Tuesday, August 09, 2011

Day 9 of the Beachbody Challenge

I have a confession: my eating has been pretty poor lately. I feel like I have lost some focus and drive with the nutrition part of the equation. My exercising has been consistent but as we all know, performance suffers when you aren't feeding your body well. I think I try to hide behind excuses like: "this run was tough because of the high temperature and humidity" and "my lifting session was light because I'm sore". Now, I'm not saying that these aren't actual factors that can and have impacted my sessions but......my nutrition hasn't helped the matter either.

All of the above is plain and simple fact - the hard part is figuring out how to fix the problem. My husband would say: "so just stop" but I find that much easier said than done. I don't usually have trouble getting myself psyched to exercise and when I have a race that I'm training for, it is that much easier. Food seems to be a totally different subject. Even when I have been training for events, I've struggled with maintaining good nutritional habits even when I KNOW it will help me attain my race goal. So what do I do now????

Lately, I've been trying to listen to motivational audio books as well as read similar books. A common theme in these books is listening to you self-talk. This is what you say to yourself. Keeping in mind that "You are what you think about most" this type of inner conversation is extremely important. I'm often telling people that I'm a stress eater or boy do I struggle with my nutritional habits (see above). This is the wrong type of self-talk. So, I'm trying to change that habit and as you can see it is a huge work in progress. I need to start turning the negative statements around and stating them in positive ways. So my negative nutritional statements may become something like "I eat to fuel my body" or another common one is "I eat to live not live to eat".

These are not new ideas to me. I have heard and tried all this before. I believe that it works but I've never stuck with it long enough. This time my positive self-talk will be productive (see I'm working on it already - LOL). I am going to start my writing some positive statements on some cards and carrying them with me so that I can pull them out throughout the day. I'm taking responsibility for myself and I will not use others as an excuse. Will this be a perfect process? No. I am not a perfect being and I will not be striving for perfection. But, I know I can do a better job than I have been doing and that will be my initial focus.

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