How to Survive the First Month of Dieting & Exercising
How to Survive the First Month of Dieting & Exercising
Let's face it; the first month of dieting and exercising can be brutal and frustrating. If you've started and quit dieting and exercising more times than you can count, you're not alone. Matter of fact, almost everyone has experienced this at one time in their lives.
If it were easy, everyone would be fit and lean. It can be far from easy. With social media, we are inundated with information about how to lose weight. So many people are posting do this and not this. Eat this, not that. You should do only these exercises and avoid all others. So when you begin on your weight loss journey, you'll feel overwhelmed with conflicting information, so most likely, you'll restrict too much food from yourself and overwork your body.
After doing this for a week or two, you'll most likely quit and walk away feeling like a failure. Your body will be tired, and your diet will go from eating everything healthy to all the junk food you can choke down. It's a vicious cycle that will only go on repeat if you don't learn how to navigate through losing weight and sticking with it.
The worst thing you can do is too much right off the bat. You're setting yourself up for failure, and it's really unnecessary. You don't need to be extreme or walk around feeling starved and physically beaten up. How in the world would you expect to stick with it if you're always in a state of struggle? I don't know about you, but I don't want to feel horrible and defeated.
I want you to begin your diet and exercise goals with ease and excitement. I want goals to come quick. I want you to feel great accomplishment. The only way you will stick with your goals is, not only to get results but to feel better. You need reasons to keep moving forward and to stay on track with your plan.
So how can you survive the first month of dieting and exercising? Simple! You take it step by step and with tools that actually work. You don't need to buy any "magic" potions or do crazy, intense workouts that make you feel like you're going to die. Baby steps will lead to giant leaps, but you must slow down and get through the growing pains of a new, healthy lifestyle. Breaking it down into bite-size pieces will surprise you by showing you that you really can learn to love working out and choosing healthier choices when it comes to your food.
Utilize these quick and straightforward tips to overcome the trials of beginning your new lifestyle. Get off of social media, use tried and true methods that work and enjoy the process. Life is hard. Dieting and exercising doesn't need to make everything harder. Becoming healthy shouldn't be a negative thing in your life. You've made this positive choice, so let's make the process a positive outcome for you and your loved ones.
EMBRACE THE CHALLENGE
Know going into it, that you will have to show up and work. Again, if it were a walk in the park, you'd see no one out of shape. It's going to be a challenge, but one that you can overcome. You have to have a clear mindset that you will struggle, it will be hard at times, and you will have to overcome obstacles to get the results you want.
If you begin your new lifestyle with a negative mindset, full of dread and resentment, your mind will fade out before your body does. Remind yourself daily that you want to smash this challenge and know that you will have to focus and work to achieve your goals. A new body will not just show up and become yours without you doing the work. Ridding your mind of all the noise and solely focusing on what you must do to succeed.
Once you have grasped the fact that you're ready for a challenge and you accept the work that will go into it, you're already well on your way. Now that you have that accomplished, you have to remind yourself continually that you're working towards incredible goals and nothing will stop you. This journey is for you and about you, and only you have the power to make it happen, so it will take work to keep yourself motivated and willing to challenge yourself every single day.
KNOW YOUR WHY
I am big about this with my clients. You must have a WHY. Going aimlessly into a healthy lifestyle will increase your chances of falling off track, and you'll forget why you began this journey in the first place. Your why doesn't need to be huge and you may have more than one, but you must have a reason for why you're doing this and why you need to remain focused on getting fit.
Your WHY could be as simple as you just want to feel better. It could be because of a health scare. There are a million reasons why people decide to change their lifestyles. Your WHY needs to have some meaning to you. It needs to keep you driven and inspired to stick with your dieting and exercising.
Be sure to WRITE your why and place it where you see it daily. It may sound corny, but it does help remind you of why you need to hit the gym or skip a bag of chips and stick with your healthy nutrition plan. Everyone has a reason to want to live a healthier life or else they'd never stick with it, let alone attempt it.
REALISTIC GOALS
When you start dieting and exercising, you have a goal in mind. Maybe it's to feel better or to lose weight. You may just want to prove to yourself that you can do it. However, when you set a goal, don't make them extremely outrageous.
If you decide that you want to lose a hundred pounds, that is a huge goal that you can do, but this goal will take quite some time if done healthily. To survive your first month of dieting and exercising, you need to break this goal down into bite-size pieces.
Having a goal that will take months to achieve, you'll need to have goals set daily, weekly, and monthly. Start with goals like packing all of your food for today, exercising five days in a row this week and lose five pounds this month.
Write your goals down, as so many begin a new regimen and forget their goals or change their goals before ever realizing they reached most of them. If you're forever chasing goals, you'll always feel like you're on a hamster wheel, never seeing any of your accomplishments. Be clear with your intentions, have them where you can see them, and check them off as you reach them.
SCHEDULE YOUR FITNESS
Your first month of dieting and exercising can leave you feeling all over the place. You'll feel great the days you nailed it, and you'll feel like a failure on the days you miss the mark on everything. Eventually, you'll become numb to the days you're missing your workouts and healthy meals. Once this begins to happen, you'll fade out from your regimen before your first month even ends.
