Before you can change your body, change your mind

When there's no will, there's no way. That's one of the major themes of Chantel Hobbs' fitness book, "Never Say Diet." Here's an excerpt:

Say good-bye to your excuses
Believe it or not, it is still difficult for me to say the words “I once weighed nearly 350 pounds.” Not because I’m ashamed of the person I was, but because I no longer define myself — or others — by weight.

For most of my life, I focused on the number that appeared on the scale and how I appeared in the mirror. Winning my weight war was not quick or easy. Being overweight is a personal battle that makes you feel insecure and weak. Trust me, I tried diets and fads and trendy weight-loss programs, but I kept repeating the same cycle of losing and regaining. Simply put, diets don’t work. And it’s not always the program that’s at fault. If you have tried — and failed — to lose weight and keep it off, the reason you continue to struggle lies in your approach.

I’ll bet I’ve used every excuse you’ve ever thought of, maybe even several that you haven’t. There are plenty of excuses to go around. In fact, at the end of this introduction, I’ll list the top twenty excuses I have either used or heard.

You must get beyond all of them. Your only hope for success is to decide not to allow anything to stand in your way. Why do we allow our excuses to control our lives and damage our health and ultimate happiness? I could write a book about self-doubt, denial, and self-hatred. That’s where I lived for many years. But I finally reached the point where I was done with living that way. Success began after I made some hard decisions, and I will show you how to make the same decisions so you can tell your own success story.

If you are ready to get serious about claiming optimal health and fitness, you are about to begin a life-altering journey. You can achieve much more than you ever dreamed. I know this because it happened to me. I was the woman who could barely squeeze into a seat at the movies and had to stop and rest while walking around Disney World with my kids. Today I’m a marathon runner. I don’t have anything special inside me that you don’t. I just got tired of disappointment.

If my story doesn’t make you believe in yourself again, then perhaps nothing will. This is your time to start becoming the best you can be, to accept the challenge, and to make a personal commitment to never say diet again. It will require discipline and hard work, but the return is greater than you can imagine: a permanent life change. This time you will break the fat habit for good!

Over a period of nearly two years, I lost 200 pounds and got a job as a Spinning instructor. I later started running marathons, and I now work as a personal trainer and life coach. I’ve seen a great variety of people change their lives by doing the same things I did. In this book I’ll show you how to lose weight and keep it off — whether it’s 15 pounds or 50 or 150. But much more important than that, I’ll show you how to change your life for good. You can reclaim your health, achieve fitness, and do it all while juggling the responsibilities of everyday life. Having a demanding job, being a wife and mother, or facing special challenges is no reason to sacrifice your well-being. “Never Say Diet” works in the midst of real life. We will walk through the program together, and you will begin a new life course.

We’ve all heard that to lose weight long term, you must have a lifestyle change. But that advice is incomplete. To achieve any life change, you must first experience a Brain Change. The good news is that it can happen in a moment, immediately, even though getting weight off takes time. Truthfully, if you don’t first change your brain, you will almost certainly fail to permanently change anything in your life. Before you can retrain your body, you must first retrain the way you think about the solutions.

This is not an ordinary fitness book, because it’s not simply a recipe for losing weight. Neither is it about physical beauty. The goal is health, fitness, and choosing to live a life of passion and achievement, with no more regret. Therefore, being the best you can be each day is your primary focus. Once you make the Five Decisions and accomplish your Brain Change, you will discover that you automatically choose every day to do what it takes to live this new, exciting, and fulfilling life.

Along with the mental techniques that will get you started and keep you focused, you will learn how to make the best food choices and how to put a realistic system in place for regular exercise. Though I designed my own program when I lost 200 pounds, in this book I have worked closely with experts to make sure the program is as effective as possible for everyone. The nutrition portion is endorsed by Lon Ben-Asher, MS, RD, a clinical dietitian. The cardio and strength-training portion is one I designed with Dr. Joe Tedesco, a certified athletic trainer and physical therapist with a doctorate from Duke University. A medical doctor, Barry Ross, lent his expertise as well, to assure the soundness of the “Never Say Diet” approach. Still, you should consult your personal physician before beginning this or any other nutrition, exercise, and fitness program.

I am blessed to be able to share my story with you. As you begin to make a permanent life change, you can look forward to a lot of fun and the excitement of finding out what it feels like to believe in yourself and your abilities. You will break the barriers that have held you back for too long. Be done with disappointment, and dare to be remarkable!

The top twenty excuses why you ‘can’t’ get fit
It’s important to look at the excuses that have prevented you from succeeding in the past. Having been there for most of my life, I’m more than familiar with the leading reasons why people fail to change. These are the twenty excuses I hear most often, either from new clients or from women I meet who say they admire what I’ve done but know it could never work for them. I used plenty of these myself before I decided to make a permanent change in my life.

