Why do we stop Ourselves?

We all can achieve our goals or targets once we put in the hard work and effort consistently. Ultimately, we all know this, yet time and time again we choose the path of least resistance which leads us away from our goals.

It appears short-term gratification trumps long term gratification in our minds. If you were like me and you consistently went with the short-term gratification, it’s going to be a challenge to gain the discipline to hang in there for the long-term gratification and ignore short term pleasure.

It can be done but it’s virtually impossible to do so quickly, it takes time, conscious effort, and consistency and unless you give yourself six months to a year to make the necessary changes, you’re going to keep failing like I did. You teach yourself discipline through experience and doing what is necessary and not what is easy.

I started and stopped training and eating healthy time and time again for years before finally nailing it down. Why did I fail so many times? Was it my motivation? Was it my personal life? Were there other factors that negatively influenced me?

The answer to these all these questions is a resounding yes. My personal life was not geared up for a health and fitness lifestyle as over years I’d built up so many bad habits and reinforced those habits. Trying to be healthy was an uphill battle with the odds not in my favour but I put a huge amount of pressure on myself to fix my perceived problems quickly.

Other factors that negatively influenced me were my career and my partner. It wasn’t fair on either my career or my partner to make a knee-jerk change to my lifestyle and expect them to be able to adapt immediately. The crucial other factor which I failed to consider was my discipline especially surrounding diet and I set unreal expectations of how I should go about getting fitter, healthier etc. which set me up to fail instead of succeeding. 

I was effectively stopping myself from achieving my goals by setting myself up for failure. The more I failed the more my motivation was drained and eventually I highly doubted my own ability to maintain a training regime and was blissfully unaware of how much my diet was a factor in my weight gain.

This cycle of psyching myself up and starting new plans followed by trailing off and failing the plans was a vicious one and left me depressed, worse off health and fitness wise and utterly de-motivated to try anything else.

All the while I would binge eat bad food to make myself feel better and continue to fantasise about starting my perfect plan the following Monday. I clearly wasn’t happy, and I desperately wanted to be fit yet I was failing time and time again to maintain even the simplest of training regimes.

I also willingly became a victim to the health and fitness industry and the excellent marketing used to sell products that promise results in virtually no time at all. I mentioned it before but it’s worth reiterating that I spent a huge amount of money on products that promised Hollywood looks in X weeks at only X minutes a day so many times a week. None of them worked or really helped me, most left me feeling worse off.

Celebrity endorsements were one way to guarantee I bought a product. The celebrity also tended to have a body that looked like it was carved from marble by the gods. It was an easy sell really; I saw the rock-hard abs saw that it would take only 8-12 weeks for me to achieve ‘similar’ results. I really feel shame now thinking about how naïve I was and some of the purchasing decisions I made back then.

All I really did was treat the symptoms of why I was unfit and unhealthy i.e., being overweight and being depressed, for some reason logically it never really clicked with me to tackle the actual problem. I don’t think I even realised that the problem might not be in my plan but my approach to health and fitness itself was critically flawed.

I tried the same approach over and over under different guises and as such I got the same results over and over. Certainly, in some cases I maintained a plan a little longer than before or I did see some weight loss and improvement in fitness. Ultimately, I wasn’t consistent enough to carry on any of the programs and I hadn’t got the foundation or the ability to maintain that level of training or dieting in my lifestyle.

How did I, stop stopping myself?

I cannot pinpoint an exact eureka moment where I simply knew exactly what to do to have a health and fitness lifestyle because there wasn’t one. More so it was a case of things coming together slowly through trial and error that helped build my confidence up again.

Psychologically I believe things really started coming together when I began to make the smaller changes. Winning the little seemingly insignificant battles, at the start which mainly involved making sure I didn’t skip a day’s training. At that point I still considered training to be the 100% of most crucial element of a health and fitness lifestyle.

I began to try and make having a health and fitness lifestyle easier for me to incorporate. I joined a gym right beside my job so that I wouldn’t have to commute any further than I already did and that I would have the option of training both before and after work.

I started to try different foods in the canteen when I was having lunch, things such as adding sweet potato to my plate along with what I knew was bad food just so I could taste it and not have to make a big fuss over eating healthy.

I started to eat one piece of fruit a day along with everything else. Bananas and berries mainly but as I began to acquire a taste for them, I started to try other fruits and eventually I was eating 2-3 portions of fruit a day. I’d use Google to see the benefits of the fruit I was eating and try to base my intake on nutritional recommendations from medical sites.

Cutting out sugar drinks was one of the most difficult tasks I had to undertake. It took months. I started by limiting myself to a can at work and a can at home. But invariably if there were 6 cans in the fridge at home, I’d probably drink them all in a day.

So, I decided to remove my ability to buy these drinks in work. The vending machine only took coins, so I made sure I never had any coins on me. The first few days were the hardest but once I got over that initial week, I only occasionally craved my lunch time can.

I then significantly upped my water intake by buying a one litre water bottle and making sure I drank at least 2.5 – 3 litres a day. I didn’t count any coffee or tea I drank so the measure had to come from just water.

As you can see, I didn’t do anything outstanding I just started implementing small things one after another with no time pressure or ‘Monday’ start for anything. If I thought hmm maybe I should try eating pears I would go and buy pears whatever day of the week it was.

