At this point, you are probably feeling the regimen. Every day brings the thought that you will be doing this “one more time tonight”. It has been a tough week and you have only seen marginal gains, if any. Can you really do thirteen weeks of this? This is where all the doubt creeps in.
I had a pretty good online debate going yesterday with a mortgage broker who was touting the benefits of a new loan program for low income folks with no money down. Without going into a lot of ‘off-track’ detail, I kind of had an inside front-row seat to the mortgage and finance debacle of the last five years. He was trying to convince people of how great these products were, in spite of all the lessons of the last twenty years. It occurred to me that if you want something bad enough, you can rationalize just about anything. So, do you REALLY want to quit?
There are a lot of reasons to want to quit and to justify it. I know, I have been doing this a long time.
(1) “I feel sore every day. I just want to wake up and feel good when I go to work.” Feeling good is relative. You don’t like how you feel now, so you think that if you feel marginally better tomorrow, that will work for the rest of your life. Wrong. You need to keep physically active. All of you. This program is telling you that there are parts of you that are just not being used anymore. Also, there are parts that are getting older very quickly. If you are going to make it to the end and feel good about it, there is a price to pay and there is no time like today.
(2) “Every day I look in the mirror. I won’t ever look like those people on the DVD.” You are right. You most likely won’t. They are gorgeous. THAT is not your goal. The people you are looking at have never been really fat or really out of shape. I can tell the difference. They look that way because they have been active their whole life and because being fit is their means of income. Their goal is to sell fitness products. Fat people exercising is disgusting. I know, I have seen it. In a mirror. They wouldn’t sell ten programs if they were out of shape. And you wouldn’t have bought the program either! So stop this excuse. Your goal is to improve and be a better, more fit, YOU.
(3) “I just want to eat like everybody else.” Of course you do. Because eating for pleasure, all the sugar, all the fat, causes the secretion of serotonin and endorphins in your blood stream and makes you feel temporarily happy. But then your insulin response kicks up, you crave more sugar, you start storing the fat, your cholesterol goes up. And your muscles atrophy because you are sitting around a table and turning meals into a form of entertainment. You want to see where that is going? Go to a mall and play a game I play now with my daughter. As you walk through the mall (and do about four trips around, cause it’s good exercise) simply start at zero and add one for every fat person and deduct one for every thin or average person. You will realize that the number is somewhere north of zero. It may seem like a low number, until you figure out that ANY number at zero or greater means that HALF of the people you saw are considered fat. That is where our societal eating habits are going. Go ahead. Quit. Join them. Great club right?
(4) “It’s not working for me.” Seriously? It took quite a bit of time to get into the fabulous shape you are in. I am taking a leap of faith here but many of you are doing this to improve your physical well being. We are a world that more and more thinks that we should have instant gratification. I want to be happy NOW. I want to be smarter NOW. I want to be beautiful NOW. Well, the world is doing it’s damnedest to satisfy all those requests. IM and chat, liposuction and lapband surgery, botox and chin replacements…you know what this really is? Shortcuts. We are hell bent on getting our way, even if we can take a shortcut to get there. And if we can rationalize that no one is getting hurt, all the better. Time to come back from Oz, Dorothy. Every shortcut has its price from a lack of social skills to some of the worst botched surgical procedures you may ever see. Just Google it. There is no shortcut to health. It takes work. Before it works for YOU, you have to work for IT.
(5) “What harm will quitting do?” None. None to anyone but you. And that is okay with me. But is it okay with you? Staying in shape is a habit. So is quitting. You quit one thing, then another. After a while, it’s not hard to quit just about anything. You will tell yourself, “At least I tried.” I hate that statement. I hate it because I hear it all the time from people who quit something. Occasionally, it is a justified statement but 98% of the time it is justifying quitting. I will never say that. My goal, in anything I do, is to complete what I started. My goal is to give it my all and to do my best to complete the journey. You never get to Paris by patting yourself on the back for taking a taxi to the airport every day.
(1) “I feel sore every day. I just want to wake up and feel good when I go to work.” Feeling good is relative. You don’t like how you feel now, so you think that if you feel marginally better tomorrow, that will work for the rest of your life. Wrong. You need to keep physically active. All of you. This program is telling you that there are parts of you that are just not being used anymore. Also, there are parts that are getting older very quickly. If you are going to make it to the end and feel good about it, there is a price to pay and there is no time like today.
(2) “Every day I look in the mirror. I won’t ever look like those people on the DVD.” You are right. You most likely won’t. They are gorgeous. THAT is not your goal. The people you are looking at have never been really fat or really out of shape. I can tell the difference. They look that way because they have been active their whole life and because being fit is their means of income. Their goal is to sell fitness products. Fat people exercising is disgusting. I know, I have seen it. In a mirror. They wouldn’t sell ten programs if they were out of shape. And you wouldn’t have bought the program either! So stop this excuse. Your goal is to improve and be a better, more fit, YOU.
(3) “I just want to eat like everybody else.” Of course you do. Because eating for pleasure, all the sugar, all the fat, causes the secretion of serotonin and endorphins in your blood stream and makes you feel temporarily happy. But then your insulin response kicks up, you crave more sugar, you start storing the fat, your cholesterol goes up. And your muscles atrophy because you are sitting around a table and turning meals into a form of entertainment. You want to see where that is going? Go to a mall and play a game I play now with my daughter. As you walk through the mall (and do about four trips around, cause it’s good exercise) simply start at zero and add one for every fat person and deduct one for every thin or average person. You will realize that the number is somewhere north of zero. It may seem like a low number, until you figure out that ANY number at zero or greater means that HALF of the people you saw are considered fat. That is where our societal eating habits are going. Go ahead. Quit. Join them. Great club right?
(4) “It’s not working for me.” Seriously? It took quite a bit of time to get into the fabulous shape you are in. I am taking a leap of faith here but many of you are doing this to improve your physical well being. We are a world that more and more thinks that we should have instant gratification. I want to be happy NOW. I want to be smarter NOW. I want to be beautiful NOW. Well, the world is doing it’s damnedest to satisfy all those requests. IM and chat, liposuction and lapband surgery, botox and chin replacements…you know what this really is? Shortcuts. We are hell bent on getting our way, even if we can take a shortcut to get there. And if we can rationalize that no one is getting hurt, all the better. Time to come back from Oz, Dorothy. Every shortcut has its price from a lack of social skills to some of the worst botched surgical procedures you may ever see. Just Google it. There is no shortcut to health. It takes work. Before it works for YOU, you have to work for IT.
(5) “What harm will quitting do?” None. None to anyone but you. And that is okay with me. But is it okay with you? Staying in shape is a habit. So is quitting. You quit one thing, then another. After a while, it’s not hard to quit just about anything. You will tell yourself, “At least I tried.” I hate that statement. I hate it because I hear it all the time from people who quit something. Occasionally, it is a justified statement but 98% of the time it is justifying quitting. I will never say that. My goal, in anything I do, is to complete what I started. My goal is to give it my all and to do my best to complete the journey. You never get to Paris by patting yourself on the back for taking a taxi to the airport every day.
You can rationalize just about anything if you want to. I have spent a lifetime achieving many goals because I decided that I needed to at least complete the journey. Even if you fail in the big prize, the discipline of completing the journey is a prize worth taking home.
You feel like crap right now. So you can just trust me on this. Now go do another workout!
[later that night]
Kempo X. Awesome! This is the first routine that I did ALL the exercises, ALL the reps, and felt like I could hang with the people on the DVD. I am so psyched. I should have guessed that I could do this because it was a lot of legs and kicks with punches and twisting. The form was really great too. I kept careful eye on it. I felt so good that I did a twenty minute speed walk to cool down. Lovin this. See you in the AM!!
[later that night]
Kempo X. Awesome! This is the first routine that I did ALL the exercises, ALL the reps, and felt like I could hang with the people on the DVD. I am so psyched. I should have guessed that I could do this because it was a lot of legs and kicks with punches and twisting. The form was really great too. I kept careful eye on it. I felt so good that I did a twenty minute speed walk to cool down. Lovin this. See you in the AM!!
Thanks for this blog post. I was looking at quitting P90X, hoping to find someone who had similar thoughts, and the ones you described were what I was thinking. I'm 135lb to start but I've put on weight and I'm only on day 5 of P90X. I've been struggling with it and combined with two big failures in a row (plus a Plyometrics failure) and now the weight gain, I felt like I was wasting my time. I'm going to keep going until next week though. Like you said, I'm establishing my baseline; next week I'll be competing against myself and that baseline instead of those freaks on the video.
ReplyDeleteP.S. Nice results! Great work. :)