See if you recognize some of these excuses — and if you agree with my reasons why they are lame!

1. I don’t have enough hours in the day.

The longer you put off addressing your weight and health issues, the more years of life you lose. The time you invest in exercise is returned with interest in extra years of healthy living.

2. I can’t afford a gym membership.

Great news: exercise is still free! This book includes workout options that don’t cost a cent.

3. I don’t want to be judged on my outer appearance.

Too late. We all are.

4. I’m addicted to sugar.

Good, because with this program you get to eat a lot of fruit — nature’s candy.

5. I don’t like to work out.

Do you love heart doctors and medication? Do you love looking in the mirror and hating yourself?

6. I don’t think this is the right timing.

Would it be better to wait until after your next nervous breakdown?

7. I’m too old to do this.

You’re still breathing on your own. The older you are, the more you need to do this.

8. I just want to use diet pills.

If there were any that worked, don’t you think Oprah would have done a show about them already?

9. I’ll get started as soon as I find a partner to do this with.

Right, so that when your partner lets you down, it won’t be your fault.

10. I have too much weight to lose.

That excuse kept me from getting started for years. Don’t think about what you have to lose. You have too much to gain not to start today.

11. I can’t stand being hungry when I try to diet.

Your body has not been truly hungry in years. You need to retrain your body to know what it needs.

12. Can’t I just get lipo instead?

Why use a short-term patch job when you haven’t fixed the problem — unless you can afford to keep a plastic surgeon on retainer?

13. I have the fat gene.

Yeah, so do I.

14. I always fail.

Nobody can maintain that perfect record forever. Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right!

15. Isn’t healthy food expensive?

Doctor visits are expensive. Lipitor prescriptions are expensive. Natural foods like eggs, apples, greens, and oatmeal are cheap.

16. I need to lose this weight as fast as possible.

Studies show that rapid weight loss leads to subsequent rapid weight gain. Put the time in to learn how to make weight loss last forever.

17. I hate paying attention to calories.

Bad news! Losing weight requires math. But we’ll keep it like kindergarten, not calculus.

18. I don’t want to look like a bodybuilder.

The workouts in this program are designed to make you lean and fit, not bulky.

19. I might give this a shot. I have nothing to lose.

Wrong attitude. You’ve already got one foot out the door. When you’re ready to commit 100 percent to success, come back.

20. I have negative people around me.

Good, let me bring them to my family reunion! They’ll feel right at home.

PART 1
It should have been a scene of American family bliss. A Sunday afternoon in our home on a beautiful fall day in South Florida. My husband, Keith, was watching the Dolphins game in the living room with some friends. He’d waited all week for this. Our girls, six-year-old Ashley and four-year-old Kayla, were helping me in the kitchen. Well, kind of. Our six-month-old, Jake, was jumping and laughing in his Jolly Jumper. I was baking Vanishing Oatmeal Raisin Cookies, our favorite, and everybody could smell the cinnamon and butter and couldn’t wait for the cookies to come out of the oven. Especially me.

As I worked in the kitchen, I could hear the football game coming from the living room. The announcers were talking about a player who had arrived at training camp completely out of shape. He was six-foot-four and weighed 320 pounds. “That is a big boy,” they said. “Wow! He is huge.” “Would you look at that guy,” I heard my husband say with disgust. “I can’t believe he got so fat! What a lazy bum.”

Those words cut me to the heart. I had created a happy home, with a happy husband and happy kids. But at that moment I wanted to die, because I outweighed that player by at least 10 pounds. I was bigger than anyone playing for the Miami Dolphins. And I knew I was anything but lazy. I pulled the cookies out of the oven and felt nauseous. I was pathetic. I’d been overweight my entire adult life, but I was bigger than I had ever been. I was miserable but doing an excellent job of faking out everyone who knew me. I was five-foot-nine and weighed 330 pounds, maybe more. I didn’t know for sure because it had been months since I’d dared to step on a scale. Besides, the only one in the house was a conveniently inaccurate discount-store model with a wheel underneath that calibrated the scale. I had adjusted it to register the lowest weight possible. I was in denial, but I was also without hope.

It was the autumn of 2000. I was twenty-eight years old and was starting to believe I would never live a long and fulfilled life. Not this way. If an angel had landed on my shoulder and whispered in my ear that, in less than two years, Oprah Winfrey would have me on her show to tell a feel-good weight-loss story, I’d have sent that angel packing and gone back to my cookies. I wasn’t Oprah material. And there was absolutely nothing feel-good about my life. Call me when you want a feel-bad story. That was me. If that angel had whispered that I would one day run a marathon, I’d have checked him into an insane asylum. I couldn’t run around the block. Even in high school I hadn’t been able to run the required twenty-minute mile. My knees hurt all the time. I was morbidly obese — a term that I knew meant an early death. If one thing was clear about my life in the fall of 2000, it was that I could never, ever run a marathon.

