Devlin Brown at the water cooler | Transform your body through mindful living

This December I’d like to finally be in shape on the beach. What are your top tips when committing to a body transformation?

Body transformations are big business. They offer the promise of a crash course in a “secret” most people don’t know about. A commitment followed by an enlightened “after”.

Social media is full of them. The best edited ones involve sliding through hundreds of photos, one taken every day of the transformation, creating a stop-motion animation of someone morphing from despair to triumph. The music matters too.

However, the obsession with a quick before-and-after wasn’t caused by social media. Way back in the 1940s, bodybuilding coach Charles Atlas created the famous beach transformation advertisement called “the insult that made a man out of Mac”.

The story was about a “scrawny” young man getting sand kicked in his face by a big, muscular bully. To add insult to injury, the victim’s girlfriend berates him for being too skinny.

Humiliated, Mac goes home and responds to the mail-order ad for Atlas’ “Dynamic-Tension” fitness system. He then develops an impressive physique, returns to the beach, knocks out the bully and earns the title “hero of the beach”.

All it took was a transformation. In the decades that followed, before and after photos in magazines encouraged people to purchase a whole host of products and services.

I once tried the USN three-month transformation challenge. I bought the starter pack with supplements. Took the before photo with the newspaper showing the date and followed through … for 10 weeks. An impressive change, but one I felt wasn’t good enough to enter.

I did another transformation with a personal trainer a few years later. This time it stuck for a few years before slowly sliding into a suburban holding pattern. An Irish friend once told me it is easy to spot a South African man: “Meaty”. I took it as a compliment at the time, but in retrospect I realise she was describing the east stand at Loftus Versfeld.

I am married to one of the winners of the 2000 EAS Body For Life challenge. The challenge was clear: before and after photos and an intense 12-week transformation programme. Of course, the challenge included whichever EAS supplements were needed to achieve the goal.

Most people leave these challenges, rebound and end up exactly where they started. My wife “got it”. She went on to live a fit lifestyle while embarking on a creative career unrelated to fitness, understanding she didn’t need a timeline and she didn’t need the supplements. Decades later she certified and today trains dozens of people. Her biggest lesson, besides the importance of strength training, is mindset.

Her motto is that you have to fall in love with exercise and healthy eating . That may sound impossible to some, but with the right trainer, support network and commitment, it is not just possible but likely.

This matters because it exemplifies what a transformation should be: forget a start and end date. That is a recipe for failure. The start date is the only one that matters.

It may sound terrifying, but it isn’t. We enjoy pizza and dessert. There’s no “earning the right” to have a slice of cake.