Building a Sound Emotional Foundation

Bob Greene's Total Body Makeover
by Bob Greene

(Page 3 of 10)

Most people poised to embark upon a 12-week body makeover program will begin by thinking about, and maybe even worrying about, how they're going to change their eating and exercise habits. But this program is different. It begins not with food or fitness, but with something that I think is equally, if not more, important: building a solid emotional foundation.

If you've tried lots of other weight loss programs before (and even if you haven't), putting diet and fitness concerns aside for a short while probably seems like a pretty crazy idea. In fact, it's the sanest thing you can do. If you want to transform your body, the first thing you need to do is transform your mind-set, your attitudes, your outlook, your way of seeing the world, and most critical of all, your way of seeing yourself.

The root of most people's weight problems, or any problems that relate to lack of motivation, is buried deep within. I have heard enough tales of stalled body makeover attempts to confidently say that virtually no one — no one — who hopes to lose weight and keep it off for good can succeed without first addressing her attitudes and the way it affects her behavior, then shoring up her level of motivation. You can cut calories and exercise all you want, but if you don't develop a strong emotional foundation first, everything you've built is likely to fall down like a house of cards. For long-term success, spend the time to make yourself emotionally healthy before you even think about adjusting your diet or joining a gym.

Building a new, healthier life for yourself is a lot like building a house: both require that you start by laying a foundation. Without a foundation to prop it up, a house cannot stand (at least for long). Likewise, without a strong emotional foundation, everything you achieve toward making your body over will not withstand the stress, strains, and temptations of daily life. The house, your body — each needs a solid base.

So how do you build that base? It starts with four cornerstones. You might call them the mental equivalent of bricks and mortar: honesty, responsibility, commitment, and inner strength. They're the seeds of success for accomplishment in weight loss and, in fact, all areas of life. The reason is very simple: these four cornerstones provide you with what you need to stay resolute in the face of everyday challenges to your resolve. They also help you weather the storms that typically derail months and even years of effort. If you think about it, when someone fails to reach a goal, it's usually because there's been a breakdown in one of these four areas. But if you've got them all in check and are standing on steady emotional ground, nothing — not relationship troubles, family crises, job stress, blows to your self-esteem, illness — is going to keep you from achieving long-term success.

I want you to know, though, that honesty, responsibility, commitment, and inner strength are more than just concepts. Each represents a goal in itself, one that can be reached only by doing some serious soul-searching and self-evaluation. Much is often made about how difficult it is to eat right and exercise, but taking an honest look at yourself and working to change or fortify some fundamental aspects of your personality is an even greater challenge. So by asking you to lay the four cornerstones of a strong emotional foundation, I am asking you to gear up for what might be a tough, challenging, and perhaps even uncomfortable endeavor. Getting there may or may not be fun — some people find that having those moments of self-revelation where everything comes together is quite wonderful, others don't.

But making the effort is entirely worth it.

Successful people who have made honesty, responsibility, commitment, and inner strength central to their very being have found that it changed them in ways they would never have imagined. That's because while, certainly, these are the keys to making your body over once and for all, they are also the keys to accomplishing anything.

As you go through the steps of conquering each cornerstone, you'll find you have the power to let go of the past and anything else that is stopping you from becoming the person you really want to be. I'm not going to kid you: the process can be rough. But make it through the emotional discomfort, and you'll find that you have emotional freedom and that the pleasure you can take in this empowering, life-changing experience will far outweigh the pain. If you're tired of feeling guilty about your actions and are disgusted with yourself for procrastinating, tired of feeling bad about the way you look, and fearful about the state of your health, this is the road you want to be on.

I want to qualify this a little bit before I go on. Just as there are exceptions to every rule, there are exceptions to the idea that most people need to do some soul-searching before they try to lose weight. Maybe you already have a good mind-set about eating and exercise, know yourself well, and take responsibility for your actions. Maybe you've just never had to be disciplined about eating and exercise before and simply need some help getting on to the right track. Perhaps committing to something isn't a problem for you as long as you have the right tools to work with. If you feel you don't need to spend the time working on your emotional foundation, then by all means move on to the next chapter. But it's not a bad idea to spend some time reading through the next sections just to reinforce the attitudes and actions that determine success (and failure).

