Remember it’s about Progress not Perfection

As you progress along a journey towards fitness and the body and lifestyle you want you will most like spend a little bit of time contemplation how far away you are from your eventual goal, or at least I did. There were many, and I mean many, times along my journey where someone would comment about how much weight I lost and how good l looked and all I would think was how much more weight I had to lose. Even as I was seeing numbers on the scale and sizes of clothes that I hadn’t seen in two decades I still beat myself up because there was still work to do. Now while it is good to be honest with yourself and acknowledge the work you still have in front of you focusing too much on this differential is a common reason people give up, they figure they are so far away from their goal they won’t ever get there so they might as well quit. This is when it is important to keep your focus on the progress you have made not the perfection you visualize.

Why do we do this? It seems weird that we wouldn’t just be happy with the progress we made and keep moving forward instead of focusing on some ideal that we are aiming for that seems so far away. Well part of the problem is the constant exposure we get to this “perfect body” ideal. Television, movies, magazines and even those people at the gym all look better than us no matter how hard we are working so why bother? Well the reason to bother is because long term weight loss doesn’t happen overnight. Even if you follow the plan I did and recommend you only have the large weight loss in the first handful of months, after that you are building a long term dietary plan and the weight loss slows down. The trade off is you will not only build long term healthy eating habits but you will keep all the weight you lost off for the long term and all the hard work you did won’t go to waste.

Focusing on your progress helps keep you from getting discouraged and falling off the weight loss wagon. There are a host of tricks you can use to remind yourself of how far you have come. Put on some of your fatter clothes and see how funny you look in clothes that are a couple sizes too big for you. Go buy a new pair of pants in a size you haven’t seen in a while. Look at current pictures of yourself compared to pictures of you in your heavier days. Think twenty pounds isn’t a lot to lose? Try carrying around two ten pound dumbbells for a couple hours and you will see exactly how much twenty pounds is. Check back on your past weights that you charted and see how just a short time ago you were much bigger. You will get to your goal eventually if you stay focused, stay on the program and give yourself the time you need to make it .

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