I Broke My Limiting Beliefs… Then I Got Shredded
In this 30‑minute solo monologue, fitness coach Lucas Wilhelm Hedenbäck recounts his personal transformation from a traditional bodybuilding mindset—characterized by extreme training volume, strict macro tracking, and a focus on appearance—to a holistic, health‑first approach that ultimately delivered the physique he originally wanted. He identifies a series of limiting beliefs that kept him chronically fatigued, brain‑fogged, and unmotivated, and explains how he systematically replaced them across nine core pillars: (1) shifting the primary goal from looking good to feeling good; (2) overhauling nutrition to prioritize food quality, seasonality, and micronutrients over calorie/macronutrient counting; (3) treating gut health as the foundation for nutrient absorption and energy; (4) aligning light exposure with circadian rhythms through morning sunlight, reduced evening light, and even sun‑gazing; (5) redesigning training to fewer, higher‑intent sessions, often outdoors, emphasizing recovery over volume; (6) making sleep a non‑negotiable recovery pillar with consistent timing and low‑light wind‑down; (7) minimizing environmental toxins by swapping plastics, Teflon, and chemical personal‑care products for cleaner alternatives and using sauna for detox; (8) managing stress and conditioning the nervous system via breathwork, grounding, cold plunges, and deliberate stress‑recovery cycles; and (9) integrating all these variables into a comprehensive “Superhuman Protocol” coaching program. He supports each pillar with personal anecdotes, before‑after client case snapshots, and concrete actionable steps, urging viewers to break their own limiting beliefs to achieve sustainable health and a natural, lasting physique.
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A few years ago, I used to believe that the only way for me to get into very good shape and get the physique that I wanted was to just suffer more, because that was the reality that I was living in. I was eating like a bodybuilder, I was training 6 days a week, I was tracking every single detail to a T, and I was pushing harder than everyone else that I knew. I was the hardest Working guy, like in my whole circle, no one was putting in more effort and doing more and being as religious as I were. So I thought that, well, if I want to achieve more, well, I just have to put even more effort into this thing and then I'm gonna yield the result that I want, as most things in life work. What I didn't understand is that health is not exactly like everything else. Mm-hmm. More effort will not always yield more result. And for me, it came to a point where I was putting in so much effort, but I was feeling so insanely bad. Low energy, brain fog, constant fatigue. Dependent on caffeine to get through the day. But I was doing everything right, and I was continuing to push through because you have this image about, oh, it's just, we just have to grind harder, we just have to do more, and we can't complain. And then I actually started to realize that, well, I shouldn't be feeling like this from doing everything right. I'm putting in all this effort, I'm tracking everything to a T, I'm doing everything perfectly from what I've been taught. This can't be the roof of how I can feel, right? Of how my health should be. So I started to question everything. I started to think to myself, well, I've always been wanting the physique. That was my main goal when I got into training. I wanted to become a bodybuilder. I wanted to step on stage and all these things, right? But it came to a point where I was doing all this effort, all these inputs, and I felt absolutely terrible. So I completely dropped that goal, and the only thing that I wanted to focus on from this point forward was I don't even want to try to look good. I just want to feel good. Because I was back at this time, I was working my corporate job. I had all these ambitions of things I wanted to do and accomplish in my life, but I simply didn't have the energy and the capacity in order to go on and tackle them, right? I didn't want to stay stuck in my corporate job. I wanted to do my own thing, etc., etc., but I had no energy. I had no capacity to do so. So I started questioning everything and I started to shift my focus to how can I not just Look good, but how can I actually feel good? That's the only thing that I want. I want to have high energy. I don't want to have brain fog. I don't want to feel fatigued. I want to have laser-sharp focus. I want to be able to punch through work. I want to be able to feel good in my body, and I want to be able to enjoy my day-to-day life. So that was when everything changed for me. And when I did this, I had the belief that well now when I shift my focus. I'm not gonna get the body that I want, right? By not following all these fitness influencers and these bodybuilders, I'm not gonna get— I'm not gonna build more