Choosing the Right Goal
**Setting Fitness Goals for the Right Reasons**
When setting fitness goals, focus on becoming the healthy and fit person you aspire to be, rather than escaping the shame society has taught you to feel about your own body. This mindset shift ensures your fitness journey is driven by a positive vision rather than negative emotions. When your goals align with positive desires in your life, you are more motivated and resilient in your workouts and nutrition plans and can better cope with “failure”.
**True Growth in Fitness is Inevitably Painful**
Achieving fitness goals often involves challenges and discomfort. Fantasies about a fit lifestyle might give a dopamine hit and involve the fun, easy parts (like buying new clothes and shoes) but real fitness goals require hard work, facing failures, and giving up comforting but unhelpful habits. Confronting fears, past traumas, and developing new, demanding traits (like waking up at 5 AM for a workout or incorporating more protein into your diet) are part of this journey. You will fail sometimes and feel despair, but if your goal is something you genuinely want to become, the struggle is worth it. If your goal stems from a desire to BECOME you will persevere through discomfort. If it's to ESCAPE something, like social disapproval of your physique and the shame you’ve been taught to feel about it, your negative emotions will undermine your progress, leading to failure. As Kara Loewenthiel wisely puts it, "You cannot fuel positive change with negative emotion."
**No Exit off the Highway of Human Experience**
Regardless of meticulous planning, you will encounter negative experiences on your fitness journey. You will fail and feel miserable at times. Embrace these moments as part of the process. Resistance only leads to more suffering. Accepting these experiences is crucial for long-term success. Learn to feel and process your emotions, accept them for what they are, and then use logic and BELIEVEABLE positive thoughts to calm your fears and anxieties. Accepting failure and the negative emotions that come with it is what gives you the ability to continue moving forward with your goal instead of getting lost in frustration, self-pity, and shame.
**Failure is NOT a Moral Issue in Fitness**
Failure does not define your worth. It doesn't mean you're weak, stupid, or lack willpower. It's simply a part of the fitness growth process. Understanding this helps you stay resilient and focused on your journey, without being bogged down by self-judgment. Embrace failure as a natural part of achieving your fitness goals and use it as a learning experience to improve your ability to foresee and overcome similar obstacles in the future.