This time of year, is a little weird, we are either going to put our goals on the shelf, or we are all about “I’m going all-in and I want to sprint to the finish line.” I don’t ever want you to set your goals aside, but I hear a lot of people making excuses. I’m going to tell you how to avoid the end of the year slump and put all those excuses on the shelf.
One of the worst things I hear people say is I’m going to start ______. Monday, next month, after vacation, September 1st. There’s any number of ways you can fill in that blank. But the first step to beating the end of year slump is to ditch the start date. JUST START!
It’s time to break free of the start date. You’re done with that BS!
When you do start, don’t start from a place of deprivation. As soon as you say you can’t have something, Sweet Georgia Brown, that’s all you think about, and it could be good food or bad food.
Back in the day when I was competing, as I got closer to my show you had different food choices, and one of my choices was I couldn’t have apples. I was at Marshalls randomly shopping and this woman was eating an apple and I was like, “I just want that apple. The apple sounds so delicious, that apple looks so delicious. I just want that 🤬apple.”
And it’s a “good” food, think about when you tell yourself you can’t have a brownie or you tell yourself whatever you tell yourself you can’t have, everywhere you look everyone is eating a brownie or everyone is eating a candy bar, everyone is eating something you told yourself that you couldn’t have, and that absolutely sucks. Let’s just stop putting things on the “do not eat list” because it’s just setting yourself up for failure.
So many people tell me, “I don’t have willpower”, or they try to white-knuckle it. And this is what I know – when you try to white-knuckle it, if you say you wanted chocolate, you wake up and you’re, “God, I have a hankering for chocolate.” And you tell yourself, “No, I’m not going to have chocolate, I’m on this diet, I’m not going to have chocolate. Chocolate is BAD” Then you go all day with chocolate on the brain, and your willpower battery is just slowly ticking down, tick, tick, tick.
Think about your cell phone battery, all day long your cell phone battery just goes. You’re doing great, you’re doing great and then you look and you’re like, “How did I get to 20% of battery power'” That’s how your willpower goes, and when you hit that 20% you’re like, “Ugh, I’m going over there and I’m going headfirst into whatever chocolate you can find, because I absolutely need it.” And then you go there and then you feel guilty. Where if you gave in to say maybe one square of chocolate, it gave you the satisfaction that you needed, and you probably would have moved on with your day.
But over the course of the day you romanticized this chocolate and how amazing it was going to be, but then you’re like, “I can’t”, the guilt, the shame, the blame all came through, but if you just sit with it for five minutes like, “I need to scratch this itch”, and just scratch that itch without any guilt, without any shame.
That leads me into stress. One of the biggest triggers that I hear from a lot of my clients, I see it on the interwebs, stress. There are people who fall into two camps, there are the, “I’m so stressed out, give me all the food” or, “I’m so stressed out, I can’t even think about eating right now” but once that stressful situation is over, they’re starving and they’re like, “Feed me.”
I’ve done a whole episode on stress, listen to it right here https://link.chtbl.com/jb4vxP3Z On this episode we talked about better ways to manage your stress, and Nikki Stansbury was awesome about talking about her chaos model modality. You want you to listen it, it helps you to really own and recognize that stress can derail you. Stress is not only food-wise, but just your energy. When you are stressed out, the thought of working out might not even occur to you, when you’re stressed out your body just gets so inflamed that you look at yourself and you’re like, “I’m doing all the right things and I’m just not seeing any results.” It’s the stress.
And one of the biggest things about stress is that it can be a tough nut to crack, and I’m telling you this from a recovering stress ball. I lived with Tums and Advil and wine those were like the Holy Trinity for me, and I had a headache pretty much every day, my stomach was always topsy-turvy, and the wine just made the day go away, and eventually I had to deal with my stress.
These are the types of things we talk about in the Fit Girl Magic Society. I work with my clients, it’s like how do we decide if it’s something that I’m going to actually do versus something that I’m actually turning into a habit’ I want you to think it’s not this overnight thing.
Listen to Fit Girl Magic Podcast to learn more about beating the year end slump.
