Congratulations! You have made it to the 12th and final week of the Nutritional Freedom Course!

You’ve worked hard to build awareness around your eating, learned how to meal prep, dialed in your macros with protein rich foods, nutrient dense smart carbs and healthy fats. You’ve constructed an environment for success, started a shift to more whole foods, and learned how to incorporate flex meals without sacrificing your goals. You’ve learned how to spot fitness and nutritional bullshit, control those pesky cravings and how to correct your course when you do fall off track.

Now it is time to put all of the pieces of the puzzle together and build a plan that will continue to grow for the rest of your life.

We will do this by mapping out your three core pillars: Redefining your Identity, Eliminate & Luxuriate and Fortify your Weaknesses.

Define your new identity:

Author James Clear writes, “To change your behavior for good, you need to start believing new things about yourself”.

Lasting change requires a shift in how you view the world, how you view yourself and how you judge others. Your identity is the sum of your beliefs, your assumptions and your biases. This is where your long-term habits emanate from because your habits align with who you truly believe you are.

This is embodied in the language we use when we talk about ourselves.

Imagine there are two people who want to become musicians.

When asked about this goal, one person says, “I’m trying to learn to play the guitar.”

When asked about this goal, the second person says, “I am a musician working on my craft.”

Which one do you think will practice more? Which one do you believe will succeed at their goal?

The second person has shifted from wanting to being. This shift speaks to having a certain pride in who you are and what you do. The more proud you are of how clean your car is, the more likely you are to practice the habits that keep it clean. The more pride you feel in how your landscaping looks, the more likely you are to cultivate a beautiful garden. The more pride you attach to a healthy, strong body, the more habits you will create to achieve and keep that body.

Identity can cut in both ways as well.

“I’m not a morning person.”

“I hate vegetables.”

“I’m terrible with money.”

“I’m never on time.”

These negative identities cement a fixed mindset about who we are, making incorporating positive new habits very difficult to achieve.

“The more deeply a thought or action is tied to your identity, the more difficult it is to change it,” writes Clear.

Self-image is the engine that drives your habits. In the worksheet below, you will flesh out your new identity and make very clear what actions a person with that identity will take on a daily and weekly basis.

Eliminate and Luxuriate

As we’ve reiterated numerous times throughout this course, nutrition that sustains results is not about giving up everything you enjoy and love. In fact, the opposite is true. Being able to enjoy the food and drinks you love most is what keeps you from feeling deprived and over-restricted all the time. The secret is learning how to do it right so that you experience the joy of the thing and not the guilt that will inevitably send you into a shame spiral.

In his book, “I Will Teach You to be Rich”, author Ramit Sethi writes, “Everybody talks about how to save money, but nobody teaches you how to spend it.”

There are so many parallels between good finances and good nutrition. If we spend more money than we make, we go into debt. And if we consume more calories than we expend, then we gain body fat. But if we plan and spend/eat with awareness, we come out healthy in the wallet or the waistline on the other end.

Ramit Sethi coaches people to make a “Conscious Spending Plan.” With this concept, you spend a few hours creating a plan, making sure you save enough money each month for essentials like bills and investments, so that you can use the rest of your money guilt-free on the things you love.

“Conscious Spending, quite simply, is about choosing the things you love enough to spend extravagantly on - and then cutting costs mercilessly on the things you don’t love,” writes Sethi.

This is the same way you need to think about the foods you love and want to “spend” the calories on - clarify what you really love and cut out what you don’t (or even just kind of like).

If you love pizza, keep pizza in your plan. But don’t just settle for the slices spinning under a heat lamp in a gas station - be lavish with the pizza you choose. Get the good stuff. Choose your favorite pizza place. Create a satisfying experience around pizza night.

Conversely, if you only kinda like cupcakes but they aren’t among your favorites, don’t fritter away calories on something that you moderately like.

In the worksheet below, you are going to make your own “Conscious Calorie Spending Plan.” You will clarify what food and drinks you love the most and are willing to invest your flex calories in, and what you are willing to cut out ruthlessly. This will help you feel more comfortable with your flex eating, stay on track with your goals and free yourself from feeling guilty afterward.

Fortifying your Weaknesses

At this point in the course, you have been working hard on parts of your nutrition that were weaknesses when you started. But the work doesn’t stop here.

“It’s amazing - once a problem improves, people often stop doing what caused it to improve,” writes Dr. Carol Dweck, author of Mindset. “Once you feel better, you stop taking your medicine.”

Lasting change requires a growth mindset, and a growth mindset is nourished by consistently working on your weaknesses.

This concept was further illustrated by Dr. Dweck in a study of fixed-minded students vs. growth-minded students.

The fixed-mindset students studied by focusing on memorizing as much as they could so they could ace the test and preserve their image. “If they did poorly on the test, they concluded that chemistry was not their subject. After all, ‘I did everything possible, didn’t I?”

The growth-mindset students focused not on preserving an image of being smart, but rather on learning. “Instead of plunging into unthinking memorization of the course material, they said: ‘I looked for themes and underlying principles across lectures,’ and ‘I went over mistakes until I was certain I understood them.’...this was why they got higher grades - not because they were smarter or had a better background in science.”

Fortifying your weaknesses will not only break you out of fixed mindsets that hold you back (“My metabolism is slow”, “I’m just not a good cook”, “I’m just getting old”, “I’m a picky eater”, etc.), it will generate an incredible amount of motivation and self-efficacy - making you much more capable of handling the inevitable bumps in the road that lie ahead on the path of all fitness journeys.

In the worksheet below, you will identify your biggest nutritional weaknesses and pledge to work on fortifying one of these weaknesses going forward. You will also identify ways to help yourself with the remaining weaknesses you name.

Once you have completed the worksheet - CONGRATULATIONS! - You have completed the 12-Weeks to Nutritional Freedom Course! The principles you have learned will transform your relationship with food when put into consistent practice, and the vision you set for yourself in the worksheet will be the blueprint to the healthier, happier, and more free version of YOU!!