You want to lose weight. And every week you tell yourself “THIS is the week!” You’re going to get to the gym, stock up on healthy groceries, plan your meals, and maybe even buy a new workout shirt to really motivate yourself.
The first few days go great. You get up and workout, cook a healthy breakfast and eat a great lunch, dinner is a delicious concoction of lean protein and veggies, and you’re actually starting to feel pretty incredible. You feel proud of yourself because you’re really doing it!
So when a co-worker asks if you want to go out for drinks instead of hitting up your yoga class, you say yes, because you’ve earned it, even though it’s your favorite class and you hate missing it.
Or when your roommate wants to grab pizza for dinner, you say “sure” feeling slightly guilty and panicked about going off your plan, but again, you’ve done great this week and you deserve it.
Or you run out of your healthy groceries by Thursday afternoon so you decide to order takeout and get back to the grocery store to stock up for the weekend, but then the end of the week festivities get the best of you and you find yourself ordering more take out, going out to eat and skipping the gym- just like last week and all the weeks before.
So there you find yourself (again) standing in front of the mirror on Sunday night, promising yourself that you’re going to do better this week, but only half believing it.
This was my exact story for YEARS. The endless cycle of starting over, promising myself I’d do better and feeling so disappointed hopeless that I was back here yet again and how was I ever going to lose the freaking weight?! The ups and downs, the emotional turmoil, the low self-esteem…I lived it. The best part thought? I know how to get out of it.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Losing weight isn’t easy. It take focus, it takes hard work and it takes having a whole lot of positive support around you to get you to your goals. I hear from clients all the time that lack of motivation, lack of time, confusion and temptations are the most difficult things to overcome when they are trying to lose weight.
The thing is, these are just stories that we’re telling ourselves. And the worst part is when we actually start believing we don’t have time, we don’t have self-control and we don’t have what it takes to reach our goals. Because you do have what it takes. You do have time. And you do have the ability to make the right choices.
Below are three lies you may very well be telling yourself on a regular basis that are keeping you stuck and how to change them.
1. “I worked out/ate healthy today so I earned this burger/margarita/candy.”
We are inundated with the message that we have to earn our food, especially foods that are “bad” for us or are looked at as “guilty pleasures.”
Let’s just make this abundantly clear: you do not have to earn your food. Ever. You don’t have to exercise harder and eat less to enjoy the foods you love. You also don’t have to punish yourself by restricting or overexercising for eating and enjoying food.
When we look at food as something we need to earn and deserve, we begin to define our own self-value based on our food choices: “I was so bad today! There were all these cookies in the break room at work and I ate two of them” or “Sally makes the BEST cookies. She brought a tray into work today and even though I really wanted one I said no because I’m really trying to be good.”
Food is not a treat for being good, and exercise is not a punishment for being bad. On the same line, restricting food is not a punishment for “blowing your diet” and exercise is not a way to earn extra treats. This may have worked back in college, but I think lots of us are living proof that we can’t out exercise overeating, and restriction leads to bingeing.
The key is finding…you guess it…balance. It’s eating the cookie and moving on with your day without any emotional attachment or judgment. It’s going to the gym because you love to move your body and rewarding yourself with a nutritious dinner and a couple pieces of chocolate for dessert. It’s knowing that nothing about your self-worth is based upon what you choose to eat. It’s being 100%, completely confident that no matter what you eat everything is going to be OK because you know exactly what to do to get yourself back on the straight and narrow.
2. “I can totally do this on my own.”
Ahh the independent women. I love her. I am her (most of the time, hah!) and I have a tremendous amount of respect and admiration for her. The thing is, though, as Ms. Independents, we have to know when it’s time to ask for help.
Once we take the initiative to decide on a goal, make that lifestyle change and lose the weight, the next step is taking action. And this is exactly where a lot of people stumble.
Whether it’s procrastination (“I’ll start on Monday/after the kids go back to school”) or confusion (“Do I try low carb? Carb cycling? Keto? Paleo? Whole 30?”), or doubt (“It hasn’t worked before, what makes me think it will work now?”), it’s really difficult for people to just get going. And it’s clear why.
Fortunately, there’s a solution for each of these struggles.
That solution? Accountability.
Accountability is all about helping you reach your goals in the most efficient and sustainable way possible. Your accountability partner or coach will help you stop procrastinating and get it done when you’d rather wait ‘til Monday. They’ll help you come up with strategies to make a slow and steady lifestyle change and they’ll give you that swift kick in the butt and pep talk (with love, of course) when you’re feeling like you just can’t keep going or like your results aren’t happening as fast as you’d like them to.
The real power of accountability, though, is the power in having an external and objective voice whose only job is to help get you where you want to be. Someone who will help you develop a plan of action, will provide you with helpful resources and strategies and will help motivate and encourage you to move forward when you’re feeling stuck. {Need someone just like this? You’ll want to join the Living Lean Lifestyle Club ASAP because this is what we’re all about.}
3. “I don’t have time to go to the gym/cook healthy meals”
But you do. If you have time to watch another Housewives re-run and if you have time to drive to Chipotle, order a burrito, drive home and eat it, you have time to workout and you have time to cook. I could stop there, but I’m sympathetic to my hardworking peeps and I know, just as much as you do, that it’s a hell of a lot easier to plop down on the couch and order some takeout than it is to get your butt in the kitchen and cook up a healthy meal. So here’s my solution.
1) Realize and own the fact that you do, in fact, have enough time – especially when it can take literally 3 minutes to make an amazing salad and only 20 minutes to get a killer workout in.
2) Plan one or two days during the week where you’ll just veg, order takeout and relax then on the other days get after it.
3) Care just enough to do what you have to do to reach your goals. Because they are your goals, after all, and you do have exactly what it takes to reach them. You might just need a little help, a little accountability, along the way.