I tried multiple variations of fruit mixes some good and some very bad. Over the course of several months the little pieces all added up and my diet was virtually unrecognisable from what it once had been.

I had done similar changes to my lunches and the only thing I bought from the work canteen was my morning poached or boiled eggs which were both inexpensive and delicious!  By making small changes and not having a time pressure or a big start date for eating well I removed that psychological barrier I had built based on my past failures.

I gave myself a chance to succeed and I did. The more I managed to be consistent the more my confidence grew, my general health and wellbeing also improved drastically, and I no longer caught my fortnightly head colds or painful headaches.

Stack the odds for a health and fitness lifestyle in your favour as much as possible, try and plan for your worst willpower day. If I know that on Monday’s, it’s much more difficult for me to get up and go to the gym I’ll make sure that my lunch that day contains something I feel will be a reward for going like a can of Dr Pepper until I can phase that out.

By making small changes to your diet, you’re effectively tweaking it as opposed to a complete overhaul which usually results in you falling back to bad habits and binging worse than before. If you try and imagine what you can accomplish in 6 months to a year with small changes and tweaks to your diet, you’ll see that in 6 months you can have diet that is virtually unrecognisable to what went before.

You’ll see health benefits; you avoid the knee jerk change and the resulting pressure to not fail. You’ll also be able to somewhat avoid the peer pressure that comes from people noticing and commenting on your ‘new diet’. If asked you can just say oh, I really like or I just fancied some fruit this week.

Planning Ahead

You can save yourself a lot of pain and effort by planning your week out in advance both diet and training wise. If you have a social event on any night and you know the quality of the food is going to be low or that it’ll mean you cannot exercise, that’s fine.

Plan, accordingly, if you can move the training to another day great, if you can eat lightly throughout that day to allow for higher calorie bad food later that’s also fine. Or maybe this week you’re just going to let it fly and take a night of the gym and allow yourself the bad food. You’ve eaten healthy for several weeks and in the grand scheme of things you’re going to allow yourself this night off, because you know how far you’ve come.

We all have these nights and there’s no major issue but you’re going to need to exercise some self-control to make sure it’s not a regular occurrence. 

Everything in moderation and make sure you revert to your good health and fitness habits the next day and don’t make it a two- or three-day binging sessions. I’ve always allowed myself to eat bad food if it’s in moderation and I don’t binge on it. If I get a McDonalds, I’ll get whatever burger meal and leave it at that. There’s no need to add in chicken nuggets, apple pies, McFlurry’s and the works.

Firstly, it’ll undo all your hard work and secondly, it’ll likely result in you feeling awful both physically and psychologically. The taste of the bad food in my experience is never worth it when you’re asking yourself afterwards why the hell, I have eaten so much of it and still feel hungry.

How do I make myself want to exercise?

I’ve been asked this one before and it always is a difficult one to answer as like many things health and fitness related it’s such a personal thing. Not everybody likes the gym, not everyone likes to run and not everyone likes physical activity.

While I believe that some people just don’t enjoy some forms of training, I completely disagree that there isn’t a form of training out there for everyone. If your excuse is that, ‘you hate the gym’, or ‘you hate to run’ that just doesn’t cut it if you’re overweight and trying to lose weight.

There is an element of sucking it up and doing what’s necessary but again if you can find some form of training that you enjoy it’ll make it easier for you. Like the diet try to set yourself up to succeed by spotting potential obstacles earlier.

I’ve always enjoyed physical training in most formats, and I’ve kept an open mind in terms of trying other forms of training. It’s personal preference and ultimately it doesn’t matter what you choose once you are doing something to keep active. In my experience strength training has been the most beneficial type of training I’ve engaged in, certainly more so than cardio but I would recommend exploring both routes.

There isn’t an end point with health and fitness instead you constantly learn, and you should try different methods to learn what’s for you.

You should be willing to go and try new things and provided you’re not just making excuses you can drop them as you see fit. In most cases going once or twice is enough to determine if it’s something you’re going to enjoy.

Be conscious of the instructor and if there are multiple instructors it might be good to try different nights/classes with them and see if you enjoy it. Being consistent will not only make it easier to attend something but will also give you a good reputation at whatever it is you’re doing as a person who is consistent and reliable. These are particularly admirable traits for team sports.

I would caution that you shouldn’t let your physical capacity or lack thereof put you off joining a club or taking up an activity. Contrary to what I thought myself when I was overweight, when I see an overweight person training in Muay Thai I am impressed with them for making the effort and I have nothing but admiration for them. I personally always felt I was a burden when I was overweight, and that people were silently judging me.

Sometimes you just need to give yourself a kick in the ass and go and try something, it’s not easy but once it’s done then it’s done and you’re not going to be any worse off. Clubs and teams have new people arrive all the time, so you won’t feel like the new person for too long.

The absolute best way I’ve found to make sure you keep attending is to have a training buddy. Preferably someone who is fitter/better than you and who won’t let you miss training and will push you when you’re at training. It’s also ten times easier to try something new if you’ve got a friend going with you, that way you’re not the only new person and you can practice with each other.

The person I train with and many of the people I’ve trained with on other occasions have all been quite competitive and this competitiveness can lead to you pushing yourself harder than you ever would on your own. This will be of huge benefit to you, and it’ll make the time spent training both more effective and more enjoyable.

Remember, chin up, chest out and handle it.

Yours,

Stephen