If you’re wondering where all your friends are these days, they’re at the gym.
January at a gym is a very different scene than a gym in July. That’s because losing weight, exercising more and eating healthy are among the top ten most popular New Year’s Resolutions.
Why aren’t all these gym-goers still around come Spring Break? A whopping 90% of resolutions fail. In fact statistically, most of us have just about a week left before we abandon ours.
Before you go giving up already, check out these four common resolution mistakes and how to fix them.
The failure: Setting Unrealistic Goals
Pledging to work out every day when you have been previously known to hit the gym once in a Blue Moon is simply an unrealistic expectation to set for yourself. You can’t expect to wake up one morning and do a complete 180. Setting goals we’re unlikely to achieve leaves us feeling like a failure when we fall short which causes many people to give up altogether.
The fix: Be honest with yourself
Ask yourself what you can realistically commit to. I like to tell clients this usually lies in the space between reality and excuses. Saying you’re too busy to workout is an excuse, because realistically you could make time a couple of days a week to go to the gym instead of watching TV. But going every day is probably not realistic. Be honest with yourself about what you can do, and avoid the urge to bite off more than you can chew.
The failure: Taking on too much
Not only do we often set unrealistic goals, we also try to take on too much at once. Resolving to lose thirty pounds is a nice goal, but it is going to take a long time to achieve. When you start to think about how much exercise you will have to do and how long you will have to diet in order to lose those thirty pounds, it can become overwhelming. This causes some people to throw in the towel before they even start.
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