Finding Your Drive
It seems like lately social media is filled with success stories. People who are wearing their sports bras and short shorts showing off their new bodies, their new lives. It is littered with the flashy side of their success and a lot of times leaves out the darker side of hard work. These stories are meant to motivate people to change their eating habits or fitness routines. But a lot of times, these stories do the opposite. They can make people feel like the hard work they are putting in at the gym isn’t enough, or the cake they ate over the weekend is a failure, or a night out with friends shouldn’t have happened. Taking out others successes, what drives YOU? What makes you the happiest version of yourself? How do you tap into your own success and strengths to make the changes that will last? I wish I had the answers. My biggest starting point is to not compare yourself to others. Look in the mirror and own the person looking back at you.
It is a lot easier to look at what is wrong with your own training and nutrition than to look at whats right. One of the most powerful things you can do for yourself is to start picking out your strengths, to start building your successes. Look at yourself from another person’s perspective. Think about how your friends see you, how your partner sees you, how your children see you. Honestly, most people won’t see a few pounds lost or gained. Most people won’t notice the meal planning or the habit setting that can become all consuming when trying to lose weight. Most people won’t notice the extra workout or the extra effort put into your existing workouts. Not because they don’t care, but because they see so much more in you. People will notice your smile. People will notice your time with them and your laughter, they will notice your honesty and your struggles. Finding your own way is never going to be easy, but it will help you be you.
Most of the time when we think about nutrition, we immediately think diet. The word diet usually means depriving yourself of the things you love and basically changing a lot of your world to accommodate the “diet.” It can mean eating separate dinners than your family. It can mean bypassing a night out with friends. And a lot of times, it means spending a lot of time thinking about food, the food you can’t eat, the food you get to eat, the food you wish you could eat. If we can look at nutrition as a way to fuel ourselves, we can trash the word diet. We can build a program based on what our bodies need and start to heal some of those feelings of deprivation. We can start to build habits that work for us and stop comparing ourselves to what others are doing. This is so simple to write and yet the steps to take can be so challenging. There is no simple answer to finding nutritional habits that will bring personal success. It takes time and consistency. Go back to the mirror, ask yourself what you would be willing to do or change to get the results you want. You are the only person that can answer that question. Scrolling through social media will only bring you further from yourself.
How do you find your drive? What is going to motivate you to make some changes? And I don’t mean changes that will last a few weeks or a few months, but changes that will be adaptable for the future. What if you started motivating yourself, not by the weight on the scale but on how you feel, how you sleep, how much energy you have in the day, and how patient you are with the people around you. I am not trying to down play aesthetics. Some people really want to lose some weight, others want to change the way they look or fit into a pair of jeans. Most people want to change something about themselves, and usually the starting point is to change some habits around food. Instead of listing some nutritional habits, I think the first thing is to start moving forward, one step at a time. Make the small steps that start to build success. Once you have a foot firmly planted, look ahead to the next step. Nutrition takes time. Changing your habits takes time. And there will be days when you step a little off course. So get back on course and keep moving forward.