Well, it’s Groundhog Day… again. Time to get up and start your ever-familiar daily routine. For many of us, our days consist of basically the same things over and over. Depressing….
If you haven’t seen the movie Groundhog Day, you’re missing out on a true classic. The basic premise is that Bill Murray’s character is reliving the exact same day, Groundhog Day, over and over and there is nothing he can do to change it.
There is nothing he can do to change the fact that he has to wake up in the same place, see the same people, go through the same series of events, and is powerless to stop it all.
I think you all know where I’m going with this.
Are You Living in Groundhog Day?
How many of us go through the same routine day after day, month after month, year after year?
The scary thing is that most of us will never even think about if it’s a good routine? A routine can be fun or interesting, but often times we end up on auto-pilot and just go through the motions of daily life.
Life can and should be about excitement, joy, passion, and happiness. Being stuck in a mindless routine doesn’t allow us to experience any of these things. We just become drones and that isn’t good for anyone.
So, I want you to ask yourself these questions:
- Are you happy with your life right now?
- Are you spending your time how you choose?
- Are you just trying to get through each day?
- Are you just eeking out an existence?
If you answered yes to any of these, why? Why are you doing this to yourself and to your family. You are doing a terrible disservice to those who care about you. Nobody wants to see you unhappy all the time, just trying to survive.
It’s like you’re wasting your life and it’s so sad. In the movie, Bill Murray cannot take the repetitiveness anymore and tries to kill himself. Most of us will never consider something that extreme, but it can often feel like we are on our way to an early grave….
Move On With Your Life
If you’re living the same ol’ same ol’ every day, it needs to stop right now. I hate when people give me that answer when I ask them what’s new. To me, those people have no real passion and are just passing time until they die.
Take a hard look at your life and figure out if it’s working for you or against you. Being stuck in the daily grind of life and reliving the same boring day is definitely NOT working.
To get past your Groundhog Day, you need to do a few things:
- Recognise that you are stuck (wake up, travel to work, hate job all day, travel home, sleep)
- Make the choice to change it for the better (i.e. add adventure, be spontaneous, change job)
- Figure out how you are going to do it (join a social group, get out of your comfort zone, take part in a fitness challenge)
- Take action (get up and do something about it)
If you are ever going to change your routine (that is not working for you), you MUST find a way to shake it up.
The other routine belongs to someone close to me and they are very content with it. I say good for them. If it works, the great. If not, change it.
So today, Groundhog Day, is your day to break free from your rut of a life and make great things happen.
Yesterday’s blog post was one that described a lot of my client’s experiences when it came to training and by reading through the email comments, it seems that a fair share of you have experienced the same.
That continuous cycle of feeling determined, training hard, seeing the results then for some unexplainable reason, slipping back into old habits and experiencing groundhog day once again.
I know people who have been doing this for years, following a yo-yo style of training and dieting but never really finding the stability needed for lasting results.
There are a number of reasons as to why this is happening but in my opinion, there is a common theme and a lot of the problems may not actually be your fault.
When it comes to training, for most people, the belief is that the tougher the class and the harder you push yourself, the better it is.
Social media is swamped with photos and videos of muscular bodies and vomit-inducing workouts, accompanied by #gohardorgohome and other “motivating” hashtags. We watch these workouts, admire the perfect shape of the insta-famous models and so obviously assume this is what we should be doing.
Gym owners aren’t stupid either, give the people what they want and they will love you for it, so they focus on circuits, boot camps, HIIT, Tabata (even though they aren’t actually Tabata but that’s a different article) and Interval style classes.
The harder and tougher the session, the better. There are so many gyms whose reputations are forged on how hard their classes can be and the results they get and a lot of them, get great results!
I’m not saying this type of training is not good, it is when implemented correctly. It just seems to me that there are a lot who don’t know how to do this.
Fact is, if you work as hard as demand in these classes, you have no choice but to burn calories, unfortunately, it is not the only thing that you burn.
Pushing your body too hard, for too long risks burning yourself out. There are people out there who can do this on a regular basis but for the majority of us, keeping that level of intensity going over a sustained period of time eventually leads to something giving.
Whether it comes through an injury, a lack of motivation or exhaustion, our body finds a way of slowing us down.
So, you burn out and stop training.
We all know the saying, what goes up, must come down. While training you had been feeling great, focused and determined. Your body has been changing and the compliments have been coming thick and fast (that was the UP) but now that you have burned out and lost that motivation you start to feel guilty, with guilt comes the DOWN! This can happen as a double whammy.
There is a whole host of hormonal responses associated with stress. Stress can be physical as well as mental and it has a massive impact on weight loss. If you have been following a restrictive diet (which unfortunately have become popular with a lot of unqualified trainers who focus more on the image rather than the health of the clients) then you can damage your metabolism, gain weight and unable to lose it can be the outcome.
The second thing that can happen is the food association issue. We associate certain foods with experiences and build habits that we find hard to break. Cinema and Popcorn, hangover and takeaway food, depression and…. sugar, for most of us this means comfort food, ice cream, cake and chocolate.
My point is, when you are in the zone you associate exercise with clean eating, this combination leads to great results but if your training is too intense for too long and you do burn out, the guilt of not training, along with the lack of endorphins that were released during these sessions, can lead to a feeling of guilt and with that guilt comes the comfort food, with the comfort food, comes the weight.
The weight leads to more comfort food, the more crap we put into our body the worse we feel and this cycle eventually leads us back to the point we started at all those months ago.
We now know what can cause this cycle but how can we break it and once and for all? I will discuss that next time.
Ready to get started? Check out our new 28-Day Lean Lifestyle Challenge that kicks off next week.
