My Trainer

When working on getting fit and losing weight, a big decision to make is whether to get a personal trainer. With YouTube, Pinterest, and a million blog posts about workout ideas and training plans, it's super easy to get the information you might get from a trainer. So why fork out the money for one? The obvious reason is to be sure your form is correct so you don't hurt yourself, but for me it is worth so much more than that. 

I feel really fortunate to have the trainer I have. She teaches as a group, so the cost is much lower than a personal session would be. She sends a text an hour or so before every workout I've signed up for to remind me. She brings positive energy and motivation to every workout to encourage me to work harder. But the big value for me is having someone who's job it is to cheer me on every day. It's her job to not let me quit or get too busy. Having someone who literally will not let you give up is amazing!

I have worked hard and focused on getting healthy many times in the past, and I've succeeded in losing 10 pounds on my own. But then life happens. Depression happens. I get sick, my kids get sick, my husband gets sick. Holidays happen (as a friend told me the other day "I do really good except for the time from Halloween to Easter"). It's so hard to persist in living healthy when other stuff is going on. I've said on many occasions "that's just not something I can focus on right now in my life." Well, right now I am focused on it, and my trainer has helped keep me focused on it for almost a year now. The only way to make a lot of progress, in anything in life, is to work at it consistently and diligently for a very long time. 

Giving my daughter a piggy back ride is really easy because she is the same weight as the number of pounds I have lost this year!

Doubt

My daughter just turned 7.  She has been frustrating me by freaking out every time she is told she has done something wrong. I don't want her to become the type of person who thinks she is always right and everyone else is always wrong. So I've been trying to teach her to be more teachable. 

These talks have made me realize how much I tend to need to always be right. This need leads to a big fear of being wrong. Putting this blog "out there" triggered this fear for me big time. I'm not a person trainer or a nutritionist, so my advice isn't founded on anything other than my personal experience. The fear of saying something wrong paralyzed me from publishing more posts.  

Even worse, I started doubting my own exercise and diet plans. What if I'm overtraining and I'm going to get shin splints? What if I'm wasting time doing inefficient exercises? What if I'm eating tons of pesticides by not buying organic produce every time? What if I'm getting too much mercury from the fish? What if I'm destroying the environment by using disposable water bottles all the time? (I really do keep buying reusable ones, but they get ruined when I forget to wash them).  Losing confidence in my plan made it a lot harder to stick to. So I spent a month cheating every few days and didn't lose any weight. There were other causes for my lack of progress, like getting sick and having sick kids and stuff like that. 

So for the month of April, I decided to be completely confident in my diet plan and stick to it 100%, because even if it isn't perfect, it was working. I also revamped my exercise plans and goals. With that, the weight started melting off again, and I've made huge strides in my fitness level. 

Point of the story is that I remembered that pride and insecurity are the same thing. When you're trying to change your life, first gather as much information as you can but don't be afraid of not knowing everything. Next make a decision/plan and move forward with confidence, and stick to it. Then be willing, even eager, to accept correction, feedback, and new ideas.