Ask any gym owner and you’ll always hear the same thing. Attendance for gyms always rises in the early parts of the year. It’s easy to see why; people yearn to shake off the holiday pounds, and many people spend New Years thinking about goals.
Why is it that goals do not remain as high a priority all year, especially when it comes to health and well-being?
I think a large part of it is a mental hurdle. The truth is that in today’s world, “get a quick fix” is more socially accepted and easier sold than “maintain a lifestyle for the rest of your life,” even if the result is a longer and more rewarding life. But being healthy doesn’t mean paying attention to nutrition and fitness for a month or two. How many businesses market to people, in fitness or otherwise, as “Sign up now and in three short weeks you’ll be set…?” It’s an easier sale than this truth:
Your life is a life. Want to enrich your life? Simple. Change your life. For the rest of your life.
The truth is that there is an abundance of people who successfully go through fitness training and a diet plan for a short time period, experience great results, and yet stop. The mission is completed, in their minds.
Yet, in every dramatic physical transformation, there is a great benefit to the mind as well. Losing a large amount of body fat, or being stronger than ever before, or having more endurance, enriches the mind. You feel better. Life becomes more rewarding. There is only one way to ensure that great feeling of accomplishment and reward stays with you, and that is by not stopping.
For 2017, consider making your resolution the actual absence of a finite resolution. Instead, try replacing it with a new lease on life.
Boot camps and short burst transformations are great, and absolutely necessary in some cases when the system needs to be shocked. However, it is equally important to give plenty of thought towards your longterm goal. Is losing a lot of fat in 3 months the ultimate goal? Or is it to maintain that positive change for the rest of your life?
Do you want 2017 to be the year that you looked and felt great? Or do you want 2017 to actually be merely the FIRST year of a new life where you looked and felt that way? You may be surprised at how attainable that goal may be.
Contact Jason Smith Fitness if you’d like any help in creating a manageable new lease on your life, starting in 2017.