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Welcome back to the True Transformation Podcast. It is your host Josiah Novak, owner and founder of thetruetransformation.com, where we help you take fitness and use it to improve every part of your life. Today, we’re talking about 20 years of underrated fat loss lessons in about 45 minutes. If you're watching on the channel, welcome back. If you're on the podcast, I appreciate you listening.

[Episode Start]

Today, I want to walk through my list of all the things—at least as much as I can fit into 45 minutes—that I've learned since I started working out about 20-25 years ago. I became a personal trainer 20 years ago, and there's been so many lessons I've learned, so many mistakes I've made. I mean, you name the mistake, I've probably made it, and I want to help you avoid those mistakes, learn what to do differently, and give you some things that are just really underrated when it comes to transforming your body.

The first thing that I want to talk about is something called identity design, and it's a really simple concept. It's not necessarily always easy to implement, but once you understand this, you'll start to paint a better picture, or at least a clearer picture, of how to literally wipe the slate clean and start to build something sustainable, something that stands the test of time. Because the truth is, everybody could get abs for a day and call themselves elite, call themselves fit, and struggle to get there, fight to get there, do unhealthy things to get there, and call themselves ripped, call themselves fit. But the real test of whether or not your fitness program is built the right way is does it stand the test of time?

And I think one of the biggest reasons why most plans end up failing, end up burning out, and most people struggle to maintain fitness is because their identity is still attached to the person who's not fit. The version of themselves who would prefer to do the things that give them short-term pleasure and long-term pain versus short-term uncomfortable situations with long-term pleasure and ROI. This identity design concept really became apparent when I started working with people online, and I was no longer in the gym just trying to burn through people every 45 minutes. You know, it was kind of a rat race. It was one person stacked on top of the other because there's only so much time in a day. And I really didn't get a great chance to connect with people on a personal level until I moved my business online and I started doing more internal work with people, more mindset coaching, more spiritual coaching, right? Talking about things outside of just fitness that fitness has a big impact on.

You know, I realized that physical health is just one piece of the equation. You know, I started fitness, and I started working out in response to an abusive childhood. You know, I was raised in an alcoholic home, an emotionally abusive home, a physically abusive home, and a home where I went through a lot of turmoil, and there was a lot of trauma, both for me and my five other siblings. I was the oldest of six, and fitness was a refuge for me. It was a sanctuary. It was like a place to get out of the craziness. But what I realized is, even as I got older, I was still loving fitness, but my identity was still trapped around the kid who was a victim, right? It was still trapped around the person who was never ripped, was never muscular, was never confident, had a lot of insecurity, and fitness wasn't going to take care of all that. At least the physical side of fitness wasn't going to take care of all that. I needed to get my identity dialed in. I needed to get the spiritual, the emotional, and the mental identity part of my life dialed in.

That changed the game for me when I started working on it myself and working on it with people in my coaching business, and realizing, Hey, you don't have to be the person that is in your current chapter, right? You don't have to be the person who's overweight. You know, you don't have to be the person who struggles with eating. People talk about themselves, and they don't even hear what they're saying. They'll be like, Yeah, I'll never have abs, or like, I'm not the guy who can control his alcohol, or I'm not the guy who can do that. Like, that's for people with more discipline. And you're just speaking those things into existence when you could literally change who you are. You don't have to be stuck. And that just comes down to two things. Number one, making a decision, right? You decide, Hey, I'm gonna be someone different. I'm gonna literally evolve my identity into something else, and then writing new stories. So you have to write new stories mentally around what you are capable of, like, what can you do? And the answer is, you're capable of so much more.

And once you start to shift your identity, all of a sudden the behaviors become easy. You know, I tell people all the time, you get your identity dialed in, you get your spiritual health, your mental health in a better place, or in a better place. The fitness side, man, it gets so easy. Fitness is actually really simple at the end of the day. It's one of the easiest concepts to understand, really, once you break it down, it's not rocket science, but we make it complicated. Be. Our identities are wrapped up in complex, insecure, lacking discipline, all these traumas that we've never actually closed the loop on. All these things contribute to the complexity that we feel around fitness. So it's a big topic. I'm starting with a huge one here, but we have to get our identity dialed into the person who we want to be.

Which leads me to point number two, because then the next question, if you're thinking and you're taking notes at home, is like, Well, okay, that makes sense, I guess. But how do I do that, right? Like, how do I start getting into a new identity, like, do I change my name? Like, social security number? Like, how does this work? And the answer is, No, you just have to start by getting into character. Now, I'm a huge movie buff, right? I love going to the movies. I love watching every decent movie that comes out, even bad movies I'll watch. And, you know, I just love the movies, and I really admire great actors who really just get into the role on a deep level that they're playing on the screen. Daniel Day Lewis is one of my favorite actors, and he's famous for only doing a few movies, like he just doesn't do a lot of volume. But when he does a movie, oh my gosh, he goes all in on the role, and leading up to filming the movie, he becomes the person that he's going to play, like he literally becomes the person. And what this does is, when he's on screen, it allows him to be the person at a deeper level, like his acting becomes so real that you feel like you're watching someone who is literally the person who's the character, right? It's not an actor playing the character, it is the character.

So I call this getting into character, because at the end of the day, we can start to play the version of ourselves that we want to be before we actually get the result. So think about it like this, if you're someone who's like, Hey, man, I got to take better care of my body. I want to lose body fat. I want to rid myself of the bad habits. I want to start doing the right habits. I want to sleep better. I want to eat better. I want to be nicer to my kids, nicer to my spouse. I just want to be a better, happier person. Well, you can start to play that person and get into character before you actually see the results show up. And the best thing to do is start asking yourself, what would that future version of me or that future identity do in these situations. You know, it could be something as silly as when you're out to eat, like, what would that version of me order at a restaurant? Like? Let me start just pretending to be that person by doing the things that that person would do right now before the result shows up, before you're ripped, before you're muscular, before you're mentally dialed in, before you're spiritually connected like and you're feeling great again, you start doing those things.

And here's the magic. The magic happens, because when you get into character, all of a sudden, the habits and routines rapidly improve, and it doesn't feel as hard because you're playing someone else for now, until you permanently shift and become that person. And once again, this is a lesson I've learned over the last 20 years. You know, if I want something, especially with my physical fitness, well, I need to start making decisions based off of the future version of me. Like, what am I? What am I headed towards? Because the guy right now and the shoes I'm in today overweight or, you know, out of shape, or whatever. Maybe, like some of you watching, the decisions I make aren't great. You know, that's why I'm here, obviously. So let me start by getting into character. Let me prepare for the role that I am ultimately going to play in a permanent way very soon. But before those results get there, let me start getting into character now.

Now, lesson number three, as we head deeper into this discussion today about underrated lessons from the last 20 years. You know, I think it's also important to have little rules that we can have in our day to help us avoid making terrible decisions that lead to more terrible decisions. The easiest one that I've ever implemented, that I've ever created, that I've ever utilized both in my life and our clients' lives, is what's called the 10-minute rule. And the 10-minute rule is simply this: When yo