But I have. I finished my first one in 2005 and after that ran four more — in less than a year. I went from weighing nearly 350 pounds to less than 150 pounds. And I have appeared on “Oprah” and “Good Morning America” and the cover of “People” magazine as one of America’s great weight-loss successes. Getting fit wasn’t easy — there was plenty of pain, deprivation, tears, and hunger along the way. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and I won’t try to sugarcoat any of that. But, honestly, I didn’t give myself a choice. Once I made the unconditional decision that I was going to lose weight and get healthy, nothing could stop me. And nothing will stop you if you make the Five Decisions to break the fat habit for good. That’s a guarantee.

Here is the secret I learned — the same secret I want to share with you. I realized I had to change my mind before I could change my body, my health, and my life. I discovered the Five Decisions, which brought about an unconditional commitment to getting healthy and fit. Once I started, I treated it like a job so that no matter what else was going on in my life, I did what I had to do to achieve daily goals, weekly goals, monthly goals, and eventually the target weight and fitness that I desired. After making the Five Decisions, getting fit was a matter of showing up for work each day. The process developed from the inside out, which was a new concept for me.

First, you change your mind
People constantly ask me how I lost 200 pounds and started running marathons. When I explain that it took several years to achieve those goals, they wonder how I was able to stick to the plan when so many others can’t. I ask myself the same question. I had failed plenty of times before. I’d tried a few diets and failed, including a bit of foolishness called the chocolate-wafer diet, which I’ll tell you about later. I’d resolved so many times not to eat the entire package of Oreos, without success.

So how did I lose all that weight and keep it off — reclaiming my health and gaining a new life in the process? Here’s the simple answer: my brain changed. I decided to first become a different person in my mind and then learned patience as my body followed.

My success wasn’t measured only by a declining number on a scale; it was much deeper. I had to change on the inside. I needed to change my mind before I could change my body.

Ksantee

It will work the same way for you. First you must get to the right place in your head, and then you can create the lifestyle to go along with that. Your body reflects your daily choices, so stop confusing it by the way you think. The mistake so many people make is to focus on weight loss and how long it will take. In fact, the multibillion-dollar diet industry banks on people thinking this way. Don’t get stuck in the weight loss–weight gain cycle. What you should focus on is the person you want to be. Set your sights very high, and keep your commitment level even higher.

In this book I’ll explain how I did that. I went from being someone who weighed more than a Miami Dolphins lineman to someone who is strong and trim and can run twenty-six miles. I went from a state of hopelessness to a life of incredible confidence. And I want to help you achieve something great in your life. If you change your mind before attempting to change your body, you can do this.

Hitting rock bottom
While I was learning how to lose weight and regain my health, I faced setback after setback. My husband lost his job, and my mother was diagnosed with cancer — and those were only two of the crises that came along. Changing your life will never be easy, and that’s why in order to succeed, you first need to be ready to succeed. It’s a choice you make.

In the fall of 2000, when I was baking cookies and overhearing my husband’s criticism of an overweight NFL lineman, I fell into despair. I realized my life was out of control and I was headed for an early grave if I didn’t change. But even at that, I wasn’t yet ready to make the commitment that was necessary to change my life. The truth is, on that dark day I still wasn’t miserable enough to change.

I hit rock bottom about six months later. I was at my heaviest ever — 349 pounds, I think. Though I was still mostly in denial, I was starting to see myself clearly, and I hated what I saw. I’d look in the mirror and say, “You are pitiful! How could you have let this happen?” My appearance started to affect my family life. We live in South Florida, where every weekend is a pool party. My daughters were young, but they were being invited to a few parties, and I was horribly uncomfortable in a bathing suit. I knew it wouldn’t be long before my girls would be embarrassed by their mother, and that made me want to cry. It did make me cry. But that was the least of it. I was more worried that their mom would die young. I’d seen fat people, and I’d seen old people, but rarely had I seen fat, old people. If I couldn’t change for myself, maybe I could do it for my kids.

One night I was driving home alone from an event at church. I felt trapped in despair. At age twenty-nine, my body felt old. I had recently had an emergency gallbladder operation, and the doctor had told me he was afraid to cut through all my layers of fat because of the risk of infection. Imagine being worried about your diseased gallbladder and experiencing anxiety about surgery. And then you learn that your weight problem makes you more prone to infection. That night in the car I felt like the most pathetic person who had ever lived. I believed that God had made me and put me on earth for a purpose, and I was not living the life He intended for me. I knew I had to change.

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