How to Reinvent your Life (and Body) in 6-12 months.

if you’re currently waking up every day, feeling sick and tired of repeating the same habits over and over, even though you know they aren’t taking you to your goals and aspirations.

All it takes to transform your life is one single decision, the decision to commit to the process of change.

And maybe yesterday was just another day of :

• Scrolling to avoid feeling bored

• Eating to avoid feeling stressed

• Watching TV to avoid feeling overwhelmed

• Going to bed feeling like your day was empty

When all you really want is to:

• Go to the gym

• Get a job you enjoy

• Eat healthy meals

• Read books

• Live next to the ocean

• enjoy life instead of avoiding it

But when you try those healthier options, it feels impossible to adopt them in the long run—almost as if your brain is working against you.

Well, that’s because it is, and as long as you don’t understand how change works and how to leverage it, you’ll feel stuck, repeating these changes without making it your reality.

So, if you want to reinvent your lifestyle—and your life as a result—in the next six months or so, here are the five main steps I would take to commit to the process.

1 - Look Directly at the Fire.

If you want to change, and I mean truly change, you have to look directly at the fire. You have to stop avoiding the harsh conversations that you need to have with yourself.

Because if you want to change, you’re going to need durable motivation to back it up. Now, most people rely on the wrong kind of motivation.

They use the quick and easy motivation driven by an external reward—going to the gym just to be able to watch another Netflix episode.

Or following their diet during the week just to have a cheat day on the weekend.

This kind of motivation relies on bursts of dopamine that are just enough to keep you engaged, but this isn’t sustainable. For most people, this is the reason why they quit their healthy habits after two weeks.

But there’s another side of motivation that almost no one seems to talk about. Called profound motivation, or intrinsic motivation

And, this kind of motivation is much more powerful because it’s not about chasing pleasure associated with a reward - it’s about much more than that.

It’s about elevating the pain associated with the status quo and changing, permanently

this motivation will be the only type able to sustain the lifestyle changes that you’re seeking.

[Now, I wrote a full article about how pain and pleasure work together and the role of dopamine in motivation. I recommend you read it so that you have a full understanding.]

Most people turn their backs on the daily pain of their unhealthy choices.

They think they are not capable of handling it and would get stuck in their imagination and day dream about a fictional alternative to their lives.

They shouldn’t because the very key to changing them is to look right at them, look directly at the fire.

You have to practice what Anna Lembke calls ‘Radical Honesty’. You have to be willing to face the full truth because that’s the only way to take ownership of your lifestyle.

You see, motivation is the result of the balance between pain and pleasure. If there’s pain and you’re in contact with it, your body will trigger enough motivation for you to change and tip the balance to the other side.

Another way of putting it is this: you can draw unlimited motivation from the pain you feel at the thought of staying the same for the rest of your life.

(I was terrified at the idea of being out of shape, sluggish, heavily procrastinating, and non-muscular for the next 10 years)

In avoiding your reality, you find pain, and you need an escape.

But if you try to embrace the pain and take a look at it, you’ll find control and motivation. That is, if you’re willing to look directly at the fire.

2 - Slow Your Life

If you want to change your lifestyle, then I suppose it’s because it’s filled with habits you don’t want to cultivate but do regardless.

You do that because you’re seeking comfort, probably because your life is stressful and need this comfort to soothe and calm you. And that’s just a normal and human reaction.

The problem is when your coping mechanisms slowly degrade your quality of life and longevity over time.

• You scroll when you’re bored

• You eat when you’re stressed

• You watch Netflix when you’re anxious

• You party to avoid feeling alone

These habits take up too much space, and you can’t change because they’re depriving you of the energy you need to invest in healthier habits to make change possible.

You need to delete before you add. You need to slow down. You need to give yourself enough room to grow.

These habits prevent you from doing so because they condition you to depend on quick and easy rewards, which is totally contradictory to the lifestyle you want to lead.

So the second thing to do, is to slow your life down. Stop engaging frenetically. Stop stacking pleasure sources on top of each other to get rid of the discomfort.

• Stop scrolling while watching a movie

• Stop checking your phone while having a conversation

• Stop eating the cookies and the ice cream

• Stop filling every free moment with distractions - allow yourself to be bored.

This is an idea I got from Cal Newport’s work, and it changed the way I view change. It never happens on a short time scale.

By definition, change has to be sustainable, long-term, and viable. It’s a process that demands considerable amount of energy and availability.

Therefore you have to slow down, the change you want will take weeks and months. Rushing through it doesn’t make the process easier or quicker.

In fact, it most probably makes it worse, as you feel more anxious and overwhelmed because you’re trying so hard but you’re brain hasn’t the time to rewire itself to the changes you’ve made.

If you had to remember one line : stop acting frenetically, slow your life down.

Changing is simply about doing the same things over and over again while waiting for your brain to encode the change as the ‘new normal’.

3 - Plan Your Escape

This is the part most people have replayed over and over in their minds. It’s when you daydream about going to the gym 6x per week, eating broccoli, and reading instead of binging influencer content on Instagram.

Everyone out there talks about how beneficial going to the gym is and how processed foods are bad for you.

And what I’ve come to notice is that the majority of people already have a sense of what the plan is going to look like for them : eat less, exercise more, sleep better.

Most people at least know what they shouldn’t be doing if they want to live a healthier lifestyle.

Now the big step comes when it’s time to plan out your escape on a daily basis to reach your goals, as that requires practical knowledge and realistic expectations - That’s the tricky part.

