This has been a frustrating week for me. I knew I was coming up on the end of the month, and honestly, I wasn’t feeling like I was going to hit my goal. This had SUCH a detrimental effect on me. I made excuses not to go walking most mornings. I ate more sweets than I have in a long time. I think the whole thought of “I’m not going to make it to something that I put out there and many people have read about, well that’s embarrassing and depressing!” In reality, I probably COULD reach my goal if I ate nothing but cucumbers for the rest of the month and also walked about 10 miles a day. But I didn’t want to do something so drastically different in my routine because I knew it wouldn’t be sustainable and would eventually just cause me to balloon up.
Now for the lesson I learned…
Folks when you make a goal, be sure to have it somewhere you can easily and frequently see. Not only is this something that will help you with your motivation, but it will also help make sure you will always correctly identify the goal you set for yourself.
This was my mistake.
I had made the goal of getting my weight under 300 lbs. As I said before, I’m getting close, but I would have to do something unnatural to get there by the end of the month. I haven’t really been on my blog recently, and until this morning I was telling myself I didn’t have anything to write. While laying in bed (much later than I normally do), I was working on convincing myself that I didn’t need to go walking today, or that I couldn’t. I played basketball yesterday afternoon for a couple of hours, so I was pretty sore this morning. Surely that exercise would give me a Saturday morning off, right? That was my mindset. But I knew I hadn’t written a post for about two weeks. I wanted to write something. So I got myself out of bed and walked 4-5 miles (not sure exactly how much because my phone decided to stop keeping track halfway through…
…I think I surprised someone who was walking towards me when I realized this as I was in the process of yelling at my phone…
Anyway…
So here I am, getting on my blog and doing my best to hold myself accountable to the goal I couldn’t make. I had wonderful excuses lined up. I’m only focusing on walking and very slight changes to my diet. Surely I would need to do more before a lot of weight would fall off? I was getting good at coming up with different ideas.
Before I decided to write, I thought I would go back to my 3rd post to look at my goal.
There it was. I would be under 300 lbs by September 30.
…
Did anyone else see what I noticed?
Apparently in my infinite wisdom, I gave myself until September 30 to reach my goal. I had planned for the process to take a bit longer to get going for myself. But because I hadn’t kept my goal posted somewhere easily accessible so I could review it constantly, I had completely forgotten my goal timeline. I’ve been wasting time stressing for the last week because the end of August was coming and I wasn’t going to hit my goal.
I’ve learned my lesson about the necessity of not only making goals, but keeping them somewhere to be reviewed constantly.
On a happier note, the thought of it taking me over a month to achieve my goal now seems rather laughable. So I will expect to be making a “goal fulfilled” update soon enough!
It’s not all or nothing Ian. You can keep going toward that goal without guilt and making yourself miserable! Do your best each day and tell yourself that you are awesome and worth it and if (when!) you slip make sure you just get right back on the wagon . I lost 50 lbs just by taking sometimes small but “mostly” consistent baby steps. You can do it!