muscles. I'm probably gonna look like shit, but I'm okay with that. I accepted that. And this was the limiting belief that was holding me back, because obviously when I completely changed my approach and started to focus on how can I actually feel good rather than how can I actually look good, Well, everything changed, and finally I got the physique that I had always wanted and put so much effort towards getting without getting. And now, restructuring a few things, boom, I got it without even focusing and trying to get it. So with that being said, in this video I'm gonna break down exactly those limiting beliefs that I had and what I switched up and did in order to achieve this. If we look back at this, 7th February 2023, it's roughly, and this is early 2025, so it's roughly 1.5, 2 years between this. Yes, of course, once again, I had 100% got some results before, I had built some muscles, but I was feeling shit. And I was at a point where I would give up all the muscles that I've put on to just feel good. So that was my intuitively or intuitive feeling. First of all also, if you're new to the channel, welcome. My name is Lucas, I'm just a regular guy from Stockholm, Sweden, and all we do on this channel is break down all the lessons from my own journey but also from working with hundreds of hundreds of clients to fix their health issues here to simple actionable items that you can walk away with and implement and see results yourself. So if you stay to the end of this video, you will know exactly What beliefs that you need to break and how you should be going about things regarding training, nutrition, sleep, nervous system to fix your health. This is a very broad video, I wanna say, and I'm not really diving into detail, but obviously on my channel I have a bunch of in-depth guides on stress specifically and gut health specifically, but this is all the core pillars that I changed. What did I actually change then? Well, nutrition first. So my old beliefs around nutrition was that I used to think that I had to eat like a bodybuilder. That was exactly what I was doing. I was listening to all the bodybuilders and fitness influencers that I saw online. They were eating chicken rice, broccoli, low variety, protein powders, artificial sweeteners, pre-workouts, Cream of rice, oats. I was chasing perfect macros on a tracking app. I was chasing calories and I was chasing perfection in the numbers, but I was completely ignoring food quality, nutrient density, and how my body actually responded. So if you look at this, you know, we have the classic Cocoa Pops, chicken, cereal, protein shake, I wasn't always eating like that. Obviously here we have some beef, some asparagus. I was eating somewhat clean, but here you have like, I have soy sauce on this, I have taco sauce, I have some other like low-calorie sauce on this. Same thing here, like protein French toast, some bullshit recipes like this. I was always trying to crave my sugar, my sweet tooth and my sugar craving, I had to make these crazy high protein sweet recipes with a shit ton of artificial sweeteners and xanthan gum to bring up the volume at the end of the night to fix my sugar cravings. I was stuck in this loop and this is exactly how it used to look for me. And this is how everyone was preaching it. Just focus on the macros, that's the only thing that matters. Hit your macros, hit your calories and you'll be good. The crazy thing also, if we look at this, here from a numbers perspective, I was probably eating 1,800 calories trying to lose some weight, but nothing was happening because my hormones were absolutely shit and I felt absolutely terrible. On the right, I'm not even tracking. I'm eating whatever I want. I'm probably eating closer to 3,000 calories, more jacked than ever. It's insane how it works when you understand it. So what I'm focusing on right now Is this, we don't need extreme dieting. We need quality food and structure. I'm basing my diet on high-quality protein, real carbs, stable fats, salt and minerals, and I'm making most of my food myself. Not because this is super strict, but because it removes cows. I eat for vitality, not vanity. And when food quality is high, your energy will stabilize, cravings disappear, your hormones will rebalance, and your body composition improves automatically. If there's one takeaway for you, it should be to fix your nutrition. That is the first fundamental step in order to change for almost everyone. So clean up nutrition completely. That doesn't mean that we can't have some treats here and there, but obviously it's the quality that matters. If I'm having a nice pain au chocolat, I'm not going to some bullshit regular grocery store to get this. No, I'm actively going to the best bakery in town that makes everything with 100% local organic ingredients. Because it's the quality that matters at the end of the day. A lot of beef, one of the beliefs that I had in the beginning as well was that