When you start your healthier lifestyle there's a plethora of techniques out there for eating healthier, conquering cravings, a million type of workouts and a 101 ways to modify them for_______, and an endless stream of modivational posters and images like:
And I feel like everyone knows what the right things are: eat less, workout more, stress less. But there's so more to it than that! The longer I'm on this journey the more I realize this is a pyschological game and guess what- there's very little on the pyschology of weight loss!
So tonight as I started to write an entirely different blog one filled with excuses. About 80% of the way into writing it my logical voice shouted out- HEY YOU'RE MAKING EXCUSES AGAIN! KNOCK IT OFF THERE IS ONLY DO- YOU WANT IT BAD ENOUGH YOU'LL DO IT! And usually that little pep talk kicks my rump back on to the straight and narrow again. I accepted it and started to write another blog about that kick That's when my calm engineering voice spoke up: Why do we make excuses in the first place? Seriously!?! We spend so much of our lives surviving tough sh** and proving we can do A LOT of things we THINK we can't do! So LOGICALLY- excuses are dumb but we still spit them out like crazy when it comes to weight loss.
So I abandoned my own self reflection adn started a mini research project that lead me to a beautiful short article from pyschcentral.com: Excuses, Excuses. And it hit me when I read:
This phenomenon of unconsciously shooting oneself in the foot is undoubtedly related to a fear of failure. After all, if you never put your best effort in, when you fail you can always fall back on the excuse that you weren’t really trying in the first place, thus preserving your self-image.
Ah ha!! So most people make these excuses because they're afraid of failing- I get it. Then a soft little voice of self knowledge said- it's more than that for you and you know it. Not only are you afraid you'll fail- You're afraid you'll succeed- who will you be? will you be someone you don't like- cocky and prideful that you did it and other's were inferior? Will your boyfriend resent you for losing the weight while he's still struggling on his journey?
So I think I've found my struggle- it's not food- it's not working out- it's fear... So I'm trading in my old No Excuses poster for:
