So, you are two days shy of the timeline you set to achieve your fitness goal, and you aren’t even close. You’ve lived a lot of life since you made that goal to get fit and healthy. Life is hard. You’re suffering from a lack of motivation, or worse, you’ve fallen off the wagon. Don’t be ashamed. It happens.
It’s not too late to get back on track. No matter how far off course you may have veered, there’s always a way back, and as Zenbusiness.com says, small changes are the key to a healthy lifestyle. Here are some tips to keep that fitness goal going strong.
Make exercise a part of your routine
Everyone struggles to find time for physical activity. The problem many have is allowing exercise to become something you do during your extra time. With that mindset, it is pushed to the back burner and easily ignored.
It would help if you made exercise a part of your daily routine, meaning you have to give it a specific slot in your schedule. It can’t just be a “free time” activity.
One way to do this is to start small with achievable goals. Saying you’re going to wake up at the crack of dawn and run 4 miles every day sounds great, but you’re unlikely to stick with that – at least at the beginning. Instead, make reasonable requests of yourself – something like I’m going to devote 30 minutes after dinner every day for physical activity.
If you’re struggling from a lack of motivation, find some in another person. Hire a personal trainer who will keep you accountable. Talk to a friend about being your exercise buddy. It’s harder to skip your workout if you have someone who’s counting on you.
Don’t be afraid to modify your goal
If you’re having trouble sticking to your goal, it may be because your original plan had some flaws. It’s not admitting defeat to change your goals. Make them more reasonable, or shift directions slightly to give yourself a new path for success. If your goal was to cut back on caffeine, alcohol, and red meat, try focusing on just one of those, and don’t worry about the others for the time being. It’s easier to work your way up to a healthier lifestyle than trying to tackle every single problem you have all at once.
Know that with eating right, any step forward is a positive one
Don’t be generic about your healthy eating goals. Simply saying you want to “eat better” doesn’t help. How are you going to do that? What specific foods are you going to add and remove from your diet?
Instead of trying to go on a strict, hard-to-follow diet, try altering your eating habits one by one. Make some small steps like adding green vegetables to your meals and replacing one course of red meat per week with healthier fish or lean chicken. Replace your sodas with flavored sparkling water. To help you keep track, you might even use an app like MyFitnessPal or Lifesum, as recommended by Delish.com. Sometimes having a place to plug everything in makes us more aware of our choices and can be the key to good progress.
Reevaluate and reaffirm why you made the goal in the first place
If you’re struggling to keep a goal, it may help to remember why you made the goal. If your goal was to eat healthier, you might struggle with obesity or a specific health problem. If you want to get physically fit to help in addiction recovery, you may be doing it for your children. Recall precisely why you need to stick to whatever it is you’re trying to do.
Conclusion
It’s not too late to keep up with your goal to get healthier. No single defeat is strong enough to damage your entire plan. It helps to make minor adjustments gradually, working toward a bigger goal. It may sound cliche, but Rome wasn’t built in a day.
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