I was gonna get cancer from eating beef every single day, which is also something that you, like, one of the things that I did is I started to question everything that I've been programmed towards, you know. I have all these beliefs on things that someone has kind of pushed towards me. I started looking into it, I started questioning everything, very quickly realized that all these studies showcasing that meat is bad and all these things are funded, you just follow the money, funded by companies that have, let's say, an anti-meat agenda they're trying to push and that they're trying to profit on. Would a farmer that is just trying to survive ever come out and make a study about that beef actually isn't good? No, with studies we can basically prove any point that we want. If I'm trying to achieve a specific thing, it's very easy to actually achieve that. So follow the money, and that was one of the things that I was doing as well. You know, it doesn't make sense for me to eat all this protein powder, which is a complete, like, shit source, completely dead source of amino acid that is super, super highly processed with some crazy artificial flavoring to make it taste like a— Chocolate chip cookie. a chocolate cake and like it's a joke when you start looking into it and actually understanding it. So cleaning up your nutrition and completely shifting away from the macros to just focus on quality ingredients, real food, seasonal food as well is a super high leverage thing. We can't be eating bananas and mangoes in the winter when we're living in Sweden. That is also gonna completely mess up your metabolism and your body. So focusing on seasonality is very, very powerful as well. Second thing that ties into that is gut health. First, or before, I didn't think about my gut at all. Maybe I took some L-glutamine because I had heard someone speak about that sometime, but at the same time I was drinking energy drinks, taking pre-workout every single workout, using protein powders daily, eating processed foods, and I completely— I was completely destroying my gut environment. I didn't think about my microbiome, my digestion, my absorption, and toxins like microplastics that are gonna affect it as well. Same thing here. You know, it wasn't—I wasn't always eating super super bad. But here we have some some rice. We have some salmon with like teriyaki or some bullshit sauce like this. Here we have some shit quality pasta with some processed chicken and some cream sauce, soy sauce, rice. Like I was—it wasn't terrible, but I was. Fucking up what could have been pretty good, right? It's not like here grains causing inflammation as well. But if we have a super super high quality pasta, you know that that doesn't necessarily have to be a problem. This wouldn't maybe have to have been a problem as well if I didn't throw on a shit ton of soy and teriyaki and things like this to actually destroy it. So these things I weren't even aware of. I was just thinking about calories, low calorie sauces perfect that I can. Throw on to make my— make the taste good because my taste buds was so fucked from all the shit that I was eating as well. So I wasn't focusing on the gut health at all. Now I prioritize gut like it's the foundation of everything because it is, and because I understand that it's not just about what we eat, it's about what we absorb that matters. So I'm focusing on eating in a calm state, which is very, very important. If we're eating stressed directly after the gym, drinking a protein shake, you're not gonna digest any of that. It's gonna go straight through you. Digestion only happens in a state of calmness and relaxation. If you're constantly activated, your body will not absorb the food properly. So eating in a calm state, chewing properly, improving my digestion with things like sauerkraut, fermented stuff, broth, and adding fermented foods, and most importantly removing what was irritating my gut daily. Because if our guts are off, you won't absorb nutrients, inflammation increases, energy drops, and everything feels harder. Gut, everything starts in the gut. There's a reason for why everyone says that. So thinking about your gut health is super, super key in order to be as healthy as possible. This is gonna completely change your energy levels, your brain fog, your mental clarity, everything is gonna be better. It's gonna be a positive flywheel from you fixing your gut health. So nutrition is important, yes, but gut health arguably even more important when we look at it like that, because we can eat the cleanest, the best quality food in the world, But if we're eating that stressed, that best quality food can still cause gut dysbiosis, SIBO, IBS, all problems and things and diseases like this. Even the prime, top quality, grass-fed, grass-finished steak and the best of the best oysters can still be problematic if the foundation isn't fixed. So super, super. Important as well. Light and nature, one