Committing to Change

Change is hard. There, I said what everyone is thinking right now. Changing your socks is easy, but changing habits and ways of thinking definitely are not. We humans love our routines. They're comfortable and reliable, and when we're forced out of them it's a bit traumatic. When we try to make ourselves move out of our routines, no matter how positive the result will be, we still resist the change because we just innately don't like it.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I'm just as bad as anyone else.

New Year's is that time of year when a lot of people make an effort to change their lifestyle to be more healthy – usually just focusing on diet and/or exercise. The majority of people fail to make the change permanent.

Personally, I think it's because we don't truly understand why we're making the change in the first place. We may well be having post-holiday guilt over all the food we enjoyed that was primarily responsible for packing on several extra pounds, or we may be looking at ourselves naked in a mirror and thinking about summer and how short a time 6 months really is to turn ourselves around and look good in bathing suits. What we don't consider are the mental and emotional impacts of our diet/exercise changes, and ultimately I think that's why so many fail to stick with it. So here are a few questions to ponder before you take the plunge into a new set of healthy routines.

1. Is your diet/exercise change something temporary, or do you intend for it to be permanent? (Permanent changes are generally more successful.)
2. How much research have you done into the changes you're doing? Are there positive/negative side effects you haven't thought of?
3. Are you ready to put your changes into place tomorrow? If not, why?
4. Are you doing it to be healthy?
5. Are you doing it for the sake of vanity? (Which is also OK)
6. Are you doing it out of guilt, because you think you should or someone else has told you that you should?
7. Are you going into this dreading it before you start? (That's the quickest way to self-sabotage.)
8. Are you being 100% responsible for your plan, or are you relying on others to keep you on track?
9. In what way are you planning to measure success? At what interval?
10. Have you made both short-term and long-term goals, and mapped out when they should be met?

Here's the truth as I see it. Planned permanent changes usually have a higher success rate. Planned temporary changes are far too easy to give up on, because you don't have a lot of energy invested in them. If you haven't done any research into what you're planning to start doing on 1/1, you have already set yourself up to fail because you don't know what you're doing. If you're not ready aside from a last-minute trip to the store tomorrow, you're really not ready to start on 1/1. If you're doing it out of guilt, you're going to resent doing it so fast you'll probably be eating doughnuts before 1/31.

If you're planning a diet/exercise change for your health, or vanity, those are some pretty good reasons to do it and you'll have a better chance of sticking with it. If you've made yourself accountable to other people about your changes, you have a 50/50 chance of sticking with it or coming up with excuses about why you're not able to. If you're already bemoaning the lack of pizza in your future, you need to either re-think your attitude or re-think your plan. Unless you're dealing with an allergy or another health issue, most modern diet/exercise plans have a “cheat day” built into them just so you don't feel deprived.

None of this is designed to have you quit or give up on your plans for recreating yourself. Hopefully the questions I'm posing are making you think about your plans and giving you some analytical tips to make them more solid and increase your success rate.

As for me? Well, for both health and vanity, I'm pretty willing to give up pizza. I'll be eating smarter, planning my meals in advance, and exercising daily for at least 20 minutes. Part of my problem is that I sit down and read too much instead of getting up and being active, so that's my biggest hurdle to overcome. If I'm still exercising at least 20 minutes a day by the end of March, I'll be pretty happy with myself. If I'm still doing that minimum by the end of September, I probably won't even think about it because it'll just be part of my day. But honestly, that's the long-term goal I really want to achieve. My weight or my waist size are really kind of inconsequential to that.

The last time I really put a major effort into moving to a healthier lifestyle, I did great for about 8 weeks. I dropped about 10% of my body fat in those 8 weeks, I felt fantastic, and I started getting all sorts of positive attention in both my personal and professional life.

And that last part, oddly enough, was the problem.

I didn't know how to handle feeling SO great. I sort of missed being tired and taking a nap.  I was upset that people at work were taking me more seriously than when I was a couch potato, because I was the same person inside, wasn't I? And in my personal life, people who wouldn't look at me twice were definitely expressing interest. It felt so shallow, and I felt like who I was inside didn't seem to matter to anyone except me. The exercise tapered off, the junk food started to creep back in, and I just gave up and put the weight back on.

But I'm older now, my sense of self has increased, and I really don't give two figs about whether people treat me differently because I'm going to take my body on the trip from flab to fabulous. If I run into physical limitations that slow me down, then I'll adapt instead of giving up. If I don't achieve my daily goals on Tuesday, I'll try harder to achieve them on Wednesday. I think the only part of the journey I'm not sure how to plan for is the “exercise fatigue” that tends to set in when you get bored with what you're doing. Who knows, maybe I'll save my tax return until the end of March, and if I'm still exercising daily I might just buy myself a bicycle so I can go for rides on the weekends.

With whatever you choose to do, change or not change, small or large, I wish you more than luck. I wish you clarity, determination, and a positive attitude. You do have the willpower to resist all temptation, and to achieve your goals.

Blessings,

Alan