So here's the deal: Take however long you need to be honest with yourself, assume responsibility for your actions, make a commitment to change your life, and use your inner strength to help you stick to your resolve. Then move on to the 12-week Total Body Makeover program and the task of achieving your goals. Believe me, years down the road, when you have transformed your body — and kept it that way — you won't regret taking this extra step in the least.

The First Cornerstone: Honesty

The process of change requires that you stop wearing blinders; you must be honest with yourself about who you are and why you do the things you do. It's funny how we can so often give an incisive psychological portrait of other people yet are frequently at pains to truly know ourselves. I'm asking you to be as insightful into your own psyche as you are into others'.

Lying to yourself is like having one big crack in your emotional foundation — you're in trouble before you even get started. I've met people who've made a career out of deluding themselves and as a consequence never really accomplished what they wanted to. By making excuses, blaming others, putting things off — and all the while telling themselves that they're not really doing the things that they are indeed doing — they have doomed themselves to failure.

I can't stress enough how essential being honest about your strengths, your weaknesses, and even your past failures will be to your success. Recently I met with a client who was reluctant to answer any of my questions about his life. I wasn't trying to be nosy or to be a trainer/therapist. I was just trying to get a read on some of the issues that might be affecting his weight. I respected his privacy and certainly understood that it's not easy to share the details of your life with someone you barely know. But I also told him that when it comes to what he tells himself, reticence is a different matter. He didn't have to tell me what was going on, but not being truthful with himself would be self-defeating.

An unwillingness to open up and to experience the discomfort that kind of honesty inevitably brings is a huge barrier to success. This process is about self-discovery, and those who go through it change not only the behaviors that previously kept them from dramatically altering their bodies but the behaviors that hampered their lives in other ways, too. Sometimes what you find out about yourself is embarrassing; sometimes it's painful; sometimes it's just depressing. But when you have that "Aha!" moment — "Oh, that's why I've been doing that!" — it can be very freeing. Imagine trying to fix a lamp that suddenly goes off without checking to see if the lightbulb is burned out. Your chances of getting the light back on aren't very high. Same thing here: if you've tried to lose weight again and again without determining what is fundamentally causing the problem, you're working in the dark. It's just not going to happen. Oh, you might lose the weight for a while, but before you know it, you're going to put it back on.

The point of doing some honest self-exploration is not to beat yourself up about your shortcomings. Rather, it's to learn something that you didn't know about yourself or, if you did know it on some level, to officially admit it to yourself. When you make these discoveries, it's important not to just gloss over them. Don't just tell yourself, "Yeah, I guess I stopped walking after work not because it was so late when I got home but because I really preferred to watch Jeopardy!" Pause and think more about it. Do you really like Jeopardy! that much, or are you using it as an excuse? Are you lazy? Are you embarrassed to be seen "fitness walking" around your neighborhood because you think it calls attention to your weight? Are you afraid that your significant other will be angry at you for taking the time for yourself? Do you simply have no energy (a problem that might be remedied by switching your workouts to the morning)? What is really going on? Your assignment is to find out. Replay decisions you've made, both good and bad, and analyze them. It's the only way you're going to break ingrained unhealthy behavior patterns.

Here's the story of how one client of mine did it. She asked herself some hard questions, and the answers helped her get onto the right track.

Who's Your Boss?
Abby's Story

A friend introduced me to Bob, and the two of us enlisted him to help us lose weight and get fit. I got off to a good start: six weeks into my program, my regular workouts and the changes I'd made in my diet were having a noticeable impact. But then things started to go wrong. I began missing some of my exercise sessions, and I had to confess to Bob that I wasn't making healthy meals as often as before. I didn't see this as my fault, though. My kids were rebelling against the new, healthier menu, and my husband was making snide remarks about there being nothing good to eat in the house. Even my mother-in-law made comments about me being away from home so much now that I was exercising.

