As a Christian, you know that the worldly way of losing weight isn’t working. Failed diets, failed workout programs, failed “lose weight in the next 30 seconds” mindsets all combine to create frustration, resentment, feelings of hopelessness, crushed self-esteems, and massive weight loss failure… for literally millions of people.
The Fit For Jesus philosophy is massively different, but more importantly, it works. Today, I thought I would take some time and tell you the story of how the Fit For Jesus process and mindset came to be. The change from worldly to heavenly has made a huge difference!
NELMS Fitness vs. Fit For Jesus
It all started with NELMS Fitness. I was having a little fun with our last name, and suddenly it clicked.
N – Nutrition
E – Exercise
L – Lifestyle
M – Mindset
S – Success!
Eventually, whether I was presenting to an audience or a single client, I explained that it was “Nutrition, Exercise, Lifestyle, and Mindset for Success!”
The philosophy actually worked really well and addressed much more than what the world normally talks about. To most “experts”, it’s all about diet OR workout. But the reality is that it is both… AND the proper lifestyle AND the proper mindset. Teaching clients about the additional factors allowed us to get much better results that were much more permanent.
But, even though we brought to light additional, highly important factors for effective fat loss, it still just wasn’t enough. We still had too many clients that couldn’t make the switch and make it happen.
And so, as hard as it was to admit, especially because NELMS Fitness was helping people see much more of the big picture than most weight loss programs, we learned that the saying wasn’t entirely true…
Sometimes Nutrition, Exercise, Lifestyle, and Mindset does NOT equal Success.
And so we realized that it wasn’t enough. We had to make a paradigm shift, if we truly wanted to help our clients achieve lifelong, permanent health and weight loss success. Of course, it didn’t take long to realize what was missing.
Or, technically, WHO was missing. Because at some point, every Christian who is trying to make a serious change in any area of their life will come to the realization that it will not happen without Jesus Christ. And with that truth in our hearts, we knew that NELMS Fitness could no longer be our focus.
It was time to reinvent.
The first thing we tackled was the acronym. Obviously, the NELMS acronym would no longer apply. As we played around with it, we soon noticed that keeping all the letters would be a great way to teach a lesson.
You see, the world teaches that Nutrition is the solution. And to be fair, it is a major factor in the weight loss equation. But although it plays a major role, any competent fitness professional will tell you that you can’t start there. And since we had learned our lesson that the old NELMS fitness acronym wasn’t going to work, we knew we couldn’t continue to start their, either.
But what about the S?
S for Success… the worldly view. S for Spirituality – the Fit For Jesus Solution!
After analyzing the situation, we knew that S needed to stand for “Spirituality”. Simply stated, Jesus is needed in our life. The Holy Spirit needs to be the leader of our efforts. So, now we are looking at Nutrition, Exercise, Lifestyle, Mindset, and Spirituality, right?
Yes, but NELMS is all out of order. And using NELMS is both worldly and has a hint of pride to it, since it is my last name. NELMS Fitness can be no more, which is great, since “He must become greater. I must become less.” (John 3:30)
We look to Jesus, who said, “So the last will be first…”
(The rest of the verse, of course, says “and the first will be last”. But, I honestly can’t say that Nutrition is last on the priority list, so we just won’t be able to use that part.)
“So the last will be first…” puts us at Spirituality, Nutrition, Exercise, Lifestyle, and Mindset (SNELM) but there is still one more issue that I’ll bet over 98% of weight loss coaches and personal trainers are getting wrong.
Most trainers don’t even address it. The issue is Mindset. Sure, some trainers talk about goals, but the reality is that it is the mind that has to change the most and involves much more that just goals. In order for the mind to change, we need Jesus and true, sincere Spirituality. There is much, much more to this than will fit here in a single blog post, so we’ll leave it at that for now.
And that is how the new acronym, Spirituality, Mindset, Nutrition, Exercise, and Lifestyle (SMNEL) used in Fit For Jesus came to be.
Goodbye, NELMS Fitness. Hello, Fit For JESUS!
“He must become greater. I must become less.” (John 3:30)
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August 20th, 2010 on 4:16 PM
Terrific work! This is the type of information that should be shared around the web. Shame on the search engines for not positioning this post higher!