When I walked into my shared office to retrieve some files, a fitness coach was talking to a woman about weight loss. “Do you have any suggestions for her?” the coached asked me. “She doesn’t know what to eat and ends up eating her kids’ food.”
“You need to prepare ahead,” I suggested. “And have things on hand that are really easy and fast to make like single-serving chicken breasts, and vegetable and rice microwave steamers. Always make extra, too, so you have leftovers.”
“Oh, no, I hate leftovers,” the woman said. She went on to shoot down all my suggestions with “reasons” for why she couldn’t follow my advice.
As I was leaving the office, I heard her say to the fitness coach, “I’m so frustrated. I’m working so hard and doing everything right, and it’s not working.”
I made myself exit quickly. What I wanted to do was totally chew her out. If she was doing everything right, it would be working. If she wasn’t making excuses for not doing the right things and just did them, she’d see some results.
It’s hard to be blatantly honest and admit that we’re not doing the right things. We suddenly have selective amnesia about the ice cream we ate, the chips off the kid’s plate, the dinner party appetizers, and the midnight snack.
Then we look at the scale and say, “Oh, I worked so hard this week. I just can’t lose weight. I’m so frustrated.”
Well, you might have worked hard some of the time, but certainly not all of the time.
You cannot allow excuses to give you fuel for failure. You cannot gloss over any time you didn’t make good choices and think it doesn’t affect your results. You cannot allow yourself to get out of doing the right things by “reasoning.”
Those who are hungry for weight loss success will not make excuses, but instead find a way to dismantle every excuse.
A friend of ours suffered a health setback related to obesity that put her in the hospital for a couple of days. When the doc suggested weight loss as preventive medicine she very strongly demanded that the doc write a weight loss plan for her. The person telling the story saw this as a sign that she has become very serious; I didn’t see it that way as the information age is flooded with weight loss plans that work.
Excuses can kill in extreme cases but once someone’s determined to strike a healthy balance you can’t stop them. Hopefully she will get to that place.
It’s so true. When people are ready to make changes, suddenly all the obstacles that were once in teh way are no big deal anymore. They look for and find ways to work toward weight loss.