7 Steps You Need to Take to Achieve Long Term Health Results

Do you know why all the “health fixes” you have tried in the past haven’t fully worked? I mean, they did work, right? For a few months. And then, slowly, in the most sneaky way, you’ve witnessed yourself go back to what your health used to be. 

That’s because your run-of-the-mill “Fitness Guru” has made you skip these steps. Are you ready? Let’s dive into it.

1 - Prioritize yourself

You might think “duh, I know”. But do you, in fact, really know how to make yourself a priority in your life? I have now coached over 200 women worldwide, and most of them had a hard time putting themselves first, especially their needs, health, training, and nutrition. 

It's very easy for us women to put our family first, to put our work first, to put any other responsibilities first… At the end of the day, if you don't prioritize yourself, you will have a hard time taking care of everything else that is happening around you.

This is the first step. Put on your oxygen mask first. Then turn to help others. 

Prioritizing yourself will, believe it or not, create even more space and more abundance in your life. Why? Because once you start putting yourself first, you start to see all the good things around you. And the more you notice them, the more those positive things seem to be flowing to you. That’s abundance. No matter what it is that you want to create in your life, you’ll need to come from that place.

2 - Change your self-image

You start creating your self-image (or self-concept) the moment you are born. It is all your life experiences accumulated, which in turn make you see yourself a certain way. 

Let’s take an easy example. 

A belief you might hold about yourself is: I am weak. This belief is ONE of the many that constitute your self-image. It’s this I AM. Those are two very powerful words. 

So, to go back to our example. Why is it that you believe that you are weak? Maybe, all your life, people have not let you carry heavy things. Maybe your father kept doing things for you instead of letting you do them yourself. See, slowly, with time, you’ve associated yourself with that image of weakness. And with time, your brain picked up on every single cue reinforcing this very same image. And here you are today, saying “I am weak” without even thinking about it: it’s just WHO YOU ARE. 

Your self-image is deeply engraved in you, which makes accessing it and observing it really hard. It’s deeply rooted in your subconscious. 

There might be things about your self-image that are very positive, and others… a little negative and counterproductive. So how can you identify it, name it, and in turn, change it?

Have a look at your current life and ask yourself, do I like what I see? If you have nothing positive to say, you have your answer. Our environment is a mirror of our self-concept.

Reframing and REPROGRAMMING your self-image is important. 

If you don’t believe TRULY and DEEPLY that you deserve more health/money/love, will you let health/money/love come into your life when it shows up?

This is the foundation of everything that we teach in the Women’s Academy of Transformation. Without this, all of the audit tools that I give you don’t matter, you're going to fall off. If you don't consistently work on your self-concept, transformation cannot occur.

Changing your self-image IS the transformation.

3 - Healing the relationship you have with yourself

A lot of times people come to me because they want to heal the relationship they have with food. But food is only the middle man… We can substitute food with whatever it is that makes people feel good for a moment. Anything we know helps us deal with life. For those of us with emotional eating issues, it’s food. But the relationship to heal is the one with yourself.

What triggers you? What sends you to food/alcohol/drugs? And why? What is it that you are trying to fill, or numb, or forget?

Whenever you have feelings or emotions arising and you feel more emotional than usual, pay attention to how you react to yourself and what it is that you feel you need at that moment to help you cope with that. Anytime you feel, oh my God, I feel tired. I feel anxious, I feel sad. Are you sitting with this emotion at that moment, are you letting it just be there or are you escaping it by turning to other things?

Healing the relationship you have with everything that makes you you, including the uncomfortable part of you, will set you free.

4 - Heal your Traumas

It's all interrelated. Because healing your traumas will help you heal your relationship with yourself.

We’ve all had traumas. No matter how big or “small”. And they also made us the person that we are, with the self-image that we hold so dear. 

To heal trauma, we use embodiment practices and tools that help us release them from the body. It’s crucial. 

If you fell in the street while running, and the skin on your knee was a little cut open with some rocks in it, you wouldn’t just close your eyes and wait for it to solve itself. It would get infected. It would make you WORSE, not better. Instead, you take a good look at it, take out the little rocks, wash the wound, and tend to it. You clear it out and THEN allow it to heal. You can see trauma healing this way if it helps.

Look at your wounds inside. Tend to them.

5 - Understand your menstrual cycle

Your menstrual cycle is literally your health card as a woman. You should not in any way ignore this aspect. It’s one of the ways your body is used to communicate with you, giving you signs that something is off. If you have heavy periods, if it is painful, if you have painful breasts, whatever symptoms that you have, these are signals from your body. You should look further into it. The more you ignore it, the worse it's going to get. 

As you may know, the menstrual cycle is not only your period. It's split into four phases, which all have specific functions in your body and each phase brings its changes in your body. It is crucial for every woman to understand every phase and know in which phase they are in. 

Once you know that about yourself, you can live accordingly. You can better understand yourself and give your body the appropriate support in the different phases.

And guess what? Once again, it’s all connected. Doing the trauma work will in turn help release stress from the body. Stress has such a big impact on your cycle… We’re going full circle here. That’s what it means to approach your health holistically.

6 - Having the right meal and training plan and UNDERSTANDING IT

A generic meal plan for the sake of having a meal plan won’t bring you far.

A training plan that you don’t even like but force yourself to do will be counterproductive.

When I work with my clients, I create a meal plan that is tailored for their specific needs. We start by having a look at what their diet and nutrition currently looks like before moving on to creating a hormonal-friendly meal plan for them. 

Why? Because there is no “one fits all” plan. Forget that.

We actually teach you nutrition. It is SO important.

If you want to achieve long-term health success, you need to be able to understand nutrition yourself. Not only follow a meal plan, and once you don't have a meal plan anymore you fall off the wagon. You need to be able to learn what good nutrition means and how to create your own meals in the future.

With me, you learn everything there is to know to sustain yourself and create balanced meals. You will not feel like you're starving, you're actually eating more than you thought. 

The same thing applies to the training plan. In the program, we focus on strength training, but it really depends on you how you move your body and you work with your menstrual cycle as well. Strength training is incredibly important for women. It helps build muscles, helps with bone density and helps to regulate the metabolism. Forget the endless hours of cardio. With the RIGHT workout plan tailored to you, you’ll see changes quicker and they will last LONGER.

7 - Listen to your intuition

The last point is to learn how to become intuitive with all of these aspects mentioned above. 

You do not want to follow a strict plan your entire life. 

You want to learn, take the things that work for you and integrate them so that they are PARTS of you. They become your autopilot.  You won’t need to think about it anymore. And those tools will last a lifetime. 

Whatever you want to create, you must have all of these steps in place, understanding exactly what you need to do during each of those steps and applying them to your life in a way that feels easy and flowy.

It might seem like a lot. It’s ok. Take a deep breath.

This is why you have a coach. This is why you surround yourself with the right people, the right community, to make this process fun and enjoyable. It can be. Trust me. I saw so many women transform right in front of my eyes.