Starting Over

The biggest and best lesson I've learned about fitness in the 7 years I've been involved in the industry is that the key to success is to ALWAYS START OVER when you feel you've fallen off the wagon. The only way you can truly fail at reaching your goals is by refusing to start over.

Sometimes you fall off the wagon for a year or more. Believe me, I've been there. Sometimes it only a week or a day. Sometimes its not your fault, like having an illness or injury. Sometimes you fall out of love with your class, weight routine, or the gym altogether. Sometimes you feel like you'll simply die if you deprive yourself of one more donut, so you break down and have one. But whatever the reason, you're only a failure if you stay there and don't start over.

Starting over is extremely hard. It can take weeks or months to form a habit of working out and eating healthfully. A couple of bad days in a row can be enough to derail you. I know this is the case for me. My most recent example is this...

Three weeks ago I started a new nutrition program designed to torch fat, with the aim of finally revealing this six-pack I KNOW is under here somewhere. At the end of that first week, I had amazing success and felt tremendously accomplished and proud of myself for staying so dedicated to the plan and amping up my workouts as well. I lost 3 pounds that week and could feel how much closer I was to that six-pack. I felt so inspired to continue and keep seeing results.

Then I woke up that Saturday morning with a fever, body-aches, a sore throat and a heinous cough. (Don't automatically assume the illness was caused by what may seem to you a "restrictive diet". I caught the cold from my poor ill husband.) This cold had me glued to my bed, slathered in vaporub, doped up on nyquil and sucking down steam from the humidifier for three straight days. After about a week, the fever, aches and sore throat finally subsided but the cough held on with a vengeance. And the weakness I was left with after a straight week of having absolutely no appetite would not allow me to go back to the gym for another whole week.

Needless to say, once my appetite finally came back, all I wanted was ice cream, soda and greasy pizza. And I had it. Oh, did I have it. I felt I deserved something indulgent after being punished for two straight weeks with that horrible illness!

But now I'm at that starting over point. I feel flabby, sluggish and all-around unhealthy... and I HATE this feeling. I know that the only way to get my energy back is to get back to the gym and start feeding my body what it needs, not what it thinks it wants. I feel very frustrated at having missed two weeks at the gym and employing no will power in my nutrition. But I'm starting over! I can get past this two-week bump in the road and it will just be a horrible memory. If I start over, I can be back to feeling amazing in no time, and that is how to you avoid failure. Plain and simple.

Here's to starting over! As always, your comments or questions are welcome.

Mandee