Can changing your mind help you change your body?
In Episode 2 of the Fit Father Project Podcast, Dr. A looks at how creating a solid mindset and finding your true “why” is one of the most important steps to being successful in your health goals.
Your “why,” or your deep internal sense of motivation, is the moral compass that helps you make better decisions at key moments in your journey.
Do you choose salmon or a cheeseburger from the menu?
Do you choose to reach for ice cream and cookies after a hard day at work?
Each decision you make throughout the day has a positive or negative impact on any goal you have set for yourself.
In Episode 2, Dr. A explains how the most successful members here at the Fit Father Project set themselves on the best path to success by finding their “why” and writing it out in the form of a Mission Statement.
Understanding how your choices can make or break good habits is an incredible tool in your arsenal.
At face value, it appears to be common sense, but when you look at how your behaviors and choices have impacted your life to this point, you’ll see it’s not always that simple.
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Fit Father Project Podcast!
Change Your Mind, Change Your Body: Full Episode 2 Transcript
All right my friends, welcome officially to episode two of the Fit Father Project Podcast. Again, my name is Dr. Anthony Balduzzi. I'm the founder and CEO here at the Fit Father Project and the Fit Mother Project. And our team is on a mission to help busy moms and dads in their 40s, 50s, and 60s reach their goal health and get into amazing shape so they look and feel incredible and they can help their families live healthier too.
In this episode, we need to talk about the elephant in the room when it comes to living healthier. The answer to you living healthy is not another fad diet. It's not another workout gizmo or routine. It is your ability to stay consistently motivated and make the right decisions that are in the direction of the health you want.
If you and I went to dinner, we know what the healthy things are on the menu.
We know that the salmon or the salad is a better choice than the double cheeseburger or the chicken tenders. It's a matter of what are we choosing on a consistent basis? What kind of healthy choices are we making? So when it comes to making healthier choices, we have two things. One, we need to focus on the system that allows us to make healthier decisions on a more regular basis.
These are our habits around our nutrition, but that's not what we're talking about today. We're talking about number two, your deep internal sense of motivation. About why you should even care and prioritize this stuff. Look, you have a busy life. You certainly probably have some goals of how you might want your body to look and feel, but you also have responsibilities with your family, with your work, with your hobbies, and your passions.
Why take the time to focus on your health? And when I reflect upon this, I have to think of my own dad and his own life. And the fact that he died at 42. And what I learned from watching what dad went through is this — I learned this lesson, that health is the foundation of everything we love. And I'll tell you why this is true.
It's because when we lose our health, we lose everything else that rests upon that health. We lose our ability to work and provide for our families. We lose our ability to feel energetic and alive. We lose our ability to make memories with our family and to pursue our hobbies and passions and scope this life into the future.
Our health is the bedrock of all of this. And think about this, no matter what you do in your life, whether you're going to work, cooking dinner with your family, or playing outside with your kids, you're taking this body with you and the quality of this body, the energy it has, how light and limber it is, how good it feels, whether it's in pain or not, how confident you feel in your own skin, all of that influences every experience that you have.
So when we up-level this body, when we use the right methods for guys over 40 to get back in shape, the whole rest of your life improves. So we know when you lose the foundation of the house, you lose all the good stuff in the house that you like. And the flip side, when you make the foundation stronger, everything else works better.
So my question for you is this, how important right now is your health for you? How much of a priority have you made your health and your life? I think there are a couple of things when I asked myself that and reflected.
You can say, ‘I try to eat healthily, I try to exercise.' And that's one thing you can think. The other thing is though, what are the results you're experiencing? Are you at your goal weight? Are you as strong or lean as you like to be at your age? Are you taking prescription medications? Because if we don't have results, then perhaps we're not doing the right things consistently, or as much as we want to — that is a disconnect.
It is not congruent with our value of health. So here is the purpose of this episode — it's a little bit of a reflection for you. How is your health and your focus on it, or lack of focus on it? How is it affecting every area of your life you care about? How was your health affecting your family? How is the way you're currently eating and exercise affecting your kids, your spouse, your romantic relationship?
How is it affecting your finances, your ability to make money, and have energy? How is it affecting your spirituality? How is it affecting your key relationships? How is it affecting your relationship with yourself? When we begin to ask these deep questions, we can come up with the answers that are unique for us — because my answers are going to be different than yours.
But when you know your answers, what this does, it gives you a tremendous amount of power behind all the decisions. Because the next time it's 10 o'clock at night and you want to go get some chips or some cookies or some ice cream, that decision is not just, oh man, I had a long day that ice cream is going to taste really good, I want something to just take the stress off or edge off.
Now, am I going to make this choice of the behaviors I've been trapped in? Because I know that I want to live and grew up with all these other values. So what you're doing is you're creating stronger psychology and mindset around each of these seemingly small decisions.