thing here as well. I didn't think light mattered at all before. I was on my phone late at night gaming, playing, trying to do some work on the things that I was trying to build outside of my corporate job. I was waking up without sunlight and I thought it doesn't really affect me at all, but I was constantly tired, wired at night, and low energy during the day. And as most people, you've been told that the sun is a bad thing. Right, you should avoid the sun because it will cause cancer and it will damage your eyes and whatever other bullshit we've been told. Now I understand that our body runs on light. Our circadian rhythm controls hormones, cortisol, sleep, recovery. So now I obsessively prioritize morning sunlight, midday exposure, and low light at night before the sun sets because those light signals tells your body when to wake up, when to perform, and when to recover. And once that is aligned, everything becomes easier. So light diet is one of the most important things. The more sun you can get, the better. You will not get cancer from sunlight. I'm never using sunscreen, I'm never using anything bullshit like this. I'm exposing myself to the sun as much as I can with my whole skin and even my eyes. Like, I stare right into it, and my eyesight since Shifting everything up has actually started to get better, and I'm in the journey of healing my own eyes. So that's a process that I'm actively in as well. And one of the tools that I'm utilizing in order to do that and fix that is obviously through sungazing, staring into the red light as well, staring directly into the sun. So light diet is super, super important. Didn't used to think about it. Now I tick this box every single day. Training. This is also a massive one. I used to think that I had to be in the gym all the time. You know, that's where the results happen. 5 to 6 sessions per week, always pushing, always doing more, because I believe that more work equals more results. But I was constantly fatigued, inflamed, and not recovering properly from it. And I thought I just could have to push through. Obviously these are pictures from when I actually started to have been dialed with things. I didn't look like this back in the days, but Yeah, in the gym still. Now how I look at training is like this. I started training based on my reality. 3 to 4 sessions per week, high quality, adjust to my stress levels. I'm training with intent, not ego. Training is stress at the end of the day, and if your total stress is already high, more training will equal worse results. And this is the trap a lot of people end up in. 'Cause our body doesn't grow from stress, it grows from recovering from stress. So the outcome that we're trying to achieve here is that we want better recovery, better performance, better physique. Doing less is what gave me that. I don't train to feel tired at the end of the day, I train to get results. Like, I don't, sure, training is fun, but you know, you want some return on it, otherwise you wouldn't do it in the first place. And now I'm at the point as well where I, you know, I work out a lot outside because I actively know that even if that workout might not be perfect, the grounding, sunlight, fresh air, and all these things are things that are gonna be super, super beneficial compared to being inside a gym under fluorescent light, under LED light, blue light environment, which will also be very, very negative. So even if you have the perfect machines and everything at the gym, the downside to that is not outweighing the upsides of having less perfect equipment but working out outside in a more optimal environment. So more loose, not as strict, and that is literally what has given me the results. Massive belief that I had to break here because once again I was tracking everything to a T and being absolutely religious. 6 days in the gym, push, pull, legs, push, pull, legs, right? Now random full body sessions and just focusing on the quality and the intent and Yeah, I've gotten more results in the last couple years, like, from not even trying compared to obviously what I did before when I was actively trying and actively trying to optimize every single thing. So insane what that does. Sleep. I viewed sleep as optional. I thought I can just push through it. Late nights, inconsistent sleep, and relying on caffeine. Or like this, I didn't think it was optional, but I didn't put any effort towards making it better, if that makes any sense. Of course, you always know that sleep is important, but I was not taking care of it at all. I didn't have any like blue light blockers. I didn't have a wind-down ritual. It was like screen, phone in bed, sleep. And I was sleeping, but I was not recovering, right? Now I'm treating recovery as the priority, and sleep is obviously a massive pillar here. Consistent sleep, less stimulation at night, and actually allowing my body to reset. This works so good because sleep is where hormones reset, muscles recover, and stress comes down. If sleep is off, everything will be off. When I fixed sleep, everything else became easier, and I get some crazy sleep scores. 