If you've ever had a fitness goal and reached it, you probably know how easy it is to get a "fall-back". Why is this happening to us over and over again? I came to realize that it's because we're planning for it before we even start planning our workout!
The cookie on the pedestal
So what do I mean by planning a fall-back ahead of time? When we promise ourselves a new years resolution or some big goal that we want to achieve, there is usually a cookie waiting for us down the road. Before we are considering what training program and what meal plan we are going to follow, we are setting a goal and a corresponding reward for ourselves.
I won't eat pizza again before I loose 10 pounds!
Sounds familiar? I know. I do it myself. I've come to realize that the cookie we put on the pedestal, the ultimate goal we want to achieve, becomes the pizza. Not the healthy lifestyle or sexy body!
When pizza becomes our cause, not the lifestyle change, we are planning to fail, and we will! What I am trying to say is, eat pizza during diet, bro. The longer you refrain from eating it, and the bigger of a deal you make about it, the stronger will the feelings be when you finally get to eat it. The purpose of a lifestyle change is to loosen the emotional attachments we have to things that are bad for us, and instead increase them to things that are good for us. In the context mentioned above, the goal should have been to slowly stop worshiping pizza and instead become fond of veggies and unprocessed foods.
Sabotaging your results
Diet is not the only area of our lives, where we sabotage our results, by rewarding ourselves with something, that is in direct conflict with our goals. Try to think about all the areas in life, where you do this and write them down. Visualize how they have been impacting your life, how they currently are impacting it, and how they will in the future, with the mindset that you currently have.
In my case, I think about my first software development job. When I applied for it, and they gave me that Java/Spring/Hibernate/Mysql/HTML/CSS/Javascript/TDD assignment to prove myself, I was overwhelmed. I had only had a single basic course in Java at that time, and I didn't know much about programming. I had two weeks to finish it, but I did not know what Spring and Hibernate were or how to do Test Driven Development. Furthermore, I had never created a homepage before. I knew what HTML was and some basic stuff, but I have never used it.
I took the next two weeks off from college and I was determined to learn all these things in the time I was given. In those two weeks I've binge-watched more than 100 videos on Spring and Hibernate (I shit you not), studied HTML, read articles about TDD and so much more, that I can't even remember. I had all this potential and I've unleashed it all in one surge, and ended up getting the job. What happened next is what this article is about. I started becoming lazy. I did not study additionally in my free time like I used to do. I've fought and I've won, now was the time to relax. After all I would surely learn the things I currently lack at work, right? It's partly true, but I did not learn nearly as much as I'd like, since it was a part time job, and I would forget half the things I've learned last week, every week.
I was sabotaging my results. I should have learned even harder after achieving my goal, so my knowledge would keep improving instead of stagnating, or worse, disappear. Knowledge, just like muscle mass, has to be maintained and improved upon. We humans forget, and do get dumber every day if we stop learning.
Stop sabotaging your results. The goal is not the end, but the start of a new goal!
I am a huge believer of fitting fitness around your lives. Many people fail to reach their goals because they are too rigid and unforgiving in their approach which is unsustainable.
Yes people tend to ignore the small steps that make the difference. Instead they see this all or nothing game (which btw. most of the time defaults to nothing).
Beautiful post