We often just eat the chips or have the ice cream. We put more weight on those decisions. It's like, you're not just choosing ice cream at 10 o'clock. You're choosing to be a lesser version of yourself than you could be. That carries a lot more weight. At least it does for me; that seems like an integrity thing.
And for me, that's something I'm going to certainly stick to or try harder on. And the reason I bring this up is that if we can make each of these micro-moments expanded out to the bigger picture that it's not just the ice cream, it's the fact that we're continuing on this way of living, that's just dragging us down into this, for lack of a better term, a hellhole of weight gain, of low energy, of fatigue and stress, and it just compounds on itself.
But what I've seen, and I can say this with confidence because we helped over 40,000 men over 40 in our programs, is that you can change the mindset. You can change direction, you can change your relationship to food. You can get to the point where moving your body ends up being something you look forward to, not something you dread. This is all possible, but it starts with your mission.
It starts with your “why.” So why is health important to you? Is it that you want your body to look a certain way? You've dreamt this your whole life? Is it that you're sick and tired of being out of breath all the time? Is it that you got scared shitless when you went into your doctor's appointment and you found out that again, despite being on blood pressure medication, your blood pressure is still not good and your cholesterol is out of control? You know that if you don't change something, something bad's going to happen; it doesn't matter what your reasons are. It matters that you find your reasons because when you have your reasons, those reasons give you the courage and the energy to make different choices.
And when you make different choices consistently, then you get different results. And when you get different results, you have a different level of confidence and perspective, and then you get this positive snowball effect and your whole life starts to go in a much better direction. This is what our Fit Fathers experience on our program, because the first thing we have them do before they actually start the eating plan or any of the workouts, we have them write a mission statement.
A mission statement that's based on some of these reflection questions, looking at what is the benefit I will achieve at my age, in my life right now, by getting healthier. It's not just getting six-pack abs in your 60s or losing 10 pounds, but how much is that going to help things?
So we boost up this pleasure and we boost up all the good things that can happen in life. But we also look at the pain. How are my current decisions around my nutrition, sleep, exercise, and my health negatively affecting my life? And if we can boost up the positive and also boost up the negative, this is highly motivating.
We can look at it and be like, I don't want to be that guy anymore. And right now, listening to this, you might feel fired up. You might feel that, wow, I need to do some of this reflection. And I think this is important. Certainly, if you're still listening to this, something inside of you is telling you this is important.
Because the converse that can happen is if we don't ask ourselves these questions, we end up like 50% of men today, overweight out of control, lacking motivation, not moving forward in life. Just basically dying slowly. I think you deserve better. And I believe we were put on this earth to flourish at any age, especially in older age, when we have the wisdom and life experience, we can enjoy great health and I'm going to prove it to you, even if you don't believe it's possible for yourself right now. I'm going to prove it to you because I'm going to bring on some of our successful Fit Father members, guys in their 40s, 50s, and 60s who have lost weight, who have achieved incredible feats of strength and physical fitness. And these are not guys who were born athletes or were in shape their whole lives. These are average guys who made the switch. They discovered their “why” and they wrote a mission statement out. They taped it on their desk, on their refrigerator.
They found their flag. For us, it's the Fit Father flag. It's this idea that you can be better, that you're not over the hill, that you can take the hill back, but you got to know why you're charging up and the reasons have to be big and juicy and they have to matter so deeply to you.
And here's the punchline on this episode, before we close this one up. Once you discover your deep motivation, why all this stuff matters for you, you have the force and the power and the passion behind all of your decisions. And that's not to say you'll never slip up, but it is to say that you have a lot more power.
And when you make that decision to make a change, when you make a decision to fold the nutrition system we'll be talking to you about on the next couple episodes, when you make that decision, it is a powerful decision, because you know why you're making it. This is not another fad diet or workout. This is you committing to changing your life for the better because you're worth it and because your family's worth it.
I'm going to prove to you that you can do this. So in the next few episodes, we're going to be bringing on guys on the show. I'm going to interview them. You're going to hear their stories, what exactly they ate, how they move their bodies, how they saw such amazing results. And I hope that you see yourself in these guys.
You'll see the future you; that is incredible. You see the future you that has better results with your fitness. That is on track, is energized, and feels better at 50 than you did when you were at 35. We have guys tell us this all the time. It is possible. I'm going to help you. So stay tuned to this show.
New episodes of dropping every week. We'll have interviews coming soon. And then the next couple episodes, we're going to be talking about the nutrition system and how managing a system and creating the right habits around your healthy eating is going to make it almost automatic for you to stay on track with nutrition.
Thank you, my friends. This is Dr. Anthony Balduzzi signing off. I'll see you in the next episode.
*Please know that weight loss results & health changes/improvements vary from individual to individual; you may not achieve similar results. Always consult with your doctor before making health decisions. This is not medical advice – simply very well-researched info on the concept of ‘change your mind, change your body.'
