A healthy lifestyle is never easy

Sometimes I just feel like rolling into a ball and not do anything. Forget about the world and just hibernate..
If you wanted to start working out but find it too hard, know this: Everyone struggles. You have no idea how many obstacles there are, even for someone who seems very motivated and active.

Let’s start with myself: Recently real life has been a bit rough. That means after moving it’s tough to get into a good rhythm again. There are a lot of influences which make it hard for me to get into a comfort zone both eating and workout wise. Following a structured workout requires a lot of planning to start with and if you have a lot of additional outer influences it makes it ever so much harder.

Some of those influences can be:

• Time
• Not finding the right food or food you are used to
• Stress
• My illness issues I have to struggle with every now and then

All of these can influence your motivation negatively. It’s hard enough to stay focused as is, even with an ideal environment but it makes it certainly easier if everything goes according to YOUR plan.
Today for instance I really didn’t feel like working out due to personal issues and the past few days I certainly didn’t belong to the motivational folks who push through no matter what. Despite feeling totally “bleh” I pushed through today and decided to start Asylum completely over despite having done two whole weeks already. While it did take a lot of effort on my part to get started I felt absolutely amazing afterwards. It even helps get some of the frustration and stress out while fighting against yourself to keep up with the workouts. Besides the personal struggles if something in your life doesn’t go according to plan and not feeling like “punishing” yourself further with workouts, there are many more external influences that can make it ever so hard to follow a healthy lifestyle.

Another little example is the Gym we signed up to: I learned that they don’t allow you to workout in sleeveless shirts which is hard for me since I have to make sure I don’t over-heat. It’s tiiiny obstacles that don’t seem important to anyone but you, which add up to an even harder fight 🙂

Another example, some friends and acquaintances of mine decided to start P90X as a group. Yet those guys have different challenges all together which come from an ethnical background. Influences such as Fasts (Ramadan Periods), dietary restrictions (IBS, Allergies) or ethnical food restrictions in general can all be a really hard hurdle to jump over.

Last but not least, I have met a friend of mine I haven’t seen in a few years. She lost a lot of weight and generally really looked smashing with nicely toned upper arms (the rest of her slender/sporty body was hidden ;)). However, after talking to her I learned that she had a really hard time AFTER she lost her weight. It’s not uncommon for people who went down in weight quite a bit to get addicted to the workouts and pressured to not gain that weight back any way possible. This can be so extreme that you not only get addicted to working out (yes there is such as thing and it’s actually more common then you think) but also see food as your enemy and not as fuel for a healthy body. It’s a hard to find and difficult to keep balance between pushing your body to stay in shape and giving it enough and the right fuel to support what you are doing and not going over the top. Not eating enough because you think you still have to lose weight, pushing through your workouts despite being sick or if you get horribly cranky if you can’t workout. All those are little signs that you might have an unhealthy relationship with exercising.

On the other hand you have the guys that lose weight and then think: “oh goodie, here I am, I did it. Now where are those chocolate bars at again?” It doesn’t help that quite a few of those “Lose X amount of kg/lbs in Y amount of days” which only lead to a nice yo-yo effect. Fact is, yes, you can lose weight fast initially, but it’s most of the time retained water and the proper hard, real work starts after this. Once again, not really helping with the “keep motivated” issue.

It’s a daily struggle for everyone. People have to fight themselves, have to fight restrictions, be it physical, mentally or ethnical. People who snicker behind your backs about you only going for the salad and sticking to it or sticking to drinking water have hardly ever any clue how hard it is to do so. Or how hard it is to not feel like a freak while everyone think you are a nuts (or worse, a psycho) 🙂

So, next time you think about giving up on your workouts: Know that there are millions of people out there fighting the good fight with you and some of them have a much harder time then you probably have. On the other hand, it’s also ok to give yourself a break every now and then. Just don’t make it a habit.

Whenever I feel like pitying myself and thinking “I can’t do it, it’s too hard and I really don’t feel up for it” there are a few things I like doing:

• Look at old videos I took of myself doing the workouts. Proving I CAN do it.
• Remember the guy in the P90X Plyo X Video with an artificial leg

But most of all I watch this again: