Here it is, my first written post for 2017. Hard to believe I’ve gone over three weeks without updating my blog, but a week ago my mother returned to Canada after visiting us for over two weeks, and I’m just now getting back into a few of my lifestyle rhythms and catching up on a few tasks, mostly related to audiobooks I’m narrating and producing. But there are two lifestyle habits I didn’t stop while she was visiting:
- Writing
- Working out
I continued to be on my laptop writing things or editing things I’ve written in the last year, as well as preparing content that will be posted on my blog soon. I also continued to head to the gym 3 times during each week. However, I can’t say I did as good of a job remaining disciplined in my diet with all the occasions we went out to eat with my mom. But, I’m happy to say I haven’t lost any ground in my weight loss! I just didn’t lose any more weight or go further down the scale.
That being said, I’ve noticed at my gym that I have to get there about an hour early to claim one of the stationary bikes in my spinning class or else they’re all taken if I get there merely on time. In fact, last Friday night, not only was the class of about 30 bikes packed out, but they brought in at least three new machines. I don’t believe this spike in attendance at my gym is due exclusively to New Year’s resolutions, but here in Peru it’s now summer time, so I’m sure some people are motivated to form their outdoor beach bodies as well. I know I sorta am. I’ve never worked on my tan before. I’ve never gone swimming because I would conveniently “forget” to bring my bathing suit when I was overweight — well, more overweight than I am now.
Anyway, as I’ve reached the six month mark in my exercise and dieting, and though I haven’t reached my goal of 90 kg (I’m barely hovering around 99 kg at the moment), I’m in better shape than I was before. And if one looks closely, you can see a bubble under each of my sleeves that definitely wasn’t there 6 months ago. I find I have more agility and stamina. I’m going to keep doing this, whether I get my weight down further or not.
As I look back over the years and years of making excuses to myself of why I couldn’t do this or thought I wouldn’t be able to, I now wonder why I believed myself. I fell for things like,
“I’m not a ‘gym’ person.”
“I can’t do it unless I have a partner.”
“I don’t have the disciple/time.”
“I costs too much for me right now to get a gym membership.”
And on and on. And then if we do overcome these lies we tell ourselves, we often tell ourselves other ones instead like “I will go to the gym, just tomorrow“, “I will do this or carry out that goal once I’ve done this or that” or “I’ll get around to it eventually.”
If we do decide to pursue a goal, we don’t actually take any concrete steps towards it, but just push into the future, believing that intentions are the same thing as setting goals.
But now that I’m on the other side of the hill, at least when it comes to exercise, I can see more clearly that there literally was nothing in my life proving those statements to be true. They were self-told lies.
What lies are you listening to? Is there actually anybody in your life telling you “you can’t do that”? Probably not. We are our own worst enemy.
I’m in a few writers groups, and one thing I keep hearing over and over is a variation on “a traditional publisher would never publish my book.” I thought maybe that’s true, since an awful lot of self-published books I pick up are definitely um, how shall we say… self-published for a reason. But many are not. I also used to make the assumption that if people were telling me this themselves, then they must know. Until I started asking people who say this to me “what makes you say that? Did you submit a manuscript to any and get rejected?” And to my surprise, 100% of the time the answer has been “no.”
Then how do you know if you would get that book rejected unless you try? The worst that can happen is they DO reject you and you’re proven right.
But if not? How would you know if not for simply believing your own self-doubting?
Maybe for you it’s not weight loss or book writing, but what lies are you telling yourself that you truly won’t know unless you go for it?
