There is thinking, and there is doing. There is planning, and there is acting. There is waiting to be ready, and there is seizing the moment.
I so often hear people say that the time isn’t right to start a new way of eating. My translation: You’re procrastinating.
What does it take to be ready?
Procrastinating is waiting for the perfect time when there isn’t any such thing. Truth is, there’s no right time. That’s just an excuse, a delay tactic because waiting until you’re ready is telling yourself you’re going to do something, as opposed to doing it.
There won’t be a magic day some day soon, or some day many years from now, when you’ll suddenly be ready to look after your health. It doesn’t work like that. There’s no great mystery involved in this. It’s really just about making a decision and making that decision a priority.
It’s common for me to hear people explain their delay in starting the program, or sticking to it, by saying they have a birthday coming up, or Christmas or school holidays. Well, those events are part of everyone’s lives but it doesn’t mean we all go crazy with our diets.
There are people who always wait for the right time – to have a baby, to change jobs, to shift house, to get married, to make health a priority.
It’s true that there’s always a trigger and that’s when the priority jumps a few notches up the ladder. A client came in for a meeting with me recently saying he had so much going on in his life that he didn’t have the willpower to commit properly to the program.
This man runs a multi-million dollar company but he thinks he doesn’t have any willpower. I’d say he had an enormous amount of drive, dedication and persistence when it came to his company which tells me that losing weight and being healthy just wasn’t on his priority list.
As soon as people can just admit it’s not a priority, it helps them to re-examine how they think about themselves, how they see themselves and what they really want from life. They also stop kidding themselves.
Tough love, maybe. But at some point we all have to look at ourselves. I don’t want people to feel bad about they way they look. That’s not what I’m about. Just look at the way you feel and know you could feel a whole lot better with some new priorities.
