Reasons you’re eating that have nothing to do with hunger:
- Emotion/Stress
- It’s In Front of You
- Boredom
- It’s Free
- You’re Tired
- Clean-Plate Syndrome
- Can’t Say No To Food Pushers
Coming up with a plan to address each of these scenarios will help you combat the desire to undue your hard work.
A simple idea, contained within a single book, can unlock a world of opportunity.
The best part is that you don’t even need to know what you’re looking for.
Just read. Read a lot. Read different things. No piece of information is irrelevant or useless.
You can’t connect the dots to new ideas if the dots don’t exist in the first place.
One thing people don’t expect to battle when they start to make healthy changes: Enablers and saboteurs.
There are often two common categories people fall into in how they respond to these events:
1) The “self-righteous” health-nut who puts themselves above others because of their new lifestyle. They’re on a new diet and makes sure everyone knows it.
2) Individuals who allow themselves to be swayed by the suggestions of others. They intend to make healthier choices but give-in and go against their own wishes.
Falling directly into either category spells trouble for you. Instead, you want to be firm, but polite.
At the end of the day, no relationship is going to be ruined by declining food or drinks at a party. Unless, of course, that relationship already sucked.
Imitation is a dangerous game.
When people are successful, we look to them for clues for why they were successful.
A lot of wildly successful people do some crazy things. We mistakenly believe this crazy stuff is the reason they were successful, when in reality, they were successful despite those eccentricities.
The Rock (Dwayne Johnson) reports sleeping only a few hours each night. Some people might think this shortened sleep contributes to his success. Except that sleeping for only three hours a day is absolutely insane and doesn’t contribute positively to anything except feeling like a zombie.
We know that not sleeping is crazy.
When you hear a friend is losing a bunch of weight because they cut out fruit, or stopped eating carbs, or some other wild habit, chances are, it helped them lose weight because in the process they also covered the basics. (Whether purposefully or accidentally.) Those habits helped put them in the calorie deficit they needed to lose weight.
Weight loss is hard enough, let’s not make it unnecessarily harder.
Two reasons to start traveling right now:
#1 You learn how we’re different.
When you travel you are entering yourself into a new way of life. Through different customs, rituals, and food you’re able to experience the uniqueness of different cultures.
Without experiencing these differences, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking your way is the only way.
#2 You learn how we’re all the same.
At the end of the day, we all share a similar human experience. We look forward to fun activities with our friends on the weekends. We enjoy going out for a nice meal and eating too many calories in dessert. We want to feel useful, loved, and appreciated.
In today’s world, these things—an appreciation of our differences and a recognition of our sameness—are needed now more than ever.
The decision to enjoy yourself and the decision to want good health can coexist.
You don’t have to be confined to bland foods and restrictive behaviors, but you do have to be responsible.
Here’s my quick advice for the occasional guilt-free treat:
1) Don’t make it a habit. “Occasional” is the keyword here.
2) Make it a conscious choice. Take ownership over your decision, no matter if it “goes against” your goals at that moment.
3) Make it worth it. Don’t just snack on store-bought cookies and chips all the time. If you want to treat yourself, get the very best. Not to mention, access to these special treats naturally prevents repetitive exposure.
Aren’t life’s hardships—its pain—what make life, beautiful?
That oxymoronic duality of pain and pleasure.
It reminds me of a chapter in the Tao Te Ching (paraphrased):
“Tall and short give measure to each other. Difficult and easy create each other…“
Without life’s pain there would be no pleasure. We need some of the bad to be able to see and feel and recognize all the magnificent beauty of being alive.
You have every right to change your mind and do things differently.
When we step out of our comfort zones we often don’t feel like ourselves, and choosing to do something different can challenge our concept of who we are.
In his book, Influence, Robert Cialdini discusses that humans have an innate desire to be consistent in their behavior. Every decision we make, and action we take, carves itself into our identity.
Some might even feel like they are a fraud for doing something different. (Changing careers, for example.)
Here’s the good news: your identity is what you choose it to be. Growth requires doing things differently, and to become the person you want to become you have to leave the old version of yourself behind.
Yes, you are behaving in a manner inconsistent with your previous behavior. That’s okay, because you’re better now.
Freedom through structure.
This isn’t a statement about patriotic freedom. It’s a statement about the freedom that comes from feeling in control of your day-to-day, instead of feeling like you’re trying to juggle while perpetually in state of falling over.
When we prioritize too many things, nothing is a priority.
When nothing is a priority, nothing gets accomplished.
Learn how to shift focus. Use a schedule and plan your day–even personal time.
That is how you get your life back, with more structure. Not less.
No matter how much money you throw at trying to solve your fitness problems, you still have to do the work.
At first, that might seem like a pain. There are lots of other problems you can get rid of by paying to make them go away.
But after more thought, and a little experience doing said work, you might find that it’s actually pretty great.
That work is exactly why it’s such a good confidence booster. You get to look back at what you achieved and say, “I did that.”
And no one can ever take that away from you.
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