I recently watched an interview where Jon Bon Jovi talked about how he has reinvented himself again and again over the decades. He spoke about his long-haired rocker years, the shifts in his music, his changing public image, his philanthropy, and even the period where he deliberately studied acting because he wanted to be taken seriously in that world,too.
What struck me was not how many times he changed, but how calmly and respectfully he talked about every version of himself along the way. He did not sound embarrassed by who he had been, and did not sound like he was chasing his past. He sounded grounded and genuinely at peace with moving forward.
At one point, he said something that lodged itself firmly in my brain. “You have to be willing to let go of the person you were to become the person you want to be.“
That sentence lands differently when you think about it through the lens of health and body change, because so many people have been taught that wanting to change means they must dislike who they are now. I think you can love who you are and still want to change. You can respect your body as it is today and appreciate how it has served you, while also acknowledging that you want more energy, more strength, less pain, or a different relationship with food and movement. Those desires do not come from self-rejection. Very often, they come from self-respect and from listening more honestly to what your body is asking for now.
What usually gets in the way is not a lack of self-love, but loyalty to habits that belong to an earlier version of you. The routines, coping strategies, food patterns, movement avoidance, and internal stories you carry did not appear out of nowhere. They helped you survive something. They helped you function during a season when your capacity was limited, when stress was high, or when taking care of yourself had to come last. They made sense at the time.
The challenge is that habits are loyal. They are loyal to the version of you they were built to protect.
If you are trying to become someone who trusts her body more, who moves with greater ease, who responds differently to stress, or who treats herself with more care, those old habits will push back. Not because you are failing, but because they were designed for a different chapter of your life, one with different needs and limits, and they weren’t given an expiration date.
There is an old saying that if you want to sail the ocean, you have to leave the shore. You cannot keep one foot on the dock and expect forward motion, and changing your health works the same way. You cannot keep doing the same things you have always done and expect different results. Growth requires space, space for new ideas, new behaviors, and new ways of responding to yourself when things get uncomfortable.
Letting go is not a single decision. It is work, it is practice, and it often requires learning skills you were never taught. It means experimenting with new routines, questioning old assumptions, and sometimes sitting with discomfort as you step away from what feels familiar. That discomfort does not mean you are doing it wrong. More often, it means you are doing something new. And you can lean into that discomfort as a good thing.
What matters most is this. Letting go of old habits is not a rejection of your past self, it is a recognition of her. It is saying thank you for getting me here, thank you for helping me cope, and thank you for doing the best you could with what you had at the time. And now, with compassion and intention, I am choosing to lead myself differently.
When I think about this idea of reinvention, I keep coming back to how consistently Bon Jovi has modeled it without ever preaching it. Across decades of music and interviews, the message is steady. Take responsibility for your life. Decide who you are becoming. Stop living on autopilot just because the past version of you feels familiar.
There is a reason songs like It’s My Life resonate so strongly. Not because they were about youth or rebellion, but because they were about taking ownership, about standing in the present moment and choosing your next chapter instead of letting yesterday keep writing it for you.
That is what changing your health really asks of us too. Not punishment or shame. Just ownership of the fact that if you want a different relationship with your body, your energy, or your health, you will eventually have to release the habits and patterns that belonged to an earlier version of you.
You can love who you were. You can honor what she survived and what she carried. But you do not have to keep living inside the rules she needed back then.
Letting go is not forgetting where you came from. It is deciding where you are going.
And sometimes, the bravest thing you can do is finally loosen your grip on the shore and trust that the version of you that you are becoming knows how to sail.