Exercise and Its Place in Your Journey

When trying to start a new routine that results in better health, often the first thought is that getting thinner and prioritizing vigorous exercise is the best and fastest way to “see results” and “get healthy”. I think this is a huge misconception and most likely what is feeding your cycle of failure and unhappiness. I know that’s what it does for me!

Your journey is not about being skinny – it’s about building a content, healthy life, full of beautiful, fulfilling experiences. Skinny does not equal happy. Exercise is a difficult habit to build, and it may not even be the best way to lose weight!

The biggest problem I see with making your new routine all about exercise, is that it’s creating a roadblock. It’s the hardest part of the healthy lifestyle routine to commit to, and if you’re making that the most important part, it will make the whole thing seem overwhelming. I can’t stress enough that this journey is about the routine and individual choices adding up over time. If you’re making your happiness about getting to the gym at 6 am, you might make it harder to make easier choices throughout the day. Your routine is a list of checkboxes, and you don’t have to check them in order.

When I personally think about becoming happier and healthier, it does mean some sort of exercise, but maybe not in the way you’re thinking. Do you need to go sign up for an expensive gym membership and start working out for hours a day? No! Honestly, I feel the more you incorporate movement into your life, the better your body feels and the less lethargic I feel in my day to day. Try going for a walk or stretching every few hours. Take a few minutes a day to meditate – just finding a place to start. If you don’t workout, or if you don’t workout like everyone else, don’t worry about it! You don’t have to be a bodybuilder to make a change.

Focus on the parts of a health routine that bring you joy. If prepping your food, planning your budget, creating or crafting are what makes you feel complete and fulfilled, do that! Take more time to focus on those things and don’t worry about making your health routine match someone else’s.

STOP Waiting Until You’re Skinny to Let Yourself Be Happy

When you think about all the things you wish you could change about your life and how to get started doing them – does the thought process go a little like: “First, I’ll work out every day for six months and lose 30 pounds, and then I’ll be happy enough to x, y, z and the other eighty things I want”.

Does it?

How long have you been waiting behind that road block, getting so down about not being thin or fit enough to feel confident about your lifestyle?

For me, it has been years. Years of wanting to be happier and healthier, but feeling the only way I could get there was by first losing weight and attaining some level of beauty or fitness that would pave the way to everything else I want.

It’s a hard corner to turn – but we have to do it. Waiting for the toughest one of my goals to become a reality to really do anything about the rest, is not only an inefficient way to achieve goals, but it’s also just a waste of your life and your energy! Here’s how to get started:

Realize you’ve made some pretty arbitrary rules about your life

Those rules you feel like you have to adhere to – the ones saying how much you should weigh, how much money you should make, how your relationships should look and feel, you made those rules for yourself or you inherited them from your life growing up or the society you live in. Let those go.

Start something new, today.

Have you been waiting to update your wardrobe until you drop ten pounds? Waiting to start a new hobby until you really made exercise or skinniness a habit? Forget about waiting. Choose one of the other things – the travel, the wardrobe, the cooking, the drawing, the painting, the new cleaning routine – choose one and do that! Your list of habits you wish you had – they don’t have an order. Empower yourself to start in the middle of your list!

Build acceptance and gratitude into your mindset

Yeah, you may not be skinny, or fit, or the tidiest, or the craftiest. That actually doesn’t matter nearly as much as you think it does. Find the things you love about yourself, and allow those arbitrary rules to not matter as much. Accept where you are in your life (YOUR life, don’t let comparison to others sneak in here) and be grateful for the motivation, even just the basic ability, to move forward and try new things.

 

Stop letting something you can’t control hold you back. Don’t make your happiness dependent on your weight! When looking for motivation, try to get motivated for specific actions, not a dream of the perfect body or perfect house. You can do this! Start now!

Let me know in the comments if you’ve been waiting to start on a dream because of an “it would be different if I were x” mindset, and how you could get started without it.

Tools for Success

You don’t need things to get going, but I am obsessed with notebooks and planning, and this blog is supported by links that give us a little commish when you buy :). These two items in particular were so helpful in getting me started on my path:

Think, sketch, quote, plan
On the search for acceptance