5 hours 40 minutes REM and deep. If you wake up after a night like this compared to a night where you get maybe 2 hours worth of REM and deep together because you fucked up with screens and whatnot, like, it's an absolute game changer. Imagine how your life would look like if you can get Between 4 to 5 hours worth of REM and deep every single night, which is where I think everyone should be, especially if you have high stress. If you have a business, you have a high workload, that's exactly where you should be at in order to compensate for that stress that you're accumulating throughout the day. Toxins, environment as well. I didn't think about toxins at all before. Prime example here, Teflon pan and a plastic spatula with some egg whites. and 3 eggs, at least I did 3 proper eggs, but a shit ton of egg whites in here as well, completely dead source there as well, no nutrients at all. Teflon pans, plastic cutting boards, regular toothpaste, deodorants full of chemicals, constant exposure without thinking twice. I was doing everything right from a toxins perspective. These things will absolutely fuck up your endocrine system, right? So what I'm doing now is I became, or I'm intentional about what I expose my body to. I reduce plastics, Cleaner products, better cookware, and utilizing sauna in order to help detox from all this shit. Because at the end of the day, we're always gonna be exposed to some toxins, but we wanna control the variables that we can, you know? Very good quality soap, good quality toothpaste without any fluoride or without any bullshit, bamboo toothbrush, you know, really good organic deodorants. Good toothpaste. You get the point. I've actually not been using shampoo for over two years. I think it is at this point right now as well, which is absolutely ridiculous. And one of the things people always ask me is like, Lucas, how your how's how's your hair routine? What's your skincare routine? All these things. I I don't have any. I literally don't have any. Everything comes from the nutrition and from dialing in gut health and from exposing your body to or not exposing your body to the shit toxins that are around us all the time. Once again, we're always going to be exposed to some. Therefore it's important to keep our detox pathways open and optimize them in order to get rid of what you're exposed to but then controlling the inputs. Obviously if you're interested in that we go more in depth in my coaching program on exactly how to optimize detox pathways, but sauna, primary example of what we wanna utilize there to help our body detox properly. Stress and nervous system, last pillar as well. I thought stress was normal, always on, always stimulated, always pushing. And I like to view this from a stress chart perspective. When you're stressing, stressing, stressing without coming back down, it's going to be a chart that goes completely upwards like this, and that is going to completely drain your stress budget. It's going to fuck up your nervous system. Now I understand that my nervous system controls everything. If we're in a constant stressed state, we won't digest, we won't recover, and we won't grow. So I actively create calm space or calm space recovery, because when stress goes down, Everything else improves. So now I view stress like a like this chart. If it goes up, we need to compensate by bringing it down and going up, bringing down, up, down. So at the end of the day, we we're back at where we started for that day. This is how you expand your stress capacity. You know, it's about getting intense stresses, but then recovering from it. That's how we adapt, and that's how we become more resilient. Let's take. Cold plunging as the primary example here. Oh, high cortisol, you shouldn't cold plunge because it's dangerous and it's causing stress. Short term, yes. But what that is doing is it's training your body to be able to handle stress better in other stressful situations. So if you're doing cold plunging and then you're recovering properly from that, that's like a repetition for your nervous system and for your vagus nerve. And the more you do that and the more you expand that, the more you're gonna be capable to handle stress to the point where you can eventually If I take me as an example now, I can push through 10, 12 hours of work, like no problem. I don't get fatigued at all. Like, I'm so resilient because I've built up my capacity, right? But when I started, this was absolutely not the case. You have to start on the lower end. You have to do small, small repetitions and like continue to kind of progressive overload your nervous system as well. So that is how I view stress. The chart goes completely off if you do nothing about it. If you throw in the resets, if you throw in actively management