[And if you need help with that, you should consider joining the next cohort for Fitness Autonomy because it’s going to provide you with the structure needed to change your lifestyle and transform your body in 5 weeks. More info here]

You don’t need much more information—you need to start by setting yourself one goal that can be operationalized daily or almost daily. In the program, I always start with exercising as the first goal.

But you can start with something as simple as walking if you’re not currently active.

At first, it will feel really hard, and you will experience the friction of imposing a habit on your own brain.

But then, after a few weeks, that goal will become a habit. That’s when you can move on to your second goal, which, in my opinion, should be about nutrition.- soon enough you’ll stack enough habits and your lifestyle will be completely different as a result.

Again, use a slower approach. The worst thing you can do is take the New Year's resolution approach and set too many goals that aren’t within reach yet.

Another crucial key is to be specific. What is the outcome you’re looking for? Put it on the table, make it real

• Do you want to lose weight? If yes, how much?

• Do you want to put on muscle? If yes, to what extent?

• Do you want to feel more productive ? Okay, what does that equal in terms of habits?

If you just keep the vision in your head, it will stay a distant dream you don’t have access to. Plan it, put it on paper so that your future non-motivated self knows what to do.

That said, you don’t want to get stuck in the eternal loop of planning. A lot of people do, and it costs them years of their lives, spent doing the same things instead of changing because they’re waiting for the perfect plan and the perfect timing.

4 - Shake Your Own Hand

Once you know what to do, you need to make the commitment. When I train people in the gym and help them change their habits, this is usually where I see most people struggle.

They struggle to make a commitment to themselves. If you truly want to change, then you have to treat your plan as a promise.

This is also the part of the process where you have to understand how change works. Here it is, in a nutshell:

Each time you engage in an action and get a pleasurable reward, your brain pushes you to do more of that.

As you do, you reinforce the neural pathway, and it costs you less energy to engage and use that newfound path.

If you consistently engage in the same action, your brain will forge a very efficient and easy-to-use road, requiring very little conscious effort on your part, making it almost automatic.

That’s when it becomes a habit. When you see your phone, you don’t think about it; you unlock it and open Instagram. Sometimes it’s so unconscious that you only realize it after spending 20 minutes on the app.

Your brain has developed these quick responses because they are useful and quite necessary for survival.

Now, your brain hates change—it costs a lot of energy because it has to rewire itself. It doesn’t want to do that. It wants you to keep using the same habits over and over again because they are safe and don’t require much energy.

Knowing how it works, you can reverse-engineer it to your advantage. That’s exactly how we’re going to form new habits.

You want to start small, engage, and give your brain some kind of reward.

Then it’s just a matter of doing the same thing over and over again until it becomes a habit.

It doesn’t get more complicated than that.

The secret is, going to the gym, eating healthy foods, reading books—all of these can become habits too even if they aren’t appealing right now.

You just have to shake your own hand and make a commitment to yourself that you will respect your detailed plan and not pivot until the behavior is an anchored habit in your lifestyle -

Being fully aware of the fact that these habits are probably going to feel boring or uncomfortable compared to your current habits and that you’ll have to keep engaging in them, for long enough so that you’re brain adapts to them.

Crafting new habits is really simple—it’s just about repetition and consistency.

The problem most people encounter is that they set the goal of making walking a daily habit. They’ll feel motivated at first and walk for the first three days.

It costs them to do it, but they start to build this tiny neuronal walking pathway in their brain, a primer for the possible sustainable habit of walking.

Then something happens, and they skip one day. They tell themselves that they’re going to pick it up the next day

But then they skip the second day, and then the third day. After the third day, the primer that you’d built disappears, so they’re going to have to start from scratch the next time.

And people get stuck right here, in this beginner loop that requires patience as they engage enough to start building the new habit but never enough so that it sticks long term.

You have to be consistent, or else nothing matters.

5 - Play the Game

When you’ve committed to your plan, it’s game time. From now on, it’s all about waking up and showing up to the game.

You want to make it a game, life is always easier when you treat things as a game. The goal isn’t to replay other steps or to tweak the plan every two days; the goal is to monitor activation.

You have one goal, let’s say it’s making going to the gym an inherent part of your lifestyle. Okay, perfect. Now you need a tool to monitor your engagement with this specific action.

This is the part where you need to exert willpower and self-discipline because you’ll have to face the friction naturally induced by your brain, which wants to stay in power-saving mode.

[If you want more info about building self-discipline, check this out]

Even if it’s relatively easy to operate, this is the part that feels hard.

This is normal. Expect it to be hard at first because it will demand everything of your brain to start mapping something it has never done before.

The more foreign the habit is compared to your current lifestyle, the more time it’s going to take to establish.

If you haven’t been exercising for the past decade, then it’s probably going to take you more time to make it a habit than someone who has only stopped for a year.

There is no cheat code. “There is no fast way. The fast way is the slow way because the slow way is the only way.” —Steven Bartlett

You can’t cheat your own brain, that’s why you must treat it as a game. Every day you wake up, you have an opportunity to prove to yourself that you’re capable of doing the things you said you’d do.

Keep in mind that the process is never going to be perfect. You’re going to miss a day inevitably because life happens and there are other responsibilities.

But when that happens, your only goal should be to prepare how you’re going to make it work the next day.

“It’s OK to miss one day, but never miss two days in a row.” —zenhabitsbook.com

As always I hope this helps, trust the process.