That’s right. I said it.
Get healthy is a bad word. (Yes, I know it’s two words. Stretching grammar rules for effect. Just go with it, okay?. 😉
Think about it. How many times have you set out to “get healthy”…and ended up feeling worse?
Worse about yourself. Worse about your body. Worse about “failing.”
Yes, it sucks. No, you’re not the only one.
Here’s why the “get healthy” tools we learned growing up – like diets, bootcamps, and cleanses – go a little sideways sometimes.
The timeline most of us follow when we decide to “get healthy”:
- Something inspires you to take control of your health (i.e., you finally reach the end of your rope with feeling like your body is holding you back in your life).
- You decide to get healthy. You sign up for a bootcamp or grab the latest diet book or download MyFitnessPal. You map out exactly how many calories you’ll eat and how much exercise you’ll do every day for the rest of your life.
- You dive into your new plan with gusto. It goes really well for a while. You lose weight, get toned, feel better. Yay!
- You eventually get tired of feeling like you can’t eat any of the “good stuff,” bored with the exercise routine you’ve done every day for months, or discouraged because you stop seeing results.
- You give up and go back to the way it was before…and feel bad all over again.
Okay, so that’s a simplified version of your experience; but I’m guessing that some of it sounds at least a little familiar. (It certainly does to me.)
Ready for the truth about why that stuff doesn’t work? (FYI: It’s not you.)
First of all, human beings don’t like being told what NOT to do. You’re human (I assume). If I tell you not to eat carbs or chocolate or whatever, what’re you gonna want? Yep. Carbs, chocolate, whatever. Diets work against human nature instead of with it…which is why they never work in the long-term. Simple as that.
While we don’t like being told what we can’t do, we do want to be told exactly what we SHOULD do to lose weight, have more energy, have a flat stomach, whatever.
If you’ve tried to lose weight, eat healthy, or maintain an exercise plan and “failed,”, then you probably don’t trust yourself to ever make it happen. We all feel like a failure in certain areas of our lives. (Yep. Me too.) Totally understandable that you’d want someone else to tell you exactly what to do in that particular area.
But if you do that, you lose touch with your body and the signals it’s sending you to tell you what it actually needs because someone – a diet book or bootcamp instructor – told you “THIS is the way to do it. THIS will work!”. You’ve been locked into a regimented box for so long that you’re afraid to experiment to find foods that work for your body and exercise that you view as fun instead of as punishment. (Maybe you love bootcamps. I hate them.)
To make matters worse, most diets/bootcamps/whatever ignore the fact that you’re a whole person with needs far beyond food and exercise. What about stress? Sleep? A to-do list 10 miles long? Your annoying co-worker who makes you crazy every day at the office? Will your diet book or bootcamp instructor help you with all that? (All of that stuff is more important to your health goals than you might realize.)
Bottom line? Depending on willpower. Forcing yourself into a box based on someone else’s idea of perfection. Stressing out about every morsel of food you put in your mouth. All of these things block you from getting to your goals and make you feel like a failure when you can’t sustain them. Right?
Don’t get me wrong. I understand the appeal of having a step-by-step instruction manual for getting where you want to go.
Unfortunately, your body doesn’t work that way. As soon as you figure out what works for you now, something changes – in your body, in your life, in your environment – that makes the old instruction manual obsolete. Knowing how to be healthy is like a life-long science experiment. (I created The Effortless Eating Program with this in mind…to give you some shortcuts to your own personal science experiment.)
So what’s a girl to do?
Listen to your body. Learn to view its signals (like cravings) with curiosity instead of annoyance. Spend a couple of weeks tuning into how different foods affect your energy, mood, and physical body (and writing all that stuff down in a food diary). You’ll be amazed what you discover when you stop and listen!
Then, do it all over again when something stops working. It’s not as tough as it sounds, I promise.
Now it’s your turn. Tell me in the comments:
- What have you tried in the past to “get healthy”?
- What didn’t work so well? Why?
- What DID work? (Yay!)
P.S. If you’re ready to tune into your body and eat effortlessly, make sure you’re on the list to receive my free video training series (starts September 23rd). Learn simple tweaks you can make now for massive results…without stressing out about every bite you eat. Get on the list.
