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12 months ago, you wanted to get fit and live a healthier lifestyle. Today you want to make changes in your health and fitness levels (I totally respect this decision of yours by the way).
Where do you think you will be 12 months from now? How has your health and fitness levels evolved over the last 12 months when you promised yourself last year that you’re going to start living a healthier lifestyle?
Is your health and fitness levels where you want it to be? Perhaps if your goal was to lose weight – how many pounds of fat did you burn and were able to keep it off? Because gaining it back isn’t helping anyone right?
Or maybe if you wanted to build strength and pack some muscles, were you able to get to where you wanted to be or did life get in the way?
Now for any of these changes that you’re trying to make in your health and fitness levels, they’ve got to be lasting and consistent. In other words – you’ve got to build lasting habits such that you can take the necessary actions on a daily basis that will yield you the results you’re trying to produce for the rest of your life.
We’ve all experienced change for a moment. Have you noticed how always by the time December comes, the whole nation is so pumped up to make a change in their health and fitness levels? For most of them, the energy carries on through the first few weeks of Jan and then what happens? They feel let down and disappointed in the end because they’re not seeing any results in their body.
So what can you do to create lasting changes in your health and fitness levels?
If you’ve been reading blog posts over blog posts on how to improve your health and fitness levels but haven’t gotten any promising results, I want to ensure that this is the last article you read.
As it turns out, there are 3 core principles of change that you can use immediately to change your health and fitness levels once and for all.
But before I give that out to you, I wanted to ask you another question – what is your perceived definition of health and fitness?
The reason why I ask you this question is because your current personal interpretation about health and fitness also has a lot to do with the results you’re currently getting and will get down the road.
See, back in undergrad college, I was 50lbs+ overweight. But I had a personal breakthrough and worked my ass off to lose those extra pounds and also helped my abs to see the physical world.
I thought I had it all when it came to health and fitness.
But then even after getting the body I so wanted and admired, my health was still a mess.
When I moved to the US, I lived with a chronic lower back pain for the first two and a half years. Multiple X-rays and MRI couldn’t diagnose what was going on. That resulted in living on anti-inflammatory drugs – Naproxen, Ibuprofen, Etodolac, you name it.
Anytime I pushed myself during workouts, I would get muscle spasms and then the doc would write me a script for muscle relaxants.
But since the summer of 2015, I’m grateful to have stopped any medications and not had to visit the doctor for those persistent low back pain that bothered me for years.
The last time I visited the doctor was in early 2016 to have a hydrocele surgically removed from my scrotum. Since then, my body’s department of health has maintained peace and order. (Fun fact – I don’t have a health insurance and use that as a motivation to take more responsibility and care for my health and well-being).
To the outside world, I looked fit and healthy but my inside world was in turmoil.
What I’m trying to imply here is there is a reason why even after having the highest health care spendings in the world, America is still shackled in the chains of public health crisis like obesity.
For what it’s worth, how being sedentary has been a major health problem is beyond my understanding.” – Stephen Hawking
2 out of 3 people in the nation are overweight or obese is not because there are not enough resources out there. New fitness apps are popping up from left and right every other day.
Isn’t it all about eating well and living an active lifestyle? I bet that’s what I used to say before. Not anymore.
Why do so many Americans, even after having access to everything one needs to transform their health and fitness levels are still running like a hamster on a wheel?
Let me share with you what I found after living in this country for over 4 years through some research and personal experiences.
It is the failure of most individuals to grasp the difference between health and fitness is what causes them to experience the frustration of working out religiously and still having the same five to ten pounds stubbornly clinging to their midsection – that obnoxious combination of belly fat and love handles.
See I have friends who tend to give so much priority and importance to working out that they’ll even pay hundreds and thousands of dollars to keep their gym membership going on. But their belly fat is still hanging on to them which they also complain about frustratingly. Talk about insanity.
Worse than that is the plight of those who make exercise the centerpiece of their lives and believe that their actions are making them healthier, yet each and every day they are pushing themselves one step further toward fatigue, disease, and emotional upheaval.
And then we all have that one friend who always talks about working out and shares pics from the last workout on FB and Instagram. But if you were to be brutally honest to that friend, you know that the results are saying something else.
