Once you become an ‘adult’ (when does that happen btw?), no one is going to tell you to take care of your body. Maybe your mom. But if you’re like me and had an innate urge to explore a fabulous city 2,800 miles away from your hometown, she's no longer very effective.
When my alarm goes off at 5:50 am every morning, there’s a razor thin line between me just going back to bed and me getting my ass up and starting my day head on. How do I consistently choose the latter? Because of the repeated positive reinforcement that I get from making that decision. My days are better, I feel more energized, I’m more productive, and I’m an overall better human being when I get my workout in in the am. Ask anyone I work with - the first question I’m asked when I’m being extra feisty is “did you go to the gym yet today?”
So how do you do it when you haven’t had a build up of that positive reinforcement yet? I.e. you’re a beginner looking to transform your lifestyle and starting a new workout/eating routine to become a better you.
It’s hard as hell. It’s gonna suck. But the good news is, it doesn’t suck for long. And the reward lasts forever.
People don’t like hearing that daunting, ambiguous advice so I’ve tried to think of something more actionable. You have to start with a routine that will be sustainable. One that you can stick to. If that means forcing yourself to wake up to just do 10 pushups then going back to bed for the first week, then do it.
Start minimal. The thing about the health and fitness lifestyle is - it has a cascading feel-good effect. I guarantee that just doing those 10 push ups will immediately make you start feeling better than you did when you heard that dreaded alarm go off and put your bare feet on the cold floor of your room. You’ll want to keep going. The human mind is so easily trickable. If you want to crawl into a hole when you hear that alarm yelling at you, but you just tell yourself you only have to get up to do ten push ups then go back to bed - it makes getting up 100x easier. And then you can rely on your trusty endorphins to do the rest.
Endorphins are the happy little things that explain why I’m obsessed with what I do. They conveniently make being healthy an addiction. You just have to get them started to initiate that cycle. So first comes the mind trick to get you out of bed, then comes the endorphins to make you get up from those 10 pushups and get your booty to the gym.