Once or twice each year, I post something that’s not football or Arkansas Razorbacks related. Camp hasn’t started for Arkansas football yet, but we’re getting ready. I realize that this is a little off-beat. To those of you looking for something a little different today, thank you for your patience.
Across the social media, cyber friends post their successes with fitness and eating better, but it’s worrisome about how many out there who keep their failures quiet. Maybe this post can help you quiet ones.
Get Marketing Pitches & Pop Fitness Out of Your Heads Now!
“Muscle confusion and gluteal amnesia”….Call me back when your ass gets a brain or muscles begin to think.
“Only 20 minutes a day with our fabulous program will make you a god!” Here’s a hint. Giving a solid effort of 20 minutes a day for only five days per week on just about any fitness routine will make you more physically fit!
“Our product is a fat free food.” If their pitch scares you away from fat into eating a food loaded with SUGAR (which contains zero fat for someone who honestly might not know), you won’t find it helpful.
“Six-pack abs can be yours.” If they told you beforehand that you need a relatively low level of body fat first so that the definition in your abdominals would actually appear, you wouldn’t buy their product NOW, would you?
“Our 90-day program will have you ripped!” For this one, there is no snap response. It is the heart of the problem.
Let Go & Accept That Physical Fitness is for the Rest of Your Life
What are you going to do the other 275 days of the year after the 90-day program is done? Do you need to buy another one? What about the 365 days of the year after or each year after that? If you are relying on someone else to guide you, you’ll constantly search for the answers to those questions when you’re the best one to guide yourself in the first place.
Before you take an exercise step or cut one calorie, accept physical fitness and eating better as basic parts your life as much as getting up in the morning, brushing your teeth, or combing your hair. They aren’t Herculean labors requiring supreme sacrifice, and they aren’t mountains that you try and fail to move. No, think about where you are in terms of physical fitness and eating better in terms of Red describing Andy Dufrense’s escape in The Shawshank Redemption:
Freedom and a world molded to the way you want awaits.
Starting at Endgame
Had you never seen this post and started any exercise program or diet which you plowed through with some success, at some point you would find that your initial motivations would lessen or disappear, and what’s left is where you should really start now.
In the end, your efforts and satisfaction are personal. For once in your life, it IS all about you. No one else can put forth the effort and no one feels your own satisfaction for you. They never walk a foot in your skin. It’s not about how many heads you turn or some number you achieve, or whatever pop fitness tries to sell you. It’s about doing something good for yourself that’s with you regardless of whether the world around you is great or going to hell in a handbasket.
You Define Winning and Embrace Being a Winner
Get used to the idea that the only failure here can be for not trying to improve over time. If you think you need to accomplish some goal in a certain amount of time, understand that others’ perceptions of you don’t change overnight, even if you are able to meet your goal. The person you haven’t seen in a while will be the first to notice, and the one you’re around everyday likely won’t. Either way it takes time.
If you want to walk and can only manage to go up the street and back, do it! If you get used to walking up the street and back without any problems, walk up the street and around the corner and back, or pick something to cut back on that you eat. Every day that you do something to improve is one day that you win because you are better for it. No one, not even you, can vacate those wins.
Embrace the mindset that you win. It’s what you do. The fact that you struggle today or even for a month, doesn’t change how you approach your next opportunity to do better. Step up. It’s your time to win so embrace it. Embrace it with the same rock-hard determination and persistence of the tortoise chasing the hare, because in this race, you’ve got to love the turtle because he’s the one you need to be running with.
Gain with Strain not Pain
Almost everyone makes physical fitness and eating better more complicated than it is. Shave off a couple hundred calories in your diet which probably means giving up next to nothing and walk off another hundred. However, as it becomes easier to do, let go of another hundred or two – the amount of calories in a soda — or walk a little farther. Listen, the old standard of one pound of fat equaling 3,500 calories or 4,000 calories isn’t perfect, but you will never find some perfect calculation, and you don’t need some long lecture on metabolism, or how varying dietary portions really don’t matter, or relative tissue densities of fat v. bone v. muscle. Effort, a continually and gradually increasing effort, with both eating and exercise works in time. You can make it!
If you want to do some program, do yourself a favor and make sure that it’s more than realistic. So many people think that they can hit the cabbage diet or no-carb diet or plug in the P90X, and all they end up doing is to abandoning it after a a few days. How does that help you for life? One last time, accept it and embrace your daily accomplishments for as many years as God has you on this earth. That’s all it takes really, pressure and time…and a little faith that it will happen.
A shout out goes to my all of my “bunker buddies” on twitter with particular mention to wallshark84, hotpinkhippie, and razorchic21 who have all tweeted about their experiences. – Sharp
