It is normal to feel excitement about your dreams, frustration about not being able to achieve them, and fear about what it might take to make forward progress. Rather than suppress these emotions, you can and must use all these emotions to power your best intentions.

Do not wait until a “near death” experience, “close call” or escalating health problems to “shock” you into action. For many people the emotional charge caused by such negative experiences provides the power to finally take action. Find the emotional fuel to make changes now, under circumstances you control, rather than waiting for disaster to motivate you.

Take a moment to write down:

Your motivation for change
The emotion that fuels your passion
Your Goals and Actions
Consequences if you don’t change

You may feel unconscious resistance as you read this. Overcome the resistance and take this mandatory step. Your goal is to maximally leverage the emotions that emerge in order to compel you to keep moving forward in the face of resistance.

Making this “heartfelt commitment to change” is a crucial step in the process of making progress toward optimum health and living your best life.

Your Foolproof System

The next step in the process of lifestyle transformation is addressing the practical barriers that interfere with your best intentions. You will need to draw heavily on your reserve of inner strength created by your heartfelt commitment to change, in order to turn practical barriers into practical solutions.

Practical barriers:

limited time caused by your job and/or other obligations,
limited income to spend on food,
limited health caused by illness or injury, and,
living with other family members, limited cooking skills, socializing, traveling, etc..

You can potentially create “practical solutions” that help “lock you in” to the healthy habits of eating right and exercising. This will be your “fool proof system”. “Systems” are really just consistent methods that create uniform or automatic results. Rather than relying on “willpower” all the time, you want to use the power of your heartfelt commitment to create a set of consistent methods that help you achieve the best result possible.

Use your power, persistence, and creativity to simultaneously minimize practical barriers, while maximizing practical solutions. The better your methods and systems, the better your results will be.

You will need to juggle logistical barriers, overcome psychological resistance, and deal with physical limitations, but successful and sustainable improvements are your reward for such efforts. Here are some ideas to get you started with your plan:

Post your goals. And read them every day.
Keep a daily eating and exercise log. Experience shows that this is a key element of success that helps individuals stay focused and aware of their eating and exercise goals. When patients and healthcare providers review the log together they can jointly assess the degree of effectiveness of the “system” as well as ways to improve it.
Eat mostly healthy food. Create an organized system that guarantees that you will have the right food in the right place at the right time. Regularly schedule time or create the most reliable method for buying groceries, keeping your grocery list current, planning your meals, preparing meals, improving your cooking skills, and experimenting with new recipes.
Exercise consistently. Create an organized system that guarantees that you will have the time to exercise, as well as a place and sufficient energy and motivation. For some people this means exercising at the same time in the same place every day.
Plan and then work the plan. The “perfect” system cannot exist. An excellent way to improve your plan is to daily record in your log one thing you will do the following day to improve your success system. At the same time, document something that worked really well. Areas for system improvement may include improving your methods for keeping your eating on track, dealing with social occasions and traveling, logging consistently, exercising more consistently or more effectively, goal setting, support system enhancement, maintaining your passion, etc.
Set and meet deadlines. When you set a deadline to accomplish something positive (a health goal or a system improvement) within a specific time period, you create a favorable sense of urgency that drives your progress forward more quickly. Make them ambitious but realistic. The best deadlines are often enforced externally rather than internally (by you). Anything you can do to put yourself in the position of having to create results by an externally imposed requirement will help accelerate your progress. Example: signing up for a “walkathon” or other similar event or team can serve as another type of external motivation to help you meet a specific health goal.
Engage your health care team. You will need the information, encouragement, and external accountability they can provide. In many cases this can be accomplished most effectively by making regularly scheduled visits with your health care provider specifically aimed at reviewing your progress toward your health goals.
Plan for failure. Prepare a way to get back on track every time you go astray. Everybody falls off from time to time. Your preparation will help you minimize the damage this causes and get back on track quickly. Learn from mistakes but do not dwell on them. Stay focused on the present and future and not the past. Your “reasons for action” can form the starting point for getting back on track when you fall off. Reading them every day can help you stay on track.
Rally Support. It is crucially important to have a system of external accountability and support that will help you refocus and recommit at any point when your resolve has weakened. One such source may be family, friends, and/or others who are invested in your well-being. Tell them about your goals and reasons. Let them know that you are aware that it is normal to have periods of struggle and ask whether they are willing to help by asking you about your progress. Empower them to give you encouragement to get back on track when you struggle. People who have long-term success are the ones who consistently get back up when they fall, and they almost always need the support, encouragement, and help of others who care about them.
Believe you will succeed. You will meet your goals. Success is not a straight path.

Repeated, continual affirmation of your “reasons to act” and “heartfelt commitment to change” must fuel your efforts to build and maintain an evolving “fool-proof success system” that continually overcomes the psychological, logistical, and physical barriers that will otherwise consistently prevent you from reaching your health goals. Your reward for this effort is optimum health and your best possible life.

Reaching Your Full Potential

Gaining experience in successfully setting and achieving goals for health and wellness provides great practice and confidence for setting and achieving goals in other areas. Each success allows you to create more ambitious dreams and goals that fuel your excitement about the future. This optimism helps create a more consistently positive attitude that favorably affects the others around you.

A positive attitude can help you create a healthy body, and a healthy body will help you achieve a positive attitude. Together, a positive attitude and healthy body will help you reach further toward your goals and dreams. As you achieve your goals and dreams you will attract people who are motivated to help you as a result of shared or similar goals and dreams. In many cases working together with others can allow each individual to reach greater heights than when working in isolation.

The same skills that help you overcome barriers and resistance to healthy lifestyle habits can be used to overcome barriers and resistance in all of life’s other challenges. Identifying your reasons to act, gaining emotional fuel, and focusing your energy on creating a success system, are crucial elements to making forward progress no matter what barriers stand between you and your goals and dreams. Persistence in the face of adversity, keeping a success log, setting deadlines, and external accountability are other key elements and skills that will help you build your best life as well as a healthier body.

Do you have the mindset required to turn adversity into opportunity? We typically see life’s small and large obstacles as hardships and unwelcome challenges. Yet we know that everyone must face a wide variety of such challenges despite all efforts to avoid or minimize them. One key difference between those who live life to the fullest and those who do not is how one responds to such challenges. When faced with challenges and upsetting circumstances do you rise to the occasion and deal effectively with the burden? Do you look for possible ways to turn it favorable and use it to drive your will to succeed? Do you persist with a positive attitude despite the circumstances? Reaching your full potential includes dealing effectively with adversity rather than having the “good luck” to avoid it. The process of building the character traits that produce long-standing adherence to healthy lifestyle habits is an excellent process for learning how to deal strategically with all of life’s challenges.

In closing, we live in a world where we have the freedom and opportunity to eat unhealthy delicious food and avoid frequent exercise. No previous generation has had such extensive freedoms and opportunities in this regard. Unfortunately, this also means that no previous generations have had such high rates of lifestyle-related diseases, including heart disease, diabetes, and obesity. Collectively, we can see this unfavorable result as more than just a serious threat to the well being of our society. Our generation can rise above this challenge, turn it around, and allow this experience to propel humanity toward much greater heights. The key is for individuals to master the skills discussed above, and to bond together to apply them on a broader, grander scale. By learning how to consistently eat right and exercise, despite the temptations not to, we protect our hearts, optimize our health, live our best lives, and find a blueprint for making the world a better place in the process.