It’s the middle of February, which means you should be about 6 weeks into your 2012 fitness plan.
You are still on your fitness plan, right?
Hey, I’m not here to nag you and I’m not here to motivate you. Only you can motivate yourself, and with every plan to do something good for yourself — something good that involves discomfort or denial of pleasure, like getting fit (or more fit), quitting smoking, abandoning sugar — Â it takes some getting used to.
Every plan also comes with a Tipping Point.
What’s the tipping point? It’s that place in your life when you are striving for a goal and … suddenly … you realize this is no longer a part-time thing, but an actual regular part of your life.
Sometimes the tipping point comes abruptly. That’s how it was for me and sugar. I really had nothing against sugar, although I was consuming less of it, because I was well into watching what I ate. But I would still go on the occasional donut or cupcake or half-a-okay-who-am-I-kidding-whole-German-chocolate-cake-with-coconut-pecan-frosting binge.
Then one day I just said to myself, “Wow, sugar really is poison for me,” and that was it. I stopped eating it.
Most of the time, though, the tipping point comes more gradually.
I am not sure when my gotta-get-a-workout-in tipping point occurred, but I was reminded yesterday that it had occurred. I was emailing with a friend of mine, and I was describing the particularly busy day I’d had. She asked, “Did you get your workout in?”
My answer was that I had, because at some point in my life I had prioritized my workout, so it would take a lot for me to miss it. I had passed the working-out tipping point.
I really don’t know when that happened, but I am glad it did.
We often, in our lives, respond to a lack of action with a curt, “I just don’t have time.” But the old adage is true: We all have the same amount of time, it’s just a matter of how we decide to fill it.
If it is truly more important for you to do something else in place of getting fit, then you have not reached your fitness tipping point. I only hope that you’ll get there, though, before some kind of serious health issue makes you re-examine your decisions.