“I’ll start eating healthily and exercising again when I get back from holiday… after the baby’s born… when I finish writing my thesis… next year… next week.” Does that kind of “pause-button mentality” sound familiar?
If you’ve ever found yourself saying something like that, here’s a harsh piece of reality for you: You could be jeopardising your health and overall health.
Many people who start out on their fitness journey think that if they miss a workout or eat the wrong thing one day, they’ve failed and need to take a time out...But your health is a long-term investment, more of a marathon than a sprint. So, we don’t believe in wagons to fall off of. It’s inevitable that throughout your life, you’ll make some bad nutritional choices, or let a few workouts go – that’s normal. It doesn’t mean you need to stop completely until the “time is right” again. Taking a break from your program is one of the best ways to destroy your health and fitness for good.
Starting fresh is a very comforting thought for many people
That’s why people love writing out New Year’s Resolutions around this time of year. They allow themselves to indulge as much as they want over the Christmas period, because they’ll start eating healthily “next year”…But the problem of delaying looking after your health ‘until the new year’ is that you only really get better at improving your pausing skills!
Whether it’s leaving it until tomorrow, next week, or the new year, people get a deep sense of relief from being able to push that imaginary pause button. You get a sense of temporary relief when you’re struggling to keep the pace.
And we understand completely. It can be extremely hard to prioritise healthy eating habits and training when you’re undergoing stress, moving house, raising children, taking a holiday.
That’s why there is an abundance of “10-day” results programs and “60-day money-back” guarantees. They seem like the easy solution and you can fit them into your life. But, if it sounds too good to be true, that’s because it probably is. After all, what do “get fit quick” programs teach you? To concentrate on your health for short, intensive periods of time. What they don’t teach you is how to instil sustainable fitness habits that you can stick to for life.
Most of these get-fit-quick programs are destined to failure because they simply aren’t sustainable. They place your mind and body under a lot of stress and follow rigid and radical restrictions and guidelines that will see all the weight piling back on as soon as you finish.
What to do?
When life seems overwhelming, you’re moving house, a baby is coming, you’re slammed at work But, when you go through periods like that, you have to realise that something is better than nothing. Making a small effort to focus on your health is better than no effort at all, because at the end of the day – life keeps on happening.
You’ll soon realise that if you keep pressing pause, it will eventually turn into STOP mode, for good. There will simply never be a perfect time to press the PLAY button again. The key thing to remember here is that there really is no pause button in life. You can’t stop the world from turning and things happening to you. They won’t suddenly get easier because the calendar flips over and a new year arrives.
Don’t get thrown off course when things don’t go your way, it’s more than likely you’ll hit bumps in the road, but try to come up with ways to make things easier for yourself and remember, you're doing fantastically!