So what exactly do I mean by the difference between health and fitness? Let me give that to you.
Fitness is “the physical ability to perform an athletic activity.” It’s nothing sort of having an hourglass figure or sporting six-pack abs.
(Physical) Health, on the other hand, is defined as “the state where all the systems of the body – nervous, muscular, skeletal, circulatory, digestive, lymphatic, hormonal, etc – are working in an optimal way”.
Most people think that fitness implies health, but the truth is that they don’t necessarily go hand in hand. It’s ideal to have both health and fitness, but by putting health first , you will always enjoy tremendous benefits in your life. If you achieve your fitness at the expense of your health, you may not live long enough to enjoy your spectacular physique.
See.. that’s the basic fundamentals that a majority of the population has got wrong. Everyone is spending their time and money with the hope that just by shedding those extra pounds, their life will be perfect. And what’s their strategy? They try to work out regularly.
But their cortisol levels are alarmingly high – stressful job, lack of sleep, toxic relationships etc which causes them to live on food-type substances. Their hormonal system is out of whack. Their biomarkers are nothing that you would call optimal with key minerals and vitamins in chronically low levels.
I was lucky to have stumbled upon an amazing doctor, Dr. Jerry Friemoth, who as an experiment suggested I take the 25-hydroxy Vitamin D test . The optimum range for Vitamin D levels is 20 – 50 ng/ml. Guess what? Mine was at 8.7 ng/ml. As it turned out my Vitamin D levels were chronically low. This was revealing about those bouts of depression I would have along with with the low back pain.
Anyways, sorry I got a bit out of track.
Now that you’ve got the basics of what health and fitness means and how both are distinctly different, let’s get back to how you can create lasting changes to your health and fitness levels.
1. Raise the Standards of Your Personal Health and Fitness
If you sincerely want to make a change in your health & fitness levels, the first thing you must do is to raise your standards. Whether your goal is to lose weight, burn belly fat or to get stronger and gain some muscles, you must realize that the current state of your health and fitness is something you will not accept any more.
It is easy to get complacent about your health when the society sets up such a weak overall standard. What I mean to say is that your behaviors related to health and fitness are directly correlated to the health and fitness levels of the people around you.
Take a note of all the people you spend your time with – at your job, your friends, community groups that you’re a part of, your neighborhood, etc.
What is the body composition type of the people? What are their eating patterns – do they often eat out or are they enjoy cooking at home? Do they walk around sporting their belly fat as if it’s nothing or do they engage in a physical activity 3-5 times a week?
This is applicable to your family too. If your parents were obese, there’s a high likelihood that you are struggling with weight and the same might happen to your kids unless you step in to create a lasting change.
What you need to realize is that to create lasting changes to your health and fitness levels, you cannot live up to other people’s standards.
My personal breakthrough moment was when I was lying depressed on my dormitory bed, recovering from a hemorrhoid surgery. I was only 18 and in enormous physical and emotional pain. I had been struggling with immunodeficiency disorder since I was born. I was 50 pounds overweight. While friends in college were having fun, I was restricted even to go to the bathroom.
During that period, I had an eye-opening conversation with my neurosurgeon uncle which went something like this.
“Ankur, it seems like you are so focused on your studies that you are unaware of your eating habits and don’t seem to get time to engage in some physical activity. Your grandfather passed away at the age of 51 due to heart disease. Your father had his first heart attack at the age of 37. I don’t mean to scare you but only tell the truth – you may have inherited those cardiovascular disease-related genes. And your current health habits don’t look like you’re even aware of this truth. But the good things is that you can counteract gene-related diseases by living a healthy and active lifestyle. Hope once you heal from your surgery, you’ll start to be mindful of what and how you eat and also start exercising regularly.”
That conversation had a lasting impression upon me. There I was with a standard so low that it didn’t even occur to me that I was 50 pounds overweight (with a waist line of 36″) and was a binge eater.
Then and there I decided to change my standards for health and fitness. The rest is history. When I graduated from college, I had lost all those extra pounds of fat and also sported six-pack abs. But the most important thing was that my standard for health and fitness was set way high than it was ever before.
Are you satisfied with your current standards of personal health and fitness?
