This week, my mom celebrates her 85^th birthday. In the last few weeks, as my sisters and I get ready for her big day, I’ve been realizing how much I love her, but I sometimes forget to take those moments to say so and really appreciate her. Isn’t it strange, how easy it is to forget to express your love to those closest to you?

So in honor of her, today, I’d like to share with you three things she taught me that changed my life. Here they are – The Top 3 Life Lessons from Gunvor Satra:

1. Let the spirit of adventure guide you.

Growing up, we didn’t have a lot of money, but my mom found a way to show us the world. She loves to travel, and anywhere on the globe was fair game. Once, we were actually debating between Turkey, the Baltic countries, and Peru. Most people don’t look at such a wide range of place at one time, but from her, I learned that anything is possible, and anywhere is worth seeing and learning about. (We ended up in Turkey...

It’s February: the month where New Year’s Resolutions go to die.

I’m joking, of course. Hopefully yours are alive and well. But wherever you are in your journey, it’s a reality that change is hard. Often, we’re all gung ho at first, but then the daily grind sets in. We lose our enthusiasm, and we revert to our old ways.

Why is it so freaking hard to make a change?

Because our brains are like lawyers. They need evidence. And we’re crazy good at finding evidence of how “stuck” we are. We’re not so good at finding evidence of how powerful we are. Or that we’re capable of change.

I see this all the time around food and eating habits. Friends will order French fries, even when they’re trying to lose weight. They know there are healthier options, but choosing those options isn’t in line with their beliefs. “I’m not a person who orders wraps,” they believe, or “I just don’t like veggies....

A few weeks ago, my team and I sat down to talk about the upcoming Love Your Body event.

What does it mean, we asked, to actually love your body?

I’m very action-oriented, so I reframed the question as this: “What would you do differently if you truly loved your body?”

When it was Lauren’s turn to answer, she said only one word: “Everything.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. “Like what?”

“Just…everything,” she said. “How I carry myself, how I walk into a room. How and what I ate. What I did during the day. My relationships, for sure.”

As her list went on, I found myself nodding in sympathy. Honestly, when I thought about it, that would be my answer too. If I really, truly loved my body, it would change everything.

As some of you know, I struggled with anorexia for over a decade. I was so obsessed with making my body “perfect” that I almost destroyed it. My sister said to me once,...

Last week in Rio, the gold medal in the 10,000 meter track event went to Mo Farah, a British super-runner. (He holds about a million world records). But during this one Olympic race, you might’ve thought he’d lost the gold – because he wiped out in the final loop.

But what did he do? He got up and kept running. He wasted no time being upset, or worrying, or beating himself up. He just popped up and ran straight to the finish line. And he won.

It’s so simple, but what an important lesson we can take from that. Falling isn’t the end of the race. It’s not even a guarantee that you won’t win. You can take a major wipeout, and still win an Olympic medal.

Yet how often do we mistake failure for something permanent? We “fall,” or fail, or reach a setback – and we interpret it as final. But it’s not.

Falling is difficult, especially when the stakes are high. When we fall, gremlins like to jump right in with their...

We are super excited to announce that Moticise received the Fit Bottomed Girls’ Fittie Award for best workout DVD!

Mindset Reset is now officially an award-winning workout. What an honor! Thank you, Fit Bottomed Girls!      Get it here!!

It’s been an exhilarating 2016! I’ve been leading Mindset Reset workouts at a very prestigious financial institution for the second time, Seamless/Grubhub, the Grace Institute, and a handful of others around NYC. This summer, I’m booked to appear on morning TV in New Zealand (!), and last but not least…we’ve launched the latest Moticise speaking series – Holistic Nutrition for Maximum Potential, which looks at how your diet affects your mind, body, life, and everything else. Food, fitness, fun – all my favorite things! More info coming soon.

It’s so important to celebrate the highs in life. Celebrate all your...

Spring is a time of renewal, cleansing, letting go of the old to invite in the new. This week, I want to share the incredible story of how my friend Kim learned to let go of her pain and embrace a new life, while flying high above the Hudson River…

It was Monday, March 2013. I was sprawled out on my couch in Brooklyn, putting the finishing touches on my grad school application and waiting for my boyfriend to get out of work and planning what to make for dinner. When he got home, without explanation or apology, he broke up with me. Just like that.

I was devastated. We’d been together six years, talking about getting married – yet he gave me no warning, no compassion. In a second, my life came crashing down.

I fell apart. I lost ten pounds in a week, surviving on coffee and liquor, moving through my days in a painful, unreal fog. Everything hurt. I just couldn’t absorb the truth: that relationship, which had been my bedrock, my identity, was over.

...

Last week, I got to go on The Daily Burn, a fitness show based here in New York, as their guest celebrity. I did the morning workout with them, and we did a really cool exercise about “reaching new heights” on a trampoline. You can still catch the interview, and if you’re looking for a fun, challenging workout to do every day, you can stream the workouts free for a month – check it out!

During the workout – it was about a half hour of cardio and strength-training – Greg, the instructor, said something that really struck me.

“If you’re thinking ‘I can’t do this’ – remember, that ‘I can’t’ is just an interpretation of a feeling. It’s not a reality,” he said. “Breathe into it, stay calm. Keep going.”

How profound! And it’s true in several ways – not just about exercise, but about life. Self-talk is a hot topic these days, and it’s continually...

With Thanksgiving in just a couple days, you might be hearing a lot about gratitude – why it’s important, how to focus on it, and so on. For good reason – it’s essential to both physical and mental health. 

But sometimes we think that in order to be grateful, we need to be one of the Lucky Ones... those got-it-all-together, successful, confident people you meet at parties. (You know who I mean?) They must feel grateful all the time, because they’re so lucky. Right?

Wrong.

Yes, there IS a link between gratitude and being “lucky” – but, luck doesn’t just fall from the sky. Sometimes, you create it.

One morning last winter, I felt like one of those Lucky Ones. I woke up early; I had tones of energy. On the exercise bike, I had one of my favorite guilty pleasure songs blasting –  I’m totally embarrassed to admit...