of your stress, you will adapt and the chart will go up and down, and that is what you're trying to accomplish. Things, you know, the tools we have to utilize here, or can utilize here, is breathwork, grounding, getting out in the sun, you know, a couple times throughout the day, throw in those things. Worst thing here is just sitting in front of the screen for 12 hours straight without moving. That is a shit show here. But if we're structuring some breaks in, getting some resets, then we're all good. That is the most important pillars that I switched. Once again, the old beliefs were the bodybuilding style, focusing on just looking good. Now only focusing on feeling good. Because these were very hard beliefs for me to shift as well, because I genuinely believed that I If I stop chasing the aesthetics, I will lose my physique. But as I said, I got to a point where I didn't care anymore. I just wanted energy, focus, clarity, and to feel good in my body. And I quickly understood that a good physique, when I started seeing the results, will always come natural. And as a byproduct of you actually being truly healthy from the inside and having all these things optimized. The physique comes. The physique is a byproduct of that. It doesn't come from craving it, it comes from attracting it by doing the right inputs. And once again, I've said this multiple times before, but that's exactly why I take the approach that I take with all my clients as well. It's a very in-depth approach. It's not just training and nutrition, because those things are only 20% of the equation. It's by focusing on all the small little variables around that gets someone absolutely Insane results in a short amount of time. Let's take some example here. You well a business owner from Sweden. It's the same thing. It's three months between this. You don't just get this from dialing in your training and nutrition, like to a T. No, you get this from dialing in all small variables around. Same thing with Tonda. It's four months between this. Same thing here. You don't just get this from dialing in training nutrition. You get this from priming your system. with all these small things and habits and fixing the lifestyle. That is what creates these amazing results. Thomas here, 40 years old, 3 months between these. Like, absolutely ridiculous. Who else do we have? Blake, 105 days between these, also ridiculous. This is not just training and nutrition and counting calories, no. This is fixing your whole system, fixing your gut health, fixing your stress levels, fixing your toxins environment, fixing your nervous system. All these things is what accumulates into crazy results like this. Leo, 3 months. Oliver, 3 months. Edward, 3 months. Jaren, 2 months. Ian, 3 months. Noel, 6 months. 10 kgs up on the scale after 2 months. You get the point. All these clients get insane results, not just from From fixing nutrition and training, but by fixing the whole system. Because training and nutrition is just a fraction of the equation. All the other things around is what matters at the end of the day. And that is, once again, the Superhuman Protocol is my coaching program. This is where you and me sit down, look through your exact situation. Where are you going wrong? What are you doing wrong? Fixing all this shit. This is not just for you if you want a regular training plan and nutrition plan and then like just do-it-yourself type thing. No, this is a very in-depth one-to-one coaching where we do twice a month one-to-one. We do a full situation, current situation audit about your situation right now, what you're doing wrong, pinpointing the things that we should be changing up quickly in order for us to see results very, very quick as well. If there's one thing you're doing massively wrong right now and we fix that and that is a super high leverage thing, of course we want to fix that ASAP, right? So that's my coaching program. If you have any questions about that, please let me know. You can also check out the first link in the description to have a quick discovery and assessment call with me or my right-hand man Anton, where we'll just map out your situation, see if you are a good fit. Once again, this is not for everyone. This is for you if you're someone with a high stress load, you have a business, you don't want to think yourself, you just want to have someone to tell you exactly what to do in order to Fix your health and fix your shit, and you'll go and do it yourself. Right? This is not for you if you need a babysitter. If you need just a training and nutrition plan, no. This is for you if you understand that there's more to the equation than that. So check out the first link below. Drop me any questions if you have that, and I hope you enjoyed this little walkthrough of the limiting beliefs that I broke. in order to finally get into the best shape of my life. So thanks for watching, appreciate you, and I'll see you in the next one. Ciao!
