Chapter 3 The First Step to Being Successful on Your Journey
After having read a bunch of success stories, you are probably ready to get going on your own journey. You may have noticed how many of these people mentioned their mindset as key to unlocking their potential and best selves.
Most fitness books begin by talking about healthy food, or work-outs. Those are very important parts of weight loss or a healthy lifestyle (and we will discuss those later on), but first let’s begin by talking about the most important (and most-overlooked) aspect affecting weight loss and health: Your mind. How you think about yourself, and your journey, will determine your success.
Change the Way you Think
“The first place we lose the battle is in our own thinking. If you think it’s permanent then it’s permanent. If you think you’ve reached your limits then you have. If you think you’ll never get well then you won’t. You have to change your thinking. You need to see everything that’s holding you back, every obstacle, every limitation as only temporary.” —Joel Osteen
One of the hardest things you will face on this healthy lifestyle journey is changing the way you think. No one is exempt from the negative thoughts about eating unhealthy food—“I wish this was a cheeseburger”—or not wanting to work out (“I’d rather watch TV”). How you handle these thoughts will be the difference between success and giving up.
When you start thinking things like “It’s too early,” “I can’t get up,” “I will start tomorrow,” “This isn’t working,” “It is too hard,” this is when you have to start telling yourself the opposite. When you think, “It is too early,” tell yourself, “Well, if I get up now and work out, I can take a nap later.”
What I have found is that, when people wait to work out later in the day, if they usually work out in the morning, they don’t end up working out later because they get too tired or too busy by the end of the day. Sometimes you have to just force yourself to get up. I have had to do this on many days—but once I am up and moving around, I am ready to work out.
Motivating yourself to push harder also requires a change in your thinking. Having a personal trainer is great, because he or she is going to push you to wake up, to show up, and to do one more rep, but if you are in the gym by yourself, you are going to have to push on your own, when you want to give up.
I work out alone and there are times where I have created a routine for myself and I get to a certain point where I say, “I am tired and I really don’t have to do this last set.” Then I say, “You made this routine up and you said you were going to do it, so let’s get it done.” I push out the last set or routine. Then it’s done.
I will also ask someone to spot me in the gym if I need the spot. When you work out alone, it is difficult to push that last set out once you start to struggle. I look around the gym to see if I can tell if someone knows what they are doing before I ask someone to spot me. Once I find someone, I just walk up and ask. Don’t be scared to ask for help because it will help with thinking “I can’t do any more.”
Let’s say, while taking a class, you are getting tired and feel like you can’t go on. Don’t give up! Slow down, take a small break then jump back in. When I first started doing Tiffany Rothe Workouts, there were some videos where I just had to stop because my muscles were burning or because I was tired. I would stop for maybe 30 seconds to a minute, then I would get back into the work out. I would not stop the video, I would let it play and start where ever she was. I kept doing this until I was strong enough to do the full video workout without stopping.
When it comes to healthy eating and negative thoughts, you have to be strong for yourself. There may be times when you give in to the cravings, but this should not be all the time. You have to be able to tell yourself, “I am not going to eat [fries] today. I can wait to eat this for my free meal.” Another way to get through the negative thought of eating unhealthy food is to always bring your own food not matter where you go.
If you are going to take this journey seriously, there are going to be days where you aren’t going to be able to go out to eat with your co-workers, or you may not be able to eat the pie your mother bought. If they pressure you, you can always tell them, “Maybe next time.” Don’t feel bad about not eating off your plan. Sometimes someone will say, “You’ve been doing good for a long time, you should reward yourself.” This will put negative thoughts in your mind and if you give into them, you will feel guilty later about eating unhealthy food.
Here are some things to remember when it comes to negative thinking:
1. Replace negative thinking with positive thinking.
2. The more you say something, the more you will believe it and then you will do it. If you are always saying, “I can’t eat well,” you will begin to believe it, then you will stop eating healthfully or not try. But if you say, “I can eat healthy food,” and you say it all the time, you will begin to believe it and do it.
3. Remove negative people from your life. You have enough stress with trying to change your own negative thoughts, without other people being negative around you. You need people around you who will encourage you to continue with your journey.
4. Find a support group. There are a lot of great groups out there, with people in it to motivate you and to encourage you to keep going. There are groups on Meet Up, on Facebook and on many other social networking websites.
5. Remember: For every negative thought, there is a positive one, so don’t minimize the positive.
6. Don’t speak negatively about other people.
7. Don’t make stuff up and believe it. Sometimes we will make things up that aren’t true about ourselves or our current situation. No matter what happens to you in life, look at the positive of it, but don’t lie to yourself about reality.
8. Learn to love yourself no matter what you look like. You are a work in progress and this is not going to happen overnight. If you love yourself, you will not put yourself down. Would you tell a child they couldn’t do something? No, you would encourage them to do the best they could. Why not treat yourself that way?
9. Make sure you get 7-8 hours of sleep. Not getting enough sleep can encourage negativity. You end up “too tired” to work out, but then you find yourself awake in bed for hours. That one hour when you could have worked out, you were sitting on the couch watching TV feeling sorry for yourself.
10. Don’t play the victim, or blame someone else for what you know you should have done. This is your healthy lifestyle journey, no one else’s. If you allow someone to take you off your journey, it isn’t their fault, it is your fault. I like to tell people, “You make your own decisions and you have to live with the consequences of those decisions. Sometimes the consequences are good and sometimes they are bad, but it comes from the choice you made. Don’t let others dictate your choices.”
