You’ve Got This

How often do you see those beach-body photos of celebrities and with a stab of envy think, “I could never look like that”?

And then, despite feeling like it’s impossible, you mentally calculate exactly what it would take to come close?

You could run three times a week, do your barre workout twice a week, and eliminate carbs and alcohol. Maybe then you multiply the number of pounds you want to lose by the number of calories in a pound (3,500), then divide that number across 14 days to figure out how many you’d need to cut in a day to reach your goal. (This was my actual plan every New Year’s Day for about ten years.)

If you’ve spent most of your life on a diet, I’m sure this sounds familiar.

But consider this for a moment. There’s an underlying, extremely limiting belief that’s driving these thoughts: it’s the belief that the body you want is somehow far away from you – and because of this, you have to work really hard to get it.

So you torture yourself with images of women with seemingly perfect bodies, desperately wanting this to be you – but simultaneously believing that it’s out of the realm of possibility. Despite this, you devise ways to beat your body into submission and somehow get the one you want.

I want to give you a new belief to replace this one, and once you let it sink in you’ll be a whole lot closer to this ideal body than you think you are.

In fact, you already have it.

Does this sound crazy? Let me explain.

The body you envision is actually already yours . . . it’s just hidden beneath a layer of stuff you don’t need. So instead of trying to change your body into a completely different body, all you have to do is let the perfectly healthy one inside of you – the one you were born with – emerge.

Unfortunately, most up us operate with the limiting belief, one that’s driven by desperation. Desperation creates striving, and striving leads to using force (in other words, willpower). This creates massive resistance, and resistance blocks flow.

If this makes sense to you, then you can see that feeling desperate for the perfect body and constantly striving to get it is keeping you from ever having it.

So how do you eliminate the striving and the desperation? You change the belief that’s creating it – you create a new belief.

And here it is: The perfect body (which looks different for every unique human being) is already yours. It’s inside you, so there’s no need to work for it. Instead of working for it, you need to simply experience it. And the more you choose to experience it, the easier it is for your body to become what it was meant to be.

Health is your birthright. Your body is a powerful machine that works tirelessly and constantly to restore balance and maintain health. It’s just hard to spot the evidence of this process because of the unnecessary amount of strain most people put on their bodies.

Pretty much all you have to do is get out of the way and let your body do what it does best: heal itself.

It’s awesome to investigate a raw food lifestyle or take up marathon running if you want to be healthy. (I’ve done both.) But truly, if you just stop bombarding your body with crap food and alcohol, eliminate emotional trauma that comes from hating your body, and learn how to manage stress, your body can work more efficiently – and you’ll see results much faster.

The trick is to head all these bad habits off at the pass by cutting off their source – the limiting belief that health isn’t yours.

Speaking of your birthright, a good analogy here is to think about a mother and her child. The mother’s love is that child’s birthright. The child doesn’t have to work for it or earn it.

But the more that child believes she doesn’t have it or that she has to work to get it, the more she will push to get it – and the harder she will be to love.

However, the more that child accepts that the love is already hers, the more joyful and peaceful she is, and the mother can easily move toward her with even more love.

Another good analogy, one I think most of us are familiar with, is the ability to attract wealth. The more you believe you have to work hard for money, the stronger message you send to your subconscious that wealth isn’t within you – and the more you keep money from flowing to you.

Conversely, the more joyful and abundant you feel, the more likely you are to choose work that you love, and the more money you effortlessly make.

The more you strive to “get healthy” – or worse, lose weight and have the perfect body – the more health (and that body) eludes you. Feeling far away from the goal keeps you working tirelessly to achieve it, so you create unnecessary resistance to overcome. It’s like setting hurdles up on a track to jump over to get to the finish line.

This resistance pushes you to do exactly what interferes most with experiencing the health you were born to have: you fill up with food. And you unfortunately most likely gravitate toward instant-gratification foods that are loaded with fat and sugar.

However, if you accept that health truly is your birthright, the striving goes away, you start to listen to your body more, you start naturally choosing foods that support your health, and the more you allow yourself to experience it. (And, yes, you also lose weight.)

You are worthy of health. And when you start adopting this belief, you will start to live a life where you experience ultimate health – not just physically, but mentally and emotionally, too.

You’ll naturally make different choices, ones that support this new belief system. And the ones that don’t support it – bingeing on chips, drowning yourself in a bottle of chardonnay, then trying to diet off the evidence – will fall away.

Health isn’t “out there” somewhere, and you don’t have to work to get it. It’s already yours, ready for you to experience.

And best of all, experiencing true health means you also get to experience your power. And once you do, the last thing you’ll ever do is waste your life on a diet.