When Bob asked me why I'd cut back on both my healthy meals and my workouts, I blamed it on all the other people in my life: my kids, my husband, my mother-in-law. He asked me if I really thought that it was their fault and not my own. I admitted that I have had a tendency to blame other people when things don't work. Bob then asked me to take a good hard look at the present situation and be truthful about it: If I were to keep foods in the house that would satisfy my kids and husband, did that mean I would have to eat them too? Couldn't I be frank with my mother-in-law about how much meeting my weight loss goals meant to me? I realized he was right and that I alone and no one else was in control of my situation.

Over the next few weeks, I made it a point to speak honestly with my family, and to my surprise they were very understanding once I made it clear what I was trying to do. It not only improved my relationship with everybody but also got them on my side. In just outside of a year, I met my weight loss goals.

Abby had been in denial for a long time, but by finally facing up to the truth about herself, she was able to recover her fitness gains and go on to achieve even more. What I'm suggesting, though, is that you begin by assessing where you're at so that you don't find yourself grappling with obstacles in mid-makeover. Abby recovered, but many people do not. They just end up back where they started, wondering why they can never get the body they want.

I'll tell you another reason why it's so important to be honest with yourself at the outset. I have had many clients who believed that they simply lacked the proper discipline to turn down their favorite foods, when in reality their dilemma was much more complex. Many people eat because something is missing from their lives, and they don't connect it to their bad eating habits. It may have been that they never took the time or wanted to expend the energy to explore their feelings. It may have even been that exploring their feelings was simply too discomforting or painful, so they buried those feelings away beneath platefuls of food.

Sometimes it's obvious when we lie to ourselves, but other times we are simply not self-aware. Either way, you can find the truth if you make an effort to investigate who you really are. Do you feel as though you are a victim of life's circumstances or do you feel that you have control of your life? What makes you happy? What makes you sad? Are your relationships with other people distressing or joyful? What is your family history like, and how has it influenced your behavior? Have you experienced something traumatic in the past, and, if so, what are the mechanisms you've developed to cope with it? Do you use food as an anesthetic to deal with emotional pain? If you do, why is food your drug of choice?

These are some of the hard questions you need to ask yourself. Many of the issues they touch on may be sore spots, but, the only way you're going to be able to move forward is to deal with the past, then find a way to put it behind you. Bury the truth, and you'll have cracks in your foundation before you even start building; grasp the reality of your own life, and you'll be on your way to changing your body and your health for the better.

Self-discovery, I should add, doesn't end when you reach a certain weight or size; it's an ongoing process. So even though the exercises that follow are aimed at helping you begin the task of learning the truth about yourself, you need to continue to honestly examine your attitudes and actions on an ongoing basis. Just as giving up on exercise or, say, returning to night eating can undo all the good that's been done, so can losing the self-awareness you develop at the outset of this program.

Finally, it's important to note that being honest with yourself also means telling the truth about your strengths, not just your weaknesses. Discovering and acknowledging your assets is part of the process because you're going to need to rely on those strengths to help you succeed. So as you go through the following exercises, be mindful of the positive features of your personality. We all have weaknesses, but we all have strengths, too.

Copyright © 2005 by Bob Greene Enterprises, Inc.

About the Author

Bob Greene is an exercise physiologist and certified personal trainer specializing in fitness, metabolism, and weight loss. He has been a guest on The Oprah Winfrey Show. He is also a contributing writer and editor for O, The Oprah Magazine, and writes on health and fitness for Oprah.com. Greene is the bestselling author of Get With the Program!, The Get With the Program! Guide to Good Eating, The Get With the Program! Daily Journal, and The Get With the Program! Guide to Fast Food and Family Restaurants.