REAL motivation

I am working on expanding our message to market our fitness products so we're not only appealing to a person's desire to look great in low rise jeans or look great walking around a swimming pool in a bathing suit. There are other - more compelling benefits which seem kind of obvious, but we hardly ever talk about it.

So this week I posted this request in a forum on the Beachbody message boards: What specific benefits have you gotten from getting fit other than how you look?

The response was quick and compelling. For anyone looking for "chicken soup" type motivation to workout and eat right, or if you have any doubt as to the heart of the membership Beachbody community, it's worth the fifteen minutes of reading the entire thread.

There are recurring comments: "No more back pain" is a big one, like Charline's weight loss and back pain story which is amazing. She wrote: "Pre-Beachbody, I had a doctor tell me, "you are overweight. You have a bulging disc on your lower back and will continue to have debilitating pain until you either lose weight or have surgery." I chose to lose weight starting at over 200. To my amazement, once I strengthened my abs, and lost over 50 lbs of weight, I have not had lower back pain at all. And I used to be down 2 weeks at a time with back pain." For me, back pain sucks the energy out of me like nothing else - so i know what kind of relief that can be.

Improved relationships is another recurring theme. I can only imagine the lifestyle change experienced by Chris Girard who has lost 135 lbs - yes 135 lbs - not by eating Subway sandwiches, but by working out and eating smart. "More spice"/"better sex" was listed by a bunch of people, and even contributed by Dr. Dale, who also listed less sickness because of his boosted immune system - Awesome! A doctor who gets it!

Another theme was getting out of depression. Mahala said her Post Partum Depression cleared up within a week of starting her program.

And then there are the specific stories of triumph, like from Kathy who summoned the courage to end a bad marriage, Virginia who ended her fight with self-esteem issues, Mary (a frequent visitor to this blog) who just completed a round of Power 90 who points out that she is "learning to love myself more".

Dawn ("absmom") summed it up so eloquently with her post, where she actually took it a level deeper than attributing her life-change to the fitness or the weight loss: "Being fit and losing weight didn't change my emotional well being. Being RESPONSIBLE and ACCOUNTABLE changed my weight and made me fit. They are somehow intertwined and cannot be separated. For me the ultimate benefit was becoming a WHOLE person."

How awesome is that? While I'm doing what I can to attend to the operational, financial, and human resource issues of the business side of Beachbody, this is si the human side of what my job comes down to; Creating programs that get real results and elicit this type of feedback from customers. I am grateful for the responsibility, and I don't take it lightly.

But let me be 100% clear -- this installment is not a gratuitous Beachbody tribute. I am not jumping up and down to celebrate the business or urge you to order -- this is a celebration of what happens when people take action, exercise and eat better, and overcome their own patterns in order to succeed. All the information you need to get these same results is available on the internet, in the library, and by using good common sense. Go for a walk. Join a gym. Control your portions. Of course, Beachbody is also a resource for the guidelines to achieve all these results. But no matter what, the proof is undeniable -- the slightest change, combined with perseverance, can have a dramatic change on the quality of your life.

Oh, and you will happen to look great in low rise jeans and you will look great walking around a swimming pool in a bathing suit too. So be it!