Map It Out

 

You are lost - now what?                                                    

After we take a look at ourselves in retrospect of a long journey and see where we are in life, either with our diet, our health or any other area, a lot of times we are not happy with where we have arrived. Unsure of how we got to this point in the first place, it’s even harder to find our way back to the place we liked before.  Now we are lost and don’t know where to begin to find a way out. Per example when I was graduating high school the teacher asked us to write down where we see ourselves in the year 2000 (it was 1986). I thought I was going to be this competent business woman wearing a skirt suit with my hair in a bun. Instead, in the year 2000, I was actually graduating from the Police Academy.

One thing to remember is the happy picture we had in our minds in the first place. What did that picture look like? Where were you? How did it feel? And where are you instead today?                     

This thought process can also be transferred to when we look at our health and our bodies. When we start working on ourselves to become the person we want to be, it is easy to get frustrated and lose sight of any victories we have gained so far. The changes that were planned are harder to implement than we think and we expect results much faster than we see them. “Rome was not built in one day” is the phrase that comes to mind. But why don’t these words make it any easier to accept the pace of our success rate? 

Acceptance

First of all we need to forgive and accept ourselves.

          Second, we need to be patient with ourselves.

It’s funny how we expect other people to be patient and forgive us but we don’t give ourselves that courtesy. 

If it is health that needs improvement, remember that it is a natural transformation.

1. It takes approximately two weeks for your body to realize that a change is happening; either in diet and/or exercise. That means give your body at least two weeks time to notice what you are doing before you give up.
2. Also, it is widely known that it takes 60 days to break a habit. If you are trying to break a habit of eating before bedtime, then you have to implement eliminating eating before bedtime for that amount of time before concluding that it is not working.
3. The good news is that it only takes 21 days to create a new habit. Did you notice that programs or product companies give you a trial period of 21 days? It’s so that you have enough time to try it before you change your mind and find it’s not working for you.  

To eliminate a bad habit is easier done when replacing it with a new habit, because it takes less time for us to get used to it. Does that make sense?

The bottom line                                

• Don’t give up trying to find contentment after only two weeks or less.
• Make a list of things that you want to eliminate or change.
• Then write down what you want to do/be instead.
• Think of the steps you need to take to get from A to B (e.g. to get from an unhealthy body to a healthy body, replace french fries with asparagus)

 Once you have the road map to health, create small milestones and check them off as you arrived there. Milestones can be anything like having gone one week without fried foods. Or arrived at 5lbs less than when you started. As you focus on your map and your milestones of healthy steps, your focus is also shifting away from the unhealthy things that you don’t want in your life. The things we focus on in life manifest themselves and before you know it, you arrived at the goals you have set for yourself (e.g. looking like Barbie). Make yourself reminders if you need to. But mostly, after you conquered each milestone, reward yourself.
Preferably do it with non eatable things -
but how about a new movie?