The Dark Side of New Year’s Resolutions
As the New Year approaches, many people are resolving to workout more and eat better in 2021. As you ponder what changes to make to your life, please consider the following…
Food is your friend. It fuels everything you do, whether you’re awake or asleep. You don’t need to “earn” the food you eat through exercise or through punitive restrictions on what, when, and how you eat. And you certainly do NOT need to feel guilty about eating.
Unfortunately, many people approach getting in shape and losing weight as a litmus test of their character and self-worth. (Sadly, our society unapologetically reinforces said approach with nonstop advertising.) When those same individuals fall short, which almost always happens, they punish themselves for their lack of discipline. And often the self-inflicted penance takes the form of quitting, which only serves to aggravate the situation.
If your goal is to feel better, both physically and psychologically, and to enjoy your life more, then restrictions around food and ultimatums about exercise, which are then used to prove your unworthiness when you fail to comply to your own rules, will never make you feel happier or more fulfilled or lead to better results. Instead, they will make you feel small and crush belief in yourself.
Exercise has Many benefits. It’s a wonderful and miraculous activity to add to your life and should be practiced frequently and consistently in a fashion that knits neatly into your life. Exercise is not to be used as an excuse for eating poorly or to excess. It also must not be motivated by dislike of yourself or your body. Getting in shape is an excellent vehicle for bettering your life and your health. You should incorporate it into your life in a way you enjoy and will stick with.
Quick-Fit programs are an alluring lie. The dream of working out for a set period of time, preferably as short as possible, and then riding that wave into eternity is one of the biggest shams perpetrated by the fitness industry. Restricting yourself while counting down the days until you can enjoy your life again is a surefire recipe for failure.
Fitness is a process, as is health. There is no magic date when you will all of a sudden be happy and be able to maintain your results without continued effort. Health and fitness must be a part of your life and therefore must be woven into your life in a realistic way that works for you.
Liftoff is the most energy consuming period to achieving your goals. Once airborne, much less effort is required to maintain them. But you must start knowing the finish line is not thirty, sixty, or even 90 days away. In fact, reaching those benchmarks is just the beginning.
Small frequent steps produce outstanding results. There is no need to overhaul your entire life to begin seeing changes and feeling better! So don’t believe that hype. Move your body everyday. Get outside in nature and breath fresh air. Drink more water. Prioritize sleep. Add one healthy food to your diet. Eliminate one unhealthy food. Spend time with people you care about.
As the saying goes, “Rome was not built in a day.” Neither should you feel pressured to completely transform overnight. The myth of spontaneous transformation hyped be the health and fitness industry is all smoke and mirrors. Many of your lifestyle habits are the product of years of seemingly inconsequential decisions piled one on top of the other. Digging yourself out from under that mound will take time.
Instead of thinking such effort expended is a burden, look at it as a relief. In other words, you have time and space to achieve your goals. They don’t have to happen overnight.
Black and white thinking promote burnout and ultimately failure. Missteps are inevitable. It’s impossible to stick to your plan, a plan, any plan perfectly. Missing a day, week, or even a month does mean your plan is ruined. It simply means you missed a day, week, or month.
Be compassionate with yourself. Give yourself a break. Doing so will get you back on track faster than punishing yourself. In fact, trying to make up for lost ground often leads to injury, which only will delay you even more. Pick up where you left off or, if necessary, take a step or two backwards and begin again.
You’ll actually be making yourself stronger and more resilient, because you’re foundation will be even sturdier.
Long-term thinking will prevail over short-term disjointed spurts of effort driven by guilt. Getting in shape and trying to live healthier are meant to elevate your quality of life, not turn you into a nervous wreck. The pressure to mold yourself into some popularized physical type is tremendous in today’s highly connected and “televised” world. It’s important to remember the only person you should be comparing yourself to is who you were yesterday, last week, last month, or last year. If you are making progress and seeing improvements that YOU set for YOURSELF, then that’s all that matters.
Your mental wellbeing is as important as is how you look at the beach. When you take a long-term approach to your health and fitness, the minor hiccups along the way will be just that, minor hiccups. There will be no need to pendulum swing from one extreme to another, from eating poorly and not working out to throwing the baby out with the bath water and hitting HIIT classes nonstop until the inevitable swing of the pendulum heads in the other direction.
The middle way pursued frequently, consistently, and diligently over the long-term will prevail over well intentioned, though misguided, see-saw attempts to improve your health and fitness.
Looking ahead to the New Year, take stock of where you are today and envision where you wish to be this time next year. You have 12 months or 52 weeks or 365 days or 8,760 hours or 525,600 minutes or 31,536,000 seconds to make it happen. Begin today by taking your first measured step to your desired end.
Then, when you arrive there 365 days from today, begin anew.
NO!! I take that back. Instead, go one step further and look 10 years ahead. Looking so far to the horizon will minimize the importance of the inevitable undulations you experience from day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month, and year-to-year.
Certainly, the changing of the guard from one year to the next provides an opportunity to check your progress on and to reevaluate your long-term goals. At the same time, it gives you a chance to set short-term goals to be accomplished within the next 12 months.
However those interim goals must support your overarching, decade (or longer) life purpose. It makes no sense to blowup your engine in the first 100 miles when you have 10,000 or more to travel.
The fitness industry pressures you, me, us to transform overnight by leap frogging from one blitz style workout to another or by crash dieting or by buying millions of dollars worth of supplements. When those efforts stop working, you move on to the next and then the next. It’s a treadmill and takes you nowhere.
Commit to making slow steady improvement. Such an approach will produce results and will be sustainable in the long-run. There is nothing wrong with doing and intense bootcamp style workout here and there for a limited time. However, such methods must not be the main course of your health and fitness program.
For as Bill Gates cautioned, “Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate they can do in ten years.”