If you’ve had it enough and want to raise your standards, let’s spend some time to list down all the things that you will no longer tolerate anymore with regards to your personal health and fitness.
→ Write down all the things that you will no longer tolerate anymore. And all the changes you aspire of seeing in your health and fitness levels.
Just tell me where to send you the 'How to Create Lasting Changes' Activity Sheet.
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2. Change Your Limiting Beliefs about Health & Fitness
Have you set health and fitness goals in the past, took some actions, but didn’t get the desired results and got all disappointed?
See here’s the thing – if you raise the standards about what you will accept of your health, but if you don’t really believe you can meet them, you’ve already sabotaged yourself.
Take care of your body. It’s the only place you have to live.” – Jim Rohn
You and I both know that health is important. We all want to lose weight, eat healthier, and get in the best shape of our lives.
But then why are we living in a world where over-consumption is leading to a global public health crisis?
As it turns out, in order to create mastery in your health and fitness levels, you also have to diagnose your current limiting beliefs that have been stopping you from making the changes you want to make.
As humans, we have a tendency to invest energy into the things we believe will produce the results we seek. But when we believe something is not going to work out – even unconsciously, we sabotage the results by taking half-hearted action.
Little action equals lousy results. Lousy results equal uncertainty and disheartened beliefs. This becomes a vicious cycle that only ends when you decide to change what you’re putting into it.
Take a look at the picture below.
The Health & Fitness Success Cycle
Health and fitness goals. Action. Results. Belief System. By itself, each of these words is self-explanatory. But when we put them together to make the health and fitness success cycle, we dive deeper into understanding the psychology of health and fitness.
The above diagram outlines the keys to health and fitness success.
The more resolved beliefs you have about achieving your health and fitness goals, the more empowering actions you’ll end up taking. And when you take repeated actions and enjoy the small rewards and the small results you get, you train your brain to strengthen those habits muscles.
When you successfully build healthy habits, nobody can stop you from getting the desired levels in your health and fitness levels.
However, if you’re not careful, the health and fitness success cycle will also work in reverse. You have negative belief systems and thus don’t get the results you want in your health. That makes you to not take any actions anymore and thus your health and fitness goals remain distant.
Your belief system has the power to create and the power to destroy.
But what is a belief, really? It’s a feeling of certainty about what something means.
The challenge is that most of our health and fitness beliefs were unconsciously created based on our interpretation of painful and pleasurable experiences in our past. But the past des not dictate the present – unless you continue to live there.
We can find experiences to back up almost any belief, but the key is to make sure that we are consciously aware of the beliefs we are creating.
If your health and fitness beliefs don’t empower you, change them.
The only thing that’s keeping you from getting what you want is the story you keep telling yourself.” – Tony Robbins
Below are the most common limiting beliefs we tell ourselves when it comes to our health and fitness. By anticipating – or perhaps acknowledging that you already have them, and changing them, you will be able to create lasting changes in your health and fitness that so many others spend their whole life struggling with it.
MOST COMMON HEALTH AND FITNESS BELIEFS IN THE US
A. “I don’t have time.”
FACT: 26% of people think they do not have enough time to make a lifestyle change . You have the same number of hours in a day as everyone else in the world.
Why are some people able to capture every moment while others consistently use the lack of time as an excuse?
It’s because for some people, working out is a MUST , and for others, it’s a SHOULD .
B. “It’s too expensive.”
FACT: 17% of people think it is too expensive to make a change towards a healthier lifestyle. But when we really look at the facts, the cost of eating healthy meals vs. unhealthy junk food is only $1.5 more per day . The spare change in your pocket can mean the difference in your life.
C. “I don’t have the willpower.”
FACT: 27 Americans don’t think they have enough willpower to make a lifestyle change.First of all, if you are relying on motivation and willpower to achieve your health and fitness goals, you are already sabotaging your success.
The human brain has a limited supply of willpower at the beginning of each day and it ends up using the willpower reserve throughout the day during decision-making activities – what to eat for breakfast, which clothes to wear to work, which email to reply first, what to eat for lunch, etc.
But there is still hope when it comes to willpower and motivation. Research tells that you can strengthen your willpower muscles . Similarly, you can increase your intrinsic motivation levels by asking yourself the right questions.
D. “I don’t understand.”
Today we are bombarded by information related to health and fitness in such a way that one has to work hard to know now about how to live a healthier lifestyle.
There are so many blogs, websites, apps, videos that talk about this, yet surprisingly, according to a study, 52% of Americans believe that it is easier to do their taxes than to figure out how to eat healthfully! With a belief like this, it’s no surprise that many people fail to even get started.
From my research, I’ve compiled a list of health and fitness limiting beliefs. Spend some time to identify what limiting beliefs are stopping you from achieving your health and fitness goals.
Just tell me where to send you the 'How to Create Lasting Changes' Activity Sheet.
I used to believe that thinking about getting six-pack abs would make me a compulsive narcissist. That was a self-created limiting belief which I was able to overcome and today I can’t be any proud of my body that inspires me to pursue my goals with energy and passion.
Don’t let your beliefs prevent you from becoming the healthiest and the fittest version of yourself.
If you listen to your limiting beliefs, you won’t even try and you’ll be lacking that sense of certainty that allows you to tap into the deepest capacity that’s within you even as you read this.
Our beliefs are like unquestioned commands, telling us how things are, what’s possible and what’s impossible, what we can and cannot do.
Your belief system shape every action, every thought, and every feeling you experience related to your health and fitness. As a result, changing your limiting belief systems is central to making any real and lasting change in your health and fitness levels.
You must develop a sense of certainty that you can and will meet the new standards even before you start taking actions.
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3. Change Your Health & Fitness Related Strategies
The best strategy to get in the best shape of your life is to find a role model – someone who has already sculpted the body you want, someone who already has reached the levels of health and fitness you want to attain, and then tap into their knowledge.
Learn what they are doing, what their core beliefs are, and how they think about health & fitness.
Not only will this make your actions more effective, it will also save you a huge amount of time because you won’t have to reinvent the wheel. You can fine-tune it, reshape it, and perhaps even make it better.
So go ahead and find your role-model today and study what they are doing or did to transform their health and fitness levels.
Another strategy that I like to use is to see what’s working or not working for me – related to both food and exercise and then stick to what’s working and eliminate what’s not working. This personal experiment helped me to eliminate outdoors running and has saved me a huge amount of time.
To assess your current health & fitness improvement strategies, answer the following questions.
After you answer these questions, sit down to assess and create lists of –
a) What are the things that worked for me?
b) What are the things that produced no result?
c) What are the things that I experimented with but didn’t quite do it for a timeline long enough to derive any conclusion?
Let me give you one of the most crucial strategies that will transform your health and fitness levels.
Instead of going for the quick fix… you know what I mean here – those magic diet plans, and 21-day bootcamp and other short-term programs that promise eye-opening results, focus on building positive health and fitness habits that will remain with you till the day you die.
So to create lasting changes in your health and fitness levels, do the following –
→ Raise the Standards of Your Personal Health and Fitness
You’ve had it enough. You must not tolerate any of this anymore. The food industry is all geared up with marketing tactics to get you addicted to their food-like man-made substances. In such a case, you must set a high enough personal standard for yourself that you will not give in to the amount of crap that is easily available all around us in the name of food.
The same goes for your physical activity levels. Do you want to associate yourself with being sedentary like a lazy pig or do you want to be someone who is active like a warrior? You get to choose today.
→ Change Your Limiting Beliefs about Health & Fitness
Your beliefs about heath and fitness are either empowering, neutral, or disempowering. Take notes of all your beliefs and put them in these 3 buckets. As you build more awareness about your health and fitness beliefs, you will find it powerful when a majority of those beliefs are empowering you to get the results you want.
Be mindful of not only your limiting beliefs but also the people around you and see how that has been affecting the way you think about health and fitness.
→ Change Your Health & Fitness Strategies
If something is not working even after repeating it for months and years, then why do it?
Find your health and fitness role-model and get coached by them.
Focus on building habits and you will empower the strategies you adopt along the way.
So what do you think of these 3 core principles to create lasting changes in health and fitness levels?
If you have been struggling with your health and fitness levels, how do you feel about what you just read? Please share your ideas below.
