May 2020: Everything you do for your fitness is for LIFE.

Quarantine has forced me to do a lot of reflection.

Not only with myself, but with all my clients.

Having a foundational “WHY” to why you pursue becoming a more fit individual is crucial during a time like this.

I need to help all my clients find their “WHY” … otherwise I’m out of a job.

Your WHY:
Not a deadline to look your best for a wedding, vacation or party (they’re all cancelled anyways).
Not a reason to want to get in shape for revenge against an ex or to look hot compared to your ex-best-friend Becky, but a real WHY.

You’re not leaving the house. No one is seeing you on the beach, in shorts, a tank top, anywhere.

HOW YOU LOOK AND HOW OTHERS MIGHT ‘JUDGE’ YOUR APPEARANCE DOESN’T MATTER ANYMORE.

Many people are taking this as an excuse to let themselves go, to gain the “quarantine 15.”

If you have your foundational WHY, you can avoid this mentality. You can avoid this apathy that will pull you away from keeping healthy habits and practices.

The title of this article is “Everything you do for fitness is for LIFE.”

This is something one of my clients said to me recently.

Boy, oh boy… it stuck.

Let me explain:

When we FIRST embark on our fitness journey, very few of us look at it as a lifelong endeavor or change.

We want to look like the magazine model or our favorite celebrity in say… 30 days, tops. We want a flat stomach, big booty, and we want to flaunt it at X/Y/Z event. What happens after that doesn’t matter to us.

We achieve this look the first time around, we make a statement, and then we treat ourselves afterward. We EARNED the junk food. We EARNED our old, lazy lifestyle back. Little by little the habits we practiced for 30 days slip away. Little by little we are back to where we started in what we do AND how we look.

This then becomes a cycle for most women.

We try over and over again to “get back to that look” or to “get back in shape.”
We succeed, then we backpedal. Over and over and over.

Some of us stop trying after so many rounds.

What doesn’t click for most women is that if those HABITS never left in the first place – the healthy substitutions, the meal prep, the regular exercise, the hydration, the proper sleep – we wouldn’t have backtracked after the first attempt. There wouldn’t have been a cycle.

These habits that we need to achieve a short-term goal are the SAME habits you need for lifelong fitness.

You don’t have a “fitness life” and your “normal life.”

Remember – you have ONE life.

You either choose, every day, to integrate fitness into your regular, daily life, or not.

The summation of the days you choose fitness vs the days you don’t out of 365 days per year determines whether you move forward or backward. Whether you perpetuate the cycle or beat it.

So now let me say it again:

Everything you do for your fitness is for LIFE.