In anything you do in life, whether it be your career, learning a new skill, fitness or body transformation goals, if you succeed or not is almost all mental! In this blog, we are going to discuss why everything in life is mental.
Many people start up a new diet or fitness routine to improve their health, or to lose weight, but actually in most cases they only want to look better! Looking better makes you feel better and it improves your confidence, which in most cases improves your overall health.
When it comes to fitness and nutrition, look for buzzwords!
The main keywords being secrets, short cuts and small number values. For example:
- Secrets to Getting Great Glutes
- Shortcuts to Building Muscle and Losing Fat
As for small number values, which of these would you choose “3 weeks to Washboard Abs” or “Lose 20 pounds in 20 weeks”? If it’s a choice between 3 weeks vs 20 weeks, then 3 it is!
The problem is, when it comes to fitness and nutrition; there are really no short cuts or secrets.
As with anything you want to accomplish in life, even looking better and improving your health, it takes time, a lot of hard work, and a mental shift. We often focus on the foods we are eating and the exercises we are performing, and while both of these are important, we really don’t focus any attention on our mental state!
Changing how you eat and what you eat is easy, for a short period of time. Sticking to a consistent exercise program is also easy for a short period of time. When you are first starting out, your brain is focused on changing the way you look, and at first you can see the changes happen fast, weight comes flying off and you are feeling a mentally good, dropping sizes in the clothes you wear, everyone telling you how great you look, people asking you for your secrets, short cuts and any advice you can give to them. Your change in physical appearance and all of this attention you are getting feels great!
But, there comes a point when all of this kind of stops! After a while, you reach a point where it is much more difficult to see any more physical changes, and people get used to your new physical appearance, so that attention you were getting just isn’t there anymore.
This is where it can go all bad! Slowly you start to go back to the way you lived your life before all of your changes! You start saying “I’ll get back to my healthy routine next week”. Before you know it, you are back to living your life the way you did before your transformation.
What happens is that while you went through a physical appearance transformation, and a slight brain transformation, you didn’t go through a complete mental transformation! Usually we get focused on a certain goal, maybe to lose weight and look better but we miss the bigger picture.
Along that journey, the immediate physical changes we see, and the attention we get from other people fuel us to continue the journey. Once we have reached that goal, physical changes aren’t as noticeable and the attention has completely disappeared, therefore, the motivation goes away and we slowly go back to living how we did before our massive change.
Ultimately this is why fitness and nutrition are mostly mental!
You have to change the way you live your life, change the way you think, change the way you make decisions, basically change the way your brain is programmed. There’s no doubt that that is hard because we have lived our whole life only one way! You have to reprogram how your brain works and take a step back and think everything through. If you’re someone that’s struggling to stay consistent with fitness and nutrition, you have to work on the mental aspect of both of these.
As far as nutrition goes, you have to put in the hard work to change the way you think about food. A great first step is to educate yourself about serving sizes and portion sizes and also about nutrient dense foods versus calorically dense foods, and learn about moderation. It’s impossible to go through life and not eat foods that you love, even if they’re not nutritious, you just have to learn to eat them in moderation.
As far as exercise goes, make it a priority in your life. Most of us, every day, make ourselves go to work, even though we don’t want to, we still go. It would be great to find a workout partner as it becomes a social thing and also a commitment to that other person.
Staying consistent in fitness and nutrition really is more mental than anything else. It’s about changing your brain and the way you think! For some tips on improving your mental health with working out take a look at Morning Exercise = Mental Health!