Everyone tries to get to the gym at the beginning of the year in order to attempt to make themselves look as hot as they can possibly be. The problem with most of the people that do this, is that they're treating it as a superficial goal rather than a deep down embodiment of their desires to get healthier.
Don't strive to get into the gym simply to make yourself look more appealing. That sort of thing is going to cause your resolution to fail completely within a matter of weeks or just a couple of months. In order to truly succeed with your resolution to become a better version of yourself, you should focus less on your outside appearance and more on your internal aspects of becoming healthy.
Eating better is one of those things where you can hold yourself more accountable. Also, this will be the number one thing that just flat-out makes the biggest difference. You don't have to kill yourself for four hours a day in the gym every day, for weeks or months at a time. Eating healthy to create more of an internal balance of your health is such a misguided and underrated quality of becoming a better version of you. It's 80%, if not 90% of the puzzle pieces.
Cutting out the junk food in your life isn't necessarily a huge blow to your daily eating routine either. You can have what you want, just stop eating it for your entire meal. Don't eat an entire half of a pizza on your "cheat day." Have maybe a slice of pizza with a cup of broccoli, (yuck, I know) and some sort of protein. Sticking to a diet every day will ensure you're more than willing to continue on your way with the workout program you've concocted for yourself.
If you're really dedicated and want to see some sincere results in your journey, you need to stop making so many damn excuses the longer your journey continues. "Oh I've gone hard for a month; I can take a day off." No, because once you start sliding, it's hard to sincerely stop the slide. If you're sore, go do yoga and get a good stretch in and burn some serious calories. If you don't have time if you find any downtime throughout the day get some shit going with push-ups or even go for a short run. If you're tired, have an energy bar or a cup of coffee before you go.
Your body craves struggle, but it also rejects the stress that comes along with the struggle. In order to reset this instinctual response, you need to find little things around each and every one of your attempts at justifying not going. It takes time to naturally want to go to the gym and to crave getting that physical exercise at first. But once you start being able to get up and get your routine workout in, start looking for extra things to push off any possibility of a plateau.
If you've been lifting pretty hard three days a week, and doing cardio another two days a week, that's amazing and you should be proud! Your body has adjusted to all of this stress you're putting it under and you've broken the chains off of your mental limitations. But that will only allow you to go so long and see results with your strength and athleticism. Start working on all the aspects surrounding your body's abilities. With the compaction and the strenuous aspects that come with lifting, you need to do some things in order to elongate your muscles and open up the blood flow to your extremities.
Yoga is almost no longer an option. It's more of a mandatory piece to your training regiment. Haute yoga is a really good way to get your cardio going in a low impact way and really allows you to get to know your body and it's capabilities. It also is a good way to prevent yourself from obtaining any injuries throughout your lifting and running exercises.
Get someone to go on this journey with you. Find a guy or girl that will help hold you accountable to your workout. In the gym, if you're by yourself you can sluff off on how many reps you put in. You can sluff off on how hard you go or how heavy you lift. But that's not helping you. Having someone there to compete with as well as remind you of your mission is incredibly beneficial. Plus, misery loves company, right? I am totally kidding. You shouldn't be miserable throughout this journey.
Mental health is a massive influence in a journey to a healthier and happier you. This should be emphasized. Your mental health, your results, and your journey to get to where you want to be should be a positive synonymous correlation. If your results are rising, but your mental health is depleting, you're going to go out of balance and something has to be done to correct your inner balance in order to succeed in your goals or else you'll just stall.
Becoming healthy shouldn't be a chore. You shouldn't be killing yourself. I've said this multiple times throughout this article because it's so incredibly true. Dieting, working out, and taking care of yourself shouldn't be incredibly hard or dreadful. You get one body in this life. Treat it the way you want. If you don't really want to do any of those things, then don't. All I'm saying is, take it little by little because transforming into your ideal body is a never-ending marathon, not a sprint. Work is always needed to be done. Goals can always be achieved and new goals can always be set.
