These past couple weeks have been, shall we say, challenging for me.  Not bad per say, just a much higher rating on the causing anxiety scale – pulled in a few different directions, worried about some things and some tasks that I’d been putting off suddenly needed to be dealt with – like now; all at the same time.

This is always when I struggle to stay on track with diet and fitness.  They are the easiest things to skip when things get busy or stressful or I feel like I’m just too tired.  Somehow it’s like they’re luxuries that are optional, not necessities that I require. How did we get to the point where the house being dusty seems more important than a workout?  I don’t know, but I think that it’s common for most of us to feel that way.  

I know deep down though, that I am a better, more alert, more energetic, more productive and happy person when I prioritize both diet and exercise.  They don’t need to be all consuming – but they do need to be there MOST days.  I’m not saying we can’t have a busy day when we skip the workout and eat nothing but drive-thru, one day is fine and not usually that hard to bounce back from – it’s when it turns into two days and then three…and then a week that it becomes harder to recover and easier to default to our old norms.  This is the time when it’s going to come down to remembering your why and you will have to ask yourself – how bad do you want it?

A couple years ago I saw someone post the quote “your new life is going to cost you your old one.”  Originally I scoffed and thought, ‘wow way to make people not want to make changes, tell them they have to give up everything!’  And really, ya, that on it’s own might be really overwhelming for people and make them feel like they can’t make a change because they’ll have to give up too much but the more I thought about that quote, the more I realized that it’s true, but maybe not in the way that people are going to think.

Five years ago if I had started trying to “get healthy” I would have crash dieted by giving up carbs or heavily restricting calories and bought myself a new DVD program that required six days a week.  It would go fine for a few days, or a week, but the first day I couldn’t adhere to it I would have binge ate, felt like a failure and determined that I was getting back on the wagon tomorrow – and then tomorrow would come and I would maybe half-ass go back to it, but also feel like I was hungover from the food (and maybe alcohol) binge the day before and not had the motivation so it wouldn’t have been 100%…and then after a few days of that I would give up.  I would TELL myself that I was going to start again the next Monday but in reality it would take MONTHS to get up the energy to make a giant attempt like that again.

Now?  There is no room for any of that.  Sure if I have something coming up and feel like I want to quickly lose a few pounds it can be tempting to starve myself “just for a few days” – but my new life has NO SPACE for the psychological damage that those behaviours cause for me.  If I want to lose a few pounds, I do it the way that I know works – I decrease my calorie intake by a couple hundred each day and keep an eye on it for a bit.  It’s slower.  It’s not exciting.  There’s no (insane) sense of triumph that I managed to exist on 800 calories a day.  But I want my long term health, both mental and physical, more than I want to look “my best” for one day in a bathing suit or in photos or WHATEVER short term thing it is.

Five years ago when I got home from work everyday I was drained and exhausted. (Every. Single. Day.)  And I was convinced that I needed to sit down and rest.  If it was a particularly stressful day I definitely ‘needed’ a drink.  And if I didn’t have to feed anyone else I ate either cheese and (an entire box of) crackers or a bowl of cereal. Then I would turn on the TV and watch whatever it was I was binging at the time.

In my new life, well to start, I’m not drained and exhausted every day.  I have had a drink because of stress ONCE in the last year and a half (I’ll talk about alcohol in another post) but because I have classes to get to I can’t just crack a beer at 4 PM. I meal prep in advance so that food is available for me when I am hungry. I don’t watch TV much during the week anymore but that’s also partly because I work most evenings now so I can’t accurately compare that.  I will say though that even on days when I’m tired mid-day and think I just want to watch TV I always ask myself if it’s going to make me feel better or worse…because if I use it to avoid doing something else that I will regret later then I don’t want to do it.  

The reality is that gaining a new life IS going to cost you your old one. You can’t change, without making changes. Your life is going to be different. But not in the all or nothing way people assume or try to manage. If you want to workout, you have to find the time to do it somewhere so that might mean you spend less time on the couch and you will eat fewer snacks.  That’s not to say you won’t EVER sit on the couch and eat snacks, but how you go about it now will have to go.

And once you make the change you have to stop pining for the “default mode” – stop glamorizing it and remembering it with rose coloured glasses – because let’s face it, if it was that great you wouldn’t have wanted the change.  When I started running I would get home from work feeling tired and have to CONVINCE myself not to just revert to a beer on the couch.  I would get it in my head on the way home that I was too tired, that I deserved a break, that I needed to rest…and of course, take rest days, those are absolutely vital, but the days that I ran I felt 1000% better and when I collapsed on the couch with cereal and a beer I felt like utter crap.  When I ran, I slept better at night.  When I spent 6 hours scrolling through my phone and watching TV I tossed and turned and couldn’t figure out why I was NEVER feeling rested in the morning.

Trying to convince myself that I ‘needed’ to sit on the couch because I was too tired wasn’t about whether or not I was going to feel better or I enjoyed it more, it was about taking the easy, comfortable and familiar road.  Wistfully thinking “man I wish I could still just lay around and do nothing” is like thinking “man I really miss that ex-boyfriend who used to take me to fancy restaurants all the time” – ya sure, it was nice sometimes – until it came time to pay rent and he didn’t have his half.  Eventually, even in the moment when we were at the fancy restaurants and I should have been feeling special and glamorous, I couldn’t really enjoy it because I knew where it was going, and it didn’t feel good.  Pretty much the same feeling as too much time on the couch.

But whether it’s leaving someone who makes you feel bad or repeating a behaviour that makes you feel bad – it’s still giving up the comfortable and familiar.  And that is why you have to want the change. Shaming people into wanting to improve their health and lifestyle doesn’t work because big changes, even when they’re positive, are still hard.  There is still stuff you have to give up that you would rather not.  Ask anyone who has lost everything because of drugs or alcohol – of course they didn’t want that, of course they want to make it better, but for most it doesn’t just automatically make it easy to never get high again or take another drink.  Even when we KNOW that our behaviours are bad for us (or even destructive and life-threatening) that doesn’t just make them easy to stop.  It would be great if it worked that way but it doesn’t.

And that’s why we have to have a why, and that why has to be big and something you want bad enough to step out of your comfortable default mode.

With running it was never about the physical part. For me it was that I never finished BIG things like that.  I wanted SO BADLY to be someone who committed to something huge and accomplished it.  I wanted to be someone with integrity and to be able to trust my promises to myself for the first time in my life.  And I wanted that badly enough to run even when I didn’t actually want to do the running.  Burning calories or weight loss wasn’t going to be enough to get me out the door.  That was what I ALWAYS used as a motivator and it didn’t work.  My old methods of motivating myself had to go.

The God’s honest truth is that even if how we’re living now doesn’t make us feel good, it’s easier than the work it takes to make changes.  It’s easier to convince ourselves that what we have now is enough.  We ‘don’t have the energy’ to do what it takes to have what we secretly want so we just accept what we have.  And I can spout motivation and why’s, and tips and tricks until I’m blue in the face but those still aren’t going to make it easy.  A little simpler, yes.  More sustainable, yes. Less complicated, yes. Easy, no.

But one thing I can tell you is this, when you want it bad enough, shedding that old life and gaining a new one that you sacrificed and put in the work for, is absolutely worth it.

Like it or not, your new life is going to cost you your old one – so how bad do you want it?