Schedule your fitness just as you would a doctors appointment or your kid's activities. Make it a priority and don't apologize for it. Your health and well-being should be of the utmost importance, and you need not feel guilty for wanting to better yourself. You are not a bad person for getting your exercises in or spending time to prep your food for the week.
To survive dieting and exercising, you have to change your lifestyle, including your schedule. If you feel your best, first thing in the morning, schedule your workouts then. If you're more of a night owl, exercise then. There is no right or wrong time to exercise. Choose what works best for you.
Plan it and make it happen, no excuses. It may feel like a real struggle at times, but like I tell all of my clients, you're only one workout away from a good mood. So when your workout time arrives, don't waste your time avoiding it, just get it done.
“You have what it takes. You just need to show up, for yourself. ”
AVOID THE SKIPPING TRAP
Like I just said, don't waste your time avoiding your workout or pushing aside your prepped meal to eat something unhealthy with your loved ones or coworkers. Your first month is a vital time to establish a strong foundation that will build a healthy lifestyle that will last you the rest of your life.
There will be days your energy level is at a zero. There will be days your hunger is out of control, but you need to learn to avoid the skipping trap. One day missed will eventually turn into several days skipped and before you know it, the month will end, and you will be no further ahead than when you started.
On the days you absolutely dread your workout, decide on attempting it for only ten minutes, that's it. Begin your exercises, knowing you only have to put in a small amount of time; then you can move on with your day. What generally happens is that your energy level will increase, you'll be proud that you're doing it and before you know it, you'll continue on past your time you had set for yourself.
On the terrible days, I commit to merely taking a walk. Most of the time, I go for a walk then return ready to do my workout. However you go about it, don't skip your workouts. The first month of dieting and exercising will test you, and you must know how to navigate around it without quitting.
Nutrition can be even more difficult. When you're super hungry, you'll immediately want something quick and unhealthy. One BAD meal will turn into several before you even realize it. Here's a little trick I do when I'm starving and ready to cave to fast food instead of the nutritious meal I have prepped. I chug water. What you may not know is that most of the time, we mistake dehydration for hunger. If you're feeling low on energy and super hungry, grab water before you grab anything else. You will be surprised how quickly your appetite and cravings subside.
SMALL EXERCISES AND MEAL PLANNING
Your first month of dieting and exercising, you start wanting to workout nonstop, and you want to eat every single meal with nothing but healthy, nutritious foods. That's the only way to reach your goals, right?
Not exactly. What you want to accomplish more than anything is developing healthy habits that you stick with. The rest will fall in place. If you overwork yourself or deprive yourself of everything you love to eat, you'll most likely not stick with it. What would be the point of putting yourself through that for a couple of weeks if you're going to quit in the end?
Begin your workouts in small pieces and build from there. Start working out for fifteen to twenty minutes and increase your time each passing week. Start with changing your breakfast to something healthy and begin adding different meals from there. Lunch next week and dinner after that.
It's wiser to go slow and small than jumping in head first, changing everything you typically do. You need to build every week. I know it seems like you need to do it all one hundred percent, but that's not being realistic. You'll be miserable and certainly not willing to continue on.
BE KIND
Last but not least, be kind to yourself. Your first month will be challenging, and it will not be without potholes. You're a human, and no human is perfect. There will be days you feel absolute disgust with how your diet and exercises are going. Know this going into it and learn to be easy with your internal conversations we all have with ourselves.
You're not a failure, and you're capable of getting fit. You have to remind yourself of this daily. No one is above having these days, especially when wanting to change an unhealthy lifestyle. Being unhealthy isn't a hard lifestyle to follow, but a fit life can be.
You don't need to be perfect or hard on your self-worth. Learn how to forgive your imperfections and move on. Tomorrow is a new day, and there's plenty of hours in a day to make better choices. Push yourself, but don't be mentally abusive. Think about how you would encourage a loved one to get fit and give yourself the same kind of love and encouragement.
I know surviving the first month of dieting and exercising can be daunting, but I also know you can do it. Take one step at a time and practice patience as much as you can. Learning to allow yourself to mess up, but knowing how to get right back up and start moving again will propel you towards all of your goals. You're more than capable of sticking with your new fitness lifestyle, so remind yourself of that when things get hard.
Write all of your visions and dreams down to keep you laser focused and motivated to keep progressing forward. Know ahead of time that you'll fall and you'll get right back up. You'll enjoy a dessert. You'll oversleep, and you'll skip your workout. That's ok. Don't dwell on it and don't allow it to overtake your goals. When you're super rigid and unforgiving, you're only making the journey that much harder. Relax. You'll find your way and figure out what works for you. Remember, start small, have a clear vision of what you want, and begin building from there. Each task you get down is taking you another step towards changing your body and your life. I'm here cheering you!
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Aimee Schwinabart is the founder of The Purely Fit—online workouts, nutrition, and fitness coaching that actually work! She specializes in short (super effective) daily workouts combined with customized nutrition plans to help real people shed excess fat to reveal toned, lean muscles. The Purely Fit approach to looking and feeling great prioritizes small, steady, super efficient workouts and nutrition upgrades to help you stay with it once and for all!
