“You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing that we call ‘failure’ is not the falling down, but the staying down.”
– Mary Pickford
There is something so intrinsically satisfying about a fresh start. A clean slate. A fresh calendar page. A new year. Your birthday. A new school year. Monday. New beginnings become anchors in our life and that’s when we’d like to start things. Feels very clean. Very decisive. Poetic, even.
The problem is, if it is some random Tuesday in the middle of the month with nothing going on, some might want to wait starting their weight loss journey until they have one of these more monumental, calendar rocks or milestones to hang their start date onto.
While that may in fact give you a bit of a starting boost, if you don’t have any of these dates on the horizon, is it really worth waiting for one? And if you’ve stumbled and are waiting to get back on, is that really helping things? Staying off track longer so that the calendar date is more aesthetic?
Another reason I hear people putting off starting to work on their weight loss goals is because of a vacation coming up. A cruise seems to especially be something people do not want to be working on weight loss whilst enjoying. Holidays, birthdays, weddings, all the celebratory things in our lives that are so food centric seem to be reason enough not to get started. After that, maybe. And that next one. And that next one. And that next one…
We are social creatures! We go on vacations and go to birthday parties, and weddings and funerals, and celebrate holidays. The celebrations will never stop coming. The food will never stop coming. If you wait until they’re “over” you are effectively saying you will never start.
Every effective eating strategy requires you to be able to navigate celebratory events and not go completely off the rails and need 3 months to get back on track. Having one coming up is a perfect opportunity to practice how you plan to manage them going forward. Not only managing how you will eat during these events, but also what you choose to eat when you wake up the next morning. And the day after that.
Reducing party type foods is hard no matter when we start. It is. We feel like we are losing something. But that is only because we are focusing on those foods and not what we have the potential to gain. Why do we want to lose weight, again? Is it to feel better mentally and physically? To look better, be healthier, live longer? If so, do we really want to wait on that? Do we want those things sooner or later?
The best time to start will ALWAYS be right now.
The other reason people procrastinate starting is because the whole endeavor feels too much. When you have, say, more than 50 pounds of weight to lose, you know that isn’t going to be fast. You’ve got to lock in and commit and that can feel like a lot.
You start adding up all the desserts you’ll have to turn down and the effort involved in meal planning and giving up snacks and navigating restaurant food and, “oh it’s too much, I’ll do it later.” (Read: never).
I recently heard that at the core of procrastination is overwhelm. You add it all up, it feels like too much, so you just don’t. The solution? Break it down. Do not try to carry the next 6 months of moments of discomfort at once or add up all the actions you’ll need to take. Leave future discomforts and actions in the future where they belong.
What small action can you take today? Focus on that. One tiny little thing. Once it’s done, what is the next tiny little thing you can do? Losing 50 pounds is a lot. Eating a healthy meal is not. Focus only on the next healthy meal. Then the one after that. That’s doable. That’s not overwhelming. Just do that.
And lastly, we procrastinate because it lets us off the hook. It doesn’t feel very good to have a goal and not be working on it. As we reach for that problematic food, we can feel a little better if we say to ourselves, “I’ll start working on getting healthier tomorrow.” Tomorrow you won’t want cookies, I guess.
Here’s the thing, the best predictor of what you will do tomorrow is what you do today. If you really want to increase your odds of success do something RIGHT NOW to move toward better health. Literally anything. Do some squats. Decide on your next healthy meal. Throw away some junk food. Take a 5 minute walk. Momentum doesn’t come from stillness, it comes from action. Get going. Then keep going.
Make good choices.
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