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Thank you so much for all the love and support from my first two posts last week.  I am so extremely humbled and grateful that so many of you read them.  If any of it resonated with you, I hope that you find what I share here helpful.

I know I mentioned that I would talk about the importance of community and how the gym I found made a difference but before I get to that I have to talk about THE most important part of a journey to change, and that is finding your WHY.

It may seem like there are a lot of other things that are more important to the process – and don’t get me wrong, a why alone will not get you there – but having a why is pretty much the foundation you’re building on and if it’s shaky, wishy-washy, or lacks conviction you’re building a structure that is going to come crashing down.

For me, when it came to getting healthy or losing weight I generally used pieces of clothing or an event coming that I wanted to fit into/look good for…and time after time that was never enough incentive for me to stick with it.  Alternatively some people are really great at sticking with a plan to get them to that event or vacation but as soon as that incentive is gone they have no motivation to stick with it.

 

One time I kept a pair of pants hung on the bedroom wall for a year thinking seeing them all the time would motivate me…eventually they just blended into the background and I hardly noticed them. I found them in the back of my closet in April of 2020 and it was cool to discover they fit but they played no part in motivating me and other than for one triumphant photo, I have yet to wear them.

 

 

 

 

 

I’ve sometimes tried to motivate myself with the opinions of external people as well.  Mom and Dad will be proud.  My husband will be impressed and happy.  That snooty girl I worked with will be put in her place (ok this one is just an all-around terrible reason to do literally anything). But most of the time I find that motivating myself that way actually has an opposite effect; it tends to then make me fixate on the idea that those people are not proud/impressed already.  Which leads to a whole lot of emotional confusion and eventually resentment – over something that probably isn’t even true.  The people in my life love me as I am and while sure, they are absolutely proud when I accomplish something I set out for, they also don’t love me less if I don’t.  Personally I spare myself the unnecessary head games and try to not make how other people will feel about me a factor in why I do what I do.

So what are some why’s that work for me?  I have a few:

  • My health problems flare up much more frequently when I am not eating well or being active but when I am doing the things that I know work for me, my health is much better, so when I feel myself slipping I remember how I feel when I have a flare up – how frustrating the missed time is, how painful it is, how I lose some of my hard earned progress – the desire to not be in that situation again is often enough.
  • My relationship with myself.  For a very long time the self-talk that went on in my head was a loop of negativity that became a self-fulfilling prophecy – I didn’t follow through because I couldn’t follow through so I didn’t follow through.  I didn’t deserve to be better because I didn’t try hard enough so I didn’t deserve to be better.  I hated my body because it was defective so I didn’t take care of my body, so I hated my body – you get the idea.  Everything I told myself fed my unhealthy habits and that just confirmed the message I was telling myself but when I stopped allowing that message into my brain and started respecting my relationship with myself I removed space for treating myself poorly.
  • My nieces.  I know I just said don’t use the opinions of external people but hear me out because this is a little different than doing something because someone will be proud of me – this is driven by the desire for them to never go through the diet culture trap that I did and to grow up loving their bodies and enjoying movement and real food.  I don’t want them to be proud of me, I just don’t want them to ever see anything from me other than me loving my body, being active for the enjoyment of it and eating good food that I enjoy without guilt.  If I do this right, they won’t know to be proud of me for this because they won’t know of it being any other way, so I remind myself all the time that they are watching.  If I can do nothing else in life but leave them with that, I feel that my life will be successful.

 

The thing about the first two why’s is that they required a bit of proof that what I do now works, which I obviously didn’t have when I started.  So how did I get to them?  My first why was “I don’t want to live like this anymore and I am tired of hating myself.”  That was it.  I was sick and tired of being sick and tired, of punishing myself for what I ate, for feeling like every decision I made was around what my mind or body couldn’t do, so I decided to try just loving myself and doing everything I could to show my body I appreciated it for what it did do.  Sometimes finding a why is as simple as hitting rock bottom and deciding that instead of accepting that this is your new home and setting up a depressing shanty town to live in, you are going to build upwards – it doesn’t happen overnight but wanting to be heading there, even if it’s slow, more than you want to just stay where you are, is enough.

Everyone’s why is going to be different – what motivates me may not motivate you.  What matters is that the why has to be enough and the fact is that sometimes that’s going to change too.  I had been sick for years and heard many times that exercise might help – but could never use that as enough of a motivator to get moving and for a long time I felt a lot of shame that I was a sick person who was not motivated to take better care of myself.  Who would essentially CHOOSE to live like I did and not do absolutely everything in their power to better their situation?  Even typing that puts a pit in my stomach.

That mentality is a massive oversimplification of a very big and complicated issue and the bottom line is that we don’t always have all the tools to do what we should do.  I’m sure you’ve heard the Maya Angelou quote before “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.”  It is absolutely true and a quote I repeat all the time.  I cannot beat myself up for what I did before I knew better.  But there is a difference between knowing something and having the tools to act on something.  The vague advice of “eat healthy and exercise” was not knowledge; I couldn’t do better with that.  And changing my negative thought patterns?  Well that took YEARS of practice that I still do to this day.  Being told to change how I look at something is not the same as deliberately challenging negative thoughts every single day.  It took me nearly two decades of reading endless self-help books, trying every diet I came across, some therapy and researching exercise and nutrition to discover what worked for me and until I did that, nothing was going to work. But once I learned the tools to be better I used them.  And now I do better.

I didn’t get anywhere overnight.  I had to get rid of all the stuff that was in the way of my new why – all the times I’d tried to build on questionable foundations and ended up with piles of rubble.  If I didn’t deal with those I was never going to get anywhere, but I took what I could from those experiences and used it to build.  I’m far from perfect but I’m a hell of a lot further from my rock bottom than I was and that’s what matters.

My why is what my life is built on and what drives the majority of the choices I make each day – not just when it comes to my health but everything else.  How I spend my free time, how I interact with others, what I read, what I buy…everything.  And having that integration – that unifying reason for doing everything that I do – makes all of it easier because it all supports each other.  I cook each week because I want to make us healthy food that saves us money from going out for meals,  but I am also setting an example for my nieces showing myself love by taking care of myself AND eating things I enjoy; that makes committing to that time each week a no-brainer and over time I’ve found ways to make it enjoyable for myself, but when my why was to look good in a bikini? It’s easy to see now why that wasn’t as motivating as I hoped it would be.

Figure out your why – clear the clutter, the debris from the failed attempts to build on bad foundations, the distractions that aren’t motivating you and start to build on it – one brick, stick or grain of sand at a time.