You Don't Have to Wait for the New Year

I have a client who’s worked with me for over a year. She enjoys the accountability of meeting me in the gym, she likes to push herself out of her comfort zone, with me standing by her side cheering her on, and she gets it now. And she’s making serious progress. But her journey of understanding and accepting and learning how to lift weights, what level of discomfort she could tolerate and adapt to, how to stay accountable to her food choices, preparing and planning her food and environment, and ultimately changing her habits took her a very long time. It’s a lot to take in. Every couple of months, she would come into the gym and say, “I get it now.” And she would describe another facet of health, nutrition, strength, or exercise that she fully understood and committed to.

Things click with my clients little by little. One month they come to the realization that poor planning meant they couldn’t stick to their diet. Another month, they realize they’re struggling in their workouts because they haven’t been prioritizing sleep. Over time, these seemingly small “aha” moments are what ultimately allow them to change their lives. We aren’t talking about days or weeks. We’re talking about months, and likely longer than six months. And when you think about it from the standpoint of letting go of things in your life that you have known for years, you can see how it has to be a multi-step process. Just the letting go, in and of itself, whether it’s letting go of nights on the couch or the drive-thru menu, takes acceptance. Acceptance takes an incredible amount of time, because you’re asking your brain to do something it hasn’t done. You’re essentially rewiring years of the “other” choices.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how the start of the New Year usually means a spike in gym memberships and personal training commitments, only for the resolutions to be abandoned by mid-March. I think this is due to what I described above. Time to accept and change isn’t fully understood when you have good intentions at the start of the year. The expectation is that it’ll happen quickly, that it will all click, and by March you’ll have changed your habits, lifestyle, schedule, food, social life, and general understanding of the trade-offs. This just doesn’t happen within a couple of months.

It’s December 1st, and I know most of you reading this are probably thinking you can’t possibly start an exercise or diet regimen during the holidays. But if you wait to start, it’s just another month you’re missing out on learning and understanding what it takes. It’s another month gone that you didn’t work on changing your mindset and acceptance. Acceptance of what has to be let go. Acceptance of the discomfort. That’s part of the process of actually getting physical results. And you can start that mental preparation now.

You can start with keeping a diary of your meals, looking up some healthy recipes or meal prep companies, researching different exercises and watching videos, working on your sleep hygiene, or going for walks at night to look at Christmas lights. You can start before the New Year. You can start preparing yourself mentally for what it takes. Because it’s not easy, and it’s probably going to take longer than you think.

So why wait?