Getting Real: Planning for Success

Your first step on the road to total health and your best life is simple: you can't achieve success if you are not moving toward something, so before you do anything else, you have to establish a long-term goal. Sounds easy, right? Not so fast. It's easy to say to yourself that you want to look like an action hero or a supermodel. It's a little bit different to arrive at an ultimate goal that is at once ambitious and attainable.

What exactly do I mean by attainable? In our day-to-day lives we are bombarded with images of supposed perfection and beauty all the time; it's easy to let the media and the world at large dictate how you feel you should look and consequently how you feel about how you do look. I'm telling you right now, that's got to stop. You know those articles about how to get J-Lo's toosh, Gwyneth's arms, Brad Pitt's rock-hard abs? Forget them! Even Cameron Diaz doesn't look like Cameron Diaz. Those photos we see in magazines are shot after hours of hair and makeup sessions, then airbrushed to perfection.

Unrealistic aspirations to live up to these impossible standards lead nowhere except to poor self-image, self-loathing, and disorders such as anorexia and bulimia. Lizzeth from my Biggest Loser season 1 team had suffered all her life. And I know because I've been there, too. When I went from being a chubby kid to a chubby teenager, I became obsessed with my weight, falling into a cyclical pattern of self-hatred and low self-esteem fueled by the bogus images of women in magazines or on TV. I struggled desperately, obsessively, with the desire to be as skinny as Kate Moss. In my worst years I starved myself and even went for a liposuction consultation. I would spend hours in front of the mirror picking myself apart, analyzing my every flaw, beating myself up over every imperfection; my body became a screen onto which I projected all my negative feelings.