I seriously hate January. January is like the Monday of months, literally and figuratively. Its cold, Christmas is over and you’re usually facing some defeating resolution that end up just making you feel bad about yourself.
When I found out my son was due in January, I thought, good, maybe now I’ll actually like the month, and then he was born at the end of December. January sucks.
Seriously why are we still starting the new year with resolutions. You are setting yourself up for failure.
Deciding to start a new diet, or quit smoking etc on New Years Day sets the tone for your expectations on yourself. Let me guess, you decided on your resolution sometime in December and decided that you’d start on New Years Day, mean while, you live it up because its the holidays and you’ve only got just a week or two until your done with whatever vice you may have. You develop a mentality that you will never stray from this new resolution, “New Year, New Me,” right?
When you do this, you’ve created an all or nothing, perfection dependent system that is unrealistic and destined to fail.
Stop for a second and think of one thing in your life that you have maintained perfectly. Not your job, not your marriage, not your role as a parent, or role as a friend. You’ve screwed those up more times than you can count. So why in the world would you think that you are going to be able to stick to a resolution without messing up.
As soon as you let go of this you can succeed.
You see the day you yelled at your kids because you’d had enough, the day you were late to work because you’d been out too late the night before, the day you got in a fight with your husband about taking out the trash, you didn’t give up on any of those things that day, and they didn’t give up on you. You got over whatever little hurdle you faced and you moved on. You persisted.
After my daughter was born, I knew I wanted to get back in shape, a drive that was lacking after the birth of my son. This time I wanted it. It was Wednesday, October 4. It was not Monday, it was not the 1st, and it was not January. Actually it wasn’t even morning time. I had already had breakfast and lunch, and I decided I was ready.
I signed up for WW and then reluctantly tracked my breakfast and lunch that I had had that day. I thought, maybe I should wait until tomorrow when I can make better choices about what I have for breakfast and lunch, maybe I should wait until I go grocery shopping, maybe I should wait until my fitbit arrives in the mail, that way everything would be perfect, but I stopped myself.
If I wanted to achieve my goals I was going to have to let go.
I’ve had good days and bad days on my journey. I’ve had days where I was so absolutely effing tired of thinking about my food choices. I let myself have a free for all one day and at the end of the day all I could think about was how it wasn’t worth it. I didn’t feel any better, I felt worse. Because what I had done was not on the path to getting me to my goals. But this time we faced with defeat I didn’t stop.
You see from the start I never had perfection and that in itself is perfect.
If you want to be perfect at something, be perfect and getting back up every time you fall.
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