My biggest mistake was trying to start running with one goal in mind – to lose weight. If you don’t eat much and run a lot, you’re doing great, I thought.
Now that I’m an established adult woman, I definitely realize that it doesn’t work that way. It wasn’t until I changed my life and my perception of physical activity that things started to work out for me.
Here are the top mistakes I made.
- Conflicted priorities. It’s important to sit down and ask yourself a couple questions “do I really need it?” and “what’s in it for me?”. When I was working like hell at the beginning of my career, I didn’t really need running, or sports in general. People around me are screaming that you need to exercise, you need to lose weight, you need to shave your legs, you need this, you need that blah blah blah. But who needs it? Me? Why me? I only needed to learn a new stack of technologies and start working properly so that I could have money for a good adult life. I did not care about the rest. If there are more important things in your life than sports and the desire to get a beautiful body, then give yourself a break. If you really have or need to, you’ll start. Trust me.
- Not understanding how it works. I thought that a couple weeks of patience and everything will be ✨fine✨. And I would not need to count calories or exercise ever in my entire life. And sure I will keep up eating a lot of sweets. Uh-huh. The only problem is, you never stop working on yourself. EVER. So once you start doing something, you either do it until you die or you lose progress.
- Not understanding why I need to do this. You know, when you’re 20 years old, you don’t have to think about the fact that sometime in your 50-s your knees are going to hurt if you’re a lazy ass. You think about it more as you get older. Now I realize that if I keep sitting behind a computer all day, I probably won’t be able to move without pain by the time I’m 50. And ideally, I’d like to avoid that.
- Lack of any kind of systematic training. You worked out today, but not tomorrow. Today the weather was nice, tomorrow it’s not. Today I want to, tomorrow I don’t want to. There is no such word as “don’t want”, there is such a word as “need”. If you want results, you need stable training. Regardless of the level of motivation and weather. You start training because you’re motivated. Motivation runs out in a week or two (that’s exactly what my training has shown in the past), and then it’s all about discipline.
So if you’re failing at something, it doesn’t mean there’s a problem with you. It could simply mean that you don’t need it at the moment, and your energies are focused on other goals. And that’s okay.
